What Happens When Your Enthusiasm Overtakes Your Wisdom?

It is very important for human beings to be balanced in mind. Mind balance is what is called maturity of mind. Some may call it a sane mind. Only a human being with a sane mind can have wisdom or the capacity to listen to the feeble life guidance that originate from a source that transcends the inbuilt intelligence of the brain.

It is not necessary for me to ascertain the fact that an imbalanced mind akin to insanity. And insanity takes away the human qualities in various ways. While insanity is mostly a curable brain disorder in these days, various forms of insanity are non distinguishable often. That makes it impossible for a good majority of people to seek ways and means to rectify the mind disorder they might possess in some degree or the other!

In this article, I wish to discuss about some subtle forms of mind imbalances that many of the modern day individuals or groups of people may have in varying degrees that are not usually distinguished or recognized as insanity always.

The fundamental principle of to judge any imbalance is deviation from the normal. Mind is no exception to this rule. Applying this logic, we may safely conclude that any thing in excess from normal is a kind of insanity.

A good human being should have compassion to fellow beings and other life forms.But when this compassion becomes irrationally imbalanced it becomes insanity causing loss of wisdom.

Imagine the case of such an irrational human being. The good trait of compassion in this human being could be too much in this individual making him or her soon becoming filled with too much enthusiasm to safeguard other life forms. This over enthusiasm soon envelopes the mind of this individual to such an extent that he or she would soon transforms to become a fanatic ideologist in the guise of a life protector. He or she may become a fanatic environmentalist who cannot withstand the idea of any kind of a damage to a green plant or a tree for any purpose whatsoever!

Another version of such a fanatic life protector may assume the guise of an animal protector that he or she would make the lives of fellow human beings a misery by making a hue and cry about some other sane fellow beings killing some street dogs that have become a danger to the society or some other human beings slaughtering animals for eating their meat or for other purposes. 

Their compassion to other life forms soon turn to a kind of sadism that they take insane pleasure in troubling other human beings who do not agree their line of thoughts. When their insanity goes to higher levels, these fellows would not even mind the destruction of other human beings who are not agreeing to them, simply forgetting their original compassion to life fully! 

Some other kinds become obsessed with their spirituality or religion fully forgetting the fundamental that their spiritual or religious teachings do not really encourage them to be with animosity to other human beings. Teaching god's love, they become insane proponents of evil! They make war cries to kill other innocent human beings who do not agree with their view points of spirituality or religion. They call those of the kinds that not like them as satanic and venture out to destroy all those for and on behalf of god, fully forgetting that it is the satanic mind in them that makes them to behave ungodly. Here too the problem essentially lies with the subtle insanity that they have! They do not realize that it is their insane mind in them that is causing wisdom to vanish from them!

Then there is another kind of insane fellows. These are the types who instigate insanity among their fellow beings and find sadistic pleasure when such others become more and more insane to cause troubles in the society.

Yet another kind of insane fellows keep praying to their gods instead of doing anything to stop insanity among their fellow beings keep rising. They keep thinking that it is the gods who play with the minds of people. A person known to me recently told me that God is really a sadist who keep turning the people against each other and enjoying them fighting and killing each other! I failed to convince him that it is not God, but we ourselves are the problem creators because of our imperfections and our varying types and degrees of insanity!

Subtle insanity is very difficult to detect and treat. Wise counselling by more balanced individuals could be beneficial to bring an individual to normalcy when the kind of feeble mind imbalance on any count is at its nascent state of development. But when more and more of the modern humans are victims of some forms of subtle insanity and when modern humans are abandoning their habits of talking to each other, the number of persons with imbalanced minds are on the rise!

Wise men from the old had theorized that the idle minds are devil's workshop. In reality when humans have lesser challenges to live, their minds become more and more idle. For many, this period poses another great challenge in life. Material comforts are no more the challenge and they fail to transcend their minds beyond materialism. Human beings are expected to use their minds for seeking advanced truths of life when material challenges are overcome. Unfortunately, a good majority of humans fail to do so. They try to get themselves immersed in materialistic thoughts even after material life challenges are no more any real challenges to them. In that process, they slip back to thought processes of degradation that causes subtle insanity to set in. Without they ever realizing, their minds have become the devil's workshops! 

I do not know if the real devil is actually playing any role in this or not. There are some possibilities for that for some people. But on the whole, it is the individuals themselves who are responsible for this degradation of mind.

To come out of it, it is essential for humans to know the purpose of their lives. Yes, I am talking about the purpose of human life and not about the purpose of life in plants and animals. While there is some purpose in the latter, the purpose of life in humans is much more important. To learn about that, subtle insanity has to be taken out from the mind first. And that is possible only when the individual concerned recognizes his or her immaturity of mind in order to set it right!

