Laugh your way to health

We know our health very much depends on our mental condition. When we are in the company of good people and cheerful surroundings, our body functions much better. Unpleasant scenery and the presence of those whom we dislike can make us sick and tired. A steady, good state of mind can usher in health and a negative one sickness.  Mental states influence our nervous system and vital organs.  One can acquire radiant health with a bit of exercise and food control coupled with a positive state of mind. It is now proven mental disturbances like anxiety and tension can induce diabetes, asthma, bronchitis and even blood pressure. Acute depressions and intense grieving can induce cancers!  One’s feelings, emotions, and mental states reflected in one’s brain waves, influence our health. Simply put, mind has a lot to do with one’s physical state.  By controlling one’s mind one can be healthy. Depressing and negative thoughts force our glands secrete poison into the blood. It affects or retards the normal body functions like circulation, digestion and assimilation.  A pleasant state of mind induces positive secretions which facilitate all these functions.

Constant laughing, smiles and a joyous state can cure diseases and help our body build up immunity against them. If one is depressed or sad immunity gets reduced and the count of the white blood corpuscles comes down. In a recent medical research, cancer patients were accommodated in a hall where they were allowed to read only funny magazines, articles, anecdotes and books, and see humorous films or videos. The experiment was continued for six months. When they were tested afterwards, it was observed that almost 20 percent of the patients were cured totally! There was a marked improvement in the others!  If a continuous joyous state can cure even incurable diseases like cancer, ordinary illnesses can easily be overcome even with occasional smiles and a positive state of mind.   It is also proven medically that anger, frustration and sorrow can bring in diseases including cancer. Widows, for instance, are much more prone to breast cancer than others.  A pleasant state of mind is conducive for health and well-being. The facial features can change one’s inner state of mind.  If your facial muscles can be turned into a smiling state, the intensity of sorrow will lessen and it will help maintain a pleasant state and build up disease fighting mechanism. So, keep a smile always dangling in your lips.    

A Blunder of the Great Mother Teresa

 

Everyone has a flaw, however high he or she might be. Mother Teresa is undoubtedly one of the greatest women ever lived. But she did commit a Himalayan blunder inadvertently. But the error of the Mother is so consequential that it eclipses a lot of the good she has ever done to a poor nation like India.

 India has been tottering under heavy population. It is increasing at an alarming rate. At the time of independence India had about 400 million people. In 2000 the population was more than 1000 million!  An increase of 600 millions in just 60 years!  10 million stomachs were added to this poor country in just a year! Out of the 1000 millions, At least 500 million were living below the poverty line: without one square meal a day. Even with all the strides India made in the late nineties, the number of the poor kept on increasing.
Mother Teresa came to serve the poor of India after independence. The Holy Mother went round exhorting the people to have as many kids as they can. “Every child is an expression of God’s love,” she kept on reminding. This did contribute to the population explosion.  She may not be the sole reason for the proliferation but she did have an impact. The ordinary people of India have always heeded the advice of holy people. They would not listen to even great leaders in this aspect. She being holy and revered, the poor believed her and took her advice, seriously.
May be she has taken care of say, a million destitute and orphans. How do people become destitute or orphaned? They are mostly from poor families. It may not be possible to compute how many more were added to the list of the destitute due to her principled stand. Let us assume 1% of the population followed her advice (one in hundred) and one child was given birth by each couple (again one out of one hundred couple) who literally believed her promise that god would feed and educate and clothe the additional child. The actual figure could be much more!  Half percentage of 10 million--one child for two people =5 million children-- were added to the list of the poor. Out of this almost all of them would have been poor. (The rich would not have heeded her advice and added another child.) Say, ten percent of them got educated fed and clothed and landed up in good jobs. The remaining 4.5 million destitute kids were thrown into the vortex of wants, illiteracy and sickness.  She altogether took care of a million orphans, sick and destitute.The net result? She made more than 3.5 million destitute by her principled stand. What a service to a poor nation!

How to attain super health?

