CHAPTER 5
At the very outset, before we talk about actual and effective ways to work out a model of Sanity System in personal domain, it is mandatory to accept something, which shall brace us up for the tough task we have at hand. There has to be a humble and very sincere acceptance of the fact that there is huge problem in explanation of frontier ideas with the help of humanly designed words and languages. The trouble emanates primarily because of the way our brain has been designed and works for us to have perception and acceptance of realism through linguistic expressions and communication. When we talk about possibility of personal sanity, we run the same trouble with our perception that has to depend on language-led communication.
The content of intent is not foolproof and optimal when the content is only language. Intent is a vast territory and content that transfers intent from one person to another is restrictive if only words are the singular carrier. Option-less-ness of linguistic communication as sole media of intent transfer is suffocatingly crippling. This must be borne in our mind consciousness when we proceed ahead.
Secondly, also very importantly, there is a primary need to ‘unlearn’ so many things, to begin with a ‘neutral’ mind consciousness. It shall then have ease in accepting new ideas that shall be required to be allowed central position in new thinking. From what modern scientists have known about brain mechanism so far, we know that human learning is a complex mechanism. Our brain itself is hugely complex and precarious mechanism. It is believed that a child is born with a brain, which is already loaded with ‘archetypes’. This means, the brain is created with a ‘pre-designed’ framework that sort of already contains encoded information about human world, even before it consciously begins to realize and learn them through the five senses. Long years of more than 4 million years of evolution has evolved a brain that comes pre-loaded with predilections and conforming attributes in its trillions of neural plexus for survival in the world a human infant is about to step in.
The evolutionary process follows the cyclicality of phenotype shaping up genotype and genotype in turn affecting the phenotype. It means, humans are genetically wired for suitability and survival in the environment they live and as humans change the environments they live, their genetic make-up is suitably altered. Therefore, long years of evolution in the physical milieus of our Earth has shaped and formed the neural structures and functions of human brain, which are pre-loaded in every new brain of an infant coming in the world. These fixed and innate wirings of human brain even in an infant is called ‘archetype’, which means old and continued choices and preferences already there in brain states, before the child even begins to learn anything new. For example, scientists accept that belief in God and a world beyond is some sort of archetype that every child is born with. He or she may later ‘Unlearn’ this archetypal belief. We may also include in archetypes those genotypes that an infant acquires from parent’s phenotype. That is those genetic inclinations of an infant, which come to him or her from the milieus in which the parents have survived and adjusted to. Much of this too has to be unlearnt.
Unlearning begins by testing the validity of these archetypes. This is toughest for any human being. Not only unlearning archetypes of our subconscious mind states is tough but it is also singular misfortune that human system of education and learning, be it familial, societal or institutional, has never been designed to help a child or a young man or woman in this difficult enterprise. Every single individual on Earth is left on his or her own to evolve ways and seek guidance from whatever source it feels fit. No institutional help in the form of education and learning mechanism is available anywhere in the human world.
It seems, almost 90 percent of humans in contemporary world are seeking and are under some form of guidance either from spiritualism, religion, psychology, philosophy, ritualism, cult practices, etc at personal or group levels for peace, wellness and empowerment. All these can be clubbed into a singular need of all humans to seek and find help and support in dealing with so many issues of life-living that unsettle them and affect their wellness. However, globally, nowhere there is an institutionalized and authorized platform for learning and education of mind consciousnesses. Unfortunately, this issue is considered something as a subject matter for scientists to discuss among themselves but never the role of governments and politics to assimilate it into curriculum for universal education and learning.
The second element of ‘unlearning’ is pruning the ‘auto-learning’ or what we may call automatic creation of a replica of localized and ambient milieu in the subconscious mind states of a child in the first seven or eight years of his or her life. Unlearning this is also equally tough as this is also aligned to the very survivalist instinct of human brain mechanism. In contemporary scientific discourse, it is believed that in the first eight years of his or her life, a child imbibes almost everything that is part of his or her ambient milieu and also subconsciously accepts as his or her base reference point for all utilities and futilities, good and bad and right and wrong. The child picks up these benchmarks largely from the parents, physical elements of the ambient milieus, perceptions and practices that are prevalent and dominant in the ambient milieus. This forms as the primary and base template of all future learning that keeps happening through associations. They are essentially the strongest ‘contexts’ and ‘relationship’, which make Reality happen or collapse for a man or woman.
