On my trip to Germany, I play a card game with the boys. Needless to say, I got emotionally involved. Yesterday, as I was losing big, I asked myself, why do we get so hung up about it? Isn’t the notion of “I” just like that? Why do we distinguish the happenings as good, bad, indifferent? Who is it who decides anyway?
The physicist David Bohm summed up the conversation with J. Krishnamurti in the following way. He said, the notion of I was once a thought, and since then all psychological happenings over the eons were used to strengthen this concept. We are wired not to question that reference point. More than that, we are internally discouraged to ask questions.
Equanimity of mind about life’s happenings has to be earned, it cannot be stoically imposed. I mean we can, but then we are just repressing what is implicitly meaningful to us in the name of spirituality. No, when we face openly and alertly how we think and feel about situations, we have a shot into inquiring who is behind all these sentiments.
When I inquired about the 500-point loss in the card game yesterday, not why I lost, but rather why I cared in the first place, the whole structure of competitive winning and losing unraveled. Do that form of self inquiry for a while. While we can’t be alert all the time, we can be open to life’s events with an inquiring mindset. Get to the root of the “I” notion and dissolve it.
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