Essay on The Heart

Some of the little "me" time in Mecca was spent at a couple of bookshops just standing and looking at books on display. Being in a foreign country with foreign money, one tend to be less stingy with one's spending. 10 little books caught my eye! I even bought 2 copies of the same book coz I couldn't recall if I already have a copy. I didnt want to risk not buying it coz one gets lost pretty easily and finding the same book shop would take away more precious time.

Currently, I'm reading a thin book entitled A Commentary on Ibn Taymiyyah's Essay on The Heart by Dr Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips. Reading it constantly reminds me that my heart is not yet ready to read such books. The eyes see and the mind processes information but the heart struggles to keep up, somehow. I guess in some ways, the following paragraph in the book puts it nicely:

"As the heart was created to know things, its pursuit of things out of a desire for knowledge is [called] thought and reflection, just as the ear pursuit of speech desiring to hear it is [called] listening, and the eye’s attention to things trying to view them is [called] sight. Thus, thought relative to the heart is like listening relative to the ear and sight relative to the eyes, etc. If [the heart] comes to know what is reflected on, that was its goal, likewise, if the ears hears what it listened for, or the eyes sees what it looked at."

For a while now, I've been going on about listening to the heart and the head. Perhaps, this thin book could help shed a little more light on the heart. And who knows, perhaps in future, I'd want to listen to my heart a little more often.