The Need & Essence of Evolutionary Mentology
The approach and objective of Evolutionary Mentology
Evolutionary Mentology is a new body of knowledge and understanding which essentially attempts to enable the contemporary human being to intelligently redesign and further evolve his mental processes based upon a holistic understanding of the human mind, and the direction of its further development as a part of Nature’s own evolution. We believe that this understanding will add a completely new dimension to human knowing and doing and equip the individual to undertake a serious engineering of his entire mental makeup, which is basically a product of his past history, and clearly seems incapable of coping with today’s complexities.
The pursuit of this holistic understanding, which can enable the human being to intelligently reconstruct himself has become possible due to two very important breakthroughs in scientific knowledge in our times. One, a growing body of facts and understanding about the origins, evolution and working of the human brain/mind. Two, information about the inception and evolution of the cosmic process of Nature, which has produced the human mind. The emerging fund of scientific knowledge in these areas enabled us to view the mind as a natural phenomenon having an evolutionary history, and logical mechanics pertaining to its working, which could be inquired into and understood like all other phenomena in Nature. So, clearly mental processes were no longer a mystery, or a supernatural entity. The only issue was that one could not completely explain them in terms of the known tangible matter and energy processes of the brain. Hence our postulate that mental processes would be hybrid processes composed of the most rarified massless energy forms in Nature, akin to those that must have existed in the pre-bang era of Nature together with the post-big bang forms of energy. What followed from this was that mental processes as energy forms could be harnessed to evolve new mental tools—based upon holistic knowing—which could be used to acquire knowledge about the internal working of our mind, discover the methods to bring changes in our existing mental makeup, and also develop new capabilities.
When we combined the above with the understanding about the evolutionary journey of Nature, beginning with pre big bang energy forms till the stage where it produced the human mind, operating in terms of the same energy forms, we could discern a logical direction to the entire process of Nature including the human mind. It seemed that Nature was on a journey from unconscious energy to conscious energy or from the dialectic of contradiction to the dialectic of harmony. We could see this because the energy forms of the human mind had become capable of developing a holistic awareness about their working and evolution, and also the larger evolutionary process of which they were a part, which indicated their potential to proceed towards a process of their further conscious evolution. In result of which they would be able to reduce conflicts and contradictions in their own evolution and move towards more intelligent states of organization and harmony. So far, evolution in living things had been taking place at the unconscious level and hence through conflicts and contradictions. Even in the case of human beings their mental processes—ideas, feelings, intelligence, temperament and habits—have largely been evolving unconsciously, and not on the basis of an understanding about their working. Due to which their internal life has been adjusting and developing in response to the pressures of civilizational developments. During this process, since the erosions and additions to mental formations and capabilities would occur at the unconscious and sub-conscious levels, so the process of progress always produced contradictions and conflicts within and outside the human being. However, now with the emerging scientific knowledge about the working and evolution of the mind, we can hope to develop a holistic intelligence about the mind, which may act as the most efficient tool for the evolution of our mental processes. And this is happening at a time when the need for it has never been so acute. Today we have reached a stage where it seems that without an intelligent understanding of the working of our mental processes, and the ability to intelligently redesign them we will not be able to resolve the continuously growing complexities, conflicts and contradictions that have emerged in our internal and external life, particularly since the emergence of science and technology.
