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true richness comes from innovative thinking, a sensitive heart and a smiling face.

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Excerpts from "What can i give?" by Srijan Pal Singh
Teachings of APJ Abdul Kalam
Knowledge equation = Righteousness + Creativity + Courage
An Oath for the Youth by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam
I will have a goal and work hard to achieve that goal. I realize that small aim is a crime.
I will work with integrity and succeed with integrity.
I will be a good member of my family, society, the nation and the world.
I will always try to save or better someone's life, without any discrimination of caste, creed, language, religion or state. Wherever I am, a thought will always come to my mind. That is, what can I give?
I will always protect and enhance the dignity of every human life without any bias.
I will always remember the importance of time. My motto will be 'Let not my winged days be spent in vain'.
I will always work for a clean planet and clean energy.
As a youth of my nation, I will work with courage to achieve success in all my tasks and enjoy the success of others.
I am as young as faith and as old as my doubts. Hence, I will light the lamp of faith in my heart.
My national flag flies in my heart and I will bring glory to my nation.
On criticism - Criticism is a debt which needs to be paid off with applause. It takes a toll on both the criticised and the criticiser. It should be given and taken, wisely. Follow up and assess constantly whether your criticism is right. be the first to applaud when corrected. such should be the circle of criticism.
The one who works hardest deserves the greatest respect.
What would you like to be remembered for?
Critical stakes ignite the mind and awaken hidden potential. Difficulty cannot be handled by being scared of how high the peak is. It can be tackled by drawing a path to the peak, and when you toil in the process of scaling that height, you learn and grow.
Major General Swaminathan - Arishadvarga prevents man from attaining salvation (moksha).
1. kama (lust) 2. krodha (anger) 3. lobh (greed) 4. moha (attachment) 5. mada or ahankar (pride) 6. matsarya (jealousy)
Think solution - even if compact.
Think of solutions which you can implement alone and avoid making grand plans which require the globe to tilt for you. Pocket sized solutions which walk are better than wardrobe sized plans that squat.
A leader gives the credit for success to those who work for it, while he takes the blame on himself for their failures. That is leadership.
Anyone can be intelligent, he (Abdul kalam) was great because of his high emotional involvement. Great achievers are not merely smart or productive, they are unimaginably sensitive and compassionate. Emotions directed towards a specific goal make such people more determined; it enables them to push themselves and deliver results far beyond their wildest imagination.
science provides focus.
faith provides perspective.
dr. brahma prakash (director - VSSC) - if you perceive the world as mean and rude, it will disturb your concentration!
acharya mahapragya - svetambar terapanth order of jainism -
our consciousness is the birthplace of our ethics.
we instinctively know what is right when our consciousness is clear. Our consciousness is our true friend.
development plan - PURA (met pramukh swamiji), wrote Target 3 Billion.
If we are weak, we become selfish, if we are empty, we take, if we are filled, we automatically give to all. this is our nature.
to be a giver, you dont need to be rich. all you need is compassion in your heart and a smile on your face.
ssp - space solar power (howard bloom)
A general theory of Love - notes
Traditional versions o f the mind hold that Passion is a troublesome remnant from humanity's savage past, and the intellectual subjugation of emotion is civilizations triumph. Logical but dubious derivations follow: emotional maturity is synonymous with emotional restraint. Schools can teach children missing emotional skills just as they impart the facts of geometry or history. To feel better, outthink your stubborn and recalcitrant heart. So says convention.
In this book, we demonstrate that where intellect and emotion clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom. In a pleasing turnabout, scienceβReasons right handβis proving this so.The brains ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live immersed in unseen forces and silent messages that shape our destinies. As individuals and as a culture, our chance for happiness depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolvesβ invisibly, improbably, inexorablyβaround love.
More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing.
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something," wrote Bertrand Russell. "In the absence of good grounds for belief, ht will be satisfied with bad ones." Wherever and whenever they are, people vastly prefer any explanation (however flawed or implausible) to none.
As physicists and mathematicians delved deeper into the stuff of reality, they collided wich the end o f objectivity's jurisdiction. "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" asked William Butler Yeats in 1928. The poet was in perfect harmony with the science o f his age, which was reeling at the impossibility o f dividingβas traditional science demandedβ the knower from the known. Those hard-won lessons in scientific subjectivity can help us to understand why our age is at last on the brink of a revolution in humanity's vision of its own heart.
Tracing the initiation of movement further back into the tangled undergrowth of the neural jungle soon reveals the brains propensity for frustrating such facile conceptions as a neat locus of control. Recordings of encephalography electrical waves show, amid their jagged spikes and hieroglyph swirls, a signature downward dip signifying that a neuronal mandate for motion is under way: the socalled readiness wave. While the motor cortex produces motion, the readiness wave appears to signal intent. So we should look here for will. When experimenters placed their subjects in front of a clock, however, they found that the conscious experience of a decision to move occurs after the readiness wave has already passed. What we feel as the conscious spark of resolve in this case proves to be an afterthought, not the majestic nexus of initiative we might imagine. Just where and how the early glimmers of intention coalesce, like glittering dust motes into the swirling jinni of action, remains beyond the ken of todays science.The more we discover, the more we find chat we do not know. As E. E. Cummings observed: Always a more beautiful answer that asks a more beautiful question.
