Towards A Better And Happier You In 2017
It is not that only people await good times. Good times also await good people to come and hoist the potentials seeded in the soil of future. In the year 2017, you are sure; you do wish the New Year to bring better things for you. It is only natural. Every new day should make things better and improved for all of us. However, this wish comes with a certain realization simmering deep within your consciousness that this year has made it very clear that things in the world we live are going to be tough and as trends are, the New Year 2017 may well carry forward the gloom, troubles and uncertainties of the preceding year.
Let it be. Why should we worry! In the four million years of evolution of humanity till date, there never has been a year, which has not challenged humanity. This is rather good for the race and its evolution to greater intelligence and wellness, as we always evolve better, when things are tougher. Real men and women never grumble about challenges and problems; they rather design and devise a way out of it.
The world we live is what it is, neither good nor bad. It is neutral and objective. Somehow, it is an individual’s position in a particular milieu that lands him or her in wellness or troubles. The individual has it, how it takes the world as. We all can evolve, design and devise our wellness and lead ourselves into a life positioning, from where, troubles seem very manageable and wellness seems an ambient milieu.
What we are talking about is a simple way, which can put us all, in a new and novel state of mind and consciousness in the New Year 2017. This shall make us a super person, endowed with required skills and personal resources to solve troubles and enhance personal excellence and wellness.
In the New Year, with renewed consciousness, it is the right time to answer five simple questions. This shall surely facilitate a better, happier and more stable new year for you. The five questions are:
The five questions actually cover almost all possible areas of life where we feel troubled and lose our wellness. If we have the ability and personal resources to solve our problems, be a winner in life situations, be great in love and our relationships, have spiritual wellness and a worldview that makes us cool and collected, we have no reason, why we should not be happier and better in the coming New Year 2017.
Let us not waste time and get down to the answers of the five questions. Before that, just talk to your inner self and reiterate that the coming year, you won’t allow yourself to drift and shall stick to the resolve that 2017 is going to be my best year of life and I shall make it happen. Tell yourself that there is a super person within you and all you have to do is to raise your bar and be into it to awaken the sleeping and procrastinated potential in you.
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The Nine Hindrances
Before we take up the crucial five questions, 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:
Let us be firm and focused on our goals and enter the five crucial questions. All best.
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How Can I Be A Brilliant Problem Solver?
The world we live in; is what it is, neither good nor bad. It is people, who are the ‘Theatre’ of all pains as well as joys. The human mind is the most capable and instinctively galvanized mechanism to solve big problems. Still, the same human consciousness is the most potent dilemma. The core trouble is, modern day problems are so ‘dressed up’ partly by our complex environment and partly by our consciousness that we fail to see the ‘naked’ reality of the nature of problems. We can see them clearly, if we ‘undress’ them. It is an art, we all can master. How?
Solution of problems is not a big task. If you have a problem, you already know it that solution is somewhere ‘inherent and embedded’ in the problem itself. The milieu around us presents some factors in an ‘arrangement’, which stand in our disadvantage, at a particular stage of our life positioning and we call the outcome of such an arrangement as a ‘problem’.
Often, solution presents itself as some ‘alternative’ arrangement or placement of the same factors in such a way that they turn advantageous for us, hence qualifying as a ‘solution’.
In most cases, especially the modern day problems we face, the artistry of arriving at solutions is not in ‘creating’ or generating something externally but in ‘rearranging’ and ‘repositioning’ the already present factors and elements in some alternative ways.
That is why, we need little ‘action’ but loads of calm and objective ‘reception’ in analyzing the ‘factors’ that essentially constitute a problem. From our experience we know, the crucial part of health-management is diagnosis of the disease from symptoms and syndromes. Often, there are common traits of different diseases. However, once the disease is diagnosed correctly, the line of treatment is just a matter of routine.
It is pertinent to reiterate here that understanding the mechanism always helps in understanding the problems and this in turn reaches us to bare solutions. The new wisdom has facilitated the objective and singular understanding of the mechanism. Let us spare our precious attention to the details of the ‘mechanism’ so that we have better understanding of the root of the problems.
