Thoughts About Thoughts

By Dr. Munir A. Cheema

One life is far too short for one to start learning from a scratch. In honing these stray thoughts, I have leaned heavily on others. Many of my ideas tallied with those of my associates; some wise, some scholarly. They have made such instant impact that I can no longer discern the origin or legacy of the thoughts. Our sentiments are alike, like in hospitals whose walls have heard more cordial prayers than in temples, synagogues, churches, and the mosques. Ours is a lineage where we share our callings.

I trail a dynasty of writers particularly medical that have similar passions. Our thoughts, and the themes are alike; because the subject is common. I bask in the reflected glory of my predecessors who stand on the shoulders of their precursors. Our knowledge is concord.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984581785

Dr. Munir A. Cheema

The very title is thought-provoking and captivating. When a thought enters the mind – while awake or even asleep; it can become an inspiration – and can take you to sublime heights; in poetry, prose, art or science. It is creative way of handling thoughts in general, especially the profound ones. Professor Dr. (Brigadier) Munir A. Cheema is a prolific writer. His usage of English is excellent and his way of writing and expressing himself superb. Being a senior army officer, he has been trained to be highly disciplined, meticulous and keen observer. His writings captivate the reader and the stories or anecdotes he has chosen to pen down are revealing. As a matter of fact, while reading some of the anecdotes, I felt like I was reading the “Bostan” and “Gulistan” of Shaikh Sa’di of Shiraz. These are expressed in the same simple way but with far-reaching, useful moral outreach. He is very candid in his writings and, just like Sa’di, advises that often silence is golden. He very candidly advises to keep shut, if you are not sure what you are going to talk about. He does not hesitate to call a spade, a spade and always takes the bull by the horns. For some people, writing can be arduous, but it flows like a calm river from Dr. Cheema’s pen. I am sure that, whosoever reads this book, will take away something from it and perhaps be a better human being. Prof. Dr. Munir A. Cheema is a surgeon with empathy; a trait so far was taken for granted in medical students. But it is so fast vanishing that now it has to be taught in medical schools as a separate subject!

Book preview

PART I

THOUGHTS

1

THOUGHTS

We are shaped by our thoughts

We are; what we think.

—Buddha

The awaiting crowd of reporters from all over the world had gathered to interview Nelson Mandela, who was about to be released after twenty-seven years from the notorious Robben Island prison. They were expecting hate, bitterness, venom, and fireworks against the apartheid regime. One correspondent asked him, Which was the most memorable moment while you were in jail for so long? He reflected momentarily and then said, Yes, I can recall one. It was a terribly cold night in the cell when I had a recurrence of a bout of malarial fever. I was violently shivering, delirious, and was semiconscious. But I can still recall the concerned face of the white guard who was posted to watch me to ensure that I do not cause any trouble. In the frigid night, watching my paroxysms, he did not know what to do. He quietly took off his overcoat and spread it over my shaking body.

Before Nelson Mandela left the jail, he stopped and spoke again. As I stand before the door to freedom, I realize that if I do not leave my pain, anger, and bitterness behind me, I will still be in prison. Self-imprisonment is worse than that imposed. How many are in self-inflicted pain today for lack of forgiveness. How many of us have imprisoned ourselves inside the walls of anger and bitterness? Holding grudges do not make you strong, it makes you bitter. Forgiveness does not make you weak, it sets you free.

Such thoughts are iconic and describe the grandeur of a soul. That is how Mandela is celebrated—by the thoughts he expressed. But he envisaged a lot more and succeeded in abolishing apartheid.

The right of thinking freely, acting independently, of using our minds without excessive awe of authority and shaping our lives without unquestioned obedience to customs is the ultimate freedom—the birthright of every free man on this planet.

A thought is an inspiration, or an idea produced sometime by thinking or a flash in the mind. Thoughts are the original source of all wealth and success—the bedrock of our persona. Thoughts and expressions are intensely personal. They define who we are. They define the perceptions we have for others and others have for us. Where are thoughts formed? And where do they come from? They come from the shelves of archives of memory. The circuits through which thoughts are molded are unbelievably complex. A notion born and bathed in chemicals is conducted through electrical impulses as it becomes a thought and is translated into the words that we speak.

