Be Lonely, Be Your Best - Santosh Jha (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📗

Does this all seem not very serious thing but just a small gap between what is perceived and what turns out to be? Does it seem that the trouble is not actually something physical or actual but notional and subjectively perceivable? If it is, doesn’t this signify a very usual thing between people. Globally, experts accept that despite technologies, humanity has grown this trouble of gap between people, be it communication or relationship goodies.

This surely seems the reality. Researchers and scientists say that worst thing for lonely people is that ‘loneliness itself can further distort their thinking, making them misread other people’s good intentions, which in turn causes them to withdraw to protect themselves from further rejection. This in turn causes other people to keep them at arm’s length’. Scientists warn, ‘loneliness can create its own self-defeating behaviour’.

Now, let us put in picture what we said very initially in this book. We talked about the idea of 3Cs and their utility in understanding core realism of our life-living experiences. We need to apply this 3Cs principle for better diagnosis of the populist perception about loneliness being a huge trouble. The simple realism, it seems is, loneliness is a condition of our own drifted or fluxed consciousness, giving us misplaced cognitions, thus and in turn making us accept a wrong and unrealistic causality.

What the scientists say about perceptions of lonely people is a two way mechanism. Loneliness distorts what we perceive and believe. However, it is also the vice-versa. Our distorted worldview and perspectives leads us silently to the deep woods of loneliness. Scientists say, ‘you are in your perspectives and your perspectives are in you’. What this means? This suggests the simple fact about the 3Cs. If we have an affected consciousness, which happens because of our over-indulgence in drift and flux life-living choices and clutter culture, we shall have a distorted or disturbed cognition. This means, a consciousness, which misses the poise and balance of perspectives and worldviews, also has distorted cognition – means, he or she sees and accepts something, which is either not a fact but fictitious, or accepts things, which have little facts but more fictions.

The straightforward fact is – there are so many cognitive troubles in our popular cultures, which are embedded in the affected consciousness, many of us tend to evolve, because of the flux, drift and complexities of modern life and living. We have already discussed how our conscious minds and subconscious minds become home to loads of chaos, conflicts and confusion in this contemporary populist culture and then lose their poise. This affected consciousness then affects poorly our faculty of poised cognition. This in turn makes us see and accept twisted and mistaken causalities.

Loneliness, which is actually a potent and potentially positive faculty of a poised consciousness, becomes a victim of wrong cognition and causality. As we said, drifted and fluxed life-living and clutter culture pushes us to the deep woods of loneliness. This forest is a nice place, a truly empowering milieu if we see it that way. However, most people are scared of woods. Therefore, they fail to enjoy the very soothing and serene environs of the woods. It is all because of affected and distorted perspective. We are in our perspectives and our perspectives are in us.

Scientists however very categorically say that being lonely is ‘not such a passive situation that you can say, you just cannot help’. You can, with a change in your perspectives, through a process of unlearning and learning, towards the acceptance of this true and actual realism, within and outside you. The learning, which we all need to have, is about the 3Cs. We need to learn scientific and singularly objective facts about consciousness, cognition and causality. This is what getting popular in many parts of the world. People are accepting that clutter cultures we are in are taking us away from our own realism. People are accepting that mindfulness is the call of the hour. Loneliness is gradually being appreciated.

What we have to unlearn is that populist cultural clichéd, which has entered our instinctive behaviour and actions. We have to unlearn inappropriate benchmarks of success, self-worth, utility and happiness, which the contemporary clutter culture of markets, media and celebrities has heaped on us. We have to unlearn that we cannot do. We sure can! We shall discuss about how to handle loneliness well in later chapter.

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Time To Unlearn Obstructive Vestiges Of

Obsolete Wired Notion About Loneliness

We have in our popular cultures, a rather stupid situation. Most of us now know and believe in evolutionary theory of human existence on Earth. We always talk about how things are hard-wired and how, things are there in our brains, about which we cannot help much. It is rather fashionable and also considered an intellectual exercise to say that this is so visceral and that is not. Still, many of us do not accept the fact that modern life-living realism has almost stopped the very natural process of evolution and in modern times, what we see at best is the vestiges of the crumbled empire of evolution.

Therefore, the contemporary human civilization and cultures have one huge task to talk about and take in our hands. That is, we now have to ascertain very objectively as what evolutionary traits, we had and which were once of great or some good use and utility, now needs to be unlearnt and pruned in a smart way. We have ourselves stopped the natural stream of evolution way back and therefore, we surely carry a huge burden of decrepit and degenerated traits of that outdated and even dead evolution.

