Recently
I came across a book named "Are you ready to succeed". While the title is clearly cheesy, initial
premise of the book looked interesting, so I went and found an extract of the book for a
quick read. Am yet to read the full book, however, the initial premises on which the author expands seemed quite
fascinating to me and I thought I should expand on these before they left my
mind.
Based on this limited
reading, I picked up four key ideas in the book (interestingly, one of which I
have been aware of before) and to me it seems like these form the four points
of a quadrilateral within which life revolves. The four points/pillars are
a) mental models b) multiple realities c) mental chatter and d) witness
The central theme is
(mind you, I have not read the book, hence am just connecting the dots based on
my hunches) - life is a sequence of events. Imagine yourself as
an unattached vacillating sub-atom, sitting on a string connecting a
node called "mental models" and other node called "set of
possible realities". The sub atom is the “witness” and is surrounded by a
cloud called "mental chatter".
Now, as events happen
in the "realities" node, the sub-atom watches the outcome and takes a
model from the "mental models" node and applies it to the event,
which supplies “one possible interpretation” of the event and connects it to earlier
events in our life and evokes emotions/responses in the sub-atom. In the
process, the interpretation and the responses are sent back to the model node
where the models are updated for future applications.
So far, this seems
like a logical automaton and can remains so as long as the sub-atom is
simply acting as a witness to the events happening, using models to search
for interpretation, but consciously knowing that models are "one way"
to explain an event, but have their limitations and hence don’t offer “absolute
truth”.
More often than not
though, the sub-atom is surrounded by a cloud called "mental
chatter", which constantly throws its own interpretations to the events
happening, sometimes questioning the mental model's capability, sometimes strongly
emphasizing that the interpretation of the model is the whole truth and
only truth.
How many times have we
heard people say - "why me, why did this happen to me?" Or, that
"I am unlucky". Or that "things don't work out for me
ever". Well, they just witnessed an event, applied a mental model without
knowing its limitations which told them that they always get shortchanged
unfairly. An objective assessment would be "well, this event happened and
based on my previous life, my mind is interpreting it in this way". The watching
person can step aside, watch him/herself, interpreting that event and get
amused, of course all of this is infinitely easier said than done. But imagine
if you tried living this way, wouldn't life be infinitely simpler? Imagine the bliss when at every point, you
remember that your life is confined within a rectangle made of these four
points. You can then elevate to such levels where you interpret events as just
events, like watching a dance on the sidewalk, without any emotional
implications, and then quickly move on the next event and the one
thereafter. If one can do it, this will be a true acceptance of our infinitesimally
small existence in the billions of years old cosmos. Question then, is really this - can you remember to see yourself as a mere atom all the time?