This is the part 3 of the “You are a hypocrite!” series. In part 1, we understood that every person is a hypocrite. In part 2, we got a bit of insight about the irrational and rational part of our mind. In this part, let’s explore a beautiful way of controlling your mind and using it to your own advantage.
I was reading this beautiful book recently called Energize Your Mind by Gaur Gopal Das. The book covers a wide range of topics, including stress management, overcoming negative thoughts, building positive habits, and finding meaning and purpose in life. There is a chapter in the book titled ‘Joshua slips away’. I really love the way an analogy is established between our mind and a child. To summarize that chapter, it is about an experience of Gaur Gopal Das ji at the London airport where a really young child named Joshua is lost and his family is completely panicked and they are unable to find the child and everyone present there is searching for the child. Later they find that the child playing near the fountain. So Gaur Gopal Das ji say that, our mind is also like Joshua. Do check out the book if you want to read what he said in detail. In this blog, I will give you my own interpretation of this.
In the last blog, I had shared a survey where I had asked a few really basic level questions about parenting. Based on the answers you have given, turns out most of you are already familiar how to introspect and make yourself better! The only thing you need to know is how similar it is to raising a child. This might sound a bit confusing at first. How is raising a child and introspecting analogous? Well, let me give you some examples so you can better understand.
Imagine a child who is throwing a tantrum because he/she does not want to eat medicine. How do you handle the child? One option is to incentivize the child. For eg: “If you eat this medicine, you will become strong and intelligent like Iron Man!”. Another option is fear. For eg: “If you don’t eat this medicine, Doctor uncle will have to give you an injection! Let me tell him to bring the injection”. Now imagine the time from your student days when you were trying so hard to study, but you weren’t able to. Your mind was throwing tantrums. “I don’t want to study, this is so boring!”, the mind says. You have 2 options, incentive or fear. You tell yourself, “Study for one more day and I will pass with flying colors!” or “If I don’t study, I will fail!”. Now this was a relatively simple example but I hope you can see the analogy.
The only real difference between the 2 situations is the involvement of the word ‘I’. That’s the single word where everything falls apart. All our biases, complexes, emotions and our hypocrisy come into picture and rationality goes out of the window. The secret is to treat your mind as a separate individual entity like your child and not like yourself. Use the word ‘You’ instead of ‘I’.
Let me give you one more example. You all might have noticed this. Young children tend to cry when they are hungry. They also tend to cry when no one is giving them attention or they just want to throw a tantrum because something did not go their way. A mother more often than not understands what is going on in the baby’s mind, whether it is hungry or is just throwing a tantrum and no action is needed as such. Your mind as well throws tantrums, does things that holds you back because it is not comfortable. Your mind also cries when it is in real pain. You need to be the mother of your mind and understand what is the situation right now, and behave accordingly.
Now some of you readers might think that when does the mind throw a tantrum? Procrastination of some work is a simple example of that. You know very well that the work needs to be done, but just because your mind feels like not doing it, it throws a tantrum and you end up delaying the work. When does the mind genuinely need help (child is hungry)? For example, you have gone through a breakup recently, you have failed an exam recently, you have lost a family member recently, you were laid off from your job recently, there are countless examples. These are things where the mind genuinely needs your help. If you are a workaholic person, your mind genuinely needs rest but you constantly keep it running. Just like a very strict parent constantly scolding their child and not giving the love or pampering they require in times of need.
To face this world, you need to make your child tough, only pampering won’t work. Similarly, constantly listening and reacting/obeying to all the tantrums that your mind throws at you will make you a weak person and you won’t be able to succeed in life. So next time you see an iPhone commercial and are tempted to buy it without having the budget, think of it like your child is throwing a tantrum because you are not buying him/her an unaffordable toy when he/she has many toys already.
In case you are curious, here are the survey responses. Most of you have selected that you should sometimes pamper a child but not always, sometimes praise a child but not always, sometimes scold your child but not always. Similarly, you should sometimes pamper your mind, for eg, take a cheat meal in your diet plan but not always, sometimes praise your mind so you don’t get underconfident, but praising always will lead to overconfidence and ego, sometimes scold your mind for behaviours it should not have engaged into, give the mind everything that it requires but not everything that it asks for, similar to your child.
Parenting is a skill and so is handling your mind. And like any other skill, this can be mastered by continuous and persistant practice. I hope that all of us become expert at this one day. This brings an end to my “You are a hypocrite” series, hope you enjoyed it! Do let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Will meet you in the next blog with a new topic. Until then, bye-bye!