Hamlet, the superstar of this divided empire, fails to kill the killer of his father. What more can be expected from divided minds?
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand
We are living in a forked world which is divided into two empires. One is moving towards nature, which leads into the heart of creation, towards light and finally God. The other is represented by the march of the plastic civilization which is a result of the great Human Compromise leading man into the Heart of a Para-Creation, based on technology minus godly virtues of goodness, kindness and empathy. Man is riding a bullet train which is fast leading him into the heart of an artificial world of super-survival and success which derives its power from Dark Embryo of Hell. – Dr. Anand
T.S. Eliot in his famous essay on Metaphysical Poets, laments the dissociation of the Unified Sensibility. He finds that later poets were not able to handle disparate elements of experience and there was a fragmentation of emotion and thought. He was talking of 17th century poets that followed Donne. We are now centuries down those times, and can see what is left of emotion and thought. In contemporary life, we find complete erosion of values, and the human mind is incapable of handling these emotions any longer. Rather, today, human mind is utterly disintegrated, distracted and what possesses it are myriad passions centering on super-survival and success. Both the passions in their nakedness are base passions, which have divested humanity of its sublimity and grandeur. Confusions have set in. We can imagine a dog whirling and whirling around its own tail.
Indian philosophy is the stream of super consciousness, centered on undisturbed meditation, for which people migrated to forests, riversides, or mountains, so that through various apps like ‘jappa’ [incantation] and ‘tapa’ [hard discipline], they could meditate upon God and achieve salvation. Indian tradition promotes the idea of a forbidden culture of the body and the mind, so that when bodily senses are mortified, it is easier to divert human mind towards the Superior Being. Whenever we are to pray, we close our eyes, which means we want to concentrate on a particular object. Eyes when open, scatter our attention towards different objects that fall in the view. In the same way, untrained and uninitiated minds get scattered here and there, and are not capable of a single unified selfhood.
BODY: A COMMUNICATION CENTER
The entire body of man is a communication center of sorts. Not only eyes, our skin, our ears, our cheeks, our forehead, and our hands – all enact the commands of our mind, and react to the external stimuli. The reverse side of this thought is that all these parts of the body, which are highly sensitized, actually serve to divert our attention, towards objects present outside us. And, in case we want to unify our senses, we need to close all these doors on the external world.
Just as at a time, we can eat only one thing, and think only one thought, we cannot look with same attention at two persons simultaneously. We can move only in one direction at a time, not two. It underlines the fact that our sensibilities can be best engaged if we are doing one job at a time, as we can perform to perfection only one function at a time.
A DISTURBED PROFILE
But, this is the world of alpha-minds, and super performers. For one super performer, there are hundreds who lose their ‘superiority deposits’ and are forced into ‘general ordinaria’. The way we are leading our lives, we keep up a disturbed profile. We are ourselves never at peace. Something or the other keeps disturbing us. And this process of distraction of our mind is completed when we get untimely calls on our mobile phones. While driving, we are always on the talk. In our personal lives also, we are not ‘stay steady’. We keep many connections live. The ultimate result of all this is that our mind remains extra active, and it wears down faster. Thinking too many thoughts at the same time causes a confusion in thorough fares of our mind and it causes chaotic situations and traffic jams in the heart.
All the progress in the world has been made possible by men, who worked with a single mind for a mission. Double minds are like intransitive verbs, which reach nowhere, but rather keep coming back to themselves. The modern stressful life has further divided man’s being into a splintered entity. What can be expected from a divided man? Hamlet, the superstar of this divided empire, fails to kill the killer of his father. What more can be expected from divided minds? The modern age of multi-tasked people, ultimately finds them lost in their confusions. If the world has an increasing number of ordinary people, and if the average is the ruling score, it is entirely because men have lost their concentration in their work, because of multi-engagements. They are trains which are running forward at a fast speed in conflicting directions, whose fate should be left to imagination.
