The Most Important Philosophy of Life

If man wants to know the sole and universal secret of a meaningful and happy life, he is to be aware such a life is possible only through the determined resolve to walk in the path of pure love. It is imperative to have an unshakable resolve to be in love every moment of the day, no matter what. The crux of every philosophy is jut one - be in love, active love, Manas Love, Love emanating from Nous, from Buddhi. 

At the same time, beware of the disintegrated form of love coming out from the physical levels of Kama Manas and below (Linga, Prana, Stula). They are disintegrated form of that once pristine love of the Nous, of Buddhi. They have lost their erstwhile wings. They will just flutter and then die in a moment. They are transient. They have an inherent ego, frustration, pain, needs, and other lower propensities, which primarily belong to the realm which are lower in the evolution line than that what is present as an opportunity for man in his life. These lower forms of love although attractive on surface, pulls down man backwards and retards his growth in his journey. They just dissipate time and energy of man, and steal away his opportunity to really live. 

What is the truth is just that one love - The love emanating from the Nous - The Manas Love. Be grounded in that every moment of your attention.

The Manas love is based on the premise of Love as an art. Erich Fromm in his book - "The art of loving" has tried to identify characteristics of Manas love. He says Love is an active effort, grounded on the human potentials of objectivity, humility, courage, active faith, discipline within, concentration and meditation, patience, supreme concern, the indirect nature of love, relaxed awareness, sensitivity, right education, overcoming narcissism, universality of love. 

Glimpses of The Manas Love - Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mohammad.

Victor Frankl has expressed another important aspect of Manas Love in his book - "Man's search for Meaning" as follows - 

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

Sri. N. Ram articulates the ideal of Mans Love as follows - 

"Only as we go out in love which seeks to help and serve, do we transcend ourselves and develop that consciousness which embodies the awareness of our essential unity with others."

One has to be grounded in Manas Love every waking moment. This love has to extend to his fellow humans and to the nature. This is the secret of a meaningful and happy living. This is the only way out of the existential problems infront of man. This requires constant attention, will, memory, nurturing, intelligence and the resolve to bring into form that wisdom of the idea of Manas love in everyday life. Only then man can know who he is, and who others are, and what nature is - in reality. Any other way is a way in illusion - Maya.

Having said all this, it is very important to understand that an abstract idea is real only when it is applied. Similarly, Manas Love will remain as a dead word, unless it is actually lived, implemented and applied in real life - in the life which is alive in the realm of Kama Manas, Linga, Prana and Stula. The physical life is grounded in these physical realities. These are the realm of forms. The ideal of Manas Love has to be grounded to the framework of physical forms. Unless that is done, its all fluke and over intellectualization. It is very important to discern and have the power and resolve to play with Manas Love in the stage of the world of Maya, and not get lost in the illusion of the disintegrated forms of love so very popular and present everywhere around.

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Reminiscence of the Spirit

The beauty behind the red tulip,
The invisible aesthetics beyond
The notes of the symphony!

The profound enthrallment
Upon hearing the voice of the beloved!
The perfect rapture,
Experienced upon her mere glance!

That numbing trance,
Being intoxicated to the core
Held absolutely powerless,
Like a lovelorn kite,
Winnowing ecstatic in the lap of
Meandering wind!
With the sheer memory
Of someone special!

That restful peace,
Bowing down at the altar of God,
That perfect Being,
Beyond the idol, the mantras, the myths.
That feeling of being in the Presence,
Pristine and Pious –
A state which is just to feel!

The never ending flow of energy,
In the bonhomie steps of the little child,
Always brimming with joy,
Day and night – without any break!

That feeling of pride,
Garbed with the sheen of gratitude,
Reflecting on one’s own creation –
A work of art – an artifact of toil and perfection!

That selfless love of the mother,
Beneath her words and care,
Something which is just too profound,
To be even expressed in world of form!

The longing beneath the tears of the lover,
Having lost his love forever,
A longing beyond the reach of mortals,
A longing eternal,
Holding in the cosmos in cohesion,
Held tight in the bond of love!

The pride and grace,
Of the unspoken love!
The voice hidden in the ocean of silence,
The un-expectant, un-conditional spirit,
Beneath the trivial daily chores!

The magic of the laughter of accomplishment,
Having learnt to walk,
That tiny tot!

That invisible bliss of fulfillment,
Retiring to the bed,
After a long toiling day of good work!

The invincible of spirit
Of defiance of pain,
Of the terminally ill,
Smiling away at life!

The warmth of being at home,
With family and friends,
The assurance of being liked and accepted,
For who one is and one is not!

The angelic nostalgia,
Of visiting one’s alma mater.
Treading the memory lanes,
Tattered through the excesses of time!

The magic of the first love,
That lightness of heart,
The jump in the feet,
That feeling of the heart getting out,
Brimming with deep love,
For the damsel divine!

The beauty of those poems,
Written with heartfelt dedication
To that special one,
With the voice sweeter than that of the nightingale,
And the glance casting charm on all mortals.

Reminiscences Simoni,
The Fount of Omniscience,
Love that is not of earth!
Holding a place in physical realm -
Either in form of a Sacred Shrine,
Or in form of the Damsel Divine,
With the Most Beautiful Eyes!
Or in the form of the majestic grandeur
Of the Pantheon,
Or in the form of the perfect
Beauty of the Aphrodite!

Simoni plays hide and seek,
With the Spirit Eternal,
Invisible and Intangible –
Binding in place the beauty of form!
In profound reminiscence of the Spirit,
Beyond and Beneath
Everything so rigid condensed in the
Illusive churn of Maya!

For the essence of that Spirit is Eternal,
Independent it is of the whim of any mortal!
Untouched by the decay of time,
Out of the cycle of causation,
Ever flourishing in its full youth,
The Spirit enchants the heart of Simoni,
Forever and Ever!
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The Infinite I

When it comes to being a human, it is an amazing opportunity. More than numerous of awesome blisses of being a human, to me the most interesting one is about the inherent infinitude of possibilities a human can be in his one single life!

A person might be a wonderful poet, a singer, a painter, a nuclear scientist, a golfer, a swimmer, a biker, a lover, a father, a husband, a social worker, a son, a brother, a friend, and what not! Each of these aspects of his personality is a world in its own – each a profound way of expressing who he is – each whole and complete in itself!

Given this whole sea of possibilities, I guess it is an interesting choice each human is destined to take – what she cherishes to be. Irrespective of the circumstances of her life, irrespective of how others treat her, irrespective of what she owns and does not, she can always choose to be one what inspires her.

It is beyond cherishing that gift of choice. It is about having that awareness that we as humans are not a uni-dimensional being. Rather we are infinite sea of potentialities.

In a typical corporate world, a person is rated against 4-5 goals set on her. In an academic setting, a person is rated against 5-10 questions asked in the exam. People judge others based on what they observe about them or their work. In each of these endeavors, I feel we are losing a great opportunity to really know someone in reality.

