Bottomless Well — an Inward journey digest! [Part 1]

This series is a diary of notes I take for myself as a part of my inward journey experience by traversing across books, talks and thoughts of diverse experts from diverse fields. It is purely my opinionated series about all questionable concepts wandering around us and how can we have a prison-breaking perspective towards them. It will encompass psychology, philosophy and religion!

In a nutshell, a catalog of an amateur argumentative Indian :-)

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Well Round 1 : How to learn to unlearn?

The world around us is tremendously trying to influence from every single piece of information we encounter day in and day out. This starts from the tooth paste we use in the morning (thanks to the marketing muscle of UL & P&G) to the last seen Whatsapp message before we go to bed (thanks to the social media bouncers). We are forced to learn from all these sources with limited control on choosing who can influence us and who cannot. The worse is yet to come as the digital age is nothing but a universal information diarrhea. Generally, we would like to accept / hear whatever we want to and blindly reject other influences/opinions. We do not even think of taking a step towards neutral stands to digest or investigate any piece of information as our subconscious is fine-tuned with strong positioning factors of entities around us.

For example, If you like the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, irrespective of the quality of the decisions he takes, your hypothesis to defend his policies do not change. If you hate Dr. Zakir Naik, irrespective of his logical statements, you only try to gather data points to contradict his views. This is a kind of suffering called as ‘Confirmation Bias’ as defined in epistemology. This will be a huge bottleneck even if we have a remote plan of initiating an inward journey or an acceptance learning. Neither spiritual Gurus nor the Cult meditations can help to come out of this trap, rather they leverage this syndrome to continue exploiting us.

There could be two broad reasons for such ‘Confirmation Bias’ instances.

• Lack of interest on certain contexts which translates to lack of time as generally we do not allocate time to those things on which we have shallow interest. So, just go with the preliminary opinion. This is absolutely fine and harmless.
• Influenced by our early bird environment — our parents and the childhood commune which backed our upbringing has deeply instilled some conceptualizations in terms of religion, politics and society as they wanted, rather than what was the reality. This is a fundamental flaw in our belief system. This acts as the concrete blocks for most of our opinions we consider in any field. Technology can be exceptional as our previous generation has limited awareness than us. Genetically, we may continue their legacy in technology field also to our forthcoming generations :-)

Hence, the baby step is to learn how to unlearn things. We may be an awesome decision makers but the decisions still rely on the accuracy of the data points. One easy trick is to disprove your preexisting hypotheses for a certain period of time and enjoy arguing with people (stick to your closer peers as this has aversion/hate risk with others). You will slowly start getting lucidity on already learnt concepts and factoids what were really REAL and what were really a FICTIONAL.

Inner world is slightly complicated than the outer as it relies on expressions over impressions. It is mandatory to battle with this ‘Confirmation bias’ in the inner Kurukshetra before heading to the journey. Otherwise, the travelogue of the journey will end up as an empty silver vessel. A slight back step from the assumption of ‘I know everything’ to ‘I may not know about this’ is the greatest positive initiative to start the unlearning process.

Let us enjoy unlearning to relearn the realities in the days to come!

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Well Round 2 : Story behind our opinions and beliefs!

Any of our belief system or opinionated thoughts are undoubtedly generated by multiple sources from diverse directions. They have subtly trained our subconscious brain to decide to pick a favorable hypotheses whenever we interact with a piece of information. The bedrock for this inculcation all these years to our grey cells is said to be the ‘Virtue’ (man suppose to adopt) and ‘Vice’ (he has to reject).

Virtue — A morality of characteristic trait symbolizing goodness. Eg : honesty, love, generosity, punctuality etc., Vice — Negative morality (opposite of virtue). Eg: hate, greed, possession etc.,

All the religions claim to be providing morality to man by instilling virtues to build a healthy and happy society which in turn to a greater civilization. Let us see the process of how these virtues are delivered to humanity.

Source — Philosophy, Science & Religion University of Edinburgh material

In the above diagram, A, B, C,…N are the people who act as senders and receivers of message at different points of time in a typical communication/conversation/learning process. There are four different types of virtues as follows.

Source Virtue -

Assume ‘A’ has good knowledge of something by personally knowing about something and he communicates the message to ‘B’. In terms of Source virtue, ‘A’ possesses certain positive characteristic traits like honesty, generosity, sincerity, so he will be very cautious and sensitive in whatever knowledge he transforms to ‘B’ because he may foresee the consequence of the wrong piece of information being transmitted to somebody. Generally there are four metrics for a right communication.

Quantity — what is the actual content of the message to be heard by the receiver? / Both ‘what is’ & ‘what not’. Share what is required and ignore whay may not be required.

Quality — What is the actual fact in the communication process? ‘A’ will also communicate what information he guesses? what information he doubts? what information he thinks may be true? needs more analysis/research etc.,

Relation — ‘A’ will only tell the examples, things which belong to the context rather saying random things on his perceptions, imaginations or assumptions.

Manner — The discipline of communication will be followed by ‘A’. Ensuring whether the listener is concentrating and ‘A’ will not respond without fully understanding/hearing the question of the listener.

This way of messaging / communication will generate a piece of information with genuineness and thought provoking content. This category is called Source virtues who create most of the testimonies in all the fields.

Receiver Virtue -

Sometimes, the receiver of the knowledge or information may possess subtle listening and interpretation skills who will be keenly able to judge from the knowledge, which may potentially be true and which may not be true. These people cannot be deceived by the fictions and untrue stories due to their focus on specifics of the content and context. The challenge to achieve this virtue is mostly we have preamble opinion about the people or a group who transitions any knowledge or content.

Sometimes, we may consider believing the content shared by the person/group merely because of the trust we have with the individual. This is called ‘Credibility excess’. Sometimes, we may ignore the content (even if it is true) just because of our poor confidence on the individual sharing it. This is called ‘Credibility deficit’. As a receiver virtue, it is required to have a balanced credibility to gain any knowledge from any individual or group. This can be achieved by intellectual humility in terms of asking the right questions to the right people at the right time without random assertions.

Conduit Virtues and Echo Virtues —

A Source virtue can create an excellent source of knowledge and a receiver virtue can gain excellent inference from the source. But, conduit and echo virtues generally just repeat, claim or blindly believe whatever is shared by source and receiver virtues. They just report the assertions from their favorable sources just to win the arguments rather making meaningful conversations. Unfortunately, most of our communes and environment are filled with these conduit and echo virtues. Hence, most of the philosophers and scientists ignore these conduit and echo virtues in their consideration. So, we need to ensure we either possess Source or Receiver virtue when we dive into the direction of epistemology.

When it comes to our belief system, we may have natural susceptibility to fall to these conduit and echo virtues over source and receiver virtues. That may be a driving force of the ‘confirmation bias’ which we have discussed in the previous round.

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Well Round 3 : Is ‘God’ just a neuroplastic material?

How about a brief (yet longer) traveling back in time? Say ~22018 years back, when homo sapiens were successfully formed.

Close your eyes for for 5 seconds and imagine you are sitting inside a Christopher Nolan’ time machine apparatus. Now, just open and check your calendar.

Tuned Time : B.C. 22018 Time : 19:30 hours UTC

It was late evening on a No Moon day, a fully formed homo sapient man, Say Mr. Blue is sitting upon a dormant rock. The rock is surrounded by thick shrubs and herbs. He was sitting all alone on an eerily silent night. After sometime, he feels a weird penetrating sound behind him from the shrubby bushes but when he turns back, he couldn’t find anything. It was scarily fishy! This trend continues throughout the night but he couldn’t able to figure out the reason as it was completely dark.

The situation instills a new emotion in his mind ‘fear of darkness/unknown’. He continues to hide inside the cave until the dawn of the next day with a restless sleep.

