Tuesday, January 19, 2016

An Introvert on the Prejudices of Psychologists



Introverts are the most misunderstood category of people. It is supposed that an introvert does not talk. Such a person keeps to oneself and does not seek company. Many go to the extent of considering an introvert to be arrogant. In schools, introverted children give a favorable impression to teachers. They think that if a child is quiet, he/she is well behaved and more likely to be studious. This is an automatic assumption and a psychological one. This assumption can be dramatically different if the teacher insists on team work. If the child is uncomfortable working with other children then they tend to think that there is significant discomfort and goading is the need of the hour. If a child is active and cannot sit still in class, teachers tend to view that as an aberration. It can get to a point where parents take their children to psychologists and they are often diagnosed with attention deficiency hyperactive disorder. It does not occur to teachers and parents that children have a certain natural tendency and to force them to behave in a manner that is incongruent with their natural inclinations is hazardous to their well being. There are ways of nurturing them. It takes time and children are not nurtured in a day. This applies to adults as well. If the education system is such that time is of the essence and teachers are under pressure to complete the syllabus within a time frame, then quite obviously the system is flawed. 

Introverts are viewed differently in different cultures. In some countries, introvert is seen as socially underdeveloped and in some they are seen as being more focused and stable than extroverts. There is also a gender bias involved. In so called liberal countries and also countries that are midway, introversion in men is not considered desirable. In women, it is considered by such societies as more acceptable. The reason is that men were always considered to be dominant on account of primordial instincts and it would interest the readers to know that this belief is also entertained by developed nations with or without their knowledge. With blind dating and the capitalistic idea of free press, the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity have reached an all time high and intellectual acumen has hit an all time low.  
An introvert is reflective and derives strength from within. There is a stronger need for solitude and it is in silence that an introvert recovers from the vicissitudes of life. To conclude that such people do not want friends is a mistaken notion. There are introverts who seek like-minded company. They may not participate in interactions with people but they can be unusually observant. Those who engage in interactions do not have the distance to notice subtle variations in people. This distance proves to be a natural advantage for individuals who would much rather watch a social game than play it. 

Psychologists, parents, teachers and peers harp on the need to have self-confidence. If there is a word or phrase in the English language, I do not like, it is self-confidence. Confidence does not refer to anything specific. There is only a context against which it is measured. Usually glamour obsessed people judge someone as confident by looking at their mannerisms and body language. This does not make someone confident. In fact it tends to amount to stupidity. What people see is a reflection of who they are. What they can see is a reflection of what they want to see. 

Psychologists and personality developers especially in India tend to lay greater emphasis on the importance of such projections without delving into details. You can only be confident about what you know. To be confident about what you do not know is a sign of insecurity. There is a tendency among people of fashionable dispositions to pitch style over substance. This is detrimental to the development of their psyche and the collective psyche of the masses unless the latter is beyond the influence of the former. 

Psychologists have yet to understand the nature of their own misplaced sense of moderation. They swear by the idiom that anything in excess is bad. This is limiting as a masterpiece is always borne out of the excesses of a vibrant intellect. People with moderate constitutions have never produced a work of art of any significance. Masterpieces have been produced only by minds in frenzy. Take any artist as an example and recoil in horror.

To define is to limit and psychologists have made professions out of defining human behaviour. They have to be rejected if the potential of your being has to blossom.
‘’Be as you are” is not just a book by David Godman. It is necessary to understand yourself better and realize your full potential. History is full of theories but no theory has survived history.      

