Why do we act the way we do?

 It is said that any action we take in life has only one of four reasons, at least a major one. 

The action may be taken for enhancing a feeling of security - be it monetary, power of even emotional security. In scriptures, this is called artha.

Or the action may be driven by a need for entertainment - sensual or intellectual. This is also called kama.

Or the action may come from a space of willingness to do the right thing, which we believe is benevolent. The path followed is then one of dharma.

Or it may be an action that arises out of a need not to be bound down, to be free - from tension, from anxiety, or from a general sense of incompleteness. This is a need for moksha. 

The actions we take can be at a physical level, an emotional level or at an intellectual level.

Let us take a look at some examples.

Case study: Future Body Inc - the dismembering plant

Imagine a world where mining is over. All metals are available only as scrap. New cars are assembled (even rockets are assembled) obtaining components from, say, rejected cars. Like assembly plants, there are now numerous dismembering plants. I, William Livergall, am a Factory Manager in charge of one of them, an employee of Future Body Inc.

Like in an assembly plant, here the rejected products - cars, machineries, metal utility items - move steadily along rails at a predetermined speed. Workers in their stations take apart designated components. These components are shipped to other assembly plants. In our case it is to another Hightech vehicle assembly plant of ours, to which we are the feeder plant.

As a manager, my goals are to ensure steady procurement, smooth movement, adequate dismembering teams (some of whom cut/unscrew, some lubricate and some clean before despatch) and maximum conversion. Items remaining on the rails at the end should ideally be totally useless. Components shipped to the Hightech facility should be ready to use.

The biggest challenge that compromises process quality, is the Procurement Manager, John Sugarspice. His procurement goals seem to be based on colour of item, sound of metal, something novel, something bought in mammoth quantities because it is available cheap - in short quite at variance from my line goals. Consequently, there are a lot of unusable/unused components that are scrapped again in the end. Or the item has many rusty parts that make them difficult to dismember and clean. Or the line becomes overloaded - I sometimes have to load two cars in the slot meant for one - much to the disgust of my crew members, who either have to leave much of it untouched, or they have to dismember bigger chunks rather than individual components. These chunks, when shipped to the Hightech facility, lies there unused, straining their storage facility, to be broken down and utilised only if they run out of components. 

Personally, I prefer loading simpler assemblies because they can be dismembered faster. But John prefers complex assemblies like small cars,  enamored by their earlier road performance and looks.

My line needs maintenance downtime. Online maintenance has its limits and I prefer to hold back loading fresh items in order to repair the rails and give the teams some breathing space. But our great Mr Sugarspice still quietly loads the line and there we go again, limping along.

Overall, line health suffers because of the stupid Procurement Manager.

I have taken up the matter with our CEO, David Frontlobe, again and again and although he agrees in principle, somehow he turns out helpless in front of the procurement zeal of our dear John. However, I noticed that once our CEO turned 60, he started paying more attention to me rather than to John. Hope he had done it earlier.

My friends, our digestive system is a complex piece of work. It knows what needs to go in to convert to a healthy body. So please do not let the tongue rule your brain. Healthy food habits need to start young.

Meditation muscles

A person went to the gym for body building. The instructor asked him whether he had any physical problems. He said, not much, just some arthritis, a bit of asthma, ulcers and spondilosis. But he wanted to do weight training. The instructor told him, first cure your ills, make your body suitable for weight training and then come back. 

Meditation is body building for the mind. We suffer from rigid attitudes, we start wheezing with anger at any provocation, our mind is full of bleeding ulcers from prejudices, and we are pains in the neck personified. Yet we think we can just plop down onto the ground, sit cross legged and experience a serene mind? 

Read up Patanjali's Yogasutra, O aspirers to meditation, and first makes your mind fit to sit. Yama and Niyama are perhaps the toughest stages to cross.

Master dialogues

Satyajit Ray was once asked : "Why do your films have less dialogue than most other film makers?"

