We keep coming across many people in our daily lives suffering from inferiority and superiority complexes. People suffering from inferiority complexes are quite fearful and afraid, low in confidence, very easily accept their faults, even if there are none, quite submissive and ready to bow down to the ones more powerful than them. People with a superiority complex argue, assert, and at times become quite aggressive in pursuing their cause. Most of the people have the shades of inferiority and superiority complexes at the same time. People appear to be suffering from inferiority complexes when they face someone more powerful than them and appear to be suffering from superiority complexes when they face people who are less powerful than them.
In fact, both these complexes appear to be just two sides of the same coin. It also appears that this coin is made of a material called incompletion of deficiency. People feel incomplete and deficient and that is the reason why they feel inferior in front of those whom they consider to be stronger. A clerk feels inferior in front of the officer and an officer feels inferior in front of his boss. Similarly, the same people who feel inferior in front of superior people also make people below them, in the organizational hierarchy or power structure of the society, themselves to be superior.
Such a sense of incompletion or deficiency develops because we have a very restricted understanding of life. We take a part of life to be an entire life and start drawing comparisons. Some of us draw comparisons in terms of money. The ones having less money are considered to be inferior while the ones having more money are considered to be superior. Others draw such comparisons in terms of positions, power, and social approvals. The ones occupying the more powerful positions are superior or the ones having more powers are superior or the people having more followers and supporters are superior.
In a society where intelligence is the last thing on the wish list of people and people do not wish to use their minds till death bed (by that time the brain is too tired to carry the stupidity that anyhow is of no use), there is a herd mindset. Whatever is considered to be desirable by the masses is followed by everybody. The median drives the rights and wrongs in society. Since most people find it is below their dignity to apply logic (sometimes afraid too) and take pride in following what the masses believe to be right, there is no scope for the widening of the perspective.
That limited perspective assigns too much of a premium to something that society considers to be desirable. Such minds develop a weighing scale within themselves and start weighing each and every person in terms of that desirable. The ones having more of that desirable are considered to be superior and the rest are considered to be inferior. For most of the people, the weighing scale is in terms of money and power. For the more evolved ones (the intelligent stupids), the weighing scale has "knowledge" or "information" as its unit. The people having more knowledge and information are considered to be superior. Such people believe the "information" and "knowledge" to be the ultimate desirable objective without ever examining the relativity of all the "information" and "knowledge".
I sometimes feel that all the complexes are just mental disorders where due to ignorance, the limited and relative is considered to be absolute and eternal. We get into the trap since we do not stay aware of the reality. We just close our eyes. Since we are surrounded by people like us, they keep confirming our understanding of life never giving us an occasion to be aware of reality.
As a person grows in terms of awareness, the first thing he realizes is that each one of us is the product of the same consciousness and the differences are quite insignificant. For example, the genetic makeup of all human beings is almost 99.99% the same. It's just like water arranged in different forms. Somewhere it looks green and somewhere blue. It may be liquid, solid as well as gas. The water in a Bisleri bottle or a water tank or a pond or glacier or clouds has the same underlying molecules. Considering the water packed in a bottle to be superior to the water of a pond is stupidity. It's just that water of the pond may have mud inside and that's just a physical attribute.
All the evolved people on this earth realized this and post realization, they developed love and compassion for the entire humanity. They no longer suffer from superiority or inferiority complexes. They understand that all these physical attributes are just temporary. The moment Valmiki realized that he was stuck due to his attachment to the family, he left stealing. The moment Tulsidas understood that he was trapped in the attachment with his wife, he became free of all complexes.
Complexes, whether superior or inferior, make us narrow. We try to get rid of the inferiority complex and in the process compare more and more with others and feel more and more inferior. We feel superior to others in certain respects and make them feel more and more inferior and in the process get trapped in our limited perspective ignoring the vastness of life. Thus these complexes make our lives more and more limited. We start becoming more and more restrictive, insecure, and fearful. The solution is the biggest problem. The more we try to gather money, power, and knowledge to feel superior the more fearful we become since our perspective of life becomes narrower.
It appears to me that the only way to live life is to realize the wideness of life and to flow with the same. The entire universe is expanding and so is the space and time. It's so easy to flow with life rather than getting fixated on time and space. Nobody can stop the flow of the river of life. One has just two choices: either to flow with the river or observe the flow of the river sitting on the bank of the river. Sitting on the bank of the river makes us wiser since we see the water flowing down the river and understand how each moment the water is different from the last moment. This helps us get rid of the fixations. We understand that it is complete stupidity to get fixated on the water passing through the river of life at a particular point in time. First of all, nobody can hold on to the water indefinitely due to the very nature of water, and secondly, we miss the rest of our lives due to our stupid desire to hold on to the water.
Comments