We have layers of conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious elements of personality and all elements are within an individual and operate simultaneously. There is layer of instincts, tendencies and complexes, which one part of our brain handles. Then is a layer of our learnt and acquired knowledge and facts, which is largely the ‘cultural mind’. And, most importantly, there is a layer of our individual talent and potential, which is largely a result of our unlearning in adulthood, forming our ‘de-cultured’ and ‘de-mystified’ mind consciousness. This is termed as ‘higher consciousness’.
An individual is often split and conflicted between different layers of consciousnesses. Different layers present different demands simultaneously – sensual demands, emotional needs, impulse, imaginations, etc. The ideal person is one who develops a ‘poise’ between all the requirements of different dimensions of consciousnesses and this is possible only when this person has a holistic, integrative and assimilative perspective of all these demands of the ‘Self’. The higher consciousness needs to strike harmony and balance. This ‘poise’ is the worthy precursor to the naked solution.
An individual has sub-personalities within his broad personality and often there is either a conflict or imbalance of sorts. This is psychosis. The idea of sub-personalities is a way of conceptualizing how we shift from one identity or shade of consciousness to another as we move through life. In a single day, we may move through having different, often conflicting and competing identities.
In the morning, we have a good talk with our partner and we feel ‘loved’ and ‘happy’. In daytime, our partner does not reply to our sms and we feel ‘ignored’. In the evening we see him with another beautiful person and we feel ‘hurt’ and ‘zealous’. At night, our partner comes home with a nice gift and we feel ‘wanted’ and ‘relieved’. Within 12 hours, we can be ‘victors’ as well as ‘victims’. We are unconsciously buoying up in a pool of emotions almost all the time.
A sub-personality functions mechanically and instinctively. It is like acting out a routine. It is our ‘reactive-mode’ consciousness. While a sub-personality is just a portion of the personality, we can and often become totally identified with it, placing its needs and perspectives above all else. This is ‘psychosis’, as against the ‘poise’ between all sub-personalities. The sub-personalities often act out unconscious motivations to the detriment of the personality as a whole. An individual needs a harmony of the different, often conflicting and competing roles (sub-personalities).
This poise and balance between sub-personalities is far more challenging in modern world as we are living in a very complex socio-economic environment and our life has been unduly pressured by cultural benchmarks of success. Also, we live in a social space full of extremities and conflicting notions. In contemporary world, psychosis is fast becoming ‘normal’ and in the popular culture, poise is being labeled a benchmark of failure. Be warned.
The sub-personality concept is particularly useful for taking charge of an automatic reaction pattern or for resolving inner conflicts. We all must identify our sub-personalities, register their conflicts and then, consciously de-identifying from them engaging in a dialogue with your higher conscious self.
The higher consciousness is not something aloof from an individual. The higher self is not a rejection of individual’s baser selves. This is a mind positioning within, which accepts conflicts of the different personality aspects and functions. It is a super state of mind awareness, which recognizes all aspects; be it in any state of unconscious and attempts to bring them to the layer of consciousness for harmonizing them into a fruitful whole.
This mechanism of the higher consciousness is very crucial for effective understanding of root problems and their naked solutions. In my ebook, ‘Naked Solutions Of Dressed Up Life Woes’, I have attempted to deal in detail the issue of problem solving skills.
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How Can I Make Winning A Habit?
In all of us, there is this definite ‘winner’. However, this champion is a ‘Random Warrior’, wins but not always. We all have the determination, patience, discipline and the mastery to be a sure and sustained ‘all-weather-all-season-Hero’. As we miss the knowledge of this ‘mechanism of winning’, this ‘random winner’ is unable to sustain the artistry of winning, to qualify as a ‘Habitual Hero’.