Another gift that the neocortex bestows is the skill of abstraetion: every task that calls for symbolic representation, strategy, planning, or problem-solving has its headquarters in the neocortical brain.
T he power to symbolize arose not to grant the gift o f gab but because it can keep an animal alive. Abstraction invents the possibility o f a mental future. Because it can travel into the realm o f the hypothetical, the neocortical brain can envision where and how a plan ends, allowing its possessor to strategizeβrehearse and refine without betraying his intention prematurely, thereby allowing fictive mistakes whose corporeal counterparts he could not afford. T h e neurophysiologist W. H. Calvin has proposed that the cerebral neocortex originally developed to serve ballistic movementsβ complicated, one-shot actions that occur too rapidly to be modified as they uncoil, requiring planned precision. Th e modern Hom o sapiens on the verge o f shooting a crumpled paper ball into a distant wastebasket or lobbing keys to an acquaintance may experience today that moment o f imaginative hesitancy before release, the preliminary, practice demitoss that sharpens aim. A talent for visualizing what-ifs may better someone's rock-throwing as much as his skill at chess. The former aptitude is what secured for the neocortex a lasting place.
Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving.
After limbic ablation, adult hamsters ignored the calls and cries of their young; a limbectomized pup would repeatedly walk on top o f the others "as though they did not exist." In addition to erasing the recognition o f others, removing limbic tissue robbed these mammals o f responsiveness to the playful overtures of normal littermates. In humans, the neocortical capacity for thought can easily obscure other, more occult mental activities. Indeed, the blazing obviousness of cogitation opens the way to a pancognitive fallacy: I think, therefore everything I am is thinking. But in the words o f a neocortical brain as mighty as Einstein's: "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, o f course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve."
Because people are most aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure o f argument and will. No t so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out o f three. Much of one's mind does not take orders. "From modern neuroanatomy," writes a pair of neuroscience researchers, "it is apparent that the entire neocortex o f humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it evolved." The novelist Gene Wolfe makes an identical, albeit lovelier, observation: We say, "I will," an J "I will not," an J imagine ourselves (though w* ohey the orders oj some prosaie person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us, and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part oj ourselves.
A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency o f discipline but because the jurisdiction o f will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded. Our society's love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts
As elegant as his insight may be, it is the force of Archimedes' emotion that calls to us down the centuries. His thrill, not his intellectual dexterity, is what has given his theorem its notoriety. The real principle behind his principle is that most people will never fathom its mathematicsβbut his exuberance they do understand. That rush o f joy comes to some from seeing an out-of-the-park home run, to others in the colors o f the sun setting into the Pacific, or in the eyes o f a newborn baby. Archimedes' delight transmits itself across two millennia in a heartbeat. W h y should we feel a kinship with Archimedes' enthusiasm, even if his physics leave us tepid? To answer that question, we would first have to know the answers to these: what are emotions? How do they work? Where do they come from, and what are they for?
emotions do more than color our sensory world; they are at the root o f everything we do, the unquenchable origin o f every act more complicated than a reflex
Greed and ambition run beneath the surface o f economics; vengefulness and reverence under the veneer o f justice. In all cases, emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide.
As his title suggests, Darwin considered emotions an evolutionary adaptation of organisms, no different from a host of other bodily modificationsβclaws, legs, stingers, gills, scales, wings. Natural selection should favor emotionality for the same reason that it does any featureβenhanced survival. Organisms with an advantageous somatic structure gain a competitive edge and live to pass their genes on to the next generation, while those less equipped fade into the paleontology texts.
Convincing proof of universal emotional expressions came when Ekman reviewed 100,000 feet o f movie film shot o f isolated, preliterate tribes in New Guinea. The footage revealed that Ne w Guineans make the same facial expressions as Americans.
Human beings, as tool-making animals, are prone to associate importance with durability. The columns of the Parthenon or the massive stone blocks o f looming pyramids easily elicit our wonder and awe. The momentousness of emotions in human lives stands in befuddling contrast to their impossible brevity. Emotions are mental mayflies, rapidly spawned and dying almost as quickly as they arise. High-speed videography shows that facial expressions begin within milliseconds o f a provocative event, and they fade immediately
Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but (among other things) a facial expression. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold of awareness, what emerges is tjetlingβthe conscious experience o f emotional activation. As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits after a feeling is no longer perceptible. Like the ghost of Hamlets father, an emotion appears suddenly in the drama of our lives to nudge the players in the proper direction, and then dissolves into nothingness, leaving behind a vague impression o f its former presence.
