Foreword:
There has to be a humble admittance – Any word, however well meant and well spelt, is a possible suspect of misinterpretation. There is a simple reason. People are in different consciousnesses and culturally as well as personally inclined to a specific value-summation of utilities. As a writer it is a huge temptation to take liberties, with not only imaginations, ideas but also with the words, as against their common and popular use. Do kindly accept my latitude with language, choice of words and interpretation of contemporary realisms, as I understand, many times, they may not conform to popular usages and sentiments.
It is a heart-felt realization that our very worthy ancestors; who had the intelligence and courage to face the worst, life made them to, so that we inherit a better beautiful world; have already said almost all good things. What I can do is present them in new set of words with novelty of references. The only justification of me telling them is that all goodness and wellness ideas and words need to be repeated and retold, to add to their all-pervasiveness.
The ideas about the wellness and excellence, which I share with you in this book to make the New Year 2017 the best of your life, are there since long. Many of them are even 3000 years old. Many new ones have been added by the contemporary wisdom of science. I have just arranged them in a patterned way to make it helpful for your overall brilliance.
At the age of 47, I can say with innocence that getting old is such a beautiful and satisfying experience. It makes the ‘self’ accept the ‘utility and fruition’ of holistic, assimilative and integrative consciousness. Getting old has probably pushed ‘me’ close to the ‘eligibility’ of perhaps beginning to understand as what essentially is there to be understood!
I share with you whatever is part of my consciousness and its honest innocence. All wisdoms say, what stays with you is what sinks in. Wisdom is what we internalize. I share with you whatever I have internalized in my life. This may not be mainstream, however, may have utility in some meaningful way. I believe, as a reader, you shall enjoy this novelty and pleasant awkwardness of the writing. Wish you all best for the New Year 2017.
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FIRST THING FIRST, WE NEED to define what we must accept as the holistic idea of wellness and excellence. This is important. It has to be accepted that in contemporary social and cultural environment, all ideas have become a victim of populist interpretation. Reasons may be over-media consumption or anything else but we are not going into it. Moreover, people are in different shades of consciousnesses and therefore, an idea is usually given to as many personalized meanings and subjective interpretations, as people are. The exercise to define the ideas of wellness and excellence is core to overall happiness and self-worth in contemporary cultures. Therefore, kindly take a few minutes to go into the details of the definition, which shall finally help you in accepting the contents of the book better. It shall help your wellness and excellence:
Wellness Crisis And Populist Benchmarks
The modern world and its gradually becoming well-off population are good news to many. However, the looming predicament for larger well-off and comfortable humanity is the crisis of WELLNESS. This crisis has one great enemy – the larger and general IGNORANCE. With all humility at my behest, I must add that there is nothing called ignorance as, it is often the part or partial knowledge of something, which is the worst enemy of we all. That is why in this book, we shall talk about things not in parts but as singular holistic idea.
In contemporary world, most people complain of some ‘missing’ feeling in their lives and this missing emotion is ‘Wellness’, despite growing availability of all forms of comfort and consumptive facilities to larger humanity, especially in urban spheres. This wellness-crisis is because of a great and oldest enemy of humanity; the ignorance – or simply, the inertia with part knowledge of things. People fail to first diagnose the cause of their wellness-crisis because of their ignorance about the basic emotion of wellness and then, they are too much a slave to the popular benchmarks of social-success as well as self-worth, to effect any substantive change in their environs and lifestyles, which happen to be the primary cause of this crisis of wellness.
It has to be understood. Around 85% of our genes respond to the environment in which they are surrounded, and only 15% of the genes are permanent. Yes, 85% of the genetics our parents gave us respond to changes in our lifestyle, and only 15% of your genes are unchangeable. This lifestyle inertia happens to be the primary ignorance. We being social beings with instinctive inclination for aping, we often simply follow the populist and prevalent socio-cultural benchmarks for successes and self-worth. Sadly, all populist benchmarks of successes and self-worth are not automatic source of personal wellness. Different people have different wellness needs and a generalization of wellness ideas and idealisms is part of the ignorance malaise.