Certainly it is impossible to know someone in entirety, as each time you label someone something, you forgo the possibility of her become somebody more. Human beings are open ended possibilities. It is an utter naivety to judge and rate people in one or two dimensions that we know of. Being a human is much more profound.

Talking of the self, our emotions are ways of expression of who we are. Also our actions, our takes, our beliefs and attitude, express some aspects of ourselves. But the beauty is that all these aspects are independent and honorable. Each gives a glimpse of our multi-faceted existence. In his love sonnets, Shakespeare had been the most passionate lover. He had been a good family man at the same time. He was a great historian and sociologist, in making his greatest plays. At the same time he had a wonderful bent towards music and visual art. So, just if I label Shakespeare as a playwright, it would be an injustice to the profound being Shakespeare was as a person.

Same applies to all humans, in even their humblest of the forms.

I guess the challenge of life is about choosing what one wants to express out. What one chooses to be. And then using what life has to offer, as means to express that true self of one. Philosophers and mystics have given various names to that true inner self. And life presents a unique opportunity to discover that  unique real self, and express that out in form – in the physical world. There is always an invisible potential inherent and latent in the self, which longs to be discovered and carved out in form.

Sometimes, emotions tend to take their own character, against that true self. Most of these are driven by natural selection – the strong pull of our genes and hormones. Certainly they play trick and it is a lost game to be able to subdue them. But, one may attempt to transmute these baser calls, to something profound and higher, which aide one to express her true self. Most of the greatest contributors in the world of literature and art had successfully been able to do so. It was either Tagore, Shakespeare or Mozart – each had some un-requited part of their baser self, which they transmuted to divine work of creation.

So, the idea also is not subduing the basic instincts of being a human. Rather it is about consciously transmuting that ancient drive to create something inspiring. It is about exercising discrimination and control, to create beauty.

It is easy to be an animal. But it is a work of art to be a human. It is not just good to be a human, but it is doing justice to the profound being endowed to us by natural selection making us human. Being some lesser version of ourselves, is a big opportunity forgone. 

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A musing from Marcus Aurelius.

WASTE NO MORE TIME TALKING ABOUT GREAT SOULS AND HOW THEY SHOULD BE. BECOME ONE YOURSELF.
- Marcus Aurelius.

It is one thing that just talking is not fun. Way to a meaningful life is about being in action. All that is true that without experience and the guts of acting an ideal way of life, any sort of preaching is flimsy and superficial; there is no power to the whole way of being. Action is the key. Ofcourse it has to be preceded with contemplation and understanding.

But here Marcus Aurelius hints into something more subtle and profound. I point out these as follows –
1.    He hints on the sense of urgency, by saying, “waste no more time talking about….”
Humanity has spent enough time in talking about great souls. Most of the life is spent being awed with the greatness of people. Men consider the great souls as a separate league altogether, and keep singing in praise what they have done or said. The Euphoria starts in talk and ends in talk. Marcus Aurelius says that is time wasted. And men should wake up immediately from this self imposed slumber, and be that great soul, what inspires him. It is about being Jesus, not just being a Christian. It is about being Buddha, and not just be a Buddhist.

2.    The second part of the first sentence – “…and how they should be.”, is also very interesting. Most of the fabled legends remain immortal through eternity, in the folklores of generations after generation. Over time, these folklores take their own character, and portray an extended portrait of the subject. There might be some grey areas, which the common man of a particular time in history might find derogatory, or in-correct. Marcus Aurelius says that it is a waste of time to speak about what those great souls should have been, and what  they should have not been. It is an extreme naivety to profess about someone’s action, without having an idea what the person was going through when he took that action. It has been experimentally proved by modern psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and neurologists, that the mind of every human is unique, and she lives in her unique illusion of what she thinks life is. No one can actually realistically know the other in entirety. It is biologically impossible. We try our best to make our point in the form of language and other modes of communication. But one’s consciousness is so very private and uniquely positioned, that it is statistically impossible for another human to have the same vantage point.

3.    The second sentence – “Become one yourself”. This sentence de-mystifies greatness. It says that no matter how great is the legend, it is possible for a common man to become that. This tries to bring the mythic aura of the great souls to earthly realities. It says that no matter what, you can be that! That gives a sense of freedom to humanity. It gives a hope that we are free and capable to be what inspires us. Life might be an interesting journey in trying to be that greatness which makes our heart pound stronger.

4.    One more thing about this is the importance of action is very important to understand. As also illustrated by Krishna in the Bhagavat Gita –
“The path of knowledge is the same as the path of action.” What this means is that “path of action,” i.e., of what is called Right Action, when it is attained, merges with the path of knowledge. At this point, they become one and the same; but this is because that action is no longer action as we normally understand it, but something quite different: it is wisdom in activity and, ultimately just Wisdom. So we can see that in order to reach this path of Wisdom, a man cannot be bound to the action he is carrying out, but must be immersed in the Law, and act from there.

This is a very profound dimension of action. Most of the western thought comprehends action as a means to achieve some goal. So goes the old saying, "You reap as you sow." It is as if, it is about reaping a reward, an action is done. Action is just an intermediate thing that is done, to actually get the primary goal - its reward. But in this case, Bhagavat Gita gives much depth into the word - action. Krishna says action as a "Wisdom in activity". That is truly profound! Action is whole and complete by itself. It is by doing an action, one "becomes", and not "has". Action is the only way to really appreciate something in its entirety - to ingrain the knowledge in the self. 

It is one thing that action should be done without any expectation of rewards; action is not a means to get something, rather it is a path to wisdom – it is wisdom in activity. But the more important thing that Marcus Aurelius points out in these words is that action is the way to really understand that wisdom of the great soul. It is only by being a Buddha can you ever understand the true knowledge and wisdom what Buddha taught. 

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The Love Affair

Human children in the first three years of life are consumed by a desire to explore and experiment with objects. Humans have an incentive to investigate the nature of things in their own right and will forever learn more about the practical – life-enhancing – potential of world they lives in.

That way of course, lies biological success. Moreover, that way, in the longer run, lie grand science and human civilization too. For it is this love affair with the natural world that drives men and women to their boldest feats of exploration and invention. 

Richard Dawkins – the exponent evolutionists – has caught the mood exactly: 

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.” Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked-as I am surprisingly often-why do I bother to get up in the mornings.”

If the atheist temperament of Dawkins does not suit to your taste, let Henri Poincre say it instead:

“The savant does not study nature because it is useful: he studies it because it is beautiful. If nature was not beautiful it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living.”

It is undeniable that there is a deeply engrained sense of delight genetically coded in the DNA of humanity – their unfaltering love for this enchanted existence of ours – our life, nature, the drama of every day existence, family, friends, art, science, etc. Since millennia humans have been is in love with life and its mysteries, its adventures, the opportunities, its dreams, its hopes, its silent love, its desires, its pains, its pleasures, its aspirations, and its grandeur. 

