I cannot analyse the human mind. I am not a psychiatrist. But I do think about human emotions and observe behavior of people including my own. Love, hate, anger, fear, sadness, compassion, lust make us what we are. Sometimes our senses such as sight, hearing, touch, smell can trigger one or more of these emotions. A beautiful sunset or a dead body on the street, a melodious song, or a sound of a gunshot, the fragrance of a flower or a foul stench from an open sewer, beloved’s tender touch or a leech clinging onto your leg – all bring different emotions. It is not easy to be totally in charge of these emotions at all the time. The external environment such as social, material, natural, spiritual influences our emotions. These conditions can influence different people in different ways and there is a different tipping point for everyone that makes us lose control of our emotions. Sometimes different people show emotions differently for the same experience. Obviously, bottled up emotions can trigger loss of physical and mental well-being. So, sometimes these emotions can act like a relief valve as pressure builds inside and it can help avoid a real eruption or explosion like a volcano or an earthquake. Obviously, those who can achieve total control of their emotions are closer to gaining higher level of wisdom with calmness and serenity.
True love is one emotion that can help in keeping check on our emotions. A newborn comes with practically a clean slate other than knowing only a world of security, love, and warmth in the womb. Food automatically comes to them through an umbilical cord. They relate to the sound of their mother through the amniotic fluid. That is the only indirect connection to the outside world. They can feel the stress when mother is stressed; they feel relaxed when mother seems to be happy. But entering the outside world for a newborn is a traumatic experience. The first time they make a sound, which we think of as a cry, signifies to us that the newborn is alive. While the baby cries from the trauma, we are happy with the sound. Other than that first shock of entering an alien world, a newborn enters the new world knowing only love, security, and warmth. They don’t know fear, predators, mistrust, etc. These things are learnt later to survive in a real world that is made upall the emotions. So when an innocent child gives a shiny pebble as a birthday present to his or her parents, it carries true love. If they find out later that the parents threw away the precious pebble (parents thinking that it was just a useless rock), their feelings may be hurt because of the new reality they had not expected. Lessons on trust or mistrust happen similarly. One has to live by example or “walk the talk” for a child to develop certain values. To advise the children to tell the truth and then do otherwise robs their trust for the person giving advice. Truthfulness, honesty, compassion, etc. have to be practiced to develop an entire new generation with such values. So, the surrounding environment begins to mold and wire the developing young mind.
A human baby is the most helpless and vulnerable one entering an alien world compared to other newborn animals. Newborn animals come with certain basic physical abilities for survival. So it learns somehow to get up and wobble towards its mother seeking food. An animal brain is more developed at birth for physical ability compared to a human baby. An animal brain isn’t totally a blank slate at birth. Human brain at birth is practically a blank slate, except for minimal faculty to breathe and suck for milk which has to be fed (because they cannot physically get there) in the absence of the umbilical cord. The brain being literally un-wired at birth also gives the newborn almost infinite opportunity to connect the neural network, develop physical, mental, and sensory abilities learning from its environment. In that sense it is a machine designed for continued and automatic programming and re-programming (software if you wish to call it) for self-learning and self-development of physical, mental, and emotional growth.
So, our mind begins to learn from the surrounding environment, common societal and parental behavior inferring what is the norm or common behavior (a pattern recognition concept), even if it may not be the right behavior. People learn from its surroundings since their childhood and their emotional make-up slowly begins to conform to societal behavior, right or wrong. So, our environment begins to wire our brain with biases (implicit and explicit), puts us in groups, and misleads us to seek the differences in diversity as opposed to embracing it as an essential ingredient of living, thereby harboring biases. The difficulty with implicit biases is that a person may not even realize that he or she harbors such biases. We all learn that our hearts beat the same way; our blood color is the same regardless of our skin color. A black or brown person’s kidney or heart can be as good a life saving candidate for a transplant for a white person. Yet, our environment tricks the brain to wire it differently enabling us to treat people differently. We begin to get a label. We are grouped by religion, nationality, gender, color of our skin, and so on, instead of accepting all of us as belonging to one human race.
