Monday, January 22, 2018

Tendencies of the mind - II

Back in the days, more than a decade ago when I did my very first Art of Living program, and then repeated multiple times, we were taught quite a few good behavioral aspects aka knowledge points, One of them appears to be circling in my mind for the last few weeks (if not months); It is the knowledge point about "Tendencies of the mind", one important tendency of the mind is to cling to the negative, other important tendency is to either completely in the past or in the future and never in the moment. I am sure the course taught a few more things.

That said, one other thing I realized is the tendency to categorize and label anything and everything (including itself). To elaborate, growing up in India and specially in south of India there were always few tensions between people, one had to do with  language (Kannada vs Tamil) and other with geographic location of your specific city in the Indian subcontinent (north vs south). As some one rightly put it, I became an Indian only after I left India. Living in America for almost 2 decades now, I have realized this place is no different, there are tensions between people but may be for slightly different reasons.

This made me think further and I realized, the human mind cannot and will not rest until it has categorized anything and everything around it. In the early days of civilization it wanted to categorize based on the color of skin, type of attire and then as civilization grew and expanded came  the division on occupation and with trade came the division based on location and later with the more industrial world and “intellectual” world, it became about the belief system (philosopher, intellectual, poet, activist, pacifist, communist, liberal, conservative and so on) then when the mind became even more evolved it started categorizing further and refining it even more, “fiscally conservative’', “religiously conservative”, “animal rights activist”, “women’s rights activist”, “right leaning”, “left leaning”, “extreme right wing”, “extreme left wing” and so on. Needless to say in between some where came the rich vs poor and my other favorite one “religion and culture” (I believe they exist together). I am sure I have missed a few categories and the timeline may not be perfect, but I am hoping the reader got the idea. 

It is fascinating to see the evolution of the human mind, to some extent one can argue that as a collective, human mind is evolving towards finer and finer divisions only to realize nothing exists in the end :). It’s all hollow and empty.  

ps: the game mind plays when combined with Ego is even more fascinating. I will leave it there :)

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