Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "self-awareness"

Today, religion gets beaten up in the world of rational thinkers because of what it has become. Religion has become a matter of blind faith upon doctrines, without the slightest bit of rational intervention. And that, my friend, is called religious orthodoxy, which, though being related to the term "religion", has, in reality, nothing to do with true religion. The religion that I advocate, and so did the mortal humans known as Jesus, Buddha and Nanak, is the religion of love, compassion and self-realization. I don't want to take away anybody's religion, but simply to make them see what religion really means.

You need to find the highest form of divinity within yourself, not in any book, creed or institution. That is the true essence of religion, which, unfortunately, we see nowhere in today's world. And from this standpoint of true religion, the atheists are a billion times more religious than all the blind "orthodogs". Religion, in the world of thinking humans should be compatible with reasoning and progress. Any religion that impedes in the progress and rational thinking of the human society, is no religion at all.

"Progress" sounds like a fascinating word to be proud of, yet it comes at a price. A price that most of the human society is often unwilling to pay. It is the price of all bigotry, prejudices and barbarian practices. Without sacrificing these primitive tenets of human character, there cannot be any true progress or any true religion. True progress begins with the recognition of your innate evil. Only after recognizing those evil elements of your mind, you can take action towards having a healthy conscientious control over them. It is this control that distinguishes a civilized human, from the primitive cave-people.

As I have said in my book We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism

"Good and evil are both fundamental features of the human mind."

In a civilized human the good outweighs the evil, whereas in a primitive human, the evil outweighs the good. And one of the most disgraceful and evil tenets of the human mind is today's so-called religion - i.e. religious orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the biggest obstacle in the path of peace, progress and wellbeing of the society. Take away religious orthodoxy and all the violence in the name of religion and God shall disappear for good. In the face of rigorous rational arguments, any man or woman who, out of blind faith, consistently keeps saying, his or her dear scripture has all the answers in the universe, is either suffering from delusional disorder or simply an idiot. A creature that does not have the basic mental faculty of reasoning, is not worth the title "human".

Here one may confuse orthodoxy with traditions. So, I must make it clear, that you should not confuse traditions with orthodoxy. Traditions can be both healthy and harmful. By choosing not to eliminate the traditions that over time tend to become a harmful impediment in the path of progress, one leans towards orthodoxy, that ultimately drives a people back to the stone-age. Various traditions of various cultures throughout the world make the human species filled with colors. But these traditions must keep evolving through adoption of new practices and elimination of the useless ones, based on the needs of the time. Either one evolves or gets extinct - this is the principal law of Mother Nature.

So, here one may wonder, how can we eliminate the evil tradition of religious orthodoxy, and turn religion into a progressive endeavor of the progressive society! It will not happen by engaging yourself in a worthless debate with the intellectual idiots of religious orthodoxy, as you may think. Because those idiots do not have the cognitive capacity to recognize any rational argument against their dear doctrines. The real answer lies in you - or to be specific, your children. The transformation from a primitive, orthodox society into a real civilized society, can only begin with your children. This means, that your children shall determine the fate of the human society. They shall determine whether religious orthodoxy will keep on prevailing throughout the world, or conscience triumphs over all evil. Hence, it is in your hands, to shape their minds to become real civilized humans of a progressive, loving and conscientious world. Teach your children - "there is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion" (quote from my memoir Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost). Once you do that, rest assured, the world will become free from all sorts of prejudices.

Orthodoxy, bigotry, prejudices - these primitive traits only lead to chaos and destruction of all humanity. Hence, it is your existential responsibility to raise your child as a human being above everything else - catholic, muslim, jew, asian, caucasian or whatever. These human beings shall determine the fate of humanity. Remember, orthodoxy has no place in a world of civilized humans. We are not medieval monsters any more, we are civilized beings, and as such our most priced possession is our rational thinking, not mindless orthodoxy.

No tradition is greater than the mental and physical progress of the human society. However, traditions do indeed add value to the survival of a culture, but they must be scrutinize by each generation of that culture in order to get rid of the useless and harmful elements. Traditions that advocate bigotry, misogyny, racism, and fundamentalism, must be thrown away at ones by the responsible, civilized and conscientious beings of a culture. Then only they shall be qualified to be deemed as humans. Remember, no being is a human unless it elicits a character of courage, conscience, compassion and reasoning.

Further Reading
Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
The Education Decree
We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism

People often ask me – what is my work about? I tell them – I study humans – I study how they think, how they feel, how they behave and why. This answer probably would induce another question in your mind, which is – “how does this apply to my personal life?” So, the real question here is – how does the understanding of the mind, which essentially is the understanding of brain functions in a large scale, can effect and change human life? How can the understanding of the mind be applied by the lay-person – the non-scientist, in his or her life, to live better, with friends, family and co-workers?

