There is so much humbug about the idea of the mind. Religions, philosophers, psychologists, medical doctors and, of late, businesspeople, especially those in the marketing domain, offer their own constructs about how the human mind works. And, for sure, people have no clue about the origin of their temperaments, attitudes, fears, and desires. It is interesting to understand the mind from a Calculus perspective.

Calculus is the child of two fathers – the English, natural philosopher, Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The tendency to observe similarities and see a need for integration, and the tendency to notice dissimilarities and see a need for differentiation, is common and widespread. Labeling these two ways of looking at things as “integration” and “differentiation” from Calculus, is reasonable. 

There is variety. Some individuals are high in both, integration, and differentiation, and conversely, some people are low in both traits. For simplicity, and to emphasize their distinctness, we can call people as “lumpers” and “splitters.” A child is a great lumper, over-inclusive and its classes are generic and undifferentiated. As we grow, the development of “I-ness” makes us divide things, mostly into “what I like” and “what I dislike.” 

The “I-ness” is straightforward and should be accepted as the cornerstone of human personality. In the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita (VII. 4), it is written as having been said by God Himself:

भूमिरापोऽनलो वायुः खं मनो बुद्धिरेव च।

अहङ्कार इतीयं मे भिन्ना प्रकृतिरष्टधा।।

Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, and the feeling of I-ness (अहंकारः) – thus is My Nature divided eightfold (इति अष्टधा भिन्ना मे इयम् प्रकृतिः).

The Austrian doctor, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), called “I-ness” as “Ego.” The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung (1875-1961), called it the center of the “conscious mind” and placed the “unconscious mind” as its opposite. The “I-ness of me” is held in balance by “what I am, but not aware of,” thereby, making it a dynamic entity. It will keep expanding as more and more psychic energy emerges out of the unconscious and gets added into the conscious. 

The issue is, therefore, not “what I am”, but “what I can be”, and the focus must be on “my openness” to “become.” The idea of openness to experience was articulated by the British polymath, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), and the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits is currently the dominant theory in all of psychology today. The five factors are – Openness, Conscientiousness (careful way of working), Extroversion (outgoingness), Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (irritability). 

Self-development is all about discern, which is differentiating functions. The environment we live in offers a basket of options – some good, many bad – and there is always scope to choose one, especially not to go with that which is unwholesome. Growth demands declutter – letting go off all that and all those who have not been good. This not only includes primordial identities, dogmas, habits, and beliefs, but also faling into grooves of careers and roles in the society.    

The first differentiation, fundamental and the most difficult, is that we separate from the “parent” we have internalized. This is filled with anxiety and the most prevalent reason for young people getting into addiction or substance abuse – mostly smoking and alcohol – is to pacify this anxiety. Successful differentiation from the “parent” is like a “second birth.” Failure in differentiating ourselves from the parent effect settles us permanently in mediocrity and powerlessness. 

The second differentiation involves recognizing and changing the negative personality borrowed from our parents and other influential figures in childhood. Altering these unpleasant or toxic personality characteristics is essential. All vanity, phoniness, self-centeredness, a victimized orientation towards life, attitudes of superiority and contempt are appropriated from people around, and must be disowned. 

The third differentiation is, looking into the psychological defences we developed early in our lives to deal with pain. There is a strong, and almost automatic, tendency to defend ourselves the way we did as children. Denying, forgetting, exaggerating, projecting our fears, and outbursts are childish behaviours. Saying goodbye to our “child selves” is essential for living fully as the adults we are now.

The fourth and final step of psychological differentiation is to identify our own values, ideals, and beliefs that may be different from those of the culture in which we grew up. For example, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam did not eat meat from age 15 onwards. This is the last barrier before we can strive to lead a life of integrity, according to our own ideals, overcoming social pressures to conform to the standards of others. 

Integration operates in two domains – internal and external. Internal integration is to allow and assimilate the unconscious into consciousness. External integration is concerned with relatedness, interpersonal communion, and intimacy. Seeing similarities and connections is beneficial. Looking at the food before start eating and appreciating the complex ways it traversed to come before you – grains from fields, salt from the sea, spices from the hills, curd from the dairy…. and so on.  All forms of meditation are essentially integration exercises. 

Finally, I come to Limits and Continuity, the central concept of Calculus. All phenomenon is a function; constant for a while, that is, in a narrow frame of time, but eventually, changing. Only within limits is a function an independent variable. Outside the limits, it is part of chaos. This is like a line that can be drawn on a paper. Once the pencil is lifted or the paper border is breached, there is no more extension of the line.  