Interestingly this profound attraction is created inside the phenomenology of the interaction of the never endings in the brain. The objective external world where the drama happens is just the starting point. That triggers a set of excruciatingly complex mathematical signal processing inside one’s mind. It is inside, where this sparkling, seductive, mushy, luscious, and elegant qualia – what we call our experience. There is a borrowed phenomenality that the external world takes up which adds that sheen in one’s existence. I say often – “Perception is a project of internal Self”.

How often have you stared into a flaming fire, listened to the hoot of an owl in dark dangled your feet in cold stream, or watched the sun setting in a blaze of color and been knocked back by the transcendent beauty of it? How often have you been captivated by some gemlike detail of your environment that seems almost too right and too good to be true, leaving you gasping? How often you have had that special person in your life whose just one smile or a frown either beautifies, or devastates your entire week? Certainly every one of you would have go through such profound experiences in your own lives.

As per Vincent van Gogh, “I have never had such a chance, nature here being so extraordinarily beautiful. Everywhere and all over the vault of heaven is a marvelous blue, and the sun sheds a radiance of pale sulphur, and it is soft and as lovely as combination of heavenly blues and yellows in a Vermeer of Delft…I am ravished with what I see…I have a lover’s insight or a lover’s blindness.”

Imagine an existence which is entirely guided by physical science, business utilitarianism, and self preservation and proliferation agendas. It would be a world of zombies, of robots. A zombie would never make the mistake of coloring the world with projected qualia or of misjudging his own boundaries and feelings himself mysteriously connected to nature and the world outside. Indeed, imagine if you can the zombie’s world. It would have to be a disenchanted world – a world where things no nlonger glow or have any phenomenal  significance. The great psychologist William James raised that possiblility as a dreadful thought experiment, “Conceive yourself if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion of which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as “it exists”, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness! “

Certainly you would have had glimpses of such states of zombies in your everyday life, where existence is motored by eerie realism, scientific objectivity, personal agendas of self preservation and proliferation, sole pursuits of money, power and status. Life indeed is so very dis-enchanted and dark for those.

This profound love-affair with which humanity has evolved since hundreds of millions of years, has given rise to something what scientists call consciousness. This aspect turns every human to a poet, a lover and a maverick. This has a very important evolutionary role to play. For the first time, we have a living form (humans) in this planet, who do things not just it is useful to do. But it takes delight in doing so. This added sense of delight, mushy longing, appreciation and aesthetics and beauty increases the probability of existence and sustenance of humanity over years of evolution. Certainly that deep fear for death, and all that humans meticulously do to avoid death, is due to this profound love-affair they have with life and the world. The first thing that a depression patient taking into suicide loses before contemplating suicide is his love affair with life. 

Shakespeare in his following sonnet beautifully expresses how we cast this magic dust on our reality of world, making them glow!

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

This profound love affair inspired Viktor Frankl to use wretched environment of Hitler’s concentration camp of Auschwitz to use as a laboratory for his research on logotherapy! The other inmates who lost this sheen of romanticism either died of depression or some other bodily disease due to unhygienic state of existence, without food and clothing. This love affair inspired great souls of likes of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Vivekananda, Subhash Chandra Bose, Einstein, Newton, Freud, Darwin, Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata, Ram Charan, Michelangelo and thousands and thousands of them, to go beyond the seemingly dry realistic and limiting circumstances, and transmute the mundane existence of themselves, to awe-inspiring creations they made or still making in their lifetime.

Certainly it is a pleasure to be in love. 

It is a pleasure to be a romantic maverick. 

To spend the life is silent appreciation of that perfect river, 

That magnificent formation of cloud in the twilight,

Seen from the terrace of one’s home,

The sense of being lost in intoxication of those Most Beautiful Eyes,

The pleasure retrieved from a work done well,

That feeling of being loved,

In the appreciating and understanding eyes,

Of family and friends!

That deep sense of faith in the heart of the kid,

In the mother’s casual answers to her curious questions!

To that satisfying feeling of being relevant,

In doing something that will live beyond ones life,

Making a positive difference to posterity to come!

That deep fulfillment of shedding sweat and blood,

Fighting for some victory for humanity,

Either in forms of a social activist, a musician, a poet,

Or a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a mother.

Certainly it is a pleasure to be in love.

It is a pleasure to be a romantic maverick.

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Darwin - His life and his teachings

It is certainly true that Darwinism can help make a person saintly. No doctrine heightens one’s consciousness of hidden selfishness more acutely than the new Darwinian paradigm. If you understand the doctrine, buy the doctrine, and apply the doctrine, you will spend your life in deep suspicion of your motives.
That is the first step toward correcting the moral biases built into us by natural selection. The second step is to keep this newly learned cynicism from poisoning your view of everyone else: to pair harshness with leniency towards others; to somewhat relax the ruthless judgment that often renders us conveniently indifferent to, if not hostile to, their welfare; to apply liberally the sympathy that evolution has meted out so stingily. If this operation is inordinately successful, it might result in a person who takes the welfare of others markedly, but at least not massively, less seriously than his own.
Some people worry that the new Darwinian paradigm will strip their lives of all nobility. If love for children is just defense of our DNA, if helping a friend is just payment for services rendered, if compassion for the downtrodden is just bargain-hunting – then what is there to be proud of? One answer is- Darwin – like behavior. Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be truly moral animal. Now, in the light of the new paradigm, we can see how hard this is, how right Samuel Smiles was to say that the good life is a battle against “moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice”; these are indeed the enemies, and they are tenacious by design.
Another antidote to despair over the ultimate baseness of human motivation is, oddly enough, gratitude. If you don’t feel thankful for somewhat twisted moral infrastructure of our species, then consider the alternative. Given the way natural selection works, there were only two possibilities at the dawn of evolution:
a) That eventually there would be a species with conscience and sympathy and even love, all grounded ultimately in genetic self-interest,
b) That no species possessing these things would ever exist.
Well, a happened. We do have a foundation of decency to build on. An animal like Darwin can spend lots of time worrying about other animals – not just his wife, children, and high status friends, but distant slaves, unknown fans, even horses and sheep. Given that that self-interest was the overriding criterion of our design, we are reasonably considerate group of organisms. Indeed, if you ponder the utter ruthlessness of evolutionary logiv long enough, you may start to find our morality, such as it is, nearly miraculous.
Having crafted a moral measuring stick, Darwin gave his life a passing grade. “I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science.” Still, while feeling “no remorse from having committed any great sin,” he had “often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures. My sole and poor excuse is much ill-health and my mental constitution, which makes it extremely difficult for me to turn from one subject or occupation to another. I can imagine with high satisfaction giving up my whole time to philanthropy, but not a portion of it; though this would have been a far better line of conduct.”
It’s true that Darwin didn’t live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn’t a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

PS - The above is an excerpt from the last part of the book - The Moral Animal from Robert Wright.

