Why Do You Want To Change Me? - Santosh Jha (good non fiction books to read txt) 📗

tangible element in consciousness being the key constant, we feel a continuity of sorts – feeling a feeble sense of ‘we’ being present all along our journey of aging. However, our consciousness also having the intangible element of evolved knowledge in its composition, we feel only a part of we being there all throughout. This we are elaborating to bring home the fact that aging of body is not that important. Important is the evolution of knowledge as it is this component of consciousness, which essentially defines our consciousnesses. And as this major component is intangible, we feel unsettled and unresolved about it. That is why we keep saying that ‘self’ is the biggest mysticism and all external mysticism of life emanates out of this core mysticism. This also bring out the challenge for all of us. Body being tangible, we have the instinctive attitude to care more about it and its evolution, whereas knowledge being intangible, we usually miss its larger importance in shaping our consciousness. This needs to change. We are humans and we do have this definitive edge over other species. We always need to consciously accept the predominant influence of intangible knowledge in our consciousness. This is a must for our wellness and excellence.

As we said above, there can be a singular idea of a question and there can be one singular answer of the question too. However, this does not usually happen as the dualism of the cultured mind and consciousness colors and shapes the questions and answers in unending plurality. For those, who arrive at the non-dualistic consciousness, all questions and answers become singular and therefore easy to understand and accept. This is the core idea of the book. We all are ‘right’ in our subjective consciousness and that is why we have different answers of same questions. Our subjective consciousness, colored by different cultures and milieus, accepts different answers. This is primary reason, why we need to change this. The change is moving the consciousness from this state of dualism to the non-dualistic consciousness, which accepts singular answers of all major questions of humanity.

Naturally, this is not an easy process. What helps in successfully attaining it and arriving at this non-dualistic consciousness is knowing and accepting the mechanism. No doubt, humans are much more than their mechanism and even the knowledge of this mechanism is still evolving and probably shall evolve always. However, knowing helps. We shall deal with mechanism of dualism and idea of this non-dualistic consciousness in this book.

The core and unavoidable idea about our mechanism is that every person’s consciousness, which accepts a question and an answer, has a dominant shade of consciousness, even when other shades may well be there, not so active in the subconscious mind. Moreover, the mind consciousness keeps evolving and changing as brain pathways keep building, depending on the milieus in which a person lives and moves. This itself suggests that as an individual, we all have a consciousness, which keeps changing and evolving life-long and that is why, our consciousnesses shall always have newer questions and newer answers. This book is not about telling you why changes are inevitable. It is about making you consciously aware about mechanism and dynamics of changes, so that you could be in command of changes and not getting swayed and commanded by them.

Change is intrinsic in our mechanism and that is why a changing consciousness must be allowed to first understand and then accept changes consciously, as this is the way our consciousness evolves to larger wellness and excellence. If we block our minds and refuse changes in our personality, as per the evolving consciousness, we are actually hampering our own wellness and excellence. We need to understand this in detail. This book is all about that.

Talking about the need to change our questions and answers and the way we look at our life-living troubles, the most crucial aspect is of understanding consciousness. The primary question of ‘who we are’ comes first and now, when we have enough scientific, objective and credibly singular mechanism to understand details about our consciousness, there has to be a major change in the way we perceive of our own being, our consciousness and our sense of life and living. Naturally, when this happens, the question, ‘why do you want to change me’, acquires justified importance and singular objective utility.

There is a major paradigm shift in how we have understood all the age-old questions and traditional answers of humanity. It is only natural that as we gear up to change our position vis-à-vis understanding them, we all get into the need to change. Let us understand it.

It is said, a very famous Russian writer, who won Nobel Prize for literature and is acclaimed as one of the best ever in world literature, renounced all his writings in his lifetime itself. In his last days, he almost abandoned everything, even his writings. He talked of compassion and things, which his writings probably had not accommodated. This is not unusual. Many people chase lot many dreams and even become hugely successful in their pursuits, garnering name and fame for them. However, in the last part of their journey, they discredit them as futile and talk of something, which they always neglected in their lives.

Since long, literature has been the prime source of presenting the conflicts of life and living and many of great literary works even suggested answers and solution. They were all subjective and as the literature never understood the core and objective mechanism of consciousness, questions and answers about life and living taken up by literature almost always started and ended in conflicts and more conundrum. We talked earlier about how you shall feel your own consciousness as partial realism as you go down memory lane.

The philosophy and religion also attempted unsuccessfully to raise questions and provide answers but they too failed. Philosophy and religion, like literature, only added conflicts and conundrum to all questions and answers of humanity. There is a reason to it. We shall talk about this issue here in summary only, as we wish to keep focusing on our core topic of consciousness and changes necessitated by new wisdom.

