Archis's Blog

August 21, 2009

Are people the worst of our addictions?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:43 am

Addictions in the classical sense are substances or behaviours on which we have become so co-dependent, that they seem absolutely necessary for our survival, and at the same time are dangerous for ourselves or those around us. Only when someone else cares enough for us to recognise our self-destructive behaviour, do we begin the difficult journey towards acknowledging it (recovery is still far away). Some addictions are easier to identify – drugs, alchohol, narcotics, etc. They can be measured by the visible co-dependency a person has. Urges to satisfy these needs can be medically suppressed, or in simpler cases, by simply denying access to them. It is easy to call out a drug-dealer and arrest them in order to prevent the drug delivery chain. Even if the addict is a moral failure, the drug dealer can be called an equal, if not worse, moral failure too. Addictions to substances, in short, are VERY easy to deal with because they are visible – and that’s half the battle won.

Lately though, I began to identify a behaviour pattern that had manifested within myself and those around me, and only over the weekend after lots of contemplation, did I identify it as an addiction of the most dangerous kind I had ever encountered. I now realized why attachment is forbidden in the Jedi Code. Under the labels of “love”, “affection”, and “caring”, we tend to become so highly co-dependent on people that we become addicted to them, their company or their approval. Really really think about it. We may dismiss these addictions by running away from them by using excuses like, “Afterall, we have to live in society…” but I dare anyone to say, “It’s not an addiction, and I don’t need it!”

Afterall, doesn’t a drug addict say they “need” drugs to survive too? Don’t they come up with excuses too? Don’t they deny the very fact that it’s an addiction in the first place? What’s the qualitative difference between a drug addict and a social addict? What is the moral foothold based on which the social addict displays their holier-than-thou attitude? At least drug dealers don’t use every form of media at their disposal to propagate their addiction. Society, on the other hand, does – making the drug dealer look like an angel on a morality scale.

We propagate romanticism through novels, movies and even religion. We ignore the true meaning of Love, and instead pervert it with our definition which is identified by our needs rather than the needs of those we claim to love. The existence of very word “heartbreak” shows just how perverted our definition of love is. An alchoholic is heartbroken when they are denied alchohol. So are we heartbroken, when we are denied approval by the person we “Love”. Through creative poetry, we plunge ourselves into the depths of addiction. We then justify said addiction by portraying it as something noble and desirable. Over the last few months, I’ve seen some remarkable achievements of friends who owned up to their addictions to people and turned their life around. Those who seemed like they had nothing to live for, suddenly became people I began to envy because there were thousands of people who couldn’t live without them. I dedicated this blog to honour these role models of mine. They may not be celebrated in newspapers or interviewed on television, but I want them to know that they have one admirer in this world, and I hope, the first of many.

I never realised what they really meant when people say, “Let it go…” My first instinct was to get defensive by saying, “I won’t let it go, because it’s a defeatist attitude. I want to win!” It’s no different from how a drug-addict will use every means at their disposal to “win” more drugs – it’s not really winning at all. The vicious circle was now apparent.

Then we come to those who feed these addictions. Ever notice just how tense the relations between so many “close friends” really are? One wrong word, one wrong comment, one inappropriate gesture, and all relations break down like a stack of dominoes. In order to avoid this, we find ourselves enslaved in their clutches. We try to please them in any way we can. Initially even I thought that the only person addicted would be the blame, but observe carefully and you find another culprit – the drug-dealer.

Over social experiments and careful observations performed for the last eight weeks, it turns out that the attention-seekers also feed these addictions to keep them going. Whenever a someone realises the person they are co-dependent on is drawing away, they modify their behaviour to what they think will attract the person back. So great is the need that people will go to remarkable lengths to make it happen. So far, nothing is really wrong. However, I found that at some stage, the addict starts losing their interest. They either begin to forget what codependency was like, or they just decide all the trouble isn’t worth the approval they may gain, or if they’re smart, they’ll realise they will never gain the approval they so desperately seek. If only their “victims” were merciful and would allow these people to recover by acting stuck up or standoff-ish. Life isn’t so easy, I’m afriad. It is at these critical points that I found the drug-dealers actually fiegning approval or closeness to feed the addict and give them hope, thus plunging them back into the depths of their failure.

Why this blog? Because knowing the enemy is and facing it is the only way to win the battle. Have you ever found yourself making excuses of “Love” or “Friendship” out of fear of losing someone? Chances are you’re addicted to them. Do you find people around you oscilating between being very friendly one day and distant the next? Chances are your addiction is being fed. It’s time to own up and face the reality. It’s hard to change – especially when you’ve been friends or acquaintaces for a long time, but life isn’t about what’s hard or easy, life is about what’s necessary!

