The Hidden Enemy Part I: Why we tend to be irrational.

Scientists of cognitive psychology have time and again wondered at the irrational nature of humans, especially when it comes to taking decisions. Even the most brilliant top brain is not free from this flaw and will tend to be irrational when it comes to taking a real life decision, or wayward while interacting with people in his routine activities involving even the most insignificant things of everyday life.

A lot of effort is being made to understand this human flaw in the West but no concrete or convincing explanation is forthcoming. The brain chemistry too has been mapped but the mystery of illogical action continues to elude one and all alike.

Sages in the Ancient India too were intrigued by this inexplicable flaw. By constant observation over centuries and meditating on their findings they discovered that it is not a human flaw by default. They found that the fault lies in the aham or ahankaar i.e. ego that gets engrossed in the Human psyche as one grows up.

But over the tens of dozens of centuries, the meaning of these words changed and various definitions of the word 'ego' surfaced, the result being that the findings of the sages of Ancient India got lost.

Their findings were as simple as their living but the discoveries have tremendous possibility for the whole human race to live a complete life without miseries.

They found out that a newly born child is equipped with enough endowments to live a life in its entirety. 
As the child grows, she sees the world around her and feels the world with the five senses bestowed upon it by the Mother Nature.

The child can see everything and an image of the properties of everything around it gets formed in her mind in the form of knowledge or logic which she would use to her advantage by connecting these logics. That far the child is rational and would stick to logic and will do everything exactly the way she had planned to do it and react to the result in the most mature way. Life will remain simple, disciplined and fulfilled.

The sages figured out that the real problem was in that the child could see and feel everything but herself. Not being able to see herself she is not able to understand as to what exactly she is. As the child grows, she becomes  aware of people around her and what they think about her. The child sees herself through the impression reflected by the people around her, mostly based on how they treat her. 
When she is appreciated, loved, encouraged, confirmed etc she feels good about herself and a self image is formed inside her mind in which she thinks she is good, brilliant, efficient, strong, fearless etc. When she is rejected, refuted or abused she feels bad about herself and a self image is formed inside her mind in which she thinks she is worthless, weak, dull, clumsy, fearful etc.

As she goes about the worldly activities and moves around in the society which is ever increasing in size, she meets different type of people in different circumstances, each person casting in her a good self image or a poor self image.

By and by a composite self image is formed in her which consists of two broadly classified self images. One is the good self image which makes her think of herself as possessing the ability in achieving things, having good looks, deserving respect etc and this self image makes her happy.  Likewise the other image is a poor self image which makes her feel sad. The problem now lies in the degree of goodness or badness of the images, of which she has no idea and therefore she keeps on testing the degree of goodness and/or badness about her through the reaction of people towards her and their opinions of her.

Eventually, she starts to think of herself as the composite image that has taken over her real self, The real self is now clouded and lost for ever. The false image now guides her.
This false composite image is called aham or ahankar or ego. 

She now goes about her adult life  and lives with two images simultaneously. Every time she thinks that her good self image is confirmed she feels happy and whenever she thinks that her poor self image is being validated, she feels miserable. In either case she has become a slave to her ego and tends to act and behave irrationally to satisfy her ego.

Full of futile and troubled preoccupation, her life becomes miserable. 

Click here for Part-II of this article.