Optimality Of I Potentiality by Santosh Jha (the reading list book TXT) 📕

handling that I could not do a certain function. He looked at my efforts and said laughing, ‘You cannot do anything with computers if you do not first create the pathway for your commands’. Later in my life, I realized that this was true with all communications in all media. There is a specific and decisive ‘Pathway’ that must be at place so that the media could effectively launch and sustain a communication.

What I was trying that day was write something on the page that the software provided. My colleague told me to first create a text-box, which then could support my writing. So, clicking on the side menu bar for creating a text-box was the ‘Pathway’ that I was not creating first and therefore was unable to write anything. Later, when I had learnt computers well, my sister was the novice and she had the same trouble. She complained that she wanted to have some of her words she had written on Word file as bold letters but it was not happening even while she was clicking the bold option on the menu bar. She was also doing the same mistake. She had not created the required ‘Pathway’ in the media and therefore her ‘Communication’ to make a letter bold was not being heeded to. I told her to create the pathway by ‘Selecting’ or highlighting the specific word she wanted in bold letters and then click the bold option. She did it and the same irresponsive media launched the required communication within split second. She was happy as well as embarrassed that she could not do as simple a routine like selecting. But, it is not always simple. The pathways may at times be simple but without first having them at place the media we are using cannot do any communication. At other times, the pathways can be complex and also, the communication for desired attainments may not be as simple as clicking the bold option or text-box option on the side menu bar.

The media and communication we are talking about has similar challenges that a computer or specific software have but we are faced with far more tough challenge because we are dealing with body-mind and its hugely complex system as media and communication. The computer is one great marvel of algorithmic system with singular and replicable media and communication. However, our body-mind system is not algorithmic but highly heuristic. This media and communication of body-mind plexus as well as its pathways and commands are highly randomized and precariously placed. A computer’s entropic environment is very negligible as its algorithmic structures and functions are purely physical. Our body-mind media and communication structures and functionalities are highly entropic as they are majorly virtual, vectoral as well as emergent. Therefore, effective and appropriate media management and communication with consciousness is neither simple nor easy. It requires ‘Pre-Hand Preparation and Persevered Practice’ so that we have not only a definitive ‘Pathway’ for communication but also a deeply installed effective and optimal one. Next, we talk about how we can go about it.

As we now zero down to the core issue for which this book had to take shape, we need to keep in our minds two very basic things. That shall help us in not only understanding the issue at hand in facilitative holism but shall also make us efficient in handling our own media and communication. These two elements are –

Importance Of Facilitative Milieu: Any system works in a milieu and therefore automatically enters into a causality with it. We all know it very well that most systems around us, be it our body-mind, family system, socio-cultural system, nation-state system or work-place system, are stressed and work below optimality primarily because they are not operating in an environment that are facilitative. Rather, the milieus our systems operate in, themselves extend many pulls and pressures and are obstructive in many ways. For example, our body-mind system is designed for Homeostatic equilibrium and its Allostatic process to readjust things for attaining a disturbed equilibrium is also at place. But, as we all live in such polluted milieus, consume toxic stuffs and work in complex and conflicted spaces, etc, our system tends to get stressed. Scientists warn us that our body’s Homeostatic processes is not designed to handle air pollution or smoke we inhale and therefore there is no auto-process to reverse the damages inflicted by pollution and smoking.

Therefore, it is very natural for us that we have to take personal and very conscious initiatives to ensure that we have a facilitative milieu, not only external but primarily the internal milieu. The holism of classical Yogic Philosophy elaborates in details about ways to have facilitative internal as well as external milieus for attainment of poise and purpose. As we are discussing the intangible process of media and communication of our consciousness, we must accept that most of our conscious efforts and enterprises must focus on ensuring that either we have facilitative, or at least not a stressed and diastrophic internal milieu. No amount of conscious and qualitative communication with consciousness can work effectively with our body-mind media if our physical-mental-psychological milieus are not facilitative. This surely needs persevered practice and constant investing. This is also where most contemporary spiritual processes of healing and wellness fail as the populist demands for instant success and missionary insinuations eliminate the core process of milieu correction and sanity.

Meaning Of Awareness: The word awareness is probably most un-understood and mis-understood word in human cultures. Most people take this rare and labored achievement for granted. Tell a person that he or she is not aware and they shall be angry at you. Everyone has this self-sustained belief that he or she is always aware. This is a misconception. Science has established that in our daily lives, we are aware only for few minutes at best, even while over 98 percent of our life-living is carried out in subconscious state. Science says, awareness or conscious sense is just a fleeting and ephemeral epiphany, which needs persevered practice for prolonging it.