June 16, 2009

Is ‘God’ the dark matter of spirituality?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , — archisgore @ 4:13 am

Whenever physicists can’t explain something, they just call it “dark matter” or “dark energy” and assign it properties they need to explain away their theories (well, that’s a gross exaggeration, and certainly not a criticism). Mathematicians come up with “imaginary numbers” (at least mathematicians have the guts to use the adjective imaginary directly.)

I don’t make any claims as to the existence or non-existence of God here, so don’t degenerate the comments section with those issues. The purpose of this post is to explore the very instinctual and primal necessity to believe that God exists. In fact, it is my contention that most people need to believe in God, rather than the other way round through a leap of faith, as most religions would have you believe. Heck, we desperately need to know God exists, because if he doesn’t, all hell would break loose.

To give you a context of what I expect to learn from your feedback, I am looking for answers to how one may truly become a God-believer without needing to, and if, assuming God doesn’t exists, then how do we reconcile the conflicting notions of fairness that I’ll come to below. Basically, what is it that keeps us from falling into complete anarchy?

We live in a world of symmetry and opposites (no, this isn’t turning into a Dan Brown-ish post). Ever since we remember, we are brought up in a profit-loss environment with an ideal zero-sum game. Basically here’s how our brain is programmed to look at the world:
1. All things being equal, the world is zero-sum. We give something, and we get something back of equal worth. We work for money. We pay money for services or goods.
2. Given a choice, and following our natural instincts (I can’t be sure whether these are natural instincts or something we were programmed with as children), we aim to upset the balance in our favour. We aim for “profit” which is a way of saying, an attempt at gaining a return worth more than what it was given in exchange for.
3. When we lose something more than what we get in return, we call it a “loss”. Loss hurts.
4. To keep the system in check, and to prevent a descent into complete anarchy or returning to our savage roots, civilization prides itself on it’s systems of rules and procedures to prevent (2) and (3) happening and to aim to keep the system at (1) as far as possible.
5. In a profit-loss scenario, the loser, blames the profiteer for being unjust or immoral or whatever. The culprit is quantifiable, identifiable and observable.

When it comes to feelings however, we have no one person to blame. We all try to be good people (yes, there may be bad people which I’ll come to later, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone who is truly convinced they are bad themselves.) Due to the Zero-Sum mentality above, we expect others to be good to us in return. This is compounded by the fact that faiths, religions and cults all have some justification for why we should behave morally and ethically.

However this seldom happens. We do get hurt. We feel betrayed, hurt or treated unfairly. And yet, there are no laws to combat or prevent unethical behaviour – since laws depend heavily on “intent” and in such cases, there is little chance of proving the intent to “hurt someone”.

So we end up in a place where the theories don’t fit:
1. The world is based on a Zero-Sum game, or so we’ve been programmed. Ideally, there is no profit, no loss.
2. The world doesn’t seem to work on a Zero-Sum principle. Sometimes we experience only loss – and if it was emotional loss, than all the worse because it is unquantifiable and unmeasurable. Or at least, we don’t see a civilized system of rules and regulations to give us justice when we experience loss.

How do we reconcile the two conflicting ideas above? Well, before that let’s attack why we need to reconcile the ideas above. For one, we all like to believe we have a purpose in life. If the first concept were to be shattered, the world appears to be a much crueller and harsher place than we want to believe. There seems little point to keeping up pretenses of morality and ethics. We would resort to anarchy and selfishness, and yet something conflicts inside us, because even this vision of the world seems equally frightening.

The reality is, the only vision of a tolerable world is one where everyone (at least, everyone except us) is good, and honest and ethical and moral. A view where only we are good, and the world is bad doesn’t fit. A view where we are as bad as the rest of the world doesn’t fit either, because well, frankly, we want peace and happiness. Getting a green signal to breaking morals and ethics isn’t very reassuring so long as everyone else gets that green signal too – we all know there will be stronger people, and a survival-of-the-fittest world would inevitably be horrible for us. For closure, I have to mention one other view appeals a lot more – a view where everyone else behaves ethically and morally, while we have a green signal to break ethics and morals ourselves – basically, given a choice, we want spiritual/emotional profit the same as (1). However, in a perfectly good world, perhaps there would be no point or purpose to breaking ethics and morals anyway, so this view may be redundant….. wait… isn’t this what we define as “Heaven”? We’ll come back to this in a moment.

