The Raw Material of the Mind

“Roots do not grow at random in the dark. Plants spread through the soil in a dance of exploration, mapping the ground, sensing the presence of water, and gauging the density of the earth.”

Roots explore the ground before finding a path along which to grow. Why do human beings so often seem to do the opposite? Do we grow first and only then begin to look for our way?

At the beginning of autumn, the landscape seems to change its clothes. It becomes an open-air fair, inviting us to discover its colours and bring some of them into our homes. Watching nature change can also become a way of understanding ourselves more deeply.

The transition from one season to another brings a certain weariness. It is a time to seek inspiration in simple furnishings and woven textures, but also to ask a question: what is the raw material of the mind? What allows us to imagine pumpkins, chestnuts, grapes, and leaves of every shape and colour?

For Aristotle, prime matter is that which can take on any form while possessing no form of its own. The idea calls imagination to mind. Before transforming a garden, we can imagine it. Before furnishing a house, we can already picture flowers or sculptures on the table, trace paths in our minds, bring materials together, and arrange the light. We can ask what that space might become. But where does this capacity to imagine come from? Does it arise from nothing?

Al-Fārābī understands the mind as a faculty capable of transforming what it perceives into knowledge. Through the Active Intellect, experience can become understanding and meaning. In his account, the prophet translates intelligible truths into images and symbols through an exceptionally developed imaginative faculty.

In everyday life, too, we continually transform what we perceive into something we can communicate. We observe a landscape, form an image of it, and search for words to describe it. Yet the person listening does not receive our experience exactly as we lived it: they interpret it through their own memories and assumptions. Communication takes place in the space between what we intend to express and what another person understands. Relationship allows us to recognise that distance, ask questions, and make sense together of what we have seen.

The intellect can imagine orbits and bands of light, construct vertical spaces, containers for objects, new pathways, and surfaces. It can turn a vision into a floor plan and help us recognise our possibilities, creating connections with what surrounds us.

But a floor plan comes to life when someone inhabits it. In the same way, an idea changes when it is communicated and encounters another person’s thought.

The most extraordinary design is the human being; the largest space we inhabit is the world. Yet too often, instead of making it a place of peace, we turn it into a bunker without light. When we stop listening, that bunker also becomes a way of thinking: our interpretations begin to seem like the only possible ones, and we lose the ability to see beyond them. It is said that we human beings paint our own reality. But with which colours, and from which elements?

If we can rethink a space, we can also try to rethink how we look at reality and encounter others. When something within us grows dark, we risk assigning meanings to events or to other people’s words that they do not carry. Going outside, observing autumn, and allowing its changes to surprise us can remind us of a simple movement: we gather from the outside what we wish to bring within. To understand a person, as to know a place, we must first explore and listen.

I seem to recognise a similar movement in reading the Qur’an: beginning with what is vast in order to consider what is small. Today, by contrast, we often expect to understand the whole by starting only with its smallest parts.

Like the prime matter described by Aristotle, what we are capable of becoming has not yet taken a definitive form. The mind, however, is much more than a space to inhabit. It is also where relationships begin and where we give meaning to what we see, hear, and feel. The words we choose to describe the world reveal part of this inner work; the responses of others can help us recognise what we had overlooked.

The spark I find in the Qur’an can speak even to those who do not follow a religion: it is an invitation to seek knowledge, to reflect, and to explore what exists both within and beyond us. From here, another possibility emerges: that a conscious intelligence lies at the origin of reality. Prime matter then becomes, for me, part of a wider question about the origin of all that exists.

The details deserve our attention. How are the spaces of the mind organised? And what of the spaces in the world we share? What place do we leave for what we do not yet know, or for what another person is trying to tell us?

There are no clear boundaries. There is poetry in different eras, in each person’s ideas, and in the ways they overlap. Yet it all draws, in some measure, on what exists outside us: a spark passes through the architecture of the universe, and what we encounter becomes thought, language, and relationship.

Hermann Hesse said: “It is not easy to have a beautiful garden: it is difficult to govern a kingdom.” Perhaps that is why we so often remain at the surface and hesitate to probe the ground more deeply. After all, if so many explanations already exist, why keep observing?

Autumn may seem an insignificant season, yet it reminds us how many possibilities remain for giving shape to reality. At school, during art class, our teacher told us to paint by drawing on what we could see outside ourselves. Faced with an abstract painting, however, we may see only a jumble of colours and shapes because we cannot recognise what inspired the artist. Asking what they saw, or telling them what we see, can open a path between two different ways of looking.

To examine the assumptions through which we interpret the world is to observe how our ideas arise, how they become words, and how they change through encounters with others. Yet this inquiry also reaches a limit: if we do not know the primordial assumption on which everything rests, no explanation can claim to be complete. Like roots moving through the soil, we can continue to explore, enter into relationship, and search for a way forward without mistaking what we already know for the whole of reality.