The title might remind you of the “Me talking to me” meme of Nithyananda. But really, when I look around people and myself sometimes, I see that we are a nothing but a bunch of zombies or for the elite among us – under Imperius Curse. No, no – I am not against technology or social media and am not propagating the idea that we should all go back and live in caves. But, next time you do something – anything, just stop a moment and think “Did I decide to do ‘this whatever’ I am doing”. Why and how did I happen to end up doing this.
Take a simple case of unlocking your phone. In a day, backed with statistical proof, I can safely assume that we unlock over 100 times, easily, even for a conservative user like me. It is probably double or more for others. So, I pick up the phone 100 times and do something with it. Now, of these 100 times, about 95+ times I have no idea why I picked up the phone till it is already unlocked and am staring at some stupid app.
So I decided to slow-mo or unwind this process and try and act with full intent and under complete consiousness. Like, if I have to do something, I need to first analyze and decide to do it. That is when I realized the immense difficulty of this seemingly benign process. For the first few days, I didn’t even last few minutes. As a random example, I would be in some Chrome Tab, browsing some website before it hit me that I never deliberately wanted to do it in the first place. Slowly I was making progess and now I last a few hours with full control over my actions. I did it purely out of self interest and as a fun activity (am I being Holt as Smith would say), but it did throw up interesting results.
It helped me observe similar and stronger patterns in people around me. It also led me to think of the ‘Head Office’ inside us that was directing us to do things which consiously we were not aware. We can just term it as our subconsious self but the more I think about it the more interesting it seems to me that something can control us from within without our explicit approval. For a lack of a better analogy, this seems almost like a Computer Virus, an intelligent program that is capable of silently taking over the entire system, with or without malicious intent.
But then, Think about it for a moment. This same inner intelligence also does 100s of other important activities like pumping blood, heart beat, digestion and so on. So, we can’t term it as malicious but does it have its own agenda or goals that it is trying to fulfill through us – like the classic ghosts of Indian movies. Will ponder more on this. (Updated later: Didn’t have to ponder for long as most were answered by genetics – benefit of reading on a broad range of topics I guess)
