Saturday, May 30, 2015

Grand Meanings of Human Life

Fundamentally, meaning of human life is derived from basic human instincts of survival, progress and procreation with the purposes of living a lifespan and continuing it through generations in line with natural design. These are natural demands of life applicable to all known forms of life, but human life has evolved differently from what natural life is, as a superset of natural life. This means that the human life includes all that what nature demands from life plus a few things more. The cause of the additional things is the evolution of human intellect to a high level as compared to that of the other forms of life. This has caused evolution of three more instincts in humans.
Memory - Memorizing experiential information and using it whenever needed,
Curiosity - Being curious, hence making efforts to know things in vicinity, and
Imagination - Imagining what is non-existent and trying to develop them
Directly and indirectly, all these three additional instincts aim at improving quality of human life. Therefore, a meaning of life may be contributing to improve quality of human life. With this idea, let us examine some meanings of life through basic and additional instincts of humans.
Basic Meanings
The human experience proves that lifespan of an individual form of life can't be endless. Thus, every birth is complemented by a death. Therefore, survival is not the meaning of life but a healthy survival can be the meaning of life to an individual. For this, the individual is required to take care of health resilience and agility which are included in true meaning of good health.
In living beings and also in every organic system, regular changes are inevitable. These changes may be for betterment of the system or for its decay. Therefore, even for avoiding decay, betterment has to be adopted to by an individual in his/her life as an organic system. This betterment is renamed as progress through which the individual seeks and creates more and more convenience and comforts of life.
Humans have made rapid strides in this respect but many such efforts have become counter-productive for their adverse effects on health resilience and agility. Therefore, a balance between health and progress has to be made through trade-off between the two. For some individuals, this may be the purpose of life.
Humans procreate with the intention of surviving after death through respective generations carrying their genes. Thus, genes appear to be immortal providing an apparent immortality to an individual. But this can't be ensured as a break in procreation of generations may be possible at any stage for various reasons. Secondly, marriages introduce amalgamation of genes from different sources, therefore, after a few generations, the original individual's genes may be present in individuals in part only. Say, a new born may have facial features of his/her one ancestor, body structure of another, characteristics of some other ancestor, etc. Therefore, the individual's set of genes gets lost through permutations and combinations of genes from different individuals down the generation chain.
Thirdly, with continuity of a certain practice different from the original practice for three or more generations, the genes undergo modifications. This upsets continuity of genetic inheritance from an ancestor.
Thus, surviving through genetic inheritance can't be the purpose of life for an individual. Through procreation, an individual can only contribute toward continuity of life on earth.
Procreation being futile for an individual for immortality through genetic inheritance, the humanity has successfully sought another purpose of getting sexual pleasure in process similar to that of procreation. Therefore, all sexual intercourses of humans don't aim at procreation which is the case with other forms of life. This makes sexual pleasure as a possible purpose of life for some individuals.
Advanced Meanings
Propagating Human Experience
Lifespan of memory records of experiences of an individual may be extended through transfer of information through generations for taking advantages of these for betterment of human life. Creating written records of experiential information through use of languages, enhances this process further. Therefore, propagation of human experience to the future generations may be a purpose of life for some individuals. Some authors may be working with this contention.
Probing the Unknown
Human instinct of curiosity may compel some individuals to improve human knowledge base through efforts for knowing the unknown. The science behind this process is to probe the unknown through what is known. This may be the meaning of life for some individuals benefitting those who seek more knowledge.
Imaginative Innovation
Human capability of imagining what is non-existent until that time works for seeding innovations through lateral thinking for improving quality of human life, but this has potential for misuse too for creating like atomic weapons to destroy a part or the whole of humanity. Whatever be the case, this may be the meaning of life for some individuals leafing to more innovations in the world which may improve or decay quality of human life.
The Grand Purpose of Life
We have seen above that various meanings of life have some potential subscribers for their own choices and provide benefits in their limited ways. Therefore, the humanity is in a process of differentiation for pursuance of different meanings of life based on basic or advanced instincts by different persons. No purpose is capable of taking the whole humanity to a higher level. In the process, some humans pursuing their basic instincts as their meaning of life may remain what they are today or even get degraded. Others pursuing their advanced instincts for their meaning of life with the basic instincts relegated to routines of life may evolve further. As a result, the humanity would get divided into humans and super-humans. This takes some of us to pursue a grand meaning of life to evolve to super-human level through conscious pursuance of advanced meanings of life.
This point of further evolution of only a part of humanity is supported by the evolution process so far wherein only parts of species have been evolving to higher levels under circumstantial differentials. Even the humans evolved from species still existing on earth in their forms of pre-human evolution. Differentials in circumstance and practices keep on creating diversity in evolution levels within each species of life, thus giving rise to multiple species from a single species.  
To summarise, the whole of this treatise, those willing to evolve to super-humanism must consciously pursue their capabilities of memorizing and recording human experiences, curiosity to improve upon the human knowledge base, and imaginative creativity, while the basic instincts of survival, progress and procreation get pursued through their routines. Those who fail to do so and keep on relying on the basic instincts only would remain as ordinary humans. 

