Giving Existence to a Thought Marks the Beginning of its Decline

Jaun Elia beautifully expressed, “Wajud Khial k Zawal hota h (loose translation: giving existence to a thought marks the beginning of its decline)”.

It is as if, with one line, he avenged Plato and all the logical positivists, saying that whenever we materialize a thought, we strip it of its purity—a thought is always more perfect before it becomes reality.

Think of a child who dreams of flying. In their imagination, they soar above mountains, touch the sky and feel infinite freedom. But the moment they jump off a swing in a park, they only stumble forward, hands scraped, breathless, realizing that the real world has limits. The idea of flight was flawless, but the experience, however earnest, was always weaker.

Being an adult, I spent hours in imagining something new. The end result? Flawed! Going beyond a certain boundary feels dumb and unrealistic. My mind always bring me back to the reality. I thought of a perfect world, and in the end, I cannot go beyond a system which is already known—even Marxism which is considered the mother of all utopian theories, failed.

In this aspect, an all-knowing yet unknowing child has the potential to break the boundaries and imagine the unthinkable.

Plato said that the world of ideal forms exists beyond what we see. A deeper truth that helps us interpret this imperfect world. For every book, there is a perfect idea of a book; for every mother, there is an ideal of pure love; and for every sky we look at, an image exists in our minds that no view can ever match.

Then came the logical positivists, who insisted that only what can be measured exists (logists for a reason). They tried to turn dreams into data, love (an abstract phenomenon) into logic. But Jaun Elia, as an unapologetic idealist, refused to accept a world that measured feelings with rulers. He lived in a world within, a place built of: memories, emotions, unspoken hopes and silent meetings. That richness made facing the cold, transactional outer world hard.

Different moments in our lives carry different thought processing. When we grow up and step into the real world, our inner world changes. From the Moon appearing to move with us while sitting in car to the Moon rotating around the Earth’s orbit, the difference lies in controlled and uncontrolled reasoning.

In a universe where reality is chaotic and decays constantly; it becomes essential to protect our inner world. To build within our children a universe made of great thoughts, deep poetry, rich imagination, self-imagination. If they have not read Shakespeare, they will think every rhyming verse is poetry. If they have not met Rumi in his own words, they will mistake every best seller with a Sufi title as enlightenment.

So we must plant ideal thoughts in their minds before they go out into a world that negotiates everything. Let them read or hear a story. Let them interpret first. Let them teach you. Let them construct and deconstruct. Let them know the truth: that the moment an idea is made material, it begins its journey of decay. A reality, no matter how beautiful, can never match the perfection of an idea.

In the end, every adult is a child; every child is an adult.

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Peace 🕊