There is a definite Hero in all of us. We all have an in-built and natural ability, a born facility, which makes us ‘eligible’ for understanding the ‘mechanism of winning’. The only trouble is; eligibility is not automatic ‘qualification’. All of us are born with a facility called ‘instinctive inquisitiveness’. This is our born eligibility. However, we need to orient and align our inquisitiveness towards ‘objective knowledge’ to ‘qualify’ as an intelligent person, who is the ‘master of mechanism’ and not only the ‘puppet of mechanism’.
It is the mind consciousness, which makes us a ‘random warrior’ and it is the same mind, which holds the potential of we being the ‘All-Weather And All-Season Hero’, the cherished pole-position, for which we all have born eligibility.
We have so many examples in our daily lives, where we see that if we have prepared ourselves well for multiple factors and have anticipated rightly the dynamic interplay of these factors, we are successful in having a smooth and safe go.
We are driving a car on the busy highway. Driving itself is a multi-tasking skill. Those, who have better coordination of their eyes, hands and legs, shall be driver with lesser chances of accidents. This is however only one part of successful driving. You also need to have intuitive anticipation towards possible mistakes of not only your own driving, but also of others, who shall be ahead and behind you on the highway. You have to anticipate correctly and in time, if a driver ahead you does something silly. Accident happens not only when you do a wrong, but also when others do wrong with you. You are in trouble both ways.
Moreover, on the highway, you need to know, where those accident-prone zones are and where drivers usually make errors of judgment. There may be a signboards warning you but you must have this pre-knowledge, back in your subconscious. It means, you must be very aware of the entire stretch of the highway.
We can see, how a simple thing like driving a car is such a multi-dimensional skill, where we have to master the inter-play of so many factors. However, as we have become used to all this, we do not feel its burden as these skills have become part of our subconscious mind. The skill has become an auto-function of subconscious mind.
The fact remains that even when we all have been allowed licenses for driving, this does not mean we all are ‘Heroes’ of the highways. Many of us are only ‘Random Warriors’. Many of us are just ‘eligible’ drivers. To be a qualified driver, one needs to have long experiences of the highway driving. The finer skills, like coordination, anticipation, judgment of error, preemptive moves and precautionary measures, et al come to us only through practice and experience.
There is a very good metaphor of this skill in psychology. It is called ‘helicopter-view’ consciousness.
For example, you are standing mid-way a five-kilometer road, between point A and point C. As a car starts on the road from point A for point C, the spheres are defined for you at point B, where you stand mid-way. The car at point A is your ‘future’ as it shall take ten minutes to reach you. As it reaches you at point B, it is your ‘present’. The car shall take another ten minutes to move away to reach point C, which then shall become your ‘past’.
You can deal with the safety and wellbeing of its passenger only when it comes to the domain of your ‘present at point B, where you stand on the road. Before and after that, you have no control over the car and passengers’ destiny.
However, if you are given a helicopter at point B and you lift up to a certain point from where you can see the start of the car at point A, its entire journey down to point C, there shall be no future, no past. The entire stretch shall fall in the domain of your ‘present’ as you can see the car all along the road. As everything is in ‘present’, you have full control over the safety of both car and its passenger. You can see everything and therefore can put up a warning, before anything untoward is to happen.
Life and its problems are also like the journey from point A to point C. Usually, we are grounded in our consciousness and perspectives towards life and it is like restricting our views at one small point, between the two ends. If we can rise up our consciousness to this ‘helicopter-view’ perspective, we can have a view of our entire life-span as one clear long landscape. Everything shall be in the domain of ‘present’ and within our possible control.
Usually, the conscious-mind in we all is restrictively concerned and knowledgeable only about a ‘part’ of the entire complex mechanism of life and living. This consciousness is a restrictive positioning of a ‘Random Warrior’.
The all-weather and all-season true ‘Hero’ shall definitively be aware and responsible towards the ‘whole’. The holistic, assimilative and integrative perspective towards the ‘mechanism, it its entirety is the hallmark of a true Hero.