Your immediate and ambient living environment and the lifestyle choices, which this environment forces you to adopt, are the key elements to your wellness and living. You definitely cannot change your environment to your wellness needs. Therefore, you can choose either to get away from this debilitating environs or effect substantive changes in your personal popular choices.
What is the missing link that has led to the chronic diseases of today and contemporary crisis of general wellness emotions? The answer is that it is our lifestyles and the environment that surrounds our cells. Never ever in the millions of years of evolution, humans have faced such a devastating environment as the one we live in our current industrialized and highly urbanized one. The actual threat of such an environment has to be understood.
Get acquainted with what is now proved as the number one crisis for humanity; the Oxidative Stress. The oxidative stress comes from poor diet, environmental pollutants, drugs, radiation, and other life style issues, especially stretched periods of stress. Oxidative Stress has been identified and proven to be the root cause of more than 70 chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease, muscular degeneration and other serious ailments, according to medical and nutritional experts.
Factors that can increase the number of free radicals produced in the body include excessive intake of medications, sunlight, cigarette smoke, radiation, enormous stress, pesticides in food and air pollutants (many of these are beyond our control).
Therefore, the one line fact is, we are in an environment where the single largest threat to our body and mind is “Oxidative Stress”. The contemporary physical/social/psychological environment has got lot to do with it. The corrective measures are there but ultimately, the wisdom is in moving away from such ‘contributory environment’ to this oxidative stress or effect suitable changes in personal life-living choices.
However, we have so far dealt with only one aspect of this wellness-crisis. Wellness we talked so far was all about physical wellness. Wellness also includes, social, intellectual, occupational, emotional, spiritual and environmental.
Wellness is not about just being disease free. Wellness is a collective emotion of wellness in all seven aspects of human living. The trouble of this wellness crisis is that in contemporary world, led by our ignorance, we believe being physically well means all the wellness. This partial approach is a killer. Wellness is a holistic idea.
The great crisis is that most of us are today only concerned with only one single aspect of our wellness and devote all our time and energy as well as intuitive and conscious attention. That is ‘Occupational Wellness’. Career and jobs have become our full-time obsession. Most people, especially in urban spheres are either sleeping or are on their professions. This naturally ignores all other six aspects of our wellness and that is why, despite great successes and satisfaction in occupational and physical spheres, most people feel they have a very low ‘wellness quotient’. The missing wellness in other spheres engenders the feeling of ‘something missing’ in our lives, which most people complain of.
Humans are humans… if we can see the state of the wild life and animals there, we can well understand how even wild animals make a good balance in their daily lives to work towards larger wellness. We are now even behind animals. Go to a park and see the birds and watch how meticulously they spend time in caring their own body and also that of their partners. We grossly neglect our bodies and seldom work for nourishments of our precious minds.
Wellness cannot be bought with money… yes, we can buy resources from this but we also have to see at what cost this money comes to us. The ultimate utility and fruition of all human endeavors have to be tested and cost calculated in terms of how much holistic wellness they bring in our lives. The golden word is to understand what is wellness in its totality and then go for the precious but very rare balance in life. Wellness is the most precious human treasure worth a pursuit.
Wellness is a function of wider poise of person and personality, which includes factors not only cognitive but also emotional. A person is in complete WELLNESS when there is a balance between the cognitive factors such as income, wealth, comfort, leisure and health as well as emotional factors such as trust, security, integration with family-friends-colleagues, connectivity, stability, sense of desirability and spiritual purpose, etc. Collective human enterprises must work towards attainment of all aspects of wellness.
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Excellence Is In Being Master Of Entirety, Not Parts
At the very outset, it has to be accepted that excellence is an idea majorly associated with wellness. If any action or behavior fails to create an overall and holistic wellness for individual as well as the collectivity, it cannot be excepted as excellence. That is why excellence also has to be accepted not as partial but in totality and entirety. Also, excellence needs to be understood as an idea beyond the populist benchmarks of success and self-worth prevalent in contemporary societies and cultures.
