Youth Sanity In Crazy Culture by Santosh Jha (read e book TXT) 📖

and drives and they make him seek personal empowerment at all cost. However, human is a social animal and he or she can survive and excel only in group and society.

Therefore, there has to be a balance, a poise, prudence and proportion between an individual’s desires of personal empowerment and his or her need for accommodation in society. A good culture has structures and functions, which ensures this poise. The culture, which cannot ensure this poise is an ‘inappropriate culture’, the one we have now.

Therefore, what a man or woman wants, if it is in conformity and synchrony with what society needs, then what he or she wants is what he needs. The poise and proportion is then ensured. This in other term means, individual empowerment must always create collective utility.

One simple but essential idea is – as an individual is constantly advised to recheck his or her ‘wants’, society also must always be liberal and resilient enough to allow a self-recheck on what it ‘needs’. This means, both individual empowerment and societal utility need to be evolving in tune with time and circumstances. This ensures poise for all. Otherwise, psychosis rules both individuals as well as societies.

The trouble with our contemporary society is that not only individuals but society as a collectivity itself has surrendered to populism and the ruling machinery also somehow extends support to the culture of populism. The populism is a culture, where people are guided and lead their lives more on the basis of their natural and unhindered instincts and drives. It is a culture where people indulge in what they want and never think of what they actually need.

This culture has its own trouble. When we give in to the populism, the instinctive demands of body, without thinking of the ‘appropriates’ of survival and excellence in the long-run, we land ourselves in untold miseries. The contemporary culture is therefore in the storm of troubles.

Let us understand it with daily life example. The food we eat is felt until it stays up to the throat. After that the body mechanism, which continues to work upon the food, is not felt. The mind has 100 billion neurons and billions of other supportive neurons are working incessantly in the process of food movement from mouth to digestive system. However, we can feel and understand only a fraction of this operative mechanism.

This is our design. However, the real intelligent is a person, who does not divert his or her attention and focus from the food, even when it is past the ‘felt-zone’ of throat. We all need to be aware of and receptive towards the journey of this vital food down the tracts till its last processing. Populism is also like a short-term gratification desire, without the responsibility of watching for its impact in the long-term.

Doctors have been warning us. They say, “Own the onus of the food your mouth shoves to the body, as you are not just your tongue, but the entire body”. The idea is to convey the fact that usually, in our restrictive consciousness, we eat in loads what our mouth, especially tongue likes. It is true that the taste buds are restricted to tongue only and as the food goes down beyond it, we do not wish to remember and care about. It is simply because there is no pleasure of gratification of food beyond our mouth.

However, we are not only our mouth. Our body is an intricate and huge mechanism. There are long food canal, liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart et al and together there are millions of functions that go on within our body, which we do not consciously register. However, they are crucial for our survival and general well-being. The mouth is our conscious mind but rest of the millions of complex functions are handled by our unconscious mind.

A true intelligent person, cannot restrict its responsibility and attention to just the miniscule conscious part. The unconscious is also our onus as it is the larger domain, which essentially handles our basic health and survival. The real intelligent shall always know and respect the ‘details’ of the entirety of the ‘body-mechanism’ and shall own the responsibility of the wellness and success of all parts, not only one part.

It is clear that what we want is only a small part. Like it is just a small part to shove into our mouth what our taste buds want. However, what we actually need is a long process and responsibility. It is a collective decision of all other organs of our body, like liver, kidney, heart intestines, et al. Populism is about caring only for the instant gratification of mouth. It is about wanting only what our instincts and drives want from us. Intelligence is in being responsible towards the wellness of all body organs in the long-term. If we indulge in populism, in the long-term, we degenerate our body-mind health and threaten our own survival. As we have talked earlier, culturally or personally, this may be right but from the point of view of survival and excellence of humanity as a race, it is ‘inappropriate’.

The conscious-mind in we all, which is restrictively concerned and knowledgeable about only a ‘part’ of the entire complex mechanism around us, can be ‘culturally and personally successful’. However, the true intelligent is a person, who 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 intelligent. This person shall not fall prey to populism and its associated calamities.

We cannot blame ourselves. It is our mechanism! The conscious part, the mouth, gives us tangibles as instant utility and fruition. The mind consciousness is bound to register the immediate advantage of ‘taste-satisfaction’ and extends instant thumbs-up. We eat a huge and rich creamy cake and feel so happy. The tongue gives us a huge thumbs-up as it registers big bonus on gratification-scale.