The fundamental philosophy of Calculus is to approximate, to refine the approximation, and apply a limit process. An insight into Calculus helps us identify the “balance points” as steady states. Moving away from steady state invites reactions, which may or may not be what we expect. To predict what changes would appear – integrating one instant, differentiating the next – is the real of art of living.

Unheeded happiness is, indeed, fatal. The more you desire, the weaker you become. The more you consume, the more diluted your life gets. The Scottish philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), described his despair of “becoming a utilitarian machine with a suicidal ghost inside.” All the world’s a differential equation, and men and women are infinitesimal variables – may be less than any finite quantity; yet, never zero. 

Know your soul as a continuous function – infinity to infinity – but live within the limits of the time and space imposed by your body. Don’t slight or belittle anyone, or overlook a change, however minute it may appear. And never allow your mind to create its own imaginary world, neglecting the people around you, and running away from difficulties. Live your life embracing both, the good and the bad that it brings. You are an infinite function, so always choose to rise over run. 

I have been unwell for a while and mostly stay at home. It has been three years since I have traveled out of Hyderabad. There was the lockdown period in between when everybody was stationed at home, and culture of Zoom calls and work-from-home evolved, but gradually, the world has returned to normal and all the birds are flying again, except for those who must learn to enjoy their tree, the branches, the nest, and the straws of which it was made, remembering the story of each straw.  

I have been a voracious reader and a regular writer. Somehow, by publishing one book every year, I could publish some 24 titles and can brag of writing. Many of these books are ordinary but some are brilliant – especially, Wings of Fire (1999), A Doctor’s Story of Life & Death (2001), Transcendence (2015), and A Modern Interpretation of Lokmanya Tilak’s Gita Rahasya (2017). When I read them now, I wonder if it was I who wrote them, or an unseen force that wrote them through me. My book on Kabir, explaining the idea of God Within is with my publisher and the manuscript of Abundance and O Mind! are works in progress. 

My study is indeed a strange place. There is a wall on my left, fully covered with books that I have bought, or received as gifts, and I could read most of them. There are some mementoes that I have collected after my talks, and a picturesque pencil sketch done by former CSIR scientist Ali Kausar, showing me sitting at the feet of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. And of course, my Apple computer, connected to the Internet and the Bluetooth earphones with which I prefer attending to videos of leading scientists and philosophers of our times and educational matter of high quality and value.

Two Carls have been my heroes – the Swiss medical doctor and psychologist, Carl Jung, and American astronomer and writer, Carl Sagan. Over the years, I have read the 20 volumes of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung that run into some 10,000 pages and also all the books written by Carl Sagan. Recently, I discovered an hour-long interview of Carl Jung, and was thrilled to see the person I idolized talking on my computer screen. When asked by the interviewer, “Do you believe in God?” Jung answered, “What believe? I know God.” Jung died in June 1961, but his answer filled me with awe even in 2022.

This interview of Jung’s created ripples in my psyche, as does a stone when thrown in a placid pond. I came across, or to use a better expression, a lecture appeared before me given by David Bentley Hart on experiencing God as Being, Consciousness and Bliss, what we call in India as Sat-Chit-Ananda. This video was followed by an essay written by American psychologist Kirk Schneider which made me write this blog and I am using the title of his essay. Kirk Schneider is known for his work on Existential-Humanistic Psychology. The gist of his work is to guide his patients towards personal and collective aliveness as against waiting for death passively in their adverse health situations. 

Carl Jung explained a human life as merely a link of a very long chain. We are aware of our parents, grandparents, and very rarely, some children may even see their great-grand parents. Beyond them, there is darkness. In earlier homes, there used to be an old trunk filled with articles of ancestors, but no more. Nucleated families live “lean” and prefer “fully furnished” rented properties over building houses or wasting “space” for storing “old stuff.” No wonder, an increasing number of children are estranged from their parents and one can find “old-age homes” in every big Indian city. In small towns, old people are living alone their social deaths while waiting for the biological end. 

The thirteen-part television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage written and presented by Carl Sagan in 1980 is now available on YouTube for anyone willing to experience the awe of universe in which we live. Carl Sagan passed away in 1996 but I can be with him watching this series any time and so anyone can who is interested. In one short clip on YouTube, when someone asked Carl Sagan if he believed in God, Sagan asked back, “What kind of God are you asking about?” His question took me back to David Bentley Hart and through him, to Sat-Chit-Ananda. Can I feel Sat-Chit-Ananda in me? 

