THE MIDAS TOUCH, continued

Once we successfully convert a living person into a dead memory we have opened the Pandora’s Box for ourselves. Firstly this golden memory is chiefly composed of nothing but our fantasies about how a person should be (be it husband, wife, friend, brother, in-laws etc...) and partly of edited reality which we have chosen and handpicked to corroborate our pre-existing ideas about them. Secondly no living person can be frozen and reduced to a bunch of dead memories. We had seen in our discussion on the cosmic laws, the four principle forces of nature CREATION, MAINTENANCE, CONSTANT CHANGE (EVOLUTION) and REJUVENATION (DEATH) are busy unrelentingly changing each and everything in the cosmos from galaxies, stars, rivers, rocks and mountains to trees, animals and humans. So how then is it ever possible for a living and ever changing person to continuously live up to a bunch of dead memories and ideas???
We do not understand this principle fallacy (mistake) of ours and then go about declaring that the other person used us, cheated us etc... It is we ourselves cheating us and nobody else. Please understand if a person is continuously able to live up to our golden memories and ideas about him / her then he/she too is dead and lifeless (not necessarily physically but emotionally and mentally) like the gold statues of the king, since living people will be vibrant and changing. If he / she is able to do that then be very sure that we, like the king Midas, have successfully reduced them to a figment of our fantasy and rendered them lifeless.
Instead of intelligently understanding the universal fact that “CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT THING, NOTHING ELSE CAN REMAIN CONSTANT” we hang on to our golden memories and instead of editing and updating them to the new changes we register “DEVIATIONS”.
Simply put we always cross-refer a person’s present behavior with our golden memory track record about him / her (in case of people whom we dislike it can be called as “stone sculptured memories” but they also function in the same way as the golden memories by not allowing us to see a person afresh in the present moment as he is) then we keep a score. Any behavioral pattern falling out of purview of the expected golden memory pattern is a “DEVIATION”. These deviations can be good or they can be bad.
Now comes the height of cunningness, driven by our greed to obtain and sustain happiness in our lives via the means of the other person we make decorative editions in our golden memory with the new “GOOD DEVIATIONS”, raising the bar of our expectations from the other person further and further higher. But we purposefully fail to do any addition or editing about the “NEGATIVE DEVIATIONS”. Instead we just keep a record of them (negative deviations) in the “THIS IS WRONG, IT SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING LIKE THIS” folder. As time passes by more and more entries are registered into the “this is wrong, it should not be happening like this” folder and when we compare our golden memory with the current records in the “this is wrong, it should not be happening like this” folder we get overwhelmed and now we begin our drama of declaration of being cheated and used...... etc...
So we can clearly see that what we do in the name of love is nothing but fooling ourselves and choking the other person and then putting the blame on each other.