Monday, January 4, 2016

The Mistake of Intelligent Design

It is generally supposed that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. If he was omnipotent he should have the ability to correct the flaws in the universe. I personally do not see him doing any of those corrections. The distinction between good and evil is at least in a profound sense blurred. It is difficult to say for sure if you can rest trust on any one individual including your ‘self’. The self is constantly changing and so are the emotions that accompany it. The Hindu thinker says that if there is one aspect that never changes, it is the ‘self’. We will weigh this statement a little later. But now if you take into account the experiences that you go through in life you cannot be impervious to the fact that there are so many flaws in the world around you. One part of the world is well off with high life expectancies and the other part is the exact opposite. Animals get killed by carnivorous animals. No one can blame them because it is not in their design to find alternate sources of nourishment. If they are not to blame then there is only one person and that is nature or maybe even God.
It may even be a fallacy to suppose that there is a God because there are so many logical contradictions in the possibility for the existence of God. For one it is difficult to conceive of a perfect being creating an imperfect world/ universe. The other argument which is a bigger contradiction lends itself to a question, “what did God do before he created the universe?” We can see around us that the living beings and even inanimate matter change through a process of conflict and struggle. The process as observed is self-sufficient. There seems to be no need for any intervention. 

The fact of the matter is that the cosmic force is impervious to the destruction as a result of the conflict which is all pervasive. So God as a being full of compassion is a matter of doubt. Is God omnipresent? If he was then the universe may as well worship itself. God would have been the other to man and man the other to him. There seems to be here a duality that challenges creationism.
Observations tell man that what happens around him is unjustifiable. You take for granted your existence as the self to the other and you observe the universe as a phenomenon of duality. You cannot observe otherwise because it is as much impossible to deny yourself as it is to deny experience or sensation. The only time when sensation is denied is when you are not conscious.

The state of nothingness so to say only exists as a concept. This in itself is a flaw in ontology. You exist as a self and you exist as the other to the other self and what you have to justify existence is a circular argument. Existence is an a priori phenomenon as a result of sensation. The mistake in intelligent design, if at all there is an intelligent designer is to create life out of contradictions. A life out of contradictions can only produce ethics out of contradictions and the duality is itself the dwelling centre for the impasse called infinite regress.

On ‘the Search for Happiness’

One emotion that unfortunately does not have a clear meaning is happiness. Although it is considered a desirable state to be in no one is able to explain without ambiguity what happiness really is. Some say it is a state of mind; others say that it is a euphemism in some sense for the word ‘pleasure’ which is normally a word used in the context of human or animal instincts and there are those who say that happiness in the ideal sense is an illusion. But whatever be the specific meanings that people ascribe to it, it remains a word of the heavens. By ‘word of the heavens’ I mean something that does not have an earthly place as it is not a plain emotion. Yet people are searching for it hoping that they will find it sooner or later. In the struggles of their situations some may give up the hope of finding happiness and be content with their predicament. This is a rather unusual state to be in because on one hand they have not found the state of mind that they are looking for and on the other they give up the search accepting what little they have and they find it! But there is a pathetic fallacy associated with the search for happiness and it is that one usually does not know to what extent happiness is possible and how to preserve it till the end; yet one wants it quite desperately. 

From time to time it has been observed that we go through happy moments now and then. If they are outcomes of the dreadful word ‘success’ then you can be quite sure that it is subject to insecurity. Preservation of a success induced joyful state is by no means happiness. Happiness is a joyful state which is experienced for its own sake or when you are involved in an activity that you like without any intentions of benefiting from it in the future. Happiness from this angle never exists in the future. Attempts to discover happiness only leads to creating techniques that will have to be applied to be able to find it. But application is a process which has nothing to do with the end result, which in this case is happiness. There have been people who write about happiness; psychologists who research on the subject and find only their own perspectives of it. Whatever be the attempts to find the heavenly state and preserve it till kingdom come, you should be spared the vanity of associating it with success or priggish talks. It must be noted that one who experiences anxiety does not want to be unhappy but is desperately trying to find this heavenly state of mind. One who is anxious is not just tired but is terrified at the thought of consequences of not finishing the line or entering mainstream. He is anxious and not unhappy. 

The only person who really is unhappy is one who is able to see that nothing in life can ever bring him happiness. If nothing can bring me happiness even from within then I would not want to keep searching for it as it is a waste of intrapersonal effort. If I am unhappy then I may consider not looking for happiness at all and this unhappy mind does away with itself. It has let go of my unreasonable search of that which I cannot describe. If I cannot describe it and have no idea of what it is then it does not exist in my being. If someone else finds it in common pursuits then I can be quite sure that that is not my concept of happiness because I cannot find it. Happiness is simply a myth.