Can I Live with Myself? - Part 1

Can I Live with Myself?

One fine day during my morning meditation practices this is the question that I got and was rock still for few minutes. My mind tried to ask another question - "Can you live with yourself"?

How much time do I spend with myself?

In this whole life, how much time do we really spend with ourselves? Except for sleeping time where we would enter into the deep sleep where we live with ourselves unconsciously, otherwise are we living with ourselves?

We are living someone else's lie

When we deeply look into our life and the way we are living, we are constantly trying to live someone else's opinions which are excellently manipulated and marketed by various skilled advertisers and impinged or pressed upon us. Hence, a reality check will very clearly tell us and probably scare us that we are not living with ourselves (or our life), but constantly living someone else's lie that has been so much hypnotized upon us, that we almost lost the skill of how to live with ourselves (our actual life). In the process of civilization we have created so many lies and in the process of living all those lies that have been created and nurtured generations after generations, we have left the truth into oblivion.

One of the biggest blockhead in this scenario is accepting oneself. For most of the people on this earth self-acceptance is a huge bottleneck. The kind of external paraphernalia in terms of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.); movies, pubs, outings, picnics, parties, etc.; all are diverting our attention towards anything external and very rarely gives time to turn within. And, when our mind turns within and introspects, that introspection is so much influenced by the external information and the false belief systems that we have unconsciously built. And, most of the time we end up succumbing to someone else's opinion which will eventually lead us towards frustration at some time or the other in future, and further leads to depression and many psychological and psychosomatic disorders.

The kind of frustration I see most of the times on each individual's face whom I come across makes me bewildered and forces me to ask questions - why and what makes them so frustrated if they have chosen to live the way they want? I think, they rarely see themselves in the mirror and think about this question.

In my life whenever I made (and hopeful to make in future) an every attempt to ask this question and almost every time the answer comes out as - do you need to live someone else's lie?

In terms of marriage, bearing children, living in the society the way it runs, and it is supposed to be run, reveals to us that we all are living someone else's lie. Just because there are about 3000 years of history on how people lived does not mean that we need to live like them and make the same mistakes as they made. Some of the examples that would be suffice to share for the present generation are: a big house (may be a 2 or a 3 BHK), a car or one car for each member in the family, all kinds of insurance policies, working in fortune 500 companies, having a huge bank balance, having more physical assets, house with all latest gadgets, huge and costly furniture, various kinds of toiletries for physical grooming, various kinds of clothes, footwear, etc, etc,; all those so-called unnecessary necessities that have been hypnotized upon us by the highly skilled marketing people and to which we have succumbed to the advertiser's agenda and started feeling deprived of these external paraphernalia and rarely realized that we got lost ourselves, and in this journey of losing ourselves, the advertisers and the rule makers made us successfully to forget how to live with our selves (our true Self).

Avoiding further damage

To avoid further damage to our self, we need to take a step back, stop doing all those nonsensical activities that we have been doing or have done and reflect on what exactly we really need. For this to happen we should start spending time with ourselves. May be a silent walk alone to start with. May be a retreat for a couple of days where there is no external information being added into. May be just a reflection for 4 to 5 hours without any external aid also would suffice to start with. And, in this self-reflection we should ask one question and that is, "how much I am living someone else's lie"?

This self-reflection if done properly, will surface us to an enormous amount of revelation and probably will shit scare us, that in reality we are just living someone else's lie and somewhere in this journey convinced ourselves that, that lie is our life and our life's ambition.

If an individual can take this daring step, then the first step of accepting one's self happens.

- to be contd... in part 2