Thursday, August 26, 2010

What is the brain and what is its fragrance?

Pleading with the brain to stop the wrong electrochemical reactions is like telling a dirty bed sheet to clean itself! It will never happen.

Prof. KVSS @ Me

What is brain and what is its fragrance? What is the development of the brain? What is the difference between intelligence and knowledge? Both concepts are related to the brain of a person? When do you call a person sub normally intelligent? When is a person super intelligent? When is a person wise?

Emotional intelligence is only one aspect of brain. You can not say at high levels it is wisdom. You are taking a recent popular topic and blowing it up without adequate conceptual foundation. Your passion to make more people wise is commendable. But conceptual structure on which you want to do it is very weak. Let us think over the issues.

What is the brain and what is its fragrance?

The brain is an organ of the body. Its function is to make man know, understand and become his true potential; to understand life and everything in it. Just as a flowers function is to have a fragrance. It is the brain's function to have intelligence. This intelligence is of two types. Regular which determines the knowledge level of the person and emotional intelligence which determines the emotional maturity of the person. In most people the intelligence level is a mixture of the lowest and highest levels of intelligence. I am focusing on making mankind aware that certain values that we cultivate in our children do their brains emotional and physical harm. Imagine America with a majority of people who are selfless unlike today when most are burdened with a trophy self image. Unwittingly creating trophy self image in our own child burdens the child with lots of unhealthy consequences.

For any job one needs the right tools. Our most important job is to know, understand and become ones full potential. The tool that enables us to accomplish this goal is the brain. The brain has to be in top physical and emotional shape for us to know, understand and become our true self.

Just as fragrance is an automatic quality of a flower, intelligence is an automatic quality of the brain. The level of intelligence will be different in different individuals but it will always be there.
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What is the development of the brain?

Development of the brain means physical and emotional changes in the brain through education of the brain.
Development of the brain is the physical and emotional changes of the brain towards more and more maturity through regular education and through emotional intelligence education. It is essential that we focus on developing the brain in the right direction on both fronts. There is such a thing as right (super mature) education and even education I have quantified into -2, -1, +1 and +2. America mainly teaches +1 education so the American brain mostly develops to +1.

What is the difference between intelligence and knowledge?
Intelligence is the capacity/quality/function of the brain to know, understand and comprehend life and everything in it. Knowledge is what we can call organized information regarding life and everything in it. The level of intelligence determines the capacity to understand knowledge.
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Both concepts are related to the brain of a person?

Intelligence is what determines the quality of the brain's function and the knowledge level does the same. However it is the intelligence level of the brain that determines how much knowledge the person can comprehend. Thus intelligence level is more crucial. What use is knowledge if one cannot understand it? Both are related to the brain, intelligence is part of the brain and it determines the level at which the brain will function. Knowledge is just as important for correct knowledge will result in successful results and incorrect knowledge will result in bad results.

Emotional knowledge in the early stages of life determines the emotional intelligence of the person. Thus knowledge and intelligence are close determinants of the brain. Emotional knowledge level will determine the emotional intelligence level; thus both are dependent on each other in shaping the quality of the brain.
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When do you call a person sub normally intelligent?

When his intelligence level lacks the capacity to live a normal life. However normal itself is a matter of opinion. I have been saying that our so called normal society is currently sub normal.
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When is a person super intelligent?

When he has a brain that perceives actual reality just as it is. When he knows, understands and is his true self. When he is a master of the ropes of his life and is a master of his chosen life, including his profession.
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When is a person wise?

When he has developed/educated his emotional and physical brain to its full capacity. When his brain functions at the super mature intelligence level. When he has a brain that perceives actual reality just as it is. When he knows, understands and is his true self. When he is a master of the ropes of his life and is a master of his chosen life, including his profession. Super intelligence = wisdom = real self = self master = pure humanness = full actualized human potential = The Buddha in us = The Christ in us = the true me = the true you.
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Emotional intelligence is only one aspect of the brain.

Yes, indeed emotional intelligence is only one aspect of the brain. The brains main function is to run the body like the heart and lungs. Its other function is to help the person live and make sense of his life.
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You can not say at high levels it is wisdom.

The qualities of an emotionally super intelligent brain and a wise brain are exactly the same. And they are both the same as that of a fully developed and actualized self. All of them are the one and same entity. All three are selfless, the fundamental quality of a wise person.

Wisdom is like there is a gold mine in your back yard ( in your brain potential ). It is your parents, mentors and teachers who can dig it up (actualize it) for you. Through their nurturing they can refine the gold ore (wisdom potential) and make it possible for you to have and make full use of pure gold (wisdom).
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You are taking a recent popular topic and blowing it up without adequate conceptual foundation.

I think I am not being able to stress fully the importance of emotional intelligence in the lives of individuals, groups and countries. Take the example of America itself. Most people here are emotionally over stressed. The consumption of tranquilizers here is the highest in the world. Look at the mess in our India. Corruption is a way of life. At least part of this tragedy can be traced to our lack of emotional intelligence education. In huge parts of the world life is -1 because the group emotional intelligence is -1!. In America life is mostly +1 because the group emotional intelligence is +1. In spite of all the economic progress and all the luxuries of life, a vast majority has to pop in pills to sleep and ease the restlessness in our American brains. And the cycle continues and will continue until we can wake up to the root cause of lack of wisdom education. No amount of stressing will be out of proportion. Just imagine a +2 world run on +2 brain power! As I said wisdom is like there is a gold mine in our own back yard but unless we are aware of it and we take steps to mine it for our selves and especially for our children; It will remain untapped.Suppose it was discovered that in your neighborhood one of the back yards had a gold mine. Imagine the excitement in your entire neighborhood and beyond. Yet our own wisdom mine is real and instead of tapping it we continue to life our lives partly in emotional poverty.