These are the questions, which I attempted to address in one of my works, entitled “What is Mind?” I concocted various thought experiments to elucidate answers to such questions among other philosophical ones? So, in this piece, we are going to take a look, at two excerpts from the book, which are most appropriate in this context. First let’s bring up an excerpt to shed some light on how our behavioral capacities and traits can alter radically based on internal and external conditions.

Excerpt 1 from What is Mind?:

Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision.

But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life.

From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.

So, you see, what you feel when you are angry or sad, or desperate, may not actually be the baseline emotional state of your individual mind. Taking that into consideration, you can take necessary precautions to prevent your angry outburst from ruining a certain relationship with another person. Now let’s look at one of the most significant thought experiments from What is Mind?, which actually depicts the real life benefit of the understanding of brain functioning. I named this thought experiment The PMDD Conundrum.

Excerpt 2, A Thought Experiment from What is Mind?

The PMDD Conundrum (Thought Experiment, What is Mind?, 2016)

Mental health influences your decision-making ability regardless of your experiences. However, experience is what makes you better at making the right decision in a given situation. Here the term right only refers to your subjective perspective of the choice. To explain how experience alters one’s free will,let’s carry out a little thought experiment in the context of two different scenarios.

CONTEXT 1

Imagine yourself to be layman with no notable awareness of biology. You start dating a woman planning a long-term relationship. Every month right before her period starts, she gets extremely cranky like all menstruating women. However, she tells you that she has a rare medical condition called Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder or PMDD, which is the extreme form of PMS. You have already heard all about women getting agitated during their PMS, so you think that it is just the same. However, in time things get real stressful. Every month during those days, she would turn into a completely different person. And one time, she gets so agitated that she bursts out – you are the worst decision of my life. Naturally, it feels beyond acceptable to you. You are a human after all.

You cannot ignore such behavior any more. You start perceiving every single insulting word from her mouth to be true. It seems that it is what she really feels. You start getting upset beyond tolerance. And after several of such intense insults from her during those days, you realize that you don’t deserve such nonsense. You have no practical idea of what PMDD really is, so you perceive the insulting and violent behavior of your woman to be extremely inappropriate. So, one day you simply go ahead and tell her – you are nothing but a psychopathic maniac who just likes to hurt people. I think it’s time we ended things. Here, due to the lack of deeper understanding of what PMDD really is, your lay brain makes a decision based on your limited perception and needs, that you need to end the relationship.

CONTEXT 2

Now let’s run the same experiment in a different context. Imagine yourself to be a person with a hobby of reading a lot of Science books, especially those connected to the mind. You like to learn new things. Now, you get into the same situation and the same circumstances as mentioned earlier. But, here when your girlfriend tells you about her condition after the first month of outburst in your relationship, you get really curious. Previously due to your curiosity you have already learnt about the basic biology behind PMS and how it affects the female psychology. So, hearing about PMDD, you don’t only feel responsible but also very intrigued to learn about it. You feel the urge to know how can such a cheerful person turn into a completely different human being, almost like a beast?

And as you start reading, everything begins to make sense. The first thing you realize is that, PMDD is nothing like the common PMS that almost every girl faces. It is the extremely violent form of PMS, which is very rare. Due to the intense hormonal storms of PMDD inside a woman’s head, her cognitive reality changes drastically during the pre-menstrual days. You start to realize what your woman has to go through every month, due to her condition. A man can never even imagine in his wildest dreams how such storm feels like.

PMDD leads to the worst of hormonal mood swings. Every month during these days she turns into a completely different person filled with hopelessness and gloom. As soon as the tides change she comes back to her real cheerful self. It is this condition which makes her say the things she would never say in a lucid mental state.

You begin to understand that for most women with PMS the hormonal changes are manageable, and they are able to somehow keep their agitation to themselves. But for your special lady, the story is different and quite unmanageable. Most weeks of the month she is brainy, creative, enthusiastic, cheerful and optimistic, but a mere shift in the hormonal flood on certain days makes her absolutely hopeless about the future, about herself, about your relationship and basically about everything that she can think of. On those days her inner instability forces her to hate herself as well as get irritated at every single action you take. And the most fascinating thing about her mental state during that time is that the hopelessness caused by hormonal imbalances feels so damn real to her that she literally perceives it as the everlasting reality of her life. The utter hormonal turbulence completely transforms her cognitive reality from a cheerful one to a gloomy one. It constructs an altered state of consciousness, in which she becomes a different personality filled with nothing but hatred and rage.

