The Hidden Enemy Part V: Ego & How It Is Fuelled.

Continued from Part IV

As we have already discussed in the previous articles, ego is just the image of yourself on you through the eyes of the people. It mostly depends on what they have made you feel about yourself. You feel good about yourself when the ego (i.e. whatever you think you are) is confirmed by the people around you through their actions or reactions and that makes you feel happy. Similarly when one feels that the self image is getting invalidated through how people behave with oneself, one gets irritated, sad, miserable and unhappy. You feel bad about yourself. We have also seen that ego starts controlling us as soon as we find someone in vicinity and stealthily people become a part of us by creeping  into our thoughts and generating a vice like grip on them. We lose our connection with reality and true nature and get trapped in society assuming it to be the ultimate truth because the most marvellous gift of nature, the human mind has been usurped by people who are now controlled by how others behave with them. The mind is now limited in its performance and the most beautiful endowment of Mother Nature, the human life is now full of miseries. 

The ego once firmly planted in our mind is constantly growing.

The Sages of Ancient India found out that it grows by feeding on attracting attention.

Whether we accept it or not, whether we realise it happening to us or not, we all are always being compelled by our ego to attract attention by doing or saying whatever we are doing or saying. It works in a very subtle manner and most of us do not see it happening within us (although we always see it happening in others by noticing the way they behave).

We all try to attract attention in some way or the other. We all dress up in a certain way, try to talk intelligently, discuss our tastes, do our best to look beautiful and impress it upon others that we care, that we are polite and kind and that we are so much very like those around us in whatever values are held by them.

When no one pays attention to us we tend to feel down and out and empty. The ego becomes starved and hurt. It propels us to act irrationally and we do the stupidest of conceivable acts.

Most people do not even know how intricately this subtle tendency to attract attention is ingrained in them.

The Ego feeds upon gaining social acceptance, on throwing false impressions upon others, on lying, on the compliments offered by others, on criticizing others, on downsizing others, on show off, on lecturing others, on telling others what is right for them and what is wrong, on complaining, on preaching, on finding fault in others, on giving opinion without being asked to etc.

The Sages of Ancient India also found out that the Ego being false is never comfortable with itself.

Our Ego always knows that no matter what we think we are, our self image is incomplete and is flawed and baseless. If you look around yourself you will see that one constantly regrets what one is. At the same time one also always regrets what one is not. In this process, one always tends to impress upon others and also upon oneself that one is different from what one assumes oneself to be.

In other words our Ego is at constant conflict with itself and makes our minds restless and strained, taking away the natural calm that one is born with and which wanes away with the growth of Ego within us. We come in conflict with others and with ourselves.

                            ... Continued into Part VI

The Hidden Enemy Part IV: Self Consciousness & Ego.

CONTINUED FROM PART - III 

Many thinkers have preferred to call it self- consciousness. Self-consciousness is nothing but the cause of ego and soon after it becomes a habit, the ego takes over on one’s psyche.

Self-consciousness is the chain of thoughts that gets triggered when you are not alone. Soon as you are in the company of another person, when there is someone in your vicinity or in your thoughts, you become aware of yourself. You start seeing yourself through the eyes, the action or the words of the other person or through the way the person has responded to you or behaved with you. You now start thinking, whatever you were thinking taking whoever pops up in your mind into account. You now behave and do things taking into account how the person in your vicinity will take on your action.

It happens to everyone and the neuro-process is so rapid that one barely notices it happening within oneself, let alone accept this fact.

Over a lifetime, self-consciousness, which is a process, or a system of processes in hundreds of thousands of cells, becomes a habit and renders one a slave to this habit, without one’s knowing that it is this habit which has reduced the unlimited capacity of human brain. All the thoughts in your mind are, hereafter, either about people and what they think about you or will say about you or about what you did or have to do while taking all the people you think are involved (or even not involved but related to you) into consideration.

Continued rapid self consciousness helps in formation of ego, which may be likened to a neuro-highway; all thoughts and actions now take this path.

Now it is your ego that starts thinking for you with your logical and rational self relegated into inactivity.

Ego is now your master and you are its slave rendering the unlimited potential of human life into a miserable journey full of suffering and pain.

                                                     ... Continued into Part V

And the Man-Booker Prize for 2014 goes to ...

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' ,written about war, death, love and evolving as a man from a war hero, by Richard Flanagan bags the prestigious Man-Booker Prize for 2014.