In our usage (adapted from Ekman), a mood is a state of enhanced readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows.
The most common precipitant of this reiceranc emotionality is cognition: people tend to think about emotionally arousing occasions afterward, recirculating the experience and stimulating the consequent emotion just as if the inciting event had actually reoccurred. The human penchant for this post hoc cogitation can magnify the physiologic impact o f an emotion many times. Anger sharply increases blood pressure on a short-term basis, for instance, but it may well be the recurrent stewing over provocative events that causes sustained hypertension in touchy people like type A executives. The neocortical brains tendency to wax hypothetical then becomes a deadly liability. The limbic brain, unable to distinguish between incoming sensory experience and neocortical imaginings, revisits emotions upon a body that was not designed to withstand such a procession.
In its present form, the limbic brain is not only the seat of dreams, but also the center of advanced emotionality.
Th e face is the only place in the body where muscles connect direcdy to skin.
With its power to weave and unravel abstractions, the neocortex produces languageβa string of arbitrary symbols that convey a message. While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. Tha t division of labor creates translation troubles. On e of the neural mechanisms that bridges the gap is prosodyβa process the neocortex borrows to inflect its dry concepts with emotional relevance.
Wernicke's area translates the whistles and clicks o f inbound speech into meaning, while Brxxa's area spins thoughts into a steady string o f words. People with damage to Wernicke's area cannot understand what is said to them, though they can express themselves verbally, while those with damage to Broca's area can no longer talk, but they can still comprehend others who do.
T he mirror-image areas o f the right temporal neocortex perform the same functions on the emotional content o f speech. People with damage to these areas evidence aprosodia: a significant fraction o f them can no longer discern the emotional meaning o f speech, while others cannot deliver emotional nuances in spoken language. Thes e are crippling deficits, because sentences with identical semantic structure can easily have opposite meanings when they differ in prosody. Sarcasm owes the whole o f its existence to cone. A sentence as apparently straightforward as "That's a nice haircut" is thoroughly ambiguous without prosodyβthe words can convey anything from "I'd like to go to bed with you" to "You look like a fool."
. In mammals, emotionality vaulted to a vastly more sophisticated level. A young crocodilian can sense a possible predator behind a wavering frond, and it can mobilize its physiology to evade the threat. But a mammal can turn its advanced neural sensor not only on the inanimate world but also on other animals that are emotionally responsive. A mammal can detect the internal state of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match the situationβa change in turn sensed by the other, who likewise adjusts. While the neural responsivity of a reptile is an early, tinny note o f emotion, mammals have a full-throated duet, a reciprocal interchange between two fluid, sensing, shifting brains. Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call litnbu resonanceβa symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each others inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face o f another emotionally responsive creature a multilayered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap o f yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze o f another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.
Spitz had rediscovered that a lack o f human interactionβhandling, cooing, stroking, baby talk, and playβis fatal to infants
A mammal in protest shows a distinct physiology. Heart rate and body temperature increase, as do the levels of eateeholamiius and Cortisol. Catecholamines (like adrenaline) elevate alertness and activity. A young mammal who has lost his mother ought to stay alert long enough to find her, and the rise in catecholamines during protest promotes his vigil. This part of the ancient attachment machinery may also keep a human being staring at the ceiling all night after a breakup.
Adults remain social animals: they continue to require a source o f stabilization outside themselves. That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their ownβno t should or shouldn't be, but (ant be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge o f the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them
The lack of an attuned mother is a nonevent for a reptile and a shattering injury to the complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.
the process whereby che brain undergoes struccural change from experience. Memory does noc travel a straight line, and neither does the human heart.
But have no doubtβunconscious emotional knowledge Joes exist. A shadow does lie across the landscape of memory, but that darkness is not the sinister specter of censorship.
As we move through the world we tend to presume that success comes from understanding. The brightness o f rationality's narrow beam makes this supposition nearly inescapable. "Reason is the substance o f the universe," Hegel crowed in an age when science still expected to explicate everything. But these memory studies have intuition leading comprehension by a country mile; they reveal our lives lit by the diffuse glow of a second sun we never see. When confronted with repetitive experiences, the brain unconsciously extracts the rules that underlie them
Th e medieval definition o f setientia was just that: ccgnitio per causas, knowing the cause. Th e science o f our day is confirming the utility, even the supremacy, o f knowing that X is so without why. Comprehensions proper role is icing on the cognitive cake. Reason, as Pascal observed, is the slow and tortuous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it
The poec Charles Baudelaire once wroce chac che devil's finest trick is convincing the world he doesn't exist. Implicic memory has done the same.
He owes the ignorance o f his own heart not to repression but to the brains dual memory design.
Tolstoy was right: Happy families are blandly similar (much in che way chac healchy bodies are), and unhappy families unique in che exacc and varied configuracions of their pachology.
