Whatever is said or done is interpreted always, and misinterpreted almost always. Well, not almost always, but we do misinterpret others much more than we would want to be misinterpreted ourselves. There is no substitute, after all, to honest conversations.
Chetan narang
So much of our waking lives revolve around words that we barely get time to think about what is the right relationship to have with our own words.
We interpret everything – all the quotes we read, all the videos we watch, all the podcasts we listen, all the conversations we have, all the social media posts we consume – all of it passes through the mental models engrained in our minds.
The path from these interpretations being justinterpretations to them becoming truths should be one we carefully travel, especially when it matters.
It is not these quotes that are limited, it is our interpretations of them that limit the world we see.
Join myself, Chetan Narang, in Episode 14 of The Unlearning Playground Podcast where I talk about how quotes, words and our own interpretations of them can limit us and our understanding of our world.
Yeah, quotes are great. But have you ever caught yourself misinterpreting one to suit your own preconceived story? That is the one of the most potent, generalised use of quotes in my opinion – to take you to the realisation that you (mis)interpret words all the time.
We all have stories in our minds.
Stories about how the people around us are, stories about how people are in general, stories about how certain ‘kind’ of people are, stories about how the world is,and so on and on …
These stories help us in navigating the world, and do a good job about it.
A lot of times however, our own favourite and cherished stories limit us from seeing things as they actually are. Everything that reaches us passes through, and is coloured by these stories. No matter how brilliant the quote I just came across is – if the mental model it triggered in my mind is not based on truth, I would not be able to squeeze the nectar out of it.
This happens all the time around us doesn’t it?
I, for one, have noticed this happen a lot on social media – I would see someone share a quote or a clip of some wise words; and the interpretation of those words that made them worthy of a share for this person was just one that confirmed their already preconceived notions. Someone who is politically left-leaning would be moved by the same quotes that move a politically right-leaning person, and both of them would happily share the same words in their circles; assuming that the words they are sharing mean what they think they mean, and what they have always thought they mean.
All of this, like most truths that matter, is easier to see in others than it is to see in oneself. Because it is not comfortable to see your own thoughts being proven incomplete and biased. It’s like that powerful quote by Robert Pirsig in his beautiful book, Lila. Yes, the man wrote a book other than the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. The quote goes like this:
It’s always the other person who’s ‘deluded.’ Or ourselves in the past. Ourselves in the present are never ‘deluded.’ Delusions can be held by whole groups of people, as long as we’re not a part of that group. If we’re a member then the delusion becomes a ‘minority opinion.’
Robert Pirsig, Lila
All said and done, I hope this creates a little curiosity in you to check out your own interpretations (and misinterpretations) of quotes. Catch yourself the next time you hear yourself say things like
“Yeah, this is nothing new.” “Yeah, I know this already.” “Yeah, so what?”
I’m not saying that these responses are always uncalled for. But be aware enough to see when you’re actually understanding something, and when you’re just substituting it by something you already ‘know’.
If whatever you read/hear immediately falls into buckets like
Episode 13 – How important is money? 3 advices to develop a contrarian thinking about money (22 min)
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
Jim carrey
Money is not everything but it is something. While most of us agree on this basic statement, we still do not quite understand what is the right relationship to have with money.
How much money is too much money? How much money is enough? What is the right way to think about money?
These are some questions that remain perpetually unanswered for a lot of us, in the busy lives that we lead these days.
With the employee performance appraisal season right around the corner in the Indian economic cycle, money is definitely one of the hot topics flowing around. And there wouldn’t be a shortage of questions and concerns that pop up in our minds about it.
Am I getting paid enough? Should I switch jobs? Will that promotion make it all worth it? Should I look out to get a higher salary or benefits?
All of these are important questions. And there are better answers to them than “It depends.” or “It’s all relative”.
We just need to open our eyes and see things the way they are, not the way we think they are. Let’s spend some time doing just that. Tune right in.
Episode 12 – 4 utilities of true spirituality | The dream of Life | Engineering a utopia (24 min)
This is the secret of dreams—that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamt.
Carl Gustav Jung
A meditative discourse on spirituality, philosophy and its utility in our everyday lives.
I walk through an understanding of the root of eastern philosophy – The Advaita Vedanta or Nonduality – via the metaphor of dreams.
And then I talk about how the realisations that follow this understanding, can actually lead to a better future for ourselves, for humanity and for Life at large.
Did I do any justice to the big claims? Only one way to find out. Tune right in.
Episode 11 – Solving for anxiety | A short, fresh discourse on perfect and good (5 min)
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Anxiety is a problem that all of us want to solve for, but very few of us actually get to even realise that a subtle change in our perspective can actually work wonders only if we try and sit with it honestly.
Join me in this episode where I aim to offer one such solution. It is a short and fresh perspective about a quote that I find to be amongst the most potent ones ever – “Perfect is the enemy of good.”
I think this episode is far from perfect, but it is good. Practice what you preach, eh?
Episode 10 – Is human memory reliable? Experiencing vs remembering self | Cognitive biases #3 (10 min)
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dalí
Another standalone episode in our series about human cognitive biases and logical fallacies. And I dare say, this is amongst the most “useful” episodes I would do in this series.
If you let it, the concept covered in these ten minutes has the power to change the way you’ve been thinking about your life thus far.
Am I exaggerating? Only one way to find out. Tune right in.
When it comes to any experience, all of us have two selves. One is the self that is having the experience in the moment, which we can call the experiencing self. Another is the self that remembers that experience, which we can call the remembering self.
And believe it or not, they are both different. To confuse one with the other is a very strong cognitive illusion that we labour under in our everyday lives.
What you remember about the past is simply that – what you remember about it. It might not necessarily be true to what you actually experienced then. Especially the adjectives you use to describe the experience now, might not really be accurate and do justice to the actual experience.
In fact, there is a strong recency bias when it comes to our memory of an experience. That is, our memory of an experience is very likely to be overshadowed by how the experience was towards the end, rather than how the experience actually was.
I first came across this idea of the two selves – the remembering self and the experiencing self – in that book by Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, fast and slow.
In one section of this book, he described a certain experiment which brought home this point quite well.
To paraphrase it, the experiment had students dip one hand in uncomfortably cold water for 60 seconds. The students would then remove their hand and be offered a warm dry towel.
After a few minutes, they were asked to dip their other hand in the same uncomfortably cold water for the same 60 seconds but in this trial, after the 60 seconds, instead of taking the hand out, a tap was opened which poured warm water in the tub for the next 30 seconds that raised the temperature of the cold water by a few degrees so that the discomfort was lowered. They were then asked to withdraw their hand and were offered a similar warm dry towel like the first trial.