Coming to the idea of excellence, the simple fact is – a whole range of qualities, including concentration, determination, patience, courage, discipline, mastery, intensity, power, organization, integration, et al, which are required for the success and excellence of a role performance, can be of little help, if we do not know the ‘mechanism’ of the roles and functions we are expected to perform. This needs to be understood.
It is said, “God is in details”. The other variants of the quote are also much in vogue. We all truly believe, goodness and wellness, even evil is in details. The word ‘details’ means, when we dig down, break the situation into smaller fragments, reach to ‘parts’ to understand the ‘whole’; the mechanism of a situation at hand can be revealed for success optimization.
Most of us love the character of James bond. He is somehow very close to the concept of our all-weather all season Hero. We also love the superman. However, our James Bond is purely human and more like us, but a ‘winner’ in all tough and almost ‘unwinnable’ situations. He seems to be excellence personified.
When we see him coming out a winner in all tough situations, we know why he could. He always does it because he is the ‘master of mechanisms’. The best part of his glorious winning ways is the fact that they all seem so spontaneous and habitual. He does not have to move a mountain like our superman to save his beloved. He always knows about a secret pass or a crack opening in the mountain to sneak in beyond it. It is because, every mountain has passes; we just have to know where they are. Often, excellence is in knowing the details of all possible aspects of life-living situations.
We shower his performances with encore and applauds as he pulls out another of his masterly tricks with aplomb, to score over his detractors and conspirators. In all his troubles, he knows a diversion and bypass. Not surprisingly, they are mostly very believable as the winning tricks come out of the same mechanism, which brought about a problematic situation at the first place. This is his heroism – He is the master of mechanisms. This is excellence. He is able to do it because he sees and visualizes a situation in entirety and holism. He has the dead cool attitude and demeanor to muster up all possible details to his aid, when he needs them.
Can we all be James Bond? Why not, but being a James Bond means lots of homework and preparations. And what this homework is all about? It is painful, persevered and postured preparations to arrive at a state of ‘readiness’, where we have the ‘objective knowledge’ of all situations, life can put us in. There are always multiple factors, which together contribute to a success. A success is simply a juxtaposition of all elements in a favorable situation at one point of time and space. Therefore, excellence is in being knowledgeable about all possible factors and elements, which constitute success. Excellence therefore has two broad elements – objective knowledge of multiplicity of life-living factors and secondly, the ingenuity to connect all these elements and factors in a favorable plexus. This is James Bond stuff!
Present a latest high-tech car to the James Bond, with first-time features anywhere on the globe and James Bond already knows, how to successfully run it and fruitfully use every new feature in all tough and unwinnable situations, which his work may land him in. The reason he could do it is he has gone through the painful process of ‘preparedness’ of basics, well before he became James Bond, to be in ‘readiness’, which defines him as James Bond.
And, what is this process of preparedness? The process is to be aware and responsible towards the ‘whole’, not only the ‘part’. The holistic, assimilative and integrative perspective towards the ‘mechanism, it its entirety is the hallmark of a true Hero – the icon of excellence like James Bond. God is in details and excellence is also in details and in connectivity of every details.
Only a person, who is receptive enough to respectfully accept the utility and fruition of every little detail of the mechanism of anything he or she is learning, can be ultimately ‘ready’ to be in the position of an all-weather all-season winning Hero. Excellence then comes naturally.
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. Ask a doctor, who performs a complicated surgery. Ask a formula race champion, who wins it often. Ask a successful housewife, who is master of skillful multitasking and still smiling all the way! They all shall tell you – the excellence is in being ready to receive all elements of eventuality in advance, being knowledgeable about them and then; weaving a successful pattern of probability, which evolves as overall utility and worthiness. This is sure pathway to holistic wellness.
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 loser. 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 excellence.
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There is a purpose to it. Often, there is an imagery of things in our mind, which leads our efforts towards attaining it. It is therefore very important that in the New Year, you have a clear and perfect template of both wellness and excellence so that in the coming days, you design your efforts and move around your resources to attain the best of both. It is also very perceptible that wellness and excellence are both correlated and often, two sides of a coin. Therefore, we need to look at a singular approach to attain the best of both.