So there we have it – the reason we want to reconcile conflicting observations.
a. We want spiritual and emotional profit
b. We have no way of knowing how to ensure it – the rules seem very arbitrary. But we already know a system in place where we can ensure profit – system (1) – the Zero-Sum game. So we want to somehow map spiritual gain into a system we are familiar with.

Let’s get back to how we end up trying to reconcile it. We begin with the assumption that (1) applies to (2) without first considering whether it does or not (except Gautam Buddha – the only person who actually even questioned whether (1) applies to (2) to begin with) So beginning with the assumption that spirituality is a Zero-Sum game, we now need to account for the times when we were good to people, or tried to be decent human beings, and yet we get treated unfairly and unethically. We behave in a remarkably scientific manner than most would like to admit. The way Mathematicians came up with imaginary numbers, and Physicists came up wtih Dark Matter and Dark Energy, we came up with God. (No, this still isn’t going in a Dan Brown-ish direction.)
We want to be good people, and we want the world to be good, or rather, we want to be good people because we want the world to be good – it’s the only way we are assured of happiness. So there we are, behaving morally and ethically, and we get hurt.

The system makes perfect sense now. Just as we have judges and rules and laws for our materialistic possessions, we now have a God for our emotional and spiritual ones. As with Imaginary Numbers, we can now assign whatever unexplained properties to God by simply saying, “Let us define God as having x, y and z properties. Now, using God in equations (1) and (2) we can reconcile them.”

As I wrote at the beginning, I’m looking for your thoughts, ideas and other viewpoints on this. Furthermore I want to know how I may be convinced God exists, especially when I have nothing to gain or lose from his existence. If he doesn’t exist, then I want to know how people reconcile (1) and (2). I want to know what prevents them from breaking every pretense of ethics and morals. Why doesn’t everyone turn into a raving murdering lunatic?

Is anyone of us really God-loving or God-fearing as opposed to being desperately God-needing?

(For the purposes of clarity, when I say “God”, I mean the various super-natural concepts around the world, or the concept of a “Higher Power”)

June 15, 2009

Addicted to Failure

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:07 am

I did comment before on how I find many, if not most, parents determined to grow their kids like horses on a stud farm for the purposes of display in a zoo. Yes, and I mean this quite close to literally in some cases. I can’t come up with a fancy or catchy name for this behaviour pattern yet, but I’m open to suggestions.

This is just a commentary and I make no point here, and I’m certainly not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just an observation I made and wanted to verbalise it and get your thoughts on it.

Parents’ defensive maneuver
I’ve covered the basics before – parents choose to shower their kids with everything they could possibly do – waiting in long lines for weeks to get admissions in the best kindergarten schools, sending kids off to extra coaching, and super-extra coaching to make sure they top their kindergarten, and if time permits send the kids off to extracurricular activities which are precisely timed and measured. Some learn music, some learn sports, but all in a measurable and quantifiable format. Why you ask? So that when the kid “fails in life” (failure again defined by said parents), the parents can claim they did everything they could possibly do. What more could they have done? Now this would be perfectly fine if it worked, but I’m now convinced beyond any doubt that it doesn’t. (For those not familiar with scientific terminology – all this means is that it has no effect on the outcome whatsoever, so don’t cite examples of where it worked and tell me it doesn’t ‘necessarily fail’ – if it doesn’t consistently succeed – or even succeed with any statistical significance, it’s called a failure. You might as well be throwing dice as your predictor for success.)

Two years after I pass out of college I can confidentaly say that some of my supposedly stupid friends from back in school and college turned out to be greater successes than most contemporaries from prestigious technical institutes who used to look down on us. I can now boast of ex-classmates who are reputed professional singers, an actress, a guy who runs an advertising company, a guy who failed his 12th exam (a BIG deal in Middle Class India) now lives on the sea-shore of Wales discovering oil, and countless others who became successes in things that I’d have hardly imagined were accessible to commoners. These are kids whom I’ve known to have never attended a single class, spent their time in coffee shops all day and spent time doing what they loved to do (which isn’t saying a lot). These were people who did everything wrong with their lives, by social norm. And yet, every time I talk to them when I visit Pune, I experience an intellectual high I no longer find in my own field. These people can talk about everything from literature (and I mean real literature – not Harry Potter books), wines, complex cheeses, intricacies of musical styles from different continents, history, philosophy, movie production, social dynamics, discrete mathematics, quantum physics, nanotechnology, and whatever else you can think of (had to cut down the list up there). These people are truly happy, and fun to be with.

