Vipul Agarwal, Delhi, May 26, 2023
I see many people always feeling tired. While there are many others who are always full of energy. Sometimes, there may be some underlying physical reasons like deficiency of certain nutrients. However, in most cases, this lack of energy is psychological. The primary reason is the loss of energy in conflict within us.
We take hundreds of decisions each day. From the first decision in the morning “whether to leave the bed or not?” to the bigger decisions like “whether to marry a person or not?”. While taking all these decisions, we keep weighing the expected pleasures and pains of such decisions. For example, getting up from bed in the morning will result in starting the day, reaching the office on time, and sending the kids to school on time. Continuing to sleep will give more rest to the body. All these outcomes are weighed by the mind each time we take a decision. Most of the time, the unconscious mind is at task, and we are not aware of this calculation taking place inside us.
Most of the time we get tired because there are conflicts within our minds. At the time of taking the decisions, these conflicts come to the surface and start dragging us in different directions. It’s not a problem to have conflicts, the problem is not to have clear priorities in our mind. When we do not have clear priorities in our minds, we keep struggling with the decisions and waste a lot of time and energy in taking the decisions.
There are 3 reasons for this confusion:
• Changes in ecosystem
• Being unaware of the unconscious mind
• Little understanding of life
Changes in eco-system
This is one of the most important external causes of conflicts. With the development of the modes of transportation, there is fast movement of people across the world. Many of us come from villages and small towns and get settled in big cities and sometimes in different countries. It results in widespread changes in the ecosystems. Our thinking process is largely the outcome of social conditioning. We start thinking the way our parents and society at large think and feel. With such changes, we develop a lot of conflicts. During my interactions with the Indians settled abroad, I could notice many such conflicts. Like the conflict between individual freedom and community traditions. Rights and wrongs are also defined in different ways in different societies. Divorce may be a no-no in India and may be quite a norm in some other countries. Respecting elders may be a much-appreciated value in India, while adult-to-adult relations may be more preferred in certain countries even between the parents and the kids.
Being unaware of the unconscious mind
This is the primary psychological reason for the conflicts. There are two broad divisions of our mind: emotional and rational. The emotional mind divides everything into desirable and undesirable based on past experiences. In traditional Indian families, liquor and smoking are a strict no. The emotional mind of a child born and brought up in such a family starts considering them to be undesirable. When he goes to the hostel, under peer pressure or with an equally strong desire to experiment and explore, he starts taking liquor and smoking cigarettes and these things become desirable until their ill effects on health are visible and they again become undesirable.
We remain conscious of a very small part of the emotional mind. Most of it plays at an unconscious level. The conscious part is like the waves in the ocean and the unconscious is like the strong ocean currents. When we keep doing certain things repeatedly, they become part of our unconscious. The unconscious mind is the storehouse of our mental likes and dislikes. That is the reason why there is a conflict when doctors advise us not to take liquor or to smoke. We get addicted to the pleasure felt by our mind each time we drink liquor or smoke cigarettes and it becomes a habit of the brain. These pleasures are nothing but a dose of neurotransmitters released into our body when we undertake such activities. These neurotransmitters are broadly adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin.
Since we have got addicted to these neurotransmitters, the unconscious mind demands a regular dose of these neurotransmitters. Even if the conscious part of the emotional mind wants to be healthy and leave these addictions, the unconscious part of the emotional mind does not allow this to happen and the entire energy is wasted in this conflict.
This is an extreme example of the conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. Similar conflicts occur almost all the time. The unconscious mind wants us to sleep further and the conscious mind wants us to leave the bed and take tea. The unconscious mind wants us to play with friends and the conscious mind wants us to study to get better marks. The unconscious mind wants us to stay with our parents while the conscious mind wants to settle in a different country having better career prospects. The unconscious mind wants us to gain powers and the conscious mind wants to set up systems.
This is an ongoing tussle all the time. This results in the loss of energy and time. The rational mind is the logical mind that provides us logic. However, It is like the minister who provides logic to support the decisions made by the king. If the unconscious mind rules, it provides logic to support that and if the conscious mind rules, it provides logic to support that.
There is always an ongoing conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. The conflict between career and relationship, one friend and the other, one career option and the other, and so on. At the unconscious level also conflicts exist between the desire for power and comfort, the desire for social validation, and individual excellence. There are so many conflicts all across the mind.
Little understanding of life
The underlying reason for all the conflicts referred to above is the little understanding of life. We hardly ever invest time and energy in understanding life. We are conscious of only the waves on the surface of the ocean and life is quite deep. It needs time and orientation to find the deeper meaning of life. Since we stay at the surface of the ocean, the underlying ocean currents keep impacting our lives without us being aware of the same.
Due to this shallow understanding of life, our conscious as well as unconscious mind keep storing the list of desirable and undesirable outcomes without being able to decide their relative importance in our lives. There are some, who get fixated on certain desires and start ignoring the others. For example, Ravana getting fixated on Sita. They get fixated on a wave on the surface of the ocean without realizing that it is the nature of the wave to die. This leads to gross meaninglessness in their lives.
Most of us consider certain waves on the surface of the ocean to be desirable and others to be undesirable ignoring the fact that both are temporary. It happens because we lack any alternative motivations. I have listened to many of my friends and relatives saying that if we do not have the desires left, how will we live life. In fact, that is the greatest reason they do not wish to understand life.
The problem is that the frog in the well can never realize the fun of staying in the ocean. Freedom carries no value to the one who is mentally reconciled to slavery. It is also a fact that once the frog in the well comes out of the well, it would never like to go back. The problem lies in the motivation to come out of the well.
The moment we come out of the well and see the vastness of life, all confusions drop. We understand the relative significance of different desires. We understand that the purpose of life is expansion. We have to exercise the freedom that comes with realization of the reality and explore all the possibilities that exist in this world for the body and the mind to explore. The desire for pleasantness and aversion to unpleasantness relegates to the background. It no longer carries that much significance in our life. Exploration becomes the primary focus of life and it can very well adjust to the unpleasantness created by unfulfilled desires. In fact, the desires in the conscious and the unconscious mind also start aligning with the larger aim of life. That brings focus and we are able to carry out all the tasks at ease and feel more fulfilled in life.