Kirk Schneider’s essay provided me the answer when I read it in the light of Carl Jung’s description of “psyche” as an energy between two poles like charge in an electric battery cell. Schneider lists eight conditions of old age: being alone; experiencing sorrow; loss or absence of hope; fear; fragility; uncertainty; anger; and feeling lost. Then he gives two possible responses – one of death and the other of life. 

I can feel the challenge of being alone; worry about my regrets and sorrows; feel paralysed under despair and hope of any kind; shudder of fear of this being my last day, or week; feel terrorized of fragility; be distressed due to uncertainty; experience the bitterness of rage for all the wrong that was done to me; and the panic of feeling lost. This is one way of living the remainder of my life. 

Or, I can enjoy the creativity of being alone; feeding the birds; tending to plants; or indulging in some hobby I always wanted to take up but could not find time for; feel the sensitivity of experiencing sorrow; the mobilisation spurred by despair; the defiance sparked by fear; the humility generated by fragility; the possibilities opened up by uncertainty; the strength aroused by rage; and curiosities prompted by disarray. 

My long-standing friend and renowned cardiologist, Dr P Krishnam Raju tells me that though diseases are pathways to death, the two are not necessarily related. People die without any disease even in their youth and severely diseased patients live for years praying for their death in vain. If I am alive today, it is indeed a gift. What am I doing with this day, this moment? And it is here that a wide-angle picture helps. When you watch a sparrow visiting you to glean its grain and you find it waiting if you are late by a few minutes, you will be filled with awe. Watching the sun rise is another powerful experience! And the dazzling show of stars every night is there for all those who can “plug themselves off” from their TV.

Neglecting and abusing the body is sinful. My body is the instrument, the medium for my soul, and my willpower comes from the visceral core. A malnourished body, an unkempt body, a tired body, a body kept awake for watching some program on TV late in the night, a body deprived of fresh air and blocked off the fragrance of flowers and plants, the sounds of birds and the sight of floating clouds in the vast blue sky – renders a cordial invite to ailments. Know life as the expansion of consciousness and death as its constriction. Get up, stretch your arms, look up, take a deep breath, exhale and enjoy the wonder of being alive. Carl Jung said in the interview I watched, “Live life as if you are going to be there for 100 years!”  

I have always regarded well mavericks, who are described as unorthodox or independent-minded persons. They keep coming in every age, as if to puncture the balloons flying high in their times, and to point out the limited shelf-life of every dogma. Not all mavericks become prophets and philosophers, but they do serve their purpose of “grounding” the people around them from their mental voyages, into the reality of their existence. 

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1949) was born in Armenia, then a part of the Russian Empire. He rightly observed that most humans do not live consciously, and their minds are mostly not focused on their surroundings. Even their thinking is diffused and instead of following a logical train, their minds keep wandering without purpose, like a rudderless ship drifting in the ocean, or a monkey jumping from one branch to another in a grove.

Gurdjieff described such people, which means most people, as living in a state of “waking sleep”. He wondered if it was possible to awaken them to a higher state of consciousness so that they could achieve the full human potential. Gurdjieff observed that there were three methods in vogue – living in astute poverty, overcoming emotions through ardor, and developing one’s inner being at the cost of undervaluing one’s body and emotions. He called these ways as those of the fakir, monk, and yogi and reasoned that these could be followed/adopted while doing one’s normal work in this world. 

This was not an original idea, but an innovative rendering of the desireless work (निष्काम कर्म) advocated in the Bhagavad Gita, and the Buddhist method of mindfulness (स्मृत्युपस्थान). Kabir (1398-1518) promoted the Nath Sampradaya’s yogic exercises for raising the “Kundalini”, while pursuing one’s livelihood in this world. But Kabir’s message was lost, suffering a language barrier, and never reached beyond a part of north India. 

Gurdjieff called his method to access a higher level of consciousness without asceticism as the “Fourth Way”. Nature operates upon every individual and to be conscious of these forces, and live following them, rather than be tossed over by them, is the essence of the method. Gurdjieff created an enneagram of nine numbers bound together “as a system”, describing the man-nature interaction. 

The Bolivian philosopher, Óscar Ichazo (1931-2020), took the enneagram’s idea forward as a human potential movement. I got introduced to the enneagram (pronounced as any-aa- gram) through a book of the American teacher, Don Richard Riso (1946-2012), on the Enneagram of Personality, published in 1987. Following the book, I saw myself as a Personality of type 2 of the nine, and the description of how it functions, and malfunctions, was most useful. 

