Our mind is not only restive but also highly reactive. Incapable of being reflective, our mind misperceives and misbehaves. Our life centres around relationships and roles. We relate with others for emotional support to ensure and enhance our sense of security and perform various roles, familial and social; to secure in terms of pelf and position. Our routine revolves around these activities.
Encountering the persons and the problems in these processes would pose challenges to us to fine-tune our skills in behaviour, communication, and coordination. Used to mechanical and superficial functioning, we get upset being unable to bring out our potential to cope with the challenges. Unused to reflective attitude, we react with fear to every such challenge posed by a person or a problem. Instead of studying the problematic challenge, our ego unleashes the chain of emotions from fear to violence.
Our paralyzing fear, unnerving nervousness due to loss of wit and grit, impulsive irritability, tactless tantrums, remarks, rude retorts, emotional expressions and crude gestures are all attributes of our psychological violence engendered by our reactive and impulsive ego. Most of us are cultured enough to restrain ourselves from the verbal violence, but not the non-verbal violence due to the unawareness of our mindset.
Every such reaction, including the righteous ones, is booster of stress level. Though cognizant of this, we are not able to overcome our cognitive handicaps and gaps due to the lack of honest self-assessment and consistent self-awareness. We are rarely focused on the working of our mind. That is why it works us up.
Our reactive ego vitiates even the home atmosphere. Harboring prejudged notions about the mentality of our near and dear ones, kith and kin, our ego eggs us into negative reactions of misconstruing their body language, gestures and words provoking them becomes condemnatory instead of being corrective. Snubbing, rebuffing and riling, we cease to care and share.
We become gulm and grin, uncommunicative and uncooperative. They react to our reactions.We behave so absurdly that we snub and shrug off sincere love- conveying gestures of our close relative like mother, wife, and children.
Though aware of such heartless insensitivity on our part, our ego, instead of amending indulges in self-justification, vitiates the very atmosphere of the house. Spurned in their love, their ego resorts to condemnation of our insensitive behaviour giving rise to mutual acrimony. This remains a source of stress in both until it is dissolved through mutual empathizing and renewal of love.
Our thinking is so conditioned that we deem it not only unfashionable, but also undesirable to be sober, sane, individuals. The notion and usage that “a simple man is not an able man” preempts us from strengthening our self-restraint. That macho, aggressive, smuggish, sensuous and self-obsessed movie-influenced persona we try to cultivate while young being sex-obsessed, marks our personality projection.
Our parental injunctions on self-confidence, that are reinforced by our teachers seed the assumption that a ‘dashing fighter’ rather than an ‘enquiring philosopher’ is better equipped for life in a competitive worl. But the competence required for the wordly success comes out of an enquiring reflective mind not the reactive ego. Let us learn to act from the heart and not react from the ego.
Another negative fallout of our reactive mind is our compulsive reliving and reacting psycho-physiologically, upsetting our-selves several times a day for several days a month, and for several months, the hurtful interactions caused by other persons and conversely to others by us. So will be our mental conditions with regard to the reverse pleasant incidents. The mind dissipates itself replaying repeatedly the past visually, verbally and emotionally.
The article has been taken from the book ‘Art of Being and Art of Living’ by Captain KV Reddy