INTELLECTUAL MOULD

Choose Carefully

EVERY person develops a certain mindset or intellectual mould, which is shaped according to the conditions that one faces. People think according to this mould, and form their opinions according to it. No matter what the reality of things may actually be, our ideas about them are those that accord with our particular intellectual mould.

This fact about human beings is expressed in the Quran in the following words:

Say to them, ‘Everyone acts in his own way, and your Lord knows best who is rightly guided.’ (17: 84) That is to say, one forms an opinion about something according to one's own mindset, irrespective of the true nature of that thing.

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It is the process of introspection that saves us from developing a wrong mindset and spending our whole lives being controlled by it.

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We human beings are social beings. We are born into this world within a particular social milieu. In this milieu, every day numerous happenings keep occurring. Whether we like it or not, we keep imbibing influences from our environment. In this way, our minds become conditioned. And, gradually, this conditioning becomes so strong that we begin to think that what we are conditioned to believe is true.

In this situation, what each one of us needs to do is to constantly introspect. We must keep trying to find out what is natural and what things our minds have accepted as a result of conditioning by our environment.

It is this intellectual effort that is called ‘introspection’. It is the process of introspection that saves us from developing a wrong mindset and spending our whole lives being controlled by it. In this regard, then, we have to become our own inspector and must constantly inspect ourselves.