Chapter Fifteen: Blossoming of the Senses and Intellectual Capacity

Following the recognition of talent, the fortification of willpower, and the activation of the spiritual capacity for patience, another essential component for individual flourishing and development is attention to active intelligence quotient and the utilization of intellect and creativity for problem-solving proficiency. Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire knowledge, learn from experiences, apply awareness and understanding, absorb and process information to address issues logically and methodically, arrive at novel affirmations, judgments, and rulings, and adapt to new environments.

In psychology, intelligence is characterized as the capacity for information processing and problem-solving. To achieve intellectual acuity and harness intelligence, one must first activate their senses. Consequently, the blossoming of the senses and intelligence are interdependent and intertwined. The senses, as primary conduits of information, play a pivotal role in cognitive functioning.

Senses: The Foundation of Awareness

Healthy comprehension and optimal brain function reside within a healthy body. The brain, for optimal performance, requires adequate and appropriate sleep, a balanced dietary regimen, and an environment conducive to growth and development. Sufficient sleep and proper nutrition have been confirmed to enhance memory and intelligence.

A child should be granted freedom to explore the range of their sensory perceptions, to discern which senses are particularly robust, what they can smell, hear, or anticipate, what scientific insights they can attain, and how much pressure they can endure. One must observe the frequency and vibration of their intelligence and refrain from tethering their talents to rote memorization, which risks suppressing and stifling their natural abilities under the burdensome weight of obligatory memorization.

The source of human perception lies in the senses, which, in the realm of awareness and intelligence, reign as the sovereign of the physical body in the material world (nasut). Sensory perception is capable of enhancement and varies across different contexts and times. Human senses are not confined to the well-known five; these represent merely the rudimentary stage of sensation. Senses are either external (jawarehi) or internal (jawanehi). Beyond the apparent bodily senses, at the esoteric level of human existence, the heart, soul, spirit, secret (sirr), hidden (khafa), and most hidden (akhfa) serve as sources and levels of awareness. In religious psychology and mysticism, concepts such as the heart are explored, and advancements in sensory understanding will further elucidate these.

Humanity’s understanding of external senses remains limited. While once the elements were considered fourfold and the senses fivefold, modern science has expanded the known elements to over one hundred. However, in the realm of discovering bodily and sensory cognition, humanity is still at the nascent stage. Initially, one must enhance visual and auditory capacities and strengthen the ability to discern flavors—spicy, salty, sour, sweet, and bitter.

Numerous phenomena surround us to which we lack sensory attunement, yet animals such as cats and dogs possess sensitivity to them. A dog, for instance, has a far superior olfactory sense compared to an average human, reportedly capable of detecting scents within a sixty-kilometer radius.

The human body is a generic animal, not a specific one, just as it generically possesses the elements present in the earth, not specifically. A specific animal or element is closed, incapable of being anything other than what it is. In contrast, a generic animal or element is open, capable of becoming anything. Human awareness begins with bodily senses. Through practice, humans can strengthen and cultivate these senses, such as by training to identify objects and their properties through touch with closed eyes.

Human sensation forms the foundation of experiential awareness. Human experiences are interconnected with imagination, fantasy, and intellect, with various senses exerting dominion over these dimensions. Some individuals possess weak senses and are entirely insensitive to stimuli like tickling. Some experience near-numbness in areas such as the heels. Certain individuals have a dulled sense of smell, slow to detect odors like burning or cigarette smoke. Others lack sensory awareness of conditions such as diabetes or high cholesterol. Conversely, some have highly sensitive palms, capable of discerning others’ inner character or hidden traits through a mere handshake. By touching objects with closed eyes, one can accurately identify them.

Sensory Acuity in the Blind

Individuals who are blind may strengthen other senses, such as hearing and touch. They often possess vibrant and robust senses, which may function more effectively than the vision of sighted individuals. Some can identify others by their breath alone.