And then, after a few minutes, they were given a choice to have one of these experiences repeated again for the third trial.
If I remember correctly, close to 80% of the participants chose to repeat the second experience, even though that involved an unnecessary 30 seconds of discomfort. The reasoning is quite simple – the second experience leaves a better, warmer memory than the first and the self that takes the decision for the third trial IS the remembering self and not the experiencing self. And the remembering self thinks what it remembers IS all that ever happened, which could be true in some circumstances but could also be false in others.
Being aware of this can help us identify the faults in the way we act out in the world.
A personal experience comes to my mind which fits the bill here. Allow me to share.
I once worked for a company, and I had a great time working there, especially for let’s say, three quarters of the time. It was only during the last phase that I had a fallout with some of the people there (and there were a whole bunch of reasons for that too – I’m sure I wasn’t my best self too around that time).
But anyway, after I had moved out of that job, whenever someone would ask me about my experience at that company, I would mostly be critical of the culture, the management, etc. It was when I started meditating and paying attention to my own thoughts that I realised that this narrative, like a lot of other narratives in my mind, was coming from a very incomplete standpoint.
Of course my last memories with that company weren’t too rosy, but I sure had a great time for the majority of the time I worked there. And the fact that I was so easily polishing over all this with the comfortable narrative purely based out of my “remembering self” surely did open my eyes to say the least.
Realisations such as this are quite literally the point of this entire series I’m running on this podcast currently. To be aware of your own biases and illusions is important. The point to being more self aware is not to feel low about yourself or even to feel superior now that you’re aware of so much more than others.
It is simply to be aware, to be aware of the truth, aware of the facts about how your own thinking works and aware of how the human mind works in general. Wherever that awareness leads you to, should again tell you more about your own nature than about anything else.
Back to memories, experiences and the two selves, one more example which comes to my mind about this very important cognitive bias is one that I read in David Eagleman’s book, The Brain.
He talks about a hypothetical situation where you are invited by a friend to her birthday dinner, where she’s with her boyfriend and you guys sit together, have a great time, share a few laughs, have good food, etc. He then builds it up by asking us to imagine that a year has passed since that dinner, and your friend and her boyfriend have since then had a pretty nasty falling out and are no longer together.
And then he points out that it is entirely possible that your memory of that birthday dinner is now coloured by this new piece of information. It is very likely that you might think that even back then, you could see clues that this guy is a good-for-nothing douchebag who might even cheat on your friend if the opportunity arises.
And it is very likely that you may start to consider all of these thoughts to be true because your remembering self is what is always activated in such scenarios, never your experiencing self.
The experiencing self had the experience of that great dinner, and left memories for the remembering self. And the remembering self can’t help but fit the memories to suit the current story that is unfolding right now. I hope these terminologies are clearer in your psyche now.
Our present colours the way we perceive the past.
And what we remember about something in the past is anyway not necessarily how we experienced it at that moment.
Both of these statements are true and are worth pondering over. I’ll repeat them once more.
Our present colours the way we perceive the past.
And what we remember about something in the past is not necessarily how we experienced it at that moment.
It is only when we become aware of such illusions of our minds that we can hope to unlearn them. Unlearn them not in the sense of ensuring that we don’t think in this manner. We cannot control the thoughts that pop up in our heads. But we can choose which thoughts we act on. And once you do that, you have, in one manner of speaking, unlearnt the attachment to your thoughts. That is when real understanding begins to dawn on you.
You should not always trust the first thought that pops up in your head about anything. And by the same token, you should not always doubt your intuition either. It is a moment by moment choice, and being able to discern what to do when is the key to a mature response to any situation.
To be able to make that choice in the best possible manner, you must be self aware. You must understand that your mind works under a whole bunch of biases and delusions that mustn’t really be trusted.
If you’re aware of the fallacies your mind is labouring under, you can start to see things as they are, not as you think they are. And anyone who thinks that that isn’t something worth doing, really doesn’t have a clear mind and is not being the best they can be.
And we all need to be the best we can be. Both for our own sake and also for the sake of people around us.
And if I may ask you for a favour, please leave a rating and a review for the show on as many podcast platforms as you can. You very well know the impact that can have for the reach of this content.
Episode 9 – Cognitive load, ego depletion & the need for meditation | Cognitive Biases #2 (12 min)
You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day – unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.
Zen proverb
Another episode in our series of episodes about human cognitive biases.
In this one, I talk about Cognitive load, which is an overarching phenomenon that affects our moment-to-moment state of being and thus, affects our ability to make decisions, to understand and process information – in short, it affects how we think. And hence, being aware of it is important.
I also briefly touch upon the need for meditation, and why it is something that everyone should incorporate in their everyday lives.
This episode is as everyday-life as it gets when it comes to pragmatic philosophy, wisdom and understanding. Tune right in. I’ll see you in the playground.
In the previous episode, we talked about the fact that we see the world as we are, not as the world is. We discussed the three levels at which this is true – at the level of our moment-to-moment state of being, at the level of our biological conditioning and at the level of our cultural, social or rather psychological conditioning. If you haven’t checked out that episode yet, I would highly recommend you to. And you can do that even after this episode. It is a good introduction as to why being aware of all this is a big part of growing up and taking up the role of being a mature adult, which in turn is a big part of what we talk about here in this podcast.
Now in one manner of speaking, our decision making capabilities and our capabilities to understand something or process something depend on a whole bunch of factors, and we’re not always our best selves when it comes to any given moment. In this episode, we’ll be discussing one such overarching phenomena which impacts a lot of our thinking capabilities at any given moment – cognitive load.
Cognitive load is quite easy to understand actually. In purely layman terms, it is a measure of how much you have on your mind at any given moment. And it shouldn’t be very tough to understand that this affects the quality of your state of being at that moment. Someone who is dealing with a whole bunch of things, has a wide array of thoughts running through his or her mind at any given moment, is obviously under a lot of load in one sense.
A few things happen in such a state of mind which, it can only benefit us adults, to be aware of.
Our ability to make good choices is not at its best under high cognitive load, especially about things not already in our mind. If you’re driving on a busy road, you’re under a lot of cognitive load. The busier the traffic the more the load. And the more the load, the more susceptible you are to being irrational if an argument now starts with your partner in the seat next to you. It might distract you from driving properly too. Now, it helps the overall situation if both you as well as your partner become aware of this, in that very moment, and take whatever action seems rational then – delaying the argument would be a good starting point to be honest.