Thoughts can evoke different emotions—ecstasy or sorrow. Thoughts of gains or achievements are pleasing, while thoughts of loss are melancholic. The thought of superannuation brings with it the concept of involution, disease, irrelevance, and, finally, death.

Memory is thoughts stowed away. When you want to remember something, you pull it out like a book from a shelf in the library.

Thoughts are the connecting links between the metaphysical and physical worlds. When a person speaks, he first encodes the mental picture onto a thought wave to produce a sound that he associates with the idea of the picture that he and others around him can understand according to the language known to them and the corresponding alphabets and words stored in the memory. This first sound is audible only to his spiritual (nonphysical) ear. This sound can die like a nightmare if the thought is not communicated to the vocal apparatus. This depends on whether or not a person is willing to speak out his mind. When it is released, it causes the lungs to pump the air through the vocal cords. It causes the mouth to open, the tongue and lips to make specific movements to create the desired sound, which is audible to the ears. Intellect associates this sound with specific pictures and ideas, and thus the meaning of the sound becomes clear to the intelligence.

Thoughts to speech—there are two parts. From vocal cords onward we all know very well. How thoughts are formed is a mystery. Before the thought process starts, neuroscientists in f(MRI) shows ripples in that part of the brain about to be activated. These vibrations in the activated part of the brain are either due to chemical or electrical effects and proceed before a person can hear himself think. Even patients with aphasia or who suffer a stroke show ripples, and their thoughts have been recorded and translated. What causes these ripples? Since we do not know, we will call them intuition! A certain cluster of neurons start to quiver and then vibrate at a frequency with nature. The mental picture is scrambled and translated into sound waves. The intelligence decodes these sound waves, which is communicated as a spoken word.

What are thoughts made up of? Physiologists would describe it in material terms. These are really just electrochemical reactions, but the number and complexity of these reactions make them hard to fully understand. The human brain is a very complex structure, composed of about 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) interconnected by trillions of connections called synapses.

One of the big mysteries of human cognition is how the brain takes concepts and puts them together in ways to form new thoughts, but soon helplessness used to prevail, and we took shelter in intuition, divine and mystic versions.

Not anymore. In medicine, one of the biggest breakthroughs in this century is the investigation in the neurosciences through an fMRI of the brain.

About the brain and heart, we knew a lot. The brain, we presumed, was for intellect; and the heart, a mechanical inert pump to push blood through the body. The poetic romantic interpretation of the heart does not fit well in science. But in Arabic, there is its right description—qalb. It is not a mere pump but has perceptions of head and heart and much more; in fact, it’s the core of our consciousness. It deals with our distinctive qualities like cognitions, emotions, moods, persona, and the spirit—in fact, everything that makes our personality. Neuroscientists now have traced these connections within our brain. It is called the limbic system. It consists of about a dozen nuclei with fancy names and numerous relays, including those from the cerebral cortex where our memory is stored and the thought process starts. Sudden shock like news of death of a near or dear can be fatal. Broken heart is now a clinical entity, with a Japanese name—takotsubo.

How are thoughts formed, converted into words, and spoken as a language, flashed at an amazing speed of 1/100th of a second? Neuroscience research claims it starts in the neurons of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, in the depths of convolutions of its sulci and gyri. Memories are stories perched and relayed in the brain shelves through an egg-shaped nucleus called thalamus, which plays a pivotal role in churning out thoughts. The neurons work like an orchestra, and the thalamus is its conductor.

The thalamus in the future may even become a seat for interventions to reduce cognitive deficits in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.

Research shows that cortical circuits alone cannot sustain the neural activity required to prepare for movement. It also requires reciprocal participation across multiple brain areas, including the thalamus as a critical hub in the circuit.

The prevailing notion of the thalamus as a relay was based on its connections with parts of the brain that process inputs from the senses. But the thalamus has many more connections with other parts of the brain that have yet to be explored.

But in what way are thoughts produced? And in which sequence: do thoughts come first as impressions, or do chemicals initiate the process? Which came first—the egg or the hen? After having read philosophers like Rumi and Iqbal, I know there is more to it than simple chemistry. I have no doubt at all in my mind about it. Thoughts come from heaven and are divine. Is it possible that one day we may discover what is involved in thinking? Not just the chemical or electrical processes and which and how neurons play a significant role, but we could perhaps divulge the human soul! And why visions and such ecstatic revelations do not dawn on everyone. And why these are revealed only to a few. Is it a calling?