THE MIDAS TOUCH

Again the same mistake “Conversion of a feeling generated in innate intelligence to a mere memory or idea in the format of words and labels of social intelligence”. But there is more to it than just this alone when relationships are concerned.
Remember the story about a king who prays to god for a boon that whatever he touches should turn to gold. Then he turns his entire beautiful garden into lifeless gold and rejoices in the fulfillment of his madness for money. In his excitement to show the miraculous feats he had achieved while his daughter and wife were asleep he rushed to their room. In the feverish excitement and forgetfulness of his newly obtained boon he shook both his wife and daughter to wake them up and in the process with his “MIDAS TOUCH” turned them into gold too. The story goes on to describe the continued suffering of the king because he is unable to eat or even drink since whatever he touches turns to gold...............
Well sadly we too have blessed (rather cursed) ourselves with the “MENTAL MIDAS TOUCH”.
We are always busy converting the present moment into a GOLDEN MEMORY; we are busy creating beautiful archives of our lives to be presented to ourselves and people around us at a later date that is precisely the reason why we are busy clicking away photos at the sites of breathtaking natural beauties and wondrous monuments instead of enjoying the moment itself then and there. This is on a gross physical plane on a more subtle mental level we do a similar thing. Like the king we too are driven by a kind of greed but this greed is a bit different it is the greed for happiness instead of just gold (we want gold too but happiness is an absolute must). So we too are busy en-robing the people around us, people whom we claim to love, into golden memories with are “MENTAL MIDAS TOUCH”.
So what happens is that we pick and choose the finest moments we had had with that person (whom we claim to love) edit and further refine those moments to suit our fantasy about the ideal person/partner by omitting the events that do not conform to our liking and exaggerating those that we cherish and freeze that living person in a GOLDEN IDEA OR MEMORY about him. A living person is reduced to a dead memory. And from here begin the endless fallacies.
Please understand that the GOLDEN MEMORY drafted about the other person is driven by our own greed to obtain and sustain happiness in our lives via his/her means and this so called golden memory is mostly our own fantasy about the person and only partly (if at all) reality imposed on him/her by us.
This is an act of selfishness driven by the greed of attaining and sustaining happiness for our own selves. But one of utter foolishness too, like the king whose greed for gold leaves him with nothing but suffering and misery within himself and gold on the outside we too are left with beautiful ideas and memories within our head and starkly contradictory events of reality on the outside. We are left feeling cheated, used and miserable. But the entire mistake like the king is ours..................

THE INTRICATE MISTAKE, in relationships

So what exactly was the intricate mistake in all these situations?
“Conversion of a feeling generated in innate intelligence to a mere memory or idea in the format of words and labels of social intelligence”.
So what’s wrong with that? And what has it got to do with relationships?
Susan meets Craig for the first time and somewhere amidst there exciting conversation there occurs one eye contact and she is swept off her feet, a wonderful experience dawns upon her being!!!!!!
Moments later she snaps out of her personal bliss zone and returns to the normalcy of the mundane reality. Now her mind (social intelligence) has kicked into action “this is it......... this is LOVE” “this is what you have been looking for all your life!!!!!!!!” Excitement grips her. This is an Excitement of being in love mixed with the excitement of uncertainty. She is unable to be at rest, she is constantly stormed by “does he love me too?” or “does he not”. All is this is very unlike the soothing and joyous experience she had had upon her first meeting but it is exciting and unrelenting none the less. Day in and day out she figures out ingenious new ways to strike a conversation with Craig and amidst the conversation she is busy scrutinising each and every word and gesture of his to find a clue to the two bothersome duo in her mind “does he love me too?” or “does he not”. As days pass by Craig seems to be resigning into Susan’s persistence and not exactly on a particular day or date but somewhere with indistinct boundaries of date and time they both slowly realize a mutual liking exists between the two. So now Susan gets a sort of confirmation (an indirect one through extrapolation of Craig’s behaviour and by reading between the lines) that Craig also likes her and Craig on the other hand finds a number of characteristics of Susan very affable. So he too is declaring this phenomenon as LOVE to himself.
Now the state of affairs is quiet a pleasing one, the tormenting excitement of “does he love me too?” or “does he not” has been replaced by sense of a more relaxed longing to meet Craig often ,within Susan, and Craig’s doubts and dilemmas about “is she the one?” have given way to “there cannot be any one better”. The eagerly awaited rendezvous, the excitement of meeting each other, stealing glances, the endless exchange of innumerable words, time just evaporating away in each other’s company............... Oh this is bliss..........
And finally it happens; Craig proposes and does so with a genuine style and flair. Susan, who of course has been expecting and eagerly awaiting for this to happen at some point in time, is touched deeply emotionally by his gesture and accepts the proposal amidst the overwhelming tears of joy. They get married and lived happily ever after............????
Yes they do get married and they did live with each other, only for a while though. Slowly the excitement of meeting and being in each other’s company has vanished into thin air without a warning. As days progress to months something drastically different starts to occur , instead of enjoying each other’s company they start enjoying television programmes better and instead of going out with each other they now go out with their friends. As the mounting months give way to the year something dramatically different has started taking place, Susan finds a number of Craig’s habits as extremely repulsive and Craig feels that Susan is intolerably nagging and complaining continuously. The same time which used to fly away and vanish in each other’s presence now seems to have come to a standstill. Everyday is the same heavy drag of nagging, arguing, complaining and then repeating the same cycle afresh the next day with seemingly new agendas.
And then the unthinkable, yet ironically, inevitable happens. They break up.... why???
Because Susan is convinced that Craig is cheating her based on certain circumstantial and situational extrapolations she vehemently pours her wrath on him one night not willing to listen to or give the chance for any explanation. Interestingly Craig is not bothered to give any (explanation) either. He has no reason or interest now to hang on to Susan any further. What follows are nothing but bitter law suits and ugly mudslinging allegations sessions on the days of court hearing.
So what went wrong? And where did it go wrong?

