Identity and Personality

One of the most Intriguing and disturbing Novella, I have ever read is METAMORPHOSIS by Francis Kafka.

In that novel a salesman, goes to bed and on waking up the next morning finds him transformed into a giant Insect. He is horrified and terrified and the novella then captures all the essence of everything that happens when a unexpected change happens. I was extremely thrilled to read the novel and was amused how a human mind can leap to such high to create such a master piece.

Years later, I was into psychology and started reading all the Psychological writings available. When I wanted to trace the origination point of western psychology, I had to end up with Philosophies of western world. I took a tour of it and returned to read Psychological writings by Indian and of India. To my surprise I found very little. So when I start searching for them intensely, one thing hit me. If we need to read psychology in India, it Is in the epics and in the Philosophies. Why would all Upanishads start with a story and then try to explain the most complex universal structure.

Two of the most important Philosophical Indian text, which I consider as the ultimatum of Psychology, is The Bhaghavath Gita and the Yoga Vashishta. If one can perceive these two texts with some depth, I can say he has seen all in psychic realms. Among the two i was blown away by Yoga Vashishta.

The Period of Yoga Vashishta is a uncertain. It is said 6^th century text by some and 14^th century by other. But we see a pattern very similar to Upanishad. Its starts with a story, the story here is RAMA who is a warrior philosopher, is in a great confusion about reality. He has questions like is there a single realty or multiple realities and what is his role if there is multiple realities? Will his Identity change if he is in multiple realities? Vashishta, a wise sage clears his doubts through parables.

In one story there is a king called Lavana. One fine day he wakes up and finds himself as a Shudra (There are four types of layers in Indian society humans based on their roles and the work that is to be done; they are Brahman – To acquire and spread knowledge; Kshatriya – To protect Brahman and other people from Danger and give Just rule; Vaisya – To build business and trade which brings money to the kingdom and to act as peace and marriage ambassadors for kingdom; Shudra – the tools men who make things that enables Kshatriya and vaisya to perform their role better). Lavana was confused and then it was found that he was hypnotized by court medicinal.

When I read Yoga Vashishta, almost 10 years have gone by since I read METAMORPHOSIS. The striking was hard as the conclusion of both the stories gave me the same feeling. Identity is the main theme for both the stories. The stories may be separated by time, but time is like a shore of a same wild Big river, tells Upanishads.

Identity is the most basic thing which gives a man his sanity and an understanding of his world around him. If a human does not have awareness of his/her Identity it would be the biggest problem of one’s life. Because Identity is the one which gives the skill set and behavior for a person to be social with the world that he is in. Identity shapes one’s personality. Identity is the awareness, and personality is the image.

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The Middle Path

Words are always liberally used. One should pay attention; One should have responsibility are some of the common clichéd dialog people often utter. This New Year many people would have taken the same old resolution that many do but seldom keep and follow. The motto of this year is to get fit and stay focused; many of us would have this in mind. Some might even have taken membership at local gym. If that is the case we are very happy for you and wish you good luck to achieve the goal you intend.

What must be taken into consideration is that our resolution should not be those words that are liberally used and often forgotten. Exercising is good in many ways. It keeps all the chemicals balanced in our body and makes us rejenuate ourselves. The regular schedule in the gym might be weight training for a day, cardio for another, Upper torso for the third and Legs for the four and fifth day is round robin training and sixth day would be mixture of cardio and weight and seventh day would be a rest. If you see you are training one part all the day, and that part is called CORE. This part gets trained every day because it is the connection point of upper torso and lower body. So if you train your upper torso, it is impossible that your core is not worked up. The same with lower body and legs, if you work them out you sure are working core too.

The connection is so important; one of the greatest martial artists in the history Bruce lee worked it out like crazy. For him if one trains the CORE he is very hard to beat by any other martial artist. His famous ONE INCH PUNCH came from the strength of the CORE. Yoga is a practice which focuses on CORE than anything else, and same with martial art training. If you are familiar with martial art practice like KALARI and SILAMBAM, you would sure know how much importance they put on CORE Training.

This is about our physical form and its transformation. What about our Psychic form and its transformation? I think most of us would agree by the statement that we go through two experiences all the time. The self-experience where we experience more about our own needs, priorities and desires are the first type experience. The second one is we placing ourselves in a world where we have to hear, see and speak with other people. Now if we consider the Self world as upper torso, and the you world or the outer world is the lower body, what would be the CORE that connects those both things?

The CORE for those two things is paying attention. Being observant is the only way that the both the two worlds can be perceived in a sane way. The more we train the CORE we can have a better and quality Psychic transformation.

This is the Middle path that Buddha preached. This is the ADVAITHA (NOT TWO) taught by Shankaracharya, and this is the Entanglement of Quantum Mechanics.

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ART OR SCIENCE

We humans love to differentiate. We say some are introvert, and some others are extroverts. We have our choices and we fight over them. One such great fight is Right Brainers vs. Left Brainers. People who are not good with math or science concepts think that they are right brainers. And there is a perception that people who are right brainers are creators, artists and experiencers, while left brainers are all about Logic, System, Symmetry and Exploration. How true are these things? Let’s explore (oh, am I a left brainer??!!!!)