The realization that we are a spirit in the body is fundamental. This spirit is both, unique and universal. The unique part, inseparable from the universal part, forms the ground for our awareness, and is called consciousness. But it is a small part of our unique consciousness, which was called ‘personal unconscious’ by Carl Jung and it exists, as if floating, over the collective unconscious that envelops everything that exists. This is, perhaps, what Adi Shankaracharya meant by Advait Brahman.

Carl Jung brilliantly called the conscious idea of “I” as Persona, which is like a mask we wear living in society, and our “autobiography”. Our reality is our unconscious – which carries at least three inherited psychic energy patterns that Jung called archetypes, namely, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, and the Unique Spirit, which Jung called the ‘Self’ and that Hindus call the Embodied Soul (जीवात्मा). Then, there is the collective unconscious that carries information on our ancestors, and the history of our race. 

Shadow is that part of our psyche – our thoughts and feelings that we have been hiding from others for a hundred reasons. Anima is the female personality of a man and animus is the male personality of a woman. After all, both genders differ by the absence or presence of just one chromosome and everything else is the same. When husband and wife fight, anyone can see their hidden anima/ animus performing at its best.   

Jung declares the purpose of life as bringing our unconscious into the conscious and doing whatever is to be done. In this situation, the unconscious supports you and life starts rolling out as a spectacular success. If this is not done, in the famous words of Jung, your personal unconscious ‘drags’ you through this world, as your ‘fate’, like a hunter drags its killed prey. The process of integrating the personal unconscious into the conscious starts with the Shadow, followed by the Anima/ Animus and finally, manifesting the Self in this world. 

Look at any famous performer in this world – leaders, sportspersons, businesspersons, artists, scientists, poets, writers etc. They are all manifesting their selves and their fame is due to the support of the collective unconscious. The enneagram sidesteps the philosophical and scientific jargon and delivers deep insights in a child’s play manner, according to your type, 1 to 9, and what happens to you when you start degenerating in life. This awareness is, indeed, most valuable to avoid setbacks and failures, and prevent disasters.  

There is no room for ignorance in the age of the Internet. Google the word “enneagram” and you have before you a great light, which is all that one needs to navigate through the world.  In 2005, I read in The Inner Journey Home, written by Kuwaiti American A. H. Almaas (b. 1944), that in the darkness, you will stumble upon the furniture and hurt yourself in your own house. The point is to have light and live with awareness. 

I conclude with the words in the book mentioned above (Ed. 2004, p. 82), “There is neither destination nor source, but merely the flow outward of the arising of experience as a continuous flowing fountain of conscious presence. The fountain effect is a sensation, a feeling, an impression of flowing. The streaming fountain is a bubbling stream of experiences, where the bubbles and eddies are the forms, experience is taking… The water emerges out from nowhere; an experience was not there, and now it is there, while the flow is always present.” 

That life is ephemeral, transitory and that we all will die is, indeed, good news. See yourself in the becoming of every moment. Throw away the burden of knowing the reason for everything and guessing the results. Why not enjoy the flow, instead of counting the bubbles and eddies in the fountain and the stream? It is sufficient to live through experiences rather perceptively. Understanding ourselves and others and the wholeness of the entire creation will make your life, if not happier, then less hurting, but surely fuller. And like a flower blossoming out of a bud, you will flourish by “becoming” yourself. 

Normally, the 24 hours of a day are divided into 16 hours of waking time and eight hours of sleep, plus/ minus an hour or two. That means, one-third of one’s life is spent in sleep. Sleep is divided into two types – deep sleep and dream sleep. There are about five cycles of approximately 90 minutes each, with spells of deep sleep and dream sleep (technically called Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep). At the beginning of sleep, the cycle is mostly deep sleep and towards the early hours in the morning, the cycle is mostly Dream sleep. Overall, about 20% of one’s sleep is REM sleep. So, when you sleep late after watching a film, you lose mostly deep sleep, and when you wake up early to catch a flight, you lose mostly REM sleep.

Matthew Walker, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and later, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in his 2017 book Why We Sleep defines, rather dramatically, the purpose of sleep as, “a consoling neurochemical bath that mollifies painful memories and a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.” According to Prof. Walker, “REM sleep performed the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind from the information-rich fruit.” The deep sleep is to repair the body by restoring cellular homeostasis. Almost all ailments of the body and mind are rooted in insufficient sleep.

