My life is chaos – and that’s putting it mildly.  I have no idea when the day starts and ends, what I’m doing, why I’m doing.   I am supposed to get married, have kids, earn money via a job – and that’s called making a living.   I can take an occasional break – that’s when I do my nature and wildlife photography, but it’s back to the grind after a few days of planned “peace”.  

But even these few days have provided me the space (internally and externally) to at least investigate what is happening and what is the reason for all this turmoil.  When I try to find out the last time I was ‘happy and peaceful’, I am automatically transported back to my childhood days.  Its not like there weren’t sad or boredom moments, but there wasn’t a persistent noise, weight, chatter, turmoil or whatever negative noun we want to add.  There were irritating/sad moments, and then they would vanish based on whatever the next moment brings in.  There were no remnants, constantly reminding me of ‘those bad’ stuff, and how it’s unfair to me, how to take revenge, etc. etc.  Good stuff happens – done; bad stuff happens – done.  That’s it.

So, naturally I tried to figure out the physical and mental makeup when I was eight.  I had a body.  Well, duh.  And all I “did” was explore the world around me.  The sense organs were my window into the external world and the internal world didn’t matter.   All that the sense organs ‘sensed’ was routed to my brain and ‘me’.  The ‘me’ in that sentence is a placeholder for whatever we call as the ‘I’, the ‘soul’, the ‘witness’ to all that is happening.  I am alive – which means there is something that is within ‘me’ or encapsulating ‘me’.  Below is the simplistic representation of what I think the childhood used to be.

And I grew up – and everything got messed up.  But why?  I think it was the rise of the ‘mind’.  As a child, not a lot was registered in the memory (the memory banks itself were being developed as it is).  But the impact of memory was minimal.  Note that memory was just a piece of hardware that the brain was using to store important information.  Retrieval of data from the memory was done only for some important tasks as the society starts dominating the brain to memorize numbers, alphabets, words, etc. etc.

The primary pivot-point occurred once a piece of software called the ‘Mind’ started developing and executing (in the brain?).   In the initial stages, it had a low-key footprint as the workload demanded of it was quite less.  What is 2+2.  ‘A’ for ____.  Spell “Cat”.  And such things – basically the beginning of societal programming to “fit-in” with everyone else.   The Mind had to use the memory extensively, look for patterns, and store them in easy-to-retrieve locations.   This “looking for patterns” essentially became its primary job and it looked for patterns not just in what is being taught, but also in how people speak, act, behave – and the mind became a pattern maker and behaved according to a pattern.  Well, everybody else is doing ‘something’ – so if “I” do the same thing, “I” should be safe.   The safety aspects also kicked in.

But this is where the problem multiplied exponentially.  Societal programming doesn’t just stop at how to talk to your neighbors and doing basic math and science.  Oh no!   Societal programming continues through middle school, high school, college – even if you need a Ph.D. – society will tell you (more like dictate you) how to get it.  What you should learn, how to learn, how to write, how to speak, how to behave among your peers, teachers, the project business, grants – the whole business.   One might say, well it makes sense.  There should be methods and criteria to be met to be ‘learn’ something or be ‘certified’ as someone or to ‘achieve’ something.  But this programming is way too deep – and unfortunately also becomes universal!  For each and every aspect of our life, we look for the “3 steps to …”, “5 methods to …”, “the best way to …”, etc. etc.   If one wants to achieve something, ‘somebody’ would have done it, and one can ‘follow’ a set of methods/procedures to achieve the same.  It doesn’t matter whether you didn’t attend school, but rather took up the job of a cab driver, security, or whatever (I would still argue that NOT attending school gives one a better chance to be ‘free’, as long as one doesn’t fall into a different routine/pattern/trap).  This has even percolated to the so called ‘creative’ pursuits.  For painting, wood working, sculpting, photography – its always the same pattern that gets repeated.  There are minor replacements here and there, maybe an ‘opposite’ of the norm.  It’s art! It’s beautiful!  Fine!  – but that doesn’t make it creative! 

Sorry, I went on a tangent there!  Perhaps will revisit that topic later.  The point I’m trying to make is that almost everyone uses the mind to get things done.   Of course that includes me.   Mind was the only instrument I had growing up (and even after I was ‘fully’ grown-up).   This over-reliance on the mind meant that the mind was free to use all the available bodily resources.  Brain had a huge amount of storage space that the mind used to store all day-to-day information (of course mostly irrelevant) – and more importantly, it derived ALL kinds of patterns from this information.  How?  It didn’t just store my useless information, it also stored all my neighbors, peers, friends, family data.  It also stored all the information that I read in newspapers, saw on TV, heard on radio – everything.  Storing is still okay – to an extent.  But what also got imprinted was the ‘societal judgement’!!   Society, by default, judges every action, event, decision (basically everything) as good or bad.   I might have been casually reading an article – but I’m also subliminally or in most cases, blatantly – reading the judgement provided the author of that article.  That movie sucked because of reasons a, b and c.  That person gave away all his money – he is such a good person.   That neighbor didn’t buy toys for her children – bad parent.  Mind stores all that information as well – even though I really didn’t intend to.  And as a result, the footprint of the mind gets larger and stronger.  There are to many patterns to store (luckily the huge brain supports the mind here) and many ‘solutions’ to compute.

Even during all this activity – one can argue no damage is done.  It’s just storing information – so what.  My laptop has 1GB of junk data or 100GB of junk data.  As long as there is enough memory for the Operating System and applications to run, there is no problem.  And I agree.  But this over-reliance on the mind rears its ugly head right here.