The way God is described (magical, mystical creature) was put into us by the surrounding. It was not there inside us by birth. Had they told (/showed) us nothing, we wouldn’t know anything about it at all (I surely wouldn’t know anything about ‘God’, had I been born in a Sentinelese tribe). The real question is not ‘Does God exist …?’ (the way it is presented), but ‘Why does the question exist …?’. The real question is not ‘How to invest/trade in the stock market …?’ but ‘Why does the stock market exist (the way it is)…?’. Is the ‘gender pay gap’ a real problem …?, are the women less paid or men overpaid …?, what is the point of reference and what justifies it …? It is very possible that for the same job, a man and a woman are being paid equally and still they both are overpaid or underpaid from some other point of reference (but in most cases they end up comparing with one another).
( Makeup Artist = Turquoise Jewelry )
( or why are farmers paid less in general …? )
It is possible that male and female writers are paid equally and they both are underpaid in an unfair way from some other perspective.
Is the argument really about gender …? What is the real question …? Is it even possible to derive the real value (the intensity of admiration which eventually turns into wealth) of anything (art, sport, technical & non-technical skillset, Gold/ diamond, certain information, IQ, ….) …? ((Video 75) – Why are Make-up artists paid more than Soldiers …?) Why is a certain amount of calories spent in one profession more important than the same amount of calories spent in another …? Why is one sport more important than other …? Is the real question ‘Why are women paid less in sports …?’ OR ‘Why are men paid in excess …?’, ‘Why is a top male badminton player paid less than a top male football player …?’, ‘Why are people willing to buy precious gemstones at double the price …?’. Does ‘pay’ have anything to do with actual work done (either in jobs or in businesses) …? Women use men as a benchmark to know ‘how much they should be paid’. What benchmark do men use …?.
We don’t want to address the real problem because we don’t know how to solve it. For the sake of satisfying our ego, we find the wrong answer to the wrong question and move on. That’s why problems don’t ever really go away (Video 237).
Is the real question ‘Who am I …?’ or ‘Who am I not …?’. Is it ever possible for a wrong/ inadequate question to have a right answer …? (Video 102). And even if we happen to get the right answer for such a question, that just means the entire ‘Question-Answer’ duo is wrong in entirety. These kinds of answers don’t last long because they never address the real problem. (In some cases, questions might be right but the intensity/importance associated with it might be wrong).
Today, we have things that our grandparents couldn’t have possibly imagined when they were young and we still have a lot of problems (personal (worry, uncertainty, anger, hatred, envy, holding grudges, not knowing what is ‘Right & Wrong’, .…), national-international conflicts, ….). What makes us think: what we do now is going to solve those problems …? Aren’t we repeating the same cycle while completely ignoring the actual fault in our psychological structure …? The future is nothing but history repeating itself with slightly different physical forms and hence not so different. Can we call something like this a development or ‘going ahead’ in life …?
(Take a pause ….)
Let’s consider a situation: You are a person with following abilities.
Assume that today no one needs you. Now if tomorrow you help someone because they needed it, should you feel inflated (no matter how small that feeling is) …? (Video 328), (Video 331). But you are still the same person you were the day before ((Video 10) – does how you feel have anything to do with your actual physical actions …? Is sports a physical event on the outside or an emotional interpretation inside …?). If we use a horse to carry a certain load, does that make the horse ‘Great’ …?
Why do we need to go into the world outside to find out what our value is …? (Video 233). Why shall one give outside events enough power to alter our emotional state …? Today they think we are unfit/incompetent, does that change who we were a day back. Tomorrow they will say we are ‘right & good’ and that still doesn’t change who we are today. Everyone has a group of well-wishers and people who resent them and it still doesn’t matter. Can people (including myself) be the measure of anything …? We might be inclined towards people who think we are ‘Good’ but we might just be fooling ourselves because we are still the same. What is anyone’s true value …?
Being yourself (or ‘My life my rule’) will not necessarily yield desirable outcomes. It certainly didn’t work for Galileo (maybe he would have been appreciated had he made the same discovery a few years later) OR Jyotirao Phule. What happened with them was completely independent of their actions and fully dependent on the emotional reaction of people around them. Not all passions will yield similar side effects. Does one’s success/ result depend on one’s righteousness or is it the other’s opinion of it …? (Video 239). What we call results are not the results at all. It is just an uninvited reaction from the people (based on their interpretation of that event) and hence completely irrelevant. We shall not look for our value in the wrong place/ system. What criteria people use to judge someone is based on their own conditioning/ experiences and we have no obligation to live up to those criteria (Video 152a). It shall make us wonder ” What if the source of evaluation criteria that we use in itself is fraudulent or incompetent …? “.