There is no point in living Without being healthy. Does your health depend on the treatment you receive to cure your diseases? Does it depend on the number of times you visit doctors or hospitals?  Doctors, hospitals and medication can only help you get rid of symptoms of diseases. And, absence of disease is not health. There are 3 stages in this: Diseases, absence of diseases and super health.   Generally people are worried about the first stage and are interested in the second one. Super health is perfect mental and physical well-being. Very few are even aware of the third stage and still less know that it is purely based on a personal initiative. You can be mentally and physically fit only if you want to, only if you think and intensely desire it. Medical examinations and tests will reveal certain parameters like blood pressure, sugar and cholesterol levels in the blood, the onslaught of cancer, AIDS, or any other disease and the way  your heart, lungs, kidney, liver or any other vital organ functions. The doctors will advise you as to how to get rid of adverse symptoms and prescribe medication to get rid of them.    But no doctor can make you healthy. No medication can ensure your mental and physical well-being nor can it induce youthfulness and energy. NO ONE ELSE CAN LEAD YOU INTO SUPER HEALTH BUT YOU. Your thoughts will decide whether you will be healthy or sick, young or old. May be the following checklist would help: Do you have an intense desire to live long and healthy?  Do you have a life goal or goals which will drive you forward and make you fruitfully engaged always? Are you fit mentally and physically? (Do you exercise regularly  and control your diet--eat generally less, eat more vegetables, fruits, whole grains and nuts; take less salt and sugar, drink more water; avoid a lot of fatty or fried foods) Do you exercise your brain and memory on a regular basis? Do you feel like involving yourself romantically with those of the opposite sex of any age? Do you enjoy your life and feel grateful to the forces that gave birth to you? Do you take care of your personal appearance, go for picnics and keep friendship with likeminded people? If you do all these you are on your way to super health.

Who become your enemies?

The guy or woman whom you disliked at first sight is prone to become your enemy much more than those whom you liked at first sight. As the latter confirm to your standards and as their features harmonize with the features you love deeply, the chances are that they will remain in your friends or ‘good people’ list. From the people we come across, we make enemies of those whose appearance and features are incongruent with our mental map, and friends of those whose features and criteria are congruent with our maps. The world is as we see it. People behave to us the way we see them. We tend to nourish a grudge and become harsher with those we dislike and they in turn they show their resentment and dislike us. They understand our subconscious attitudes and reciprocate with equally inimical behaviors. We are thus creating our own enemies and friends under the influence of our mental maps. 

Instead of complaining about the misbehaviors of others or trying to change them we should, I think, become aware of our mental maps and analyze how we see others. To our surprise we would find that most of those we hold ‘bad’ are not that bad after all. Pluck off the initial impressions from our mind and take them as good people and there will be nothing more to complain against them. We make our world.

Examine how you feel toward each person you meet, your neighbour,  subordinate, colleague or superior. Impartially identify whether the first emotional impression (without any objective basis) influences your opinion of him/her. If the answer is yes you will have to restructure your map and make an assessment from an objective study of the person, his behavior, efficiency, output, usefulness, honesty and integrity. Change you map before you can become a good friend, colleague, neighbor, manager, or supervisor.

Why do we love/hate a person at first sight?

You may answer: ‘it is because of his/her character and personality.’  

But the truth cannot be far from that.

You might have met someone just once and you felt attracted at first sight. Not a ‘thunderbolt love’, but you certainly felt some unknown strings pulling you mildly to him/her. There was no time to study the person or his/her background, likes, dislikes, views on family, future, religion, politics or anything else. You could not even ask her/his name. All the same you felt attracted.  

“You look at a person and you feel like  you have made a connection. you looked at this one person out of the entire people assembled there and thought, wow! This person is made for me!” In eastern societies living together before marriage is unthinkable and consent for marriage is based entirely on the first impression or liking.   A youngster will like a person whose features match with those held dear in the subconscious. 