Next morning, Mr. Blue witnesses bright sun rays spreading throughout his environment which kills the fear of darkness and also the mystery of unknown. His mind receives a comfort blow which boosts the confidence to start his day for the hunt. The same trend continues for every day and he keeps awaiting the sun light every night. His conscience connects this fear slowly to an delusional devil. The devil is now killed by a daily savior ‘Sun’. Slowly, he started wishing for Sun to come soon to kill his fear and falls asleep. When he wakes up, Wow, Sun literally came! Fantastic, he is saved from the darkness devil.

So, his brain started generating new sensory signals ‘Devil’ and ‘Savior’ from this experience and his motor signal also got tuned.

Logically, the sound from the shrubs could be because of

• Natural heavy wind blow
• Wild animal/predator searching for a hunt
• Herbivorous animal just moving for a rest

But, he couldn’t figure that out the root cause even after the discovery of fire as fire had limited capability brightness. Fire just kept the predators away from Mr. Blue but did not completely eradicate the anomalies he observed in the darkness. Because, he believed that ‘Fire’ is a fellow man’s invention but ‘Sun’ is supernatural. Some humongous shining thing appears in the sky everyday to kill his fear. That’s awesome! So, he easily connected this partially tangible and evident ‘Sun’ to ‘God’. And, here comes the birth of a concept or a sensory signal ‘God’ in Mr. Blue’s brain or mind (although he never named it ‘God’ initially).

Close your eyes again for 5 seconds, tune the calendar back to current day and step out of the machine. Congrats, you have safely landed back in 2018! Let us diagnose our experience we have witnessed from the time machine. Thankfully, we have a powerful weapon called ‘Science’ in 2018 to introspect what just happened in 22018.

What happened to Mr. Blue?

His brain started experiencing a new situation wherein there was a transformation of emotion from fear to comfort; unknown to clarity; darkness to brightness; a question to answer; eventually, a concept of ‘Devil’ to ‘Savior’. This new situation has created ‘God’ particles in his brain whose quantum evolved over generations from Mr. Blue to your & my dad in the last 22K years. We have also carried a part of it in our grey cells whether you wanted it or not. This could be potentially one of the outcomes of what they call as ‘Neuroplasticity’ in neurobiology.

What is Neuroplasticity? -the brain’s alterations of its own function and structure in response to experience, especially as they relate to the natural processes involved in the development of beliefs.

Our human brain is highly adaptive and continuously goes for a change in shape with our experiences. Every experience induces a thought or an emotion in our brain and these thoughts & emotions repeats everyday. This repetition generates changes in the organization of brain. You can connect this neurological evolution of brain as a subset of biological evolution of Darwin’s theory. Sometimes, the strong experiences are capable of creating deep footprints in our brain which may take good amount of time to unlearn or relearn to change the signals. These signals are the bedrocks for the genes in our DNA.

As Mr. Blue has already inculcated the ‘god’s particle’ in our ancestral neurons, the forthcoming juniors of Blue continued fueling this belief system faster than the development of science. This paved a distinct way for tons of beliefs from different geographies of this planet depending on the experiences of the peers of Mr. Blue and the stories given by their forthcoming generations. (Just recollect the Source & receiver virtues discussed in the previous round to comprehend the impact of communication over the ages)

This collective hypothetical group of thoughts contributed to different belief systems from different source virtues with different receiver/echo and conduit virtues at different points of time in the history and they have been evolved as ‘Religions’. Take a breath!

So, is ‘God’ just a neuroplastic material of our brain? Let us unwind more on this.

(Reference of neuroplaticity to human belief system — Sarah Jones’s dissertation)

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Well round 4 : Science behind Elephant-headed God!

‘Lord Ganesh’ is one of the most popular gods of Hindu mythology and he is always claimed as the Lord of beginning. Who is this elephant headed god? What does he signify to us? Let me try to connect our known anecdote about this gentleman to the scientific facts. You can associate the echo virtue of Lord Ganesh to the actual Source virtue of science (refer to Well round 1 above to know about Virtues).

Anecdote from our Granny -

While growing up, most of us are very well associated with Lord Ganesh as he looks similar to the favorite cartoon characters of our toddling world. So, we were tempted to ask the question ‘Who is this Ganesha?’ to our grannies. The story narrated by our grannies was also very interesting. Just try to recollect a standardized version below.

It was a usual cold evening in Mount Kailash and Lord Parvathi wanted to take a shower. As Lord Shiva was out for a hunt and wasn’t back home, she wanted to guard herself from others before she starts taking bath. So, she has gathered a patch of dirt in her body and clustered into a conical form and kept at the entrance of the nest. In a while, a small boy emerged from the conical form and he is none other than our beloved Ganesha. She has happily hugged her son and kissed on his forehead. She requested him to guard the nest by strictly not allowing anybody until she is back and goes inside to take bath. Lord Ganesh takes charge on day one unlike us!

After sometime, Mahadev alias Lord Shiva came home after a tiring day to rest. One strange small boy was waiting at the entrance and stopping Shiva from entering the home. Shiva was clueless about this young boy above which he was stopping him to enter his own home saying that his mother strictly told him not to allow anybody inside. As expected, the tribal God gets terribly angry with this small boy and without investing time on his know-hows, takes his powerful Trishool and instantly chops the head of the boy. In a while, Parvathi walks out after the shower and searches for her darling Ganesha in a panic mode. She hardly bothered Shiva being home. Eventually, she observed that Ganesha was brutally killed by Shiva and she gained enormous anger over her husband for the stupid act he had committed. Like any other angry wife, she demanded her husband to get her whatever she had lost. She badly wanted her son to come back alive and literally ordered Shiva to do the needful.

Lord of death was first time assigned with a task of creating a life to satisfy the anger of his wife. Anybody trying a task for the first time may not be an expert and ‘Mahadev’ was not exceptional. He has got a head of a powerful elephant (instead of a human), fixed on the body of the dead boy and gave him life. Finally, Lord Ganesha was reborn and Parvathi was also cooled down by her poorly performed husband after getting her beloved son back. Pardon me if I have missed any bits and pieces from your granny’s narration.

Big Bang Theory

Let us take a pause and listen to what Einsteins and Hawkings of the world say something similar!

According to science, billion years ago, there was a high energy explosion in an infinite space. Due to this explosion, humongous bundles of particles of matter were revolving across space in a tremendous speed for a really longer time. Many of those particles collided and started grouping in patches. As a result, galaxies and planets were formed. This is called ‘Big Bang theory’ in a nutshell.

Let us go back to Granny’s version. Goddess Parvathi is also popularly known as ‘Shakthi’ which means energy. In the above anecdote, Shakthi has created a finite existence ‘Lord Ganesh’ with the help of her dust particles. Even in science, there are evidences that most of these source particles were technically dust particles floating around in universe which concentrated to form planets.

So, ‘Ganesh’ from dirt of Shakthi exactly correlates with planet earth formed from Big bang in the universe.

Ganesh has the head of an elephant and body of an human being. What does this signify? Fundamentally, earth is composed of two supreme living beings viz. animals and humans. So, Ganesh is signifying planet earth with two major species contributing it. Head of elephant represents animal kingdom and human body represents human kingdom. Interestingly, as a matter of fact, Lord Ganesh is always considered as the ‘Lord of beginning’ as he represents the philosophy of our universal creation.

Story of Planet Earth

What is the scientific context behind origin and future predictions of our planet? — Planet earth was said to contain land component more when originally formed with relatively lesser water component. But, gradually the water component started increasing due to the drastic melting behavior of polar glaciers and the global oceans are invading all the continents across. There are Satellite image evidences that the shape of our continents are changing every year. The demise of planet earth is expected to be due to the global warming inducing the oceans to occupy the entire land component. So, Land will eventually get submerged in water.