Will You Burn Your Home for Fear of Rats?

In my native language, Malayalam, there is an idiom like this: 'eliye pedichu illom chuttathu pole' [എലിയെ പേടിച്ചു ഇല്ലം ചുട്ടത് പോലെ] . Literally in English it means 'like burning house fearing the rat'!

Only foolish people will burn their home for killing or evicting a rat that went inside their home as they have high aversion to this rodent.

But foolish or stupid people are very common in our society. So, day in and day out we see similar stupid acts done by stupid people around us.

Each passing generation smiles at the foolish superstitions of its 
ancestors while it goes on entertaining those fallacies of thought and worship 
which will give cause for further smiling on the part of enlightened posterity.
 [The Urantia Book Paper 86:6.5]

Many of us might have learnt the story of the stupid son of the wood cutter, during our childhood. The story was included in the text books of children for making them understand the forms of foolishness or stupidity among us. In the story, the wood cutter entrusted his son to keep watch while he took a short nap in the jungle after cutting the woods with his axe for some time. While he slept, the watchful son saw a fly disturbing his father by flying around his father's head and occassionally sitting over his nose. The stupid son took the axe and tried to kill the fly sitting over his father's nose! I need not tell the rest of the story because any one not stupid could easily guess what could have happened!

But such stupidities we see every where even now. Some times we also do such acts of stupidity. That is because, we all have some imperfections in our mind capacities that we call as our wisdom. Mind you, wisdom is different from intelligence, though wisdom needs intelligence.

I had an IITian colleague who was extremely good with his mathematical intelligence and problem solving skills. He would solve mathematical problems just like a computer which many of us could not. He also had a sharp memory and could recite or quote several literary works quite easily which too were difficult for many. But if you ask him simple questions about day to day activities he would stumble and most often I had seen him in confused state, incapable of taking a decision. He would even stumple for a decision to enter his room and would occassionally stand still at the door thinking what to do! Such individuals, though geniuses in some areas of intelligence, are dealt as lacking common sense or practically foolish or stupid.

Every one of us, being imperfect, do reflect some of our stupidities at some point of time, if not often. The degree of our stupidity varies from individual to individual and group to group. But when our foolish acts are predominant over shadowing our wise acts then we fall in the class of stupid people in general.

When we are too stupid, we fail to recognize our foolishness and that is a much more serious problem than being stupid at times!

Foolish people generally lack the ability to differentiate between facts and falsehoods. They also lack the ability to differentiate between good and bad. When they are too foolish, they argue a lot to prove what they think as right regardless of the realities.

Unfortunately, when stupid people are in majority, it would be wise for wise people to keep quiet. Perhaps this could be the reason why in India in these times, we hardly see any wise men or women open their mouths to express their views! They are quietly realizing the most difficult thing in their lives!

Stupids in majority make stupid laws and intrepret laws foolishly making the society and nation hellish. When they try to come out of the problems caused by one stupidity, they do ten other stupid acts.

But come whatever may, they never seek wise directions from a few wise men and women here and there to come out of their miseries caused by their own foolish acts.

They can relish on rotten food and enjoy drinking sewage like liquids. They declare such foods and drinks as too good for health even while they suffer from chronic dysentry and stomachaches. But at the same time they accuse the cook who made clean, delicious alternative food for them for years and also kick the cook hard  that he is forced to run for his life! They are indeed stupid to realize the causes of their dysentries!

Is it not a situation similar to burning the home for killing the rats?

We have been doing our activities without application of our intelligent minds in several of the instances making our acts effectively stupid. That caused our air, water and land polluted. We now do not have naturally occuring fresh water or fresh air in most parts of our regions. Ofcourse, the wise among us knows to device means ot over come such problems. But we are so stupid in our collective acts that we never allow our learned experts to do the work properly for us. Instead, we create such stupid hue and cries that our engineers shy away from doing any effective work!

The stupids among us know only to shout punish, punish and punish, but do not ever say reward, reward and reward! We still virtually live in the medieval era where the kings and chieftains believed stupidly in the effectiveness of punishment only for getting any work done. Our laws only talk about punishments and nothing about rewards! Our stupid minds recognize only sticks and no carrots!

So we do not mind to burn our homes for punishing that naughty rat that went inside our home with least regard to us! We want the perpetuator killed at whatever be the cost! For that matter we want all perpetuators to be killed, not only the rats! We want our laws to be re-written that way, if ii is not that way now!

Our stupid minds cannot recognize any justice system other than the archaic tooth-for-tooth-and-eye-for-eye laws of the old!