This is applicable in general to so many avenues in our life, much more than we would want to acknowledge. Whenever we have too much going on in our heads, we are more likely to not be our best selves, to not take criticism well, to not accept where we are wrong, to not consider that someone else with an opposing viewpoint might have something right in his or her narrative. In short, we are more likely to be everything we ourselves don’t like others around us being.
So, in moments of high load, it helps to become aware of your own state of mind and understand that your decisions and choices may be hampered. Taking a deep breath, and delaying decision making unless you feel still and grounded again, should be your plan of action in such a scenario.
Also, it helps us to understand that a lot of times, we might encounter a situation in which another person we’re dealing with, is under high cognitive load, and hence they are not at their best self. And it helps the overall situation at such times to, again, to slow it down and delay decision making until the other person feels still and grounded again. That is taking action from a place of compassion and love born out of understanding.
Now, there is another phenomenon I want you to consider. Being in a state of high cognitive load for a long period of time, or what the average modern human calls Wednesday afternoon these days!
Jokes apart, put your imaginative horses to work, and picture for a minute that you’ve been working all day long in your office – meetings, discussions, fire-fightings, handling a resignation, and also a new joinee, avoiding a conflict with your manager as well as your subordinate, project work – all of this on the same day, in a span of a few “working” hours. Now, what would be your state of mind at the end of such a day? You’d be depleted, to say the least. You’d be exhausted. And what do you imagine your quality of decision making would be at such times? To put it lightly, let’s just say you would not take your best decisions.
This state of mind is what I understand to be ego depletion. Now that term is a bit controversial in the psychological literature these days, but we’re not using it to mean anything other than the state of feeling mentally depleted or tired. And like everything else we discuss here, that happens with me, happens with you, happens with those public figures we love or love to hate, happens with our managers, happens with our subordinates, happens with our partners, happens with human beings.
It just helps us to be aware of ourselves, our own state of mind, in the moment when this is happening. And also, helps us to be aware when we see another person not being their best self. And in both these scenarios, it helps to take a deep breath and delay making decisions and drawing conclusions, to the extent possible of course, until you feel still and grounded again.
You know, there is this famous saying in Hindi, “Khaali dimaag shaitan ka ghar hota hai”. Loosely translated to English, it means that an empty mind is the devil’s home.
When I started meditating and delving into my own psyche a good few years ago, I remember that one of the first few startling realisations was that this quote is absolute garbage! Anyone who has ever experienced the state of having an empty mind knows what I am talking about, knows that it is an extremely calming, peaceful experience. If anything, it is the home of the divine not the devil!
The problem, of course, is that we never really get to empty our minds in our everyday lives these days. And if a mind full of rotten, incomplete thoughts, which is our default state, suddenly has a lot of time at its hands, there definitely is a recipe the devil would enjoy. So what do we do under the disguise of practicality? We double down our efforts to get busy with whatever it is our minds think is worth it. While what would have been more practical, my dear human, would have been doubling down the effort to try and really empty your mind. Try, and ponder on the realisations that follow. Maybe we could even do a podcast episode together if you really tried it.
Meditation is one practice that everyone should incorporate in their everyday lives. But we’re all so busy these days with whatever swell things we have set out to achieve, that almost everyone says that they simply do not have the time. And that always reminds me of an age-old Zen proverb – “If you’re so busy that you cannot meditate for twenty minutes a day, you should meditate for an hour a day.” That is just lovely isn’t it? You need it much more than the free person does, my fellow busy human being!
To break it down for you, I talk about meditation in terms of the act of observing the flow of one’s own thoughts. For starters, you should try to allocate some time in the day, when you sit down, take some deep breaths, and do that – just observe your own thoughts. That’s it. That’s the entire activity.
And then keep consuming good, potent content to improve the quality of thoughts your mind ponders about. In our information age, it is your own responsibility to filter out all the noise you receive otherwise by default. So, read more books, listen to better podcasts, follow better youtube channels, declutter all the junk from your Instagram feeds, etc. You know the drill.
And of course, DM me on Instagram if you feel like having a word about any of it. I’m always open to honest and engaging conversations, like many of you have already found out.
Well, I guess that’s it for this episode for now. I hope this episode found you in a state of relatively lower cognitive load to enable better understanding.
If not, I hope you find it in you to listen to it again and meditate on it.
Episode 8 – We see the world as we are, not as the world is | Cognitive biases | Logical fallacies (15 min)
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Join me as I build on one of the most influential quotes I’ve had the good fortune of coming across – “We see the world as we are, not as the world is.”
Cognitive biases and logical fallacies govern so much of our day-to-day thinking that it’s almost mind-boggling when we encounter them for the first time. In this episode, I talk about the three levels at which our perceptions color the world we see.
Something that I always talk about is how you need to become the adult you never had around you as a child or as an adolescent. Becoming aware of, and unlearning the attachment to, our own biases and delusions is a major chunk of the work everyone needs to do to really become an adult.
So hop on. Let’s grow up together. I’ll see you in the playground. Pun intended!
I’ve been wanting to do an episode on human biases and logical fallacies ever since I started this podcast, because it is so central to the majority of the work that needs to be done by all of us to grow up. And if anyone asks me why that is the case, I tell them this one quote which is one of the most profound ones I’ve ever heard, “We see the world as we are, not as the world is.”
I’ve heard so many versions of this that I cannot really say whom to attribute it to anymore. But that is beside the point anyway.
If you’ve never come across this quote before, or have never given it much thought, just hear me out, I’ll be building on it for the next few minutes here.
Our perceptions colour the world we see. Our perceptions, in that sense, also limit the world we see.
Have you ever had a feeling that everything around you is absolutely bullshit – the job you’re in, the book you’re reading, the course you’re pursuing, the person you’re in a relationship with, the people around you, etc. etc.
I’m sure you have. If you’ve lived enough years in this world, I’m sure you have. We all have.
And by the same token, I’m also sure that all of you who are listening to this right now, have also come out of it on some day and faced with the same job, the same book, the same course or the same people, you’ve felt, “Ahh! This is not so bad after all!”
What exactly happened there? How do you understand this dynamism of polar opposite feelings about the exact same thing?
The answer, of course, is that your perception of something or someone at both those moments depended more on YOU than that particular something or someone.
Let me say that again – At both these moments, your perception of something or someone depended more on YOU than on that something or someone.
How often do we acknowledge that? How often do we realise that? That is a question to ask yourself, and you must permit yourself to sit honestly with the answer.
Welcome to the world of human cognitive biases! These biases operate under the hood on so many levels that it is almost mind boggling when you encounter them at first. So fasten your seat belts, we’re gonna take a topsy-turvy ride through the three levels our biases and fallacies work through us.