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On Religion and Evolution

The theme of strict self-governance, the control of animal appetites, appears again and again in the world’s great religions. Also widespread, is the doctrine of brotherly love that Darwin found so beautiful. Six centuries before Jesus, Lao-tzu had said, “it is the way of the Tao..to recompense injury with kindness.” Buddhist scriptures call for “an all embracing love for all the universe..unmarred by hate within, not rousing enmity.” Hinduism has the doctrine of “ahimsa,” the absence of all harmful intent.
People tend to say and believe things that are in their evolutionarily ingrained interests. This does not mean that harboring these ideas always gets their gene spread. Some religious doctrines – celibacy, for example – may dramatically fail to do that. The expectation, rather is simply that the doctrines people latch on to will have a kind of harmony with the mental organs natural selection has designed. “Harmony”, admittedly, is pretty broad term. These doctrines may, on the one hand, slake some deep psychological thirst (belief in an afterlife gratifies the will to survive); or they may, on the other hand, suppress some thirst so unslakable as to be a burden (lust for example). But in one sense or another, the beliefs people subscribe to should be explicable in terms of evolved human mind. Thus when diverse sages manage to sell the same themes, the themes may say something about the contours of that mind, about human nature.
Donald T. Campbell, one of the first psychologists to get enthusiastic about modern Darwinism, has suggested as much. In an address to the American Psychological Association, he spoke of “the possible sources of validity in recipes for living that have been evolved, tested, and winnowed through hundreds of generations of human social history. On purely scientific grounds, these recipes of living might be regarded as better tested than best of psychology’s and psychiatry’s speculations on how lives should be lived”.
Some have noted that, while these religious ideas must by definition have a kind of harmony with the brains they settle into, that does not mean they are good for those brains in the long run. Some ideas, indeed, seem to parasitize brains – they are “viruses”, as Richard Dawkins puts it. The idea that injecting heroin is fun keeps infecting people by appealing to myopic cravings, rarely to the ultimate advantage of those people.
Besides, even if an idea does spread by serving people’s long term interests, the interests may be those of its sellers, not its buyers. Religious leaders tend to have high status, and it is not beyond the pale to see their preachings as a form of exploitation, a subtle bending of the listener’s will to the speaker’s goals. Certainly Jesus’ teachings, and Buddha’s teachings, and Lao-tzu’s teachings had the effect of amplifying the power of Jesus and Buddha and Lao-tzu, raising their stature within a growing group of people.
The great religions are at some level ideologies of self-help. It would indeed be wasteful, as Campbell suggests, to throw out eons of religious traditions without inspecting it first. The sages may have been self-serving, like rest of us, but that does mean they weren’t sages.

The concept of evil – still people seem to find it useful, and the reason is that it is metaphorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long term happiness to us and may bring greater suffering to theirs. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it out genes. If it will help to actually use the word evil, there is no reason not to.

When the Buddha urges digging up the “root of thirst”. He isn’t necessarily counseling abstinence. Certainly there is talk in many religions of abstinence from various things, and certainly abstinence is one way to short-circuit the addictiveness of vice. But the Buddha put his emphasis not so much on a laundry list of proscriptions as on a generally austere attitude, a cultivated indifference to material rewards and sensory pleasure.

This fundamental defiance of human nature is encouraged in some measure by other religions. The Hindu scriptures, like Buddhists and Christians, dwell at more length, and more explicitly , on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who “abandons desires,” who “has lost desire of joys”, who “withdraws, as tortoise his limbs from all sides, his sense from the objects of sense.” Hence the idea man as depicted in the Bhagvad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism. This way the image that inspired Gandhi to persevere without “hope of success of fear of failure.”

That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a sever maxim – life is a suffering – and placing it at the very center of his philosophy. If you accept inherent misery of life, and follow the teachings of Buddha, then you can, oddly enough, find happiness.

In all these assaults of the senses there is a great wisdom – not only about the addictiveness of pleasures but about their ephemerality. The essence of addiction, after all, is that pleasure tends to dissipate and leave the mind agitated, hungry for more. The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature – a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying “Just Kidding.” As the Bible puts it, “All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.” Remarkably, we go our whole lives without ever really catching on.

The advice of the sages – that we refuse to lay this game -  is nothing less than an incitement to mutiny, to rebel against out creator. Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us, to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system. To cultivate some indifference to them is one plausible route to liberation. While few of us can claim to have traveled far on this route, the proliferation of this scriptural advice suggests it has been followed some distance with some success.

It remains true that pleasure is ephemeral; that its constant pursuit is not a reliable source of happiness; that we built not to easily grasp this fact; and that the reasons for all this are cleared in the light of new Darwinian paradigm.

There are scattered hings in the ancient scriptures of an understanding that human striving – after pleasure, after ewalth, after status – is yoked to self-deception. The Bhagvad Gita teaches that men “devoted to enjoyment and power” are “robbed of insight.” To pursue the fruits of action is to live in a “jungle of delusion”. The Buddha said that “the best of virtues is passionlessness; the best of men he who has eyes to see”

This grasp of our naturally skewed perspective is bound up with exhortations towards brotherly love. For a premise of those exhortations is that we are deeply inclined not to view everyone with the charity we extend to our kin and ourselves. Indeed, if we weren’t so deeply inclined, if we didn’t buttress this inclination with all the moral and intellectual conviction at our disposal, you wouldn’t have to start a whole religion to correct the imbalance.

PS - The above is an excerpt from the book - The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

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The Shattering Dynamics

When a glass breaks and shatters into pieces, a unique thing takes place. The surface area of the glass pieces as a whole increases exponentially. More surfaces get exposed to the atmosphere and light. Repeated reflections, refractions and total internal reflections happening in this conglomerate of the broken glass  pieces gives a perception of glitter, sparkle and shine.

Yes that is true that the original shape of the glass article has been lost. But having lost that fixed shape the glass particles explore a new dimension of existence – having exposed to maximum air and light – allowing them to really experience the world better – if you would. I call such a process as “Shattering Dynamics”

On similar lines, if drawn an analogy here is a famous saying from Andrew Harvey

“If you're really listening...If you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world. Your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; Its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold ever more wonder!”

This concept of, “burst open again and again” is a dramatic expression of the process of breaking into pieces. The event of shattering down into pieces appears as an opportune process of bursting open into a whole new realm of being able to absorb, experience, feel and appreciate life and what it has to offer, in a more profound way.

This even signifies an eventual crushing of one’s ego; the state of being guided by Freudian “Id” - A way of life which was expressed by Dawkins in his book – “Selfish Gene”. 

Evolutionarily, humans were designed selfish. But then with millions of years of evolution, there has been an interesting attribute of cooperation and collaboration also imbibed into humans. Might be such a bent of mind was necessary for humans to evolutionarily participate in bigger and more complex Non – Zero games. Such a proclivity towards cooperation appears certainly the design of natural selection to proliferate more and robust genes through eternity.