Only a person o f surpassing wisdom doubts his own mind enough to remark, as the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson once did when reversing himself on a point o f law, "The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then."
Limbic Attractors spawn a vexing and fascinating aspect o f emotional lifeβ"transference," Freud's term for the universal human tendency to respond emotionally to certain others as if they were figures from one's past.
The teach of limbic Attractors stretches beyond the moment. The situ qua non of a neural network is its penchant for strengthening neuronal patterns in direct proportion to their use. The more often you do or think or imagine a thing, the more probable it is that your mind will revisit its prior stopping point. When the circuits are sufficiendy well worn such that thoughts fly down them with little friction or resistance, that mental path has become a part of youβit is now a habit of speech, thought, action, attitude.
In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy o f our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts o f the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brains inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. W h o we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.
Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament They arranged for especially nurturing monkey mothers to adopt baby monkeys genetically prone to anxiety. Anxious young monkeys usually become inhibited, low-ranking adults. The substitution o f an attentive mother reversed their fatesβonce on a genetic path to a lifetime of timidity, these well-loved monkeys became dominant in their troops. T he inverse also holds: inadequate nurturance can disrupt a healthy limbic inheritance, imposing anxiety and depression on someone who had the genetic makings o f a bappy life.
A limbically attuned mother can tell a fearsome fall from a harmless one. When a child senses his mothers fear, his
anxiety rises or falls in harmony with hers. H e looks to his mother as a piano tuner looks to the sound o f pure C. After he compares what he feels with what his mother shows, a child's emotional read on the world moves closer to hers.
Fuzzy people exist, he tells us in this scene, people whose selves, not their bodies, are painfully indeterminate. Such a person enters psychotherapy because he does not
know who he is. To people who do know, the predicament sounds improbable. But a person cannot know himself until another knows him. Omit skilled limbic resonance from the life o f a child, and he will emerge with a psyche as indistinct as the blurry habitus of Allen's character. If a parent actively hates a child, if she affirmatively knows him in the punishing clarity of her furyβthat child will fare better than one who languishes in the dim ether of emotional ignorance.
. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are rich, vivid, and frequent.
If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful, and hurts are soothed as best they can be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous loveβone where his needs don't matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerableβmakes its ineradicable limbic stamp. Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible.
It is attachment that makes familiarity trump worth. A golden retriever thrills only to his owner. He is amiably and helplessly indifferent to passersby who may be kinder, fonder o f walks, quicker with treatsβhe does not, he cannot value them. Everyone is in the same limbic boat as those patient, expectant dogs.
a different trio cooperates: attachment implicit memory, and scrong Attractors. There one can read love stories like this: boy meets girl, who (reminiscent o f his mother) is needy and scifles his independence; chey struggle bitterly over the years and resent each other a little more every day. Some people carry chat tale in their hearts, and whether they find a player for the part or not, the piece can only come to grief.
Despite the longevity o f Attractors and the waning o f neural flexibility, the emotional mind can change in adulthood. The old patterns can undergo revision, although the task is not easy. Y
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. βMarcel Proust
And so, left to his own devices, a child who knew and loved a deceitful, selfish, or jealous parent does not often learn to love differently at age twenty, forty, or sixty.
T h e mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. Whe n a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state o f relatedness. Evolution has sculpted mammals into their present form: they become attuned to one another's evocative signals and alter the structure o f one another's nervous systems. Psychotherapy's transformative power comes from engaging and directing these ancient mechanisms. Therapy is a living embodiment o f limbic processes as corporeal as digestion or respiration. Without the physiologic unity limbic operations provide, therapy would indeed be the vapid banter some people suppose it to be.
In this chapter we will examine how loves three neural facesβlimbic resonance, regulation, and revisionβconstitute psychotherapy's core and the motive force behind the adult mind's capacity for growth.
T h e first part o f emotional healing is being limbicatly knownβ having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence.
Early emotional experiences knit long-lasting patterns into the very fabric o f the brain's neural networks. Changing that matrix calls for a different kind o f medicine altogether.
The neocortical brain collects facts quickly. T he limbic brain does not. Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force o f another person's Attractors reaching through the doorway o f a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain o f another.
Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience o f yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationships today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.
An attuned therapist feels the lure o f a patients limbic Attractors. H e doesn't just hear about an emotional lifeβthe two o f them Im it. Th e gravitational tug o f this patient's emotional world draws him away from his own, just as it should. A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patientβ it can't be done. If a patient's emotional mind would support good relationships, he or she would be out having them. Instead a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into whatever relationship the patient has in mind-βeven a connection so dark that it touches the worst in him. He has no alternative. Whe n he stays outside the other's world, he cannot affect it; when he steps within its range, he feels the force o f alien Attractors. He takes up temporary residence in another's world not just to observe but to alter, and in the end, to overthrow.
Through the intimacy a limbic exchange affords, therapy becomes the ultimate inside job.