Our future appears bright as far as scientific, technological and material growth is concerned, but rather bleak considering the existing state of our mind as a whole, wherein the unintelligent dynamic of the various contradictions and conflicts within us are becoming the breeding ground for all kinds of mental distortions, verging on the point of anarchy, both at the personal and social levels. And not only this but mental illnesses of varied sorts have also become rampant. In this situation none of the reformist or humanist approaches towards the human being, which catered to the more tangible/manifest form of human problems, of alleviating cruelty, injustice, violence, or poverty, can hope to produce any lasting results. Therefore we feel that the issue of contemporary human problems needs to be addressed on a totally different plane. In our suggestion we need to approach it from the perspective of Nature (and not from a subjective/humanist standpoint), i.e., from the standpoint of evolution in Nature, which reveals that the evolution of the human being and his mind is not as yet a complete story. Wherein he needs to make a transition from being unintelligent about his mental processes to becoming intelligent about their working and then also discover the direction in which to intelligently redesign, organize and evolve the whole of his mind. So that he is able to raise the quality of his life both at the individual and social levels, by minimizing contradictions and pain, and consequently connecting to the potential of happiness possible in our times and also in the future. So in Evolutionary Mentology our thinking about the human being and the human condition draws a clear departure from the humanist ideology of ‘reform’ in which we are including the practiced religions and even political revolution. And that departure is in terms of the fundamental assumption of the humanist viewpoint which accepts the human being as he is, as completed by Nature, and just aims to address some tangible defects left in his formation and their consequences in his material life. This assumption underlies all issues pertaining to human existence today ranging from man’s spiritual and religious life and its requirements, to addressing various forms of cruelty and violence, and then improvement in material conditions, which includes alleviating poverty, disease, etc. In modern times this list incorporates the elaborate economic and social activity and its problems, and then education and the arena of politics (democracy, dictatorship etc.) and culture.
Of course, we should continue to attempt to reform and improve our living conditions; reduce pollution, exercise population control, remove social injustices, and so on. These are current problems and matters we should try to attempt on a day-to-day basis. But this is not the main task which faces mankind. Neither is it the fundamental task of a human being to plan for an after-life after his death. The primary task of contemporary man is to evolve consciously and intelligently, so that a growing happiness becomes an integral part of the future of the human life process. That is the fundamental challenge facing us today.
Our main propositions and conclusions about the evolution of the human mind as a part of Nature and its required intelligent restructuring
Today we can clearly observe, in the light of knowledge that has emerged in Astrophysics and particle physics, how the cosmic process and its logic evolved through different stages, and then brought us into existence and made us pass through different stages of evolution to produce our present form (biological and mental) and how that process of evolution is still continuing. It would be a fallacy on our part to think that the process of evolution, which has been operating as an integral property of Nature’s own working, has come to a halt with the emergence of our species. There is no legitimate reason and reality on the basis of which we can say that Nature’s own evolutionary process, or its work on the human being and his mental processes has ended. On the contrary all the reasons and observations confirm that it is continuing.
The Following are the broad conclusions that we arrived at with respect to the nature and direction of further human evolution:
1. The Mind originated in Nature with the emergence of single-celled organisms. It was a tool for their survival, because they had to consume from the outside world on a continuous basis to fulfill their cellular needs, and also had to defend themselves from the environment. Given the dynamic nature of their relationship with their environment, these elementary life forms were not possibly going to survive without some kind of computing systems; perceptual, emotive, problem-solving and executory systems, to mediate this relationship. The nature and quantity of work that was required in all these systems could not possibly be achieved through the heavier energy and matter forms operating in living things, so these organisms had to evolve a mechanism employing energy forms that would require the least amount of energy for carrying out the growing mental tasks. Hence the evolution of mental processes as hybrid formations of pre big bang forms and post big bang heavier energy forms/states in Nature. Since then, the mental processes have been evolving as a part of the requirements for the survival, efficient functioning and evolution of the biological life forms - which meant that the core evolutionary process was occurring on the biological plane.