Sensory Acuity of Divine Saints

Senses can be refined to such an extent that they yield powerful, unconscious perceptions. Prophets and divine saints possess vibrant and potent senses, with many of their perceptions stemming from their bodily senses rather than esoteric or spiritual insights. These perceptions are examined as mystical phenomena in religious psychology.

Sensory Kinship Recognition

Intelligence is contingent upon sensation, and thus, senses must first be strengthened. The ability to discern kinship through physiognomy arises in individuals whose visual sense is highly developed. Physiognomy is a science acquired through sensory enhancement.

Utilizing Others’ Senses

By strengthening one’s own senses, it becomes possible to control, contract, extract, and utilize the senses of others. In energy healing, one can, with consent and without violation, drain another’s energy through a glance or touch. With potent sensory capacity, one can alleviate inflammation, infection, or illness in others’ bodies. Senses, like medicines, possess cleansing and therapeutic properties. This ability is within the reach of those with vibrant and robust senses.

Individuals with strong senses experience accelerated learning and education, achieving in a short time what others might accomplish over a prolonged period.

Weakness and Dullness of the Senses

Humans must keep their senses vibrant, active, and sharp. A sense lacking vitality or with sluggish perception impairs the body’s efficiency, forcing it to expend excessive energy for comprehension. An idle individual with a lethargic disposition and weak willpower lacks the capacity to draw energy and strength from its sources, succumbing to lassitude, sluggishness, and inertia, devoid of agility and dynamism. Through agility, effort, and endeavor, the body gains greater energy and capacity.

Among all human senses, vision, hearing, and touch are of paramount importance. Other senses can be said to translate or refer to these three. Strengthening and utilizing these senses is critical. Sensory enhancement through focused exercises has been validated in cognitive sciences. Individuals who have mastered sensory utilization and achieved maturity can interrelate these three senses, seeing through their ears, hearing through their eyes, and both hearing and seeing through their hands.

Those with impaired hearing cannot attain distinguished or exceptional empowerment. Powerful and authoritative individuals cannot have deficiencies in their auditory system or be disconnected from their heart and soul. A robust individual, through their sensory inputs, achieves amplified and superior authority compared to others.

The capacity for awareness pertains to human essence and the strength of one’s senses, not to gender. Any individual, male or female, who can cultivate their senses and better utilize their mind, intellect, and reasoning to enhance their intelligence will advance further in awareness and skill, regardless of gender.

The Inner Self: Born of the Senses

The inner self and soul of a human are born from the body, the strength of the senses, and the precision of sensory perceptions. The soul’s quality, strength, or weakness is shaped through nutrition and sensory experiences. Nutrition constructs the soul, brain, mind, perceptual apparatus, emotions, and affections of a human.

Through a healthy and balanced dietary regimen, humans can build, enhance, and develop their perceptual, emotional, and inner capacities, as well as their willpower and resolve, discovering the grandeur of their own being and new dimensions of life.

If the body moves toward abstraction and accesses meaningful, particularly abstract energies, it can fulfill its needs from these subtle energies. When the eyes, ears, and heart achieve their healthy systemic functionality, they receive such an influx of frequencies and energy waves that it may become overwhelming, necessitating recourse to grounding mechanisms, such as complementary counterparts.

To clarify, women who are heavy, grounded, and immersed in the material body draw individuals from the realm of meaning and spirituality back to the material world (nasut). Association with them provides a landing ground for those who have ascended abstractly and attained heartfelt transcendence (not illusory fantasies), enabling reconnection with the material body.

An individual with high intelligence and inner authority, whose self-care system is active, possesses a healthy, rational, and intelligent appetite for food and chaste inclinations, along with an autonomous capacity for self-preservation. Such an appetite identifies the body’s essential needs, brings them to the individual’s awareness, and places these needs and desires at the forefront of their attention.

An individual endowed with an aware and authentic appetite should pursue what is beneficial and aligns with their preferences, maintaining their freedom and avoiding hypocrisy, pretense, or self-suppression. Guided by an aware and authentic appetite, an individual can shield their body and self from numerous ailments and disorders.