Friday, May 29, 2015

Body can be Alive without the Brain

A recent suicide attempt in my neighborhood and his progress through ongoing medical treatment have been educating me on functioning of human body and their control by the person's mind and brain. The suicide victim is in hospital with doctors assuring his family members of a full recovery. Condition of his body which was stout and healthy otherwise, except the head injury due to shooting point-blank through frontal portion of the brain, is improving.
On passage of 10 days in hospital, he is able to breathe without external aids of oxygen and ventilator, his heart beat is normal, he opens his eyes, and is sensitive to touches on his skin. Apart from nutrition injected into his body, he is being tube-fed milk which he seems to be digesting. But there is no action from any of his action organs. It is not known whether he is able to understand what his sensory organs sense from the external world. Doctors attending him say that he would take about two more weeks for speaking and affecting other actions. With this set of information, I am trying to separate mind and brain functions in monitor, control and regulation of a person's body condition, sensory inputs and output actions. Accordingly, provided here is a functional constitution of human body with incorporation of its mind and brain.

Physical Body

Apart from mind and brain, human body has three sets of parts -
Sensory organs - palms and soles for touches, eyes for visuals, nostrils for smells, ears for sounds and taste buds for tastes.
Action organs - tongue for speech, arms with hands for handling things, legs with feet for walking, sex organs for reproduction, two excretion organs, and the body in general for other movements and expressions.
Life support systems - breathing, digestion, blood formation and circulation, etc

The Mind

Routine sustenance of these systems of body is looked after by the mind without any support from the brain. Therefore, the body may sustain or remain clinically alive even if the brain is dead.  This seems to be the present condition of the patient mentioned above.
The mind of a person is composed of many sub-minds with one in each sub-system of the body. All the sub-minds are attached in form of glands to the network of neurons spread throughout the body. Apart from taking care of routine sustenance of the body sub-systems, the mind reads body's special and contingent needs and desires, and communicates them to the brain for further instructions. Thus, the brain has no direct communication with parts of the body.

The Brain

The brain resides safely inside skull and is connected to the body through an intricate and comprehensive network of neurons, termed the mind. It has three functional parts -
Body sensing and control centers for interpreting inputs from sensory organs, issuing instructions to action organs and taking care of special and contingent needs of body's sub-systems,
Memory to keep record of experiences of the body with the external world and providing the recorded information to thinking faculty whenever needed,
Thinking faculty to analyze experiential information and take decisions for actions through the body,
Thus, the body can be clinically alive without intervention of the brain, but can't sense the external environment or take any action.

My View differs from Medical Science View

Medical science practitioners are of the opinion that the body can't sustain without the brain. So in their opinion, if a person breathes, his/her heart beats, and he/she digests food, his body is not only clinically alive but he/she is fully alive and can be brought to normal health and working. With this opinion, they keep on treating even brain-dead persons based on condition of their physical bodies. In all such cases, a day arrives when a sub-system of the body develops a contingency needing intervention of the brain. For not getting any support from the dead brain, the body meets its end of life. A brain injury is termed as 'concussion' in medical terminology. Therefore, a person with seriously injured brain has very rare chances of survival. Persons with partially injured brains may survive but with physical impairments or mental disorders. 