Irrespective of what Natural Selection’s hidden agenda is, it is a fact that humans like to cooperate and collaborate. They – if given appropriate triggers – they would be ready to shatter into pieces – lose out their self interest and self forms – and be available to creation of a magnificent collage! Taking part in a “Shattering Dynamics”

Somewhere, something is hidden which overtakes that pride of self ego, and helps a person to be a meaningful part of a big picture! She is available to bursting open again and again so it can hold even more wonder!

When a lover transcends his selfish lust and desire for self gratification from his beloved, and sets her free – to be what she wants, to go where she would, to act what she likes, even does not care if she hates him, he creates a “Shattering Dynamics” in his life, and the life of his beloved. Here the lover has allowed himself to be shattered to pieces – abandoning his self ego needs and pride, and surrenders in his entirety to his beloved, and her whims and likings. Such a state of immense immersion in love probably has led to creation of magnificent works of arts from men in love like Shakespeare, Tagore, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.

Such examples of “Shattering Dynamics” are very much visible in history of great and awe-inspiring creations like Google, Wikipedia, Open Source Revolution, Facebook, Android and many more! Classic illustrations of the shattering experiences are beautifully expressed by Kabir in his songs. 

The deep motivation under these shattering experiences might be given several names – love, devotion, likings, inspiration, awe, loyalty,  adventure, explore, creation, innovation etc. But it certainly is a unique virtue deeply engrained in humans. By design there is an un-selfish sheen created on human psyche – which yearns to be expressed. 

Designing a cooperative system – be it an organizational process, a legal regime, or a technical platform is immensely dwarfed if the makers rely on monitoring, rewards, and punishments. Their efficiency is limited by information gathering techniques. On the other hand systems that harness intrinsic motivation and self directed cooperative behavior don’t need to limit themselves to knowledge of what people will do. Every participant becomes his or her own monitor, bringing insights and initiatives to the task – whether or not someone is monitoring behavior.

I see it as a universal tendency in humans – to grow, learn, and create. This is what makes humans so special. Always there is an urge to break free – explore the un-chartered, experiment the unknown. This deep propensity to evolve towards a greater complexity is what makes humans to do different things. One such thing is to affiliate to the “Shattering Dynamics” – Shattering ones old self, in a desire to have a new collaborated self which is greater, nobler and awe-inspiring. Over millions of years, the genes of humans have observed it work. This assurance that two is always better than one, is hard-wired in the DNA of humans. This deep seated belief, allows humans to become a social animal. This infact is the reason humans are still alive in its excruciating journey of evolution in an ever increasing ruthless Nature.

There is this omnipresent unified spirit in humans to collaborate, cooperate, and consider oneself as a part of the whole – as the broken glasses take pride in having got shattered, but belonging to an inspiring collage! 

Evolutionary Psychologists attribute such a strategy as another natural selection’s agenda to proliferate healthier and greater number of genes. That might be true. But more important than the root cause of this phenomenon, is the phenomenon itself! It gives an awareness of the prevalent “un-selfishness” and “un-conditionality” apparent in human psyche. It is of lesser importance whether the source of such un-conditionality is a deep seated conditioned self oriented ploy of the genes. 

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The Best of Freud..

What is best in Freud is his sensing of paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings – having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraints. From this insight flows Freud’s most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

One biological view of this sort of conflict comes from Paul D. MacLean. He calls human brain as a “triune” brain whose three basic parts recapitulate our evolution:
1.    A reptilian core – the seat of our basic drives
2.    Surrounded by a Paleomammalian brain – which endowed our ancestors with , among other things, affection for offsprings
3.    Surrounded in turn by a neomammalian brain – This voluminous neomammalian brain brought abstract reasoning, language, and perhaps selective affection for people outside the family.
Like many neat models, this one may be misleadingly simple; but it nicely captures a critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.

Freud’s “Id” – The beast in the basement – presumably grows out of reptilian brain, a product of pre-social evolutionary history. This “superego” – loosely speaking, the conscience -  is a more recent invention. It is the source of the various kinds of inhibition and guilt designed to restrain the id in a genetically profitable manner; the superego prevents us, say, from harming siblings, or from neglecting our friends. The “ego” is the part in the middle. Its ultimate, if unconscious, goals are those of the id, yet it pursues them with long-term calculation, mindful of superego’s cautions and reprimands.

Congruence between the Freudian and Darwinian views of psychic conflict has been stressed by Randolph Nesse and the psychiatrist Alan T. Llyod. They see the conflict as a clash among competing advocacy groups, designed by evolution to yield sound guidance, much as tension among branches of government is designed to yield good governance. The basic conflict – the basic discourse – is “between selfish and altruistic motivations, between pleasure seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests. The functions of the id match the first half of each of these pairs, while the functions of the ego/superego match the second half”.

All told, Freud’s scorecard is not bad: he has identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of turbulence: and animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.

But when he got less general than this, Freud’s diagnosis was sometimes misleading. He often depicted the tension at the center of human life as essentially between not self and society but self and civilization.

In reality, it has been a long, long time since nay of our ancestors enjoyed “no restrictions” on these “instincts”. Even chimpanzees must weigh their predatory impulses against the fact that another chimp can be a “potential helper”, as Freud put it, and thus may be profitably treated with restraint.

The point is that repression and unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further complicated mental life. The new paradigm allows us to think clearly about how these things were designed over those millions of years. The theories of kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and status hierarchy tell us what kinds of self-deception are and aren’t likely to be favored by evolution. If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, may be they can save Freud’s name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if task is left to Darwinians.

[Excerpt from the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.]
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A New Life

It might be an interesting experiment to have a radically new way of living. It is about living in defiance of what initially natural selection had in mind during the inception of life - creating humans as a means of proliferation of genes. The deep engrained human propensities, hidden in the realm of sub-conscious awareness, have been evolutionarily hardwired to program humans to be a better vehicles of proliferation of more and better genes. That is what the life operates for all flora and fauna, as illustrated in details by hundreds of naturalists before and after Darwin.

Now, at this current era of information revolution at its peak - at a time when human brain has evolved to become aware of itself with never before clarity and accuracy, there is a possibility of living life in a brand new philosophy - the philosophy of being alive as a means to proliferate healthy memes, instead of healthy genes!

This new frame of reality, this new framework of existence is based on the idea that world is all about information, expressions, stories, ideas, dreams, thoughts, and intellectual insights. Humans are mere means to create and hold such information. In that terms, the army of creator and maintainer of thoughts, humans are joined with computer programs, journals, magazines, books, media, etc. These entities are artifacts of human ideation, and also work as stimulators for newer ideas. So the world transforms to a stage for not actors in the form of humans, rather a stage in which ideas/memes interact and evolve, using human mind and other forms of information processing centers as vehicles.

Such a scheme of things creates an interesting way of existence. A stance of living in which a human lives not for pleasure for its body, but for the evolution of its mind - to process more and more complex information. The parameter of social status and prestige becomes not the material possession and economic power, but rather information, and ideas in ones mind. The idea of self indulgence for physical pleasure goes out of context, as life is viewed as drama of ideas and thoughts - not of human beings as such.