The bigger problem is that the brain cannot work in a vacuum. The brain runs on intelligence. Just like the body requires blood, the brain requires intelligence, especially emotional intelligence. Lack of wisdom, that is lack of +2 intelligence means there has to be +1, -1 or -2 intelligence or a most likely mixture of these levels. Thus life can be perfumed with wisdom or it can be covered partly in stink/ignorance. And stinkiness costs us not just in terms of happiness it affects the over all quality of life in every respect. It even affects group/country behavior. Thus if emotional intelligence education is taken care of it produces the bounties of life and life on earth is heaven and if it is neglected it takes its emotional and physical toll which is reflected in all aspects of life.
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Your passion to make more people wise is commendable.

It is not like I am trying to create something that is not already there. It is just that I am trying to wake up the world to something that is potentially already there. It is like we have a gold mine and we use the ore without fully refining it.
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But conceptual structure on which you want to do it is very weak.

The conceptual structure is weak indeed because there is still too much fuzziness about the very nature of wisdom. However from the earliest times it is amazing that the first prophet Zarathustra had it well figured out that there are just two forces in nature. Good and evil. He described them as ignorance and wisdom! However he made the same mistake, he described wisdom by its attributes. So from the very beginning the long hard and almost impossible quest to find ways to cultivate the attributes of wisdom started. Every philosopher and scientist that followed took the same path to cultivating wisdom. As cultivating wisdom through cultivating its attributes does not succeed the world finally got tired. However the religious prophets did not give up this quest and prophets like the Buddha and the Christ gave us the wisdom path through code. The Buddha figured out the road to wisdom through selflessness and the Christ figured it out through love. Above all the Torah and the Bible gave us the best clue, again in code, when it describes the answer of Gd to Moses, 'I am who I am'.

The good part is that the importance of wisdom is very well recognized and again we have some very serious research going on, on wisdom, like at the Berlin Institute. I think one of the problems is that we try to figure out what is wisdom through the work of philosophers and scientists and we ignore the contributions of the religious prophets. I think the prophets have contributed much more to wisdom then the other two. My own research takes the clues from any and all sources. I try to figure out wisdom from the concepts of philosophers, scientists and the prophets and I feel that main stream science must do the same.
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Let us think over the issues.

Our current discussion is what I have been wanting for; for a long time. Thanks.

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"It is better to characterize wisdom as super intelligence in multiple spheres applied properly by a person to certain important pursuits of physical or spiritual affairs of mankind" - KVSS's quote gives a good clue that wisdom can be described as super intelligence in multiple spheres. However this is the same old, same old way of trying to cultivate and describe wisdom by its attributes. Wisdom is a tree, it is a single entity. It is an all or not much reality. And it is generated by the actual physical and emotional quality of the brain. You cultivate and nurture the brain and wisdom will sprout automatically. If you are selfless then everything else, all the other attributes of wisdom will be there too. Try to cultivate super intelligence in one sphere without the whole wisdom tree is like trying to cultivate a mango without the mango tree. Why do you think main stream education has more or less abandoned the official teaching of wisdom? Because they tried and tried to teach individual super intelligences and found it almost impossible. Their failure and frustration in teaching individual attributes led them to the conclusion that it is impossible to teach the attributes of wisdom. This is exactly what I am trying to wake up the world to: it is impossible to teach the attributes because these are the fruits of the wisdom tree. No one can produce a mango without the mango tree. The world can keep trying to teach super intelligences individually but there will be little success. The secret of wisdom is that wisdom is the fragrance of the brain. Only when the focus and all efforts are shifted to cultivating and nurturing the brain will the world succeed in making wisdom common.

Starting from the womb stage the inner experiences of the outside reality physically changes the brain and the brain generates its own electro-chemical reactions/actions that determine set patterns of perceptions. The chief being it creates a self image, image of others and of how things are in the world. We develop a set pattern of personal reality that determines our individual perceptions of actual reality.

How much we are ignorant of our true self that much we are ignorant of wisdom, that much we are ignorant of the humanness in us, the Christ in us, the Buddha in us. You can personify wisdom exactly as the scriptures have been saying all along - as the Christ. Cultivating Christ is an all or nothing reality/truth. You have to cultivate the whole essence of Christ! Imagine cultivating one part of Christ or one part of humanness. No wonder cultivating one attribute at a time has not worked since the ancient times.

You cannot say to some one to be truthful and honest while his brain continues to generate selfishness powered by electrochemical reactions. It is these very physical and real electrochemical reactions that have to be eliminated. It is the physical reality/quality of an ignorance generating brain that has to be changed. Asking or pleading with a physically and emotionally ignorant brain to stop generating the wrong electrochemical reactions is almost like telling a dirty bed sheet to clean itself! It will never happen.

"What I think a great leader does, a great coach does, is understand what kind of talent you have and then you help people leverage that talent so they can achieve what they never thought they were capable of"- David C. Novak in today's NY Times. The biggest talent in every human being is the undeveloped wisdom potential!

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