Nabokov was setting forth the requirements for reading a novel, but he might as well have been describing the oudook most congenial to apprehending che parallel limbic realities o f the people around us. A capable cherapisc shares much wich a good reader: he muse willingly suspend his belief in the rules he knows and approach a personal universe whose workings should be unimaginable to the uninitiated. If he is able to accain a state o f sufficient receptivity, a therapist can allow che ocher mind co burst onto the scene like great art doesβ"as a more or less shocking surprise."
That makes selecting one's therapist a life decision with (in mild terms) extensive repercussions. An uncomfortably large number of therapies yield neutral results; the only record of their existence is time spent, words spilled, and money that changed hands. But if therapy works, it transforms a patients limbic brain and his emotional landscape forever. The person o f the therapist will determine the shape of the new world a patient is bound for; the configuration of his limbic Attractors fixes those o f the other. Thus the urgent necessity for a therapist to get his emotional house in order. His patients are coming to stay, and they may have to live there for the rest o f their lives.
Wha t Richard Selzer, M.D., once wrote o f surgery is as true o f therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act o f two madmen.
"The one thing in the worid of value," Emerson observed, "is the active soulβthe soul free, sovereign, active. This every man is entided to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn."That second effusion of life is the work of childhood; love and security are the patient midwives whose ministrations bring forth a new soul.
An ironic revelation o f the television-computer age is that what people want from machines is humanity: stories, contact, and interaction. (Nature took a few billion years t o create that kind o f mechanism from scratch, so perhaps we should not wait for Silicon Valley to produce one any time soon.) Today s machines deliver not a limbic
connection but imprecise simulations. Small wonder that Internet use in adults actually causes depression and loneliness. "We were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such anti-social consequences," said that study's author. However enticing their entertainment value, mechanical companions are unworkable relationship substitutes for adults and children alike.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: the difference between a caretaker who tunes in to a child and one who almost tunes in is as great as the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
An infant s brain is designed for ongoing attunement with the people predisposed to find him the most engaging o f all subjects, the most breathtakingly potent axis around which their hearts revolve. Instead he finds himself competing with half a dozen peers for the emotional focus of an understandably unimpassioned surrogate. Will a parents infatuation and the divided attentions o f sequential strangers exert a comparable effect on the developing brain? The pull to believe so emanates from wishful thinking rather than the plausibility o f the hypothesis itself.
In a dazzling vote o f confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness o f being in love while discounting the importance o f loving.
A child tunes in to the emotional patterns o f parents and stores them. In later life, if he spots a close match, the key slides in the psychobiologic lock, the tumblers fall home, and he falls in love. Th e accuracy o f limbic architecture astounds. In a city o f 5 million people, in a country o f 27 0 million, in a world o f 6 billion, people pick partners emotionally identical to their predecessors and swoon. In love twists together three high-tensile strands: a potent feeling that the other fits in a way that no one has before or will again, an irresistible desire for skin-to-skin proximity, and a delirious urge to disregard all else. In the service o f that prismatic blindfold, in love rewrites reality as no other mental event can. "Whos o loves," wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "believes the impossible."
Every popcultural medium portrays the height o f adult intimacy as the moment when two attractive people who don't know a thing about each other tumble into bed and have passionate sex. All the waking moments of our love lives should tend, we are told, toward that throbbing, amorous apotheosis. But in love merely brings the players together, and the end o f that prelude is as inevitable as it is desirable. True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor.
Lovtng is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In lave demands only che brief acquaincance necessary Co establish an emocional genre buc does noc demand chac the book of the beloved's soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and decailed surveillance o f a foreign soul.
Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other's emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep 208 A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state o f togetherness.
T h e neurally ingrained Attractors o f one lover warp the emotional virtuality o f the other, shifting emotional perceptionsβ what he feels, sees, knows. Whe n somebody loses his partner and says a part o f him is gone, he is more right than he thinks. A portion o f his neural activity depends on the presence o f that other living brain. Without it, the electric interplay that makes up him has changed. Lovers hold keys to each other's identities, and they write neutostructural alterations into each other s networks. Their limbic tie allows each to influence who the other is and becomes.
Mutuality has tumbled into undeserved obscurity by the primacy our society places o n the art o f the deal. Th e prevailing myth reaching most contemporary eare is this: relationships are 50-50. Whe n one person does a nice thing for the other, he is entided to an equally pleasing benefitβthe sooner the better, under the terms o f this erroneous dictum. Th e physiology of love is no barter. Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs o f the other, because neither can provide for his own. Such a relationship is not 50-50βit's 100-100 . Each takes perpetual care o f the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both thrive. For those who attain it, the benefits o f deep attachment are powerfulβregulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient co the stresses o f daily life, or even to those o f extraordinary circumstance.