All future realities that a growing up child accepts happens through a process of association and dissociation that brain states make with this base-reference learning of utilities and futilities, good and bad and right and wrong, acquired in the first eight years and consolidated as primary subconscious mind states. As we have talked earlier, Reality is always contextual and relational and therefore, a growing up child sees and accepts Reality in context of what the subconscious mind paradigm presents as primary benchmarks of utilities and futilities, good and bad and right and wrong.
This subconscious mind ‘context’ and relativism of association has to be unlearnt as we grow up and mature as a young person in our twenties – the earlier the better! How we can unlearn, we shall talk later and it is relatively easy, once we accept the utility, worth, goodness, righteousness and indispensability of ‘Unlearning’ the archetypes and auto-mode subconscious mind programming. We first need to understand why ‘Unlearning’ is indispensable for Possibility Of Sanity at personal levels. It should not be very difficult to understand as now we have known the idea and situation of ‘context’ and ‘relativity’ in the framework of Reality expression and acceptance.
This idea of approaching Reality sans fixated contexts and relationship with something tangible or intangible is as old as 4000 years for humanity. This is also the cardinal principle behind the very cherished and critical notion of objectivity of mind consciousness. This objectivity leads us to the idea of Holism, which is the singularly most cherished and ideal situation for acceptance of Reality in human life-living and world as well as in all other extended milieus.
This all may seem complicated but the simple and one line meaning of all these is – Our brain is designed and evolves in our early life for subjective, localized and automatic self-learning to optimize survival potential of an infant. However, this creates a fixated, very restricted and monolithic perception and worldview for a grown up person. This surely was a good design for early humans who lived in small tribal communities and did not move much because of fear of conflict with rival tribes. Also, in small homogenous human collectivity like a small tribe or regional community, this instinctive design definitely augmented survival chances.
However, humanity has journeyed a long way from this early life-living. We live in multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan and diverse demography and move to far off parts of the world, beyond societal, regional and national boundaries. Already over 50 percent of global population lives in urban spaces and we can say with surety that modern global culture has come to stay predominantly as urban culture, shaping even rural live-living. This massive change in life-living milieus has happened very fast, in just the last 50 years. Add to it the reach that modern technologies have provided to average human. Milieus have changed fast but our mindset has not coped up with these fast changes.
Urban life-living is complex and diverse with little propensity for homogeneity. In contemporary world and life-living, it is a natural progression for every individual to consciously prune and unlearn those archetypal and instinctive elements of subconscious learning, which restrict and hinder the growth of objective, holistic, universal and evolved perspectives and worldviews.
This is not easy task as ‘Unlearning’ makes an individual feel like opting for self-destruction as it involves a tough emotional and intellectual decision of letting go many ideas and preferences that we held dear and thrived on them for years since childhood. Unlearning is a conscious process and it naturally clashes with one’s own subconscious mind layers, seeking to overrule it and install new regime of reality, the subconscious has linked with survival. Unlearning is tough because it is like ‘I’ being pitted against ‘I’ itself. It is a battle of self-negation for augmentation of empowerment, which most people lose as quantum of inner conflict is colossal.
The subconscious shall resist it with its life and for a moment, it shall prove that the ‘self’ is battling against the self itself! This shall create a feeling of split within and shall unsettle an individual attempting unlearning for some good amount of time. This is a rather tough period for self. Unlearning is tough not only because starting this process is met with resistance from within as well as outside but also because unlearning process is a long and persevered one. This needs assistance, support and encouragement from family, friends, peer groups, milieus, society, polity and economy in general. Tragically, none is usually forthcoming and rather, there shall be reverse of it all!
As we said earlier, this happens to be the tragedy of humanity that it has failed to install a singular and effective institutional mechanism for true and right learning of humanity, despite having this wisdom about human life-living since thousands of years. It seems a true human tragedy that we evolved languages thousands of years back, evolved to have scripts and publishing. We evolved educational systems as early as 4000 years back. However, humanity failed in installing a singular, optimal and universal educational and learning regime, which could attain this simple task of moving a person’s infantile subconscious of subjectivity, locality and rigidity of partiality to objectivity, universality and holism. This failure is a huge causality of sanity becoming impossibility in contemporary world.
Even in contemporary world, where we do have enough scientific evidence about how human learning should be designed, the world does not have a singular educational and learning model and paradigm. Humanity is still experimenting with education and learning and the biggest tragedy is that these experiments are carried and installed not by scientists and academicians but by politicians. Moreover, high quality education is still available to may be less than 10 percent of human population. That is probably why majority of grown up people have to struggle individually to seek guidance from spiritualism, religion, psychology, philosophy, rituals, cults, isms and even science for personal wellness, poise and peace.
