INTRODUCING THE QURAN

The Quran calls us towards spirituality of the positive kind. It means living in the world and trying to derive spiritual food from material things as a matter of intellectual discipline. corrupts it is sure to fail” (91: 9-10). These Quranic verses refer to the importance of personality development, laying emphasis not on its physical but on its spiritual aspects. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the main theme of the Quran. What is purification of the soul? It is to purify one’s mind of all kinds of bias and negativity. In other words, it is to de-condition the wrong conditioning. This is the mind the Quran tries to build. One who fails in this de-conditioning process will become a corrupt or an unwanted personality in the divine scheme of things. Man’s personality is like an onion. An onion has a central core, but this core is covered by many layers. If one wants to reach the core, one has to remove all these covers or layers. The same is true of the human being. A human personality is always subject to the process of conditioning, which wraps it up in many layers. The process of conditioning begins right from birth. Initially, it is an unconscious process. The individual’s family, the institutions, the society, the community, are all sources of this conditioning. From childhood to adolescence, one is affected by this conditioning. Only after reaching adulthood does one become capable of understanding this problem consciously. From here onwards begins what is called personality development. It calls for an awakening of the mind and a conscious discovery of the problem. At this stage, the individual must develop the capacity for antiself thinking. He must engage in introspection. He must try to de-condition his previous conditioning with complete objectivity. This is the most important task for a person. Without carrying out this task, there is no one who is quite complete. Everyone is like a sub-human being. The Quran calls each one of us towards this de-conditioning. Deconditioning is a process of analyzing what one has stored in one’s mind with complete objectivity and then overhauling one’s personality in a dispassionate manner. It is to remove the negative thoughts from the mind and turn them into positivity. Thus, one can say that the Quran is a book which calls people towards their own personality development, so that they become eligible for God’s perfect world of Paradise. o