T he contrast between that culture and our own could not be more evident. Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on America's list o f collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the pursuit o f wealth, physical beauty, youthful appearance, and the shifting, elusive markers o f status. There are brief spasms o f pleasure to be had at the end o f those pursuitsβthe razor-thin delight o f the latest purchase, the momentary glee of flaunting this promotion or that unnecessary trinketβpleasure here, but no contentment. Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America s values. These rebels will necessarily forgo exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs, designer everythingβall the proud indicators o f upward mobilityβand in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life.
A person who lacks a stable center feels an urgent need to fill the gapβhe needs something to orient himself as he tries to navigate the wodd. Since he cannot use the limbic tools that penetrate to the core of self and others, he will look to external cuesβthose he can be sure about. Thwarted attachment and limbic disconnection thus encourage superficiality and narcissism. People who cannot see content must setde for appearances. They will cling to image with the desperation appropriate to those who lack an alternative. In a culture gone shallow, plastic surgery supplants health; photogenicity trumps leadership; glibness overpowers integrity; sound bites replace discourse; and changing what is fades before the busy label-
swapping o f political correctness. Whe n a society loses touch with limbic bedrock, spin wins. Substantive aspirations inevitably suffer.
If the attachment fabric o f a civilization frays, if people cannot get from their relationships the emotional regulation that those bonds were designed to furnish, they will commandeer whatever means o f limbic modulation they can lay hands on. Their hungering brains will seek satisfaction from a variety o f ineffectual substitutesβalcohol, heroin, cocaine, and their cousins. As a society produces more people who lack access to the neural process that engenders emotional balance, the ranks o f street drug users will grow.
Debates on solving America's drug epidemic typically alternate between conservatives demanding longer prison sentences and liberals calling for more treatment programs. Both sides are reluctant to admit that neither approach has come anywhere near to ridding this country of our gargantuan problem. Consigning users to a penal system that combines a plentiful supply o f drugs and the incentive to use them is not a convincing prescription for ameliora- J tion. Treating addiction has proved subscancially more effective, when legislators are in a mood co fund icβand, since addiccs lack lobbyiscs, chac is noc very often.
Will lectures on the evils o f chemical dependency deter teenagers from a life o f substance dependence? Don't believe it. Whil e their end is worthy, such talk targets the neocortical brain, not the limbic one. Pain is too potent a motivator for facts to undo. Pretending otherwise is a threadbare illusion convincing only to chose who already feel basically well. The insouciance o f Just Say N o assumes that the human brain and will are separable. They are not. Limbic instability undermines the neural capacity for resolve that jaunty slogans call upon.
Raising children attentively, thoroughly, and patiently immunizes their brains against stress like Salks potion protects their bodies from polio. Love is and will always be the best insurance against the despair for which street drugs are the obvious antidote.
Today's most treacherous false attachment springs up between human beings and corporations. In this era o f downsizing and its euphemistic equivalents, the tale of the dedicated worker abrupdy terminated after years o f loyal service has become archetypal. Behind the stark outlines of the tale are thousands o f people who pour their hearts into jobs, give beyond their monetary recompense out o f team spirit, and later are unceremoniously dumped. Many such people are waylaid by the attachment mechanisms that should promote well-being but trap them instead. Natural limbic inclinations include loyalty, concern, and affection. "When you love," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." Within their designed environmentβa familyβthese impulses make fertile ground wherein healthy relatedness takes root and grows. The workplace bears strong resemblance to the homeβindeed, for most of humanity's history, the work environment wtv the home. In both settings, one encounters amiable companions, authoritative overseers, shared travails.
Whe n the tobacco industry delivers death more efficiendy than any war machine in history, it does so to our own peopleβbecause our own is a limbic, not a corporate, precept. Whe n the Johns Manville Corporation covered up the lethal effects o f asbestos, the company sent to their unknowing deaths not strangers, but hundreds o f their employees. Any reptile would have done the same. Assuming mutuality where none exists is a mammals grave and occasionally fatal error.
The urge to embed oneself in a familyβto hold an endeavor in common with others, to be part of a team, a band, a group that struggles together toward a common victoryβis an indomitable aspect o f the human mind and brain. In a culture whose members are ravenous for love and ignorant o f its workings, too many will invest their love in a barren corporate lot, and will reap a harvest of dust.
Chddren who get minimal care can grow up to menace a negligent society. Because the primate brains intricate, interlocking neural barriers to violence do not self-assemble, a limbically damaged human is deadly. If the neglect is sufficiendy profound, the result is a functionally reptilian organism armed with the cunning o f the neocortical brain. Such an animal experiences no compunctions about harming others o f its kind. It possesses n o internal motivation not to kill casually from minor frustration or for minimal gain. One young offender who crippled his victim during a mugging accounted for his actions in this way: "What do I care? I'm not her."