He answered : "Every time I have to use words to explain a scene, a situation or an emotion, I feel I have failed as a director."

So is it in life. 

How many times have we used words and wished later that we had not? If we have to use words to explain our emotion, then our love has not spoken till now. If we have to use words to convey our happiness, then our smile has not spoken till now. If we have to use words to give an instruction every time, then our living philosophy has not spoken till now. 

Let us use words - only if it is better than silence.

The two purposes of action

We act throughout our lives. If we are the selfish type, we act for ourselves. If we are the generous type, we act for the upliftment others. In either case, we believe that the purpose of action is for benefitting somebody or the other.

I have a slightly different take on this. It does not really matter what we do to the world. Action actually has two other purposes, which sometimes we miss altogether.

The first purpose is to hold up in front of our faces what is the mechanism of our mind, our decision points, our value systems. Since most of our actions are reactions, they reflect quite accurately our inner workings, provided we are humble enough to look inside and see them without defensiveness. This needs awareness of course. We should be able to look at our action and ask: Now what made me act like that?

Having done this, we need to recognise the second purpose of action, that is to modify or improve our inner working to make it more refined, benevolent, driven by good values and less compulsive. We do this through the deliberate actions of introspection, meditation, selfless charity and worship.

These two are the main purposes of action. What we really do to the world outside is relatively unimportant. As our mind becomes more evolved, our need for action itself reduces. Sages who do "nothing" have probably crossed the need for action. On the other hand, an unrefined mind cannot afford to be sitting without action, because then it would have stopped looking at the mirror and halted its own evolution.

We all need to be in action, for our own sake. What benefit we do to the world is incidental.

In pursuit of happiness

Can we ever reach good health? No we cannot, because health is our natural state. To be healthy, all we need to do is to keep away disease from happening and cure ir if it ever happens. Disease is a distortion of health.

Can we achieve happiness? Again we cannot, because happines is absence of unhappiness. Instead of trying to learn how to be happy, we need to learn how to avoid unhappiness from enveloping us and how to get out of its shadows if it does.

Gold Rush

Suppose I was on a riverbed in California in the 19th century, walking amongst the pebbles looking for gold nuggets. It's evening and the light is failing, but I have to carry on and maximise my riches. What would I do? Pick up pebble by pebble and examine them before throwing them back again, right?

Life is like that riverbed. Opportunities will seem to come up all the time, inviting our action or involvement, but we ignore most of them, especially if we are the low-energy type, saying "Oh, I will wait till I can see the glittery one, the gold nugget. That will be the right one for me. "But, really, how do we know it is not a gold nugget without picking it up, without addressing the opportunity to some extent before rejecting it?

It seems we choose our life path when we are born, having set out to experience some particular events for sure during this lifetime, mostly for self-growth (Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield talks about this with a fair bit of passion). Opportunities for the same, the gold nuggets, keep popping up, but are overwhelmed by the pebbles of ordinary living. That is why it is important that we taste as many opportunities as possible, whether they seem relevent or not, so that the gold nugget does not escape our scrutiny.

We need to get rich quick, right?

Being rich is a mug's game

We are all trained to become rich, to own more and more things, which, apart from status, will give us right of exclusive use of a service that the property represents.

But I tell you, it is a mug's game. Why not let someone else own the goods but let them be ever ready to provide the service to you.

How many mansions can you own? But if you are a person whose presence in a house makes the house-owner feel blessed, imagine how many mansions across the world you can live in.

That is how, I feel, spiritual leaders are far beyond personal wealth. They need not own a car, because hundreds of cars are at their disposal for their local travel.  They need not plan their next meal, because werever they are at meal time, there will be many who are keen to have them share their food.

Personal richness is very limiting. When the world opens its arms to you, everything becomes available without owning anything.

Muscles for the mind

 

We all are keen to do meditation. But is it that simple? This is what I read.