Mental, Psychological and Intellectual Disorders

Some disorders such as spasms, defective speech, Parkinson's disease, etc are caused by defective or broken communication links in the neuron network spread in the body - the mind of the person, resulting into communication weakness between the body, mind and the brain. Most of the spastics fall in this category. These disorders require medical treatment to strengthen the neuron network in the body.
A second type of disorders of the same class, such as phobias, excessive anger and irritation, depression and anxiety, inferiority and superiority complexes, etc is purely psychological wherein brain fails in understanding the situation in right perspective. This is dysfunction of thinking faculty of the brain and may be cured through psychological counseling by a psychiatrist. The practice of treatment strengthens neuron links within the brain for developing the right perspective. No medication is necessary in such cases but some brain tonics may prove beneficial in the treatment.    
Insanity in a person is considered a disease and is medically treated though it is rare and its low percentage of detection makes it rarer. It is a disorder of the brain wherein some part of the brain doesn't function properly. So, I put it in a class intellectual disorders which I find rampant in human societies. 
Many intellectual disorders are considered as part of culture of the people, hence neither recognized as disorders nor treated. Faith in divine miracles and incarnations, religious fundamentalism, spirituality, worshiping of pebbles and stones placed in so-called temples, respect to a person based on his/her dress or make-up, etc are intellectual disorders in people remaining untreated for thousands of years, hence becoming cultures of many societies. Such disorders have been hampering scientific developments and progress in human civilization.
Since body can survive even with a dead brain, it can survive with weak or defective brain too with display of all signs of life. But all such cases make the persons less human-beings, may be called sub-humans, than those with their brains fully functional. Unfortunately, the modern world has more of sub-humans than those with fully functional intellectual faculties, but their disorders remain undetected under covers of cultures and democratic majority of theirs. Thus, many cultures and democracies in the world have been preserving and promoting intellectual disorders in their subjects. 
Vaidic life recorded in Vaidic scriptures ensures full intellectual development of people through healthy foods. This was the case with Theo culture and race about 2,500 years back. That culture was decimated by enemies of humanity for establishing their psychological, political and social domination over common people under covers of religions. 

Monday, May 25, 2015

Why nobody Truly Knows Anybody Else

We work under presumptions of knowing other persons in our contacts, but individuality of each of us is too complex to be understood by anybody else. If mutual knowing of two persons were possible, there would remain no possibility of misunderstanding between them. Since we often notice misunderstandings and disputes among persons familiar to each other, we may safely infer that the two persons were not knowing each other. Not only that, even most of the persons fail in knowing themselves that is why they take wrong decisions about matters fully under their own control. Most of the sicknesses among humanity are results of this misunderstanding of the self.

Dimensions of an Individual

A person's existence gets expressive in three dimensions - physical, mental and intellectual through the three organs body, mind and brain, respectively. A living body is a passive organic system having many subsystems interwoven and supportive of each other functionally. It functions under partial control of the mind, and the body and the mind combination functions under overall control of the brain. Thus, the brain is the supreme commander of an individual.
From practical experiences, we know that even supreme commanders fail in exercising full control over their domains with the result that elements of domains become undisciplined and even revolt occasionally against their supreme commanders. Similar is the situation with the command line of the body, mind and brain.

Reason for Indiscipline

Like the practical life incidences, the command line fails for control of the supreme commander being indirect with a hierarchy of mediators in between the ultimate domain and the supreme commander. In case of an individual, the mind is the mediator between the body and the brain which plays its own tricks in between to gain more authority over the body. Tricks of the mind are termed as wisdom of the individual, which gets played often in conflict with the intellect of the person.