If I contrast them with the people who did everything right with their lives, those were labelled by society as some of the best technical minds from the country, university toppers, 4.0ers, etc., I feel a great sense of frustration. The very people who went to a million coaching classes, did extra school work, would feel guilty for having missed out on the first five minutes of a class they were accidentally late to, are now the ones who spend their lives squabbling over marginal pay raises, fighting for promotions, cribbing about work-life balances, and bitching every evening about managers, co-workers and their companies. You’d have imagined these people spending spending their time discussing advanced algorithms, new breakthroughs, or products that change the world, and you’d be wrong. Then again we know what the smart MBAs from the best business schools, who were funded from taxpayers money and glorified in the press, have done to our economy – we’re all feeling the effects of that. It’s a gloomy and depressing scene in the technology and financial world today – where supposedly the smartest people exist.

Looking back on my life, I feel these people are the real failures in life. The reason we don’t hear about it as “failure” in common society is simply because all possibility of blame has been removed. Parents did all they could – they gave these guys the best tuitions, the best schools, the best of everything. They did everything Middle Class Morality expected of them. It was so much easier to push all responsibility on society rather than show a little backbone and take the risk of being right. You just send the kid to whatever the majority calls the “best thing to do” and you’re now no longer responsible for the kid’s failure – the majority will never admit they made a mistake – and the world moves on.

The Addiction to Failure
You heard that right. It is my observation that such parental behaviour encourages an addiction to failure in kids who are brought up this way. The I-did-all-I-could-do attitude comes from an inherent addiction to failure. During my last trip to Pune – which was my first trip in the middle of the recession, I realised something. My “loser” friends have fun and happy lives because they are really afraid to fail. They don’t know when they might fail, and they’ve experienced some really bad failures in their lives. They know the difference between hitting rock bottom when nobody cares for you, and the mushy-mushy failure when you have sympathisers. This means that they know what real failure tastes like (all you Indian readers can imagine what failing 12th standard feels like) and will do everything they can to avoid it. It also means that whatever fear they had of hitting rock-bottom has been faced and nothing frightens them easily. Someone who scores horribly in exams and goes to bad colleges will know that there is no pity to be expected in real failure – there’s only condescension, insult, and humiliation. You learn to live with the fact that you have nobody on your side. You are relegated to reading in newspapers about various opportunities, initiatives and whatever being offered exclusively to students on fancy colleges or those meeting certain criteria knowing that you have no chance in hell of ever being noticed.

The winners however, are addicted to failure because it gets them pity – an addiction worse than drugs, mainly because it cannot be easily identified. If you do everything right, and yet fail or are miserable, you have a bunch of people to pet you and pamper you. Over time, you start looking for trouble because it’s the lab-rat or dog-training reinforcement behaviour. You do something – you get sympathy – you do it again. When you’re a socially-defined winner, the majority won’t ever admit they were wrong, and instead enable you to feel sorry for yourself in order to justify themselves.

I know this seems a bit counter-intuitive and crazy, but look around you, the evidence is there. If I weren’t in Microsoft, or hadn’t gotten far in Code4Bill three years ago, how many sympathisers would have I had? Would you have said Microsoft doesn’t know how to hire good people? Now put me in the best college in India, and rethink the last two sentences. Would you have told me that I’m simply that bad which is why I failed? That’s real fear of failure – when you know that if you fail, you’ve got nobody to symapthise with you, and instead the entire world is waiting to tell you how much you truly suck. Now when I look back seven years ago at those aspiring singers, actors, writers, musicians, etc. I realise that the reason they learnt to be happy and fun is because they got to experience first-hand what it means to be ignored, rejected and not cared for, and I can safely say that boy are those people afraid to go back there again! The winners though, experienced early on that so long as they do what society asks them, and keep whining about how their life sucks, they get that many more admirers and sympathisers, and I can imagine why they’d want to go back there over and over and over again.

Fear of Failure provides objectivity

Another counter-intuitive statement and yet one that will make sense by the time I’m done arguing it.

People who’re afraid of real failure, know what it takes to win. They do whatever is in their power to win. What they don’t do is irrelevant stuff in a defensive maneuver. People were always surprised to find me and my friends watching movies during exams, and we’d open books at the maximum one hour before an exam. I can honestly say the maximum I’ve ever studied for any paper would be 4 hours before – much less than the countless weeks and months that the winners would spend on. I wasn’t the only one in class though – I’ve known tons of people who wouldn’t touch a book.