A person went to the gym for body building. The instructor asked him whether he had any physical problems. He said, not much, just some arthritis, a bit of asthma, ulcers and spondilosis. But he wanted to do weight training. The instructor told him, first cure your ills, make your body suitable for weight training and then come back.

Meditation is body building for the mind. We suffer from rigid attitudes, we start wheezing with anger at any provocation, our mind is full of bleeding ulcers from prejudices, and we are pains in the neck personified. Yet we think we can just plop down onto the ground, sit cross legged and experience a serene mind?

Read up Patanjali's Yogasutra, O aspirers to meditation, and first makes your mind fit to sit. Yama and Niyama are perhaps the toughest stages to cross.

The fertile field of uncertainty

In many discussions, I have heard concepts rejected, saying it is not scientific. Something being "scientific" seems to be the ultimate approval stamp on a phenomenon, that makes it worthy of discussion. 

Yet, what is a scientific phenomenon? One that has gone through the steps of hypothesis, data, formulation, validation and subsequently used for prediction. If it is not possible to carry out these steps, the phenomenon is not a scientific one. But I feel that putting a scientific framework in place is itself a marginal activity, because each of these steps are limited in scope.

Hypothesis is limited by human imagination.

Data is limited by instrumentation.

Formulation is limited by intelligence.

Validation is limited by choice of field.

Prediction is limited by boundary conditions.

As we filter out one phenomenon after another, we are left with a scant sample that can stand the test of this intellectual game. Yet when we are faced with any uncertain process, we call it unscientific and be done with it.

In that sense, Hiesenberg was perhaps the biggest iconoclast, because he knocked the validity of observation out of the window when he said that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be determined at the same time. This makes space itself uncertain. Holding the hand of Hiesenberg, scientists are now taking a few steps out of their small cottages of certainity and exploring the fertile fields of the uncertain.

After all, experience is a far stronger determinant of truth than experiment.

The preloaded paintbrush

Someone had said: Words are the biggest impediment to communication.

Words started out as convenience. Instead of saying a full sentence, saying one word would suffice. That word comes preloaded with a meaning.

Yet that preloading is a problem too. If I want to paint in pink and my brush is preloaded with green, the pink colouring gets distorted. If I say "kill" in the sense of "finalise" (an idea, say) and in the listener's mind "kill" means "terminate", that preloading corrupts the meaning I am trying to communicate. That is why, when we want to be abundantly clear, we need to use simpler and simpler words, words that are almost unitary in their application.

But even in this process of simplification sometimes we reach a dead end, where there is not a single word available that is capable of conveying what I want to convey right now, without any preloading whatever. Finding a word without any preloading is difficult because, after all, preloading IS the purpose of wordification. 

Sometimes when I look at a sky laden with monsoon clouds with white egrets flying across, that feeling is... indescribable. Words fail. When words fail, we succeed. We succeed in silently touching a level of thinking and feeling that is super-communication. We are silent not because we do not know words but because all the preloaded words that we know are insufficient to express this sensation. 

Then it is time to drop the brush and become the paint.

Sin and sinfulness

There is a great difference between sin and sinfulness, and we tend to equate the two.

When I say "I have sinned", I mean that I have been party to a physical event where I hold doership as an actor. 

Sinfulness is not this act itself, but the feeling that flows on inside us, of regret or guilt, and colours our present day image of ourselves with a dark brush.

We cannot undo the original sin, if we choose to call it that. What we can do is to remove the tinge of sinfulness from our memory of the sin, so that we are whole and pristine again, free to deal with life with our fullest energy.

Sometimes an act helps to drop this feeling of sinfulness. It may be a confession, or a reparation, or even a ceremonial bath. The memory then no longer haunts us but just remains as a reminder of a path not to be taken again.

A champion's blister

When in college, I was a champion carrom player. But every year, before the contest season began, I had to go through a minor ordeal.

When I would start playing after a longish gap, the skin on my thumb at the contact point would start to peel and then to blister, which would burst and again re-form. Only when a hard callus formed at that point on my thumb would my aim suddenly improve...and then whatever I hit would zip towards the pockets.