The first of course is like the example I just gave you. The adjectives that pop into our heads at any moment are fuelled, in part of course, by everything else going on inside us at that moment.
If you’re having a bad day, if you’re in a bad mood, the same episode of FRIENDS which otherwise would have you in splits would not even warrant a single reaction from you. Except maybe a little pity for whoever was having their leg pulled in Central Perk in that episode.
Even if you didn’t get the FRIENDS reference or if you do not like the show for whatever reason anyway, I hope you can still catch the drift of what I’m trying to convey.
For another example: I know that I’ve had days when my favourite dish didn’t really taste as good as it would have if only I was in a better mood while eating it.
That should be relatable I hope. We’ve all had these experiences. The important thing to understand is that more than the episode or the food or any of those experiences, it is the one who’s having those experiences that determines the adjectives that describe that moment for them.
At any moment, we see the world as we are at that moment.
Now onto the second level.
Our biases and perceptions work on another deeper level too. As human organisms, our brains have been conditioned by years of natural evolution to behave in certain patterns and react in certain ways to certain signals. And we just can’t help it.
Ever heard of the hollow face mask illusion? It is a popular optical illusion, you can very easily check out some video illustrations of it on Youtube. In short, imagine a hollow face mask with the protruding side pointing towards you. So the nose of the mask points towards you. Now the mask is rotated and by the time the nose has gone to the background, you would expect to see a depression right? Because the nose is facing the other side now. But you’d be surprised to see that we actually see the nose to be protruding outwards again! It’s actually quite fascinating.
And the scientific explanation for that is that our brains have evolved over the years to see faces protruding outwards, and we cannot help but see it in that manner!
We see the world as we are, not as the world is.
The same bench in the neighbourhood park that you see as obviously green, might appear confusingly red to a color blind person.
The same gesture from a person might be interpreted as a sexual advance by a hormone-ridden 21 year old or just a friendly wave by a 52-year old.
The mind of a dehydrated person, or a person who hasn’t been out in the sun for a few days in a row is more likely to produce depressing, even suicidal thoughts.
This is all just basic biology. Just the way our bodies are wired.
And this wiring colours the way we perceive the world around us.
One more level, the third one, at which our perceptions colour the world we experience is at the level of our conditioning. In short, the story in our heads of the world around us. A person who has grown up hustling their way through life, you know, competing with siblings for the love of their parents, competing with classmates for the highest score in an exam, etc. Such a person may see life more or less as a game of one-upping everyone around them, as a race, even as a dog-eat-dog world in an extreme scenario.
While another person who has the inclination towards and also, due to a variety of factors, had let’s say the opportunity to be more easy with their pursuits, might go about looking at life as a means to express their most creative endeavours. Almost going through Life as a musical number instead of a journey.
Both of them have very different models of the world in their heads. Both of them are right, but both of them are limited, both of them are incomplete if they do not see the other side of the equation.
Which brings us to the gist of why we need to become aware of our own particular biases.
Incomplete is something no one really wants to be . And one sure way to remain incomplete is to remain immersed in one’s own thoughts, ideas and biases, and never really examining or challenging them.
At any rate, it is suitable for us as a species to expect our adults to recognise where they themselves are wrong, are biased, and are incomplete. How else would they lead the children and the adolescents?
One quote that comes to my mind right now is one of Wittgenstein. He said, “The limit of my language is the limit of my world”. Quite simply, it means that the limit to which I understand Life is determined by the limit to which I have words for or mental images for or at least metaphors for.
Which is why, the next few episodes of this podcast are going to be dedicated to understanding, and putting into words, the numerous different cognitive biases and logical fallacies we human beings function under. There are a whole bunch of them, and I’m sure that as I embark upon this journey to collate all of them in a digestible manner, I will miss out on some. But I can guarantee that any listener who goes through this road with me would arrive at the end more equipped than when they started.
More equipped on how to point out and catch themselves when they are not being the best version of themselves and are not being objective enough,
More equipped on how to point out to the ones they love and care about, where they aren’t being the best version of themselves and are not being objective enough.
And very importantly, more equipped on how to wrap their heads around the fact that all of us, all of us are more same than different. The ones we love, and also the ones we love to hate. The difference between man and man is one of degree and not of kind, as that man Swami Vivekananda said.
One thing I wish to call out before we embark on this journey though is that we’re not taking this journey to be more ashamed of ourselves, to feel low about not being perfect and all of that jazz. Not at all.
The idea is in fact just the opposite. The idea is to become aware of yourself in a manner that enables you to accept yourself as you are. Almost as a parent lovingly accepts their child, you as an adult have to lovingly accept your inner child, as my man Rocco calls it, and tap it on it’s back by saying, “It’s ok. It’s in your nature to be so.”
And to be able to do that authentically, a certain degree of understanding is needed. That understanding is what we’re embarking upon in this journey.
To be honest, I can’t wait to get down to work and design the coming episodes, but I wish to end this episode with a little story. Those of you who know me, know that I love to tell stories, especially when they drive home the point in a manner no amount of reasoning and logic can.
So here goes.
A man once visited a Zen master and asked him, “I am new in this town and am looking to move here. How is this place?”
The master asked him, “What is it like in your current town?”
The man replied, “It’s horrible. Everyone is mean and selfish. I just don’t like it there.”
The master replied, “Don’t move here. It would be pretty much the same here too.”
Later the same day, another man visited the master and asked him the same question, “I am looking for a new town to move to. Would you advise me to start living here in your town?”
The master asked him, “What is it like in your current town?”
The man replied, “It’s great. Everyone is friendly and helpful. I love it there.”
The master replied, “You can move here. It would be pretty much the same here too.”
Now the point of this story isn’t that there aren’t environments you shouldn’t be moving out of. Absolutely not. There absolutely are situations which you should permit yourself to walk away from, but that is a topic for another episode.
For the purpose of this episode, the point of this story is that we see the world as we are, not as the world is.
And if that didn’t seem to you to be the point of the story, that should tell you more about yourself than about the story. Check out the episode here again.
Thank you for spending these past few minutes with me here. As usual, the show notes contain the links to my Instagram page, and my Youtube channel too. If the content you just consumed seemed of value to you, please consider checking out these channels too. I’m sure you’ll dig it.
And of course, it goes without saying – share this with your community if you think it’ll help them.
Episode 7 – 1 important insight on being better at relationships | What does Love look like? | Rocco Jarman (9 min)
Love will save us all, and love will not be gentle.
sarah elkhaldy
Most of human life is relationships – personal, professional, casual.
