How to bring Truth in our lives

Today it is difficult to imagine a man who can become another Mahatma for India. His immaculate character and inner strength in unimaginable to be replicated in today’s life. Lost admist material gains and losses , urgency in achieveing success we know we cannot follow his Golden rule of Truth and Non violence. But I have a firm believe of seeing a new dawn in India. Last one and a half year seeing people of similar minds on roads to bring about a collective change in India has filled me with hope of bringing back Mahatma’s India. So this article of mine is a small but practical effort towards an honest India. I agree this is not the only way but just like a mother uses both love and punishment together to discipline her child none being completely wrong , this might just be a not so wrong way to bring change.

To bring Truth to the forefront we have to understand why people lie? In our everyday life we know “n” number of people lie to us. Sometimes we can catch them and sometimes we cannot even guess their lies. Why do we lie?The obvious answers are : I want an easy way out, afraid of punishment, scared of hurting people, scared of being judged wrongly . Liar can have good or bad motives but every liar will have a reason or justification for lieing.

Truth has 2 parts one the speaker and one listener (there can be multiple people involved but we’d keep it simple here). Two individuals involved in the scene can have different capacity to accept or reject truth. Which means they both will react differently to the same situation. Now here few situations can arise depending on them.

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A. If the speaker has less inner strength to speak but the listener is stronger internally to hear truth half of the job is done. People around us are afraid to speak simple truth’s where they are expressing their opinion because they are afraid of being punished or being judgemental. Here only the listener will have the choice to make the relationship better and stronger.

B. If the listener has less inner strength to accept truth and has a tendency to react at the slightest thing. Then only the truthest of all Speaker will be able to speak truth without making things difficult for himself.

C. If both the speaker and listener are weak neither can handle any change nor situation then they will always have a relationship of distrust and dis respect with each other.

D. If both the speaker and listener are strong inside then their relationship will always be strong and of mutual respect. As neither creates a fiasco nor is afraid to change the mistake.

Now we live at a time where option C always happens, D is a distant dream or may be rare. While option A and B is still feasible. We need to know where we fall in, I know as speaker we can rarely take the risk of speaking truth because till now we haven’t been able to gather the strength of facing every tricky situation. But B I feel as a listener I can show more patience and appreciation towards the person who is willing to speak the truth to me.

How?

a) We need to define truth in a new way. Once we understand that every one has a reason to do what they do no matter how selfish that justification is but still from their point of view , at that time, at that situation, in their capacity that reason is sufficient for them to make what you think is “mistake” or “unjust”. We have to accept that for that person Truth is what he speaks or believes.

b) After that you can show consideration by not reacting wildly but by responding. Sitting and having a plain dialogue will help the speaker to expand and explain the reason while slowly develop faith between you two.

c) Address the issue, not the character of the person. While I know you have pent anger and believe that the speaker will never change but by believeing so very strongly you decrease the little want if there is any inside the speaker to change by hurting and speaking of his character. This happens often between husband and wife as they bring in old unresolved issues and then they hammer the past more than resolving present. So focus on issue. You can always give opinion of change once the other person gains faith of you being patient with him.

d) Have faith. I say this especially keeping family relationships in mind. Most often we want our family members to do something in some way but doubt their capacity. Then slowly what you think shows in your action and eventually the motivation the speaker could have received from you depreciates thus they lie to you again. Note this kind of action with children is extremely detrimental . So have faith and REAL INNER FAITH. It will take time to achieve results but if you are patient enough you will soon see drastic changes even in a habitual liar.


In context of present society and country..... friends lie to friends scared of hurting them? Children lie to parents scared of being judged wrong ? employess lie to boss fear of being punished. With so much fear we can only bring laws to end corruption but we won’t be able end corrupt minds. We won’t be able to weave a social fabric or life and relationships built on faith and honesty. Honesty is not just a parameter for a corruption free country but it uplifts us from weak mindsets and we cannot do it unless we consider thecause of fear in the liar as justified.

I know the thing that pops onto mind is , how will the work get done without the fear of punishment. Tell me one thing if as a parent I punish and judge my child being wrong all the time how difficult it is for the child to lie to parents and do what he wants to. Is this how we want a honest country and dishonest families? What are we clinging on to? Social fabric of country is wroven when we accept people and their opinions even if we don’t find them as correct. Without this flexibilty superficially we will have an honest country but broken relationships.

A simple thing we all can do is accept truth when people speak it to us. Yes it might not be truth in our opinion it could be just jealously or useless criticism or even careless attitude for us but the one who is saying it is completely convinced about it. I know its difficult to speak truth (blame 100 reasons for that) but we can face truth. Lets bring facing truth in our homes, welcome it to our daily relationships. Let us be more stable and welcoming to truth spoken to us. Tell our family , friends and colleagues that they can tell you anything without fear of being judged, held wrong or being punished. Once they see you stable more welcoming to accept truth as it is and not forcing them to change always (No one likes to change ), they would eventually become stronger listeners too and then you’d be able to share their truth’s to them. Yes it takes time to weave such a relationship but is it not better to have one such honest Relation than a 100 dis honest relationships ?