Wisdom and Intellect Conflict

Wisdom of an individual is applied with sole purpose of getting things done for the body in accordance of her wishes which may not be appropriate always for the negative human traits raising their heads through the body. All crimes by humans are committed for these negative traits with full support of the individual's mind and justified by the wisdom of the self. For this reason, each criminal tries to justify his/her committed crime. Wisdom doesn't have analytical power but is merely empowered to get the desired results by hook or crook.
On the contrary, the intellect, function of the brain, with its faculties of memorizing studied and experiential information, logical reasoning, and imaginative extrapolation of information through application of logic is capable of judging right from wrong, if properly applied to a problem. But for the complexity of body and mind functions, it is impossible for the intellect to keep watch on everything under its overall command. It relies on the wisdom standing in between with the instruction of referring any matter to it whenever needed. Another reason for the limitation of the intellect is its being mono-tasking, while a multitude of processes keep ongoing every moment in the body of an individual. So, relying on wisdom is a compulsion of the intellect.

The Societal Scenario

For the reason explained above, an individual can truly know another individual through application of one's intellect only. Since, the intellect remains burdened with a huge workload all the time, the wisdom is empowered to know the person which plays its tricks for own vested interests. In the process, the other person is not understood well but presumed to be understood. Since the matter is not referred to the brain by the mind under the presumption, the brain doesn't get involved in the matter leaving it to the mind.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

6 Elements of Harmonious Living

Every moment of your life is precious because you get it only once and it passes on whether you misuse it, disuse it or make the best out of it. Purpose of living a moment, every moment should be getting a happy feel. There are only 6 elements of living which are indispensable for each and every human-being. And, mind their order of priority as provided by their placements below.
Beware, the 6 subheads below may sound well-known to you through noises all around from vested interests to drive you crazy and loosen your purse for them, but the senses I attach to them are different from what you may be knowing. So, please check out precisely through the details.

Your Inspirations

Forces in the form of persons, nature and wherever you put your faith on are your inspirations like the air you breathe in every moment of your life. They are the sources of your spiritual strength you need every moment of your life. But these sources may be misguiding you too, if you have not chosen them by yourself but gone by advices of others, your routine education, or as told to you by your parents and social contacts. Religion is such a mischievous guide often thought to be an inspiring force.
Your parents must be the first and foremost inspirations for you but not their advices on other inspirations. Problem of modern parents is that either they are too busy to be too good, or too misguided to be too bad to you. Respect them as your parents, but judge their ways of life lest these corrupt your life too.
What is not realizable by you through your intellect and wisdom of your sensory organs can't be an effective inspiration to you. The best inspiration is one that moves with you every moment of your life and inspires you at your pace. Some books may pass this test, so are their authors - living or dead.
Some people opine that a spiritual guru is a must for uplifting force of life. This is sheer nonsense. If you need a real guru, go to your primary school teacher or someone like him - the greatest one to inspire you so far. For final guidance in this matter, ask your own spirit of life and none else.  

Your Spirit  

Apart from owning the physical persona, you are a spirit composed of your wisdom and intellect, built on your instincts, education and experiences so far. Your self-esteem, self-confidence, value system, etc are important attributes of your spirit. Respect these and keep these beyond bargains of your routine and commercial life.
Your spirit is your guide every moment of your life, particularly in moments of distress and excitements.    

Your Persona

Basically your health is your persona but it extends beyond that to what is usually known as your personality that includes everything in you including your spirit of life, discussed above. It is built through breathing in clean air, intakes of healthy food, body-care for protection from climatic extremities through clothing and shelter, physical hurts, etc and regular physical movements of your organs - for productive work, a creative endeavor or an exercise. Better use your physical movements for productive purposes and for saving yourself from paying for others services to you. Better be self-reliant as far as possible.
Your mental health is an important part of your persona as it is that of your spirit. It is ultimately determined by the concepts of life you pursue in your routines, relationships and profession. Being crazy, having a craving, getting excited or distressed often, etc are indicators of bad mental health. Some people consider a good memory as an indicator of mental health which I beg to differ seriously. In my view, it is immaterial what you forget but what you remember is important as an indicator of your mental health.
Outcomes of a healthy persona are your feeling healthy every moment, your impressive looks, and your sensuality for healthy relationships with your chosen persons. Never mind if you are not accommodative to everyone for your family and social relationships. None is made to accommodate all.   

