Let me tell you a story. Twin boys were born to a couple. One of them was healthy and normal but another had congenital heart trouble. The doctors declared that the boy shall not survive long as his weak heart shall not allow him to see his third birthday.
The couple were strong and they decided to make everything count for the abnormal boy. They believed in their abilities and resolve. They took great care of this boy and made him live a life, which consciously consisted of all healthy efforts and practices. This abnormal boy had no choice as he did what his parents made him to. Destiny sure was changed as this boy lived for 80 long years, living within his limitations, but surely evolving everyday to attain in life what a normal person could.
However, his healthy brother, who was supposed to be normal and under no limitations, died at the age of 22. He was killed in a motorcycle accident, when trying to race it beyond reasonable limits. The couple believed this normal child was good enough to care for himself and therefore spared little attention for him. He was a mainstream person and lived a life even he didn’t choose for himself!
This is a metaphor of what plasticity is all about and how it writes its own beautiful script of life, which the decisive destiny makes no provision of. Neuroplasticity is a term, which has similar connotation, which we all must understand and accept as potent tool to override our destinies, adding all those beautifully endowed shades of life and living experiences, which destinies make little provision of.
Neoroplasticity is a term given to a mechanism, which is about physiological changes actually happenings in the brain, brought about by mind consciousness. It refers to changes in neural pathways and synapses owing to changes in behaviour, environment, neural processes, thinking, and emotions, as well as to changes resulting from bodily injury.
This is very real yet seems so magical and mystical. This shows how brilliant yet so complex and mesmerizing our body-mind mechanism is. What this magic is all about? The magic and marvel is about how the intangible elements of our life-living experiences become so powerful that they actually bring about tangible changes in the brain. The intangibles are behaviour, emotions, thinking, attitude, orientation, resolve, etc. These intangibles are about our personal choices of conscious mind, which we put in place in our lives for certain desirable destiny. And, our brain responds to that. Sure, this stupid called brain is wayward and likes to be in the comfort of inertia, if we choose to be in the drift of our subconscious minds. However, the same brain becomes our great facilitator friend, the moment our conscious mind takes control and invests rightly in the intangibles. This as we now know, is a process called neuroplasticity, which signifies that destinies can be changed and this happens by actual and physiological changes in our brains.
In contemporary world, especially the developed societies, people are growingly accepting the realism that mind is the centre of all realism. The realism, we think as something external to us, in our pop belief, designing our destinies is a huge misnomer. The reality is – everything is engendered within us and we see only their images in the external world. What truly matters to us are not the tangibles but the intangibles.
Life is about plasticity, destinies we all have and end up with are about plasticity. That is probably why we have our brains, which also has plasticity. The neurons do it for us.
This leads us to the hypothesis we have been trying to work out in favour of loneliness. We cannot change things; we primarily cannot even know what needs to be changed. We cannot because, as science says, we buoy up and down in the vast ocean of sub-consciousness for most of our lives, only occasionally surfacing on the environment of consciousness. This happens to most of us and is surely aggrandized in those who live a life of drift and flux because of deep indulgence in the clutter culture, mad multitasking and instant self-gratification. We need to stop, keep away from this drift and think about self in a qualitative leisurely state of positive loneliness about what changes we need to bring in our lives for our wellness. We then have to consciously bring in those relevant intangibles in our mind consciousness, which can effect physiological changes in our brains. This shall institutionalize wellness and goodness in our lives.
Millions of people all over the world have been into this meditation. Meditation is nothing but a conscious choice of our minds, to physically keep away from those tangible elements in our external milieus, which are causing drift and flux in our lives. And then, with practice, meditative loneliness consciously brings about the intangibles into our mind consciousness. Gradually, as our brains build up new and facilitative neural pathways and synapses, we begin to feel the joys and satisfaction of the true wellness and happiness. The brain changes physiologically and gets aligned to the actual wellness and happiness.
The human mind, the functional mechanism of brain structures, has instinctive mechanism to universalize goodness as well as evil. What we feed in it is not its concern. This is the role of intellect. The intellect is the intangible faculty to be in control of the instinctive as well as the culturally learnt behaviours, to objectively assess all life-living choices with holistic logic.
The universe has not put us where we are today with any specific purpose of designed goodness. We have to design our purpose. As we repeat this objective mind training to our brain, the objective goodness would spread all throughout its neural circuitry. The notion of neuroplasticity says that brain can actually create new pathways to institutionalize this objective goodness. And then, we won’t have to think twice to perform goodness, as it would then become an instinct, and thus an involuntary mechanism, like a hand moving away involuntarily as it touches fire.
It has to be understood and accepted with all humility and compassion that a real good human is not one who needs to think and then behave and act good. Rather, it is one who does not have to think, as all his behaviours and actions are instinctively bound to be good. We don’t consciously remember when we drive a car or cook a meal as it is instinctive, even when they were once learned behaviours. Objective goodness is also learned behaviour. But when we repeatedly practice it, it becomes instinctive.
Neuroplasticity is also about this objective intellect. It is about consciously aligning with desirable intangibles of life and then practice them with mindfulness of higher consciousness, helped by meditation. This then becomes structured in our brains. This means, goodness and wellness is no more our choice, but it has become an auto-mode virtue, an optionless absoluteness for us.
That is why we have been insisting that loneliness is a positive state of being as it creates a space for mindfulness and option-building towards the ultimate optionlessess of goodness and wellness.
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