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FEBRUARY 2017
PRABUDDH JEEVAN
35
THE SEEKER'S DIARY
LIVE AND LET LIVE !
"So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other". - Orson Scott Card.
"We spoke." "She misunderstood." "Are you even listening?" "I said this but I meant this." "I meant this and I did not say this." "Oh I thought you meant it this way." "I did not mean to hurt you." "I meant to tell this to you.." So it is 2017
We pretty much live in a world where we know everything or we CAN know everything. We collect and process data and have million opinions to understand and discern with this information overload.
Whether it is Trump or Modi, whether it is philosophy or religion, whether it is love or hate, whether it is books, rocket science, recipies, embroidery, quantum physics we can have data enough to fill the entire city and more.
We read, and feel quotes on the profoundest of love, we have tips for how to have the best marriage, how to be a great friend, how to be a better mother, how to be happier, calmer, beautifuler,deeper, how to be...
We have internet to browse and go deep, we have WhatsApp forwards and instagrams for quick fixes..
Friends and country men, we have it all. We live in a present time where we can be a better anything and better in anything if knowing about something can make us better, if information could make us better.
And yet as we are overwhelmed with data, we are also losing touch. Losing touch with a certain reality, be it in our own specialisations, professions, or definitely in our relationships, because information overload also means a constant mental and emotional make up to integrate the rapidly changing information.
So as usual what am I talking about? Are we talking too much or not talking at all?
Both. We are doing both but what we might not be doing with either is communicating.
This is such a broad topic, it entails an entire social and psycological ethos so I am going to choose one
aspect of it this time and elaborate on it and take other aspects some other time.
In a world gone manuals, where one can pretty much stop thinking and live off information and wisdom so easily accessible, what is actually happening.
In any of our intimate relationships, we already are communicating with an extremely crowded mindspace. We are communicating with a combination of past baggage - good and bad, unmet expectations, fulfilled desires, unfulfilled desires, preoccupation, distractions (the bane of all existence in today's age of information), constant faltering of self worth.
So what we are hearing is pretty much not what is actually being said.
We are hearing what we feel, and only what we feel.
So when we are in a space of abundance (my favourite word, as all of you who read me might know by now), or a space of clarity about our position in relation to self and society, we are a bit generous in what we hear and when we are unclear and insecured about our own position / direction, we become myopic or pretty much deaf.
So when I am not plagued with self doubt and in a soft all is well with the world, I am listening to what the other person is saying, experiencing and able to be happy in his/her happiness and with empathy if he/ she is spiralling downwards. I am able to take his/her thought, give it attention, make it grow into a lovely thought process, or put it aside if it is inconsequential. I am able to read in clear words what is being said and not try and catch the in between words because what is being said is what is being said and I don't need to hear what is not being said.
But if I am in self doubt, if i am unclear and sluggish and blurred about my own equation to that day, boy oh boy, will I hear too much.
I would not be a balloon to the other person but a dead weight. Because i will not be listening to the others words, but to my feeling of alienation, disssonance, abandonment, deeply coiled in my own feeling of failure and crutching and thus shifting that feeling from the self to the other.
And this can happen to the best of us, and by best!