The Trainable System and the Importance of Freedom

While intellectual strength, political acumen, and human resilience are innate and divinely bestowed, the mind and intellectual capacity, like the physical body, are subject to the contingent system of the material world and are trainable. The body can be transformed under any condition. For instance, a docile cat can be conditioned in a laboratory to become a ferocious leopard, or a parrot can be trained to become a powerful canary in song. Similarly, an individual with innate intellectual strength or genius, if deprived of the necessary conditions—particularly freedom—for its expression and placed in a stifling, authoritarian, closed, or constrictive environment, may succumb to madness. Conversely, someone with modest intellectual capacity can, by strengthening their senses in a free environment, achieve a level of understanding comparable to high intelligence.

Weakness of intellect and mental stagnation render an individual superficial, appearance-driven, shallow, persistently imitative, and aimless. Some individuals periodically experience disruptions in brain function, cyclical madness, and disconnection from reason. In self-care, one must be attentive to whether they are susceptible to such afflictions.

The Harm of Excessive Academic Engagement

Contrary to common belief, excessive engagement in study, teaching, and voluminous reading is not inherently beneficial. Overindulgence in acquired knowledge and a simplistic, utilitarian intellect leads to neglect of the heart, the luminous intellect, and the sense of love, resulting in deprivation of intimacy with objects and individuals. This weakens intelligence and stunts understanding.

To attain superior, supra-mental awareness, one must guide the mind to a state of silence, emptiness, and trance. As stated in Awareness and the Divine Human: mere rationalism, pure conceptualism, and knowledge devoid of emotional intelligence and disconnected from the inner self may lead to ambition, arrogance, obstinacy, hypercriticism, heightened sensitivities, fragility, shyness, and coldness, rendering one worldly. Such an individual lacks balance and equilibrium in social interactions, succumbing to extremes, incompatibility, and significant mood fluctuations. Emotional intelligence, linked to emotional regulation, psychological balance, and creativity, is critical, and its absence can lead to social difficulties.

Mastery of emotional intelligence and deriving fulfillment through intimacy and emotional expression fosters balance, joy, and vitality in interactions with others. It mitigates fear and anxiety, promoting commitment, responsibility, ethics, compassion, personal confidence, appreciation of life’s beauty and art, a meaningful existence, optimism, expressive capability, initiative, creativity, and the transformation of hostility into innovative capacity essential for survival. This engenders balance, popularity, influence over hearts, expansiveness, flexibility, adaptability, understanding, dignity, and tranquility, directing the brain’s power and bodily capacities toward healthy activity and application.

Short-Term Learning

When senses are trained, sharpened, and refined, they require no strain to comprehend, achieving speed, precision, focus, and quality in perception. However, one must first identify the capacities of the senses to utilize them effectively. Variations in sensory training result in differences in sensory capabilities.

While the essence and quality of senses and intelligence are not entirely within one’s control, being influenced by bodily constitution, genetics, and background, their trainability renders their enhancement and quality discretionary. An individual can work on their senses—like the magnetism and iron of their body—to increase their body’s receptivity and sensitivity. If an individual’s bodily iron is abundant, their clothing may cling to their body, potentially even igniting; if it does not ignite, it is due to their weakness.

Strengthening one’s senses and intelligence impacts understanding, knowledge, insight, maturity, and even faith. Vibrant and active senses possess the power of focus and concentration. For many, learning is arduous and protracted due to scattered efforts, with individuals forgetting initial lessons before completing their education, their academic progress reliant on overnight exams and degree-centric metrics rather than true knowledge.

Robust senses and high intelligence make forgetting studied material or losing it impossible. A vibrant and potent sense, akin to drug- or survivor-detecting dogs, can perceive and comprehend with precision. One whose senses are neither vibrant nor active is akin to a moving corpse. Advanced societies, rather than merely increasing population numbers, focus on enhancing individuals’ senses and intelligence, leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and supra-mental perceptions.