Once again, the answer is true fear of failure, as opposed to an addiction to failure. If I screwed up, there’s nobody to sympathise with me. The winners know as well as I do that most courses don’t have a whole lot of content that requires studying for weeks and months, but their sympathysers are the ones who really require to see them study for weeks and months so that when they screw up, they are assured of another sympathy fix, “Aww… you poor dear. You studied so hard. It’s alright, there’s nothing more you could have done!”

I’ve noticed this most commonly in humans. If they are assured they have no shoulder to cry on, their decisions are inherently rational and objective, than if they knew they had someone’s shoulders to cry on. When you know you have nobody on your side, you give up the sham of “hard work” and really begin working hard because you start focussing on what you want as opposed to what you need to prove in order to get sympathy. You really start exploring all your options. You become desperate because you’re afraid. You really end up doing all you could possibly do.

I noticed this in exams and I notice this in all the different companies where my friends talk about promotions, pay raises, whatever. Those who’re really afraid, just do whatever it takes and are happy when they get it. Others will do everything else except what their evaluators are looking for and will keep cribbing year after year about how they’re stagnating, because actually getting what they want would be detrimental to their sympathy-fix.

Part of why I had to verbalise this is that I began to realise I was falling in the same trap lately – especially in the last six months. When life becomes too easy, and you find yourself surrounded by people who won’t tell you you suck, its time to shake things up a bit!

June 11, 2009

Middle Class Morality

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 1:45 pm

A phrase coined by Bernard Shaw and voiced by his character Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion. Alfred Doolittle is arguably the most loved character from Pygmalion, and every sentence he utters in the play could lead to lengthy blogs in their own right, but this one phrase has had the most impact on me personally.

I’ve already explored questions such as what it is to be a good person, and once defined, why anyone would want to become one. Entire religions, cults, and societies have been formed upon these questions and Alfred Doolittle’s five-minute stage time answers them all so elegantly.

Countless Matrix fans are already familiar with the concept of control in society. Whether real or not, we live in a world with psychological barriers meant to control us. Religions, customs, traditions, social acceptance are all imposed by a few upon the masses in an effort to contain them and control them. Generally speaking a selfish person is good for society. I know this sounds a bit counter intuitive, but really think about it. So long as a person is trapped in the selfish loops of their lives, they are harmless. They may be irritable and frustrated, but they are generally so involved in their own little world that they can be manipulated quite easily. Just imagine what would happen if majority of the population had their lives as relatively easy as people in my situation do – bills get autodebited, household stuff happens on autopilot, and get lots of free time on their hands – it’s a nightmare for the ruling classes – all of a sudden people would have loads of time and energy to demand better roads, better governance, and so on – in short people would become selfless.

And yet, due to industrialization and globalization, that’s exactly what did happen – in Europe and America a century ago, and in India over the last decade. The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. Most services are provided by private companies – meaning better customer care and relatively easier lives for the masses (anyone remember the days when the government had a monopoly on telecommunications?) That can’t be good – people suddenly start caring about shit like “Human Rights”, “Budget Allocations”, “Corruption”, and all that kinda stuff. These aren’t people you can push over, because they’re the so-called ‘working class’ who use the word ‘deserve’ a lot more than is comfortable. These people work hard, and hence they deserve certain things and won’t back down until they get them. These people are in a majority too. These people also believe in notions like “self-respect” and “honour” and “dignity” – so long as these adjectives are applied to them by others.

Enter “Middle Class Morality”. In almost every speech by politians, business tycoons and generally anyone else, we hear the middle classes praised in one form or another – usually with the same adjectives above – self-respect, honour, dignitiy, hard-workers, etc. By creating a society where such adjectives need to be applied by “others”, you create a perfect selfishness loop for people to be involved in and keep busy. Now everyone is trying to gratify themselves by trying to get as many of their peers to apply those adjectives to them, while the peers are also engaged in the converse process. By tying these virtues with morality, you have a perfect weapon for manipulation.

As time progresses, whatever problems, issues or squabbles the middle class may have, can be squished with morality – whatever you don’t want them to do, just define it as being things that “bad people do” and you’re all done. Once the middle classes start judging each other’s nobility and self-respect and all that crap based on your definition of what bad people are, you’ll find not one of them will dare have any of their own kind call them “less dignified”. A system of perfect control. Of course, not all morality can be attributed to control – most of it is just plain stupidity. Once you have notions of “more dignified” or “less dignified” (don’t we just love comparisons?), the middle class starts inventing their own definitions and standards to be somehow “more moral” than their peers, who are trying to do the same.

Over time, we find ourselves in a society with a majority so selfish and self-absorbed in non-issues that the minority are left to do what they want and rule the world. I know it’s ironic, but morality is the biggest evil our society could face today. We all live under illusions of being “good people” and “moral people”.