Interestingly, our rituals fuel this scientific observation. During Ganesh puja, we generally buy Ganesh made up of clay (signifies the land component) and strictly recommended to use natural leaves and flowers in the process of worship (living beings). After the worship, we dissolve the clay idol in water in a grandeur way. This represents Land component of earth eventually getting dissolved in the water component (ocean) as predicted by the science.

So, I can easily conclude that Lord Ganesh is nothing but a scientific analogy of our planet earth.

Ganapathi Bappa Moriya!

Let us learn more about other godly virtues matching with scientific virtues.

Well round 5 — Story & Glory of Religions!

I shall take an astronomical perspective and restrict the conceptual evolution of ‘Religion’ to ‘Globe’ (globe shaped planet earth). After all, this insignificant piece of ball has more than 7 billion thinking capable species like us. Let us try to have an bird eye view of religious evolution and its secret sauce.

Historically, the world can be categorized into two parts.

1. Western World (West)
2. Eastern World (East)

The categorization can be in terms of economics, lifestyle, modernization, culture genesis etc., and religiousness is absolutely not exceptional but forms the crux of the evolution. Let us dive deep on knowing how these two worlds approached ‘Religion’ or ‘Connection with God’ historically.

West has witnessed major religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam originating between ~1500 B.C. to 400 A.D. (discarding the concerns on the timeline reliability). All of these religions coin their center of focus on the external world or giving importance to the ‘contribution of humans to this planet of existence’. The messiahs and the scriptures stressed on major practices like prayers to God, helping the poor, old & sick and creating impulses connecting with the physical entity by sharing the material belongings to the peer. The bedrock of these practices is that nothing can technically be owned by anybody but belong to the existence. All the popular holy books revolve around the same philosophy of empowering the extrinsic belongingness of human beings. This is very much required for the mankind as he should ensure that he does little/no disturbance to the peer living beings in the name of his survival or support their existence with his own. But, these religions have lesser/negligible traces of motivation on internal world or diagnosis of the self.

As West/these religions dominated the major part of the world politically for a longer span of history, most of the geographies & their Governments till today award for the ‘Service to people’ or ‘Peace’ (Nobel prizes of the world or their country’s civilian awards) and grant tax exemptions for the ‘Public contribution/welfare’ activities to their common men. Interestingly, all these political/economic policies have stronger religious origin.

East has witnessed major religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Sikhism originating between ~1400 B.C to 1400 A.D.(Ignore the timeline reliability). These religions majorly focused more on internal empowerment in terms of self actualization/realization, connecting to inner soul, contemplating on the existence etc., Servicing to people/needy comes as a secondary goal in the mythologies/scriptures of these religions as the assumption is that without realizing your existence servicing to peer existence is insensible. This can be a higher philosophical school of thought but hence we find difficulty in digesting. The sole framework used for this purpose by all these religions has been ‘Meditation’ through which self can connect with the universe to contemplate intrinsically on the personal existence. In simple terms, the gateway to realize or feel God, the only protocol is ‘Meditation’ which will help you in attaining inner peace. If one attains ‘inner peace’, education/nurturing on ‘Service to mankind’ is unnecessary as it will automatically generate in the human psyche without any external triggers. Their literature has limited highlights on exclusive servicing to mankind.

Unfortunately, the geographies followed these eastern ideologies have been colonized with the western powers in terms of governance, influence and lifestyle for a longer period of time in the recent history. So, the policy making paralysis is still evident due to outsourced thought components. These countries failed to encourage ‘Meditation’, ‘Self actualization’ and other elite concepts as part of their Governance from their religions unlike West has done.

Technically/mathematically, servicing to 10 needy is less impactful than teaching 5 on how to meditate. Because, it is a simple Causal-Effect approach.

‘Servicing’ may fix the ‘Effect’ but ‘Meditation/self actualization’ may fix directly fix the root cause which creates the human sufferings.

Despite the challenge of educating this methodology to masses, it may indeed solve the ongoing problems of mankind faster.

Even the age old Greek gentleman Socrates stressed on ‘Know Thyself’ which contributes to the same introspective perspective proposed by Eastern religions. With the evolution and influence in other dimensions viz., civilization, politics, power (invasion/colonization), science, economics, religious egoism on the both the parts of the world over a period of centuries, there were many idea transactions between & among the sides and today all the religions have become extremely hybrid and slowly initiated crawling towards a common ground (may be in another millennium). On the other hand, it is absolutely novice to discuss further or debate on the superiority on both the approaches as we aren’t fundamentally equipped with the sufficient intelligence.

No matter whatever approaches last for long, historically ‘Beliefs’ have been communicating the right messages to mankind beyond time. But, ‘Believers’ have always been the trouble creators.

Beware of your believers but be relaxed on your belief. Because, believers trigger superstitions and unrest but beliefs only grant your ticket for your travel towards inner peace!

Ref: Few insights from ‘I teach Religiousness not Religion’ by Osho.

Well round 6: Interdependence — an untold truth

Osho says that the core mystery behind many of unknowns revolving around human mind is the acceptance of ‘Interdependence’. He strongly thinks that every single entity/event happens/occurs in the universe has consequential connection to one another. Let us wear a life belt and dive deep into his contemplation.

Life of a man always revolves around 3 loosely coupled factoids.

• Dependence — every man is dependent emotionally, ethically, economically or even theologically on one or more entities for the survival. Survival without dependence is technically not feasible for any common man living at any part of this planet earth. In general, dependence always procure bitter consequences no matter whatever is the degree.
• Independence — every man always seeks for independence from all of the above mentioned dependencies and the shallow philosophical hypothesis of life tend to be gaining independence from all of them. Though it is a nice status quo to accomplish, practically it is a never ending crossroad. That’s why self actualization is more of a journey than a state.
• Interdependence — This is more of a reality than a concept or a theory. Every entity of this planet is either tightly or loosely dependent on other entity largely connected with invisible nexus. Let us try a mind-mapping methodology to understand this further.

Let us take a basic example of a red rose plant in your garden. This red rose is physically connected to planet earth. It is also connected with atmosphere as it consumes Carbon dioxide and exits Oxygen on daily basis. It survives because of Sunlight for photosynthesis which resides very far in the galaxy. These are certain evident things which the plant is taking from the nature. What does it give back? May be the beautiful red flower along with a small quantum of oxygen. This can trigger happiness and creativity in those who experience looking at it. That may have potentially generate positive impacts on their respective activities. In any case, there is a equal transaction between entities surviving inside or outside the planet.

Let us see another large scale example.

Man cuts tress across the planet for various materialistic purposes. Every year there is a huge drop rate of Tree cover in the earth. A Global tree watch says that we have lost 51% of tree cover in 2016 from 2015 (29.7 million acres from 71.4 million acres) which increases the global temperature of this planet by one degree every year. This is forcing the polar ices to melt which increases one foot increase in sea level. This may obviously submerge popular beach side cities like Cape Town, Sydney, Barcelona, Los Angeles, San Diego, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata etc at the end of this century. Eventually, for our useless productive purposes, we have actively headed towards the demise of this planet. (You can refer to Well round 4 above to read more about Planet earth story).

This is an horrible attempt of mankind in breaking the interdependence seemingly for his survival but realistically towards the demise. It is not the demise of God factor but ‘Interdependence’ which will pave clear roadmap for the collateral damage of this livable planet.

Any food chain process in the ecology also fall under this ‘Interdependence’. I remember watching a documentary in National Geography a couple of months ago. Here goes the story!