Join me as I walk you through an extremely potent and a really effective method that has the power to improve all your relationships manifold.
It is based on a meditation that my friend Rocco Jarman shared with me quite recently. Like most of the man’s work, it is powerful, it is moving and it is worth looking at with eyes wide open.
And as is the case with most life-transforming things, all that’s needed of you is an open mind and a willingness to unlearn and relearn.
Most of human life is relationships, isn’t it? Whether you are a working professional who wants that manager to understand you better; whether you are a manager in your workplace who wants those employees to understand you better; whether you are a parent who can’t seem to get a hold on that kid; whether you are a kid who can’t seem to get your parents to see things from your perspective; whether you are trying to convey something important to someone via a series of podcast episodes; whether you are a listener who is liking it so much that all you can think about is how to convince your friends to listen to it too, most of your life is about relationships.
Well, if that last bit about liking the podcast is true for you, I want you to know that I love you and deeply appreciate you. Keep sharing the love.
So, back to where we were. Most of our lives IS about relationships – personal, professional, casual, etc. And I’m sure all of us have found ourselves in tricky situations in our relationships.
There are situations where we are stumped, we have no clue how to act or what to do. There are situations where things get a little overwhelming and we regret later how we acted – we know we could have acted better, we know we could have handled it better – but it was hard to see it at the time and sometimes, it is hard to see even after.
We all are in such situations a lot of times. And at any rate, if you haven’t been in such a situation lately, you still cannot guarantee that the next moment wouldn’t present one, no matter how enlightened you are.
With regards to handling and processing such situations and also navigating everyday life in general too, I wanted to very briefly touch upon a message my dear friend Rocco Jarman shared with me very recently. His words were, “Ask yourself – what does love look like in the present moment, really listen to the answer, and then act on it.”
Just take a few seconds to reflect on the sheer potency of these words. I’ll go about them slowly. Ask yourself – what does LOVE look like in the present moment, REALLY listen to the answer, and then ACT on it.
The next time you are in a situation that demands a conscious action, and there are a whole lot of them in our everyday lives, consider trying this. Pause, take a deep breath and ask yourself – “what does love look like in this moment?”. Really listen to the answer that turns up.
The answer could be anything.
It could be just hugging the person in front of you.
It could also be scolding them.
It could be crying your eyes out.
It could be being silent.
It could be talking your heart out.
It could be walking away.
It could be agreeing with someone.
It could be correcting them.
It could be anything.
You see, love, and for that matter, kindness too, takes a variety of forms. It is not always the mushy mushy goodness and niceties we associate with it. All of the different examples I gave above, could mean love. Only you can say about yourself whether you’re coming out of love or out of displaced anger, jealousy, greed, lust, shame, fear, etc.
Be conscious of your thoughts and you’ll see all of this in play in every relationship you engage in, moment by moment. Do not be surprised if these “negative” thoughts surface. They do, for all of us. What you need to consciously do is to not ACT on them. Dig deeper, act out of love, act out of kindness. And that takes time, give yourself that time. That’s all we need to do really.
I distinctly remember this one example Rocco has shared many times on his Instagram. I’m paraphrasing. He says something like, “If there is a wolf at the door and you’re sleeping, and I let you sleep, I am not acting out of love or kindness. Kindness in that moment demands of me to wake you up and not to let you sleep.”
Now, an observer who can only see the action inside the house might not be able to see the wolf. That observer might label me as an inconsiderate person, maybe even an arrogant person, maybe even an unkind person – but my action might never appear to him to be coming out of love. But that shouldn’t change my action!
Similarly, the person who’s asleep probably also doesn’t see the wolf. Who would remain asleep otherwise right? Only us humans! But anyway, that person might also not see that the act of me trying to wake them up is one of love, is one of kindness. And that shouldn’t change my action either!
For the one who sees the wolf, love in that moment demands him to wake up the sleeping person. Period.
There are various other examples you can see in your own everyday life where apparent kindness is not real kindness, where apparent love is not real love. And also, where apparent unkindness IS the real kindness and the real love.
If you are wrong somewhere, and I can see that THAT is keeping you from growing, and I simply enable you in your smallness because I have lowered my expectations from you or because it makes ME feel bigger compared to you, even though I look kind and compassionate, I am not being kind. I am not acting out of the greatest love I could have acted out of.
If someone is inviting you for something, and you decline their offer out of love for your own self, for your own peace, even though you seem unkind to them, you are not. Sometimes, saying no is the greater kindness, is the greater love.
So, what does love look like at any moment? It depends on the moment, it depends on the actors in the moment. There is no single right answer, and no one will get it right all the time anyway. No one. Not Osho, not JK, not Kahlil Gibran, not Swami Vivekananda, not Sadhguru, not Alan Watts, not Jesus Christ, not Buddha, not Lord Ram. No one.
We can only ever try to better our interactions and relationships with others. And this sure is one way to do it. Reflect on it.
Unlearn the idea that love and kindness is only mushy-mushy goodness. Sometimes, it can be a scolding or a disagreement too.
Unlearn the idea that all apparent goodness is love and kindness. Sometimes, the greater kindness is telling the other person where they are wrong.
See the truths in these statements. And the next time you are in a pickle, ask yourself, “What does love look like at this moment?” Really listen to the answer, and then act on it.
I would like to thank Rocco for sharing this wonderful insight with me. If you guys haven’t yet, do check out his page on Instagram, his handle is @rocketsprocket. He also runs his own podcast by the name Eyes wide open life. I cannot recommend his work enough. Go through it, your future selves will thank you for it. And thank me for it too I hope. 🙂
Episode 6 – Simplify your life | Work-life balance (17 min)
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (WALDEN)
In the name of development and progress, we modern humans have complicated our lives way more than needed.
And in the name of paying our bills or advancing our careers or earning a livelihood or being independent, we complicate them even more.
Isn’t this true? It is. It most definitely is.
This episode is an attempt from my side to make you, the listener, think deeper on this subject. It is an invitation to reconsider HOW you are leading your life, not WHAT you are doing in it.
We need to have the courage to identify where we are complicating things for ourselves and then to act on these realisations and simplfy them, so that we can focus our energies on our real needs, not the imagined ones.
I build on a real life incident from my life to expand on a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, “The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.”
Has it ever happened to you that you read or listened to something somewhere and you couldn’t help but feel that everyone should go through it too?
Well, firstly, if your answer to this question is yes and you haven’t shared that something with me yet, drop me a DM on my Instagram page. I’d love to hear about it. The link to my Instagram is in the show notes.
