CHAPTER 3
Science is working on bio-engineering probabilities, which could install a ‘package’ of knowledge and information in the minds of every new born, like a computer is installed with a software, so that every individual of every new generation could not have to spend long years reading about them and learning them. May be, science could also be someday successful in creating a ‘pre-fabricated’ brain-software, which makes it possible for all kids to be born with all past knowledge of humanity. Till then, it is ‘field-day’ for every stupid man and woman to flamboyantly flash his or her ignorance and proudly proclaim it to be the ‘exclusive genius’ of humanity…! This is visceral…!
Solipsism, early-life streaks of ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘anti-rationalism’ is not something, which come ‘pre-installed’ or ‘pre-fabricated’ in human mind but we are wired for them. Individual men and women ‘learn’ these ‘stupidities’ from their mad-milieus, as not only now, in all ages, ambient social-cultural milieus always have abundance of ‘stupidities’ for every young man and woman to ‘learn’ and then flash them as ‘exclusive genius’ of personal possession. Aping is visceral, however, what one apes is his or her choice, evolved out of the milieu, he or she was born and raised into…
Somehow, every newborn boy or girl comes on this planet with just an operating system of raw instincts, wired deep in his or her neural-make-up of brain states. Though, science may not yet have devised this ‘magic-software’ of ‘knowledge-package’, to install in every newborn’s mind but for sure; since ages, most newborn boy and girl are blessed with two ‘engineers’, in the form of mother and father, who keep installing ‘good-software’ of necessary personal/social/cultural knowledge and information in the computer of young minds, so that they have the contemporaneous mind training to fit into the larger sanity of humanity as well as ambient milieus. However, tragically, not only in contemporary world, but in almost all ages, majority of newborns are assigned stupid ‘engineers’ of mother-father, who either do not have ‘sound engineering’ knowledge themselves, or they are themselves victims of stupidities, or they do not have the time, wherewithal and inclination to do their cosmic duties. In contemporary cultures, the parenting has become qualitatively more precarious.
Therefore, on an average, at any time in evolution, human society has been inundated with over 80% stupids, who believe and accept that just being born as human being, they become the veritable genius and most knowledgeable creatures on earth. It is only very natural that average level of stupidity in human society and culture is almost always constant at 80%-stupidity. Somehow, it is also visceral and that is why the critical mass of stupidity is stabilized at optimum 80%. Why?
It is largely because, some humans may endure all pains and sufferings to unravel and decipher the true sanity and symmetry of knowledge for human wellness and excellence but they are always part of our history – A knowledge base not amenable for automatic transference to every newborn mind. No mind is born ‘pre-loaded’ with a software of ‘historicity’. Every individual boy and girl has to grow and evolve to learn the ‘history of knowledge and wisdom’ and then make practical use of this human wisdom in their own lives. This is some task, which requires loads of painstaking and honest labor and persevered poise. Only handfuls have it… This is also visceral… Why?
Somehow, solipsism, anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality are all something, for which we all are wired. This is how evolution has designed our body-mind mechanism and consciousness as evolution itself has been and remains a stupid engineering. That is why, in this factory, mostly stupids are manufactured. Science has deciphered this ‘hardware-software’ trouble of humanity, even as billions of humans happily and stupidly accept themselves as geniuses. This is hardwired… visceral to all of us…!
Science says –
“When confronted with the unpredictable and unknown, your frontopolar cortex refuses to admit defeat. It draws on all your computational abilities to search for patterns in random data. In the absence of real patterns, it will detect illusory ones. And it will prompt you to act on them.”
That means, we all live in a world of make-shift beliefs and ‘perceptions’, for which our brain and mind consciousness has such predilection that it is ever willing to accept any idea, which is already there in our memory/experience – part of ‘I’ or ‘Self’, which we have an infatuation to associate with. However, even a universal truth or transcendental realism, which is not in our brain referral, we shall ignore it and would rather fight against it with all might of our ‘perceptional’ mind consciousness. That is why, most people love to live, survive and thrive in the world of ‘self-suiting’ and ‘self-satisfying’ perceptional world of imaginations, sans facts and truths. We shall deal with the ‘perceptional-living’ troubles, later in ensuing chapters.