Animal sacrifice was common in the past in many countries including my old country India. I saw it as a young boy. Although the sight of blood was repulsive (a sense triggered by a sight), I did not protest, as it was fine with the adults who apparently were doing it to please the gods and goddesses. Who was to question them? It would be disobedience, perhaps could even displease God. Only later as a young adult, when perhaps my additional wiring was completed in the brain, I could reason out the wrongful act and question it. So, with more wiring, more analytical thinking, we begin to question the validity of certain behavior; it learns and relearns to revise its past answers or responses. But our labels or stamps stick with us, although we did not have any label or stamp on our butt at birth.
When we were young, mental illness was not talked about as if it was a taboo and families generally hid it from the society. When a mentally ill person loitered on the street half naked and talked incessantly what appeared to be nonsense to others instead of being sympathetic to the person, people used to make fun and even throw pebbles at such a person. We children used to laugh and ape the same behavior. It was inhumane. We did not think about others until it affected or hurt ourselves or our feelings.
When I was a little boy, even my teacher used to make fun of my relatively flat nose. He was a good teacher in the academic subjects he taught. But looking back, they had no training in child psychology. My close friend in elementary school, Kilington Marak from the Garo Hills, also had a nose like me. Then I found out that people from the neighboring hills generally had relatively flat noses like me. I wondered if the hills people made fun of anyone among them with a sharper nose, since that won’t be the norm among them.
There are millions of orphans in this world. I was an orphan myself, which I did not know for a long time. Unlike many, I was fortunate that I had a set of wonderful parents (maternal grandparents) who raised me like their own son and I even addressed them as my parents. But it was the outsiders who used to make me miserable or sad or angry saying that I was an orphan (which I thought was alie). As a matter of fact, once a neighborhood woman had scolded me saying that I could not grow up to be a good boy without parents.
Our human emotions are numbed out by societal behavior. It is the case with disabled people too even today, when the president of the most powerful country mocks a disabled person. My mind was slowly awakened to such cruel behavior when I had to grow up with a disabled older brother. He could not do anything other than walk awkwardly dragging his feet. My mother had to feed him, bathe him, and put on clothes, etc.; after all he was her son. My brother used to wet the bed that I shared with him with my mother in between two of us. I used to get mad at him for wetting the bed not realizing that he had no control. But I did not have to walk in his shoes. He died at the age of 18. I went to his funeral, the first one in my life. I realized that he would not come back. I had more room to myself, but it was not the same anymore. I realized that I could have been such a person and how fortunate I was. So, due respect for a disabled person is very personal to me. Now, I detest (I suppose I am not fully in control of my emotions) when people mock disabled people. Their brain was wired poorly. It is said that brain fully develops by age 25. It is more difficult, although not impossible, to rewire after that age. That’s why perhaps the saying goes that you can not teach an old dog new tricks. Sometimes it perhaps takes a significant event in life to rewire that part of the fully developed brain. Regardless, our developing brain begins to analyze and correct our emotional course. Being able to imagine walking on another person’s shoes is what we call empathy. It is a first step in being able to treat another person with respect and dignity and practicing a sense of equality.
I arrived in America in the early 1970s as a single young man. I was struggling to survive working long hours for meager earnings. I had no time to think about the lofty ideals and worry about those who were even less fortunate than I was. I got married in a few years. Soon we had a house of our own. We were slightly better off than before, but not rich by any means. Then one by one we had two wonderful daughters. We did not know much about raising children or had no clue about child psychology. But to my surprise I began to learn a lot indirectly from them. Like other parents, we gave in to their requests from time to time. Who would not? The younger daughter wanted a pet. She would bring home some roly-poly in the palm of her hand and tell us how cute they were. So, we started with a small fishtank with some goldfish. Our daughter had named every goldfish. Growing up in India in a poor family, we had never heard of fish tanks or goldfish. If we had any fish at all, it was at meal time cooked by our mother. So, fish as a pet was unheard of. One day a goldfish died. Our daughter was distraught. So, I picked out the dead fish and put it in the trash can. To me it was just a small dead fish. Our daughter started crying at my unacceptable act of dumping the dead fish in the trash can. Right then I realized how a relationship grows and feelings and emotions are inter wound with such a relationship. I picked out the dead fish from the trashcan and prepared for a burial in the back yard as our daughter requested. As I dug a hole and laid the dead fish in there, she picked a few flowers from our yard and put it in that hole in the ground. Then I covered the hole with dirt. It was a huge lesson for me. Later I recall watching “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” on TV where Mr. Roger had given an honorable burial to a dead goldfish from his fish tank while indirectly giving a lesson on life and death.
