Sanity Is Impossibility by Santosh Jha (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

that we evolved languages thousands of years back, evolved to have scripts and publishing. We evolved educational systems as early as 4000 years back. However, humanity failed in installing a singular, optimal and universal educational and learning regime, which could attain this simple task of moving a person’s infantile subconscious of subjectivity, locality and rigidity of partiality to objectivity, universality and holism. This failure is a huge causality of sanity becoming impossibility in contemporary world.

Even in contemporary world, where we do have enough scientific evidence about how human learning should be designed, the world does not have a singular educational and learning model and paradigm. Humanity is still experimenting with education and learning and the biggest tragedy is that these experiments are carried and installed not by scientists and academicians but by politicians. Moreover, high quality education is still available to may be less than 10 percent of human population. That is probably why majority of grown up people have to struggle individually to seek guidance from spiritualism, religion, psychology, philosophy, rituals, cults, isms and even science for personal wellness, poise and peace.

Therefore, ‘unlearning’ is the primary task at hand, before we begin to ‘learn’ about the next good thing for possibility of sanity in personal lives. We need to understand and accept why unlearning is indispensable today. Also, we must address a possible query here, which some people may ask is – when ‘unlearning’ is such a cardinal aspect of growth and optimality of wellness, why then it is not an automatic process for brain states and why ‘Unlearning’ requires to be conscious enterprise? If ‘unlearning’ is so critical to survival optimality, it must have been an auto-learning process of subconscious mind states? This question is valid and must first be answered.

The evolution itself seems to offer the answer. It seems, probably initially in the early stages of human civilization, when humans lived in small tribes and had just begun to lead a settled life, it was important that all members of the tribe behaved and acted in one way. This itself was a lineage carried forward from almost all mammals who live in small groups or packs. Early, fast, rigid and conformist assimilation and acclimatization of the newly born towards milieus, prevailing practices and accepted realities were basic requirements for survival. It is essentially called wired behavior of newly born to ‘ape’ others to be part of the ‘survival package’.

This wired instinct of survival, which is common in almost all species in our world, is one of the many tribal instincts that modern humanity has to ‘unlearn’. This instinctive subconscious mind state is referred to as ‘mammalian brain’ that is genius at aping. Scientists maintain that many instinctive behavior and actions of even modern day humans are vestiges of not only of tribal lives, a few thousand years back but millions of years back. For example, it is believed that modern humans still get unsettled in full moon nights as thousands of years back, it was a phenomenon that exposed early humans to risk of predation. The risk and threat has gone away for modern humans but yet, the fear psychosis remains as we are genetically wired for such behavior. Scientists believe, evolution does not dump old genetic expression, rather overwrites the new genetic writing over the old ones. Therefore, effectively, it may be said that humans have huge genetic debris accumulated in their genome. This is debatable and we are not going into this!

The idea is, in the long progression of time and space, the milieus humans move into or settle change fast. However, genetic changes that evolutionary processes could bring in do not happen this fast and automatic. And, even when genetic changes happen, they do not replace the old and redundant ones but instead pile up new and required genetic changes over the old and redundant ones. Moreover, there are views that evolution has stopped to work the way it was as humans have now unsettled and overcome the natural forces that worked as tools of evolution. So, we can say, the nature is not bringing in the adjustments and pruning anymore and therefore, we humans have to consciously and decisively carry in the ‘unlearning’ of all those vestiges of past life-living that evolution forced on us but are now a burden on us, affecting our wellness and sanity.

Even if we consider that evolution is still working and making suitable adjustments, we can clearly see that changes in modern life-living are too fast for evolution to keep pace with. It is there even for an average person to see and realize that modern life-living milieus have become very complex and huge in a short span of time. They present huge challenges to modern humans for life-living wellness. Moreover, everyday things change and bring in new challenges as we live in an age where technology brings in fast changes in milieus. Adjustments by an individual means not only learning new things but also equally importantly ‘unlearn’ old behaviors, actions, attitudes, psychosis, perspectives, beliefs, etc.

For example, by 1900, only 16 percent global population lived in urban areas and rest of 84 percent in rural regions. Naturally, human world could well have been termed as rural living and its cultures majorly rural oriented. However, in 2016, only in 116 years, around 55 percent of global population lives in urban areas. Naturally, it can be seen that on around a century, the world has turned upside down, from essentially rural to predominantly urban. As we discussed earlier, there is little study, very sketchy data about how this major transformation has affected and shaped human consciousness and cognition. There is also very limited information about how this fast change in physical and cultural milieus has impacted life-living and added new elements of unlearning and learning for humanity. There are so many similar causalities that has emerged and emerged fast in human world and life-living and average person has no information and no readiness to deal with it. The politics and economics of the day are not helping anything.