Scientific studies reveal that over 90 percent of human population does not breathe the correct way! Why? Simply because we are not aware! Our body needs right breathing because we survive and excel on Oxygen. We all take breathing as taken for granted because it is an auto-process controlled by unconscious layers and monitored by subconscious layers of our brain states. That is primarily why most meditative processes begin by asking a person to focus on inhaling and exhaling of air through nostrils. It is however only a basic process to enter the ‘Door’ of conscious domain. One needs to journey deep inside and this breath watching alone cannot do. It requires more. Most people are happy doing aware breathing and think, they have hit finality!

The primary reality is that most processes inside our body-mind mechanism are subconscious and as they are ruled by an auto-process, a wired proposition, we do not need to bring things into aware and conscious domain. Being aware is a holistic notion, which entails having conscious and definitive registry of infinite processes and causalities that work inside us and outside in external milieus. It is the level of awareness that decides the potential of empowerment of a person. There is no limit to how much and to what extent we can be aware of as there are infinite causalities and processes going on inside and outside us. Awareness is a life-long learning and unlearning process. But it has a process too. We need to know that.

Awareness is a dialectical process. From our childhood, we are made to get exposed to different types of information and every new information that makes us aware of a realism, opens up a gateway to one or two level up of awareness. We learn the language first, then we get aware of poetry and later we get aware of how poetic excellence creates magic with self and consciousness. Therefore, awareness comes in steps and if we miss out on one or two steps of the ladder of information and knowledge, we cannot get to higher levels of awareness. This means, there cannot be a short-cut or easy route to awareness. Awareness is evolutionary mechanism. It requires continuity and perseverance of practice of the art.

Then, the most critical part of awareness process is its dialectical nature. We get to one level of awareness and that makes us stand on the door of dualism. Every next level of awareness requires that we learn something new of higher levels but at the same time also unlearn something that holds us back from moving up the ladder of awareness. For example, a child learns things in his or her life and becomes aware of the idea of divinity and religion that his or her family and current societal and cultural milieus extend. He or she follows it and keeps evolving. Surely, the next level of awareness requires that he or she unlearns his or her existing awareness about God and religion and use the higher levels of his or he awareness to present a logical critique, using his or her energy of skepticism to what he or she knows so far. If he or she is stuck with what he or she has already ‘known’, they cannot move up the ladder of awareness about divinity and religion because both the domains offer infinite conscious thoughts and emotions as we keep evolving to higher levels of awareness. Therefore, leaning and unlearning are equally critical in awareness evolution. As most spiritual traditions seldom stress on unlearning processes, the practitioners fail to rise to higher consciousness.

Third important aspect about awareness relates to the very crucial brain mechanism of ‘Recall’, ‘Relate’ and ‘Replicate’. All information that we have or we get exposed to is stored in brain states in the form of synapses. There is insufficient knowledge about how brain stores and processes information but we know that not everything we learn or get informed is available for later recall and replication. It is believed that brain has its own process of assigning value and worth to an information for the purpose of memory. Information or learning that is associated with conscious and aware inputting has better chances of future recall. Science accepts that there are definitive pathways created in brain states when it stores some information. Therefore, when we recall it later, the pathways need to be reactivated. Therefore, if the pathway is weak, faint and unrelated to already entrenched precedents of utility and worth of our brain states, the recall process is abstracted and our brain states either fails to replicate the information or in most cases, it virtualizes the information, churning out a poor copy of the stored information.

Therefore, it is very important that whatever information or learning we feel we shall need in future, we must be in higher state of awareness when assigning it to our brain states. Also, there must be definitive logic or emotional worth assigned to a stored info so that its pathways in brain states are deep and thick. Moreover, for better recall and optimality of replication of memory, we should also assign clear ‘relational’ element to it. For example, if I am undergoing an experience of meditation, I shall ensure that whatever feelings I am going through, I register them with high awareness. Also, I ensure that I repeat to myself time and again that this particular feeling was like something important in my earlier experiences so that I could relate to the feeling when I recall it later. Human brain accepts metaphors easily so I can say to myself, this sedate feeling of meditation was like sitting under the mango tree in my village home in hot summer day. As my mind consciousness has already created deep and thick pathways for my village experiences, because of earlier assigned emotional utility and worth to it, I have great ease in recalling and replicating my meditational experience awareness.

Scientific studies