Religious dogma, hate, anger, trust are reflections of behavior that can positively or negatively impact the life we live. There are millions of orphans in this world. They did not want to lose their parents. It is the result of hunger, poverty, disease, wars, and so on. It is not their fault. Yet, because of blind loyalty to the group we find ourselves in, we fail basic humane considerations even for such children. It is civil society’s responsibility to care for these vulnerable children. As they are generally out of sight of the fortunate ones, they seem to be out of their mind too; they become invisible. Not only have that, instead of empathy for them, some mock them as rubbish of the society. We find some so-called powerful leaders even separate children from their mothers and put them in cages. Their parents only want to better their life, their children’s life in an alien land; but some shut their doors with a sign “no entry”. The children abandoned by the world in turn grow up to be cynical of the uncaring world, or build up hate to take revenge for what they lost, or go into depression or showup as beggars on the road side. Then some cannot even look eye-to-eye at such panhandlers to show a little respect. That sends the wrong message to their own children. This in turn makes the world poorer emotionally and spiritually.
Society needs to understand the plights of millions of orphans and reject that as an acceptable behavior. Society needs to feel a collective responsibility, empathy, and compassion and resolve to eradicate war, poverty, disease regardless of the label they carry. A civilized society with advanced minds must treat these orphans like human beings, provide them shelter, food, education and love regardless of the color of their skin, nationality, gender, language they speak, etc.
Talking about spirituality, as love evolves it can end up being spiritual love. Spiritual love teaches us meaning and purpose in our life. It is a love beyond individual love, love of a family, but it evolves from those. If you cannot even love an individual, you certainly cannot love the world. True love what overcomes our biases and learn to accept differences or diversity as a natural phenomenon. Religion without spiritual love is meaningless. It only divides people if we cannot practice “live and let live” philosophy. True religion must show love, not hate; must unite, not divide, and must not start war, only peace. True love, spiritual love leads to complete control of emotions. I recall reading a historical novel titled “Nirmal Bhakat” (meaning Monk Nirmal) a long time ago written by an Assamese author named Rajani Kanta Bordoloi, unknown to the rest of the world. A POW (Prisoner of War) named Nirmal returns to his homeland Assam after being released after many years in captivity in Myanmar (Burma) by the Myan (Burmese) who had invaded Assam. His country, his village is unrecognizable from the destruction caused by the invaders. He goes in search of his love, the only love he knew since his childhood. He discovers her to be married to his boyhood friend. She has a family with happy children. For fear of disturbing her new life, he does not expose himself and ends up spending a night under a tree near a monastery as he has nothing and no place to go. He remembered how he had visited a monastery with his father as a boy and the priest had asked Nirmal if he would like to be a monk. Nirmal had said “yes”. But the priest had said that he was too young, maybe someday when he was old enough. The next morning when the head of the Monastery finds him just outside and finds out that he had no one and nothing in this world, he is given shelter in the monastery. So, Nirmal becomes a monk. With life’s invaluable lessons, his wisdom and teachings touch the hearts of people visiting the monastery. People from faraway places come to see him and receive his blessings. The word spreads about this wise monk. One day the family of Nirmal’s first love comes hoping to receive blessings for the children and the family from the wise monk. Nirmal blesses the family without revealing who he is.
Nirmal’s love had attained spiritual level. He appeared to be in control of all emotions – anger, sorrow, hate, lust, fear, attachment, expectation. He was an embodiment of spiritual love. True love only gives, with expectation of nothing in return. True love can free us all; it is the only emotion that can conquer hearts.
This world belongs to all. We must learn to love and respect each other. This world is the only home we have. If a part of this world gets sick, a part gets polio, we cannot claim that our world is healthy, that our home is strong and full of joy. Eventually that diseased part will make the whole body sick. So, we as a society must alleviate the sickness anywhere, be it poverty, war, injustice, lack of education, etc. If we honestly believe that we are all children of God (or nature as some may say), that we living beings are all connected, then we must take care of our extended family. We must learn to love each other, teach love. We must strive to control our emotions to reach the higher level of living and be at peace with ourselves and with the world around us.
