All I know about computers is what we learnt in primary school, that is, they take inputs, process them and give output. How funny because it is what we humans do as well. The only difference is that computers cannot be conscious that is why they unconsciously do it, but humans can be conscious but still we choose to unconsciously do it. The difference is not in conscious and unconscious. The difference is in the reason why both are unconscious.
See it this way, there is a wonderful machine inside all of us running 24*7 tirelessly like your CPU. And we put up a face and roam all over boasting ourselves like your monitor. Now the monitor thinks he is the most important device and lives by. Poor cpu works backstage and nobody notices. There is no access to cpu/intelligence other than through the monitor. So it is like a middleman, If you want to access the consciousness/intelligence that is inside, you need to go through this externally constructed human personality or ego. Which works well enough but takes credit for owning the machine itself.
Now coming to inputs and outputs, I have written on it in another story called Clarity in chaos. Where I have said that our body, senses, 9 orifices, locomotion, talking and few other subtle activities are both input and output devices. But in humans taking input, processing and output is all happening at the same time in any given moment. We are continuously absorbing inputs, continuously processing and continuously giving output, no matter what you are doing.
The things we do and things that happen to us, is the expectation we have from ourselves. Here it is the machine inside us which does all the work. We do not know how the machine works, we are not conscious of it. Machine sounds absurd, you can also call it Life-force/ Soul/ Human intelligence which has evolved from billions of years/ Life itself. We are not conscious of it, we are in our monitor consciousness. But there is this life inside all of us.
So now when we know this amazing, efficient and tireless Life is responsible for everything we are or do, can we not study and understand ourselves better and give out improved and fantastic outputs?
How can we do it?
We know that anything and everything we do is both output and input, so if we are aware of what we are feeding ourselves as input in any given moment, we can take a guess on how our output can be in the near future. If we start taking care of our inputs, we have automatically taken care of output.
If we can’t be conscious of life-energy inside us, we can at least choose the inputs we are sending to it. Look, the machine has no preference or doesn’t know to distinguish between good and bad. It is just pure life. You feed good, it processes good and good output. You feed bad, it processes bad and bad output. If we unconsciously just go by everything, we become a mess. But if I consciously filter my inputs as to what I need my machine to process and what not, you can undoubtedly expect good output from yourself.
For example the education we all have got. Do you remember every single word, sentence and concepts you learnt over the years? No, then how can you say you are educated? It is because, though we do not consciously remember everything, our machine has processed and knows it in some form. And we can bring it out in any form we want.
Similarly when you read a book, it doesn’t matter if you will be able to recite it back to someone or not. All that matters is you are choosing to read that book, so that it becomes the input of your machine and in some form or the other it will come out in your life and work wonders.
If you are scrolling through social media, you are feeding inputs. If you are watching a you-tube video, you are feeding input. If you get attracted by the juicy title of a video and want to see it right away, you are unconsciously choosing that video as your input. Where in case the video is bullshit, you are feeding yourself bullshit!
Well obviously there are exceptions, human tendency is curiosity towards gossip. But if you are not excited about something, but just want to entertain yourself and kill some time, you can do it consciously. Even then it is your input, you can’t stop the machine from processing conscious inputs.
Reading books is different from watching videos, everyone knows it. The difference is you WATCH a video and when you read you will LIVE a little of the book yourself. So once you finish the journey set by the author, you will come out having experienced something and not just feeding words or information. You will have grown a little.
That is because reading is a slower way of telling a story and it runs depending on your ability of imagination, when compared to videos or movies. You do some hard work to read and nothing with videos.
You go through the journey and continuously second guess the story, use your brain to think, imagine, guess and come up with the best possible scenario, all this because you have time until you read each and every word and sentence just to know the story- the whole book- say 2 days per book.
But watching an intense movie or video in 3 hours is just accepting whatever is being shown, though you second guess here too, but it is not powerful, when it is so beautifully and colorfully made for you, why imagine and spoil it?
I’m not endorsing reading books just because I like to read. My point is, instead of thinking that, we are doing all the hard work but still unable to fulfill our expectations of ourselves, if we smartly filter or take care about our inputs everything else takes care of itself. You don’t always have to do the hard work, you can make/build yourselves better so that you can do better. Instead of concentrating only on actions, concentrate on what we are consciously and unconsciously receiving. This applies to both body and mind, physically and mentally.
This is a simple technique I saw becoming a pattern. Though I’m never satisfied with how much I read, I have a satisfaction of how reading has affected and changed me over the years. I would never purposefully want to stop reading.
It is said we grow mentally upto 15 years of age, we believe it and stop growing. We think we GROW until we become adults and then we LIVE life! So we stop growing and get stuck at a certain age, though our body grows. This is so wrong. Our physical brain might stop growing but we as a person should never stop growing.
At 26 if I still hold the growth of an 18 year old, still work based on the same old values, experiences, lessons and most importantly the upbringing I had back then, then I’m screwed. It only means I grew only until I was brought up by my parents after that I stopped growing! Doesn’t that sound stupid? Until a certain age I was completely dependent so I needed bringing up, but after a certain age I should continue to grow on my own, and not stop growing! Call it evolving.
But you as a life will not stop evolving, you find whatever around you take them in and grow. You just don’t know you are evolving, but you are.You are fooled that the technology alone is evolving! You believe an inert and lifeless technology is evolving around you and you don’t look at a life energy inside you which is continuously evolving from countless years. If a monitor and cpu can evolve and become a laptop, imagine what you can make of yourself?
Ask yourself if you still need external support to evolve like an inert-lifeless device or are you alive enough to evolve consciously on your own?
Doesn’t matter what you choose to do, just remember that everything you do is adding up to your evolution. I choose to meditate and read just for me, not to gather information/facts (deep down which means nothing to me) and recite it back.
Well please do not mistake this with STUDYING a particular discipline independently.
And thanks for reading!
Very thoughtful
ReplyDelete