Question प्रश्न 112

The Multi-polar

and The Uni-polar

Existence.

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Question :

How does a human being differ from the rest of the living beings?

प्रश्न :

मनुष्य और शेष प्राणियों में सर्वाधिक प्रमुख अंतर क्या है?

Answer :

Human being is a species given with a mind. The Sanskrit etymology suggests the derivation of the word "human" as from -

ह उ मन् - मनुते इति मनुष्य, मानवः, मनुजः --इति। 

The only specific difference between a man and any other living being is - man has a "mind" a multipolar instrument which man is habitually addicted to. The other living beings don't have any such a very sophisticated, well developed tool to help them in dealing with the world and the surroundings.

Even if the other living beings are called "sentient", they lack an elaborate system of "language" that connects man with so many a hypothetical universes as in the case of humans.

Fortunately or unfortunately we learn a language from the very childhood. This is a system where a physical or a mental object is associated with a spoken word.

This is indeed very useful in connecting and treating with others in the everyday transactions. However this facilitates for the kind of things mostly of  the physical or tangible kind only. When the mental things are concerned, we are often at a loss of proper words in conveying our feelings and sentiments and again that too depends on our sensibilties. Moreover, sensibility of any man too is often conditioned because of the society where we are born, live and follow their ethical, moral, cultural standards, and values. Leaving Religion and spirituality aside, we are slaves and captives of the conditioning, and we all have been also trained to behave in a certain pattern.

When we compare ourselves with other living beings, we can see that they all live by the dictates of their specific nature. For example if you bring an animal from one part of the world to another part, it's behaviour and dealing with the old and  surroundings remains the same or quite similar. For a human being however it is comparatively difficult to fitting in and accommodate in the new environment. It's mostly because a man "thinks" and "thoughts" force one to believe in certain concepts which all are but hypothetical mental constructs and hold no truth in them at all. You can believe so different and so many contradictory ideas at the same time and have no even a hint that nothing of all that is true. Indeed it's all ignorance only. Our minds are therefore are multi-polar and in comparision the consciousness of any of the living being other than humans, is uni-polar.

Our Ethics and Morality determine and define our relationships, our sensibilities too fashion our behavior with the other fellow human beings accordingly.

It's because though all do have memory of the past (experience), only we humans  store it in the form of a narrative. 

Any good or bad experience is thus soon  translated into words of our language while the other living beings can hardly even think of doing or going through all this exercise.

So we have a "history", knowledge and memory, -the detailed information in a "language" just like any computer has in its system. Of course the computer has a well-arranged and preserved one, while we have a random access that is often of a kind of read only.

Other living beings have access to past information in the form of habitual and instant response to the situation, while we humans often "think", "evaluate" and then try to judge a situation through the knowledge stored up in the memory. We don't and can't respond to the situation in the very instant as all the other living beings do.

Moreover we have invented civilizations and these too continue to govern, control and format our mind. The conditioning is so deep in our brains and DNA.

That may perhaps is the only mark of difference between us humans and the rest of the living beings living on the earth.

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