Thousands of years back, when humans started understanding key questions, which his instinctive mechanism of intelligent observations made him to, he started a practice of finding answers, which was the only way available then, given his level of brain development. All around him, things happened and he could not understand why? What he observed with the help of his six senses were in fact ‘effects’ of something. As many of these ‘effects’ either enhanced his survival or jeopardized it, both ways he needed the answers as why they happened. Some of them found a way. They started imagining about the whole chain of ‘effects’ and then speculated about the ‘cause’. This is ‘reverse intelligence’, which attempted to ascertain ‘cause’ from ‘effect’.

Observable realities are more than often, only ‘effects’ of something which is the cause but not empirically observable. The Sun was always observed as rising from east and then moving towards west to set. This effect of a particular cause was imagined and the erroneous wisdom that was created was that the earth was solid and stagnant whereas the Sun moved. The earth was observed as flat and it was accepted this way.

Both religion and philosophy accepted this ‘reverse intelligence’ and as ascertaining the cause from effects was a function of imaginations, same ‘effects’ were ascribed plurality of ‘causes’ and even the effects were interpreted in similar pluralities on the basis of opinion, conjecture, imagination, hearsay, dogma, ideology, fantasy and fiction having no measurable and proven basis.

This ‘reverse intelligence’ continued till very recently, may be till some 200-300 years ago when pure science started to come with proven, measurable and singular answers. Now we are at a stage, where science has made great headway in understanding the mechanism of consciousness, which has changed many popular cultural notions about life-living questions and the answers. However, it has to be accepted without doubts that this ‘reverse intelligence’ actually also helped ancient humans in a big way. Lot many learning and discoveries were made possible by this mechanism and humanity benefitted a lot. Farming and animal husbandry is one such boon. Humans observed plants growing from seeds and this effect they replicated with success.

The only trouble is, there were some effects, which they could not imagine right and still included them as part of their religiously sanctioned cultures. Evolution of humanity growingly provided right answers about this objective cause-effect mechanism. However, as culture and traditions are so deeply ingrained in human mind mechanism, it is still very hard for most people to accept anything that is new to this contemporary culture and ancient wisdom of religion, which is the largest chunk of a culture.

We live in the 21st century where modern science has unleashed an objective and singular wisdom about realisms. We all have to come out of the age-old culture, which still lurks deep inside our consciousness. This old wisdom of reverse intelligence has to give space to modern objective and holistic intelligence of proven and replicable causality. As we said above, the important constituent of our consciousness is the intangible element of knowledge, which needs to be upgraded and updated. We cannot have our bodies in 21st century and knowledge in 19th. This spells disaster for our consciousnesses. It has to be understood that most conflicts and chaos are inside us, well in our deep consciousness. The conflicts get enhanced if we have contradictions within our consciousness. The consciousness is a bridge, a virtual agency between the body and mind. If the two lack mutual harmony, symmetry and linearity, the consciousness is bound to be conflicted. Especially, if we have contradictory and conflicting ideas in our knowledge, our consciousness shall be conflicted and our wellness and excellence shall be missing. This we all need to change. We all need to consciously weed out conflicts from our consciousness and for this, there has to be perfect harmony, symmetry and linearity in our knowledge. For this to happen, we need to open doors, accept utility and fruition of newer questions and evolving answers, which collective wisdom of humanity engenders for us.

Our consciousness is predominantly intangible and it accepts utility of all intangible elements of inner and outer milieus more than tangible factors. We therefore need to change our perspectives in a way as to allow larger importance of intangible elements in our decision-making. As we talked earlier, you are in your perspective and your perspective is in you. For example, in a race for 400-meter sprint, there shall be ten people running for it. However, the winner shall only be one person and this person shall be the one who shall have better intangible elements of endurance, determination, sense of success, egoistic sense of superiority, et al. The physical strength of body being a constant, almost common in all those in the race. It is empirically observed by we all that success in life is almost always a function of intangible factors mentioned above. We all need to accept that and suitably change our perspectives to be in sync and tune with this realism of life-living wellness and excellence. In our lives, the physical tangible matters are only a common, constant and generic realism. What matters most and stands as a definitive decider of success, wellness and excellence, is the ‘intangible factors’, as they are discretionary, uncommon and specific. We shall discuss in this book as how we can arrive at the continuity and permanency of this specific consciousness, as against the generic consciousness, to be in perpetuity of wellness and excellence.

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The New Thinking Necessitates Changes

The question about wellness and goodness of life and living is ubiquitous. The question has been there in different forms since millions of years. They still are. However, new issues of wellness and goodness have been added, as we all are heading for a