Yesterday, today and tomorrow

There is a modern sculpture in upstate New York by Arnaldo Pomodoro, Triad, which has three very tall vertical cylinders identical in diameter and height. The first is almost entirely covered by a shiny metal sheath, with only a little bit open to show the inside, which looks like the innards of machinery. The second one is much more open, maybe half or so, and has no shine. The third is almost entirely open, and what is left of the exterior appears burnt and peeling. They represent the future, the present and the past. The future is shrouded, the present is much more open to view, and the past is the most open to view. 

This is an excellent metaphor for the most fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Throughout the world, you see that conservatives are far more certain of what to do than  liberals. That is because conservatives are basically guided by the traditions and beliefs of the past, while liberals are looking for ways to create a better future by abandoning the dogmas and prejudices of the past. Conservatism is an inertial force, seeking to avoid change, liberalism is progressive, embracing change in seeking intellectual freedom. Conservatives would like the future to behaviorally be basically the same as the past, maybe even the very distant past as in the case of religious zealots. Liberals would like to filter out anachronistic beliefs, not allow the future to be weighed down by sedimentation of the past.  The attitudes to women, caste, gays, illuminate the distinction. Its a question of what drives behaviour: the shiny but uncertain future, or the burnt and peeling past.  Orthodoxy is no different to superstition, it isnt rational, it holds us hostage to the past, straight-arming fresh evidence and thinking. 

At yet another level, this gives an insight into our own development. How much time do we spend trying to figure out the future, how much brooding on the past, and how much on actually living in the moment. We actually cannot live in any one domain. If we live entirely in the present, be 'present' to the moment as some new age-y types would have us be, our lives would be a train wreck. We have to spend time reflecting on the past, and on anticipating the future, while living in the present, where our lives are crafted at the confluence of the experience and momentum of the past with the dreams, aspirations and challenges of the future. Any domain embraced at the cost of the others, any domain neglected, will send life off at a tangent. We need to balance the three, a balance that is personal and will need to change constantly, depending on the situation. 

Life as a dynamic balance between the past, the present and the future. The life well lived leans forward into the future, relinquishing the detritus of the past.

I and not I

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that the biggest  block to our lives both temporal and spiritual is the ego. A big truth hidden in plain sight - the ego is a monster, much bigger and much more pervasive than we imagine, a majorly damaging and mercurial aspect of our selves. Mercurial not only in its effect on our personalities, but also literally in that you cannot pin it down any more than you can pin down mercury - when you think you have a grip on it, it balloons out in a different direction.

What is this ego? It is essentially a feeling of superiority over others in an attempt to feel good about ourselves. In part it can be based on pride. We are proud of our achievements, we are proud of our god-given characteristics like intelligence, looks, natural skills, which distinguish us from the herd. We are even proud of our birth ("I come from a 'good' family, country, community....") which like our physical characteristics is not an achievement at all. Pride in characteristics we have not created is silly, and is pure ego. Pride in achievements is justified. If you do good work, there is no harm in feeling proud of that work, of achievement. Pride is fine as long as it is just a good feeling about real achievement, and as a positive payoff that encourages you to achieve more, but not as  arrogance, as self aggrandisement, as feeling superior to others.

Pride in achievement does lead to 'ego inflation', that is a pretty universal human frailty, the question is how much and for how long. That is a measure of character - the greater the inflation and the longer it lasts (a lifetime?), the less the character; the less the inflation and the shorter it lasts, the more the character. Ego is an ugly outgrowth of pride, like a wart on a face. Those with character have their eyes open to this, can see the wart and get rid of it, those who dont have character are blind to their faults, and display their warts blindly, with arrogance, for all to see.