Anyway, this episode is dedicated to one such quote I came across a few years ago. I was reading Walden, by Henry David Thorreau and I came across a line that resonated with me so hard that I must have quoted it a gazillion times in conversations since then.
The quote goes like this, “The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.”
He wrote the book in the 1850s, and it is Dec 2021 as of today. And need I say that the formulae we humans apply these days to solve our livelihoods are only getting more and more complicated with time. And unpacking these formulae is the need of the hour.
Isn’t that true? I can say with complete conviction that it is. In the name of earning a livelihood or paying the bills as we like to call it now, we humans have gone so far beyond the line that we do not even see it anymore. Or as Joey would say, the line is a dot to us!
Seriously though, I honestly feel that in modern times, we have really forgotten that Life, at its very basic, is not eventually as complicated as we’re making it out to be. And that is primarily because we don’t know any better. In a fast-paced life, which a lot of us in “developed” or even “developing” cities live, you hardly get time to slow down, step back and look at your life from an observers’ viewpoint, from a zoomed out viewpoint. So we kind of keep doing what others around us do. It is monkey-see-monkey-do at a global level then!
Let me share an incident that happened with me a few years ago which really jolted me and forced me to think deeper.
I was returning back from work in the evening one day with a friend who used to work with me. It had been a long day at work I presume, because it was already getting dark. At least that is the scene in my head now. Usually after we got off the bus, it was a 10-15 minute walk to our homes. Except that on this day, my friend received a call from his roommate that they were out of groceries and he would have to buy some before he comes back home. My friend asked me if we could stop by the nearby supermarket so he could do so, and I obliged. So, we entered the mart, I was just strolling alongside him and I observed him just gunning through the process like The Flash. He picked up 4-5 bags from the counter, stuffed them with veggies, rushed to the checkout counter and literally within 5 minutes, we were out of the supermarket with a bagful of groceries on our way to our homes again.
But something about what just happened just didn’t feel right to me. A thought popped up in my head – That here is a guy who spent an entire day working in his office, and I’m pretty sure he made all the efforts and spent a considerable amount of energy that day like most days to ensure that whatever he does there is done to the best of his capabilities and sound knowledge – he was, and I’m sure still is, a very intelligent and diligent worker. But somehow, when it came to buying food for himself, he just rushed through the process as if this is just something secondary you know – Ahh not that important! And something didn’t feel right to me about this.
You know, granted that we were getting late in reaching our homes and the fact that his purchase of groceries would slow me down too. This would have been acting on his mind, he was a considerate guy. And so I do not blame him for rushing through his purchase that day – but that is not the point of me narrating this incident anyway.
The point is that that incident really did make me think how many times would I have done something similar. The answer, an extremely uncomfortable one, was a lot of times! And that made me really uncomfortable. But as is always the case, growth stood on the other side of the discomfort, and here I am sharing all this with you.
I have reflected many times on the thoughts this little incident triggered in me. And those reflections really did open me up to a glaring reality of our times – we do not even realise that our jobs, our careers, our businesses are a means to an end and not the end in themselves. Yet so often in our day to day lives, we act as if these things are much more important and deserve much more of our attention than a whole lot of other stuff. And more often than not, that other stuff IS why we are doing our jobs and our businesses in the first place. You know – to buy food, to take care of our close ones, to relax, and so on and on – only you can say where it all manifests in your own particular lives. But one thing is common for all of us – we certainly have complicated our means to earn our livelihoods much more than the original problem actually demands!
I know for a fact that a lot of us modern humans feel very teary-eyed about our jobs and our careers and value them a lot, in fact we value them so much that that is what we do all of our adult lives these days. And thereby we block ourselves from all other possibilities that Life has to offer. Don’t we do that? We do. And it’s high time we accept it.
I cannot point it to you specifically, but if you’re listening to this right now, I invite you to think deeper on what decisions you might be taking right now in the name of advancing your career or paying your bills or earning your livelihoods or being independent which are really not that important from a zoomed-out point of view. Our careers, our jobs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. And in that sense, they aren’t that important! Yet somehow, we have made them the cornerstones of our lives.
Have you ever heard about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? If you haven’t, I’ll give you a very brief overview. It essentially says that there is a hierarchy of needs that every human being has. You start with the most basic ones – your physiological and safety needs – food, water, clothes, shelter, which is what we call roti, kapda, makaan in Hindi. Then there is a belonging need, a need to be a part of a family, a group, a society, a friend-circle, anything. Then there is an esteem need – a recognition, respect, freedom need and so on, and the hierarchy goes all the way up to self actualisation – manifesting our truest potential. And let me tell you, a human being’s truest potential, just so we are very, very clear on the subject, is not becoming the CXO in some company, even if it is your own company! That is merely a very small part of the game we are all playing here collectively. There are bigger things to do, people! Bigger realisations to be had! Bigger jobs to be done! Rise above this slumber!
If you wish to see just a glimpse of what truths you might be missing in your everyday life as to what Life really has to offer, check out episode 5 of this show. It is about an objective truth about Life that everyone must understand and not just believe. But remember – the pointer in that episode is just a glimpse! This is a topic I will come back to many times in this podcast, but as of the date of recording of this episode – I would refer you to that episode of my show to plant the seeds for the same.
Anyway, so back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think that it’s reasonable to say that a hierarchy exists in our needs, but what we tend to miss out on is that no one will ever come and tell us where we are on the hierarchy, and when it’s time to move on. It’s not a strict hierarchy anyway, in the sense that you always have to provide for your physiological needs of food, clothes, shelter – no matter how actualised you are. So you’d always work a job, own a business, make money, etc – it is not that an actualised person wouldn’t do any of these things, and so, it is also not true that you would have to stop doing these things to achieve actualisation. The crux of the matter is “how” you’re doing it and not “what” you’re doing.
I mean to say that at the very heart of this entire discussion lies “how” you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. How much value you place to your job, your career, your business, etc. Is that the central part of your life? If you’re an actualised person or are consciously on the path to it, it’s fine to have your work as the centre of your life. But if you’ve never done anything else apart from your work, have never stepped back and observed the flow of your own thoughts, have never meditated on God and Life and what it means to be complete, it’s extremely likely that you are the farmer Thorreau was talking about – the one entangled in a solution more complicated than the problem itself.
Now, none of this is an invitation to become an obnoxious worker who uses this as an excuse to justify getting away from work. Or an invitation to renounce everything and go live in the mountains to actualise.