Why a man with a stroke cannot express his thoughts while they abound in his head? Outwardly, there is nothing wrong with his organs of speech, like lips and tongue and the facial muscles. The problem is central. A CT scan of the brain may show only a tiny speck on close scrutiny! Our intellect is mostly in the prefrontal lobes with to-and-fro communication with the thalamus all the time. From the core of neurons, thoughts congregate in a certain area near the motor area, which controls our speech. It is located on the left side of the brain for right-handed people and the other way around for the lefties. To make matters easy for muddled people who have difficulty remembering sides, a name has been coined for it. Now it is named after a physician, Broca, who sited it on the left half of cerebrum of the brain (in right-handed people.) He helped make life easy for lots of people like me. God bless his soul!

I have always had difficulty remembering the sides until my older brother, my mentor, suffered a stroke and lost his speech. It was the most distressing event I can recall. Within a fraction of a second, a talking man became aphasic. He struggled and stuttered. Not a syllable—just grunts. We all forgot about his heart. Silent tears rolled down his cheeks and also on mine. I revered him because he had literally shaped my life. When he died, I was shattered, perhaps more grieved than his children. In his death, I had lost my father the second time!

Since then, I’ve known where the speech area is. But I suffer from some sort of neurological affliction. Is it dyslexia? I mix left with right. I am hesitant to call it Alzheimer’s because I had this problem of remembering sides even when I went to England in my twenties to become a surgeon. While commuting, coming out of a tube station in London, I always walked the wrong way till I realized that I had to walk in the other direction. So not to get lost, I had made a formula as a guideline. Whenever I got out of the tube station, I would figure out the right direction for my destination in my head; say it was right, so I must walk toward right. I learned to reverse it when it came to actual walking, and I walked toward the left; mostly, I was right. North for South and South for North!

My professor in England diagnosed me early because I believe he also suffered from the same malady! He used to be so cross with me because whenever I answered his questions, the answer was always wrong. He used to become so annoyed that one day he gave me a piece of advice. The same one I had learned outside the tube stations: Think hard what the right answer is and when you acquire it in your head, just reverse it when you speak!

As I practiced it, surprisingly, that usually turned out to be the right answer! He was right.

He was a man of few words, would not waste much of his breath. Before the surgery, he would religiously go through a ritual. He had a small pocket-sized book, which had been tattered due to overuse. He kept it locked in a closet in the theater. Before every surgery, he would unlock the cubby and thumb through the book, and then after reading it, he would lock it back again. We, his junior staff, were very curious as to what does he read before every abdominal operation. It must be a prayer, we thought. So we also started to pray before any surgery. I do that to this day; after scrubbing for surgery when I raise my hands for water to rinse down my elbows, I cup my hands in prayer. Please, Lord, save this patient from my ignorance and inadequacies.

We never could lay our hands on this book since he kept it a secret. He was a dear soul. The day I graduated, he died the next day. It must be the shock of my success that killed him! Maybe because he never thought much of me. After his death, his belongings were gathered and were sent to his home. I was very keen to see that book he kept so close to his chest. So I found an occasion, casually walking toward his now-open cubbyhole. The book was all frayed. When I opened it, to my surprise, I saw it was blank. I turned over the decaying pages one after the other until the book started to crumble. Nothing. It was all blank. I kept turning the pages till somewhere in the middle of the book, I found a bold line, just one line: Liver on the right; spleen on the left.

Spoken words are an expression of thoughts—what everything and what everyone is all about. Because of them, scholars can deliver illuminating lectures. There are two types of words: words of wisdom and trash.

I think in our world, we are either thinkers or workers. The tragedy is that thinkers do not work, and workers do not think! On an individual level, it is so obvious, particularly in the third world countries. There is a supervisor on every worker, even one who is cleaning the street, or even laying bricks. Hard-pressed housewives know how they manage servants for household chores. In America, you need a school certificate to prove that you have the basic knowledge of the job before you are given a license to practice—not only for doctors but even for plumbers or carpenters.

When thinkers lead, as in the free world, there is progress, development, and enlightenment. And when nonthinkers lead and thinkers have to follow, as in communist countries, there is stifling and repression.

The ideal world would be a scenario where a man who thinks sometimes also works!

