In our day to day living we experience joy and happiness and also feelings of frustration, sadness, fear and anxiety. Generally thinking takes full credit when happiness is produced in the mind, but when mind produces unhappiness we blame others or we blame circumstances. Why it is that thinking does not take any responsibility for all the negative feelings and emotions that are produced in the mind? For example when somebody praises me I feel that this praise is the result of my achievement in a certain area or I feel that I deserve this praise because I am a very good person. But when somebody says something or does something that hurts me then the entire blame is laid on the other person. The fact is that both happiness and unhappiness are produced as a result of my own thinking. The question is why does thinking disassociate itself from the feeling of hurt and why does it not treat hurt to be its own baby?
If we do not carefully inquire into this question and change the status quo we are bound to get hurt for one reason or the other because neither the circumstances nor other person’s behavior and attitude are under our control.
Mr. Sardar Singh raises succinctly one of the most important issues in human behavior: Why is it that we tend to welcome others when they praise us, but tend to disavow them when they hurt us or criticize us? Why do we fail to be in full control of our faculty and fail to reject both with equal intensity?
Both these issues are ego related: they either inflate or deflate our ego depending on what emerges. All of us are well-aware of the play of our ego, our little “I”, our little “self” as we play this game over and again to please ourselves or hurt our adversaries. A more cunning ego might even deflect its barrage of criticisms by erecting some excuse to escape them (the dog ate my homework) or blaming someone else instead for them (it was your fault really).
Ego seeks pleasure to continue. It creates its own universe continuously, and in that created universe it selects, it chooses outcomes, dramas. Consider an old tale depicting an event at the court of Emperor Akbar, the Mughal Emperor of India. At the urge of his Emperor, the rumor has it, the courtier Birbal demonstrated how to shorten a given straight line already drawn on the sand without ever touching it. To touch it would be to own it, to be responsible for it, to care for it. But the Emperor was adamant: Could it be shortened without ever touching it? The courtier drew a longer line just underneath the original one and claimed the job accomplished. Surely, in terms of the longer line the original line appeared now pitifully short and wanting; the Emperor was happy witnessing Birbal’s burst of intelligence yet one more time, he decided to reward his courtier for this gratifying demonstration of ingenuity.
And this is the point of Birbal’s story! We often discredit or criticize others in order to appear larger than life in front of others even though all these creations are totally mental. Mind creates poles of pleasure and pain, and mind moves within these poles creating further eddies thinking that they are, in fact, actual and, therefore, need to be responded with more movements of mind. Thus, our ego is sustained and nurtured by its own movement creating meaning when there is none, creating reality when all are self-composed.
So what can we do? We need to see our ego at work from all different angles without any judgment. Only then it could be truly exposed in its entirety. Perhaps, only then we can say with a joyous smile: Nyah! I had enough of it already.
I do love the way you have presented this problem and it does offer us a lot of fodder for thought. However, from everything that I have experienced, I really hope as other reviews pile on that men and women remain on issue and don’t start upon a tirade associated with the news du jour. Still, thank you for this outstanding point and whilst I can not necessarily concur with it in totality, I respect your viewpoint.
Typically, the art of thinking is not one that human beings are capable of doing well. Bertrand Russell, once stated that “most people do not think, in fact, they would rather die than think.” Further he says, clear thinking is not cherished nor practiced among human beings – so we tend to be trapped in these never ending crisis of perception.
I think that one of the reasons why our thinking is so flawed stems largely from the fact that we really don’t have a good sense of who we are as human beings. We often think of ourselves as separate, and, puny forms – when in fact – the universe is folded within us.
And, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it: “we are not human beings of having a spiritual experience, we are – in fact – spiritual beings having a human experience.” Unfortunately, there are people whose flawed thinking will not allow them to appreciate this manifest truth. With clear thinking, one can see from the context of the sun, there is only a continuous steam of light, or, one could say that there is only and always day, and, never night. While from the context of the earth – there is day and night. Only clear and rigorous thinking will allow to see this simply and manifest truth, yet, it seems to be most hidden! Hence: “the context is decisive!”
As such, whenever the yield that derives from thinking seems to threaten one sense of him/herself – then, human beings tend to selectively disassociate from that seemingly nihilistic or reductionist thinking, and, sticks to the one view that gives them a sense of perpetuity.
In the end then – one’s concept of oneself – significantly informs one’s ability for clear and flawless thinking. The foregoing then are my thoughts at this theme at this time!