For many years, I believed that I understood religion and its place in this world- as humans evolved and started living in larger and larger groups, they needed a guiding principle to segregate good and bad. Religion was the document that provided this. How do you make people accept this? Tell people it was written by a superior/magical being. This made for quite a logical explanation and pretty much everyone around me agreed that it must be so. I have an educational background in science and so do most of my friends, we tend to be quick to accept explanations that validate the philosophies of modern science. It was not until I got lost and needed an Anchor point that I went back and further explored Religion and its place in our society, specifically Hinduism. Why so many Gods and Goddesses, why this elaborate scheme, why an effort to try and explain the workings of the Universe? These questions helped me look at Religion in a whole new light and I found a new answer. It is not something built just to contain society in a manageable structure and people within acceptable behaviour, it is also a framework built to help us evolve, built to be a guiding light for our growth, it gives us idols to follow, it gives us stories of hard-work, sacrifice, devotion, courage, and love.
This last weekend, four of us went out for an evening, we roamed around far and wide, ended up some 20 Km from home. Returning options were a cab against the metro, one of us wanted the cab, we tried booking one, three cabbies refused. I next went on and booked one for the nearest metro, so our guy took offence, it was an insult to his decision-making, wish, judgement, etc. The thing is that he didn’t know the whole story. There is also the question of the refusing drivers, one could get furious at them for refusing a particular destination but there is one particular trivia that I am aware of in our case. We had to travel from Delhi to Gurgaon and there is a Rs 100 24h-pass for taxis entering Gurgaon from Delhi or the other way around. A 350 bucks ride with a Rs 100 entry tax might not make sense to some.
Each one of us has a huge library of concepts and thumb rules that collectively form our view of the world. We draw conclusions from the way our life plays out, and then archive those conclusions, the next time a similar situation comes up, we quickly refer to this archive for efficient answers. Unless forced to, there is resistance to re-evaluating a problem, after all, we already know the solution. The issue with this approach is that loads is hidden from our view, and hence the conclusions that we draw are just informed guesses. Alright- So What? The reason it makes sense to know this consciously is that it helps us in being more open to new suggestions, ideas, and concepts. We can be less confident about knowing the absolute answer and might give others more ears, it also makes us more open to questioning and re-evaluating our decisions, to explore and gather as much information as is possible in a given situation before we make a decision.
So the next time your reaction to something does not seem to fit logic, remember that there could be years of reinforcement clouding your judgement, it takes strength to go against all of that and make the logically correct decision, at that moment. The next time someone suggests a wacky new idea, remember that they might know something which you don’t, perhaps it’s time you re-evaluated your definition of possible.
rabbitRambles 