THE RADICAL INSIGHT, the intricate mistake explained

So we do understand that we have been made to chase a “mirage of lasting happiness” until now. There are brief moments of pleasure in life but they are hugely interspersed with prolonged spells of boredom, anxiety, fear of failure and greed of greater success. In essence it’s an unfair deal, there is too much of investment in the form of actual effort, anxiety about the correctness and quality of effort, fear of failure to attain the requisite goal and occasional “run amok” system overrides in the form of greed for greater success completely capsizing our entire system just to get the return in the form of the aimed for goal and momentary whiff of pleasure. But all of this could be changed very easily if we were to agree upon single statement.
“HAPPINESS LIES WITHIN US AND NOT OUTSIDE OF US”.
“Oh come on, I have been hearing that lame statement all my life its absolutely meaningless”, “even if it had a meaning it does not apply to me, I am a person engaged neck deep in daily activities, I have bills to pay, I have a job to do, a promotion to achieve.......... how does it apply to me anyways?”. The mind (social intelligence) has entered its denial and rejection mode even before getting started. (There is a big reason behind this too, as to why our mind is responding in such a cynical fashion to this simple truth, we shall see that too, a bit later though).
Let us analyze this statement in reference to the “sunset view point”, what happened there?
The mind or the social intelligence drops for a while upon witnessing the magnificence and beauty of the sunset at the viewpoint in that perfectly picturesque setting due to two reasons, because it is an entirely new (first time) experience and there is no previous memory label available for the situation and hence it has to be lived “as it is”, secondly natural beauty and magnificence has a capability to override our social intelligence and directly connect with our innate intelligence (if we remain aware and cooperative).
So upon the first visit the social intelligence (that works exquisitely through the past in the form of experience, memory and labels) is dumbfounded by this entirely new experience, secondly the magnificence and grandeur of the natural beauty is easily able to override an already dumbfounded social intelligence and push us into our innate intelligence easily. In essence we live the experience through our innate intelligence and hence it is felt as such an intense and wonderful experience. But as we come to the view point again and again the intensity and the overall quality of our experience keeps declining. The natural beauty and magnificence has not changed, the natural experience is still the same BUT the “ONE WHO EXPERIENCES” has changed.
Now our social intelligence has already created a label for the place as “good”, it has the full backup of memory of past experience, it comes to the view point every time and updates itself with all the useless details as to “how many minutes it takes for complete sunset to occur”, “how many people generally come to witness the sunset”, “how many food stalls are there in and around the place” etc etc....... the endless list of useless facts and figures. So every time we come back to the view point the mind or the social intelligence becomes stronger and stronger about the place. So now not only does it NOT get dumbfounded immediately upon witnessing the picturesque panorama it also RESISTS the attempts of override by natural beauty to directly connect with our innate intelligence. And hence slowly keeps diluting our experience, until it declares the sunset view point as FAMILIAR. That is the death blow, since as soon as anything is declared FAMILIAR by social intelligence it becomes its “sovereign domain” and no interference of innate intelligence in it would be allowed,this is a part of “LABELED AND LEFT OUT” phenomenon (will be dealt with later in detail). Hence as soon as the social intelligence or the mind becomes familiar with a situation, place or person (or declares a situation or person familiar) there will be no room for innate intelligence there. So the same sunset view point which when lived through (although without our understanding of the phenomenon) the innate intelligence was such a splendidly profound experience at the first visit is now reduced to a boring drag of WAITING for the sun to quickly sink in and disappear within a few subsequent visits.
This is precisely the reason why we all love SURPRISES, since there are no memories for that situation and hence social intelligence gets is dumbfounded for those moments and hence lets us easily slip into innate intelligence for a few moments which seem to be so joyous and so pleasurable!!!!
Because “HAPPINESS LIES WITHIN US AND NOT OUTSIDE OF US”.

