I have not understood the world, the dunya in the way others have understood it, but I am seemingly getting a better understanding of it.

Based on one’s encounter with it at an early age, their interaction with it, and it with them, is decided.

If one did not have or did not get a sufficient amount of necessities and beyond necessities, e.g., desirable things, then for them, the dunya will be like a thirst or a hunger that will be gnawing at them incessantly.

Suppose someone received a sufficient amount of the necessities. In that case, the most important of them being undying love – a feeling of being wanted in this world, then their desire for the dunya will not revolve around things.

Thus, the early shaping of zuhd, or abstemiousness, which is the better word for it in the (industrial) West, begins with the infant’s relation to the breast, which of course, to it is its encounter with the world.

Therefore, the inculcation of the spiritual child begins at the earliest stages of the life cycle. This should not be underestimated.

We could say, therefore, that an insufficient suckling will cause a void, a desire to take place, a search, as it were, that will manifest itself later on in life, where one may grasp onto an object or seek to surround themselves by things to fulfill this void.

Of course, knowing what we know about the spiritual dimension of the human species, a physical object can rarely replace a spiritual deficiency.

On this note, we should take heed of our origins and our upbringing, as well as those of our children, present tense, and future.

If we want to raise spiritual beings, then we have to begin at the earliest stages of cognition and not wait, thinking that the soul’s immersion in documents or words on paper will somehow completely undue whatever deficiencies existed at the primal or infant stage.