Before ending I will say that to want to be moral and good isn’t wrong, which is why such manipulation is dangerous and requires almost Jedi-like calmness to prevent. It’s very difficult, but equally important, to be able to judge what really is righteous and moral behaviour, as opposed to what is simply being imposed as a system of control.

May 6, 2009

Dealing with fear, anger, hate, resentment, betrayal, in the "right way"

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — archisgore @ 3:33 pm

I’ve been known for being very impatient, and especially angry and vengeful when things don’t go my way. More so, when I find a scapegoat to blame, I’ll go to the ends of the earth to hurt them. My wars have been famous – especially the one with ISSC three years ago.

This time however, I decided to become a “better person”, and perhaps see if spirituality, religion and all that stuff could help me find a better way – if for no other reason than to grow towards my goal of becoming a true Jedi. No matter how much I “got back” at the people I hated, it really never made me feel better about myself. If anything, I felt worse for having done all those bad things to people. You feel good the next morning, but the morning after that, you see them happy and smiling, and you are still left with your anger. So you decide what you did to them wasn’t enough Justice, and try to do something much worse. The cycle pulls you in and you keep on at it – until you realise that what you do doesn’t affect them at all, which is when you go into a state of complete disillusionment and resentment and self-desctructive behaviour. Of course, over time I forgot them, but I don’t think I ever forgave them and the next time, I brought all that wrath of my previous hurts against an unsuspecting victim who had done me no wrong. Clearly, this wasn’t working. There had to be a better way for a wannabe Jedi.

Just to give you an idea (this is very vague and generic), the problem involved a very disturbing combination of work problems, hatered towards some of the stuff I did, resentment at some business decisions of the company, the complete obliteration of my social and personal life due to the PDC push that isolated me from the world, and so on – a combination where I was (and perhaps still am) unable to separate and identify my problems, a task which I’m supposed to be good at. This led to a lot of anger, hate, frustration, at almost everyone and everything. Remote friends were of limited help – how much can they do over messengers and e-mail?

This post is my narrative of this journey towards self-improvement and spiritual growth. It’s not over yet – far from it, but I hope that public acceptance will allow the people I’ve hurt to forgive me, and perhaps help others from making the same mistakes. I still don’t feel good about myself, and I still feel anger (even if rarely) at what happened. However, every day I truly believe I become a better person, as I learn the meaning of humility, and as I learn to face my mistakes and face the people I have intentionally hurt. If you really analyse the situation, you’ll realise many times that they have their reasons too, and those reasons are just as silly and unjustifiable as the reasons you convince yourself are valid ones for punishing them. Help them overcome their hate and anger. Show them that you are not the same as those who have hurt them in the past. Show them that they can trust you with their lives, no matter how much hatered they shower on you. Defeat hate with Love – the most powerful weapon in your arsenal against evil.

After many months of pain, I realised one important thing to remember throughout the process – be selfish. Be VERY Selfish! Repeat this to yourself over and over again. You are the victim here, and it’s you who needs help. This is about you, and about nobody else. This isn’t about righteousness. The biggest mistake I made in the first few months was thinking that all this spiritual crap was about righteousness and helping others. It’s NOT! This is about YOU! What naturally follows from this acceptance is that affecting anyone else won’t help you, and it makes living your life so much easier than it would be otherwise. Obviously, vengeance is ruled out – what good is that to me? How does it help me? I want to live life my way, and hurting irrelevant people doesn’t make my life any more Awesome.

A few weeks ago, I began looking at various philosophies, and religious teachings. The first step was approaching the problem solvers with an open mind. We have so many people around us who claim to have all the answers, so why not give them a chance? Since this is about you, do it on good faith. Truly believe they are going to help you. Do whatever they ask you to do in good faith if they can justify their position. This went well. Some helped. Others didn’t. All in all, it was pretty insightful to see how people look at problems from different perspectives, and many times, you find that unless they’ve gone through it themselves, their arguments aren’t very convincing.

The most obvious feeling I had was that of hatered. I hated everything. I hated the company, I hated my colleagues, I hated my job, I hated my friends, and anything else the world could throw at me. This led me further from them and the further they got from me, the further I convinced myself I was in the middle of some conspiracy to isolate me. You know what that leads to – rampant paranoia and utter lack of rational thought. At one point I reached a stage where I couldn’t separate delusion from reality. I decided I had enough and it was time to fix my life! Hating people was getting me nowhere but was causing just more and more pain and I was alienating whatever few friends I had left. I decided to face my fears (you’ll find tons of movies I admire that say stuff like, “Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to Hate…”, or “What you really fear, is within yourself, the anger that drives you, to do great and terrible things.”)