2. The human mind evolved as a continuity of the evolution of the animal mind. However, with the emergence of mature language there occurred a marked difference in the nature of the evolutionary process as it began to operate in man compared to other life forms. Evolution in human beings began to occur primarily on the mental plane. The vastly advanced mental processes (compared to animals) of abstraction, imagination, and consequently the capability of forming ideas that emerged with the development of mature language (which includes the written script) produced a qualitatively new level of capabilities of storing and processing information. This in turn gave birth to an expanding process of a highly dynamic intelligence and its doing capabilities. It was these growing capabilities of the mind that began to shape and define the internal and external human life in a way that it started to become markedly different from that of the animals. Our biological needs, and survival issues no more remained at a simple level as in animals, and our satisfaction and emotional process also did not remain confined to the fulfillment of the needs coming from our biology. In fact they developed and became elaborate by the inputs of the new mental capabilities, whether about things, relationships, or one’s identity, etc. Of course during this process the advanced ‘human biological mind’ was able to produce contradictions and conflicts at far greater levels than animals could—in terms of wars, cruelties, environmental destructions etc. Hence the emergence and development of the different idea systems, to both reinforce and address these contradictions, in the form of paradigms about man and his life. And social systems and cultures based upon these ideas to operate the new complex social and internal life arising from new mental needs and emotional drives that had lost their initial congruence with our biological needs. So what we find is that there occurred a qualitative change in the capabilities of the human mind, but its character in terms of its basic foundations largely remained the same as that of the animal mind. Due to this character/formation it continued to have an adversarial relationship with the environment on the basis of consumption and survival needs as an individual biological unit, and still having roots in the satisfaction systems coming from biology. Human mental processes have in essence evolved as a hybrid of the emotional and intelligence programmes inherited from the animal past, and the developing post language mental capabilities. They did not evolve into a completely new phenomenon, which could be radically distinguished from the biological mind, but became just an advanced form of the biological mind in Nature. The ‘human’ biological mind however lost the simplicity and clarity of the animal biological mind, which in turn produced all kinds of discomforts, contradictions, illusions, and cluttering that human beings have been experiencing in their feeling and thought processes over the course of their evolution.
3. Having said all of the above, we also observe at a parallel level that the human biological mind during the course of civilization produced a completely new variety of mental processes, the truly ‘post biological’ mental processes—of sensitivities, intellect, and pleasures. These became unrelated to, and disconnected from the agendas and drives of the biological mind. Although these did not emerge and develop equally among all human beings, but they did influence the mind of man generally, and in many ways. The emergence of the advanced religious and philosophical thought processes seeking to get closer to the reality of Nature and of man, and the relationship between them, have been expressions of these new growing holistic intellectual and sensitivity processes beyond the motivations of the biological mind. And also the need to discover new foundations and purpose for the developing human emotional and mental capabilities that were surplus to his biological and material life. Alongside the religious and philosophical post-biological mental processes we find the post-biological drives of intellectual inquiry which produced science, and then the feeling, sensitivity and intellectual processes which produced serious arts, poetry and literature. All of them inform us of the potential that was inherent in the post language feeling and thinking processes. We can observe how these post-biological advanced mental processes channelized and took the civilizational process to new levels, both materially and in terms of adding new dimensions to the human emotional, feeling and thinking processes. The latter however operated only in the superficial mental layers of the human being, and did not take root in the foundational, basic layers of his mind. Due to this situation the biological mind has kept on hijacking the products of the post-biological mind for its own purposes and agendas. Hence in hindsight we can say that the history of the evolution of the human mind (beginning from the developed stage of civilization) is really the history of a contradiction between the biological and the emerging post biological minds.
