It's not easy to realize our own fixations. How can a fixated mind be "aware" of its own fixations? While in a car, we can notice the movement of other vehicles, but it is difficult to notice the movement of the vehicle we are riding in. That's how we can easily notice where others are fixated, but it is difficult to notice our own fixation. Somebody is excessively worried about the settlement of his kids, or his career progression, health, disputes of properties, or a divorce case. We can see his fixation and, at times, advise our friends and relatives facing similar issues quite magnanimously. On the other hand, when we face similar issues, the trouble appears quite real and we don't want "free ki advice" from anybody. Similarly, when somebody is stuck with a belief system that appears quite stupid, but when we are stuck with our belief system, that appears quite real.
Why do our brains create this hallucination? Probably, the brain wants to be certain in this uncertain world. It wants to make sense of a world that is full of quite conflicting meanings. For example, it is quite famous that "Everything has its time". That means that we may make efforts, but everything has a pre-determined time, and we should not worry so much about the result. This argument is quite often used by our well-wishers when we are getting restless for the results and things are not happening our way. However, if we strictly implement this in our lives, we often lose motivation and become lazy. That's why, at the same time, we also listen to the words that "we should be the change we want to see". Now there comes an element of effort, and we can't be a passive spectator, and we should make active efforts to bring about the changes we want to see in society. However, as we make efforts, we often get frustrated since we do not get the desired results due to the complexity of the ecosystem, and then we listen to a story where a person walking on the beach is constantly throwing the fish into the sea to save their lives and somebody says that there are millions of fish on the beach, and it will not make any difference and then he throws a fish and tells that "it made to difference to the life of that fish". Here, there is emphasis on effort with a reality-check that efforts may not lead to a large-scale change, but they do make a difference to at least a few.
We listen to and read about different philosophies of life. They carry quite contradictory meanings, and generally, we tend to pick and choose what attracts us. We become quite generous when it comes to distributing the sweets on the birthday of our kids, and ask our kids to compete in the examination, and leave all those friends behind to secure a seat in a good university. We talk of cooperation and cocreation, and in the same breath, we talk about "survival of the fittest". On the one hand, we measure the goodness of human beings in terms of what they give back to society, and on the other hand, we tell our kids not to be bothered about what's going around in society and concentrate on their studies.
The human brain is a wonderful meaning-making machine, and we tend to make meanings that suit our purpose. Our good-bad, right-wrong, and all other classifications are quite subjective, and we pick the meaning that suits our purpose. The crucial question is, what is the purpose of life? The narrower the purpose and the greater will be the manipulation. For a drunkard, drinking liquor is the purpose of life. He may beat his wife to snatch money away from her. He may also fight his siblings to get money to buy his desired dose of liquor. For a student like "Chatur" in 3 Idiots, it may be fair to place vulgar magazines in the rooms of his batchmates so that they get distracted and are not able to perform well in the examination. For some sportsmen, their belief in a particular religion may be so strong that they may believe that people belonging to all other faiths are inferior to them.
In a world full of diverse meanings, everyone creates their own meaning of life. The narrower our awareness, the more certain we become about the purpose of life. Ask a drug addict, and he will have no doubt that life's purpose is to get that "kick." Ask a person whose life revolves around his family, and he would be 100% sure that the purpose of life is to work for his family’s well-being, without even considering what well-being truly means. We might ask someone who is fanatic about his religion about the fundamental philosophy of that religion, and he would likely not know. This would hold true in 100% of cases because the moment anyone reads the scriptures of his religion with an open mind, they begin to appreciate the context in which each message is delivered. However, a biased mind interprets the meaning it wants to assign, which serves its convenience. That's why, whenever we place anything other than truth at the center of our lives, our minds assign meanings to everything that align with that central focus. As long as truth—and only truth—remains the core of our lives, our minds will continue to create meanings that stray far from reality, as reality is not always sweet. Even if our minds can recognize our own mental narratives, which may be distorted by falsehood, we will convince ourselves to confine the "pursuit of truth" to an intellectual level and carry on living according to our mental stories. It's not easy for a person with a habitually reactive mind to sit silently and witness the outer and the inner reality. It's difficult for it to observe as a witness.
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