She becomes absolutely blind to all the cheerful moments of her life. And she gets so restless that she explodes with insulting words towards you. Over time, you learn that the best to do in this situation is to do nothing and just be there with her. And every time she gets cranky, you simply learn to remain patient and unaffected by her words. Every month, once the hormonal storm wears off, she comes back to her original sunny state. In time, you grow more attachment for her, and she even becomes fonder of you, because you are always there for her, even when she is mad as hell. Thus, you don’t ever feel to leave her, rather together you stay forever and beyond.

ANALYSIS

In both contexts, you had two available options to choose from – leave or stay. Yet, you made totally opposite decisions in exactly the same circumstances. The only thing that was different is your understanding and experience.

In the first context, you were a layman with a general view of the world. You perceived everything in a generalized manner, with no further need of your own to explore and have deeper understanding of a phenomenon. Hence, when it came to decide whether to leave or to stay in the relationship, your brain made the decision based on your generalized understanding of everything, and you willfully preferred to leave your woman in the pursuit of a better prize, with less crankiness.

In the second context, you had a better grip over natural phenomena. Moreover, you had the curiosity to understand things, in a better way than the general public. And your understanding allowed you to try seeing the world from your woman’s perspective. And the more you tried, the better you became at being next to her when she needed you the most and hated you at the same time. You got experienced at it.

Naturally, the thought of leaving her, never occurred in your mind. And even if it did, you brushed off as the spur of the moment. Because your PFC already had sufficient data on the situation to analyze and come up with a positive outcome. Your experience here served as the very foundation, of your willful support towards your woman.

Each emotional impulse, each thought, each behavioral expression, has a neurological basis. Understanding these bases can redefine how we look at a person, how we look at a certain behavior of that person, how we look at a certain emotional impulse or behavioral expression of ourselves, and then to choose whether or not to accept it as our usual characteristic. And this very looking can change how we see our lives, how we live our lives, and how we see the world which we live in. In this looking lies the true key to contentment. In this looking, lie precious jewels of graceful living.





Recommended Reading

What is Mind?

To understand mental health, we must first understand what is mind? And by understand, I mean realize, in our bones, what this mind thing is. So, let's try to figure out. I assume you know what water is - what it is made of. It's made of hydrogen and oxygen. That's why, water is H2O. Likewise, mind is made of neurons - most of which are inside our brain and the rest are spread across our body like a network, not just to drive our body, but also to receive information from the environment.

We have about a hundred billion neurons in our brain. And just so you know, the number of neurons remains almost the same, since the time of our birth, what changes as we grow up and live through time, is their interconnections. For example, when you practice a certain task over a long period of time, the neurons responsible for that task, get substantially interconnected, and as they get more interconnected, you become better at that task.

Now, where does mental health come in all this? Well you see, we are animals. Yes we are, technically speaking. But since we severed our dependency on mother nature, by building civilizations, modern civilizations, we became somewhat non-animal. Which means, we no longer rely on the internal mechanisms that helped up animals to survive in the jungle alongside other animals. And these mechanisms are what we call instincts. But by instincts, I am not talking about the way you use the term in everyday life. I am not talking about just gut feeling. Instinctual drives helped us survive in the merciless kingdom of the wild - the drive for reproduction, the drive for staying alert and so on.

Now, the drive for staying alert is the instinct that's responsible for most of our modern everyday mental health issues - anxieties, stress and so on. Why, because we are not wired in our brain to stay calm - we are not wired to remain peaceful - we come from a long line of ancestors, who had to remain alert all the time, in order to be able to fight any possible predatory attack. And this evolutionary instinct of alertness still remains quite strong in the human psyche, except, now, we have labeled it with problematic terms like anxiety, stress and so on.

We have started to delude ourselves with the belief that these everyday mental health issues are our enemies that have risen recently, but the matter is quite the opposite. As I said in my book "What is Mind", fear, anxiety, stress - these are not our enemies. You cannot get rid of them, by thinking of them as enemies. They are evolutionary wisdom in the face of danger. So, you should not try to get rid of them, rather you should try to befriend them.

Accept them as part of your life - accept them as part of your being - rid yourself of the fairytale notion, that you ought to be full of happiness all the time - rid yourself of the false belief that being sad is bad, that being upset or disappointed is bad - these are all human conditions - one can't erase them, just because one doesn’t like them or one's society presents them as evil. Only when you accept yourself, the way you are, along with all your joys, sorrows, miseries, disappointments, failures, achievements and ecstasies, can you truly step beyond the dualities of existence - only then can you become truly alive to life itself.