In the grim conditions of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his past indiscretions. As he uses all effort to protect men under his command from starvation, from cholera and a grim life, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 

Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is described by the 2014 judges as ‘a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it’. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse. Flanagan’s father, who died the day he finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway.

A C Grayling, the philosopher and Chairman, commented that ‘the two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.

How To Be Both by Ali Smith: Book Review

How to be both is a book with two different stories which have been interconnected in an abstract way by the brilliant writer, Ali Smith through a fresco painting and use of excellent literary forms. The book has two versions and it is left on chance as to which version the reader lays his/her hands upon.
The version we are reviewing has a modern day teenager girl, Georgia, in the first part of the book. 
In the very outset, Georgia is struggling emotionally trying to make sense out of her mother's death. Formerly a firm believer in perfection and either/or concept, Georgia drifts into the recent past arguing with her mother when the mother was alive and the present where she lives with her father, depressingly an alcoholic, and a minor brother that she has to tend to when a girl called H comes into her life. 
The other part is a biographical narration by a 17th century renaissance fresco painter, Francesco Del Cossa right from the painter's infantile years of first memories through adolescence till death.
How to be both is a powerful novel that will leave you thinking for days. Nominated for the Man Booker prize for 2014, this is a compelling, fast paced philosophical must read. 
We give it a 9.5 in a scale of 10.

The Hidden Enemy Part III: Irrationality How It Works It's Way.

Continued from part-II

We start this article with an example from a regular daily life.

Suppose you are passing through your neighbourhood and suddenly a couple of stray dogs start barking at you.

What will you do?

You will probably try to scare them off by pelting stones at them or maybe, at best, ignore them.  

How will you react?

You will probably be scared yourself and feel adrenaline getting pumped into your body or you might get irritated. Or maybe you will try to avoid them.

And in any case you will definitely make a mental note of the stray dogs in this part of the town.

Now imagine another scenario. Suppose that you are passing through the same neighbourhood and this time the couple of barking dogs happen to be owned by someone and are not stray dogs.

You will notice that this time your action and reaction will not be the same. Instead of taking the very logical course that you took in the former case, you are more likely to take the issue to your heart and fret and fume about it. You will take the matter to a different level and will end up feeling hurt after hurting the feelings of the dog owner. You will be emotionally bruised.

As you can now see for yourself, in the latter case your ego came to the forefront engulfing all the rational thinking part of you which made you behave in a very illogical way.

If you happen to see a monkey just outside your door, you will be too careful to avoid looking into its eyes and will slowly move out after locking your door without disturbing it. Or you might feign picking up a rock and throw it at it in order to scare it away.

However, if the monkey were owned by your next door neighbour, you will start monkeying around with the person.
This is how ego surfaces and you do not realize that you are under the spell of your ego. Now it is controlling you like a master controls a slave. You have been enslaved.

The ego takes charge in the very moment when one realizes that there is someone around in proximity. The self image that one has of oneself takes precedence immediately. It assumes full control.
Then ensues a period of illogical course of actions and reactions whereby one drags oneself into a spiralling vacuum of despair and anxiety. 
It may be noted that the same thing happens in happy kind of situations too and this is precisely why the sages of ancient India had reiterated that happiness is transient and momentary in nature. It does not last for long. How can it, when it is based on a false concept of you on yourself. 

Through continued meditation and careful analysis over the lost centuries, the sages of ancient world also discovered that when one is not alone, the ego takes over one's psyche through the first thought that pops up in one's mind.
The first thought occurs so rapidly in a fraction of a second that one is hardly even aware of it. It creeps in without one's being aware of it and soon after a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego, which has assumed full control, engaging the person and propelling him into the next moment. Your self image, the ego, is there inside you all the time, albeit dormant, and with the first thought that occurs when someone is around, it takes over.
The foremost point to be noted here is that ego is born with society, it comes to fore only when there is someone around, someone near you or in your thoughts. It also implies that ego disappears when there is no one around you, neither physically nor in thoughts.
The second point is that ego takes control of you through the first thought that flashes in your mind soon as you realize that you are not alone, ie there is someone/are people around you. But this first thought is so short lived that one hardly becomes aware of it.
The third point is that a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego engaging oneself to make it easy for ego to take full control propelling oneself into an irrational continuum.
                                                
                                                         continued into Part IV...