What do we understand from the above diagram? It is simple to say that right brainers are Artists and Left Brainers are scientists. The wiring between the neurons enables us to develop a certain pattern. The fact is we CREATE these connections, ourselves.

Yes, WE; propelled by our most deep emotion that drives us; forms our thinking pattern. So WE practice our entire life to be a right brainer or a lefty. The thinking pattern is established due to the connection of neurons which is more than all stars in the whole universe. The cause for those patterns is the basic emotion that is the most basic, primitive us. Let’s get to that in a different post. This post is trying to analyze why it is always Art vs. Science; rather than Arts and Science.

So as we said Arts have a different pattern of thinking and Science has another pattern. Let’s discuss these patterns first, so as we can have a general idea of thinking. Thinking means not just knowing stuffs, data. Rather it is the starting point and we work on it. That working on the data part is called thinking. It is generally known that we can do it in two ways. We can take all the data and correlate and we can compile. This mode of thinking is used in Science as most of the data available. The other way is you do stuff and be aware of what you are doing then dissect it and understand it. This is basically done in the arts. So people who have chosen to follow the first pattern are called left brainers and the people who practiced second pattern fall under the right brainers.

The words usually are very useful but can be decisive on certain instances. The word Beautiful is always associated with Arts and Invention is associated with Science. Let’s see two people

 

Paul Dirac

He is the man who produced the most BEAUTIFUL EQUATION on ENTANGLEMENT.

Einstein

He is the man who gave us the BEAUTIFUL theory of Relativity.

 

Coming to Invention, we also have two personalities:

Bruce Lee

He is the man who INVENTED a new fighting style

 

Picasso

Have you heard of a painting method called Cubism? He INVENTED it.

So how come Scientist used to think and express beautifully and Artists can invent something. The magic is the unification. People who are aware of their thinking pattern go to the other pattern and experience and at that moment GENIUS is born. It can be better represented by the picture below.

In order the above picture to happen one must know his thinking pattern. To know one’s thinking pattern, one should be aware of his basic emotion that drives him. Reach us to know what it is.

The Evolution of thinking and concept of GOD

The word Idea can never be used alone. It should be associated either with an Individual or with the society. So if the evolution of a being is true then one must conclude that the ideas and the structure of thinking must also have evolved. We know that when we evolved as human beings some complex patterns developed in a short span of time. The survival is the first and foremost thing that a human is concerned of. We can find his survival matters most even than mating. But does this survival always concerned with body alone? How and when could a man have thought about his soul, brain and mind? Does the survival of mind matter more as much as body? It seems it is, that is why the concepts about GOD, Marriage, Society evolved and came into existence.

One cannot understand these concepts without knowing the historicity of these concepts. Confusions and controversies happen when people enter into a conversation or worse a debate about these things without giving the considerations of the historicity. Everyone would agree when I say that humans love to narrate stories. But anyone wondered why? The story or narration is used by human species as a tool to carry on the concepts for a considerable amount of time. In the words of Yan Martel “As a non-fiction, for History, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If History doesn’t become story it dies to everyone except for historians. Art is a suitcase that carries History”.

So now we know two things from the above statement; One, if we try to explore how much the concepts of God, and other things are evolved we can accurately pin point the ancientness of a Culture; Second why the same story is being depicted in different art forms such as paintings, drama and folk-lore music. Let’s just take the concept of GOD and try to explore the evolution of thinking that helped Human beings survived in midst of a rapid endangered environment. The GODs were the result of the basic emotion of a Human; FEAR. He FEARED things and hence he needed a helping hand to soothe his frightful mind, thus the concept originated. Then it had grown so huge that the basic thinking which was the reason for the birth of the concept is denied as Heresy.

In Indian subcontinent the evolution of this concept can be treated in four levels. As the basic soothing is achieved man expanded the Idea of GOD as DUTY GOD (ஏவல் தெய்வங்கள்) where the GODS have the power to provide the essentials demolish things for the welfare of humans. This is the first leg evolution. The second leg of GOD is that of PROTECTIVE GOD ( காவல் தெய்வங்கள்) whose duty Is to protect the humans from all the endangers that might cause his extinction. The Third Leg of Evolution of the concept is the ALMIGHTY GOD ( படைப்புக் கடவுள்) where GODS became GOD and it became Omnipotent and Omnipresent. But for certain people; only for a bunch of people there is the final part in this evolution, which is PHILOSOPHICAL GOD (தத்துவார்த்தக் கடவுள்) this is the ultimate realization of the self. People who are fortunate to have a traditional knowledge would definitely see the hierarchy in this. A god who only provides and destructs is inferior to the one which protects; the protecting god is inferior to this omnipotent god. People usually stop there. The story ends when it comes to Omnipotent. There is no next stage possible. This is a danger when we see a Story without Historicity. So History without story is dead to many. A Story without historicity is distorted by many.

The People with immense knowledge created religion and put these gods, because they wanted to convey these are the steps you climb and reach the ultimatum i.e. PHILOSOPHICAL GOD. There are many examples; ATMAN In Hinduism and NIRVANA in Buddhism are the Philosophical GODS that one should seek to attain. A wise man would use all other GODS as tools to reach the Ultimatum. It is not religion for him but a thought process which has evolved and Matured from a long time experience of his species.

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