Mental health awareness doesn't mean fighting stress, anxiety, depression and other everyday mental health issues, rather it means consciously modulating the habits that intensify those issues. Once you are in control of your habits, instead of letting your habits control you, you would automatically be in a much better shape, both mentally and physically. In fact, if we put aside the severe neuropsychological conditions, there is no such thing as mental health awareness, there is only awareness. Awareness breeds health, whereas callousness breeds more suffering.

Aham dharmam, aham daivam,
Aham qurban for bhoolokam.
Aham nyayam, aham shastram,
Aham the end of all divisionism.
Aham prakriti, aham pralayam,
Aham the seed of all causality.
I am life, I am death as well,
Life to love ‘n death to inhumanity.
To most people family is the world,
But to me the world is family.
Because I am accountable for all life,
I am the epitome of collectivity.
All that is civilized starts with me.
Aham brahmandam, aham brahmasmi.

(aham: I am, dharmam: duty, daivam: divinity, qurban: sacrificed, bhoolokam: kingdom of earth, nyayam: justice, shastram: gospel, prakriti: nature, pralayam: apocalypse, brahmandam: universe, brahmasmi: almighty)

“We Are All Racist (The Sonnet)

If we are still uncomfortable to face,
The roots of racism, how can we uproot racism!
Unless we recognize our tendency for division,
How can we ever be the cause of universalism!
The fundamental fact of human nature is,
We are a septic tank of prehistoric biases.
Sectarianism comes to us far too easily,
For we are all fundamentally racist.
Cruelty is the mainspring of survival in the wild,
So our brain leans more towards cruelty than kindness.
Millions of years of conditioning won’t vanish overnight,
We must self-regulate with our newly developed conscience.
The end of racism starts with the recognition of racism.
We are civilized only when we recognize our uncivilization.”

“I don’t make baseless claims like – I’ll remove all your fears, I’ll remove all your anxieties, I’ll remove all your insecurities. I am a scientist, not an influencer – which means, I am dutybound to adhere to the truth, no matter how inconvenient they are, instead of peddling comforting lies for exposure. And the truth is, if bombarding people with some fancy facts about the mind removed their worries, every household with a DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) would be the happiest place on earth.”

“Only you can remove your anxiety,
Only you can bring you clarity.
What the hell are you doing at the feet of fraudsters!
Go out and discover your own reality.”

You are sanity, you are sentience,
You are the lifeforce of destiny.
You are conscience, you are concord,
You are the end of animosity.

Give up your chase of goldmine,
Labor in the caverns of soulmine.
You shall be rich where it really counts,
Beyond the dreams of animalkind.

If you must love, love without any agenda,
If they love you back, your heart grows softer,
If they break you, your heart grows stronger,
Either way, in act of love there is no failure.

Our mutual vulnerability is our greatest strength,
Across all insecurity let us be vulnerable together.
In hopelessness we are each other's compass,
In vulnerability we are each other's vigor.

United we are alive,
Divided we are dead.
Integrated we're lovers,
Divided we are duffers.

Intellect is not the answer,
Belief is not the answer.
These only amplify what we really are,
Good becomes great, jerk becomes jerker.

Be love and be light -
watch the fall of worldly fright.
Be free and be responsible -
watch the society take its flight.

The candle’s purpose is to be lost in light,
The heart’s purpose is to be lost in love.
The ocean may try the sailor all it wants but,
The naive sailor is lost in the ocean’s love.
The sailor and the sea are not two but one,
The candle and the light are not two but one.
The heart and love are not two but one,
Individual and collective are not two but one.
Purpose of human is conquest over the inner animal,
Purpose of a human is the expansion of humanity.
Everybody grows old, not everybody grows up,
To die without growing up, is the greatest tragedy.
Life is too short to be wasted on half-cocked may be’s!
Cast fiction to the wind, and make the most of reality.

You are the sum of all science,
You are the life of all poetry.
You are the end to animosity,
You are the answer to conspiracy.

World’s light comes from your light,
It comes from the sacrifice of the few.
If these few ever became selfish,
Whole world would drown in dwindling dew.

You are the miracle you seek in church,
You are the gospel you seek in bible.
You are the reason behind civilization,
You are the mutation out of the jungle.

Neurons giveth,
neurons taketh away.
By neurons we forge self,
with neurons we fade away.

Within neurons cosmos comes to life,
within neurons worlds come to end.
Neurons are building blocks of walls,
as well as the instrument of bridges.

There is not one but two cosmos,
one made by nature, another by neurons.
We are the makers of observable reality,
shaped by hopes and biases of our own.

Neurons are the birthplace of God,
Neurons produce all ghosts and goblins.
Life is a concoction of neurochemistry,
Boon and bane are both our own making.