I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhapsfive minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once, be bonded with mefor a brief space, survey my soul as well as my flesh to get at my illnessβ¦. I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. Without such recognition, I am nothing but my illness. Western medicine dismissed these tools o f healing as expendable hand-holding, a luxury that busy schedules could not permit. "Bedside manner" became a cursory interchange thought mildly reassuring but inessential, particulady when compared to the real science o f pathophysiology. Medicine lost sight o f this truth: attachment is physiology.
T he wholesale desertion o f limbic attentiveness, once as much a part o f medicine as the stethoscope, has been cosdy. A 199 4 proposal in The Lancet, Europe's most respected medical journal, advocated teaching acting techniques to medical students. The proposed utility of adding theatrical training to the curriculum? Providing physicians with che means to feign concern for patients, since their incapacity Co care is coo embarrassingly evidenc. "We would suggest that if physicians do feel antipathy [toward patients], they should at least act as if they cared," wrote the medical thespians.
Patients (mammals that they are) sensed the limbic void in American medicine and deserted en masse. Even while traditional medicine eschewed emotional aspects o f healing, multiple groups sprang up to accommodate them: acupuncturists, chiropractors, masseuses, body workers, reflexologists, herbal therapists, and a host o f others. Th e "alternative" healers proliferated in response to the demand for a context o f relatednes
S o deep is the divide between neocortical and limbic medicine that it extends to the pills people are willing t o take. Th e warm welcome given alternative practitioners has emboldened manufacturers to market alternative meditationsβso-called neutraceuticals, herbal or natural remedies for ailments ranging from AIDS to menopause.
Th e bustling neutraceutical businessβnow with $ 5 billion per year in U.S. salesβis an economic testament to the depth o f yearning for an earlier, more trustworthy, more humane brand of medicine.
Medicine s movement away from limbic considerations abrupdy accelerated in the 1990s, as solo practitioners and fee-for-service physicians congealed into the large corporate mass known as managed care. The emotional revamping was drastic: medicine was once mammalian and is now reptilian. The administrative framework of medicine formedy permitted at least the possibility of human relationships between the participants, even if technology tended to get in the way. But the corporate takeover o f the doctor-patient relationship fatally compromised medicines ailing emotional core. A corporation has customers, not patients; it has fiscal relationships, not limbic ones. Like crocodiles incapable o f an aversion to cannibalism, HMO s prosper whether or not customers are consumed in the process. Individual doctors can care about patients, but all too often they do not have authority to implement the decisions that could protect those patients from harm. In todays market, ER meets Jurassic Bark. "Caveat emptor" has given way to "Horvescat emptor"βlet the buyer be scared.
If you think that patients are not falling ill from preventable diseases, losing organs and limbs to deliberate delay, and dying from systematic inattention, then think again.
The Ne w York State Health Commissioner discovered a short while ago that an HM O was using its data on cardiac surgery death rates to improve the selective routing o f patients to Ne w York hospitals. Did the insurer send its patients to the most dependable institutions? O f course not. Instead, administrators used the statistics to bargain for basement-Tate prices from the most lethal centers. Then, coaxing along cherished dividends, they diverted patients to the cheapest facilities available, where those customers were likeliest to suffer and di a
No t so. Reason's last step, wrote Blaise Pascal, u mcgnizing thai an infinity of things surpass it. As a new millennium commences, science is beginning to approach that pinnacle of perspicacity.
Because we are emotional beings, pain is inevitable and grief will come; because the world is neither equitable nor fair, the suffering will not be distributed evenly. A person who
intuits the ways o f the heart stands a better chance o f living well. A society o f those who do so holds a promise we can only guess at.
Whil e we cannot alter the nature o f love, we can choose to defy its dictates or thrive within its walls. Thos e with the wisdom to do so will heed their hearts and draw strength from their relatedness, and they will raise their children to do likewise.
ONCE YOU HAVE FLOWN, YOU WILL WALK THE EARTH WITH YOUR EYES TURNED SKYWARD; FOR THERE YOU HAVE BEEN, THERE YOU LONG TO RETURN. βLEONARDO DA VINCI
Your teachers Are all around you. All that you perceive, All that you experience, All that is given to you or taken from you, All that you love or hate, need or fear Will teach youΓ If you will learn. God is your first and your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

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God is neither good nor evil, neither loving nor hating. God is Power. God is Change. We must find the rest of what we need within ourselves, in one another, in our Destiny. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Unite-- Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must God is Change People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill, Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes
A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.
-Parables of the sower, Octavia E. Butler
Intuition
~Osho

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I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you could say about a man.
-Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
what are you doing with your life? - J. Krishnamurti
(part I)
Without understanding the way our minds work, one cannot understand and resolve the very complex problems of living.
It is very important to understand the process of our own minds...
What is our mind but a result of climate, tradition, culture, social and economic influence, environment, ideas, dogmas, religion, knowledge and superficial information.
Life is always in movement, never static. But our minds are static. Our minds are conditioned, held, tethered to dogma, to belief, to experience, to knowledge.
How can we free our minds?