For a social misfit like me, the biggest fear is that of loneliness. Having been kind of a pushover in any matters non-technical, and not able to understand many social constructs, I tend to get paranoid whenever I feel abandoned or betrayed. It was time to face this. That’s why when something I work on gets killed or shelved, I get an unsurmountable burst of anger and hate. At my age, I knew that friends can betray us too. So who is there standing by our side? As escapist as it may sound, I turned to God. Faith in God saved me! I had one ally in this world, and a powerful ally is he. Repeat that to yourself a few times and you’ll be feeling so much more comfortable knowing that the most powerful being in the universe is on your side. (I know I’m going to raise merry hell with this, but I found faith in Christianity, but we’ll come to that later.) This was the most fundamental of fears to combat, because once conquered, no power on earth can hurt you. Remember the famous dialogue by Luna Lovegood? “Perhaps that’s what Voldemort wants you to believe, because alone, you’re easy to fight.” Nothing could be more true. Satan wants you to feel betrayed and alone, because once alone, you’re an easy target. All it takes to fight loneliness is to realise that the most powerful being in existence is on your side. If you truly believe in this, is there any power on this mortal earth that can hurt you? (By the way, once you start believing there is one person on your side, you’ll see that there are so many people who love you and care about you.)

Once the fear is gone, came feelings of “justice”, “fairness”, etc. “Life is unfair”, people say, “deal with it.” What they don’t tell you is just how you’re supposed to “deal with it”. Should you ignore it? Should you descend into anarchy and treat everyone else unfairly? This is where I looked at every faith and philosophy. Some have heroes that fought unfairness through battles and wars. Others advocate war as a means to save others. One faith has a Hero who defeated the ultimate fear of all – death itself. He fought death with the most powerful ally of all – God. He fought no battles. He killed nobody. He was treated the most unfair of all. He hurt nobody. He never sinned. Yet, his disciples betrayed him, denied him, abandoned him. His own people asked for his crucifiction, people to whom he had done no harm. He was spat at, teased, humiliated, and tortured. All through this ordeal, he had only one thing to say, “God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He overcame death itself! What more harm could he be subjected to now? Compared to this, what is your unfairness? Were you denied a raise? Were you teased? Were you made fun of? Think of what happened to Jesus Christ, and he conquered death itself!

Yet there are questions of justice – if those who wrong us aren’t punished, then what’s the point of doing right? There are two ways of looking at this. The key to both of them is to prevent yourself from seeking vengence at any cost – believe whatever you must to make this happen.

1. I have always admired Mahatma Gandhi, and have tried to follow in his teachings. He said that if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other towards them. I know it sounds like puny advice, but consider this – he brought Independence to an entire nation. During any crisis, other leaders were thinking of “killing others”, “hurting others”, etc. The Mahatma never hurt anyone, he hurt himself. He went on a 390 Km march to prove his point, instead of starting riots and driving people hundreds of Kms from their homes. And boy did it make an impression! Yes, it’s difficult. When people are hurting you, the first instinct is to get out there with your guns and shoot them. Takes a very patient man to do something seemingly as simple as take a casual stroll for a few miles and in the process inspire thousands!

2. The Bible has one verse which I found repeated in every Google search I made on “dealing with hurt”. “Vengence is mine”, says the Lord, “for I shall repay.” Here again, we come to our faith. If you believe in God, if you have faith, then why do you want to trouble yourself? Vengence may indeed be sweet, but it’s a lot of effort. If God has agreed to do it for you, why bother with it? Why waste your time which could otherwise go into leading a life of pure Awesomeness? Besides, what’s the best you can do to hurt them back? Here’s a guy who can bring back people from death, and who’s willing to hurt people on your behalf. Isn’t it so much easier and also pleasurable to allow this all-powerful dude to go and unleash all his wrath on your enemies, while you spend your life in awesomeness being all happy and smug? Take comfort in him – the kind of damange he can do, we can’t even begin to imagine. Isn’t that sweet vengence on your enemies?