Sensory development should be prioritized in schools, universities, and seminaries. An individual with dormant or inactive senses is akin to one whose hands and feet are bound. Without vibrant and potent sensory utilization, intelligence cannot progress or elevate. Avicenna’s preeminence in the sciences of his era stemmed from his high sensory and intellectual capacity and activated innate genius, not merely from studying others’ works.

Rest and Repose at the Point of Stillness

Among the invigorating remedies for the body, which restore and enhance its capacity for intelligence and comprehension, is rest and repose, maintaining the body at a point of stillness. Depending on the intensity and nature of work, every five to fifteen minutes, the body should be granted rest, suspending all physical and mental activities. Just as any machine requires rest, cooling, and maintenance, a human must pause all activities for approximately a quarter of an hour, granting the body complete respite. Short-term rest has been confirmed to improve cognitive performance and reduce exhaustion.

Educational systems should not detain students for academic activities beyond three and a half hours, as exceeding this is detrimental to their psyche, constituting undue hardship and pressure. The education system must limit classroom hours to no more than four hours and, post-primary education, adopt a specialization-focused approach, eschewing the omniscient, all-knowing policy. Instead, students should be directed toward subjects aligned with their talents and interests. Time-limited education and specialization align with educational research, while excessive diversity may diminish motivation and creativity.

Educational pluralism discourages students from learning, rendering their future ambiguous, lackluster, and devoid of motivation. A pluralistic system does not foster researchers and stifles the spirit of inquiry, creativity, and innovation in students, paving the way for foreign domination over a nation’s scientific and cultural destiny.

Similarly, a physician should not practice medicine for more than four hours daily, just as a poet cannot be compelled to compose poetry for hours in a single session, nor a researcher forced to conduct research. A physician practicing beyond four hours daily wrongs their patients. Precise medical work, with valid diagnoses and correct prescriptions, cannot be sustained for more than four hours daily. Medicine is a precise, technical, and scientific endeavor, and the human brain cannot perform highly intricate and technical tasks beyond this duration.

Even thinking during a point of stillness disrupts bodily rest and indicates a lack of mental control. A strong individual can command their mind, preventing it from succumbing to mental rumination, wandering imagination, or intrusive thoughts.

Continuous and unrelenting activity exhausts the human body, leading to deterioration, premature aging, and weakened nerves. The five daily prayers can be considered a respite from worldly concerns, yet the body requires moments free even from physical prayer.

The body and mind require a state of readiness (standby), lest the mind become like a spoiled, wayward, wandering child. An individual with a wayward or ruminating mind experiences prolonged, protracted dreams. In dream interpretation, short dreams are highly valuable, bearing meaning or reflecting reality, whereas protracted dreams are a quagmire of the mind and imagination, resulting from mental wandering during wakefulness. Such wandering transforms dreams into disordered, uninterpretable visions (adghath ahlam). Disturbed dreams are useful in psychology for diagnosing personal disorders.

Weakness of Memory and Forgetfulness

A body accustomed to monotonous diets, lacking variety and diversity, experiences weakened sensory sensitivity and diminished intelligence. A lack of dietary variety, even for the young, induces forgetfulness, akin to the effects of habitual drug use or alcoholism, rendering consumed food akin to waste for the addicted body.

If water is stored in a plastic bag for an extended period, it imperceptibly seeps out, gradually emptying the bag. Human memory is akin to that plastic bag, with information and knowledge as the water. Stress, mental and emotional conflicts, nutritional deficiencies, improper diets, or an onslaught of inappropriate auditory and visual stimuli create perforations in memory, leaking information, knowledge, and memorized content, leading to forgetfulness and Alzheimer’s.

Scholars and thinkers must avoid entanglement in trivial life problems, uncontrolled psychological pressures, and stress, lest they lose a significant portion of their knowledge and skills. Brain repair is far more challenging than the restoration of other bodily organs.