Which brings us right to the heart of ego, arrogance. Arrogance is never justified, based as it is on qualities we arrogate to ourselves, superiorities that don't really hold up to light. Everyone claims to be a good boss, and to have a lousy boss, but if we are all good bosses who are the bad ones? Same thing on parenting.  Everyone had damaging parents, yet nobody admits to being one. Arrogance can feed off the same achievements as pride. Being good at something or having stellar achievements in some areas doesn't really make you a superior person, yet we nurture that fallacy. Arrogance is an essential ingredient of ego, inseparable from it, a way of aggrandising ourselves. The more ego we have, the more we aggrandise ourselves, the more we find cause to aggrandise ourselves the more ego we develop. Ego can feed on itself.

There is another critical factor that builds ego, and that is a sense of inadequacy, inferiority. The more we suffer from the deflation that comes from a feeling of inferiority or inadequacy, the more we want to inflate those parts of the personality that yield to ego. Ego is often just a means of papering over the cracks in our own personalities. A sense of inadequacy makes it difficult to deal with the world, ego kicks in as a means of bolstering our resolve, a coping mechanism. Actually a feeling of inadequacy is nothing but an expression of ego, which does not want to accept limitations and sees them as shameful flaws. Humility accepts limitations with equanimity, accepts that we have flaws, that we are not perfect. Being so quick to judge others is pretty much the same thing; we use the perceived weaknesses of others to make a flattering comparison with our own flawed selves. Ego has at least as much to do with our inadequacies and insecurities as with our triumphs and strengths.

Ego in this sense is the opposite of humility. Both exist in the same individual, in all of us. In some ways we are humble, in other ways we display ego. Each of us will see our humilities rather more easily than our egos, the other way around for others. People who are highly egoistic can be surprisingly humble in some ways, and people who are quite humble can have a roaring ego in other ways.

In effect then, ego causes us to see a distorted picture of ourselves and others, driven by our own self aggrandisement and self abnegation relative to others. This distorts our behaviour, our interaction with others and can take us all the way to delusional behaviour.  We can see the distortions as phony behaviour in others  rather more clearly than in ourselves. But we can be sure that the more intolerant we are of others, the greater the vulnerabilities of our own ego. Its our way of getting even, cutting others down to our size - or smaller. Seen in this light, a lot of anger is also just a display of ego - though maybe not all, what about anger at evil?

A lot of these distortions in perception and behaviour are enabled by the pressures of living. We have to deal with people with power over us, people have to deal with us in situations where we have power over them. These situations cut across different domains, social, family, career, governmental. The dynamics can lead to intrinsically symbiotic situations which are prone to distortions in behaviour on both sides. Maintaining equanimity requires the ability to remain detached, not be deferential and sycophantic, and perhaps even quietly speak truth to power, and conversely to wear power lightly, and accept having truth spoken to us without getting upset. Integrity gets seriously challenged in these situations, and over time can get distorted.

At a very fundamental level all of this has to do with seeing ourselves as distinct and different to others. That is what makes us self conscious in the truest sense of the term. What is true in the temporal world also holds true in the spiritual. Ego separates us from true reality. That is what 'maya' means....seeing ourselves as distinct, different and independent of everything else including our creator, seeing 'I and not I' as the universe. Even physically, we see ourselves as very different from others, and from the heavens, animals, plants, the earth. If we had scanning electron microscopes instead of eyes, we would not see the facades we see, in fact we would not see the facades at all, like in an x-ray (would you be able to make out the difference between a film star and you in an MRI or X-ray? You might even look better!). We would look down to the molecular and atomic levels, where the differences narrow. And if you get down to subatomic levels,  differences narrow even more, things look very similar. Gold is not as different to lead, to sewage, to water, to flesh. Just a lot of subatomic particles buzzing around.  And at a deeper level, using techniques not yet known, perhaps subatomic particles are just different representations of the energy that created the big bang, little shards of the cosmic energy released when time began, which keep coming together kaleidoscopically to give us everything that exists in this unfurling of reality, this time series evolution of the big bang which we call the universe.