When you meet, ten people together, you may feel an instant liking for say, two of them. Another guy would catch your attention more. You feel he is really handsome.  Two of the remaining ones evoke a dislike in your mind while a third is detestable. The remaining four persons look neutral; you neither like nor dislike them.   Well, what a diverse reaction! You have just seen them. Of course dressing and grooming does differentiate them, but that may not be the real reason that has evoked these reactions in your mind. Your judgment has nothing to do with their character, education or status as you do not know them at all

Why did you see them differently? The psychology of falling in love may enlighten us to understand why we fall in love with someone. But the majority of us do not care to analyze the reasons and we just like to treat this as a mysterious process with no rules.  But we have to know why we like certain people and why we dislike others.

Why we like the person we like? If we find someone who has similar features to someone who was dear to us during our infancy and early childhood (these features are all indelibly inscribed in our subconscious mind) we may take an instant liking to him/her. Further, from our life experiences we have drawn a list of the nature of the characteristics (‘criteria’) like  the color of the skin, height, weight, facial appearance, hair, body profile, body language and communication ) that strongly appeal to our mind.  If we find these criteria in a particular person we tend to like him and generally we are attracted to him. If the features held dear by our subconscious mind (gleaned from the features of the persons who loved or took care of us in our early days) and the criteria, we have come to accept as ideal, we are looking for in a person, are found in a man or woman, we tend to instantly fall in love with or like him/her strongly.  

This is an unconscious process and it does not result from any objective study of the person in front.  This is universal and this first felling will create a lasting mental bias towards him or her unless conscious efforts are later undertaken to correct the same.  We are positively inclined to one who matches with our map of an ideal person and negatively inclined to another who is a mismatch.A question like this may have propped up in your mind sometimes: “Why don’t I feel attracted to someone who is ‘absolutely fantastic’ to many others?”

Otherwise, you might have felt, “why am I feeling an attraction to this person even though he/she is not conventionally beautiful or handsome?”

If the features and the criteria held by you match with those of the person in front of you, there will be an instant liking which may lead to love. People instantaneously notice one’s physical appearance and get trapped into love/hate at the first sight/ meet. Strongly- felt positive feelings and the webs of sexual attraction between a male and a female makes an impartial assessment of one’s nature and personality later very difficult. And hence the first attraction is very crucial in the eventual decision to accept or reject. If you strongly dislike a person in the first encounter it is mainly because of the mismatch between his appearance, body language communication and the features and criteria you hold dear to you in the depths of your mind.  This dislike will continue to influence you in assessing the person in your future encounters before the crucially important decision as mentioned before. Many of our enemies’ features will not match with those held good by your subconscious mind. There will be mismatches between the criteria held dear by us and those of the persons in question.     

 Love or liking at first sight starts with an impressible feature and criteria matching. Dislike, hatred, enmity -- all must have a beginning in a total mismatch of features and criteria. 

Why are we Christians, Hindus or Moslem?

Have you ever thought why you are a Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Moslem or Hindu? Is it because you have analysed every religion threadbare and come to the conclusions that yours is the only true one? Most of us do not attempt to do anything like that. We just believe what we have been taught from our very childhood.  We do not question what has been imparted from day one. That could be the reason why children born to Christian parents become Christians, those born to Hindu parents become Hindus, and Moslem parents Moslem. Yes, there are occasional ‘jumps’ from one faith to another. This is a universal phenomenon and is not confined to any one in particular. There have been mass conversions too.  When the Roman emperor converted to Christianity the entire subjects had to become Christian. When the Persians conquered India, millions were converted forcibly into Islam. Today also mass conversions do take place, mostly in the developing countries, due to traceable reasons. Even in the advanced nations, conversions happen from one sect to another due to mostly selfish or social motivations and preferences.  But these are exceptions and the vast majority remains steadfast in the religion of their birth.  Our childhood brain gets programmed into believing our birth-religion. We do not question its veracity or analyse critically its basic tenets later. We are led to simply continue to believe.  