However, the burst of calamitous sugar, which goes inside the food tract and gets big disapproval and thumbs down from liver and pancreas are not registered on the satisfaction-scale. These organs are rather neutral. The mouth is a vocal and populist showman. The liver however is the silent worker.

The ‘true intelligent’ shall never have this tendency of giving in to populism. Rather, this intelligent person shall always have the poise and perspective to see the picture in entirety as this person understands and is responsible towards the ‘mechanism’ not in ‘parts’, but in holism and assimilation.

The ‘intelligent’ shall never be swayed away or blown out by populism, as it has the holistic perspective to understand that ‘success’ is not in pampering the mouth with all it ‘wants’, it is rather in ensuring the larger health and wellness ‘need’ of the whole body. The ‘intelligent’ understands, “Success is not in having all that we want for instant joys; it is rather in the prudence of having what we actually need for persevered satisfaction”.

You, my young friend, are the genius of the universe and it is expected of you to be intelligent. You should yourself decide, what intelligence you wish to accept. You just have to accept that mind is more or less like a computer, may be a bit more than that. It can provide only those answers and perform only those tasks, which it would be programmed for. Like a computer, it is restricted to process only those data, which has been fed into it. Brain is just a referral mechanism for processing facts; what one may call a value summation (deciding right and wrong for motor action).

All its decisions, based on instinctive value summation, are therefore subjective and never entirely objective. A human mind decides on an individual’s goodness and righteousness mostly on the basis of the values that it has been programmed (neural circuitry) with. This programming is his or her instincts in almost 95% of his or her value summation and decisions as well as the culture he or she has received. You also have your mind programmed as per the definitions of right and wrong, which your contemporary culture has generated for you.

So, what we need to do is to change or at least divert this programming of your conditioned mind. You need to consciously and continuously tell your mind that look, we are in the midst of a huge change and we are introducing some new programming and that is going to be the new and additional matrix, equally important, if not superior than the popular one, for a new and objective value summation and decision-making.

Reiterate this resolve to your mind repeatedly as it is only through conscious repetition that mind accepts external inputs and then forms it as part of its instinctive value summation programming, or what people popularly refer as ‘soul voice’ or ‘higher conscious’.

For example, Dalai Lama said, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”. Reception of pain in mind is a sensor mechanism; one cannot stop that at entry point. But, mind also has ‘processing’ neurons which is what we call ‘higher conscious’. This processing neuron can be trained not to react to the pains in usual emotions, rather accept it as an emotion of larger ‘wellness’, thus creating a ‘feeling’ that results in less suffering. Science admits, effective meditation can curb the sufferings upto 70%. Buddhist monks do it 99%. This is mind training through persevered practice, no miracle.

From the functioning of our minds, we now know that it is instinctive in human neural system to accept training and compete to become better. Therefore, intelligence is in conditioning our instincts and drives through self-control, self-discipline and objectively training it to accept only those values as referral for instinctive value-summation, which are ‘appropriate’ for larger wellness of self and society. We now have a scientific value matrix, which also must be known, understood and accepted for mind-evolution of a uniform global culture.

The human mind 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 universe has not put us where we are today with any specific purpose of designed goodness. We have to design our purpose. We cannot accept survival as our purpose anymore. We as superior human race have to design and devise higher and lofty purposes for our excellence. Instant-self-gratification, the contemporary global culture, is also not our purpose. You as the ultimate genius of universe, as intellectual beings, need to set lofty and larger goals for yourself and then program your minds to attain it.

As you repeat this objective mind training to your brain, the ‘appropriate’ goodness would spread all throughout its neural circuitry and then, you won’t have to think twice to perform an ‘appropriate’ goodness as it would then become an instinct, and thus an involuntary mechanism, like a hand moving away involuntarily as it touches fire.

You, my dear young friend, need to know, a real intelligent human is not one who needs to think and then behave and act good and ‘appropriate’. Rather, it is one who does not have to think as all his behavior and actions are instinctively bound to be good and ‘appropriate’. You don’t consciously remember when you ride a cycle or cook a meal as it is instinctive, even when they were once learned behavior. Objective goodness is also learned behavior but when you repeatedly practice it, it becomes instinctive.

Mind is value neutral. We all are born with a value-neutral mind with instinctive mechanism for survival. It is like a new computer, which comes with a factory-loaded Operating System (OS), but you have to load all those software, which you want for your specific needs. Mind spreads values that it is assigned by an individual (chosen software) or a culture to every part of its neural circuitry. This is why and how the minds of innocent people are conditioned to become terrorists, even suicide bombers.

That is why; my dear friend, you have to use your objective intellect to