The question is never ‘what other people think of us …?’. The true hidden question is ‘Does their opinions affect us (physically, socially and financially) …?’. That’s why only the opinions of people (or a group) we depend on, bothers us. If we are independent of them (physically, financially and especially psychologically), their opinions become irrelevant.
(Note : Whenever we use word independence, what we really mean is that we are independent of one group of people, but dependent on another.)
(Take a pause ……)
Hitler (who certainly thought he was right) didn’t cause the entire genocide with his own hands (If you had the opportunity to sit in Hitler’s mind, you would have realized that he believed that he was 100% right. He never thought he was evil). He wouldn’t have been able to force anyone unless they had the subtle desire to do so ((Video 98), (Video 280) It’s easier to fool someone to buy a precious gemstone at double price than to buy a banana at double price. Precious gemstone is a desire, banana is an unavoidable necessity. The very desire for stone itself is illogical, so it never mattered if the price was doubled, tripled or quadrupled, unless totally out of budget). Maybe Hitler was there inside them crawling under the skin (invisible) and needed a slight push, which real Hitler happened to give them. Had the people put Hitler under house arrest (just like they did with Galileo), he would never have gained so much power in the first place. People liked him, because he told them what they wanted to hear (Video 35). Hitler and people around him were just the two sides of the same coin. Why did people choose Hitler over Galileo …? What does that say about people’s/ society’s tendency …? Should one follow/ copy people like these …? One might say “People also admired Gandhi’ and that makes them random with no personal sense of right and wrong. They just stumbled upon people randomly.
(Video 45) – You give people hands, they may slap each other. Give them mouth, they may curse at one another. Give people stones, they will break each other’s skull open. Give them a sword, they will slice others. Give them guns, they will shoot each other. Give them AI (Artificial Intelligence), they will misuse it to harm someone. Give them roads, they will drink & drive and cause accidents.
But we find it easier to blame one person than to blame many. In blaming one single person, one can extract a feeling of certainty. Blaming a group is making vague accusations (and also we are powerless against large groups), there is no one to point fingers at and hence no certainty. We (humans) for some strange reason don’t like uncertainty or at least don’t know how to deal with it. So we start looking for certainty (or create false certainty). We choose the path of least resistance so as to arrive at the conclusion faster than going through troublesome investigation, even if it comes at the cost of a wrong conclusion. And we are more interested in closing the matter and moving on to the next one than to stick to one issue and go deeper in it. Maybe we don’t want to feel like “I am not smart enough to solve this problem” or whatever.
[ Again : The other reason we look for wrong solutions is because we don’t want to feel like a powerless person and hence we use wrong answers to soothe our ego or to give ourselves false comfort that “Look, I am doing something. I am not incompetent. I have the ability to solve the problem.” (Video 237). ]
We make a bigger enemy out of Hitler than people around him mostly because it is easier to do so, but that doesn’t make it right. Hitler and people around him were exactly equally responsible. Maybe Hitler was just another troubled kid who got un-necessary encouragement from people who had no personal sense of right/ wrong. If precious gemstones and Gold (something that does not have life in it) can control our psyche, so can Hitler or anything for that matter (including a person, religion, material/non-material thing, tradition, ….). There is no wonder in it. We can’t be fooled unless we are one. Thieves don’t steal from empty houses.
Even inside families and out in society, we end up blaming people around us, maybe because it’s easier than to go to the root cause of the problem. We get mad at people (or hold subtle grudges) for not behaving in a certain way, not doing something a certain way, …., because society had certain subtle (unexpressed) expectations from them and he/she didn’t live up to it. We don’t see the invisible forces behind our (so-called) normal actions unless we make an attempt to go in the opposite direction. We hold weak people responsible because we can and not because we are right (Video 325). It’s easier to point fingers at one single person (something that we can control irrespective of the objectivity) than a large group irrespective of whether that’s the real problem or not. And the cycle goes on forever.
Are we being society for someone else (no matter how small that thing is)…? (OR are we being a ‘Pope’ to an unknown future ‘Galileo’ …?), are we holding someone else hostage …?
Pointing fingers at the wrong question is meaningless. No matter how right the answer is, if the question doesn’t represent the actual problem, then it will never go away (it will keep recurring in different physical forms).
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