4. Today human mental evolution has reached a stage where it seems that finally it has started heading towards a crisis of the biological mind, which is manifesting at various levels. We find its increasing failure to cope with the complexities that it has created. The human being is unable to handle his highly developed and growing emotional and intellectual capabilities, which include the capabilities coming from science and technology, within the design framework of the biological mind. The resolution of this crisis cannot be achieved whilst remaining within the framework of the motivations and intelligence coming from the biological mind. Nature has brought us to a stage where we will need to evolve a post biological holistic consciousness, which is able to acquire an understanding of the working of our mind, and carry out its restructuring based upon a new design reference – which it can only find from the evolutionary logic of Nature itself; in terms of its transition from the dialectic of contradiction towards the dialectic harmony, that we call the ‘aesthetic of Nature’. This will be the criterion for the redesigning and organization of our biological mind and also the design framework in which our surplus mental processes—of feelings, sensitivities and intellect—will find the nucleus for their own growth and evolution. Our sensitivities that seek pleasure on qualitative levels, and our intellect that seeks knowing on an expanding scale at micro and macro levels of Nature, are basically expressions of the evolving process of Nature itself, and its Aesthetic; the product of the evolution of its own capabilities and functions. They have emerged as the most powerful tools of Nature capable of transforming not only our internal reality but also the process of Nature as a whole. The latter we can foresee from the new capabilities of knowledge that are emerging in the cutting edge Sciences of today. Of course this stage will come about at a much later stage in our evolution. But even at the present stage connecting to this process and introducing changes within us will also bring about productive results for our biological mind, at the individual and social level (in our politics, economics and culture). At the same time it will also serve to promote the growth of our post biological sensitivities and pleasure systems, including the intellect. We cannot undertake these processes on the basis of some moral or ethic or some ideology, but only on the basis of a growing understanding and pursuit of pleasure at the highest levels of quality.
Intelligent restructuring of the existing gene-based biological mind of an individual and its social dimension
The existing mental complex of contemporary man is fundamentally a gene (software and programmes) based emotional and mental response system made up of specialized mental modules that arise out of our neuronal processes. By gene based we mean their basic design is made in our ‘mental’ genes, which exist alongside biological genes in our neurons, and it becomes specific during an interaction with the environment. These are a highly developed and complex form of elementary response systems in simple living things, which essentially evolved to efficiently address and fulfill their biological needs of survival during an on-going interaction with the environment. Like in the case of all living things our response systems develop in layers during a child’s interaction with its environment; the programmes and software of these systems keep getting modified unconsciously and new mental processes are added as the child grows and passes through the various stages of its life span. Thus these response systems basically develop unintelligently and their basic design is also unintelligent and individual centric. The human personality or our unique sense of ourselves is an accumulated product of the on-going functioning of all these response systems. It is a unified meta-layer which arises when we become aware of our internal experience resulting from the repeated functioning of our response systems and are also able to verbalize it, which gives it a unique identity.
The problem today is that our unintelligent emotional and mental response systems and personality are coming in conflict with the agenda of our developed sensitivities and intellect and that is the root cause of the various levels of conflicts, contradictions, and crises we observe and experience both within ourselves and in our external environment. Hence the need for a new intelligent post-genetic mental operating system which is not dominated by our unintelligent genetic response systems but has a new design and architecture based on the agenda of our intellect and developed sensitivities. Our existing emotional and mental response systems will be very much a part of our new mind but will not be in the driving seat. They will be subordinate to the emerging post-genetic conscious mind. To move towards the making of this new intelligent post-genetic mind an individual will need to form new mental processes through new mental mechanics (not software based but mental process based) and that can only be done through carrying out a sustained process of mental restructuring within oneself through mental tools. There will be four broad stages of mental restructuring within the individual.
-
The first one is to become intelligently aware of our mental processes - their genetic origins, development and evolution, functioning, and how they have been unconsciously modifying throughout our lives.
-
The second stage will be to construct a specialized cognitive module for cognizing the mental processes in their interaction as human personality.
-
The third stage will arise when after sufficient cognition of our mental processes in their layers we will be able to come up with some mental tools to make modifications in our existing mental processes and to develop new mental processes. So in this stage we will acquire the capability of engineering in relation to our mental processes and the new post-biological mind will start acquiring an identity of its own.
-
The fourth stage will be of the maturing of our new intelligent post-genetic mind and its identity, where it will no longer remain subordinate to its genetic roots and will become capable of truly externalizing our mental processes and restructuring them just as we intervene and change things outside of us.
