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Mass Denial of the Truth

All of us have heard of the instances where a person denies the death of a close relative. We become so attached to the relative that we start denying the death and live in hallucination imagining that he is still alive till somebody shakes us of that hallucination or time heals the wound and we get back to the world. We are able to get over such denial because the truth is so evident and the entire society helps us see the truth. Even if we believe that the person is alive, we can't touch the person, and if we behave like that after a few days society will take us to a psychiatrist. What if the entire family is in denial mode or the whole of society is in a state of denial? Everybody will confirm each other's denial. In such a case, how will the truth be ever known?

We keep denying many truths, which are not so evident and there is a mass hallucination in society therefore there is nobody to wake us up from the denial. For example, we all know that we have a limited life and yet all of us live as if we have an indefinite life. We plan for post-retirement, old age, and our kids and their kids, presuming that we will live forever. We look forward to the promotions at our workplaces. We are quite future-oriented beings who live less in the present moment and more in the future because somehow we deny that death is a reality and therefore always think of making our future secure. 

Not only death, we also deny life. When life has been given to us for a short period of time, then there has to be a purpose. Somehow, we never introspect and explore the purpose of life. Questions about the purpose of life and the meaning thereof naturally come to the minds of almost all of us when we are children. Our parents and the entire society have denied such exploration and when we ask these questions, we do not get a satisfactory answer. In the absence of a genuine answer, we do not gather the courage and determination to seek our own answer and start denying the question itself as a post-retirement pursuit and we deny retirement too. Thus, even after retirement, we do not want to accept that we are retired and wish to prove that we are still young. Thus, we keep denying the questions that are fundamental to our existence almost whole of our lives till we are forced to think about these questions by nature when we are confined to a bed in a hospital and suffering unbearable pain.

Mass denial of inquiry into the truth and meaning of life has resulted in mass-scale inner hollowness. Since, we as a society, are quite hollow from the inside, we are quite fearful and insecure. Out of the desperation to find some meaning, we cling to one or the other things such as money, power, relationships, social validation, or self-image, and feel secure. With time, we get addicted to such security and any loss thereof becomes unbearable. That's how we suffer almost whole of our lives. We are prisoners of our own ignorance. Our own ignorance makes us insecure and out of that insecurity, we desperately cling to one or the other thing and then feel insecure again whenever there is a danger to the things we cling to.

Sometimes we construct a home with certain fundamental flaws in the design and architecture and that makes us suffer. Every day we stay in that home adds to our suffering and yet we do not have the courage to build a new home. Building a new home requires razing the existing building but that is not only a lot of work but also requires huge expenses and is emotionally difficult because we get attached to our home. That is why most of us keep denying that we have built it wrongly. Acceptance makes it more painful since acceptance demands action. Denial is easy. We can keep suffering and pretending that everything is all right. Razing the home needs courage. That is why most of us keep living a routine life because we do not want to make efforts to contemplate the fundamental questions of life. Such inquiry has the possibility of shaking the foundation of our lives and may make living a routine life all the more difficult. It may unsettle everything and that's why we continue to live in a badly constructed home and pretend to be happy. Such denial is validated by the entire society and therefore everybody can stay happy with a mass denial of reality. That is the reason why inquiry is so rare. To add salt to the injury, the few people who challenged society were killed brutally to set the example so that nobody in the future dared to challenge the "mass denial of the truth". The only way out that appears to me is to get some time off from society and meditate on the truth so that truth gets some space to reveal itself. 

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