There was a deserted and completely dried land in West Africa. But, historically it was lush greenland with wide range of plant & animal species and plenty of water resources. The forest administration was clueless on the sudden natural afforestation of the region and evolution of new desert. They desperately tried to solve this problem and hence approached expert ecologist to rejuvenate the area. After careful analysis of the geography and historical ecosystem, the ecologist gave a simple solution. He just suggested to get four foxes from nearby zoos or forests and leave them in this region to solve this problem. The forest officers weren’t convinced with this stupidly sounding solution however they got the foxes and left them per his recommendation.

It has been 5 years and the forest crew slowly started witnessing plantations resuming everywhere with new sources of water streams and the lost green cover is back. Though it seemed like a magic, it was a simple interdependent biological food chain.

The actual problem with the land was that the population of deer in the forest suddenly multiplied. They were eating all the plants and seeds which engendered a heavy drop in floral growth. The drop in plant lives hit the rainfall rate which induced the water scarcity in the area. So, most of the hydrophytes and heterophytes either vanished or migrated. With the intervention of new foxes, there was a cut in the deer population and the lost ecological balance was resumed. The problem is solved and the beautiful ecology was reverted in five years.

Even a macro economic model which encompasses Production, Supply, demand and labor components is also a classical example for a tightly interdependent ecosystem.

Edward Norton Lorenz, American Mathematician & Meteorologist who has coined the popular ‘Chaos theory’ which depicts an interesting concept called ‘Butterfly effect’. He has posed a question,

‘Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’

This concept also highlights that outsize consequences of the minuscule events. Even a short sway of a blade of a grass in one part of the planet could potentially trigger a humongous natural calamity in the other part of the planet. A small droplet of rain from a temperate part of the world can potentially fuel to establish a lush green vegetation industry in the tropical part. So, every single event happening here either directly or indirectly triggers and supports another event.

Lorenz’s core argument emphasizes that any small variance during initial condition could have a profound and wide divergent effects in the system’s outcomes. This hypothesis holds good to any complex dynamic system with unpredictable behavior which we claim as Godly activity. He has clearly understood that nature’s interdependent ecosystem is too difficult to resolve. However, in the field of meteorology, the approximation is still dependent on the sets of different starting conditions to run parallel forecast simulations. Even today, this method is the crux of all weather forecast systems across the world.

Sir Issac Newton also predicted that the entire nature is a probabilistic mechanical system which acts as a Clockwork Universe.

So, the ‘Interdependence’ is clearly a known unknown system we have to admit. Our voyage in this bottomless well with this hypothesis may at least acts as a rechargeable battery for the torch we may have to carry in the dark channels to come.

Takeaway — Interdependence and Godly matter are one and the same!

Well Round 7 : Travelogue of our Atma!

From where did we start, where we shall go?

It was mid September 2018, I was standing at my native river ‘Cauvery (Kaveri)’ bridge in my hometown (Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India) and gazing the bank-to-bank flirting water in the stream. It had been almost a decade later, the naked dry river was dressed up with jingling water bed. Thanks to seasonal downpour in Kerala & Kodagu district of Karnataka. I (so as the people from my geography) got overwhelmed with the water flow in our land.

The flowing stream of water reminded me a interwoven metaphor which connects the life of a water droplet to the life of a living being. It indeed indirectly answers few of our unanswered questions. Let me share that with you and we shall try to interpret the metaphor for deeper understanding.

Life of a water or water cycle (as per Science) is a continuous process during which water constantly changes different forms liquid (water), gas (vapor) and solid (snow) and the cycle is endless. Let all of us try to recollect our 3rd grade Science teacher’s lesson on ‘How rain is formed?’ for a quick recap on Precipitation, condensation, vaporization etc., If you struggle to recollect, reach out to a toddler nearby and skip seeking the help of a search engine. Believe me, toddler can better explain than a Google.

Metaphysically, let me try to explain the life of a water droplet.

• It inherently belongs to the part of an ocean and due to vaporization it changes its form and goes to atmosphere in the form of a gas
• Due to condensation and precipitation, it gets isolated in the atmosphere and gravity pulls it towards the ground.
• When it falls in a random river stream, its real journey begins. Sometimes originates from Mountains, plains, plateaus or what not and travels across ups and down on its way.
• Many biological species consume on its way for various survival & luxury purposes and the momentum doesn’t stop at any cost.
• Unconsciously, it attains to embed into the ocean again from where it has originated and the cycle tirelessly continues.

Brief glossary before we swim into the metaphor.

Atma : Soul / Consciousness (self)

Para atma : Peer soul / consciousness (Para + Atma : other person’s/being’s soul)

Paramatma : Collective consciousness (Para(m) + Atma)

Now, let us try to connect our soul or ‘Atma’ with this travelogue of a water droplet.

• We cordially belong to a collective consciousness (Paramatma) : Ocean
• Whenever vaporization demands, we change our form either as a ‘Sperm’ or ‘Egg’ depending on the conditions
• We happen to enter into somebody’s (mother’s) womb and begins our story of life
• We take birth, grow up, encounter societal challenges & personal problems, grow old, fall sick and eventually die / expire.
• After we die, our atma (consciousness) so as paraatma (other’s atma) again join the paramatma (collective consciousness). The story pauses but not ends.

Whether you are a priest, a billionaire, a monk, a President, a dictator, a Scientist, a Socialist/Communist, a thief, a terrorist, a layman, a patient, the power of nature doesn’t recognize and differentiate you from the above cycle. You will tend to continuously reborn and redie.

Hindu and Buddhist theologies highlight a state called ‘Moksha’ or ‘Nirvana’ (Liberation) respectively as the end goal of everybody over here in a series of births. Depending on our actualization capability, our tenure in the above cycle will be decided and we will get rid of rebirths. We will dive deep about Liberation and Karma mathematics in the upcoming chapters.

So, a river stream can beautifully teach us the unknown known truth if you happen to observe deeply and keenly. Give a shot and worth trying.

Let us unwind more such truths shortly!

Takeaway — We are subjected to recycling. The more we try seeking the truth, less will be our recycling frequency.

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Well Round 8: How does God Operate?

In our previous posts, we have been brainstorming on how ‘God’ factor has either evolved or beautifully created by humankind. Now, let us give a shot on sailing a boat of thought towards the modus operandi of God.

As we may have to brush up our psychological awareness a bit, let us see some illustrations before we dive into the conceptualization.

#1 In my childhood, I have learned a trick from my mom for getting up early in the morning. Being an early riser, whenever I wanted to get up early during my school days exam season, I never used to use an alarm clock. I will just inform my mom about the time (say 4 a.m. in the morning) I want to get up for preparation and I will restfully go to bed. She will wake me up at sharp 4 a.m. with a cup of coffee and I have got surprised many times. And, of course, she never had an alarm clock either. This had been habitual for me at all occasions by leveraging mom as my alarm clock. One fine day, I asked the secret of this practice to her. She told, whenever you want to wake up in the morning, on the previous night before falling asleep mindfully chant 3–4 times on the exact time you want to wake up (for example, ‘I want to wake up at 5:30 a.m. sharp’ 3 times…) and confidently go to sleep. You will for sure get up at your expected time. I wondered on this magic however I have been practicing this myself since then with more than 95% success rate.

How it works? Hold on! Let us see few more brief illustrations of similar magical experiences before getting into conceptualization.

#2 Enrico Caruso, a famous Italian Opera Tenor (artist who sings at opera houses), once he was about to perform at an Opera show at a big audience gathering. Unfortunately, he encountered a stage freight moments before his call. His internal fear caused spasms in his body impacting his throat muscles. He felt his vocal chords are slowly paralyzing. His legs started trembling and he started thinking, ‘I can’t sing today. They will all laugh at me and my career is finished’.