Animals also communicate their thoughts, as we all know when the dogs bark, the cats meow, and the birds chirp. I never knew even elephants could connect with one another. The low-pitched rumble of an elephant that cannot be heard by human ears can reach other elephants as far as a mile away. It warns them of predators or that it is time to move on. It is the herd interaction—that even animals like to socialize because it is inherent in everything living.

Thoughts about time and the universe are the most difficult. The sharp minds keep working on them. The chemical processes in the brain run at a fast rate, and sometimes amazing new breakthroughs can take place. Nightmares, on the other hand, are bursts of frenzied disjointed chemical reactions and electric short-circuiting in the brain that do not divulge any articulate notion.

I can recall what nobody knew when I was young and that what we know today: exploration of human genome—information of life. It tells the story of the race to sequence the genome. It is a scientific breakthrough that nobody could have foreseen. Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithm, and theories about thoughts are ultimately about trying to discover the meaning of life. These are just about ensuring that our questions, as yet unanswered and possibly not even formulated, shall be set before the enquiring minds of future generations.

To think and to ponder is something we all have in common. I do not know anybody who has not gazed up at the stars and not wondered. The inquisitiveness is in our genes.

Many people give up, stop thinking early, and move away. Some give up early when still young; others continue wondering until later in life. But in the end, they also give a philosophical shrug of their shoulders and stop thinking, leaving a vacuum in the mind. Some people seek the truth in religion; others remain confused and continue to gaze up at the stars.

Thinking is the pastime of philosophers. The sky is not even the limit. The mind is free, no walls, trenches, or minefields—like a free bird in the sky. Trying to solve complicated problems in your head during solitary walks in the woods, finding the right word or an expression for a speech or a treatise. It is liberating, invigorating, and great fun. The biggest challenge of all is to have the will to explore new thoughts and not hesitate to ask questions. This will keep some checks on the thought process as the human mind can touch extremes on either side. The spectrum of the mind’s reach is awesome: from abysmal depths to far beyond celestial cosmic. Criminals can reach abhorrent limits, and in wars, the destruction of life can be unparalleled—like the thought of making an atomic weapon. Left alone, man can surpass Satan.

Empty head is a devil’s workshop. Just keep it occupied. The military takes extra precautions to prevent soldiers from thinking by keeping them busy physically round the clock in necessary or sometimes pointless activities, to prevent trouble.

The other extreme is the great heights reached by great men that have made this world sublime. The most difficult thought of all is to stop thinking and banish thoughts. Amnesia is sporadic, and Alzheimer’s total darkness.

To hear yourself think and listen to the inner voice, you require ambiance, an environment, and a serene atmosphere. You need solitude and calm. That is why Buddha disappeared into a forest, the Prophet Muhammad into a cave, and Mandela in jail—to mull over their thoughts. You cannot think in a cacophony. Children, however adorable, won’t let you deliberate and are an impediment in the thought process. Their assertiveness is extreme—they live in their own world. They are genuine, candid, and clever enough to have their way.

A retired professor and a grandfather who was living with his son was once presented a fascinating book. He fell in love with it the moment he opened it. At night he savored every word of the first chapter until his old eyes started to ache and he fell asleep. The next morning, while he was readying to start reading it again, his daughter-in-law, mother of a five-year-old little girl, requested him to babysit, as she had to go out on an errand. The professor was dying to get back to the book but reluctantly agreed. He collected all the toys, wrapped them in yesterday’s newspaper, which he had read page to page, and gave them to the little girl to play with. He then settled down to read his book. The little girl would play for a while and, when bored, would come back to the professor and seek his attention to play with him. The grandfather would oblige for a while and then somehow manage to send her back to her toys. Again, when bored with the toys, the little girl would come back to her grandpa, seeking his tender loving care.

This went on for some time till the old man got fed up. He then thought of a trick to engage the little girl for a length of time. In yesterday’s newspaper, he remembered seeing an incredible picture on page 9—the photograph of the earth taken by Hubble Space Telescope splayed on a whole page. He explained to the little girl the significance of the picture. He then cut the page across with sharp scissors into multiple pieces. He sat the little girl on a carpet with a plastic sheet, put the mixed-up pieces on it, and asked her to put the pieces together as in a jigsaw puzzle. He then got back to his book for a quiet read. The thought that the little girl would never be able to put the pieces together brought a sardonic smile to the cunning professor’s wrinkled face. He now would be able to read his book in peace, he thought. While he was lost reading the book, the girl, after a few minutes, came back triumphantly. I have done it, Grandpa. The professor could not believe his eyes that she could place all the jumbled pieces together so quickly. He hesitantly asked the little girl, how did she do it?