Here I think it is fitting to divert to a small play I saw during my college days which will piss off religious fanatics, but was so amusing to me. In the play a certain diety is being worshipped in their idolated form. The worshippers are drunk and dancing around the diety praising it and shouting how it will burn their enemies and destroy them and stuff. Accidentally, one of the dancers tips it off it’s base and it falls and breaks on the ground. Suddenly they all start shouting, ” fell! fell!” If their diety can’t prevent it’s idol from falling, what can it do to their enemies? When we try to avenge ourselves, we become that idol of the diety. We can fall easily by one accidental push by one of our own followers, and yet we have the arrogance to think we can damange others. Why bother when someone way more capable than us is already on the job 24/7? Seems a bit redundant.

The final step – defeating Evil with Love! This is the step I’m struggling with. Maybe I still don’t believe it works, or perhaps my faith is weak or maybe I’m just not strong enough. Satan wants us all to feel we’re alone in this world which allows him to play Divide and Conquer. The only way to conquer Evil is to Love your enemies. This is much harder than it sounds, especially when you have been hurt by them bad. But look at it this way, you’re not fighting them, you’re fighting Evil. Wanted to be like those Evil-fighting super-heroes in all the cool movies? Want to be a Jedi? This is how you fight Evil. You don’t let it spread. You contain the disease. You show it you’re immune to it’s infection. People hurt you. You love them back. People tease you. You love them back. People hate you. You Love them back. Frustrate Evil with Love. With God as your ally, what can it do to you anyway? It’s not as if it can kill you, can it? But death has already been conquered! What’s left?

The most difficult phase in all this is when you have to face the facts. God asks that we forgive our enemies. This isn’t easy, but what’s worse is forgiving ourselves. Many times, when we’re hurt (at least in my case), the feelings we don’t want to admit to ourselves are those of embarrassment at our mistake. We trust someone, they betray us, and sometimes they go on to rub it in our faces. We’re embarrassed at having trusted them. We hate ourselves for ever having loved them. Forgiving them is easy. Forgiving ourselves is difficult. We make mistakes. We’re only human. Whenever we come close to the truth, our ego defends itself with thoughts like, “How could I have done this? How was I so stupid? No! I was right! They were wrong. They hurt me!” This makes it harder and harder for ourselves to ask forgiveness. Here again, there are feelings of “giving up”. Don’t they “win” if you give up and admit our mistakes? If we make ourselves vulnerable, Of course they don’t! We have the most powerful guy on earth seeking vengence on our behalf. You’re in no way “giving up”! :-) If anything, it’s at this point that your enemies should be running for their lives, because you’ve given up your urge for vengence into the hands of the most powerful being in the universe.

If you’re more mature mentally than I am, perhaps understanding what they’re going through can help too. I recently read a story that affected the way I looked at those who were trying to hurt me. It was a narrative of an employer who hired an employee who had been laid off once before. The employee came with feelings of resentment and anger towards his former employer, and chose to take them out on the current employer. The employer was left in the middle of a critical phase of the project as this employee left with a smug look upon his face. The employee was avenging himself on the wrong person. This story gives two perspectives. For one, when you go out to avenge yourself, you may not be thinking straight, and secondly, those who seem to hurt you may have nothing against you personally

The final step – asking for forgiveness. When in the US in my childhood, at Sunday School they taught us a very important lesson, but one which is so difficult to follow in real life that we conveniently forget it. They always taught us that if we went down a wrong road, the very first thing to do was to trace our steps back up the road to the point where we forked off. Then to follow the right path. Ask forgiveness from the people you’ve hurt. Ask forgiveness from the people who’ve been accidentally hurt (yes, when your mind is calm, you will see them too.) Ask for forgiveness from God.

This one I actually took from Mahatma Gandhi – especially from Lage Raho Munnabhai. Trust me, no matter what, this policy works. It may seem like when you ask forgiveness, people don’t forgive you or that they make use your against you. Out of recent experience I’ve learnt a valuable interpretation. You should be worried if they don’t get angry and mad, and don’t take out their hurt on you. It means they don’t care. The fact that they’re angry and bitter, means that they still care, and they care a lot. At this point, you need to know you’re the most beloved person on earth. It takes courage to face your enemies in battle. It takes even more courage to face your friends in seeking repentence. Takes courage to face Evil head on, and to declare, “You shall not win! It ends here!”

April 10, 2008

Trying to keep my mouth shut!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — archisgore @ 1:01 am

Dammnit! We’re about to release a very cool thing and expect tons of blogs from me the minute we go public! I’m ready with so much to say in so many forms, that it’s very difficult for me to control myself!

Most people have already guessed what’s coming, and others are skeptical. Some think it’s full of shit, while others think it’s cool. All I can say for now is that those who have seen it, seem to be nuts about it.

So I guess you’ll just have to wait and find out…. afterall, it’s only a matter of days now, not even weeks.

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