This process taught me two life lessons. The first - and more obvious one - was that we all have to go through a preparation process of hardship and pain before we can become successful at whtever goal we plan to pursue.

However, the second lesson is less obvious. This callus-forming process used to take around a month, so I had to, strategically, start playing through this rough patch more than a month before the competition. If I started playing straightaway at the competitive matches, I would be nowhere, knocked out in the first couple of rounds itself. 

Similarly, for us, mentally, this process of toughening up has to start far before we hit adult life and take on responsibilities and serious challenges - the championship game, so to speak. We often give our children a pretty easy time when they are growing up, thinking that anyway they have to be burdened with responsibilities soon, so let them play around now. However, we would be doing them a great service if we allowed some scrapes, some blisters to form while growing up, so that when they play the first serious match, their skin is callused and their aim is true. Otherwise, before they know what hit them, they would have missed the first job offer, lost the first life partner, messed up a few friendships, mishandled the first sales team...and in general perhaps got diverted to a life by default instead of a life by choice, just because they did not know how to handle themselves, how to aim true.

For those of us who still have children who are growing up, let us not protect them like oysters. They will develop a shell, but will never grow a spine.

Mental Gemba - Intuitive decision making

Japanese manufacturing follows a review system called Gemba, which is "reviewing at site", not in a conference room. This gives higher access to local information, involves more people and puts participants more in the mood of the subject.

In our day to day decision-making, we mostly do it in the conference room, that is our concious mind. If we need some extra information, we send a peon to the warehouse, the immense store of our concious and unconscious memory, to pull out whatever is relevant. So what does this ego-based peon do? He pulls out the data most near the door (most recent) and he pulls out those that are most lit up (most emotionally charged) and runs back with it. 

I try to do some Gemba here. I try to immerse in the concious and unconscious memory without thinking and wait for the relevant memories to gather around, balance out subliminally and give me a solution. In the deepest sense, this is a meditative solution. In a slightly smaller sense, it is an intuitive solution. 

However, this Gemba solution can come through only by non-judgemental immersion in the quiet depth of our mind, putting ready made and emotional judgements aside. The final recommendations of "this feels right" is the one to go with.

The queue starts here

"Hum jahan khade hote hain, line wohin se shuru hoti hai" was a hit dialogue from the Amitabh-starrer Kaalia, a gob-stopper that had many a wannabe teenage hero turning up his collar and squinting at his pals while shooting off this ego-laden line.

This dialogue is meant to convey - hey I am strong, I am independent, I am a trend-setter, I am a natural leader, I am willing to stand against the world, I follow my own rules, I am the man to follow.

To me, it means something else. To me, it means that since I and my senses are the nodal point of all experience, the presence of my physical body is also the kingpin of my state of enjoyment. Instead of wishing that I am somewhere else, eg in Switzerland, for my enjoyment of life to peak, it is better to gather enjoyment in my arms wherever my physical body happens to be in. If we are in a nice place and happiness flows triggered by something outside, fine. Else we have to up the game where happiness flows from inside to out anyways.

Hum jahan khade hote hain, happiness ka line wohin se shuru hona chahiye.

Won't power

There is a convention in some Indian rituals where we have to promise to forgo some edible thing for a period of time, if not forever. Some of us mention some weird food we never eat anyway, so that this promise is not an inconvenience.

Why is this convention there at all? Like many rituals, this particular action is also linked to betterment of life and character - in this case, development of willpower. There are two types of actions where willpower can be exercised and developed. One is the I WILL type, where we become determined to do something, whatever the odds; and the other is the I WON'T type, where we decide to forgo some favourite action. In both, an exertion of will is required, but in the first one, the universe also has to co-operate to a certain degree, which makes execution more complicated. If I say, I WILL go to Bangalore, it can become possible only if trains and flights are running, if I have money, if my wife allows and so on. However, if I say I WON'T go to Bangalore, it is only my own attraction for Bangalore that I have to fight.