She had put all the pieces of newspaper jumble on the sheet of plastic in perfect order. There was a flawless picture of Donald Duck on page 10. Aha, said the professor elatedly, but that was not the picture I gave you. The girl then carefully turned the plastic sheet over to page 9. On the reverse of the page, there it was—the exactly assembled picture of Mother Earth taken by the Hubble telescope!

The old professor was about to start pulling his hair; instead, he threw the book in disgust, sat down on the floor, and started playing with the thrilled little girl.

The older you grow, the more you learn from children that become your favorite company! The next generation will always be smarter—generation gap.

Thoughts at night, when sleep level fluctuates, are uninhibited and bizarre; they can overcome any barrier, can climb every height and travel from prairie to sea to mountains and sky in the fraction of a split second. The (logical) brakes are off, and unbridled thoughts can cruise at lightning speed, especially during the languor of sleep when one is in that fugue state between dreaming, waking, and sleeping and far from reality. Half-baked and irrelevant thoughts churn out and seep through a sieve with big holes and can be bewildering, as in nightmares. Being incoherent and raw, fortunately, such dreams are soon erased from the mind.

When the human mind is in its waking state, it controls the thought-generating process; but when asleep, it wanders. Higher powers may intervene when a dream of spiritual nature takes place. And higher powers may also intervene when some guidance is needed during the waking state of the mind. This is where the difference between the will of the man and the will of the Lord occurs. Will is a kind of thought that carries a command with authority. It commands one to do certain things or refrain from doing certain things. Will of the man is a thought that travels through the medium of the mind, which is a relatively low-energy wave. The will of God is a thought wave that travels through a spiritual medium and carries a very high level of energy. Thus, thought waves are similar to electromagnetic waves but cannot be detected by material detectors because they are much more subtle.

Speech is an amazing form of communication that has evolved over thousands of years. We take for granted how easy it is to speak—that is why losing that ability can be so devastating. It is our hope that its understanding will be helpful to people whose muscles enabling audible speech are paralyzed. It requires over one hundred muscles to say a syllable!

The loss of the ability to speak can have devastating effects on patients, whose facial, tongue, and larynx muscles have been paralyzed due to stroke or other neurological conditions. Technology has helped these patients to communicate through devices that translate head or eye movements into speech (Stephen Hawking with a superb brain and dysfunctional speech.) The systems involve the selection of individual letters or whole words to build sentences. The speed at which they can operate is very limited. Instead of recreating sounds based on individual letters or words, current technology limits use to, at best, 10 words per minute, while natural human speech occurs at roughly 150 words per minute. Researchers now have developed a neural decoder to translate brain activity into simple sentences through computers. This can help us to understand the thoughts of people who cannot speak.

All living cells of the body need basic nourishments like oxygen, water, and energy to function. Food is digested in the digestive system. Oxygen is consumed in the lungs; urine is produced from the kidneys. Thoughts are the product of the living brain. Dead brains do not think.

What excites thought production?

The electric potential in a neuron starts the chain reaction. Do different emotions like melancholy thoughts, happy thoughts, or intellectual thoughts have the same assembly line? How can we differentiate these thoughts? Is it emotions and intellectual curiosity or electrical potential? That is all conjectural and is food for thought!

Everything that man creates begins with a dream. Idea forces humans into action. How is that possible if thought is not a force? Thoughts are the connecting links between the metaphysical and the physical world. When a person speaks, he first encodes his mental picture onto a thought wave so as to produce an impulse, which he associates with the idea or the picture that he and others around him can understand according to the language known to them and the corresponding alphabets and words stored in the memory. This first sound is audible only to his spiritual (nonphysical) ear. This sound can die here if the thought is not communicated to the (physical) vocal organ. This depends on whether or not the person is willing to speak his thought. The will of the person is a thought carrying a command to release or not to release the earlier thought carrying the sound. When it is released, it causes the lungs to pump the air through the vocal organ; it causes the mouth to open, the tongue and the lips to make specific movements to create the desired sound, which is audible to physical ear. The breath becomes sound, and words are spoken. Intellect associates this sound with specific pictures and ideas and thus the meaning of the sound becomes clear to the intelligence to understand it.