We need to understand this. Scientists believe that loneliness is also a wired response of body-mind mechanism, which seems like a trait, we developed during long years of evolution. Scientific studies have accepted that in some species, the male may live in isolation of the group, but most species live in large groups as it suits their survival and living needs. Human species have larger needs to live in tribal groups as human offspring have such long period of body-mind maturity that it needs the nurturance of large number of families, apart from its immediate one. Humans have the largest Social Animal Needs (SAN).

That is why, we all are wired to feel safe, sane and happy in social environments, where high levels of nurturance and interdependence is a very positive element. Scientists define loneliness as a body-mind response, indicating us to move into the collectivity, the larger family, friends, peer groups and society in general. We all are somehow, wired to feel lonely and as evolution ensures; emotion of loneliness is as good a friend for we all as is the core emotion of humanity called fear. Scientists term fear as humanity’s first intelligence. If we didn’t have emotion of fear, we would have poor survival chances.

Similarly, loneliness is also an intelligence, which is wired in our brains. We all are born with this intelligence of fear as well as loneliness. However, as since long, we have changed the nature and its raw forms in such lateral and vertical ways that we do not need to accept this raw emotion of fear, as evolution has bestowed on us. We do not fear things, the way our ancestors needed to, thousands of years back. We now have the technology for assured safety and security. We fly jets and walk the space on a space shuttle. We have simply gone much beyond fear, as our first intelligence could decide our horizon.

However, we still have this emotion of fear and it still helps us in some good way. But, we have learnt to use this energy of fear and this valuable emotion of fear for our larger wellness and excellence. But, the fact remains that till date, even when we have greatly overcome the raw elements of fear in our daily life-living experiences, there are hundreds of phobias humanity still grapples with. Millions of people all over the globe are badly affected by phobias. And, the fact remains that modern living adds loads of more phobias, which we were not even aware of a few hundred years back.

Similar is the situation with this wired intelligence of loneliness. We live in a world, which seldom allows us this precious liberty of being alone. We live in such crowded cities. Everywhere, there are many times more people than necessary. We are far more connected in so many ways. Distance and time have been bridged successfully. However, as the researchers say, people tend to be lonelier even in crowded world and the same person, who happens to be the centre of all intimacies and wellness becomes the trigger of loneliness.

The difference, which we all need to understand, is – evolution wanted us to live in communities and live a life of interdependence with each other not because being in the group or tribe had any goodness. The virtue of community living was in the nurturance and mutuality, which human kids needed for their better survival. We still live in communities; we still are part of societies, which are much larger than societies, when evolution wired this emotion of loneliness in us.

However, contemporary societies are no more the same nurturing and empathetic group, which it used to be. Rather, we have a modern society, which is calamitously competitive, where this race of one-up-manship and exclusivity has withered all the nurturance and mutuality sentiments. We live in modern cultures, where individualistic pursuits, attainments, possessions and consumptions have unleashed such competitive feelings, which make us get more pain than pleasure, more hurts than happiness when we are in collective spaces.

This celebrity culture has shattered the nurturance element of societies. In a society, where 95 percent resources are with only 5 percent people, how can average people be in happy nurturance and mutuality feelings? This five percent of celebrities have created a societal space for the rest of 95 percent, which is calamitously competitive for very survival. In such a society, how can one get the wellness emotions, which is required for being nurtured!

That is why in contemporary clutter culture, we are surely not requiring social and cultural connects for the type of nurturance and mutuality, for which evolution designed the emotion of loneliness in all of us. This emotion is therefore not as useful, rather a huge burden and we have to unlearn that. Loneliness and its primeval utility to drive us into societal and cultural connect is an obsolete mental wiring. It is the vestiges of the dead evolution.

We need to redesign and reshape this emotion as per our contemporary needs, which is just the opposite of what old evolution wanted. We are in modern age, the victims of collectivity. We need more nurturance and mutuality but the societal space is not giving these to us. Rather, it is taking them away from us. Therefore, we have to reverse things. We have to accept that we are somehow better off, when we are lonely and in exclusive audience with ourselves. Quality leisure time for ourselves, this golden solitude for us is now far more nurturing thing for us. This new realism tells us to accept the fact that we as individual are the prime source of our own nurturance and empathies. If we have them, we are better placed to survive in the collective space, which is devoid of the same.

It is, therefore, very evident that like fear, loneliness is also our great asset, a facility of crucial intelligence, yet, they stand as largest crippling phenomena in contemporary cultures. Looks like; we are at a stage of civilization, where we have grossly mismanaged our instincts and turned them into our predators, which were once placed as our key survival intelligence. This somehow, points to the fact that in some way or the other, loneliness is essentially an individual mismanagement of body-mind poise, which is aggravated by a clutter culture, to which contemporary life-living is