For the last few days, I have been encountering a question repeatedly as to why it is so difficult to change. Are we just a prisoner of our own choices? Do choices exist at all? There is no straight answer to all these questions. However, a comparison with the mobile may shed some light on this complex phenomenon.
Mobile has an operating system as well as different applications that run on the operating system. There are different operating systems that operate in different mobiles that broadly decide the user experience. While some mobiles operate on Mac, some are on Android and some are Symbian. There may be other operating systems as well which I am unaware of. Our cultures are also like the operating systems that broadly decide the way we think and feel. We are products of different cultures.
However, within the operating system, there are many system settings that decide the user experience. For example, when we buy a new mobile, the system asks us to make certain choices and these choices decide the experience of the mobile later. For example, the permissions we grant to different applications decide the vulnerability and adaptability of the device. While allowing certain permissions may make the device vulnerable, denying certain permissions may make it less user-friendly or may not allow the device to communicate with the external ecosystem. Similarly, as we grow up, we make choices each day. We start dividing the life experiences between good and bad, right and wrong. In our childhood, and even later, this keeps happening and we keep making systemic choices. Sometimes, we struggle with the mobile, as to why it is not responding to a particular application, while we ourselves denied the permission to the application sometime back. Sometimes, we allow a particular anti-virus to take over our default choices and the anti-virus changes our default choices without we being aware of the same.
The same thing happens in our lives. We make so many choices viz a viz our operating system. We remain conscious of some of the choices, while we lose awareness of most of the choices. However, these choices have a huge impact on the decisions we make just like the systems settings in the mobile. Sometimes, we get irritated as to why we have fears, why are we disinterested in learning new things, or why are we not able to trust. We do not look back on the choices we made while we were setting our operating system. It all depends on how we feed different experiences in our minds. For example, we get cheated in a very close relationship. We may get frightened and set the "fear" mode in our operating system. This fear will have an impact on the decisions we make for the rest of our lives. We may become revengeful and set the "revenge" mode in our operating system. We may decide to be watchful and set "awareness" mode in our operating system. These modes decide our future experiences.
Similarly, we take an initiative and do not get the desired results and are made fun of by society. We may feed this experience in different ways. We may feed to our operating system that we are worthless and may be afraid of trying new things in the future. We may also feed to our operating system caution and more hard work. We may feed better planning and preparation. It all depends on how we look at the experiences.
Throughout our lives, we keep setting and re-setting our operating system. However, we do most of these settings unconsciously. Somebody criticized us dancing and we became shy of dancing as an unconscious strategy to run away from the criticism. We performed badly in some subjects and we lost interest in that subject to avoid the criticism of the parents. We keep making many such decisions about the settings of our operating system unconsciously and that is why we are not aware of choices made by ourselves. At some point in our lives, we become confused and confined. We become a prisoner of our choices and feel incapable and helpless to do so many things in our lives.
There is no doubt that our hardware and operating system have certain limitations. For example, we can not fly due to the heavy weight of our bodies. We can not see the infrared waves. We can listen to only a certain spectrum band of sound. However, most of the limitations are the result of choices that we made with respect to our operating system. Since we have made so many choices throughout our lives without awareness, we do not know which of our limitations is the result of which of the choices. However, little awareness of the operating system helps us redefine our choices. That unleashes a lot of internal power. That is the real magic of awareness. The moment, we are aware of the choices available in our operating system, we gain freedom from our own limitations.
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