This way of thinking has its innate advantages. The first and foremost is the alleviation the divide among humans on the basis of economic divide. The worth of a person is gauged by the possession of ideas, and innovative insights. The prime importance is given to the memes in the mind. This frees a person from the inevitability of hereditary aspect of wealth and happiness. It helps to create a more democratic and egalitarian society - atleast on the basis of material possession.

So, life becomes an aware journey where it is all about learning, exploring, creating, and thereby directing the evolution of mankind towards a more optimal existence - as a whole. In such scheme of things, the selfish reasons of one own self does not come into consideration. Although the natural selection forces a person to behave in its old model - vexed towards preserving and proliferation of self, an aware state of mind (the meta mind) stands in defines of the genetic pull, to give a direction against it, shaping with the force of memetic field.

This new way of being enables humanity to evolve in a well designed direction towards a more glorious future. A choice is applied at every point, whether to surrender to the genetic pull, or to stand out and do something different - something responsible. And moreover, life also frees itself from the baggage of negative human emotions. The psychological propensities like hatred, envy, jealousy, fear, animosity, guilt, etc get freed out. The root cause is that now the person looks every situation as being caused by data, stories, information. Not due to an evil intent of a human in flesh and blood. The harming gesture of a human is viewed as just a crystallization of a thought process - manifestation of a meme that is held in the mind of the person. The the victim looks for the opportunity to come up with a meme which defeats the harming meme. Thus there is a survival of the fittest meme that takes place - letting the more adaptable, and stronger meme to thrive over the weaker and rigid meme. Such a state of affair creates a more compassionate way of looking at things. Now, a person does not hate another person. Rather focusses on the meme from the mind of the other person. This helps to facilitate a problem solving stance, where sustained focus on the meme enables a person to act as a link between the problem and the solution.

Mental well being is always of primary importance in such scheme of things. That is facilitated through reading, intellectual inter courses, contemplations, ideation, brain storming, etc. This helps a more productive usage of the life span for an individual. Being busy with mental idea creation and knowledge gaining, is incentivized in such structure of a society.


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The Immortal Traveler

Ageless, timeless bright and sunny,
The Traveler is in his journey through eternity!

Once upon a time he was born as the river Mississippi,
Once he was born as the seagull of the seventh mountain!

Then there was a time when he was the Road to the clouds,
Guiding and taking countless Pilgrims’ caravans!

Then there was this time when he was born,
As the poem from the heart of the lovelorn poet,
Swinging in the rhythm of the Charm
Of those Most Beautiful Eyes!

There was one age, when he was
The rapture of the ageless sage having the glimpse of his God!

And then there was he born,
As the painful throbbing of the despaired heart,
Of the sculptor in love with his stone and indifferent sculpture!

Then he was born as the profound attraction
Of the droning bee,
For the nectar of the luscious flower red!

And again as the pious and peaceful prayer,
Of the silent nun behind the walls of the convent!

Life span varied of the traveler –
From the few moments of the lover’s moan
In the moments of those ecstatic unity!
To the eternal wait of the
The longing hearts of the banks of the Ganges!
Waiting in vain, since millennia
To kiss each other, To touch each other, To hug each other!

The traveler lived though civilizations many!
From the hunter-gatherers Shoshones,
To the Greeks and Romans!
To the barbarians,
To the New World,
Through revolutions many,
Civilizations after civilizations!
Wars after wars!

Each time he evolved,
He grew and flourished,
Using minds of men women,
Boys and girls,
As vehicles in continuum –
Ages after ages!

He was in the form of the
Human ideas, insights, and innovation!
Hopes, dreams and inspirations!
The longing love and compassion!
 Manifested in the world of form,
As poems, songs, scientific insights!
As religious raptures, paintings and sculptors!
As lofty bridges, Engineering marvels, forts and damns!
Spanning through eternity!

He was born as an innocent wish,
Of the little girl gazing the stars,
He lived through as the
Enthused heart of the lover
Held in tight embrace of his beloved!
Living in vigor and youth,
All through eternity
As the never ending love
Of the Sky and the Earth!

Men were born,
Both Great and Wretched!
Civilizations started, pinnacled and
The fated with the inevitable death!
Springs came, and Winter passed!
Many came, many went.

Remained but forever
The traveler – beyond the dots of eternity!
Throbbing with life,
Was the ardor of being Human!
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The uniqueness of Gautam Buddha

Being a creative social innovator, Siddhartha had a remarkable novel idea that he created on the top of his synthesis of his “Middle Path” based on the Hindu philosophy. This idea was his rejection of the concept of Atman/God. Unlike what he had read about and had been taught by his senior Hindu counterparts, he considered human to be a conglomerate of psychological propensities – like – joy, pain, love, hatred, jealousy, hunger, craving, etc. He always propagated the idea of meditation as a way to calm down these psychological pushes and pulls and knowing one’s own real self. The idea was to create peace for oneself by reducing the entropy in consciousness, by letting these temperamental disturbances settle down. This obviously causes an increase in perceptive and cognitive abilities.
Instead of preaching his ideas strictly as a series of sermons, Siddhartha invited his followers to go through their personal journey of self realization by doing meditation. This is very close to the western outlook of the science of psychology. The beauty in the thought process of Siddhartha was that he was disruptive in the sense that he felt that the need for the Hypothesis of God was not required to present a discipline for attaining Nirvana. For him Nirvana was not the attainment of the union with a Hypothesis of God. Rather it was about going to the depth of ones own self, knowing one better and better.
By abandoning the Atman concept, Siddhartha produced a change in the Hindu outlook, making it more akin to the contemporary scientific view. Siddhartha never invokes a Deity concept to explain the causes of Dukkha, indeed, of anything in the universe.
This was I guess a very important step forward towards a scientific and evolutionary outlook of life. I am not going to the correctness or in-correctness of the philosophy of Siddhartha. It is just that it was a disruptive innovation in the discipline of thought – in an attempt to explain life. Something as disruptive as the explanation of solar system to Napoleon, by the 19th century French astronomer – LaPlace – without the need of the Hypothesis of the presence of God, for any role to be played in creation of the solar system.
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The Verdict of History

They say that Rome was not build in a day. One of the richest civilizations every formed – The Romans were astounding in many ways – Their strong military, the economic system based on markets, Their effective governance and bureaucracy. All these were comparable in many ways to the modern system of society. It is commendable for humans to have reached that high level of sophistication around 500BC!

But then this dominant civilization became stagnant and decaying after reaching their pinnacle of evolution. Barbarians came and the great Roman Empire collapsed. To be precise the Western part of the empire went on the hands of the barbarians. There is one thing very interesting in all these. Till the Roman civilization was prospering and continuing to grow things were ok. But when it became stagnant, contributing little if anything to the march of its evolution, it was taken over by the Barbarians.
Barbarians had a great affinity to the civilized way of living that they inherited from the Romans. They immediately adapted the same, and continued the evolution of Roman memes.