When the individual would have traveled sufficiently along the above mentioned journey within himself, then the social dimension of this process will also start unfolding. The emerging post-genetic mind (equipped with mature rationality) in groups of individuals will start an intelligent intervention in the social domain of culture, politics and economics. Consequently, they will be able to come up with completely new approaches, concepts, methods and structures in all these areas. The core drive or motivation of this process will be to intelligently address social needs and problems in the new mental framework; minimize conflicts and contradictions in our social interactions and move towards more harmonious interactions which will breed new and stable forms of pleasure and happiness in the social domain. The overall purpose of the new post-genetic mind (which will be in consonance with Nature’s own agenda pertaining to man) in the social arena will be to sow the seeds of a Third Renaissance; a new culture and civilization, which contemporary man is potentially capable of making today because he has both the mental and the material assets and resources to do so. But for this, the prerequisite is that the individual begins the process of evolving a new mental operating system (a new design and architecture of his mind and a new level of functioning) as a continuous journey both within and outside of him leading to a more harmonious and happy future for him and his coming generations.
How we came to Evolutionary Mentology
There were three emerging realities which steered us towards Evolutionary Mentology. The first one was our observation and understanding of an accumulated practical experience of past efforts of reform, whether through dogma based religions, or political revolutions (radical means of reforming) which revealed their manifest incapacity to bring about real social change or revolution in the societies within which they emerged. Whether it was radical reform like the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Cuban revolutions or the less radical ones like the various National struggles in South Asia and Africa or the further diluted ones like Civil Rights or Human Rights and other such struggles and movements. The current social and political efforts of reform also fall within the same domain because their basic approach is a carryover from the earlier attempts. In fact there is one factor missing in these recent efforts; the complete absence of a revolutionary spirit. This spirit began to wither away due to the growing entanglement of man’s mind in the emerging complexities of the economic, political and cultural landscape of modern times. And his realization and gradual acceptance that it will not be possible to bridge the gap between the original vision of human betterment and social change and what was practically doable in the changing times, which could only be incremental steps of reform in terms of social and political projects.
In our view the critical factor (although there exist many factors) which has been the dominant cause of the clear inability of these attempts or movements to achieve their objectives is their stated and unstated emphasis on the social process and society instead of the individual, barring the religious movements, which did begin from the individual albeit in a dogmatic framework. In these movements the social conditions and forces were identified as the main cause of human problems. What flowed from that was that if we change society i.e. the given or pre-existing legal, political, economic, cultural and human resource structures then our problems will be eradicated. And as a result of this change the individual will also change. The distortions in the individual’s behavior and responses were observed and experienced and there was a realization that they had to be addressed and a better and more decent human being was needed but the argument went that the real causes of his individual distortions were social and consequently the solution to them was also social (within the social framework and through social means and tools). So once that was addressed the changes in the individual will automatically ensue. What this construct overlooked was the fact that human problems, in the post-second world war period no longer consisted of just tangible and manifest social issues of poverty, disparity, injustice, physical violence, human rights, etc. but also matters and issues flowing out of the individual (mental) dimension. And the latter were gradually occupying a larger space and becoming a bigger problem than the manifest ones. These were emerging out of the existing state of an individual’s mental complex, and the growing inability of his intellectual and emotional processes to cope with the emerging complexities produced by man himself in the post-world war cultural, political and economic scenario. So it was becoming clear to us that it would be illogical to keep operating within the existing social framework to address these problems; these issues could not just be viewed and tackled in terms of personalities, or individual and social tactics, planning or strategy. Consequently, we realized that the focal point of any thinking about the human condition and problems would have to be the individual, instead of society and the social structures. The other reality was the emerging complexities (in terms of items, processes and planes of interactions both within and between the individual and social dimensions) in the radically changed external environment of man as a result of the maturing of science and its technological applications and the unprecedented material progress and development it unleashed in the last 40 years especially in the Western world. We could see how this reality had radically transformed the economic, cultural and political specifics of modern man. We observed the emergence of two consequences from this situation. One, the distorted forms of existing problems and the emerging new forms of issues and problems of man were no longer fitting neatly in the pre-existing frameworks of thinking about and addressing human problems. So these frameworks were clearly confronting failure and insufficiency while trying to cater to these new problems, which we maintain were arising more from man’s individual mental dimension. Two, man’s mental resources and capabilities were getting more and more entangled in the growing web of complexity in his inner and outer life and consequently becoming less and less capable of coping with this situation.
