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Choosing growth over the "Mount Stupid"

 So many laws have been enacted worldwide to regulate human relations. There are laws around almost every aspect of human behaviour, such as laws dealing with crime, contracts, relations, possession of property, liabilities, nuisance, corruption, dowry, marriage, succession, partnerships, companies, tax, security, and so on. The entropy of the legal literature is so huge that I don't think that any AI engine in the world as of date would have access to the entire legal literature of the world. Every day, thousands of decisions are announced, and none of us has the capacity to be aware of them all.

Despite so much jurisprudence, have we been able to resolve the problems of humanity? No. In fact, the more laws are made, the more people find loopholes therein. The law-breakers are always a few steps ahead of the law-makers. This cat-and-mouse game may go on forever, but we have probably missed a very fundamental aspect of human behaviour. While watching the web series Chiraya, my mind was filled with thoughts that most parents, due to their unawareness, pass on traces of their ignorance to their children. If Kamlesh has an obsession with her unborn son, she passes on that "gender bias" into the mind of her brother-in-law. Most of us would stand with family rather than standing with the "right", and that's why "Ghar ka bhedi lanka Dhaye" is such a famous proverb, and I have not found so far anybody naming his son Vibhishana, while Vibhishana was such a great devotee of Lord Rama that he left his entire family for Him.

Consciously or unconsciously, we continue to acquire these biases from our parents and society. Slowly, these thoughts become part of "I", and it becomes impossible to see "ourselves" as different from these "biases". Most of our reactions to different situations come from conditioning by the society in which we were born and brought up. However, over a period of time, we lose that ability to examine "who I am? That's why, when we encounter someone from a different belief system, it feels like a shock. 

We can get stuck on the "mount stupid" of whatever little we know. Or we may just take it as a "real mount" and look forward to the greater mount to climb. In the first case, we just deny the existence of any greater height under a stupid belief that the height on which we are standing is the tallest. We just turn our backs on the greater mountains and pretend to ourselves and the whole of the world that we are at the peak of our ability. That's very detrimental to growth. If we continue to stand still on that "mount stupid" for a long time, our capacity slowly gets rusted, and we develop "Fear of the unknown". The longer we stay on that "mount stupid", the greater the fear. At some stage, we get so frightened internally and so doubtful of our capacity to move ahead that we make all types of mental stories to justify that the 'mount stupid" is the peak of our capacity and waste the rest of our life in convincing self and others. In fact, as the time passes by, we get frightened to even slip down from this "mount stupid" and that makes us all the more desperate to prove that we are right. It happens over time, but generally by the time we realise, we are too late. That's why one of the primary responsibilities of parents is to be aware of their own "mount stupid" so that, consciously or unconsciously, we do not transmit the same stupidity to our children.

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