This facility of conscious mind, to extend the domain of our ‘present’ to past and even future is not something new to humanity. Somehow, this facility or faculty, which some people had in the past, was based entirely on intuitiveness of the mind consciousness. Modern humans can learn the art by simply understanding the mechanism of mind.
It was believed that some people were born with the quality of an ‘intuitive’ mind. There was a belief among masses that they could predict events from past and future. There was also a cult of ‘Tantricism’, an occult tradition as well as mainstream tradition of meditative powers to develop intuition, which was used to predict past and future.
The core idea behind all these was to have a mind consciousness, which could have the receptive brilliance of a ‘helicopter-view’ perspective. In my research, talking with many of them with intuitive power, I found that the ability to predict right about past and future, which masses called magic, the artistry was essentially that of a mind consciousness, which had special abilities of rising above the plane and be able to see things, as the person could see from a helicopter.
The aggrieved people would come to these ‘magicians’ and Tantric and tell them their problems. For example, a woman came and asked the Tantric to trace his son, who had gone missing for last one year. The Tantric listened to the woman and then closed his eyes. Minutes after, he said, he had the divine vision that her son is still alive and he left home on his own accord. Tantric asked the woman to search for the son in a place 500 kilometers east from the place he lived.
The woman found her son after a year in a city around the same vicinity the Tantric had said. I sat with a Tantric and talked about all this. My friendliness to him made him say things, which he would not reveal to others.
He said, “When a person is in trouble, especially for long period, his or her natural abilities for rational thinking is eclipsed. People who generally come to us have little education or unsound reasoning faculties. They tell us everything. We then ask for some specific information about their trouble and about the environment, where the trouble started. We then close our eyes, sit in a meditative consciousness of complete reception. All these information we leave with this meditative unconscious mind for churning. We have evolved this facility to switch off our conscious mind. The intuitive unconscious mind has a strange facility of doing its own strange mathematics. It does its own interpolation and even extrapolation. It may take some minutes or few hours but the unconscious mind finally puts all these information into a template of sorts, where we can see pictures of past and future arranged in a particular order. We then use the faculty of the conscious mind to create a pattern or sequence of events. On this basis, we predict and it usually comes true.”
There were great similarities between what the Tantric did and what doctors used to do 50 years back. Then, there were little specialist diagnostic tests of modern times available to the doctors. For diagnosis, they had to depend largely on the symptoms the patients described of his troubles or any external symptoms visible. The most popular doctor was one, who could diagnose the disease correctly.
Many of the doctors of old school used the power of ‘intuitive mind’ to diagnose the diseases correctly. Many of them practiced the art of meditation, worships and even playing musical instruments to attune and align the mind towards a state of high reception. They depended heavily on details and then used the intuitive minds to work out a pattern, which would then help them in predicting the right diagnosis.
Somehow, we all do it in one form of the other. Just visit a casino to see how the master gambler is the one who is sharp and prompt enough to predict a pattern in all games and make the right choices.
It is our mind, which is constantly doing the calculations of the permutations and combinations, scattered all around us. The interpolative and extrapolative mind consciousness is a random facility of mind, which we all can master to be the ‘Hero’ of winning habits. For more on the issue, kindly read my ebook, ‘Habitual Hero: The Art Of Winning’.
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How Can I Be Successful In Love And Relationships?
Love is ideally acceptable with its three elements of Mystery, Magic and Marvel. Most of us feel, if love is made to be understood with objective technicalities of science, the three ‘M’s’ of love withers away. The three ‘M’s’ land most of us in inexplicable troubles and pains of love, still, we do not wish to understand the mechanism in its objective and scientific terms, which can put us in good stead, vis-à-vis all the love troubles.
This mysticism of love is what most lovers get attracted to initially. This suits the consciousness of love. This marvel of love gives the young men and women huge kicks of life. Young minds get huge thrills in journeying amidst the mist of mysticism of love as precariousness of the enterprise always has its own joy. Similar is the human desire, when it comes to religion and spiritualism. Mysticism is preferred state here too. However, this mysticism further confuses those in love and faith and this confusion in turn leads to calamitous patterns of behaviors and actions in love. The resultant pain and chaos is cyclic.