What is the origin of the thoughts? That part of the brain where thoughts are about to originate start to quiver before electric impulses can be recorded. Different nuclei are activated and put in their input like old memories and experiences, and then make it up into a cogent shape before the activity reaches the vocal apparatus. All that happens in a flash.

When the human mind is in its waking state, it controls the thought-generating structure; but when it is asleep, other forces behind the mind control it. These higher forces originate from a unified field of consciousness that pervades the entire universe. During sleep, this keeps generating thoughts, and the intelligence decodes thoughts into pictures that make up our dreams. Most of the time, the thought-generating process simply picks some pictures from the memory and generates thoughts with the help of intelligence, and thus many dreams may have connection with what is already known to us. In such cases, no higher powers may be involved. Higher powers may intervene when a dream having a spiritual nature takes place. And higher powers may also intervene when some guidance is provided during the waking state of the mind, as we believe to the prophets.

This is where the difference between the resolve of a man and the will of the Lord occurs. Will is a kind of thought that carries a command with authority. It commands to do certain things or refrain from doing certain things. Will of the man is a thought that travels through the medium of the mind that is a relatively low-energy wave. The will of God is a thought wave that travels through a spiritual medium and carries a very high level of energy. Thus, thought waves are similar to electromagnetic waves but cannot be detected by present detectors because they are much more subtle.

What are thoughts made up of? They are really just electro/chemical impulses—but the number and complexity of these reactions make them hard to fully understand. The human brain is composed of over 100 billion nerve cells interconnected by trillions of connections, called synapses.

One of the big mysteries of human cognition is how the brain takes ideas and puts them together in a way to form new thoughts.

A sound, a smell, a word can all flood our minds with memories of past experiences. Researchers found that split seconds before we recall these events, tiny electrical waves, called ripples, may flow through key parts of our brains that help store our memories, setting the stage for successful retrieval.

The firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair.

At the end of the day, it seems so surreal that ultimately, all our altruistic thoughts, even tender passions like love and empathy, are manufactured—and that too from elements, earthly constituents like carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen!

How weird? How very unromantic that all our tender, even ethereal, thoughts emanate from turab—the mire!

CO2+ H2O=ATP broken down to ADP, which is energy. We spend half our body weight of it each day!

Energy is needed for all activities for every cell of the body to function, including the thought-producing and thought-processing neurons. Dead men do not think. Some people waste this energy by just claiming to be alive!

An empty head is the devil’s workshop. Do not let it remain empty.

If you do not have dreams, your life will be about problems.

Prophet Muhammad mulled, till the mature age of forty years in the lonely hush of a cave of mount Hira, in solitude till the revelation. When thinking ends in a blind alley and can proceed no further, at times divine help arrives to rescue as it has come to many prophets, thinkers, and philosophers. Iqra (read).

Revelation and reason mean the same thing. They both begin from the same point. And everything in the universe spins out from that.

What is better for the affairs of man and the affairs of society, reason or revelation?

Actually, these are not in opposition. But to find true revelation, man must first choose reason, because reason is the doorway to revelation. Man must open his mind and use his intellect to find higher truths. In this way, God shows himself to man through thoughts.

There are many claiming to be holy and righteous who say true revelation comes not from corrupted human mind but from the pure divine heart. Such men always have been with us. Be gentle with them. Try to assure them. Try not to have them fear their minds and ideas, which are sacred Gift of God. Turn all your resources to translating the great works of thoughts and knowledge in the language you understand best, whether they be in Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, or any other tongue. Knowledge has no borders. Wisdom has no race or nationality. To block out ideas is to block out the wisdom of God.

Connections between mind and soul and physical health have its origin in more holistic beliefs and traditional Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. It is as much the result of holistic Muslim views of interconnectedness of all the physical processes within God’s universe.

How are thoughts formed? It is difficult to envisage. When no explanation is forthcoming, the mind wonders and wanders into the realm of mysticism. And we label them divine—till neuroscientists come up with a better explanation!

We Muslims believe that everything in