Consider this an invitation to re-evaluate the value you’re placing on your job, your career, your business, etc. And you can do that only from the situation you’re in at the moment. Of course, if you are a student who hasn’t even started working professionally yet, or if you have some loans to pay off, or some other needs to address urgently, none of this would matter to you until that block is cleared. And that is normal. It’s OK. I myself know that just a few years ago when I had debts to clear, I would not have been able to act on this invitation even if it resonated with me at the time. Consider someone who’s living without even their basic physiological needs being fulfilled for example. It is normal for there to be situations where one cannot act on any of what I’m talking about.
But there are a whole lot of us who aren’t really in such situations, but think ourselves to be so. Only you can say that for yourself. It might be an uncomfortable fact to digest – not that you’re in a good position in your life, that is always good to realise. But what might be uncomfortable is that the actions you hold very dear to yourself in your day-to-day life are actually blocking you from realising your own truest potential.
This involves a whole lot of unlearning, unlearning the value you have invested in your work, unlearning the seemingly desperate situation you think yourself to be in, unlearning the false narratives in your head about what is more important and what isn’t, unlearning the ideas that the next promotion, the next car, the next house, the next step on the ladder IS the most important thing in your life, unlearning the conviction that you’ll act on all of this someday in the future when everything else is settled, etc etc.
Know that there is more to life than earning a livelihood.
Know that the jobs and businesses we’re engaged in, even if our own, are a means to an end and not an end in themselves.
Know that this is an invitation to reconsider “how” you are approaching life, not “what” you are doing in it.
Know that the problem of livelihood isn’t as complex as we’re making it to be.
Know that excelling in your job is not the highest potential you can reach as a human being.
Know all of this, and then act on it. If you do so, and do so diligently, you would contribute to humanity in ways no one may even fathom.
Because if you don’t act on it, and don’t lift yourself above it all, how do you expect to help someone who is not in your situation today but would be in some time to come? That someone could be your partner, your children, your friends or even your parents! So, consider the work that you do on yourself here as a service you render to all the ‘others’ you would help later.
As that man Ram Dass said, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself. You can do nothing for me but work on yourself. In the end, we’re all just walking each other home.”
For the bigger picture to rise in you, the smaller one must be unlearnt. And the awareness that there is a bigger picture, is sometimes enough for that job
CHETAN NARANG
An episode dedicated to God – what the word actually means.
Absorbing the content here should give you a whole lot of clarity about these burning questions we all have about God:
Is there a creator? What are the atheists missing? What does the word God really mean? Where do most religions converge in their teachings? What is the real answer to that age-old question “Who am I”?
In the information age, it’s downright unfortunate that the majority of us still don’t even have a hint of this understanding. It will take time to grasp the profundity of the entire thing, but the first step to any of that would be to become aware that there IS something to grasp!
If you’re here, take this opportunity and dive right in. It’ll be worth your time. I promise.
I want to start this episode with a thought experiment. Consider that you have a pot of ink in your hands. Consider that there is an empty wall in front of you and you have been permitted by the owner of that wall to smear the ink all over it. Consider that you actually do it – you smash the inkpot on the wall and now, ignoring the bits of glass, there is ink all over the place.
Now, I want you to consider that drop of ink in that far off corner of the wall. Looked at in isolation, that drop is just a tiny drop of ink. And you’re right, it is one drop in a million-billion others. But what I want you to acknowledge is the fact that it is THE ink. It is as much THE ink as any other ink there is or ever was in that original inkpot. It is THE ink. Its real nature is that it is THE INK.
Now, if that drop of ink was to become conscious of its existence, to stretch the example a bit more, I’d say that the drop would not even realise that it is a drop of ink, a drop of THE ink. I say it would be consumed with the drama surrounding its limited field of view – the lizard and the ants coming over and stamping all over it, the drops next to it being hard to get along with, the fear of the darkness when the lights are turned off in the room, the beauty of the bright sunlight when the curtains are open, the shame of being a bad drop in its heart, the fear of being miserable in the future – all of this immediate drama would completely consume the everyday life of the conscious drop.
This is the human condition. Each and every one of us is just like that drop of ink – consumed by the drama of our everyday lives which shields our very true, very basic nature. We are THE ink that did all the dance on the wall and is continuing on with the dance as we speak. We are the ink, we are the dance. Each of us. I sincerely hope you are able to draw the parallels I’m trying to make here.
In the previous episode, we covered the idea of one’s ego, one’s sense of self, one’s sense of ‘I’. And we discovered that the real nature of the “I” gets lost in identification with the illusion produced by the myriad different thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions going through our organism all the livelong day!
What is the real nature of this ‘I’? I just told you above. Do you remember the separation fallacy episode, which was the second episode of this show? If not, I would highly recommend you going through that. We covered in that episode how connected we are to the universe, to everything there is.
Let me build on this a bit more.
So let’s assume you’re a 24 year old girl named Ria working as a lawyer in some company in some city in India. Let’s ask Ria who she really is. She gives us the common answer – I’m Ria, I studied at so and so and now I work as a so and so… <you get the picture>. But ohh we’re smarter than that, so we ask her that that’s just a bunch of things she’s done in the past and plans on doing in the near future, but what is ‘she’ really, fundamentally? You see if she would’ve chosen a different career, or a different career would’ve been chosen for her, would ‘she’ be someone or something else? Or would that just have been another role the real ‘she’ would’ve taken up, like the numerous she already plays – daughter, friend, partner, lawyer, Indian, etc? Who is this constant ‘she’ really? If we could get to that, maybe we could get to the bottom of the seemingly bottomless pit after all. Let’s try further.
So, she is playing the role of a 24 year-old lawyer right now, maybe sufficient backtracking would help us uncover the constant ‘she’ who’s been behind it all this while. So what was she a few years ago? A student somewhere perhaps. And before that? A little girl playing in the school yard maybe. And before that? A new-born baby maybe. And before that? This is where it gets interesting doesn’t it? Because before that, it’s almost as if she was asleep and doesn’t remember the dream she was dreaming.
You may question that did she even exist before being born. And it’s a valid question, because in our day-to-day life experience, we experience ourselves in our bodies. We identify with the body, and it’ll be a very normal thing to say that ‘I am nothing but my body, and my idea of my self is also a part of my body.’ If you take that deeper, you’d hit upon the idea that you started in a maternity ward somewhere and will end up in a crematorium somewhere or be burned up, basis what suits those that survive you. And that your life is just something that happens between those two events. I don’t deny this idea, but the right adjective I have for it is that it is incomplete.