Lets make it possible its only easy to be patient and understanding listeners of truth and we all can do it everyday with our very own same people. Nurture better relations by responding to truth than reacting to truth.

Adios

P.S – Lots more to say but I know my blog has a very intelligent audience :) they can expand what I write and can give me a 100 better ways to do it. So as always looking forward to what you guys have to say about this. Correct me if there is any mistake on my side.

Worry or not to worry?

“Worry is a type of mental habit, which arises from the belief that it's good to worry. This belief gets acquired during our childhood. And then it keeps getting strengthened from our life experiences. We start from this belief. That attracts negative circumstances; as a result the belief gets strengthened further, because you think that with life full of so many negative circumstances, it's important to think of negative outcomes beforehand. You don't realize that these negative situations occurred in the first place largely due to this belief. When we are faced with a negative situation, again we worry because we hold that belief. Again it's the same result. In this way, we are caught in a vicious cycle.




How do we come out of this cycle?

By changing this belief to - 'it's not good to worry'. Once we do that, there is no guarantee that negative situations will completely stop arising in our life, because we have performed negative actions in the past (either in this birth or past births), but the extent of negative situations will be minimized. And even if they do come, they will bid goodbye sooner, if we have a worry-free consciousness.”

With reference to my post 10'Sept12

To expand on the same we have to understand what Worry means. Worry ia a sense of anxiety or disturbance created by repeatedly creating a scene of a negative event/outcome even before the scene has happened and accepting it to be true ot almost to be the truth. Worry is not a set of logical thinking as almost always is presumed by people. Worry instills a great sense of depression even before there is any real cause of depression.

Worry is a sense of deep fear created due to imaginative loss of something. Now once this is understood it becomes imperative to understand why fear is so deeply instilled in our minds that worrying about a particular loss comes 1st in our minds than any other thought. This is because from our birth to this date we have trained our minds to function in a certain particular way called “thought-pattern” and thus in case of any emergency our minds 1st creates those thoughts according to our thought pattern and then the body reacts accordingly. You can simply understand this by the fact that some people can handle stressful situations way better than others, not because they had any extra means of resolving the situation but because they had a Mind – Set that gave them the vision to resolve it.

So well once the mind has adapted to a certain pattern of thoughts and it gets difficult to break them, we start losing hope creating feelings for eg. Im jinxed, always bad happens with me, loss is always my side, someone or other is always conspiring against me etc. This further pulls our mind away from solutions and attracts more problems and challenges in life. By the time we understand this we already mess up our lives too much and then comes situations like suicides. While large number of people believe that worrying is important especially at challenging situations or a worry less life is worthless or tasteless , the fact is that worry alone is responsible for for pulling you into the doomed circle od sadness. It attracts you to the pit of sadness with a gullible innocent face of giving you solution and turns into a witch by sucking out all your positive energy and hope of future.

After all this it becomes essential to understand how to overcome this whole cycle and yet be able to find right solutions at right time.

1. Before anything else change the word “worry” with “pro-active thinking”(or just thinking would also do fine). It means while in worry you thought about why this happened , what will I do now, why this happens with me always or trying to remember every past event where something similar has happened. You stop for a second and accept the fact that a certain situation has arrived , that is you understand and convince your mind that there definitely is something I have to and will find a solution to. (Caution--Please don’t fret how others would react the world can wait to form opinions , they will always do like it or hate it so avoid the world and it opinion angle in this else the whole effort would fail.)

2. Once the mind accepts this. Prioritize – what or who is most important where the damage control has to be done.

3. Gather information –all about solutions – don’t relate past experiences feelings rather think how or who had helped you if a similar thing had happened in the past. (Caution—we often create sad felings from past while trying to look for solution from past. In this whole scene not only do we lose precious time we also don’t learn anything from past. We simply watch it like a movie.)

4. Do it. Don’t fret about world , as you have already sorted our priority all by yourself any further thoughts would only take you away from happiness. So act don’t let the thinking go over you.

Worrying doesn’t do any good at all and a worry less life doesn’t mean challenge less life. I know some people like being brooders that victim feeling makes them feel that I’d earn some sympathy points from someone and with that they hope to clutch on that person and spend their lifes. In reality nobody likes victims , people can sympathize but then you’d always be an extra baggage for them no amount of love can pacify anyone if there is no self willingness to do it. Most importantly worrying about losses will never add to anything, what has gone has gone while pro-active thinking can not only do damage control but also adds to hope of restoring happiness in your life. Then you’d find that you’d never be dependant on anybody to bring that smile of peace on your face.

Adios.