THE INTRICATE MISTAKE 2, continued

So what exactly happened at the sunset view point? And how does a similar phenomenon occur in every aspect of our lives including relationships?
Well............ the phenomenon that happened at the sunset view point is called “LABELED AND LEFT OUT”. So what is this “labeled and left out” phenomenon?
To understand this phenomenon we need to make a revolutionary shift in our basic understanding of life as a whole itself!!!!!!!!!!!!
All are lives we have been endlessly deluded with the idea that happiness lies somewhere outside of us. It is there in achieving great marks/grades in the exams, it is there in going to great universities and pursuing the fanciest of courses, it is there in having the most beautiful/handsome girl/boy as your girlfriend/boyfriend, it is there in having a “cool” group of friends to hang out with, it is there in getting a job with the fattest pay check, it is there in having a perfect man/woman as your husband/wife ...........................the list is endless and it does not stop even at the funeral pyre or the burial ground because there are pre-defined criterion of a good death and how to attain a perfect after life too!!!!!!!!!!
So all our lives we just keep striving helplessly and obviously without a choice to attain all these pre-determined criterion's of a “GOOD LIFE” without even reflecting even once over its reality. Each one of us has surely crossed some of the above mentioned marks, or fulfilled the pre-determined criterion's, of a “GOOD LIFE”. Let us at first take a good, honest, a critically analytical and a totally unbiased look at own lives. Are we living the promised “GOOD LIFE”?
Yes of course there have been moments of celebration upon attaining the gold medal, the promotion, the best job offer, the perfect life partner etc...... But at what price?
364 days were spent with the waxing and waning botheration about the 365th day of result announcement, 364 days were spent with a constant irritation and worry about the impending promotion on the 365th day, 364 days were spent with the crest and trough of faith and doubt about the great job offer etc.........our entire lives were reduced to just one background thought of a constant scuffle between two thoughts “will it happen?” (Our dream coming true) or “will it not”. If it did (that is we did succeed in attaining what we wanted to) then how long did the exhilaration last? A week? A month? A month is probably too much to ask for!!!!! As soon as we attained one landmark on our laid out road to “GOOD LIFE” our mind was already off to the other landmark. Sometimes it wasn’t even there to celebrate the achievement. No sooner did we get our gold medal for graduation and the mind was already brooding over great jobs and hefty pay checks it wasn’t even there at the awards ceremony!!!
So we clearly see that we are running after a “mirage of lasting happiness” that only goes further and further away (in time, as in the future, and in newer achievements) from us the more we chase or try to come near it.