Therefore, ‘unlearning’ is the primary task at hand, before we begin to ‘learn’ about the next good thing for possibility of sanity in personal lives. We need to understand and accept why unlearning is indispensable today. Also, we must address a possible query here, which some people may ask is – when ‘unlearning’ is such a cardinal aspect of growth and optimality of wellness, why then it is not an automatic process for brain states and why ‘Unlearning’ requires to be conscious enterprise? If ‘unlearning’ is so critical to survival optimality, it must have been an auto-learning process of subconscious mind states? This question is valid and must first be answered.
The evolution itself seems to offer the answer. It seems, probably initially in the early stages of human civilization, when humans lived in small tribes and had just begun to lead a settled life, it was important that all members of the tribe behaved and acted in one way. This itself was a lineage carried forward from almost all mammals who live in small groups or packs. Early, fast, rigid and conformist assimilation and acclimatization of the newly born towards milieus, prevailing practices and accepted realities were basic requirements for survival. It is essentially called wired behavior of newly born to ‘ape’ others to be part of the ‘survival package’.
This wired instinct of survival, which is common in almost all species in our world, is one of the many tribal instincts that modern humanity has to ‘unlearn’. This instinctive subconscious mind state is referred to as ‘mammalian brain’ that is genius at aping. Scientists maintain that many instinctive behavior and actions of even modern day humans are vestiges of not only of tribal lives, a few thousand years back but millions of years back. For example, it is believed that modern humans still get unsettled in full moon nights as thousands of years back, it was a phenomenon that exposed early humans to risk of predation. The risk and threat has gone away for modern humans but yet, the fear psychosis remains as we are genetically wired for such behavior. Scientists believe, evolution does not dump old genetic expression, rather overwrites the new genetic writing over the old ones. Therefore, effectively, it may be said that humans have huge genetic debris accumulated in their genome. This is debatable and we are not going into this!
The idea is, in the long progression of time and space, the milieus humans move into or settle change fast. However, genetic changes that evolutionary processes could bring in do not happen this fast and automatic. And, even when genetic changes happen, they do not replace the old and redundant ones but instead pile up new and required genetic changes over the old and redundant ones. Moreover, there are views that evolution has stopped to work the way it was as humans have now unsettled and overcome the natural forces that worked as tools of evolution. So, we can say, the nature is not bringing in the adjustments and pruning anymore and therefore, we humans have to consciously and decisively carry in the ‘unlearning’ of all those vestiges of past life-living that evolution forced on us but are now a burden on us, affecting our wellness and sanity.
Even if we consider that evolution is still working and making suitable adjustments, we can clearly see that changes in modern life-living are too fast for evolution to keep pace with. It is there even for an average person to see and realize that modern life-living milieus have become very complex and huge in a short span of time. They present huge challenges to modern humans for life-living wellness. Moreover, everyday things change and bring in new challenges as we live in an age where technology brings in fast changes in milieus. Adjustments by an individual means not only learning new things but also equally importantly ‘unlearn’ old behaviors, actions, attitudes, psychosis, perspectives, beliefs, etc.
For example, by 1900, only 16 percent global population lived in urban areas and rest of 84 percent in rural regions. Naturally, human world could well have been termed as rural living and its cultures majorly rural oriented. However, in 2016, only in 116 years, around 55 percent of global population lives in urban areas. Naturally, it can be seen that on around a century, the world has turned upside down, from essentially rural to predominantly urban. As we discussed earlier, there is little study, very sketchy data about how this major transformation has affected and shaped human consciousness and cognition. There is also very limited information about how this fast change in physical and cultural milieus has impacted life-living and added new elements of unlearning and learning for humanity. There are so many similar causalities that has emerged and emerged fast in human world and life-living and average person has no information and no readiness to deal with it. The politics and economics of the day are not helping anything.
There are peripheral, short-term and behavioral changes that is rather easy for most humans to actualize as part of adjustment to changes in life-living and milieus. However, deep-seated, core, attitudinal and perceptional adjustments to changing milieus and life-living challenges are tough and it is where most humans fail and in turn add entropy to already troubled collective sanity. This needs to be understood. It is rather easy for average man or woman to shift from landline phones to mobile phones and from mobile to smart phones with little discomfort. Shifting from 3G to 5G data spectrum is not tough. However, handling the smart phone and 5G unleashes number of attitudinal, behavioral and sociological changes that average humans find tough to do successfully, despite best efforts. So we already have smart phone de-addiction support system working to pull out growing number of kids and young ones. Medical as well as social advisory is in place warning against the addictive and debilitating propensities of technologies.