That is why, in rituals, the easier option is given, to forgo some favourite thing, and to develop will power in the process. This is the practice of tapah.

Suppose I have mentioned some weird fruit that I will forgo, knowing full well that I will not undergo any hardship at all. The universe being the clever and kind being that it is, will make sure that an occasion pops up where that fruit comes in front of me with almost no option of refusing, maybe mixed with another favourite food, or without any other option in a situation of hunger, so that I am forced to honour my tapah.

Deliberate tapah is a habit breaker, a will-strengthener and leads to a freer mind.

The Karmic software

When we sit down to play a computer game, say PubG, we know very well the program is nothing but miles and miles of code. The logic path being traveled by the player is being depicted in space and time on the computer screen.

But tell me, before we start playing we know that the program contains this space and time, right? Are they real, or do they exist as a potential?

The Karmic program is shimmering all around us, already written in all possibilities, and we trace decision-based-paths that become real for us. Whatever could happen, whenever it could have happened, exists as a potential already. As we live the moment, our chosen paths become reality to us.

Or it could be that all possibilities are not written out in the Karmic program. Imagine PubG written as a condition-fulfilling AI that keeps writing out the next step of the program based on the set of decisions taken by all the players every moment. Saves storage, right? The past program can be wiped out, the future program yet to be written, so that the program itself reduces to a few lines of rolling code defining the reality of the consequences of the current action. Logic paths reduce. For all we know, our karmic program may be working that way too.

In either case, existence seems like a manifestation of program outcomes with space and time being manufactured constructs of the same program. Nothing is real except the decisions being taken by the players at the particular moment.

Who is looking through me?

For many many years, on many occasions, I would suddenly stop and ask myself, "Who is this person who is looking through me?" Someone is. Why were my eyes chosen by him? Why am I the person who is the funnel of existence?

I suddenly realised, like a book slowly flipping over with a thud, that I was asking the wrong question. I should have asked, "Why am I looking through this body?" The I-ness is with the experiencer, the liquid flowing through, not the body-mind funnel. The funnel then loses importance, becomes incidental, inconsequential, by the way. Consciousness starts glowing beyond the experience.

Novak's T shirt

I saw Djockovitch take off his shirt, when he won Wimbledon yesterday, and throw it to someone in the crowd. It was a sweaty piece of cloth, but had great value since Novak had worn it. 

What about us? Do we feel an increase in our own value when we are associated with some particular thing or action, like wearing a brand, visiting a place, occupying a position or knowing certain people? Or do we lend value to something else when we are associated with it? Like do people want us to be part of a team for our own sake, or member of a board because it increases the worth of the board? Do people want us at a gathering in whatever manner or time we may choose to come, since we are worth it? Do we glorify a seat or does the seat the glorify us?

Like Novak, let our shirt increase in value because we have worn it. Not the other way around. Then we can claim to be a person of worth.

The Mario gameplan

Just as computer games started with Pacman, video games probably started with Mario. I am sure many of us were addicted to the little man racing through the levels, jumping over obstacles, holding on to his limited lives and gathering gold nuggets along the way.

Initially, I would be keen just to somehow complete the level. That would be my sole goal. But gradually I started developing my skills at gathering all the nuggets on the way; that became the bigger game than just completing the level. In fact, the bigger the obstacle, the more were the nuggets hanging just beyond reach and I would keep hovering around till I collected all of them.

In life also we initially lock on to the level-completion goals - a paying job, a saving target, a bungalow, certain places to visit. We tend to somehow jump over obstacles and proceed. But I think that  the maximum nuggets of learning and self-growth hang above those difficult situations. We are the losers if we do not recognise this and steel ourselves to hover at the difficult spot, maximising all that is to be learnt from it, about the world outside as well as about us inside. Those are the nuggets that we will  carry beyond the level.

Maximise Mario. Life is a game after all.