Your Relationships

Each one of us has relationships, or is expected to have, in four sectors - with the self, within the family, within one's society, and with professional colleagues, superiors and subordinates. Anybody failing in having a sweet relationship with the self would fail in making any relationship of some value. Loving your own values is the criterion of relating to the self.
It is better to have good relationship with everyone coming in contact, but it is the best to take care of your value system through your relationships too. So, don't worry if you are at variance with some persons in your contacts.
Again, it is not important whom you drop from developing sweet relationships, but it is critical whom you keep in contacts. Ultimately, you are known by the company you keep. So, don't tarnish your image by pleasing everyone, be your real self in developing relationships.  

Your Aspirations

Etymologically as well as in practice, aspirations are set just opposite to inspirations - former for influencing the external world and the latter for getting influenced by the external world. Human life has a purpose of coming into existence and living for a long period of time for is intellectual evolution.
Every work has an intellectual value in it, respect it, enhance it and continue with it. This makes every moment of life a moment of intellectualism. So, live purposefully every moment - at home, at work and even during a relaxation. Set your goals on long term, medium term, short term and even for every momentary step of your life and move on with them.  

Your Economy

Human life has evolved differently from natural way of living, hence has economic considerations at every moment of it. Take care of your personal economy through working productively enough for a living and support to the family. But don't nullify yourself with the productivity syndrome - keep on working for wealth losing health and other pleasures of living. Keep a balance between personal, working, family and social life. For an average person, recommended durations are 12, 6, 4 and 2 hours, respectively, on an average in a day for a happy and contented lifestyle.    

Monday, May 11, 2015

Meaning of Being a Perfectionist

Though perfection means having zero tolerance, perfectionism does not mean to ensure zero tolerance, but to keep it in mind in order to do one’s best as a performer and work for minimizing tolerance in the performance. This target makes the performer to go on improving his/her performance every time, all the time.
Perfectionism, being indeed unachievable, has been thrown to trash by many persons. I pity them and differ with them on their notion of it. In-spite of my conviction, like everybody else, that the perfection is never achievable, I am adamant on being a staunch votary of pursuing perfectionism. Here is my logic.
How many shooters hit their targets right? I think very few are able to do that. Those who often miss the target for being novices or for other reasons of their own, should they forget about the target and keep on shooting in the air without any objective? I think, your unanimous answer would be 'no' because there has to be an objective target for making efforts to hit that. Same thing is true for being a perfectionist wherein the target remains without ensuring the targeted outcome.
With an aim for achieving perfection, most of the time you are not going to achieve it, but you will do your best in your performance if that remains your target. Nobody can be a good performer without having a target in mind similarly, nobody can do his/her best without perfection as the target. Therefore, every perfectionist aims at doing his/her best, and with every new effort, he/she finds him/her closer to perfection than before.
What is true about perfectionism is true about ideology too, which I discussed in another article of mine on functionality of intellect and wisdom. Ideology too remains unachievable in most of routine actions of a person, yet its remaining as his/her standard norm, the person gets wiser day after day and goes on moving closer to it. Had there been no preset ideology, there won't be any target for achieving with the performance becoming without any objective.
What creates doubt in people’s mind about perfection is its intolerance to deviation, while tolerance essentially remains a way of life for each of us. With tolerance remaining unspecified in definition of perfection, it is not set at all but measured on the outcome for reducing it further in the next effort. This remains the objective of the perfectionist. The deviations in outcome from being the perfect may be different for different fields, at different times for different performers. But surely, the perfection must remain everyone’s target which means trying to do the best to minimize the deviation.   
Thus, perfectionism is not a mere slogan but a practical way to go on improving performance with a hope to become perfect some day. 

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Collapse of Social Conscience

In the year of 2000, I came to my native village Khandoi in district Bulandshahr of Uttar Pradesh State of India after I had almost left it in 1961 for my further studies, career and professional duties. I had decided to close on my Engineering Profession and involve myself in Social Engineering with the objective of improving quality of life in rural India to begin with my own native village. On my arrival in the backward village from a developed urban culture with flourishing profession, people were astonished and when I told them that my objective was to work with them and for them for getting better services from the government and administration, they seemed to welcome me. But it proved to be a faked gesture as just a formality.