The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects – slavery, exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement – flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again these human vulnerabilities have transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities.

It is just not that Romans were now lethargic and were not being able to maintain their cultural supremacy. Rather things are a bit more involved. Romans were just not able to adapt to the technological evolution they themselves started. With coming of standard, universally accepted coins and fully phonetic alphabet, complete with vowels, the potential existed for a more decentralized economy than ever before. So, for example, slavery – the ultimate in exploitation – now carried a higher cost of forgone productivity; the better lubricated the market, the more it can benefit from untrammeled participation. A mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste.

The Eastern half of the Roman Empire which survived the collapse of the west, was less guilty of some of these sins. The east seems all along to have had fewer slaves than the west. In the east the economy was less afflicted by such stultifying policies as the virtual ban on changing convocations. And, for historical reasons, the east had a more integrated economy.

The historian Chester Starr once wrote – “Every so often civilizations seems to work itself into a corner from which further progress is virtually impossible along the lines then apparent; yet if new ideas are to have a chance the old systems must be so severely shaken that they lose their dominance”.
Of course, technology isn’t some extraneous force, visited on the planet from outer space. It is selected by human minds through cultural evolution; people are the arbiters of technology. But technologies – in a broad sense, at least – are in turn arbiters of social structures.

The same evolution of memes is so much apparent in the companies and their products. There have been a definite direction apparent in the whole drama in the computing industry – starting from mainframes, to ascent of the Windows, to the rise of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. There have been a directed evolution towards more and more freedom, openness, collaboration, higher sophistication and complexity in every product and service.

Its looks so amazing that these units of culture use humans as vehicles to expand themselves. When one meme becomes stale another meme takes its place, which is more vibrant and complex. The story of the evolution of civilizations after civilizations have been an artifact to this unique dynamics of ideas, information, dreams, hope, expressions, innovations – all creations of human mind!

Certainly it is our responsibility to keep the mind nourished with Newer Ideas, Bigger Dreams, Brighter Hopes, and of course every expanding Love and Compassion!
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Towards an Inspirational Tomorrow!

The mixture of cooperative and competitive human instincts, the subtle but potent quest for status, has played a very important role in evolution of mankind towards better and more beautiful. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant noted the "unsocial sociability" of man, with special emphasis on the "unsocial" part and its ironic consequences.

Kant's in his essay "Idea for a universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" writes the following -
"Through the desire of honor, power or property, it drives him to seek status among his fellows, whom he cannot "bear" yet cannot "bear to leave". Via this quest for status, "The first true steps are taken from barbarism to culture, which in fact consists in the social worthiness of man". This commences "a continued process of enlightenment" as "all man's talents are gradually developed, his taste cultivated".

Without these "asocial qualities" human beings "would live an Arcadian, pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficieny and mutual love. But all human talents would remain hidden forever in a dormant state, and men, as good-natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals". In that event, "the end for which they were created, their rational nature, would be an unfilled void. Nature should thus be thanked for fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power".

Perhaps as history unfolds, Kant wrote, we will see "how the human race eventually works its way upward to a situation in which all the germs implanted by nature can be developed fully, and in which man's destiny can be fulfilled here on earth."

This was all conjectures, Kant stressed. Writing in 1784, before the harnessing of electricity, before the telegraph of typewriter or computer, he admitted that so far there was just "a little" evidence of such a "purposeful natural process". Only time would tell. "For this cycle of events seems to take so long a time to complete, that the small part of it traversed by mankind up till now does not allow us to determine with certainty the shape of the whole cycle, and the relation of its parts to the whole".


Well that was back then - in 1784, when the great Immanuel Kant had this visionary thought.
Today in the era of facebook, google, apple, durex, cloud computing, space exploration, quantum physics revolutions, path breaking advances in neuro-science, the human civilization has certainly come a long way towards a highly complex evolved state with a future more glorious than the Roman Gods.

In this globalized world closely knit with internet, things are much more easier to do than in those dark ages of Kant. Being alive at this point of the evolution of this planet and its inhabitants, we have this utmost privilege to build upon with more beauty on the legacy we already have.

The need of the hour is for the general demography to understand and appreciate that they belong to an inflection point of human destiny, and the way they spend their lives today will determine the degree of greatness humanity reaches tomorrow. The choice is yours - use this life for something bigger than your own existence- something which enables mankind to achieve further complexity and beauty, or just wade away in the life aimlessly - drugged with the genetic urge of indulgence. Also it is in urgent need that mankind shakes off its age old propensity to cling to idealistic perception of morality and goodness - giving mystical turns - making a good myth out of humanity - but of negligible pragmatic importance. As Kant had rightly pointed out 3 centuries ago that it was in Natural Selection's interest of human to be "humane" and NOT "divine". We certainly would have lost the race and be "good and harmonious herd of sheep" today, haven't we had the humane tendency to be better and more beautiful - sometimes labeled as "asocial" the attributes of envy, jealousy, being possessive, and enamored by the lust of respect and status.
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The Kin factor and Natural Selection

An excerpt from the book - The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

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With Hamilton's theory in hand, it is easier to appreciate the connection Darwin saw between a cow that has "well marbled" beef, and gets slaughtered and eaten, and an ant that works hard all its life without issue. The cow gene responsible for the good marbling, to be sure, has done nothing for its vehicle (the cow itself), which is now slaughtered, and may do nothing for the direct genetic legacy of its vehicle; dead cows cannot have more offspring. But the gene will still do much for the indirect genetic legacy of its vehicle, for by producing the marbling, it prompts a farmer to feed and breed the vehicle's close relatives, some of which contain copies of the gene. So too with the sterile ant.

The worker ants have no direct legacy as most of them are sterile, but the genes responsible for this fact do just fine, thank you, so long as the time and energy that would have been devoted to reproduction are profitably spent helping close relatives be prolific. Though the gene for sterility lies dormant in these relatives, it is there, and passes to the next generation, where it again produces gobs of sterile altruists devoted to its transmission. 

This is the exact sense in which worker bees and tasty cattle are alike : some genes, by impeding their transmission through one conduit, lubricate their transmission through others, and the net result is more transmission.

That Darwin, working with no knowledge of genes, with no sound understanding of the nature of heredity, should sense this parallel a century before Hamilton is one of the higher tributes to the care and precision of this thought. 

Those genes that are conducive to the survival and reproduction of copies of themselves are the genes that win. They may do this straightforwardly, by promoting their vehicle to survive, beget offspring, and equip the offspring for survival and reproduction. Or they may do this circuitously - by, say, prompting their vehicle to labor tirelessly, sterilely, and "selflessly", so that a queen ant can have lots of offspring containing them. However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from "their" point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism. 