So despite the highly sophisticated and developed state (in terms of capabilities and functioning) of man’s intellect and its continuing unprecedented growth we could also observe in parallel a process of disintegration and dispersion within his mind and its effects on his outer social existence. The growing mental disorders, nervous breakdowns and even physical disorders and then the growing breakdowns in the social arena whether in national and international conflict management, social infrastructure, public policy or other social departments, etc., were alerting us to this problem. So we realized that without a systematic and sustained inquiry into man and his mind we would not be able to avoid sinking into a deepening and many-sided crisis and an eventual collapse as individuals and societies. It was the third emerging reality that actually enabled us to concretely begin the process of a comprehensive and meticulous inquiry into the human mind; determine its contours and parameters, concretize its main propositions and state them more confidently. This was the emerging knowledge fund in the various Sciences. The scientific disciplines that reinforced and aided us included Microbiology, the various sub-areas of Physics, particularly Astrophysics, and theoretical physics, and then the Evolutionary Sciences. Then we had specific disciplines which were undertaking an inquiry into the human brain and mind; Psychology, Neuroscience, Neurology, and AI. It is on the basis of the continuously emerging facts and knowledge from these disciplines that we were able to develop and work with more informed hypotheses about the origins, structural constituents, evolution, and functioning of the human mind as a natural phenomenon and its connection with the process of macro Nature. It is pertinent to mention that this knowledge fund was a boon for us because without it our propositions about the human mind and the evolutionary process of Nature and the integral connection between them would have been just skeletons.
The method of inquiry we employed to explore and understand the human mind in the context of macro Nature
The issue of method of inquiry became critical for us due to two reasons. One, while examining the micro work on brain, mind and consciousness in the various Sciences together with the work on social consciousness and behavior of man in the emerging disciplines of Sociology, etc., we realized that we could neither use the scientific empirical method to inquire into the reality and mechanics of mental processes nor its corollaries in the new disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Although mental processes constituted a natural phenomenon which was logically capable of being inquired into like all other phenomena but we found that they could not be understood within the same framework and through the same tools that we used for understanding tangible (through our existing perceptual senses and their extensions) phenomena like the brain. They emerged out of the brain but were not operating in terms of the brain energy and chemical processes. In this situation we could only resort to the classical mode of philosophical inquiry in which we had to draw inferences from the contemporary knowledge fund in both the Sciences and otherwise and then through reasoning make the mental processes tangible. The second reason was that intelligent intervention into the mental processes from the standpoint of engineering could not take place without acquiring classified, systematized and holistic knowledge and understanding about the mind through a disciplined and rigorous method of inquiry.
The following were some premises and conclusions which constituted the main components of our method. The first component was that mental processes as a phenomenon were a natural process and logical like all other existing phenomena. The next component ensued from the first one that if they were natural and logical then they must be made up of those energy forms which were not yet tangible to us. Hence our proposition that they must be hybrid processes made up of some pre-big bang light energy forms and post-big bang heavier energy forms. Having reached these conclusions then the issue was how to approach the mental processes. Thus we started the process of locating the essential components of the unified process and logic of Nature itself of which our mental processes were a part. We found it had two main components; evolutionary component (a tendency based on motion, interconnection and interaction to evolve to more complex and stable states) and the aesthetic component (mechanics of preference for a dialectic of harmony instead of dialectic of contradiction).