Even though we are basically the same, the truth is we are also distinct from the rest of reality, we have a distinct body, a distinct soul.  While part of the solution to ego lies in seeing how we are the same as everything else, both our physical and spiritual lives depend upon individuality, and that distinction between self and non-self can leave a gap, a fault line where ego creeps in.  The dichotomy is that while seeking to see ourselves as an integral part of a bigger reality, we have to forge our path alone, even spiritually. The question is what price we put on this individuality, this difference from others. Ego comes in when we fail to see the essential same-ness and interconnected-ness, fail to look at the differences dispassionately, and start applying self serving value judgements. These self serving judgements distort our view of ourselves, and also of others.

True humility lies not in being meek and mild, not in being subservient or inferior, but rather in not seeking to judge either ourselves or others. People feel superior (and are treated so)  because of looks, intelligence, charisma, all pretty much givens. Even wealth is determined partly by where we are born and partly by the skills and opportunities fate has dealt us. What if I had been born a poor, low caste starving landless labourer, dimwitted to boot?  How far could I have got? People feel inferior (and are treated so) because they lack looks, or are dull in personality and brain, also pretty much givens.  If we deal with someone far less bright than us, why should we feel superior or get irritated by the person's lack of comprehension? 'That guy is an idiot'? Well actually that guy is exactly what god made him. If he has an IQ of 50, think of what it means to go through life like that. If the person is dumpy and ugly, think of what it means to go through life like that. All through no fault of one's own. True humility lies in not judging, not in feeling inconsequential.  Humility is being neutral between self aggrandisement and self abnegation; between superiority and inferiority.

We might justify the advantages we are born with by saying, arent they the fruit of my karma? Aren't the coordinates of my birth, my materially comfortable life, my intelligence, looks, talent the result of my own efforts in past lives? Well, when we consider the proposition of superior SQ (Spiritual Quotient or the spiritual bank balance we have accumulated over lives through our karma), how do we know what a high SQ looks like? In every sphere of temporal life, things get tougher the higher you climb, no matter what the domain may be. It takes colossal effort to achieve excellence in any field- the old saw about genius being 99% perspiration. Why would that not be true of SQ? Take a deep breath and consider: maybe people with high SQ are born poor, that is more of a test and a tougher proving ground than being rich. How many great souls, mahapurushes, including Christ, have been poor? Buddha, though rich, had to give it all up to attain samadhi.  Similarly, couldn't poor looks, low intelligence, a dull personality all just be challenges for a higher stage of spiritual development, triggered by our karma, our SQ? Let us not make assumptions about what the fruits of good karma look like, it may not be what we imagine - and it may not be the same for all. Maybe each of us is dealt a hand unique and singularly appropriate for our development challenges in this life.

When you start to see things in that way, the spiritual and temporal approaches to the ego start to coalesce. The real challenge is humility. True humility, not what someone called the last refuge of scoundrels. Humility comes from being centered within yourself; from being truly self assured, not self conscious; from not seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe - not seeing 'I and not I' as the universe. When you have true humility, you are not concerned about what others think about you....what impression you make when interacting with others. Your behaviour will tend to be more uniform and consistent, based on your beliefs, regardless of the situation and its provocations, regardless of whether you are dealing with your boss or your sibling or your servant. Ego is pompous and self important, humility is modest. Ego may seek to impress or intimidate others, humility is self contained.  Equally, on the the flip side ego will feel inferior, inadequate, diffident in certain situations, will cower before power; humility accepts limitations, feels no diffidence at all (think of Gandhi), stays on even keel.  Ego displays emotion, humility displays equanimity. Humility reflects integrity of behaviour and soul.

I now know I have been largely unconscious about the workings of my ego, even though I thought I had it consciously covered. That is the base stage, the stage of unconscious incompetence. The second stage is to become conscious of our incompetence, to be aware how insidiously, stealthily and powerfully our ego controls our behaviour. The next stage is to look at every aspect of life, examine it dispassionately, suspend value judgement, look for ego and try to deactivate it.  That is the third stage, which I am now engaging. And finally, if we can, get to a stage where we do not have to consciously struggle to fight ego, it just happens naturally. We have to go through the four defined stages of competence in dealing with the ego - from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, and, if we can make it, to unconscious competence. 