This aspect of milieu changes and failure of humanity to consciously adjust to the causalities the changes unleash for entropic probabilities needs to be understood in detail. There is a great example, which we talk here showing this critical issue that there is no auto-correction mechanism in body-mind processes. One only has to consciously work out the adjustments and corrections.
In modern day world, there are many places where wild animals are kept in man-made milieus, where they are trained for behaviors and actions suitable to their new and changed milieus. An ideal example of this is a place in Africa where a man keeps many lions, tigers, cheetahs and hyenas. They have been brought up in humanly made milieu where they do not follow any natural rules of their wild world. They rather behave and act like pet and tamed animals. The wild predators play and live peacefully with the man who has trained them. However, when asked did he not fear living and sharing space with these giant wild predators, he said that he no doubt did all his activities with them within a well specified limits as it is always in his mind that any given time, even when trained long for domesticated and conformist behavior, they remain wild and killer animals. Their raw and base instincts have not changed even when there have been peripheral changes that successfully, with a few manageable accidents, make them behave and act in coexistence and cooperation mode.
We all can see and have enough proofs of the same with most humans. The societal, cultural and personal training, apart from whatever institutional education one gets, varies unimaginably in this world. This makes loads of difference in individual’s behavior, actions, attitudes, perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, etc. This in turn affects the potential of one’s assimilation and accommodation in collective space of societies and cultures. There are contrasting beliefs in the way societal, cultural and personal training is imparted to every individual. One belief says, plants and kids grow by themselves and do not need nurturance as nature provides them with everything. Second and contrasting belief accepts, it takes a whole village and society to nurture a child to adulthood. Moreover, there is also difference of approach towards societal, cultural and personal training. One belief maintains that humans are born with animalistic instincts but can be made to fit in nicely into cultured and civilized life-living by societal, cultural and personal training. The contrasting thought believes that humans are born with all ingredients of perfection as they have been created as the most excellent creatures in universe and it is essentially the societal, cultural and personal training in civilized life-living that corrupts their innate virtues and excellence. Whatever be the reality, it is manifest that even well educated and well trained human minds often exhibit raw and animalistic attitudes and behaviors. This points out to the fact that ‘course correction’ is not innate and natural for humans. It needs deep conscious mind training and persevered practice of the art.
It is a huge tragedy that humanity has made such remarkable progress in understanding so many crucial aspects of how our brain works and how we process reality, still, there is no willingness to make them applicable for all by a universal education training. Modern science understands beyond any reasonable doubts as how a human child is born as a package of raw and wired instincts and requires persevered societal, cultural and personal training and disciplined practice to enable an adult person to fit into a civilized and cultured human milieu. This human milieu requires human instincts to become acquiescent to commonly learnt behavior, actions, attitudes, perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, etc. This is possible only by a universal and objective mind training. However, the human world seems oblivious of almost most grassroots realities.
The only way out of this situation is to personally unlearn this archetypal mindset and mentality and accept the new and objective wisdom that contemporary scientific knowledge brings us for all of us. We know that probably the collective domains of humanity shall never ever care for sanity, system and order and therefore, individually, at personal level, anyone can work out its own model of sanity and system for lasting wellness and peace. This is what we are talking about in this eBook.
Before we begin to outline steps to begin the journey towards a model of personal sanity and system in this world full of entropic probabilities, we must also accept that we are talking about evolving ourselves to personal sanity, living a normal life, well within this human world and not leaving the average life-living for a reclusive life-living in jungle or a solitary place. We are accepting a model of wellness and personal sanity amidst the chaos, confusion and conflict of the world we live on daily basis. This is tough. This situation presupposes that we accept the two broad principles as pre-conditions to our personal sanity enterprise –
Very much like a farmer preparing his field rather meticulously and persistently for a crop, we too shall have to invest strong conviction and long periods of persevered practice to ready ourselves for initiating the journey towards personal sanity. Therefore, before we begin our talk about personal sanity model, it is equally important that we list and remind ourselves of nine impediments, which often keep us away from success in any venture of life. It is human nature and once we admit that we all are human and have this natural inclination to drift away from our goals, we are better off. Knowledge of a possible reason of failure surely enhances the probabilities of success. These nine hindrances to success, as listed in ancient Yogic philosophy and reiterated by all wisdom, are:
As the task of attaining personal sanity in the contemporary world of highly entropic probabilities is a tough enterprise, let us be firm and focused on our goals. In the next chapter, we begin to list out steps for our journey towards a model of personal sanity.
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