He walked back to the dressing room and shouted at himself, “The Little Me is trying to strangle the Big Me within!”. He realized his name was called at the stage. He again turned towards the stage and stood taller. He commanded loudly to his Little me, “Get out of here! The Big Me wants to sing through me.” He repeated to himself, ‘Get out, get out, The Big Me is going to Sing!’. He entered the stage and sung that night gloriously by winning a huge applause from his audience.

#3 Once there lived a man with a young daughter and she was suffering from severe Rheumatoid Arthritis and painful skin condition called Psoriasis. He was taking her to all possible doctors in the world but nothing was helping to cure her. He was terribly depressed about her daughter’s health and one night at a dinner gathering he told his friends, “I would give my right arm to see my daughter cured”.

Couple of months later, the man went for a long drive with his family while he encountered an horrible accident due to a head-on-head collision. Unfortunately, his right arm was torn off in the accident. He was hospitalized for few weeks and while he was back at home he had a huge surprise awaiting. His daughter was fully recovered from Arthritis and Psoriasis.

#4 Once there was an old lady in her seventies who was well known for her memory of remembering things throughout her life was suffering from a severe memory loss disorder. She had started forgetting places, things she was using and even the names of the people around her. She realized and started feeling down by telling to herself, “I am getting old and hence I have started forgetting everything”. Whenever she was forgetting something, she used to tell this to herself and felt dejected.

One day while she had similar lack of memory incident, she had decided to try something different. She started telling to herself, “From today on wards, my memory will start to improve. I will always remember what I need to know at every point of time and space”. She started repeating this 10 to 15 times everyday consciously by sitting alone as her routine. In just 3 weeks, she had fully recovered from this memory loss syndrome.

All these four illustrations can be interpreted in different ways such as ‘Miracle’ or ‘Magic’ or sometimes ‘Blessing of God’ depending on your philosophical perspective in life. But, the actual coinciding technical reason is the ‘The Power of Subconscious Mind’. How? Let us tune into a Psychology mode now.

Power of Subconscious Mind

Our mind can be broadly divided into 2 components.

Conscious Mind or Objective mind — contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. This also includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily and brought into awareness.

Subconscious mind or Subjective mind — is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

Sigmund Freud, a Popular Austrian Psycoanalyst, also coins ‘Preconscious’ that consists of anything that could potentially be brought into the conscious mind from subconscious mind. Let us only restrict our learning to conscious and subconscious mind for ease of learning.

According to Dr. Joseph Murphy, an American neuroscience Author in his book ‘The power of your subconscious Mind’, he elaborates how this subconscious mind can be controlled by conscious mind. Some of his thoughts to tune our subconscious mind below.

• If you continuously tell the stories you want to see to your subconscious mind, it has the potential to make it happen. If you have a goal or wish or an expectation, repeatedly tell it to yourself day and night so that you inculcate the belief in your subconscious mind. It will take care of the rest to push you to get things done.
• Most of the diseases are psychological. If you can program your subconscious mind that you will recover fast from the disease, it can get you completely recovered. Our subconscious mind is responsible for the entire functioning of our body. For example, even when we are asleep, respiration, digestion, heart beat or any functional systems don’t stop because our subconscious mind controls them and ensures normalcy. In the same way, when you are sick, one of your body component is abnormal. The subconscious mind has the capability to bring it back to normalcy which is its natural tendency. You just need to pass the right command to it.
• Many medicinal methods such as Acupuncture, Homeopathy work on the above principle or you can also call it as Placebo Effect — Patient’s mere belief in a medical treatment can get him cured. Two thirds of the diseases in mankind can be cured if the Patient trusts blindly that the treatment of a pill or drug or a blessed flower from a priest of his religion of faith can heal his disease. This works because of a strong message sent by your conscious mind to the subconscious mind that the procedure adopted has its potential to cure your discomfort.
• It is the positive psychology what we label sometimes to think, talk and do positive things which can potentially get positive events in our life. If you have a motive, say for example you want to become an eloquent public speaker, you need to keep informing your subconscious mind about your motive day in and day out. So, it will ensure you dedicate right efforts and skills towards this goal without your consciousness and get this motive accomplished finally. This is absolutely a process but not a magic.

Now going back to our illustrations at the beginning of the post, all of them happened purely because of the training given to the subconscious mind.

#1 Training it to wake up early in the morning

#2 Training it not to be afraid of the audience

#3 Tuning it that somebody’s right arm can make her recover from a disease

#4 Making it believe that there is no memory loss syndrome at all

From all of these instructions, it is clearly evident that subconscious mind is not a rational component. It doesn’t have any logical capability to understand the situation. Whatever you educate, it will blindly accept the command and try to align the situation towards the belief. This can be demonstrated when people get hypnotized. When you hypnotize someone, you technically take the person to operate from his/her subconscious mind.

Under hypnotized state, he/she will take your command blindly without any reasoning. For example, if you tell a person that the temperature has become subzero even when the room temperature above 30 degree Celsius, he/she will start shivering immediately. If you tell a person that you will feel hungry at 5 P.M. in the evening, the person will start starving for food at the exact time even he/she is out of hypnotism. If you tell a person that your nose is bleeding now, it will immediately start bleeding. How it happens? Because, the person’s subconscious mind executes the given command without any rationale.

That’s how godly thing also works. If you believe in the concept of ‘God’ blindly and wish for something, we have been told or inculcated that ‘God’ make it happen, technically its your subconscious makes it happen. This is how God operates.

Operation ‘Prayer’

The operation to train your subconscious is called as ‘Prayer’ in all religions. You can do it by thinking about your fantasy factor ‘God’ to strengthen the faith so that your boost confidence of your subconscious. Its because of your faith factor in your religion, your cross or your holy ashes or holy wall or whatsoever gains power. All the holy books and mythologies constantly empower the faith so that you strongly believe in your religion and its gods. In the holy places such has temple, Church, Synagogue, Mosque or a Monastery, you are empowering your subconscious by a Prayer operation in the form of respective rituals.

During your prayer, you imbibe Lord Rama or Jesus or Allah or Thor as your super power and align your thoughts towards them. So, these fictional characters gain shape and value to bring blessings back to your life because of your own efforts.

Dr Joseph Murphy highlights a scientific prayer as the right procedure to leverage the power of subconscious or God. Accordingly, it is recommended to chant for few minutes with utmost faith whatever you believe or you wish, both early in the morning after you get up and at night before you fall asleep. These are the times you get easy access to your subconscious mind.

For example, if you want to purchase an house property in the near future, you should wholeheartedly visualize an illusionary house in your mind every morning and night as if you have already owned it and started living there. You can sit alone for few mins every morning & night and chant ‘I will purchase a new house soon. I will do all my best to make it happen’ repetitively. This is equivalent to keeping a fast for a god and wish for something. This is how it works! More organic approach is to get trained on meditation to control your subconscious mind to walk godly way like Gautam Buddha.

So, either God operates through your subconscious mind or subconscious mind empowers your faith in God.

Over to you for further thinking on this arena. Happy thinking! :-)

Well Round : 9 — How to unite with God?

Hope we would have gained a vague idea on what is ‘God’ factor and how it fundamentally operates in our earlier Well rounds. We will further dive deep in this well round with possible ways and means to attain this Godliness or to unite with God or prominently called as ‘Yoga’.

Fundamentally there are four steps or gateways through which anybody can attain godliness. Although this protocol is majorly described in the Hindu Mythologies (Puranas), it can be universally applied to all religions.

• Bhakti yoga
• Karma Yoga
• Jnana Yoga (pronounced as Gyana)
• Raja Yoga

Depending on our temperament and capability, every religion suggests one of the above methodologies to walk towards a divine life. Let us see each one of them in detail and how we can derive fitment according to our personality trait. To make this learning process easier, let us try to leverage Rumsfled’s Knowledge matrix.