THE INTRICATE MISTAKE 1

Suppose we go to a beautiful hill station with the perfect environment as we would like to. We happened to enjoy a marvelous sunset over there. As we witness the grandeur and magnificence of nature suddenly our inner chatter of unceasing words within our social intelligence ceases and we, almost by accident, are pushed into our deeper self (the innate intelligence) a genuine stir of feelings occurs in our innate intelligence as we connect with the nature around us, an “instantaneous awareness of the present moment as it happens”. By the time the sunset is over and we are ready to head back we have already converted our feelings into an experience, a gray (transition) zone between innate and social intelligence, by LABELING it as good (a good experience).if at this moment we remain silent and contained within ourselves we would be able to relive the experience and continue to experience similar, if not the same, joy we were experiencing during the actual event (sunset). But by the time we reach home (or the holiday resort) we have already transferred the whole incident from our innate intelligence to our social intelligence as a memory in the format of words “oh it was such a nice experience at the view point, the sunset between the hills, chirping of birds, the pleasant breeze etc......” etc... But this word document of memory has the attachment of experience tagged along with it. So every time we hear or think (words, word document) of that sunset view point automatically the linked attachment of experience also opens up in our system, without our knowledge of course, and fills our system up with that pleasant experience we had had. And here begins the fundamental error. Now we start believing that going to that view point will give us pleasure. We start visiting the view point often, but with every passing visit the intensity of our pleasurable experience seems to be reducing and yet we do come back with those same words “oh it was such a nice experience at the view point, the sunset between the hills, chirping of birds, the pleasant breeze etc......” reeling in our heads. Though we keep repeating these same words, just a layer underneath them (words) we are acutely aware of the fact that it does not feel the same, the intensity, the joy, the contentment all of it seems to be fading away. By now the visit to the view point has become more of a ritual, it is a drag and no joy or pleasant experience emerges out of it. Slowly we start feeling that the place is not that great after all, we don’t just stop at that we revisit our memory files and make corrections even there. Reducing or even falsifying the intensity of previous experiences, thus creating conflicts and contradictions within ourselves.
Well.... what just happened with the view point happens with almost everything in our life and sadly that everything includes our relationships too.

THE INSUFFICIENCY part 2

So where are we going with this discussion? what do we want to bring to light or highlight with all these examples???
“Words or languages are good at conveying a broad overview of things and facts (as in numbers, figures etc...) but they fail miserably when it comes to conveying, or replicating in the minds of others, minute and precise details of PEOPLE, SITUATIONS and EXPERIENCES”.
This is what we want to highlight, the insufficiency of the language to objectively and precisely convey details in the THREE most important domains of our lives that are “PEOPLE, SITUATIONS and EXPERIENCES”. We saw very clearly in the previous example how the discussion over Mr. Albert (people) generated a myriad variety of responses due to the different environments in which they had met (situations) leading to very distinctively different experiences. The example of the Boxer breed dog highlights the fact that no matter how much ever amount of factual data is pumped into the information provided the responses generated in each and every mind are markedly different and is based on their experiences in life.
EXPERIENCE is very closely related to feelings; in fact no experience whatsoever is possible without the involvement of one or the other faculty of feeling. A very subtle understanding exists at this juncture. An experience is generated, or takes birth, beyond the social intelligence and hence is beyond language or words. It (experience) is generated via media feelings. Feelings as we would remember are defined as “an INSTANTANEOUS AWARENESS generated within our system either in response to an outer world stimulus or situation or instantaneous awareness of our inner self WITHOUT the involvement of words or language”. During the moments of its occurrence there is only feeling alone an instantaneous awareness that’s all. After the passage of the moment the recollection of what had happened, the reminiscence of the past moment and the instantaneous awareness generated by it is what we call as an EXPERIENCE. So in essence an experience is a MEMORY of a feeling.
Memory as we would remember is defined as “an “INNER WORLD REPLICA” of an outer world incident”. This is very subtle and demands keen attention. Feelings generate experience which creates a memory. So in essence something beyond words or language happens within us in our innate intelligence (feelings), which remains in a gray zone between innate and social intelligence immediately after the passing of the incident and the feeling. Later in time all these events (feelings and experiences) which occurred in the innate intelligence get transferred and recorded for the purpose of archiving and ease of retrieval (since we mostly operate from social and rarely or only accidentally from innate intelligence) into the social intelligence in the form of words. And this is that critical juncture of a very fine understanding that when an event beyond words and language gets recorded in the form of words and language discrepancies are bound to occur. This is one of the foundation stones of all our confusions, mistakes and miseries