If we really want to move forward both as humans and spiritually, our biggest challenge is to dismantle our ego and pursue humility unflinchingly, and as resolutely as possible to reject the illusory ego inflating and deflating traps the world lures us with.  This is our toughest battle, a lifelong one, where we can expect no more than limited success - even the rishis had an ego.  One step at a time.

Who am I?

"Who am I"? The question just turned up and presented itself with quiet authority in my mind recently. Not for the first time, but on earlier occasions it was fuzzier, less defined, less important, easy to ignore. Even those of us who are not introspective will likely get snagged by it sometime. We may get a fleeting glimpse of ourselves reflected in someone else's comment and wonder 'Really? Is that who I am'? In a time of crisis or perceived failure we may get filled with self doubt.  But the question only gets properly addressed when it becomes unavoidable, in a phase of personal  philosophical enquiry of the sort  that I have been going through. Here are my ruminations.

One part of identity, and most commonly the dominant part, has a lot to do with identification – who or what we identify with. Family is our first source of identity and is the most primary and universally recognized of all - naam, baap ka naam.  Other sources of identity get layered on as we go through life. Our school is our first source of identity outside the home.  Activities like acting, debating, sports add to identity. Consciousness of nationality is instilled - stand up for the national anthem; consciousness of ethnicity within that nationality.  On to college, which can be an exhilarating and defining experience as we are now young adults, starting to peak physically and mentally, freed of the yoke of childhood school level discipline, getting independent in our thinking.  Not surprisingly college years can be a highpoint of our lives as we come into our own, and a time when we form deep and abiding relationships.  So our college connection can be a surprisingly strong and steadfast source of identity.  People donate huge amounts to their colleges. Schools and other institutions are generally less fortunate.

Then we move onto work, pretty much the largest chunk of our lives.  Powerful and abiding sources of identity here - after asking your name people generally ask 'what do you do'? Profession. I was now an engineer and a manager.  Most people find it comforting to get totally wrapped up in their careers because it gives a sense of purpose, and also some authority which bolsters ego.  When I started my work career, I soon realised that I was going to be spending the best hours of each day, the best years of my life at work, so I should get more out of it than just a paycheck, but still instinctively guarded my autonomy fiercely, treasuring the interests I had developed in college. Leisure was what I was working for even though work had to be better than drudgery, in fact had to be engaging, enjoyable, even fulfilling. We become workaholics when we see work as the only worthwhile thing in our lives, and that skews identity formation towards a single dimension, denuding other areas of  our lives including family and the potentially rich joys of leisure activities.  Workaholism fortunately doesn't feature amongst my blunders.

The role of family in our lives diminishes in college and fades even more when we start to work, dimmed by financial and emotional independence.  Ironically, these dependencies can reverse over time. Family as a source of identity goes through profound changes, mostly quiet, sometimes noisy.  Relating to family as an adult significantly resets our relationships.  Marriage, then children appear on the scene, and our primary family unit is now different. That will change again when children get married - what goes around comes around.  Nieces and nephews appear.  Later, grandchildren.  Through all this family can actually strengthen  as a source of identity, after first fading.  Family mattered less to me at 25 than at 15, and more to me at 45 than at 25, but in a different way.

And there is religion.  One of the most powerful, divisive forces around, and a major source of identity. Within a religion and between religions, identification for or against can be fiercely strong and binding.  Each religion sees its cosmology as the only true one, giving its members a unique place in the universe.  This is one source of identity that almost never changes from birth to death, and can in the extreme subsume or even dictate all other sources of identity.  Few people are able to distance themselves from religion and see it objectively.  It plays to our deepest emotions, and can retain an umbilical strength of connection.  Even most atheists, if asked, will state their religion.  I did, and even carried some religious prejudice.