It is unwise to use medication for sleep because all medicines are designed to sedate you to fall asleep about 10 to 20 minutes faster, and keep your eyes shut for about 30 minutes more. Alcohol robs you of REM sleep. And the more and late you drink in the evening, the more pronounced is the effect. It impairs your mental health. People who take sleeping pills regularly end up spoiling their waking time. They feel drowsy, have muddled thinking, experience dizziness, or lose their sense of priorities. Their ability to drive is seriously impaired. Besides, most sleeping pills are addictive. Exposure to the blue light emitted by TVs, mobile phones, and computer screens in the late evening, blocks the production of the hormone melatonin in the brain, impairing sleep quality. 

According to the Vedic philosophy, the soul lives through the waking, dream, and dreamless states. The Mandukya Upanishad defines the dream state as, स्वप्नस्थानः अन्तः प्रज्ञः (Verse 4), that is, “the wisdom of the inward,” and सुषुप्तस्थानः एकीभूतः प्रज्ञानघनः एव आनन्दमयः (Verse 5), that is, “in dreamless sleep, gathering wisdom and delight from the cosmic oneness.” So, why there is so much ignorance about such a fundamental fact of life? Why do we take sleep so casually? General irritability among children, attention deficit disorder, and a lack of body-mind synchronization are tell-tale signs of poor sleep. Adults pay for their poor sleeping habits through early ageing – hair fall, wrinkles, and high blood pressure – all occur in the absence of proper sleep. 

Your waking hours can be likened to when you are on stage, and sleep, to when you prepare for your performance. While it is essential to sleep well, it is very beneficial to understand your dreams, for there, you are not only pointed out your mistakes and what is going on behind your back but also provided guidance and hints to succeed and flourish in life. The Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), first described dreams scientifically, in his 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams. He said that dreams inform us about our unconscious desires, thoughts, wish fulfilment, and motivations. It was a great discovery.

But greater were the insights of his junior, the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875 –1961). Jung reversed the concept of the unconscious mind on its head by describing the conscious mind as emerging out of it and not the other way round, that it is the forgotten or repressed memories. He further introduced the idea of the collective unconscious, where all human beings, past and present and future in the making, get connected.  And we are connected to this great source of intelligence every night through the medium of dreams. 

What a waste life becomes, if this search for oneself is not undertaken, and one dies ignorant of the truth peculiar to oneself! And what a profound joy it is when this discovery is available every night, at no cost, in the privacy of our sleep. The idea is to access your unconscious, which is the best definition of God, a living God inside you. 

The popularity of a loving kind God who will protect you against all dangers, compensate for all your shortcomings, and forgive all your follies, is the biggest ignorance of our times. In the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, God’s Cosmic Force is described and the reality of God as Death, is explained without ambiguity – कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो लोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्त, God destroys things and people after they have lived out their time. (XI.32). 

God can’t be a wishful projection of our fanciful and selfish thinking. By looking towards God for our good and welfare without assuming responsibility for our omissions and commissions, is a seriously flawed way of living. You don’t pray before an exam without studying for it, break the law and pray for escaping punishment. This error is also at the root of all our psychological problems, wherein all physical ailments start. How can we, by denying death, live a meaningful life?  

Daily sleep is a reminder of the ultimate sleep from which one would never wake up, eventually, and every morning bestows upon us the renewal of life. Mahatma Gandhi had famously said that every night when he went to sleep, he died as if to be reborn the next morning, when he woke up. I would add, not just reborn, but born better. The wisdom acquired in dreams can do wonders for your emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Every night, your errors are displayed before you, warnings are given, consequences are foretold, and remedies prescribed. 

Know that an emotionally balanced person is satisfied with life, happy, cheerful, and peaceful. Conversely stated, if you are sad, irritated, and disturbed, something is wrong with your life.  A person enjoying psychological well-being enjoys optimism, hopefulness, and positive relationships. Social well-being means a belief in the potential of people and society, and is reflected in personal self-worth, usefulness to society, and a sense of community. Where do you stand? 

Develop a daily habit of spending some quiet time alone and looking at your life. Sleep well to live well. And learn from your dreams, which are your best guides, supporters, and your connection with the Cosmic Mind, where nothing happens without purpose and no life is redundant. Learn to go to bed early and wake up a little early. Review your dreams every morning for a few minutes before the rush for the day. The truth of your life is inside, and not outside.