Men and women today have no time of their own. TV is cutting into their silence. Mobile invades their privacy. Messaging apps do not let them sleep. FB makes a man feel that he is being chased everywhere, even in his innermost thoughts. We are never let alone. And, we are never with ourselves. We are never silent. We are all the time talking on our phones. Young and old men, going on a morning walk, are often found busy in prolonged talk. Their bodies no doubt undertake the journey, but their minds have no feel of the ground. It is an aimless exercise, because a walk can be useful for the body, only if there is involvement of the mind as well.
DESCENT FROM PHILOSOPHY TO ACTION
The greatest minds in the past studied only three subjects. Poetry, Oratory and Philosophy. Down the ages, the focus of the students has been scattered to hundreds of subjects, but can we find one intelligence which can equal Aristotle or Plato? Why are we still referring to them again and again, although, in our modern times, we have great resources at our command? Google and Chatgpt are great inventions. They can do marvels at our command, but they cannot produce a mind and a sensibility as unified as was the great Shakespeare, or, prior to him, Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.
The Neo-gods of our ‘well defined’ world are the Corporates of the Dark Empire in which you get a well-defined role.
We are the by-products of an age of information in which education is like a ‘bhel puri’ [an Indian dish of several ingredients]. We are taught something of everything so that an overall average score is maintained. Here and there we come across extraordinary minds. But how many are they? In a class of hundred, hardly one or two. These too are exclusively intelligent, not because of the education they are getting, but because of their inherent mental capabilities. Education is not man-centric, it is class-centric, and, therefore, ends up making average of great minds. An extraordinary student in Physics is forced to take exam in mother tongue and English, and is often detailed for physical education periods, which ends up cutting on his time he might have devoted to Physics and accessed the impossible. Ninety percent of school pass-outs belong to the average category from whom nothing more can be expected than opening cyber cafes and manning offices of business tycoons.
This multi-tasked generation has been distracted because of multi-focusing and destroyed by the overuse of mobiles and internet. Internet is the greatest catalyst which sets in the disintegration of human mind. Dissatisfied work force at home and offices, bury themselves in little talk, and ‘babus’ who are killed by stressful work at offices, find relief in rave parties. Do they find time to get back to their selves? Are they ever alone when they could have a session with themselves?
THE FORBIDDEN APPS
The world now wants people who know something of everything. They should be literate enough to carry out the commands of a corporatized world rooted in exploitation and self-centrism. The world is ruled by businessmen, who do not want to afford time to people to be alone with themselves, where they can compose themselves, and think. This time has been usurped from them by making things available at an exorbitant price. The most common casualty is home. Ninety eight percent people live in homes, which belong to the Banks. And, they are just living from hand to mouth. Worse, lack guts to challenge the evil system of the world. Their minds are divided, their attentions scattered and their concentration is focused only on keeping the wolf away. So much of distracting matter has been made available to people that even small children are filled with techno apps. They will think only what they are made to think. Physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, we are in the grip of the power brokers and corporates, who are following each of us like the furies of fate. We are living on an earth which does not belongs to God, but to real estate magnets, nor are we breathing under a sky which is the common property of mankind. The Neo-gods of our ‘well defined’ world are the Corporates of the Dark Empire in which you get a well-defined role. You will be a grand success, if you put your mind aside. Why use this mind when you get everything without using it? And aplenty too? It will trouble you unnecessarily and cause stress. So, this ‘mindless’ race is going on in their multi-tasked world, in which self-hood, love and empathy are considered self-annihilating apps and therefore, forbidden at the Play Store.
Read: ART: FABULATING THE FORBIDDEN DREAMS OF MANKIND
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Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, President of the International Academy of Ethics, is author of 161 books in English poetry, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy and spirituality. He was awarded Charter of Morava, the great Award by Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade and his name was engraved on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. The Academy of Arts and philosophical Sciences of Bari [Italy] honored him with the award of an Honorable Academic. Recently, he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy [Honoris Causa] by the University of Engg and Management, Jaipur. Recently, he organized an International Conference on Contemporary Ethics at Chandigarh. His most phenomenal book is Lustus: The Prince of Darkness [first epic of the Mahkaal Trilogy]. [Email: anandjs55@yahoo.com
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