Identification leads to loyalty. Loyalty to family, country, college, firm, religion, ethnicity. Loyalty to something generally leads to thinking it is the best. That actually makes no sense.  My school cant be the best just because I went there.  My religion cant be better than others because I was born into it.  My country cannot stand out in the world because I live here. Yet people are prepared to kill and die for ethnicity, country, religion - none of which we choose.

External sources of identity are like a need, we cling to them.  And yet they are intrinsically unstable.  It’s like having your center of gravity fall outside your body. When that happens, the laws of physics tell us we will fall, and the only way to stay upright is with support: in this case the support of the source of identity, which is not in our control. This kind of support  acts as a tether, because moving away from it is destabilising.  I love watching raptors gliding in the sky and think how exhilarating it must be to move freely in three dimensions, soaring high, the world beneath. We are stuck in two dimensions because we need the support of solid ground - to move freely in all three dimensions you cant be tethered to any of them.  Wouldn't that work for identity?  If we could move freely rather than being tethered to our sources of identity, could we not soar like birds?

The stablest source of identity is within ourselves: who we are.  Untethered to any external source.  Which brings us to the other part of identity, internal, rather than external. Internal identity has to do with the development of our personality - influences from our parents, siblings, peers, teachers, role models, experiences, learnings, whatever - the whole nine yards of life.  These influences leave their imprint on our minds, imprints which we can either accept passively, or absorb and shape the way we want to.  The key is how we choose to define ourselves. The less we define ourselves in terms of external agencies even though we draw from them, the more autonomous we can be as individuals. Take for example ethnicity - a major formative influence.  It is comforting to have, but need not be defining,  need not set our horizon; we can move beyond it while holding on to what we want from it.  Going back to the first source of identity, family, that I reckon is the most difficult to figure out - the first source is the last frontier in deconstructing identity.  Not only is family widely considered primary in societal terms, but even in evolutionary biology seeing your direct lineage flourish has for long been considered a primary driving force.  Not in the animal kingdom though, there the family bond lasts just till adulthood. Equally, recent anthropological studies of many hunter gatherer societies have shown that they were anything but monogamous, and bloodline/lineage was not a concern for us humans for a quarter of a million years. Its only after the neolithic revolution less than 10,000 years ago when farming emerged, that family took on importance fuelled by the need for hands to till the land and driven by inheritance. And now that a large segment of the world's population has been off the land for a while, the importance of family is declining again.  So is blood really thicker than water? Is family identity primary or a tether?

In truth, we can identify ourselves with whatever external influence we want, to the extent we want, and not allow ourselves to be defined by anything other than who we are autonomously, and even more importantly, what we are striving to be.  Identity as dynamic and live, not static and comatose, and with self determination, not imposed by circumstance.  We can reject any source of identity if it offends us, not end up defending the indefensible if things go wrong.  Say the school we went to doesn't really measure up (mine didn't); our work organisation is or becomes unfocused, inefficient, or corrupt; our religion is moribund.  If we are secure within ourselves we can be objective, distance ourselves, even reject, not feel threatened, driven to defend.  How do we achieve such autonomy?  I find intellectual pursuits  help break out of physical boundaries of time and space.  It helps to trawl over three domains: the contemporary, and in the contemporary between local and global; the entire range of past thought; and the timeless.  I could, for example, read philosophers from all over the world and since the beginning of the written word, harvest a rich crop of ideas which influenced my thinking, helped free up my mind, changed who I was. Poetry, theatre, film, literature, the social sciences, science, all have helped.

How do we examine our own identity objectively?  A good indicator is who our friends are.  I find there is a pattern in the closest friendships I have made over time.  What kind of people do we like, do we get really close to?  People who share love of a certain type of activity?  People with the same external sources of identity?  Or is it people with a certain set of values, a quality of mind and intellect, a way of thinking – which makes them people who don’t allow themselves to be defined by the external, even though they probably share an external circumstance with us, which is how we met them - school, college, workplace, club.  Think of their characteristics and that will reflect on who we are – and what we are seeking in life. I sense that our basic approach to identity formation is a pretty key determinant of our relationships.  An external source of identity is an important bond.  Lack of an external source of identity an even stronger bond.  Both can and do coexist - in the same individual, we are all hybrids, and we will see different blends in different individuals amongst our group of friends.  I find that those I have gotten closest to throughout my life have shared similar identity defining characteristics.