For memory self-care, one should avoid watching every film or news broadcast, consuming every food, or exposing oneself to every stress or mental pressure, as these lead to the death of brain cells and the loss of associated information. Human knowledge is embodied in the physical brain, heart, and bodily cells, and with their loss, related awareness fades, resulting in forgetfulness of prior knowledge.

Pluralism and coercive imposition, akin to tooth extraction, weaken memory. Teeth deteriorate and fail to regenerate due to their rigidity and lack of flexibility compared to other organs. Teeth should be preserved through human intervention to avoid premature loss, protecting memory from damage and deterioration.

Forgetfulness may indicate an imbalance in the body’s sugar and salt levels. A test of intelligence and sensory acuity involves placing an object, such as a key or pen, in a specific location and recalling its position after several hours or days.

Memory consolidation depends on quality of life, proper nutrition, and adequate sleep. Disruptions in sleep and diet diminish alertness and cognition, leading to forgetfulness. As previously noted, memory decline is not solely a consequence of aging but results from improper sleep and nutrition, which, while more prevalent in old age, also threaten poorly nourished and sleep-deprived youth. As the proverb states:

The house is ruined from its foundation,
Yet the master ponders the design of its balcony.

Persistent consumption of yogurt, particularly yogurt with cucumber, induces memory weakness and frequent forgetfulness.

In ordinary individuals, those inclined toward contemplation and rationalism with creative thought tend to have weaker memories. Conversely, those who prioritize memorization and expend significant energy on rote learning experience diminished intellectual depth and suppressed talents.

When an ordinary individual invests heavily in memorization and narration, their depth of insight, contemplation, and creative innovation diminishes.

Religious rulings must be derived with consideration of contextual analysis and wisdom. Some religious recommendations, strongly encouraged in early Islam, were context-specific and have since lost their relevance. For instance, the encouragement to memorize the Quran served as a means of printing, publishing, and disseminating it in an era when literacy and writing resources were scarce, necessitating oral transmission. Today, with widespread literacy and advancements in printing and publishing, such recommendations have lost their original purpose. It can be argued that there is no longer spiritual reward for memorizing the Quran in the current context, as knowledge has transcended memory-based metrics, with reading and writing becoming ubiquitous. The Quran is intended for deep understanding and precise learning, not for memory-centric education. Constrained rationality, habitual and imitative beliefs, intellectual lethargy, and self-abandonment are obstacles to perfection.

While strong memory contributes to creativity, encompassing the framework for knowledge construction, rapid and precise conceptual understanding, and reasoning, a memory-centric approach—restricting the mind to rote information and emphasizing limited memorization—fails to support learning or the creation of new situations, rulings, and real-time innovation. It drives individuals toward consumerism, imitative use of others’ spoken words, and disconnected recitation devoid of semantic and linguistic depth, rendering them mere transmitters of information—superficial, word-focused, and incapable of fostering learning, identity formation, or activating other learning-related faculties.

Managing Sugar and Salt Consumption

A primary cause of diminished intelligence and sensory perception is the poor quality and excessive quantity of sugar and salt used in food production to enhance flavor. Sugar causes excessive cellular enlargement, while salt contributes to the breakdown or burning of brain cells.

Controlling the quantity and quality of sugar and salt consumption enhances intelligence and sensory acuity. Excessive sugar and salt intake is linked to impaired brain function, and their regulation supports cognitive health. Reducing sugar and salt consumption and incorporating honey and spices can improve metabolism, enhance heart health, and lower blood pressure.

Use of Aromatherapy

Proper environmental humidity can contribute to overall health. The use of aromatherapy and humidification can strengthen memory and the nervous system. In dry environments, without appropriate vapor use, memory and nerves are weakened.

Inhalation of lavender or eucalyptus can improve breathing, alleviate headaches, and enhance focus. The benefits of lavender inhalation for concentration have been confirmed, and eucalyptus is effective in improving respiration. Aromatherapy, by stimulating olfactory receptors, enhances breathing and concentration.