Once these components were in place, we then had to employ the historical method to trace the journey of the macro process of Nature and its logic through its various evolutionary stages since the pre-big bang, and especially when it evolved the living and biological process and then went on to the human stage of evolution leading up to the present. From there we moved on to the next logical stage of man’s evolution that we could perceive. Acquiring a detailed understanding of the existing architecture, structure and functioning of the contemporary mind was an integral part of this historical journey which began from the origins of macro Nature. This micro process entailed acquiring observations/cognition (non-sensory) about the individual mental processes/functions, their dominant connections and interactive functioning, drawing inferences from those observations through reasoning, ideas and imagination, making hypotheses based on these inferences, checking/verifying and rejecting existing and making new ones and then coming up with some clear conclusions which we could work with and develop. This whole exercise of exploring and inquiring into the mind at both the micro and macro levels has been an open-ended, ongoing, and incremental process which we have carried out formally for the last 23 years, and informally since the 1970s.
Notes
i. Their basic design and programmes have been modifying unconsciously
ii. Manifest mental behaviours of which one becomes aware, then one is able to modify them semi-intelligently
iii. The reason why we have been thinking otherwise is that so far we have been understanding evolution of living things and man in Nature—based on Darwin’s work and its development in the contemporary Evolutionary Sciences—largely in terms of biological evolution and consequently making the mistake of limiting our concept of evolution to the biological plane. This goes against logical reasoning because today we know from the work in Astrophysics that evolution has been taking place even in the pre-biological phase of Nature. So the question is how can it come to an end with the biological processes particularly when there is plenty of evidence to suggest that biological processes in-turn produced a post-biological phenomenon i.e. the mental processes, which particularly when human beings come on the scene, became the main playground of evolution in Nature instead of the biological form. Thus it is intellectual neglect and carelessness on our part to profess the end of human evolution just because at the biological plane we are not evolving further.
iv. We find them in a healthy operational form in some individuals like poets, prophets, mystics, philosophers, artists, etc.
v. Man is using these capabilities from the standpoint of the motivations coming from the biological mind, which is creating dangers of destruction on a global scale.
vi. The design framework includes his paradigms about himself (his own satisfaction process) and his life.
vii. We are proposing that in addition to brain genes we will also be having ‘mental’ genes, which specifically contain the design template for the making and functioning of mental processes. These genes specifically programme the brain cells to produce mental processes. And they will not be existing in the form of biological molecules like our existing DNA but in the form of some undetectable weak energy forms.
viii. Which make the brain.
ix. Our developed sensitivities and intellect are in fact Nature-centric and not individual-centric.
x. Our measure of real is in terms of sustainability and growing stability and also with reference to the Idealism which initially drove the revolutionary spirit. The latter we are including as a measure because we observed a growing gap between the practical unfolding and the original vision and spirit of these movements; they began to get disconnected and became more and more distant from their original ideals and vision.
xi. Here we would like to quickly insert that in this framework human problems were largely viewed as problems of man’s tangible material existence hence the focus on changing and improving the social structures and means necessary for resolving his material problems.
xii.Here it would be appropriate to mention that the individual dimension was not completely ignored but relegated to a secondary position. This can be observed in the lesser (than the political movements) trends/movements of change in prevailing individual behavior and fabric of individual life; in Literature, Arts, and Preachings, etc. It was assumed that stimulus coming from these trends combined with social change will produce the required change in the individuals. That is how the individual dimension was integrated into the process of social and political reform.
xiii. Which focused on specific micro segments and proceeded dominantly on the basis of tangible observations acquired through laboratory tools and mathematics.
xiv. In recent times the accent of questioning concerning man, which in the past had been in the purview of philosophizing coupled with the historical method (both of them had their limitations but they were the only methods available), has shifted from philosophy and history to anthropology and sociology. We found this shift to be clearly unsatisfactory. These new methodologies of looking at man, which were derivatives of science, were all right for setting up specific projects concerning the human condition but nothing more than that.
xv. The processes of perception, cognition, memory, problem solving, emotions, ideas (Including the programmes related to them), imagination, creativity, etc,
xvi. The other knowledge areas apart from the above mentioned scientific disciplines included human history, particularly social history after the emergence of developed language and post-second world war developments in science and technology. Then we looked at past philosophical speculations and religions. Overall it has been an open ended and holistic inquiry in which we could not restrict ourselves to the barriers of various disciplines.
.