Education has only made us to be masters of formal sciences and arts. Some of us have the highest educational degrees and scores. Unfortunately, our education has failed to remove stupidity from our minds!

So we justify and scientifically prove the usefulness of burning the home for killing the rat! We don't agree that we are stupid fools. We know each and everything and there're nothing on earth that are not known to us, we boldly claim. Are we stupid?

For us what is right is that what the majority endorse. We hardly give any weightage to the opinions of a few here and there even when they are telling the truths. Our media men and media managers know this fully well. They know the art of making the not-so-thinking public to swing in favor of what they think as right! This is cleverness of getting the stupids swing!

Our social media is full of boastful know-it-all individuals who consider all others other than them as stupids. They use all kinds of profanities to bulldoze and intimidate such people whom they consider as stupids! Had there been any chance, they would have considered it a better option to literally bulldoze those who did not agree to their ideas rather than using the verbal threats that they are so used to now.

Eliminate all those whom you do not like, even when it amounts to burning your own home! There is no stupidity in those line of thoughts, they argue!

If history is any indication, collective stupidity destroys civilizations and nations. When stupids are on the rise, the wise start thinking about the imminent fall that is nearing!

The stupids will start burning their own homes out of fear, making the whole nation burn!

Can it be prevented? 

If you think this as a stupid question, the time for the rise of stupidity perhaps has begun!  

Some Random Thoughts about Food, Living, Intelligence and Spiritual Wisdom !

The internet space has lot of information on foodstuffs of various kinds. Many sites are dedicated to cooking and healthy eating habits. Recipes of various kinds could be obtained by searching the net. But, yet I find there is some need for a comprehensive coverage of these raw food items at one place especially to aid those in India who use Hindi, Malayalam or English for their day to day communications.

For survival human beings need energy. Energy is obtained from foods that contain carbohydrates, such as starch, sugars, glucose and the like. Energy value of a food item is measured in terms of calories. Additionally they need some other foods that provide some other essential ingredients for various purposes and processes of their living bodies. Ideally the food taken by human beings should contain the following:

1. Carbohydrates (starch, sugar, glucose) and fats (oils, meat) for energy.

2. Proteins for body growth, cell repair and upkeep.

3. Roughage consisting mainly of dietary fibers which are not absorbed by the body, but are essential for smooth movement of food through the 8 m long alimentary canal aiding digestion and waste elimination.
4. Minerals which are compounds of metals and non-metals found in various foods which are required in low quantities for the body to synthesize various complex compounds for innumerable body functions.
5. Vitamins, which are complex compounds
6.Water, the main constituent of body cells and blood and the medium for expulsion of unwanted soluble wastes materials.
7. Ingredients that enhances taste, smell and color of food.

People have many common features and at the same time are different in many other features. So, eating habits, likes and dislikes and the manner in which food is digested, absorbed and utilized by the body all differ from person to person.

While statistical results published by various kinds of researchers may be useful for enriching our general knowledge in food and food related benefits and problems, it is foolishness to blindly believe such data as universal truths.

Enjoying a good or tasty food is not a sin. But living only for food indulgence is nothing less than a sin.

How much one should eat? And how often? It is foolishness to follow some rules always. If you follow rules for every thing, you degrade yourself as a robot. You degrade your human existence to that of a humanoid.

It is better that you make wise decisions based on your own judgments. After all why do you have that huge brain with all those intelligence if you are not to use it ?

At the same time, it is not a good idea to waste your time always thinking about food to take those wise decisions. There are much more important things in this life than food.

Human life is a mixture of many things. It involves survival, material existence, creativity, friendship and fellowship, discharge of duties and responsibilities and a desire to find the real force behind life whom we sometimes call as God. The latter desire when nurtured properly progresses towards an understanding towards the purpose of life. A man or woman who is realizing the purpose of life has progressed towards what is known as spirituality.

How to progress from material well being to spiritual well being? Is it essential?

Again, your own assessment is the best guide. You have all the inherent faculties and abilities for that judgement.

Is it possible for life to sustain without taking food?

Logically speaking, it should be possible. Food is required as an energy source for us because our body hardware is presently designed in that manner. Those who have designed it that way, logically should have known the methods of designing it in some other way as well.

For example, look at the plants. They are living. They take energy from sunlight and even convert the excess light energy as food for those living beings of the animal kingdom.

The divine designers of plants and animals have the knowledge to do it.

Then, why did they not give us that ability?

I think it is foolishness to question the higher intellectual wisdom of the divine designers of life.

Perhaps, they might disclose those secrets to us some appropriate time.

I am fortunate to learn some thing of the divine wisdom and I am truly amazed!