Although Rumsfled coined this matrix for a political investigation to identify lacking evidences, this approach can be employed unanimously for all awareness research purposes. Of late, many expert data scientists have started applying this framework for their Machine learning data clustering methodologies and design thinking experiments. Any knowledge process can be bucketed under these four categories irrespective of the context or field. So, I tried applying this framework for our godly learning process.

Known Knowns : Bhakti Yoga

‘Bhakti’ means devotion and this method proposes a devotional lifestyle to attain godliness. Every religion will have its own set of devotional processes like Prayer, rituals, worshiping methods, mythological festivals etcetera to channelize an individual or an ardent follower towards a faithful concept. The major goal of this process is to generate a concept in your subconscious such as ‘Jesus’, ‘Ram’, ‘Allah’ or other such super heroes and build a stonewalled faith in that concept. Now, the faith has to be protected (without dilution) for which the best option is to adopt ‘Devotion’ or ‘Bhakti’. You need to be religious in terms of your Pujas, rituals, singing/listening devotional songs, 5–6 times prayer to Allah, keeping a fast, visiting a Church every Sunday morning so that your conscious mind waters the seed called ‘Faith’ in your subconscious arena to grow it bigger everyday. The process is more of praising a Godly character for his/her beauties and blessings to the mankind. All the religions have several stories and mythologies to create eminent personalities of their legacy which are labelled as ‘Holy’ with a form or formless identity and manifested in the holy places such as temples, Churches, Mosques etc.,

You are asked to adore an idol/idea or praise with flowers & lights, decorate with colors or roam around a wall or resonate the name in songs to fuel the existence of your respective super hero personality in your mind. This process is typically kept consistent on daily , weekly or yearly basis in terms of rituals and festivals so that the budding generations also adopt the same approach. The more you empower your superhero the less is your deviation from Bhakti Yoga or devotional path. Most of the global politics is around the supremacy of the various methodologies which we will skip discussing in this post as it is outside the purvey of our current learning process.

As the stories are known and the methodologies are also known, I have categorized it under ‘Known Knowns’. Technically, this yoga is an emotional journey to fine tune our local consciousness towards universal consciousness. This process definitely helps to accomplish a discipline in the lives of those who lack emotional balance or stability. As this is an evolution process and very subjective to the forefathers of the religion, it may have its drawbacks in terms of superstitions and outdated traditions for a contemporary mindset.

Known Unknowns : Karma Yoga

‘Karma’ means ‘an action’. Doing any action is called Karma be it eating, sleeping, watching NetFlix, texting in Whatsapp, feeding a Pigeon etc.,. From a philosophical angle, ‘Karma’ can be connected to ‘Deed’. It can be a good deed or a bad deed. Every action will naturally have a reaction so as Karma. Every Karma will have its consequence. Depending on the quality of the Karma/deed you exhibit, your consequence also appear.

For example, if you possess good deeds, you will naturally have good fortunes in your life. If you possess bad deeds, you will end up facing bad consequences. Although life is coined as a package of bliss and sorrows, your Karma should always stay insulated from your mindset. No matter whatever the situation you encounter in life, you should stay selfless and try to ensure your Karma should help or support another fellow being in the planet. Your Karmic actions should be performed without expectations. Good Karma is not just restricted to the service of mankind, technically it is extended to the service of all living beings which share this planet.

Now, let us try to connect ‘Bhakti’ with ‘Karma’. Religious ecosystem tries to establish a godly factor in your psyche similar to a fear factor of Mr.Blue which we have learnt in Well Round 3, and educate an individual towards good deeds to garner peace among biological species. Unless you have a strong belief mechanism, it is hard to mould your deeds towards a good cause. Religions claim that there is a God who oversees your quality of deeds and give you appropriate fortunes. Hence, ‘Bhakti’ & ‘Karma’ yoga are tightly interconnected. This bonded protocol is very much needed for those who cannot exhibit an ethical discipline by self in leading an harmonious lifestyle.

Most of the ardent Theists tend to believe and possess both Bhakti and Karma yoga. Hence, I have categorized as ‘Known unknowns’ as they know ‘what practices to do’ but many a time they may not know or ignore ‘Why are they doing?’.

Jnana Yoga : Unknown knowns

There comes a stage in some of our lives wherein most of the philosophical questions pop up on every incident of life we encounter. Typical questions are ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is the purpose of life?’, ‘Why I face so much of sufferings in my life?’, ‘Does god really exist?’, ‘Why am I asked to do it this way?’ so on and so forth. This is a stage of disruption caused by your intelligence. When you choose to dive into real spiritual journey, it is inevitable to sail your lifeboat in the ocean of these questions. It is purely because of your conscious mind feeding your subconscious mind with new thoughts for predefined concepts. This conflict takes a shape as mental disruption or Jnana Yoga.

Jnana yoga is a mental journey of willingness to learn things and gain deep knowledge beyond names and forms. You may seek for a thorough knowledge until you gain a clarity of Unknown knowns. This will motivate a person to go through various philosophies, belief systems, ideologies and fuel an attempt to come to a conclusion on real perspective around God. He/she will start getting bored or tired of the practices & beliefs which are asked to follow as not every time ‘rationale’ has been told to our subconscious minds. It is a voyage between a theory and an experience.

As this is a progressive step towards clarity from Bhakti and Karma, it generally takes a lot of time for a person to cross and even fail to cross in a lifetime. Most of the atheists and agnostics are believed to be true practitioners of Jnana yoga. I am happy to include myself in this bracket as my journey towards clarity is also getting tougher every single day amidst theist majority :-)

The common problem we encounter is the conflict of opinions and thoughts between theists and atheists / agnostics quite often across societies. This is primarily due to the acceptance of the stages of their respective Yoga journey. As a matter of respect and human decorum, it is recommended to respect each other’s belief systems as everyone should inevitably adopt to Karma yoga for a matter of fact that our universe is built on ‘Interdependence’ (as we have learnt in Well round 6).

Raja Yoga : Unknown unknowns

God has always been a representative of ‘Unknown unknowns’ and historically the only approach to attain final stage of godliness is meditation. Meditation is the medium to connect to the collective consciousness. It is the fourth stage of mindful growth once your mind gets reasonable answers for the haunting questions. It is nothing but a crave to feel the infinite power or the cosmos.

Raja yoga is the art of giving up all the materialistic belongings including body and belief systems (religions) to walk the path of Mukhti or Salvation. It can also be considered as ‘Nirvana’ a state attained by Buddha or a stage of Self actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy. It is not necessarily leading an ascetic life but making your mind to win all types of needs in the pyramid. This state can free a person from all his/her sorrows and creates a gateway for a liberation. Unless we experience, this stage cannot be claimed and hence I have bucketed under Unknown unknowns. As I am classifying this Yoga under ‘unknown unknowns’, I restrict myself in elaborating further on this :-) In a nutshell, we need to crack this nut of unknown unknowns to unite to God.

If we recollect our learning on Well round 5 on the origin of religions, most of western religions stress on Bhakti and Karma Yoga wherein eastern religions also encompasses Jnana and Raja yoga.

For a perfect mindful composition, every individual should give balanced importance to all types of Yogas in life. For example, if people only believe in Bhakti and not in Karma or Jnana, there will be severe consequences of Fascism and fundamentalism (right wing philosophy). If we ignore Karma yoga (service to mankind), the humanity factor in the world will go for a toss and there will be a huge suffering of economically and psychologically weaker sections. Similarly, only with Bhakti and Karma Yoga, it is technically difficult to attain divine consciousness.