John Bunyan (1628-1688), in his seminal book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, writes about “the Man with the Muck-rake… who could look no way but downward.” He was shown to the pilgrim at the “House of the Interpreter.” John Bunyan created this metaphor for the carnal mind, which is always concerned with the earthly things that carry the heart away from the Divine. “There stood also one over his head, with a Celestial Crown in his hand, and proffered him that crown for his Muck-rake; but the man did neither look up nor regard; but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and the dust of the floor.”

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858-1919), President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, was the first to bring muckraking into public discourse. While he acknowledged the importance of people pointing out wrongdoings of others for the well-being of society if done indiscreetly and as a trend, it becomes counterproductive. At the time, a group of American writers were providing detailed journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption by the big business houses in a rapidly industrializing United States, and it was an important contribution to nation-building.

The muckrakers had historically taken on profiteering, deception, and low standards of public health and safety. They also raised awareness about social ills like child labour, prostitution, alcohol, and the pathetic conditions of city slums. Later, pouring scorn on legislators had become fashionable and journalists enjoyed portraying political leaders as pawns of industrialists and financiers. The big businesses struck back and bought the media houses and today, muckraking has become a corporate warfare tool, rather than a social service. 

The French philosopher, Alain Badiou (b. 1937), felt that everyday life is constantly ruptured by “mediated” events. Things happen – both good and bad – but muckrakers talk about only bad things. Moreover, when muckraking becomes rife, it even feels as if the whole world is run by rogues. Badiou feels that “We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.” Watch any debate on TV and you know it is all muckraking. The Anglo-Irish philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753), said very aptly, “We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.”

With two billion people on social media, we are indeed deluged with a cognitive surplus. And this deluge is no different than the great flood in the deluge myth that destroys civilization as an act of divine retribution. When Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948), sets the date 2045 for the “Singularity,” it can’t be brushed aside as some Nostradamus prediction. 

American social scientist at Stanford University, Brian Jeffrey Fogg (b. 1963), is hailed as the father of persuasive technology. He calls social media a flower on a behaviour-change tree. Social media is indeed being used to unleash new behaviour loops apparently designed to convert human beings into desiring-machines for the products and services that are promoted for a fee by the technology companies that have “created” social media itself.

Ramsay Brown, neuroscientist and Co-founder and COO of Boundless Mind (formerly Dopamine Labs), works at the intersection of brains, minds, and machines. He claims of developing technology to manipulate human mind. So, are we heading for a day when by adjusting some knobs on a dashboard we would be quietly changing our behavioural patterns? What is scarier is to imagine that these knobs are operated by others to change our natures! 

I do not see anything stopping it from happening. The helplessness of the world was severely tested by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our great medical system was exposed as treating individual ailments and incapable of handling any public health calamity. Our governments are already working as the markets tell them to. If you watch a TV channel carefully, you can very accurately predict what is going to unfold in geopolitics, weeks in advance. The currencies, stock markets, and commodity prices, from oil to eggs, are decided by algorithms, which have already gone beyond human control. Living in the Age of Muck, our destiny seems to be that of becoming a “desire machine.”

There is a lot of cognitive noise everywhere – ideas, opinions, comments, debates, opinion polls… And as if this is not enough, there is internal noise – what is right, what is appropriate, should I fight it out or give up, struggle, or let go. The old has already crumbled and nothing new, beyond muck, has emerged. Let us give a pause to the thought machines inside our skulls and mind our physiology – our breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, sleep, bowels – and try to connect with the “life force,” the Immortal present inside. 

The Buddhist sage, Nagasena, who lived around 150 BCE, described a human being as a chariot. Just as a chariot is nothing but a collection of wheels, frames, handles, and horses that pull it, similarly, we are a body of flesh, bones, and organs, wrapped up neatly under skin, driven by our perceptions and emotions. Examine your thoughts and feel your emotions and instead of being carried away by them, settle them down by sprinkling some water of contentment upon them. 

It is also time not to rake the straws, the small sticks, and the dust of the floor but to learn to live a simple and local life, sparing the environment from litter. The high-priced urban estates are de facto concrete jungles, as risky and hazardous as the forests of the past. It is time to create self-reliant communities based on the principles of simple living, which maximize self-sufficiency, particularly in food production. Please find your livelihoods away from cities. Even if you make less money, it will suffice if your life is a little simpler. 

The American biologist and writer, Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), said in his 2016 book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, “The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.” Wilson proposed that half of the Earth’s surface should be designated a human-free natural reserve. 

My personal take is, “Want less, buy less, choose well.” The decision rests with you and not others. Don’t add to the muck already there in plenty and refrain from raking it as far as possible. It is high time for a little peace.