Naturally, the level of organism is of primary concern to human beings; human beings are organisms. But it is of secondary importance to natural selection. if there is sense in which natural selection "cares" about anything - and there is, metaphorically - that thing is not us; it is the information in our sex cells, our eggs, and our sperm. Of course, natural selection "wants" us to behave in certain ways. But, so long as we comply, it does not care whether we are made happy or sad in the process, whether we get physically mangled in our genes, even whether we die. The only thing natural selection ultimately "wants" to keep in good shape is the information in our genes, and it will countenance any suffering on our part that serves this purpose.

Hamiltonian math contains a potent symbol - r - which represents the degree of relatedness among organisms. Among full siblings, r is 1/2, among half siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, it is 1/4, and among first cousins it is 1/8. The new math says that genes for sacrificial behavior will thrive so long as the cost to the altruist (in terms of impact on future reproductive success) is less than the benefit to the recipient (ditto) times the degrees of relatedness between the two. 

When Hamilton introduced the theory of kin selection, he used as his example the very group of organisms that had perplexed Darwin. Like Darwin, he had been struck by the extraordinary self-sacrifice among many insects. He noted that, thanks to a bizarre form of reproduction, these species feature an unusually large r. Sister ants share 3/4 of their genes by common descent, not just 1/2. So altruism of extraordinary magnitude is justified in the eyes of natural selection.

So too with human beings - not groups of human beings, but the group of cells that make up a human being. At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, muticellular life arose. Societies of cells became so highly integrated as to qualify for the title "organism", and these organisms, eventually begat us. It is fair, technically speaking, to consider even so coherent an organism as a human being as tight-knit community of single-celled organisms. These cells exhibit a kind of cooperation and self-sacrifice that makes even the machine-like efficiency of an insect colony look ragged by comparison. Almost all the cells in the human body are sterile. Only the sex cells - our "queen bees" - get to make copies of themselves for posterity. That the zillions of sterile cells act as if they are perfectly content with this arrangement is doubtless grounded in the fact that the "r" between them and the sex cells is 1; genes in sterile cells are transmitted to future generations as assuredly via sperm of egg as they would be if their particular cellular vehicles were doing the transmitting. Again: when "r" is 1, altruism is ultimate.

Women are NOT equal to Men

An excerpt from the book - "The Moral Animal" by - Robert Wright.
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There is a difference of opinion over how much "respect" women get in the modern moral climate. 

Respect is an ambiguous word. Maybe men who consider woman well "respected" mean that women have been accepted at work as worthy colleagues. And maybe women are indeed getting more of this kind of respect. But if by "respect" you mean what the Victorians meant when they urged respect for women - not treating them as objects of sexual conquest - then respect has probably dropped since 1970. Women would certainly like to have more of the second kind of respect.

There is no clear reason for sharp trade-off between the two; no reason that feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in insisting on the first kind of respect, had to undermine the second. But, as things happened, they did! They did undermine the second form of respect over the first, going in the name of male - female equality.

They preached innate symmetry of the sexes in all major arenas, including sex. Many young women took the doctrine of symmetry to mean they could follow their sexual attractions and disregard any vague visceral wariness: sleep with any man they liked, without fear that his sexual interest did not signify comparable affection, without fear that sex might be more emotionally entangling for her than for him. (Some feminists practiced casual sex almost out of a sense of ideological commitment.)

Men, for their part, used the doctrine of symmetry to ease themselves off the moral hook. Now they could sleep around without worrying about emotional fallout; women were just like them, so no special consideration was necessary. In this they were and are, aided by women who actively resist special moral consideration as patronizing (which it sometimes is, and certainly in Victorian England).

Lawmakers, meanwhile, took sexual symmetry to mean that women needed not special legal protection. In many states, the 1970 brought "no-fault" divorce and the automatically equal division of a couple's assets - even if one spouse, usually the wife, hasn't been on a career track and thus faces bleaker prospects. The lifelong alimony that a divorced woman could once expect may now be replaced by a few years of "rehabilitative maintenance" payments, which are supposed to give her time to launch her career recovery - a recovery that, in face, will extend beyond a few years if she has a few children to tend. In trying to get a more equitable deal, it wont help to point out that cause of breakup was her husband's rampant philandering, or his sudden, brutal intolerance. These things, after all, are nobody's fault. The "no-fault" philosophy is one reason divorce is literally a profitable enterprise for men. (The other reason is lax enforcement of the man's financial obligations.) The height of no-fault vogue has now passed, and state legislatures have undone some of the damage, but not all.

The feminist doctrine of innate sexual symmetry wasn't the only culprit, or even, initially, the main one. Sexual and marital norms had been changing for a long time, for many reasons, ranging from contraceptive technology, from residential patterns to recreational trends. So why dwell on feminism? Party because of the sheer irony that attempts to stop one kind of exploitation of women aided another kind. Partly too, because though feminists did not single-handedly create the problem, some of them have helped sustain it. Until very recently, fear of feminist backlash was far and away the main obstacle to an honest discussion of difference between the sexes. Feminists have written articles and books denouncing "biological determination" without bothering to understand biology or determinism. And the increasing, if belated, feminist discussion of sex differences is sometimes vague and disingenuous; there is a tendency to describe differences that are plausible explicable in Darwinian terms while dodging the question of whether they are innate.

The Invisible and Unconscious

Behind the ruthless force of the Big Bang,
And zipping speed of the hurtling planets.

Behind the sluggish caterpillar metamorphosizing
Into the flamboyant Butterfly.

 Behind the superficial whims and fancies –
The profound ways of the genes – following natural selection.

Behind the veil of dry expressions –
The pristine and profound depth of Being in Love!

Behind the glamour of smiles and accolades,
The pin-drop solitude of cherishing a long passed memory,
Feeling the throb of a heart bleeding with the blessing for thou!

Behind the certainty of free will,
The unconscious inevitability of ways of things!

Behind the linear cause and effect,
The beauty of picture perfect asynchronous coincidences!

Behind the catastrophe of a dream crushed,
The beautiful genesis of a world bigger and better!

Behind the fragile birth to death dichotomy,
The eternal journey from immortality!

Behind the parasitic urge of being loved, liked and understood,
Being Indifferent in the Quite, Pristine, and Graceful Space of the Pride of Being in Love!

Irrespective of the misfortunes, heartbreak, obstacles, death and loss,
Being un-altered as a pole-star – sparkling out the radiance of optimism, creativity and workability!

Behind the rigid stance of the ego,
The humble and agile adaptability of mind and heart!

Transcending the rigidity and limiting world of the form,
Being present to the limitless and profound world of the non-form –
Contemplating in the silent space of deep meditation!
Across the jostle of everyday struggles.

Going farther from the domain of Doing,
Being grounded at the domain of Being!

Breaking the shackles of superstitious segregation God,
As a fictitious character of a farcical fairy tale,
Breathing the freedom of seeing God,
In the impeccable beauty of nature and perfection of human creativity;
In the positive dreams, desires, aspirations –
Contouring creation to a better tomorrow!

To Thou – Invisible and Unconscious,
I express my heartfelt gratitude!

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