Aldous Huxley describes it best:
“. . . since the mind-body is capable of an enormous variety of experiences, we are free to identify ourselves with an almost infinite number of possible objects—with the pleasures of gluttony, for example, or intemperance, or sensuality; with money, power, or fame; with our family, regarded as a possession or actually an extension and projection of our own selfness; with our artistic or scientific talents; with some favourite branch of knowledge, some fascinating ‘special subject’; with our professions, our political parties, our churches; with our pains and illnesses; with our memories of success or misfortune, our hopes, fears and schemes for the future; and finally with the eternal Reality within which and by which all the rest has its being. And we are free, of course, to identify ourselves with more than one of these things simultaneously. Thus a man can be at once the craftiest of politicians and the dupe of his own verbiage, can have a passion for brandy and money, and an equal passion for the poetry of George Meredith and under-age girls and his mother, for horse-racing and detective stories and the good of his country—the whole accompanied by a sneaking fear of hell-fire, a hatred of Spinoza and an unblemished record for Sunday church-going.”
Globally, we can easily find such a person and personality among our dear politicians, whom we hail like ‘God’ and other God-Like celebrities, whom we ape like primates. We shall also talk about this issue of why most of us all are in deep infatuation with this perceptional-living.
Eugene B. Shea shows us how:
“The human mind has an ‘inhibitory system’, which routinely and automatically removes from perception, reason, and judgment over 99% of available fact. We do not even feel these facts. As it seems; we actually do not select stimuli from the environment, rather, they are selected for us and this postulation makes a lot of difference in what we perceive of ‘self’. This is the super-convenience of living in stupid joy of our subconscious mind, with scant regard to conscious facts and realism...!”
So, different people shall have different personal expression of their core drives. Someone shall feel and accept that life is futile and there is no meaning of eating, drinking and having limitless sex. Many however shall readily accept life’s purpose as simple as the above. So, your core drives themselves create all shades of questions within you and accept answers as per their neural make-up in brain states. Science says, there are seven shades of consciousnesses and 16 brain types, which make people different in their thoughts, perceptions and actions. This in turn ensures that human conflict with each other is perpetual…!
The trouble is – stupidity of ‘visceral-living’ and self-certified-genius of ‘perceptional-living’ is what we all are wired for. There always is plethora of wisdom, all aligned to simple acceptance for every human being – man or woman. However, very few have the intelligence of personal initiative to seek it and imbibe it. We have already talked earlier about the generic stupidity in all humans about falling in hot-chase infatuation with the populist slogan – ‘Be Yourself’, without ever caring to learn and unlearn about the core ideas of ‘Being’ and ‘Self’…
As a wise said –
Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. Every community, every nation has its own lie, which it calls its idealism. Every creature therein breathes this lie from birth to death; lies are adapted to the mind of each race and art. There are only a few men of genius who can break free from it through heroic moments of crisis… genius cannot be defined without touching the ridiculous…!”
The good as well as bad thing is – Humanity has a long history and history has this goodness to repeat itself, so that the stupid humanity could at least see the light of sanity, even when they fail again. However, there are only handfuls of humans, who think it necessary to check the pages of history to learn continued wisdom and unlearn past mistakes.
Here is an example –
In most parts of developing world, like India, China, etc, sexual revolution is now becoming mature. Now even teenage girls are openly mouthing ‘free-sex’ and ‘unlimited-sex’ demands. This somehow makes many girls and women believe that ‘empowerment’ begins and ends with ‘Doing What Body Wants’ and what all bodies ‘want’ is sex-thrills and instant-self-gratification, most of which we do not ‘need’. This ‘Be Yourself’ stupidity of visceral drives is some ‘perceptional empowerment’ many women think is being ‘modern and contemporary’. This they do, not even bothering to check, what recent and long history of humanity has to offer as ‘learning’ and ‘unlearning’. As we said, it is some stupidity, we all are wired for. However, historicity and its sedimented wisdom does not come pre-installed in new born brains.
As contemporary young women and even teenage girls are advocating free-unlimited-sex liberalism, the part of world, where it all started, has now spent decades structuring an advocacy against it. Already, anti-feminism and ‘back-to-basic’ voices among many reasoned women and girls are getting stronger and those societies, who launched (rather re-launched) it and ‘repeated’ the mistake, humanity had committed thousands of years back, are now well on road to sanity, with both most men and women accepting the futility of the dwindling, yet prevalent free-unlimited-sex culture.
