Mind-Care, Fitterness and Collaborative Living

Mind matters. Probably the most! Yet, in our social living, matters pertaining to mental and emotional problems are mostly brushed under the carpet. Not many are willing to accept the potential of mind-care as an enhancer of the quality of personal and social living. The result is the unbroken chain of mental and emotional turbulences in people which passes from generation to generation and its huge contribution towards the competitive disruption of "normalcy" in personal and collective living in the society.

Despite all the theories religions and the people interpreting them offer, we do not have any definite idea as to what the origin of life is in individual living beings. Living is "felt" or "experienced", if I can cautiously attempt to perceive so. And hence it (feeling or experiencing) is, more than anything else, a mind-function. The process of living is quite like that of a bubble in the rainwater. We would not really know as to what intricate and complex situations prompt a particular bubble to form and what, when and how it will burst. If life is as delicate as the bubble in the rainwater and nothing in life is permanent as such, why do individuals behave as if their personal lives are unending? In a simplistic attempt to answer this question, we may conclude that it is so because that is how nature has designed the mindset of living beings.

As the most developed of all living beings known to us so far, the living practices among human beings should have been mutually supportive (in another word, collaborative), especially since our ability to empathise (to be in the other person's shoes while thinking and feeling) is well developed. In contrast, in the case of most of the lower beings, this need not be so. We can take the example of animals and birds in a slaughter-house to illustrate this. Even if they see their fellow beings being killed brutally (which might disturb them only as an unusual sight), they do not react abnormally in panic, anticipating a violent death, most likely because of the lack of higher degree of empathy in them. On the other hand, a normal human being will be able to perceive, think about and even feel the pain of a fellow human being suffering from a headache. Yet, the possibility of a higher level of mutually supportive living among them most of the time remains to be a distant dream. The constant chase of wealth, power, pleasure etc. by many, mostly at the cost of the similar needs of the others, disrupts the desirable social conditions of mutually supportive collective living.

Achieving wealth, power, pleasure etc. through the activities of life can be compared with climbing of mountain peaks. You struggle and climb the peak or manage to get a helicopter lift onto it as a shortcut (like accumulating wealth by taking bribes, feeling powerful through spreading terrorism or gaining great pleasures by taking drugs). On reaching there, you feel greatly satisfied. Then you look around and see higher peaks and repeat your attempts to conquer them, even though all this while, you probably are missing the beautiful valleys, waterfalls, greenery etc. in the lower stretches. Imagine you finally succeeding in climbing all the peaks and as the last one, reach atop Mount Everest. In the natural process, it is inevitable that you will soon start losing the thrill of reaching there, even if you have, let us imagine, the best of everything there. Then boredom sets in. If you want to make a difference in your condition, you have no choice but to climb down because there are no higher peaks to climb now. Many so called "successful" and "rich" people who embrace philanthropy, social work etc. after reaching the peak of their personal gains of wealth, power and pleasure are actually doing this climbing down to reach out to the lower grounds. Those who do not do the systematic climbing down from the peaks of their success tumble down and as usual, burst away like the proverbial bubble in the rainwater.

If we combine the Darwinian principles of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, we can arrive at a model of the purpose of life (especially in the case of human beings) as the chasing of a higher level of fitness to exist / survive (I would like to call this higher level of fitness as "fitterness"). Higher is a relative word. So, this chase is not about the cumulative height of fitterness but is about the level of the present elevation from the previous position. A patient on the deathbed can achieve fitterness when he manages to breathe easier. Similarly, fitterness (which in any case is a state of mind) can also be achieved when a rich person becomes richer. The interesting aspect of fitterness is that it is only a feeling (state of mind) which is not permanent. So, each attempt to attain a fresh fitterness has to commence from a fresh need (which in other words, is a state of deficiency).

If life's journey is a series of attempts to attain fitterness which is a state of mind, in the scheme of mutually complementary or collaborative living, the awareness of the way fitterness works in the minds of people can bring about a radical change in the way human beings lived together. Historically, the conditioning of collective human mindset by social living has not promoted this awareness with any seriousness. Spirituality, which could have contributed towards this process of awareness-generation too did not succeed much in it because the goal of spirituality in many cases got hijacked towards individuals' needs of finding of fitterness in themselves or in the glorification of religions by the religiously oriented spiritual gurus.

Think of a situation in which human beings grow up right from the early childhood gaining awareness of the high degree of fragileness of life, the way the need for fitterness workes in people and how fitterness can be achieved for self and others with mutually supportive living within the limitations posed by nature. This would have led to mutually supportive utilisation of resources and sharing of goals, needs, feelings, emotions etc., further leading to improved quality of life at personal, familial, social and organisational (workplace) levels. But, such a situation being mind-related, the reality is that it can happen only when mind-care happens at personal as well as in collective ways. However, mind care, despite being a subject that can radically improve the quality of living, is considered by most people as a matter worth brushing under the carpet as mentioned above.

Investing a minuscule of the world's military and conflict handling expenditures on mind care and the generation of the awareness on the need for the same can result in improved personal and collective fitterness sans evils like terrorism, conflicts, greed and addiction to selfish needs of unlimited wealth, authority, pleasure etc. This might sound like an utopian pipedream to many as of now. But a beginning this way somewhere, you never know, may lead to the genuine realisation of this dream and to radical improvements in the lives of the people of the future generations.