My Struggle on Electricity Front

With my basic concern of improving quality of life of people in the village I presumed that the people would welcome if I get them better electricity supply, transport facilities, etc. I knew the universal fact that everything has a cost, and better services would mean more cost to the people. I began with electricity supply to the village having a badly shattered electricity distribution lines from the government monopoly. People were hardly getting any supply and whatever was available was with voltage fluctuating beyond limits of tolerance, and with no reliability. Only thing people liked about electricity supply to them was that it was freely available to them for the government monopoly company never bothering for revenue against their electricity supply. Their losses were compensated for through government funding. In return, the officials concerned were happy for no complaints from the people about their poorest possible services. So, things were going on peacefully with both sides satisfied in their own ways.
But this was not the picture in my mind for which I had arrived in the village to resettle myself permanently. I didn't want anything free that costs money, and I wanted to have good quality of electricity supply and related services from the officials concerned. I insisted on villagers to have authorized electricity connection and pay for electricity consumed by them. About 100 agreed and became authorized electricity consumers while other 400 insisted on relying on stolen electricity.
With my efforts and contacts at the highest level, things related to electricity supply in the village were improved. This facilitated the authorized consumers as well as those involved in electricity thefts.  Irony of the situation is that unauthorized consumers of electricity are actually source of personal incomes of officials hence they have no interest in having authorized consumers for their organization.
In due course of time, condition of electricity distribution network has been deteriorating for carelessness of officials and its misuse by the people. As soon as I get it corrected, misuse is increased and situation begins deteriorating fast. So I have developed a feeling that by getting the network in good condition, I serve those involved in electricity thefts thus promote misuse of electricity.

I Give Up

Electricity supply case was first test case of my social concern, wherein I have been proved wrong. Now the situation is that the Government officials meant to serve people, as well as the people themselves have become highly immoral, and both are very well serving each other's purpose of getting maximum from others' pockets with paying for what they get. Both seem to be made for each other and complementing each other with their illicit characteristics. Persons trying to intervene to improve the situation are out of sync of both and disliked. This is where I stand today in the village. So I give up on my concerns for the rural people and their problems.

What I am to Do, Now

I can't help my society in improving quality of life of people as a native of the village, but there is nothing that debars me from improving upon my own strength through studies, research and authorship as a global citizen. So I have decided to remain indoors for most of the time and devote myself fully to study of Vaidic scriptures which indeed have scientific knowledge of immense value to humanity, not only of the present but for a long time to come. The most important part of this knowledge is related to human health, promising lifespan of about 500 years.
I have been experimenting with knowledge available in Vaidic scriptures to improve upon my own health and hence my lifespan. I have set a target for myself to have the lifespan of about 250 years. I am quite hopeful on this and making good progress. I want to prove to people that Vaidic scriptures are of great value to humanity through my own life. 

What does it Mean to Humanity

Every individual is principally concerned with three subject matters - his/her own life, his/her Society, and the Governance he/she is bound to follow. For each of his/her actions and efforts, he/she looks at the outcome balance with respect to these 3 concerns, with an expectation of some positive results through his/her own perception. 
Irony of human life is that all these concerns can't be taken care of simultaneously for mutual confrontations of these. Therefore, the individual sacrifices his/her own interests on one concern or the other. For this sacrifice, he/she wishes to get compensated for through other concerns. If this compensation is missing, the person refuses to make sacrifices.
In all such cases, it is the Society that is ignored and suffers the most in the individual's concern for his/her own life and his/her compulsions under governance system. Ignorance and sufferings on social front too cost the individual heavily but secondarily and mostly in the long run, causing increased sufferings for the whole humanity in the long run. This is why humanity has been suffering on account of social discipline.
As far as India is concerned, the situation has been perilous for a very very long time, and there is very little concern for it by individual members of the Society. Hence, the doomsday for India is closing on a dark future for the Nation, Society and the Individuals.