If only we could check our own Indian history and if only we could check the history of social sciences, we all could accept why this contemporaneous ‘free-unlimited-sex’ intellectualism and ‘Be Yourself’ empowerment is an old-obsolete vestige of history and why the new millennium men and women are moving away from this once very powerful ‘unsettled-feminism’ agenda of unbridled-unlimited-sex.
Our History –
Around 3000 years back, in India, when human civilization and culture had settled enough to find and enjoy the level of security, abundance and even opulence to think of higher joys and goals of life, there was a very powerful and popular idea of ‘Sexual-unputdownability’, wrapped in the garb of ‘Liberal Righteousness’, ‘Be Yourself’ agenda and ‘Visceral Is Intelligence’ philosophy. We have descriptions of these ‘sexual-liberalism’ of ancient India in our classical texts. The Buddha was born in such cultural and ideational chaos of ancient India, where rich and wealthy population was out to ‘enjoy life bounties’ and were willing to adhere to a wing of life-philosophy, which was akin to modern sexual-insanity, where all sex-escapades were advocated to be made above moral-questioning. Where all shades of viscerality of instant-self-gratifications and hardcore consumptive-carnality were justified and even practiced.
Buddhist literatures and texts of the time are full of description of socio-cultural anarchy, which was prevalent in times of Buddha, which moved Buddha to embark on a path of ‘samyak-vichar’ (poised thought). There are enough written texts available for all young men and women to read and learn from our history. If contemporary young men and women think and live in the perceptional world that what they are witnessing and practicing is something new, novel and contemporaneous to humanity, then they are away from facts and truths. It is just history repeating its stupidities. Their novelty is somehow only a few thousand years obsolete.
Somehow, the ancient Indian epic of Mahabharta and the embedded spiritual philosophy of Geeta in it are great texts of societal and cultural situations of the times that seem to be pre-dating Buddha. In Mahabharta also, which scientists date around 1400-1500 BC; there are vivid details of how ‘unbridled-sexualism’ and ‘irresponsible-liberalism’ had created a society and culture of ‘mad-consumptive-opulence’. In Geeta too, there is a very powerful description of a ‘demographic theory’, where Krishna elaborates to Arjuna about how ‘unbridled-sexualism’ and ‘irresponsible-liberalism’ in the then society had resulted in wider chaos and unnecessary conflicts in society.
Geeta and Mahabharta must also be accepted as one huge ‘social science’ text. Similarly, Buddha must be accepted as probably the first ‘Cognitive Science/psychology’ genius, who understood human drives, human cognitive conundrum and consciousness conflicts. It is debatable whether he was the first but so many greats of past insisted on this need to see and understand the wired drives of body and mind and then rise above them through a persevered process of self-dialogue and self-actualization. Indian spiritual philosophies of Yoga and Vipasyana are brilliant cognitive texts, detailing the causalities of human drives and milieus, which engender this stupidity of ‘Be Yourself’ viscerality. They also list the way out.
Then again, around in 600-800 AD, India again witnessed the same situation. There was a spiritual-philosophical movement led by Shankra, who advocated a ‘poised-life’ even when there was a contemporary populist philosophy by ‘Charvaks’, which advocated this ‘unbridled-liberalism’, based on ‘visceral-intelligence’ and so-called ‘Be Yourself’ philosophy.
Many believe that this Charvak philosophy was also there in the times of Buddha. In fact, since the inception of human civilization and culture, two streams of life-living philosophy has always existed –
Here, we have to see and accept something very critical. There is always this ‘cyclicality’ in time-space domain. That is why history repeats itself. There is also this very well documented history of social sciences evolved between 15-17th century, which have well elaborated how human thoughts create socio-cultural conflicts. The general will, social contract and Epicureanism ideas are there for all to see and understand.
Classical spiritualism has said it way back, social sciences documented it in modern era and now modern contemporary science in new millennium has been telling us that this cyclicality of human society is wired in our brain. That is why it has this cyclicality of repeating itself in time-space continuity. This we need to see, understand and accept –
In contemporary societies, where life and living has become very complex, it is only natural that humans shall feel the pinch of poise in a hard way. If we see, understand and accept it, we all are wise and our societies are happy. It is primary wisdom…!
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