You may at this point jump up to say “what nonsense are you saying?  I believe in it because I know it is true, I have experienced it.  But then the experience we feel is simply produced by our brain as per our intense belief.. The religious experience of a Christian is totally different from that of a Buddhist, Moslem or Hindu. No religion is better than another one.  Every religion has good points. experiences vary according to one’s own beliefs. A true Buddhist is does not believe in God. He may not have the experience which a monotheistic religious follower like that of Christianity or Islam has.  A communist who is an atheist does not experience God at all.  A Hindu believes that the underlying principle of everything in the universe is one:  the absolute Brahma. God is not separate from the person; God is you. Christians look for a spiritual heaven where they can experience the Almighty God after death, Moslem look for a material heaven. For Buddhists it is Nirvana: the escape from pain and pleasure, cold and heat.  The Hindus long for redemption from the birth-rebirth cycle. The basic tenets are all totally different. Still, people continue to believe what they have been conditioned to believe. Every sect believes too that its religious text is sacred, holy and unquestionable.

                                          In the absence of the early childhood programming , how many of us will believe what we do now? We go on as per the software implanted in us from our home environment, religious institutions and culture. And we believe what we believe is true too to the exclusion of all the others. We are compartmentalized which lead to wars, communal strife and conflicts forgetting we are ll brothers and sisters.    

Are women safe on our land?

India's culture is ancient, noble and exalted. It has been the most tolerant nation in the world accepting every faith and every race.  But of late this great culture is getting raped!   

Women in the Indian states like Kerala are subjected to pinching, stalking, hooting, singing with sexual undertones and flashing of objects. I still remember a guy who used to piss openly standing towards his neighbor’s house when he knew the lady of the house is outside doing her daily chores. He used to go on passing until the lady, noticing him holding his manhood in the guise of urinating, had to go inside expressing her displeasure.

No girl can pass alone through the roads without inviting derisive comments. No woman-whatever be her age-will be spared. Then imagine their plight at night or after dusk has fallen. A bevy of loitering youth or middle-aged guys will start stalking her as if every woman is available for sex. Even foreign tourists are not spared these days. This made an Italian traveler comment: ‘Kerala is the most sex-hungry place in the world!’

Women here experience eve-teasing in every phase of their life every day, every where: at school, at college, at the work-place, in the public transport vehicles, in the parks, cinema halls, festival sites…  It is a clear case of sexual harassment but most women prefer to ignore it. They are advised to dress ‘modestly’ when they go out and come home early.  Men are free to dress the way they want to; they can flaunt their chest or buttock muscles (remember today’s low waste stuff) or walk half naked in the house or even outside. They dress to their convenience and comfort. Nobody can question it, let alone women. But women have to conform to society (men) approved norms; even if it is scorching hot and humid. Are they not equal human beings too? Are they simply sex-objects of men?   The sad paradox is that even if they are covered up fully from head to foot, there is a lot of sexual harassment. As they try to board a bus or train they are subjected to a squeeze here, a touch there or a poking in the most undesirable places. There are those who make it a point to press against a woman in a crowded bus or train and enjoy the pleasure of continuing with the pressure maintained at peak levels. If she does not protest, the thing will go on until the natural pressure releasing system comes to work. There is the story of a man who followed a lady traveling in a bus for 15 kilometers. When she alighted and shouted at him he said casually: “I have not touched you yet and all that I want is to ask you out for  tea.”   What a way to ask a strange girl for a date!                                                                                                                                                                            This happens in a state where literacy rate is near to 100% and where people claim to be very cultured. Well, women have been discriminated against throughout history in all lands; but this attitude has changed and now men and women are equal and they march together respecting each other.  It is a pity we are still a century or two behind. Men and boys are free to go out, drink in a pub or hang out to their heart’s content but girls have restrictions in everything everywhere. Last year a bevy of youth beat up women who were drinking bear in a Mangalore pub. Let women have fun and let them enjoy life as men do. Keralites have advanced in many fields and they cannot be lagging behind in their behavior to women. Today every girl past 10 feels insecure to go out alone; she feels her body can be trounced or molested and the virtues she holds dear can be defiled by lurking men all around. Is this culture? .