What is the self?
The idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of name able and unnameable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be , the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self.
In it is included the Competition, the desire to be. The whole process of that is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it that it is an evil thing. I am using the word evil intentionally, because the self is dividing: the self is self-enclosing: it's activities, however noble, superlative and isolating. We know this. We also know those extraordinary moments when the self is not there, in which there is no sense of endeavor, of effort, and which happens when there is love.
Notes from Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore
The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves.
Boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.
The tendency of mind is economical, it loves to form habits and move in grooves which save it the trouble of thinking anew at each of its steps. Ideals once formed make the mind lazy. It becomes afraid to risk its acquisitions in fresh endeavours.
we cannot imitate life, we cannot imitate strength for long, a mere imitation is a source of weakness. For it hampers our true nature, it is always in our way. It is like dressing our skeleton with another man's skin, giving rise to eternal feuds between the skin and the bones at every movement.
we can borrow knowledge from others, but you cannot borrow temperament.
The living organism does not allow itself to grow into its food, it changes its food into its own body. And only thus can it grow strong and not by mere accumulation, or by giving up its personal identity.
The conflict between the individual and the state, labour and capital, the man and the woman, the conflict between the greed of material gain and the spiritual life of man, the organized selfishness of nations and the higher ideals of humanity, the conflict between all the ugly complexities inseperable from giant organizations of commerce and state and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fulness of leisure-and all these have to be brought to a harmony in a manner not yet dreamt of.
Life based upon mere science is attractive to some men, because it has all the characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but it is not profound. when you go a -hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and scientific. And the life of science is that superficial life. it pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But those whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsmen will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls.
Things that are living are so easily hurt; therefore they require protection.
What is dangerous for Japan is, not the imitation of the outer features of the West, but the acceptance of the motive force of the Western nationalism as her own. I can see her motto, taken from science, "Survival of the Fittest", writ large at the entrance of her present-day history-the motto whose meaning is "Help yourself, and never heed what it costs to others"; the motto of the blind man who only believes in what we can touch, because he cannot see. But those who can see know that men are so closely knit that when you strike others the blow comes back to yourself. The moral law, which is the greatest discovery of man, is the discovery of this wonderful truth, that man becomes all the truer the more he realizes himself in others.
Nations who sedulously cultivate moral blindness as the cult of patriotism will end their existence in a sudden and violent death.
The man who is drunken furiously denies his drunkenness.
Therefore I ask you to have the strength of faith and clarity of mind to know for certain that the lumbering structure of modern progress, riveted by the iron bolts of efficiency, which runs upon the wheels of ambition, cannot hold together got long.
War has been declared between man and woman, because man is driven to professionalism, producing wealth for himself and others, continually turning the wheel of power for his own sake or for the sake of the universal officialdom, leaving women alone to wither and to die or fight her own battle unaided. And thus there where cooperation is natural has intruded competition. The very psychology of men and women about their mutual relation is changing and becoming the psychology of the primitive fighting elements, rather than of humanity seeking its completeness through the union based upon mutual self-surrender.
It is not a question of the number of outside obstacles but the comparative powerlessness of the individual to cope with them. This narrowness of freedom is an evil which is more radical, not because of its quantity but because of its nature. And we cannot but acknowledge this paradox, that while the spirit of the West marches under the banner of freedom, the nation of West forges it iron chains of organization which are the most relentless and unbreakable that has ever been manufactured in the whole history of man.
The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness.
In the ancient days Sparta paid all her attention to becoming powerful; she did become do by crippling her humanity, and died of the amputation.
But it is no consolation to us to know that the weakening of humanity from which the present age is suffering is not limited to the subject races, and that its ravages are even more radical because insidious and voluntary in peoples who are hypnotized into believing that they are free. This bartering of your higher aspirations of life for profit and power has been your own choice, and I leave you there, at the wreckage of your soul, contemplating your protuberant prosperity.
The West has been systematically petrifying her moral nature in order to lay a solid foundation for her gigantic abstractions of efficiency.
The suspicion of man for man stings all the limbs of this civilization like the hairs of the nettle.
The nation's bagpipe of righteous indignation has so often changed its tune according to the variation of time and to the altered groupings of the alliances of diplomacy, that it can be enjoyed with amusement as the variety performance of the political music hall.
When you borrow things that do not belong to your life, they only serve to crush your life.
If a man tells me he has heterodox ideas, but that he cannot follow them because he would be socially ostracised, I excuse him for having to live a life of untruth, in order to live at all.
I persist in believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness in humanity, where poverty does not take away from riches, where defeat may lead him to victory, death to immortality, and where in the compensation of Eternal Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted into a golden triumph.
Iβm sorry for all the times my mental health made me a bad friend
βDistance means so little when someone means so much.β
β Unknown

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βThe best part of your life will be those small, nameless moments you spent with someone who matters to you.β
β Unknown