I response to daily post’s prompt : Understanding
The synonyms of understanding are quite a few, they are Grasp, Knowledge, Compassion,Sympathy, Kindness,Belief and many others.
For some reason I thought of William Shakespeare’s quote: “Be not afraid of greatness, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
I’m only interested to talk about one particular person. his name was Muhammad Iqbal. His father Nur Muhammad dreamed of a bird with colorful feathers flying in the sky, while the crowd watching it wanted to get the bird, it miraculously landed on Nur Muhammad, being a religious person his interpretation of the dream was, he’d be blessed with a son, who would achieve greatness.
When the son was born, he named him, Iqbal which literally means,’Fortune or Glory.’
Iqbal fulfilled the dream of his parents. He studied hard and eventually climbed the ladder of success. He was a Poet and Philosopher.
I was fortunate to know and read about Iqbal in the online courses offered by Khurram Ali Shafique, who has written the biography and other books on Iqbal.There are a lot of things I’ve learned from this online course. In our latest lesson we were learning about Self.
According to Iqbal the Self has two sides, ‘the Efficient and the Appreciative.’ The Efficient Self is concerned with and is partially formed by the physical world, it discloses itself as a series of specific and consequently numerous states. Which in simple words, means, Our day to day life of work,rest, eat, play or watch TV.
The Appreciative Self is the deepest self. We can only be aware of it when we are in profound meditation when the Efficient Self is temporarily inactive.
The elements of Appreciative Self is different from that of Efficient Self. While the Efficient Self is serial time as in clock time. The elements of Appreciative Self is pure duration, it’s duration is a ceaseless continuous flow in which all things live and move and have their being. As human beings perfect their Ego-hood , they get rid of what limits them; which is serial time and gain a measure of eternity.
It has taken me a while to comprehend the difference between our two Selves. I think I now understand.
……………………………… 🙂
Sabethville 