On the flip side, the acceptance towards Jnana yoga (liberals) should also grow to maintain the harmony in the society as many millennials will be likely to enter this bucket unlike baby boomers era.

Union of god comes with the intersection of all these Yogas. Eventually, it is a metamorphic process to unite with the supreme power or God or Paramatma or collective consciousness or however you want to call it.

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WELL Round 10 : Sapiens — Time to mutate!

(COVID -19 Episode)

It will be radical to say that entire planet is suffering from a pandemic disorder; the fact is only the most sophisticated species ‘Homo Sapiens’ is undergoing a brutal threat to its survival while the rest of the species in the world are least bothered, in fact safer now from human threats than ever. Our species is utilizing its peak intelligence and expertise gained over millenniums in controlling this COVID-19 war to restore the normalcy at the earliest in the form of research, lock-downs and other regulatory measures globally/regionally.

As everyone of us is having plenty of time during this lockdown, let me share a couple of stories before diving directly into this well round.

Story 1 :

Once there was a hilly village where one Saint was practicing a serious round of meditation at its foothill every day. On a sunny morning during his meditation, he could witness a bunch of microscopic germs migrating towards his village. He intervened their path and stopped them, asked where they were heading to. Those germs told that they were seasonal multipliers who wanted to infect few humans for their survival, they were entering his village to get into the bodies of the people and decided to live there as parasites for few days. The saint realized their purpose and allowed them inside with a condition. The condition was, germs should not kill more than 10 people in his village in the process of their spread and survival. The germs strictly agreed upon to Saint’s promise and entered the village to start infecting the people.

After few weeks, those germs were done with their mutation jobs and were moving away from the village. On their way, they again encountered the same Saint. When he asked them on the information about how many people were dead during their spread, they said 1000+ were died in the village. The saint was very angry with the germs as they had broken the assurance given to him while they entered the village. When the Saint asked the reason for such high number of deaths than the promised ones, the germs responded only 10 people were actually died with their infections. Remaining 990+ were dead in the fear of getting infected by them which they said they couldn’t account for.

Takeaway : More than the actual COVID 19 physical infection, we are broken with psychological fear which is very difficult to treat with drugs or medications.

Story 2:

Once there was a country on the Himalayan landscape ruled by a King who goes for a daily ride outside his palace to audit his countrymen on their wellness and demands. He was a descent ruler who values his people’s needs and governs them considering their welfare.

It was a winter day and the King was returning to his palace from his routine outdoor trip. Before entering his palace, he had observed a helpless old beggar lying beneath a tree adjacent to the palace grounds. When the king approached him closer, he was lying with a torn cotton spread and struggling to cover himself with the holes in the cloth. That wasn’t enough to bear the falling temperature on that winter evening. On looking at his condition, the King told he would send woolen clothing and a thick bed spread after he enters the palace for this gentleman. The old man was overwhelmed and thanked the King for his heartiful mercy.

When the king entered the Palace, he got too occupied in receiving new guests from his neighbor kingdom and other judicial duties. As a result, he had forgotten the promise made to this old man. Next morning, he stepped outside his palace for his routine public visit. While exiting the Palace entrance, he remembered the old man and his promise. When he approached the tree, there waited the shock of his lifetime. The old man was lying dead due to extreme cold winds blown on the previous night.

The king had observed there was a small chit in the palm of the dead old man which looked like an exclusive message to him. He had picked that chit and started reading. The old man written as follows.

‘Oh My dear King, I have been lying beneath this tree for decades with this torn cloth. I have crossed and survived many winters with this poor level of protection. However, as you have promised to provide winter clothing last evening, my mind was so excited and was expecting clothes from you whole night. As you hadn’t given, my body wasn’t able to bear this cold for the first time and I am afraid that I may die before sun rise. Hence, passing this message to you!’

The King realized how his failed promise has broken the confidence of that old man to lose his life and he left the tree with a lesson for his life and a few drops of tears.

Takeaway : Even if the situation is challenging, it is your mindset that decides whether you can become a victim or a survivor.

Although both the stories are highly fictional, they educate us the importance of our mindset and its response to situations. The morale from these stories are very critical in this pandemic situation. Rather than the actual threat, our mind is now being attacked by multiple negative forces across channels such as Media, social networks, peer conversations. It is high time to empower our stability and positive muscle of our mind to overcome this battle.

Dr. Carol S. Dweck (Psychologist, Author) broadly categorizes everyone into two types of mindsets in her book ‘Mindset’.

Fixed Mindset : People believe their qualities are fixed and cannot be changed. They believe that their talent is stagnant and they cannot learn new things. They also strongly feel that they cannot stretch or extend their capabilities to overcome new challenges. Whenever difficult times arrive, ‘Fear’ can easily break them into pieces.

Typical Fixed mindset during COVID situation : We may get the disease anytime, I think I may already have some symptoms, I will lose the job or salary soon, we cannot sail through this disaster. This lock-down is hell of a time and I cannot pass everyday like this.

Growth Mindset : People believe consistently that they have potential to learn new things or their intelligence or capability can grow with time and experience. Their positive mindset help to put additional efforts in whatever they do and hence they could able to standout of the crowd, they attempt to translate the challenges to their favorable opportunities. When difficult times arrive, they stay resistant to fight against the fear and evolve successfully.

Typical Growth mindset during COVID situation: This also shall pass on. We will soon resume to normalcy. Let us be proactive in protecting from this threat and see how we can use the impacts productively. I think I get lot of time during this lock-down which let me spend to learn new things, practice indoor productive habits, to have memorable times with fellow family members to cherish in future. Let the planet rest from malicious human activities for a while.

It is in our hands to adopt a mindset that can help us to overcome these difficult times. Yuval Noah Harari (a Historian, Philosopher and a revolutionary Author) says,

Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.

This pandemic situation acts as a litmus test to all our imaginations, fictional faiths & belief systems and not sure how our species recover or rejuvenate at the end of this episode. As we have learnt ‘Interdependence’ in Well round 6, this is the time most of the man-made inter-dependencies (such as religion, economy, Government, Global trade) will be battle tested. Let us pick the most powerful imagination which plays a critical role in framing our mindeset from the list — ‘Religion’ .

As all of us know, 2000 years ago, there wasn’t a single disease left unhealed by Jesus Christ. Until today, the entire Christianity community believes on their lord who can come and save whenever there is a threat to homo sapiens whoever is following the Jesus Christ. Interestingly, Roman Catholic Church (richest religious entity evangelizing the Lord) across the globe was the first organization to shut down its operations to protect itself and its followers from this viral disease last month.

There isn’t any physical ailment in the history of humanity which cannot be cured by Islamic formless God ‘Allah’. Unfortunately, ‘COVID-19’ isn’t part of the Holy book and hence is exceptional. As all the religious places are shut, people are struggling to practice their orthodox prayers.

‘Chaitra’ or ‘Vasanta’ Navratri festival of this year just got over with celebration strictly restricted inside homes thereby Mahishasura Mardhini rituals (fearless Hindu Goddess who fights and wins over Evil) and Rama Navami (Hindu Mythological Lord’s fest who has killed evil power named ‘Ravan’) are accomplished indoor this season. Same trend continued for almost all the religions of humanity and none of the gods were treated as they used to before COVID-World.

In a nutshell, all the believers ensured their belief systems are also to be protected from this viral pandemic. As an agnostic fellow human, I was just curious how the believers (certainly the majority in this planet) are confidently fighting this theological battles in their minds and cautiously shutting down their religious entities thereby remotely trusting the propaganda to recover from this universal problem. In fact, most of them already knew that no supernatural power would emerge for remediation from these entities (such as Churches, Mosques, Temples). Surprisingly, theists behave more rational than agnostic & atheistic communities in these situations by keeping their religious enterprises safe and closed.