What then is my identity? Who am I?  Am I just the sum total of influences from and identification with external sources, layered, blended, synergised, partly by my choosing, partly by fate?  If we get past these overlays, is there anything beyond?  Are we born with some predetermined identity or predetermined determinants of identity?  Is there an identity other than the one defined by this life?  In recent years I have developed belief, and I have taken the path of spirituality, while increasingly rejecting religion.  I cannot identify with the superstitions and rituals of hinduism, or for that matter any religion. Even the most rational of us accept some level of superstition or ritual as a gap in our rationality,  religion on the other hand has some level of rationality in the superstition and ritual which dominate and define it.  Yet I still define myself as a Hindu, as hinduism has two distinct parts to it....the temple based religion which I cannot relate to, and the soaring, timeless, spiritual transcendence of enlightened souls.  Hindu metaphysics as defined in the Upanishads deeply appeals to me.  My wife Kiran led the way along this path to belief, and I followed quite inadvertently with absolutely no intention of doing so, finding my way from arrogant atheism through a humbler agnosticism to incredulous belief, despite my reluctance.  Atheism was an important, a defining part of my identity, one I was proud of and reluctant to let go. Belief, especially belief without religion, is a humbler state of being than atheism and tends to soften our ego.  We get dwarfed when we contemplate the infinite, our pride in 'who' we are subsides, our identity gets loosened from its man-made tethers.  Spirituality is not just an a-priori source of internal identity, it also  powerfully redirects our identity from external to internal, while paradoxically providing a sense of connection to the external world.

What does an internally defined identity look like?  As far as I can see, the core of my internal identity is about my beliefs on the one hand, which are distilled from all the knowledge and insights I have gained  over a lifetime, a dynamic set which continues to grow and evolve, and about what I call my values on the other, which shape my actions and human interaction.  My beliefs and my values are related and interactive but not the same thing.  Beliefs are more defined by intellect than are values, values start as received, are then altered by the beliefs we adopt.  For example, do I believe in equality?  Equality of the sexes, equality with friends, peers, bosses, subordinates, servants?  How does my belief in equality compare with the values reflected in the sense of equality I exhibit in different relationships?  Integrity...what does that mean, and how do I apply it in different dimensions - financial, intellectual, relationships?  What does belief mean to my life?  What do I bring from the hinterland of spirituality into my everyday life?  The uncomfortable truth is that intellectual beliefs and operating values, and therefore beliefs and behaviour, don't necessarily match up fully.  I have found to my shock and dismay a distinct gap between my beliefs and my behaviour, and whittling down that gap has to be the driving force in developing my integrity as a person. Integrity as wholeness, without behaviour violating the boundaries of belief, with beliefs that stand up to reason.

Not everyone is interested in this search equally. I believe in the atma, and in rebirth. I believe rebirth does bring forward something from previous lives, something that can help influence our identity in this lifetime.  It determines our SQ or Spiritual Quotient.  Some people live their lives in a more conscious, self aware fashion than others who are more unconscious and driven.  I believe this difference in consciousness is driven by SQ.  SQ  influences our identity, our self awareness - how much depends on how deeply we mine for it. The more we do, the less external influences matter, though they remain. Perhaps that search ends in the Vedantic: "Tat Twam Asi", "You are That".  I am not even remotely near that stage of realisation, but I do feel that as we move towards it, we are more likely to shed externally borrowed identity, and to find our center of gravity in ourselves.  That is the physics of stability.  A suitable and achievable goal in identity formation over this lifetime.  Not a distant goal just a proximate one, one that actually just puts us on the right path.  Identity discovery and formation are the work of several lifetimes, spirituality the vector that can help keep this moving towards self realisation.