You see if you are nothing but your body, you are an accumulation. Because that’s what your body is, isn’t it? You were a little baby just a few years ago, and you’ve accumulated so much since. But you see if that was true, and you were nothing but an accumulation, you’d have to start out of something, right? An accumulation has to start somewhere. So where and when did ‘your’ accumulation start? At the time of your birth? No, you know you existed before that too, when you spent that time in your mother’s comfortable womb, sleeping with not a worry in the world. So when did YOU start?
We’re back where we left, aren’t we? The question of what you were before you were born. I think the most reasonable answer to that is that you existed in some form in your parents. Call this form genes, call this form chromosomes, call it what you want, provided you don’t confuse the word for the thing. You existed in some form in your parents before you were born. Right, so where does that lead us?
If you existed in some form in your parents before you were born, the same applies to your parents too. They existed in some form in your grandparents, which essentially means that you existed in some form in your grandparents. So, you keep taking this recursion back, as far back as you can. When I say as far back as you can, I mean take it all the way back to the very origin of everything, call it the Big Bang if you will. And where that leads you is to a visualisation that every one or rather every “thing” came from and in fact IS the same “thing”.
Now relate this to the example of the ink pot we talked about in the very beginning of this episode. This “thing” we just reached, which is what every other “thing” IS at its very core, is THE ink. And every drop of that ink, though separated from the whole collection of ink, is nonetheless THE ink, no matter how overwhelmed it is by its everyday drama.
And this “thing” is the real, incorruptible, (well, as incorruptible as I can manage in words right now in this narration) definition of the word “God”. And we are each IT. Each of us. It’s not out there somewhere way up in the sky or way down in the future. It is HERE, each moment in the present – NOW. If only we would unlearn the attachments to the drama of our everyday lives, we would see this as probably the most important objective truth of our lives.
The Advaita Vedanta, which is often considered as the pinnacle of wisdom in all of eastern philosophy and religion, has this as the central message. Advaita means non-dual. And non-dual literally means that which has no other. That which excludes nothing, that which includes everything, that which is one with everything. That which is the ink we just talked about, that which is the “thing” we just talked about. That is what God is. And that is what you are. That is what I am. Or rather, that is what each of our “I’s” actually is. Again, “I” as in the letter “I” and not the organ “eye”.
In our everyday lives, our “I” is completely consumed by the whirlpool of thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions. And we identify with this whirlpool all the time. This whirlpool is our usual everyday ego. Our usual everyday sense of who I am, what it means to be me, etc.
And it is an important part of our lives. This “I” is how we navigate through the world, how we find out what’s important for us and what isn’t. It is the lens through which we see the world in and around us. It is our consciousness.
But like every lens, it has its limitations. It has its blindspots. It can only let a limited amount of the light in. And what we are talking about here, is the deepest blindspot our lenses have.
You see, human consciousness, while it is a beautiful process that allows the human organism to make sense of its environment, is also a limiting process. It is in its very nature to ignore certain aspects of reality out of the picture. And what we are talking about here, is the deepest aspect that is left out by everyday human consciousness.
Just like that inkdrop, if conscious, would not see much else apart from its own everyday drama, the human organism doesn’t see much else apart from its own everyday ego and the story built in its head around it.
— — —
If you tuned in to the third episode of this podcast, I was dispelling a very common misinterpretation in that talk. I was talking about how for most people, the word God equals creator. This is a misinterpretation, but it’s also funny how seriously close it is to the truth too. I mean look at it from the lens of the talk we just had right now. That thing we just talked about, that ink, that non-dual thing, is God. And that thing is also the creator of every other thing. In that sense, we’re right to say that God is the creator.
But where the common interpretation diverges from the truth is that we separate the creator from the created. We imagine that the creator is someone out there somewhere, who has created all of this and is now very far away from everything he has created. Which is simply not true. So, more than understanding God as the creator, I’d say that it is better to understand God as the creative principle, the creative process which is abundantly present every time everywhere. In fact, that is all there is.
To give you an example, you create all the time. You grow your hair, you grow your nails, most of us can create more human beings like us. The plants around us create leaves, create flowers, create more plants, etc etc.
We are all the creator, and at the same time, are also the created.
— — —
Whatever I’m sharing here is not an argument from authority. I’m not asking you to believe any of it. This is merely an invitation to contemplate on it. That is how all of this came to me too. It’s not my truth. It is an objective truth. It is what man’s search for completeness and freedom and liberation has always been about. It is what religions have always been about.
Well, I will not be so naive as to say this for all religions, because I haven’t studied all religions. No one has.
But deep down, almost all the religions have this as the very heart of their teachings.
The Hindus, when they said, “Tat twam asi” quite literally meant “You are IT.”
When they said, “Aham Brahmasmi”, it quite literally meant “I am Brahma”, or “I am God.”
When the Sikhs said, “Ik oangkar, sat nam”, they meant, “That one thing created everything, and its name is the Truth.”
When the Buddhists said, “Be one with everything”, this is what they meant.
Yoga literally means Union – union of the little self, the little “I” with the supreme self, the universal consciousness.
When the Jains talk about the liberation of the soul, or rather when all the eastern religions talk about liberation of the soul or moksha or enlightenment or Nirvana, they refer to this realisation.
The Atma is equal to the Paramatma. The small self, our little ego, our “I” is actually the supreme Self. Is actually the universal consciousness. Is actually God.
And I haven’t studied many western religions, but I am given to understand by many philosophers who have, that this oneness is also at the core of the teaching of Jesus Christ and also Prophet Mohammed.
— — —
But alas, the core of the human condition is that we can translate whatever we hear into our own familiar language, and it doesn’t take much effort for us to start believing that our translation is what was said in the first place. You can see that translation happening in you if you are very silent. If you have never come across what I just talked about in this episode, chances are that your brain is right now trying to appropriate my words into a narrative that fits the one it already has – about your God, about your religion, etc.
Catch it in this action. You cannot stop it, you can never stop it. But you can become aware of it. And once you become aware of it, you know not to act on the thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions powered by the false narratives. This is what I have always meant by unlearning. Slowly, but surely, in this manner, the truth appears to you. Just like you have no control over the false thoughts popping up in your head, you cannot force yourself to see the truth. You can only see your ego in action when you fear facing the truth, and when you translate it into “nothing new”.
As that poet David Whyte said, “Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but rather in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.”
If all of what I talked about here was your first time hearing it, make sure you listen to it again. I would recommend coupling it with episodes 2,3 and 4 of the show as well. And then contemplate on them. And then re-listen. And then contemplate again. No matter how long it takes. Because THIS IS important.
For the bigger picture to rise in you, the smaller one must be unlearnt. And the awareness that there is a bigger picture, is sometimes enough for that job. You now know that there is a bigger picture.
