check what's going in Ankit's mind today.
· Man is a social animal, why?
Why do we live in society? Is it just because of human nature? Or is there any reason for that? Swami Vivekanand says yes there is a definite reason for that. What reason? Reason is IMPULSE. Impulse is the push or force that is required for acceleration in our life. You can understand impulse better in form of inspiration, jealousy, impression, affection, attraction and other forms of emotions. Every person is a powerhouse but he needs some sort of impulse to move. Bottom line is that for every soul impulse must come through another soul.
We can experience impulse in our daily lives, when we see our favorite player playing good; we also try to play like him when we are in playground. When we see few bad, strong and powerful people behaving badly with a weak person we wish to be powerful and understand the importance of being powerful. When we see our colleagues performing better than us we work hard to improve our performance. Say it inspiration, say it anger, say it jealousy or whatever; thing is that these things make people work, make people create something new, make people do exactly for what they are here. No matter in what form it acts on you; it makes you move, it makes you think, it shakes you. This is impulse. This impulse is the very reason why man is a social animal.
Human life and society
• Humanity
The very first question arises “what is human”. First of all being human is being a character, if you have some specific character you are human otherwise you are not. What characters? Though I don’t know how people have defined this word ‘human’ just because it is such a general word and that no body ever felt the need of doing so. As far as characters are concerned it’s not our structure or physicality that makes us human, it’s what we think, what we do, what we wish to do and how we express ourselves. The mixture of all these qualities makes a ‘character’, which is the only standard of our humanity.
According to few people the definition of humanity changes with time and conditions, like during a war, during an earthquake or flood, during a funeral etc. if we think deeply we still can find a permanent definition of humanity, which never changes. “Humanity is character possessed by a person which causes maximum benefit to the person himself with minimum harm (or maximum benefit if possible) to others.”
Dalai Lama; Should He, Should He Not
Some 544 scientists have signed a petition asking for the presentation (by Dalai Lama) to be cancelled. They claim, "It will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and comprise scientific rigour and objectivity". The neuroscientists have also got some supporters they say that his research is incomplete. I heard one of them saying, "true science is about making no presumptions about the unknown. But it is not a science until the known is unknown. And what the Dalai Lama plans to present is still unknown".
Science, spirituality, known, unknown, neuroscience, metaphysics…
All right.
Let's start from the very basics. What is science? I am not going to define science (for some reasons) but every body will agree with me on one thing that science is all about proofs. If a proposal can be proved it becomes law of science. The neuroscientists claim that Dalai Lama is still to provide some incontrovertible and independently ratified proof to be eligible to make the presentation. Now here is one important question which all of us tend to skip. What are the criteria to define a proof? Normally when we say, "this thing exists" we mean that either we can hear it, smell it, see it, touch it or taste it".
If you see carefully you realize that our knowledge is limited to these five senses. If something exists which is above or below these senses then it is not there for us. It is not necessary for that thing to exist but we don't have any proof to prove that something (like that) doesn't exist. See, if we can't realize the existence of something it has to be at very-very micro level. Thing is that we only start looking at something when it starts making impact on our lives or showing it's presence. Our human culture is 5000 years old and an average human life is of less than 100 years. Fact is that we don't have enough time to wait. We did wait for some microorganisms to turn our milk to curd, or to cause some diseases before making a microscope. The problem that we are not having enough Newtons and Einsteins is that our thrust for knowledge is not as pure as their. They wanted to know something for one and only one cause that is, "pure knowledge". Getting a prize, making a presentation, doing a research for name, fame and money was not all that they were for. Like today's scientists they were not scientists. They never used to think like "what I am going to get if I research on this", "will it be good for the science if we do some thinking on this topic".
There is no doubt that Dalai Lama is a religious person and not a scientist and for scientists religion is not a science. But for those who believe "religion is the most tried and tested science to explore the available human resources". If it is not true then tell me why every culture that ever existed on this planet had at least one religion. Thing is that spirituality (which is the laboratory of a religion) and science are not mutually exclusive things. And if the neuroscientists have their target as the service of human society and not of their own then they must include spirituality to science. So that they can make science more useful. And for the shake of pure knowledge Dalai Lama must be allowed to make the presentation.