Thanks to this global challenge, all these activities confirm our hypothesis we have discussed in Well Round 8 on the operational style of God from the subconscious of human mind. Now, superpower can originate only from our subconscious to fight this epic microscopic battle instead of relying on the fictional gods resting inside the gated religious institutes. That superpower should be ‘Confidence’ or ‘Will power’ to fight this unique battle.

Theological gods cannot save us from this; in fact, we need to save/protect them from this panic until things settle down. Every religious head has understood this and communicating this sensitive message to their followers. Neither Jesus, Allah, Ram would arrive, nor the spiritual gurus can do wonders. Any rational human may not expect miracles to evidently believe in these Gods. Interestingly, these faith systems can also be used to empower our mindset to migrate from ‘Fixed’ to ‘Growth’. Many assume that its a payback time for the sins we have committed so far against the nature. That’s the power of ‘Bhakti yoga’ (discussed in Well round 9), which can keep the Sapiens (with lower rationale) positive in a negative ecosystem.

In these situations, we get to know the distance between the faiths and facts of these belief systems!

If you are a non-believer, ensure your rationale is equipped with positive energy so that you can fine-tune yourself towards a growth mindset. Growth mindset is the only weapon to fight these invisible creatures. Hoping for the resurrection of humanity from this panic pandemic with loads of positive energy!

Growth Mindset is the NEW GOD!

Let us prepare to dive deeper!

Well Round 11 : Story of my mother!

While I start writing this piece of content, I just crossed 1 month after the longest and the worst night of my life. To my biggest shock, I encountered an incident which has emerged as the strongest litmus test for my own ‘Growth mindset’ we discussed in the earlier chapter (Well Round 10). My most beloved person in the life, my mother, suddenly bid adieu to everyone and left us due to sudden cardiac arrest.

It was 8:50 P.M. on 14th May 2020, me and my mom were sitting together in the drawing room and enjoyed listening to a classical old Tamil music track by Ilayaraja on Television. In fact, she did give me a surprise from her amusement because she had never been fond of listening to music ever as long as my memory is concerned. We had couple of laughters on the costumes and choreography on those days of Cinema while watching it. It was 9:00 P.M., I had to leave her for a official meeting (over call) and hence switched to my home office to get connected. When I stepped out at 9:30 P.M., my world started changing (although I couldn’t realize then). She gradually started suffering from a chest pain that got intense in the next 20 minutes. After 90 minutes with her condition being fluctuating, we had taken her to hospital with a strong hope of getting her recovered back home. However, life taught a different misery in my story. After 4 hours on 15th May at 1:40 A.M., she was declared to be no more in the ICU. The situation which none of my family members had ever expected or prepared had come. Her death was so instant, and fluid which many of us could have never imagined. She had left us forever, we were forced to accept the truth and entered a new reality next morning with absolutely no mind! That longest night gave immeasurable pain and grief to myself and my family. We were under prepared for her good bye!

It was really an awful feeling to suddenly find such a closest person completely vanishing in all aspects of life when

• her mobile phone was still left with 60% of battery
• her contact was still there in the first page of my phone call log
• her cooked dishes were still afresh inside refrigerator which we consumed the next day
• her books are carrying bookmarks halfway
• her medicines aren’t over yet
• her coffee cup & dining plate left unused
• her brand new sandals yet to carry any dust (due to COVID season, she couldn’t step out after purchasing)
• her Netflix series are half watched
• her clothes were pressed and well packed inside my car as we were shifting to new City Hyderabad for my work
• and many more such humanly things asking for justifications in my head!

Sorrow and grief everywhere occupied in every dimension of my life. More than a mother, I feel the vacuum of losing my best friend in life. My close circle understands how much she was important/participating in my life’s worldviews and decision making. My intent is neither to extend my sorrow to any of my readers, nor to talk about the greatness of her life as a caring human being to all of us — both immediate and extended family (extended goes beyond blood relations). I just mentioned the above narration to make you feel the intensity of shock I/my family have undergone. The real intent of this post is how I have overcome it (underway).

‘Death’ is a peer event in every one’s lives and our beloved ones will have to leave us one fine day with no exception. Though we consciously ignore admitting, it is an ultimate truth we will have to face. Only comfortable hypothesis we have is that it is a planned event, unfortunately that is untrue. We need to think beyond the grief we go through, to accept it and move on. As most of us indeed move on during such occasions (timeline depending on the bonding and the acceptance level), ensure you do not miss to carry the loudest take away for rest of your life. Because, as we were discussing in the early chapters of ‘Bottomless well’, there are thousands of philosophers, religious geeks and scientists (who are struggling to find a middle ground), are trying to educate us on this unknown area. These grief events carry enormous learning greater than sailing through these peoples’ opinions. Per Well Round — 9 takeaways, it needs a glimpse of Gnana yoga to accept this situation to move on, because an incident of death falls under ‘Known unknown’ category of things. I do not say that I have acquired Gnana yoga or a growth mindset (as discussed in Well Round 10) to my entire worldview but I definitely attempted to bring it to this situation to overcome faster.

Loss of my mother has not just taught me the nature of uncertainty in life but how to deal with it. While you realize the fact that nobody around you is going to be forever or to the length of life you would expect them to be, the experience we have until things are normal should be greatly valued. When we are in a pandemic situation like this, it becomes even more important to value each other rather parking things for a later point in time. The grief I have encountered is definitely not as painful as many others we hear from plenty of sorrowful stories. However, it has indeed taught me a powerful lesson.

Every increment in COVID numbers we see in the news feed would have created similar shocking story to each family in the planet. Although my mother is not COVID positive, I strongly believe that the pandemic situation enforced poor healthcare facility & under staffing issues during her golden hours. She is indeed an indirect victim of Pandemic like many others who aren’t counted by the Governments!

The case is not always that such things happen in others’ world or lives. You and I can be a victim anytime. I am not attempting to give you a threat but want to tell you to live your moment with your loved ones when you have fortunate times. Those memories are indeed more delighting than the real experiences. Because, our sequence of events in life has some synergy with the game of dice we have learnt in the mathematical class of probability, our chance typically sway between 0 and 1. We will never know when the swing goes towards 1.

I do not want to get into the self experience of death and afterlife which is a deeper conversation to itself that we will park for an exclusive post on a later day. As we have discussed in earlier chapters, her soul (Para atma) would have become a part of universal consciousness (Paramatma) as per one of the theories. None of us are sure of its credibility unless someone who has real experience vouching for it beyond ancient scripts and philosophies. I do not want to explore further too as getting to know will take me nowhere from this situation. In any case, my subconscious will continue to carry her memories (assuming her presence in different form) on every step of my life ahead.

The restful feeling I have is that I do not really regret for not meeting any of her expectations when she was with me (as long as my knowledge is concerned) ignoring few. I did have great time with her on numerous occasions that would satisfy both of us until we tend to meet again in future. Only thing is that I will miss enjoying deeper conversations about life, death, religion, caste, future of humanity, role of technology etc every single day either while having coffee or strolling in the nights. I strongly hope that she would have gained the meaning of ultimate truth by now and crossed a stage beyond being argumentative. In fact, we both enjoyed reading ‘The Art of Dying’ book by OSHO and had plenty of deeper conversations in understanding the concept of death. Now, she had experienced and mastered this art however I am still wandering with my questions on the head and continue to annoy my peers and readers with further confusions :-)!

Today, I have accepted her death consciously and feel deeply happy for her journey ahead. I am also getting into a new world with an experience of her presence in a different form.

Hence, my piece of advice is not just stay safe during unprecedented times but stay happy & fulfilled too with your loved ones (as long as you can)!

Let us unwind further!