Sciences may not be in a position right now to tell us in perfect details as why and how, what happens in love. However, there are huge research-backed substantiations explaining lot many aspects of the purely physical and bio-chemical mechanisms and processes of love, as human mind handles them. This surely takes away lots of mysticism, magic and marvel out of the age-old notion of love and archetypal imagery of love in society. However, it is hugely helpful in clearing the mist of confusion and chaos around the very core idea of love.
It is a humble suggestion that objective knowledge about something never ever takes away the subjective joys. It rather enhances them. We all know it very well that an actor on the movie screen is just portraying and professing a role or character still, we cry with them and get emotionally one with the fictitious character. The knowledge, that the actor is actually not dead and it is only the character he portrayed is dead in the movie, does not anyway reduce our emotional joy and satisfaction of movie viewing. The knowledge surely enhances our joys and nullifies the pain, as we know, at the end of day everything is back to real.
The dualism of love is actually the root cause of why such a beautifully powerful and beneficial facility called love becomes a cause of pain and trouble. When we do not understand the mechanism of something very clearly, mysticism is bound to creep in and it shall unleash the destructive energy of confusion. We need to understand the mechanism of love in scientifically explained terms to enhance the joy of love.
The mechanism of mind, explained in terms of detailed neurochemical and neuroelectrical processes in pure scientific traditions may not be suitable for all of us. Therefore, what we shall talk about here is just an outline and simplified description of the mechanism.
What we are attempting to bring out from our discussion is the ‘dualism’ inherent in the mechanism and processes of love, as human mind handles it. We also need to accept that it is not something which science is telling us now. Thousands of years back, great minds of spiritualism and philosophy have told similar facts about consciousness, the cardinal position of love in it and the dualism, which consciousness faces about the emotional positioning of love.
Human mind is where all mysticisms emanate and end. The multilayered mechanisms of mind is one huge mystery, humanity has been attempting to unravel since thousands of years. The spiritualism and philosophy have given its own interpretation. Science has taken over and presented great facts about mind mechanism, its structure and functions and this has led humanity to understand lot many things about consciousness.
Human brain is the central mechanism for ensuring the survival and excellence of human body and it has to be accepted that the conscious and subconscious mind accepts and expresses almost everything in terms of its primary and pivotal role of ensuring a mechanism for survival and excellence. This interpretation of human mind looks so demeaning as we all are inclined to accept ourselves as something big and a lofty and special creation of God. Accepting ourselves as an entity, with base idea of survival is revolting.
That is why, science says, “the idea of a self, in objecting terms is often pitted against the ‘self’ itself, which we have been used to accepting subjectively since thousands of years.”
Just for knowing the mechanism, we need to accept that human mind ensures this survival and excellence through a continuous and complicated maintenance of a process called homeostasis – better understandable as ‘poise’. All wisdoms, old or new, since thousands of years, have talked about the importance of this idea called ‘poise’, explained in terms of philosophy and spiritualism. Science unravels its physiological, bio-chemical and psychosomatic aspects.
In lower organisms, the homeostasis or poise is only physiological and biological but as human mechanism is very complex, human mind has to perform a complex and multidimensional homeostasis. In humans, the poise also has to be bio-sociological, psychological, emotional, spiritual as well as volitional. We are talking about this all because, love has to do specifically with this homeostasis thing and the trouble it creates also emanates from this.
There are sufficient scientific researches to establish that when people are in true love and absolute intimacy, their overall homeostasis is in great shape and this reflects in their healthy state of mind and body as well as behavior-action. The reverse has also been established as researches show, when people are in instable and unsettled love elements, their body gets affected and they land in serious body-mind dysfunction and even death.
Science has also established that most of the behavior-action of humans is instinctive and intuitive. Even the learned behavior, the nurture part, in time becomes part of instinctive behavior and nature. The simple idea is, almost everything, which our conscious and subconscious mind accepts