There are peripheral, short-term and behavioral changes that is rather easy for most humans to actualize as part of adjustment to changes in life-living and milieus. However, deep-seated, core, attitudinal and perceptional adjustments to changing milieus and life-living challenges are tough and it is where most humans fail and in turn add entropy to already troubled collective sanity. This needs to be understood. It is rather easy for average man or woman to shift from landline phones to mobile phones and from mobile to smart phones with little discomfort. Shifting from 3G to 5G data spectrum is not tough. However, handling the smart phone and 5G unleashes number of attitudinal, behavioral and sociological changes that average humans find tough to do successfully, despite best efforts. So we already have smart phone de-addiction support system working to pull out growing number of kids and young ones. Medical as well as social advisory is in place warning against the addictive and debilitating propensities of technologies.

This aspect of milieu changes and failure of humanity to consciously adjust to the causalities the changes unleash for entropic probabilities needs to be understood in detail. There is a great example, which we talk here showing this critical issue that there is no auto-correction mechanism in body-mind processes. One only has to consciously work out the adjustments and corrections.

In modern day world, there are many places where wild animals are kept in man-made milieus, where they are trained for behaviors and actions suitable to their new and changed milieus. An ideal example of this is a place in Africa where a man keeps many lions, tigers, cheetahs and hyenas. They have been brought up in humanly made milieu where they do not follow any natural rules of their wild world. They rather behave and act like pet and tamed animals. The wild predators play and live peacefully with the man who has trained them. However, when asked did he not fear living and sharing space with these giant wild predators, he said that he no doubt did all his activities with them within a well specified limits as it is always in his mind that any given time, even when trained long for domesticated and conformist behavior, they remain wild and killer animals. Their raw and base instincts have not changed even when there have been peripheral changes that successfully, with a few manageable accidents, make them behave and act in coexistence and cooperation mode.

We all can see and have enough proofs of the same with most humans. The societal, cultural and personal training, apart from whatever institutional education one gets, varies unimaginably in this world. This makes loads of difference in individual’s behavior, actions, attitudes, perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, etc. This in turn affects the potential of one’s assimilation and accommodation in collective space of societies and cultures. There are contrasting beliefs in the way societal, cultural and personal training is imparted to every individual. One belief says, plants and kids grow by themselves and do not need nurturance as nature provides them with everything. Second and contrasting belief accepts, it takes a whole village and society to nurture a child to adulthood. Moreover, there is also difference of approach towards societal, cultural and personal training. One belief maintains that humans are born with animalistic instincts but can be made to fit in nicely into cultured and civilized life-living by societal, cultural and personal training. The contrasting thought believes that humans are born with all ingredients of perfection as they have been created as the most excellent creatures in universe and it is essentially the societal, cultural and personal training in civilized life-living that corrupts their innate virtues and excellence. Whatever be the reality, it is manifest that even well educated and well trained human minds often exhibit raw and animalistic attitudes and behaviors. This points out to the fact that ‘course correction’ is not innate and natural for humans. It needs deep conscious mind training and persevered practice of the art.

It is a huge tragedy that humanity has made such remarkable progress in understanding so many crucial aspects of how our brain works and how we process reality, still, there is no willingness to make them applicable for all by a universal education training. Modern science understands beyond any reasonable doubts as how a human child is born as a package of raw and wired instincts and requires persevered societal, cultural and personal training and disciplined practice to enable an adult person to fit into a civilized and cultured human milieu. This human milieu requires human instincts to become acquiescent to commonly learnt behavior, actions, attitudes, perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, etc. This is possible only by a universal and objective mind training. However, the human world seems oblivious of almost most grassroots realities.

The only way out of this situation is to personally unlearn this archetypal mindset and mentality and accept the new and objective wisdom that contemporary scientific knowledge brings us for all of us. We know that probably the collective domains of humanity shall never ever care for sanity, system and order and therefore, individually, at personal level, anyone can work out its own model of sanity and system for lasting wellness and peace. This is what we are talking about in this eBook.

Before we begin to outline steps to begin the journey towards a model of personal sanity and system in this world full of entropic probabilities, we must also accept that we are talking about evolving ourselves to personal sanity, living a normal life, well within this human world and not leaving the average life-living for a reclusive life-living in jungle or a solitary place. We are accepting a model of wellness and personal sanity amidst the chaos, confusion and conflict of the world we live on daily basis. This is tough. This situation presupposes that we accept the two broad principles as pre-conditions to our personal sanity enterprise –

As we continue to be part and very