1- What your emotions say about you: To better appreciate the role your emotions play in your life, consider how you respond to your pain sensors, and what function they serve in the first place: pain is a signal that lets you know that your body is exposed to something that is harmful to it. If the harm is (potentially) great, and the pain is severe, your body won’t even wait for a response from your brain, but will respond with a reflex to jerk the body away from what’s harming it.

The same applies to feelings of hunger, for example, which let you know that your body is in need of food, or particular nutrients. If you choose to ignore your hunger, you would be dismissing an important message about your body.

The same applies to other feelings, such as fear, depression, joy, etc. They reveal to you your own values, and what you need to adjust or work on in your life.

2- What your emotions say about your beliefs: When you hold a belief that is inconsistent with the reality you are observing, your emotions will register the conflict, and you will feel uneasy, frustrated, angry, etc. Therefore, your emotions are important when considering the validity of your beliefs: why are you having these feelings? What are the issues you have not yet resolved in your beliefs? Where do the contradictions lie in the beliefs you hold, or the inconsistencies between what you have accepted to be true, and the inputs you are receiving from your senses?

Your emotions are not random sensations about a distant dimension. They reveal to you the consequences of your beliefs on your life, and they are an essential element for a better understanding of your body and your mental state. In the same way that a rational individual would take into account external factors to understand external phenomena, he needs to be attentive to internal signals to better understand his internal reality.

Natural Learning

Although this is an obstacle we must overcome, it occurs very naturally that we are not even aware of it. In order for us to respond effectively to our experiences, we register the experience, as well as any views on the actions that produced positive outcomes and the actions that produced negative outcomes, including any additional observations that we may make use of in the future.

All these ideas are stored in our knowledge-base. To learn from our experiences, we must be able to retrieve this information from our knowledge-base whenever we encounter a similar situation. Learning isn’t simply about storing data in our brains, but about making sense of past, present and future experiences. To do that, we need to apply what we learn to the situations we face. 

We should not attempt to acquire the same ideas whenever we encounter a situation we have already lived through. We should be prepared to call on our knowledge to handle the situation effectively.

Creating Templates

When we register ideas in our knowledge-base, we store them as templates that represent all possible occurrences of such a concept. For example, my son has learned what a ball is, and whenever he sees a ball he says: “ball” (or aby - “I want,” in Arabic - but that’s another issue). However, not only does he refer to a ball as a ball, but any round object, to him, is a “ball”. Therefore, all round objects fit in the template of: ball.

My son, and all humans for that matter, hold templates to understand all instances that match the template. In my son’s case, the template is roundness.

However, there is a difference between a ball and a wheel, and between a circle and an oval. These objects, and the concepts we associate with them, are not identical. But when we limit ourselves to a single template that represents a range of different concepts, we limit our knowledge and our potential to acquire more knowledge.

Knowledge Can Limit Learning

When we incorrectly apply old templates to new concepts, we limit our learning. This is when our knowledge works against us, and the more we think we know, the less we will learn!

This doesn’t mean that we should dismiss what we already know in order to see new ideas for what they are. If we abandon our current templates, we may end up acquiring the same concepts again! And all we would have done is to repeat the same learning process but without retaining the information we have acquired.

Making Distinctions

The solution isn’t to abandon templates, but to generate new templates and sub-templates. Under the template of “roundness” my son will soon realise that there are “spheres” and “circles”, “perfect circles” and “ovals.” He will associate all these to objects that don’t exhibit roundness, such as “squares”, “triangles”, etc. and recognize that they all fall under the template “shapes”. 

This is extremely important for the concepts we come across today that carry many different meanings that we lump together under a single template, while overlooking the distinctions between those meanings. If we fail to recognize the differences, then we have both limited our knowledge and misrepresented these ideas.

For example, concepts such as “religion”, “secularism”, “liberalism”, “democracy”, “Islam”, “justice”, “selfishness”, etc. all carry a range of meanings that we need to recognize and to define (i.e. limit) each meaning according to the similarities and differences between all the meanings.

By making effective use of templates to categorize ideas together and making as many possible distinctions between ideas according to their differences, we can learn a great deal more from the ideas we come across and the experiences we live through. Making distinctions doesn’t omit the similarities. We can’t say: “Each case is unique that we cannot draw parallels.” This is another case of limiting our knowledge, because we become blind to the similarities.

Both similarities and differences need to be taken into account to make sense of the world around us.

I find the saying quoted above very interesting, and deserves some time for reflection. It’s intended as a piece of advice, or an instruction. An instruction is information that changes (or guides) your behaviour, if you choose to act on it. And since you can decide whether to follow the instruction or not, instructions only apply where you are able to make a decision.

A doctor can instruct you to take some medication, and give you instructions on how you should take it, but he cannot instruct the medicine on how it should behave. A marriage counsellor can advise the husband on how he should treat his wife, but he cannot instruct him on how she should treat him (the decision would rest with the wife). You cannot “instruct” a person on what he should look like, who his parents should be, or what will happen to him if he jumps out of a window.

Similarly, you cannot instruct an infant to acquire knowledge, since he cannot understand the instruction in the first place. Therefore, what does it mean to seek knowledge “from the cradle,” when we are not able to make such a decision as babies? Is the saying intended to be an exaggerration, to highlight how important the pursuit of knowledge is?

The answer is that a baby’s pursuit of knowledge is not instructed, but a natural process. What the saying means is: continue your pursuit of knowledge, from the cradle (when you could not decide to not acquire knowledge) to the grave (until you lose your ability to make any more decisions). The saying not only highlights the importance of knowledge in our lives, but that it’s something natural to us, which we should not discontinue once we are able to decide what actions to take and avoid.

To simply label the saying as a “rhetorical exaggerration” is to ignore some important meanings in the saying. We are always in need of knowledge, not only when we are able to make decisions. An adult’s intellectual development depends on his mental development as a child. We should never forget that as knowledge served us as children, and continued to serve us as adults (including the knowledge we acquired as children), we should, in turn, continue to gain more knowledge, so that we can benefit from more knowledge in our lives.

We should also note that the years from the cradle to the grave can be divided into different phases, where the type of knowledge we acquire is different. This is one of the main reasons why we should always continue to seek knowledge. What follows is a caricature-representation of the phases we go through in our learning development, but it serves to demonstrate the different types of knowledge we pursue as we move from one phase into another. For a more definitive explanation of our mental development I would need to consult some scientific studies in the field, which I’m afraid I have not done to date:

As infants, we accustom ourselves to the use of our senses, the perceptions we make and the causal relations between our experiences. At this stage, we do not have an understanding of language. Language opens the door to a vast range of new information that we can acquire, which is not directly related to our perceptions, but we can come to understand based on our experiences.

The primary focus of children is to understand how the world works. The focus then shifts to understanding ourselves better, and what purpose we seek out of life. We can also experience a phase of trying to understand other people, and how best to communicate with them. When trying to make a living, we seek to understand business better, and what can lead to financial success. Each phase in our lives needs new information, and we cannot simply rely on the information we have acquired in the past to serve us throughout our lives.

The saying doesn’t make it clear what type of knowledge is being referred to (whether secular or religious), but this will need another post to cover thoroughly. The short answer I can offer at this time is: both. However, many people would disagree with me, and, at this time, I can only reply with: stay tuned for my reasons!