All of us encounter many people who know very little and yet they are quite confident in what they say. Isn't that a strange phenomenon? It appears as if the "art of confidence" is mastered by these people. Or, alternatively, they adopt the pretension of confidence as their "winning formula" so that people do not ask uncomfortable questions or do not confront them. In the process, they pretend to be more and more confident, and the more they pretend, the more they appear to be fake. They keep contradicting their own statements without realizing that in the process, they have lost their "authenticity". Just like the story of a boy who keeps faking around an attack by the lion and when the lion actually attacks, nobody believes it to be true. Similarly, these people keep faking around, and when their words carry no meaning to others, they become more insecure, and the more insecure they are, the more stubborn and adamant they become.
This is a continuous process and such people become more and more stubborn and adamant with the passage of time. They fail to realize in the process, how much damage they do to themselves and everyone around. Their stubbornness kills a lot of time and energy for everyone around them. Not so that they do not know the reality but somewhere they are so afraid to admit the reality. The biggest problem is that they have grown up physically as adults and therefore have "adult ego" as well. Admission of incapacity means shattering the "adult ego". Whatever little is left, that will also go.
Their intelligence fails to understand that this pretension is not going to last long and sooner or later the people around them will stop tolerating it. Every nicety has its limitations. As and when it happens, they start blaming the whole of the world rather than examining their own behavior. The problem here is that the "intellect" is generally a slave of the "ego". Intellect dances to the tunes of the "ego". Our ego makes the decisions and the intellect just makes the decisions look rational. There is no independent existence of intellect. Intellect just calculates, compares, and computes. Finally, it is either driven by the "ego" or the "divine". Generally, people who do not work on their fundamentals become insecure, and insecure people have a very fragile ego. The "fragile ego" makes extra efforts to somehow survive as we try to hold on to a slippery ground. In that process, it takes control of the intellect and uses the intellect to somehow fulfill its desire of "appearing to be intelligent". The intellect gets no space or freedom to explore the truth. Therefore, slowly and gradually, it becomes more and more narrow until its capacity to observe and examine becomes too blunt.
The "fragile ego" becomes so insecure that any suggestion from anybody appears to be criticism. There is a strong reaction to advice given by the well-wishers. It makes me recall the movie "Shaitan" where the black magician takes over control of the brain of a young child and under control she attacks her own parents and the parents have no other way than to let go of their dear child. That is how the "fragile ego" takes control over intellect, that "controlled intellect" harms all the family members like that girl harming her own brother and mother. Not so that she is not tense. There is some remembrance of the relationship with her brother and parents and that is the reason when the "shaitan" asks her to hit her parents with a knife, she struggles so much internally that she pisses in her pants. Each such person driven by a "fragile ego" passes through similar conflict and stress.
Finally, all the well-wishers are harmed in the process and they are forced to maintain a distance and bid goodbye to the "shaitan" to take control of such people. They end up not only making their own lives hell but also the lives of all the people around them. Insecurity breeds insecurity. They become more and more insecure and try to control everything around them. Their entire energy is occupied with observation of the activities of the people they want to control rather than self-introspection. Slowly, they become control freak and get triggered by the slightest of provocation.
I do not know why parents do not tell their children that the purpose of life is not to control others but to evolve. We all have a great capacity to evolve. If a single-cell amoeba can evolve into a human being with millions of years of effort, there is no reason why a "fragile ego" can't connect to the "divine". However, we have to move in the right direction to reach the goal. If we move south from Pune, we will never reach Delhi. If we keep making efforts to hide our incapacities and fears, we will never confront them and get over them. We will always keep pretending and remain inauthentic. We first need to admit that we are full of fears. Then we examine the causes of fear and understand that the real cause is the inner disconnection from the divine. The moment we understand, that is the first and foremost step in the direction of freedom and exploration. We start examining our pretensions and they get dropped. The more we examine, the more pretensions get dropped and the more authentic we become. The more authentic we become and more confident we are. Such confidence is natural and it does not require any imaging or projection. We move around the world with confidence and explore everything freely. The "shaitan" can no longer take control of our intellect since the intellect is now directly connected to the broadband of the divine.
As the "divine" takes the command of the intellect, the "shaitan" or the "fragile ego" disappears. Our entire way of looking at the world changes. We are no longer a seeker. We are complete within and live in this world to share that joy with everybody around us. If we taste something good and unique, we like to share that item with everybody in our family. Similarly, when we experience that joy of being connected, we like to share that joy with everybody around us. That is what Jesus, Buddha, Nanaka, Mohamad, Shankara, Swami Vivekananda, Paramhansa Yogananda, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Ramana Maharishi, Sri Aurobindo, and all the pious souls did in this world. On the one hand, is the existence controlled by the "shaitan" wherein one is extremely insecure, pretentiously confident, and tries to control everybody around, and on the other hand is the existence guided by the divine where one is authentically confident and freely explores this world and helps others also to explore. The choice is ours. If we make bad choices, we not only waste our lives but also implicitly affect the choices of our kids as well.
Comments