It is a scientific fact that 85 percent of our brain is shaped up by the environment – physical as well as cultural, we live in. It is only natural that majority of our decision-making shall be conditioned by the cultural sense of good and bad. The idea of wellness and excellence too is often an imagery shaped up by populist benchmarks of the endemic culture we live in. Most contemporary cultures, especially the modern urban cultures, led by liberal thoughts and economics are somehow the prevailing benchmarks of wellness and excellence. However, growingly, experts as well as even large chunk of people living in these cultures are feeling that there is surely something big and crucial missing in the contemporary life and living benchmarks of wellness and excellence. This missing link is what we should first talk about.
The contemporary populist benchmarks of success and self-worth, calculated in terms of obsessive personal utility, individualistic possession and unfettered consumption are growingly proving a misleading road to true wellness and excellence in holistic sense of the term. The populist culture of instant self-gratification and wild chase of perpetuity of thrill and ecstasy at whatever cost is polluting the social milieus with catastrophic element of crazy one-up-manship, which is leading individuals to a success and self-worth filled with hypocrisy and sadomasochism. There are reasons to it. They need to be understood and accepted.
There is this popular perception that the world is growing more problematic as overall, complexities of living environment is growing fast and individuals are more stressed, even in their normal life. However, researches also confirm that this world has growingly become a better place to live with standard of living and overall support system getting better.
If we think of it, this is in fact the carnival time for humanity, definitively a phase in evolution to celebrate with jubilation, not because we have managed to build more structures and other facilities for our consumption and better living. The reason for jubilation is that we now have reached to a ‘new wisdom’, which is fast and decisively coming up for all of humanity. This ‘new thinking’ is a huge facility for understanding the ‘mechanisms’ of all our problems and troubles and then, singularly working for a satisfying model and template of wellness and excellence.
There has been and shall always remain the critical three elements, which represent the core of all knowledge, which finally leads to overall wellness and excellence. In the past, humanity has attempted to give answers relating to questions in these three areas. The future also pertains to understanding them better with whatever novel and better tools available for humanity. Most of the problems and troubles, we face have connection with these three questions. They are:
We live in a world, which has definitively entered a doorway of new time and space threshold, opening up new information, insights, theorization, pragmatism, perspective, paradigms and methodology into the existing as well as archetypal wisdom about the above three. As we see the notions of ‘Observer – Observed – Observance’ in the light of this new thinking, we can understand the whole mechanisms of our problems and solutions in a better and effective ways. This opens up the doors of true wellness and excellence.
Humanity in the new millennium is most certainly evolving a holistic, assimilative and integrative wisdom model, comprising a judicious and innovatively insightful assimilation and integration of archetypal wisdom of spiritualism and philosophy as well as the pure sciences in its wider manifestation. The quantum physics is the indicator of the new frontier science is now willing to open, as an improvement over classical science, for better understanding of matter and consciousness. This new science may be moot, however it shows, how new answers can be explored and accepted with an open and holistic mindset.
We have now entered a phase of an understanding of the ‘self’, the subjective as well as objective consciousness and even the subconscious minds as never before. We can now understand the ‘self’ in such new and innovative lights that it opens up new insight into the archetypal and puts us all in better stead. Of course, the knowledge is evolving but evolving fast and on right track. Debatable, it shall always be. With this new wisdom, the entire range of perspectives about cognition and causality change.
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Before we talk about the wellness and excellence mantras, we must list out some primary and core needs or necessity, without which, the mantras cannot be effective. There are elements in the environment around us – both tangible as well as intangible ones. There is a causality between them. Therefore, if we wish to have a particular attainment, which itself necessitates juxtaposition and coming together of certain set of elements, we have to take in and accept all those elements, which shall constitute an attainment or success. That is why, when we talk about attaining wellness and success in excellence, we have to accept certain elements, which are crucial and inevitable part of the template of the whole. These elements are –