The tragedy of human life is that no matter how much I try, my consciousness will never truly and completely translate to the outer world.
On the other hand, no matter how much I try to empathize with someone, I can never experience things in the same way they do. Ultimately, each human being is simply their consciousness and each human being is ultimately alone.
When I am stung by a bee, I can wince in pain all I want. I can shut my eyes and let out screams of pain but I cannot share this experience with a person who may be standing just a palm’s length away from me. If he were also stung by a bee, I would still not know if they experience the pain the same way. We may be in the same situation but our experiences can be drastically different.
We experience alone, but human beings have this secret superpower that allows them to share their internal psychic happenings with other humans.
This superpower is called language.
Are you using this superpower to tell other people about yourself?
Are you using it to understand yourself?
A boy in college one day comes to me and asks if psychologists can read minds. Initially, I dismiss the idea easily.
“What nonsense is that? No one can read minds.”
But then I sit with the question for a while and realize to my amazement that minds can actually be read BUT only if they have been written.
Who writes the mind? The mind itself of course.
Every moment that we spend introspecting and thinking about the psychic phenomenon that we experience, we are actually writing our own mind. We are verbalizing the conscious experience that we have, only if it is fleeting. In those moments, we are the authors of our own consciousness. And that consciousness can indeed be read. If the author is willing to open the covers of this book for others to read.
But only if it was this easy.
Our mind is nothing short of a storm filled with our experiences, our memories, our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, morals, values and so much more. The storm demands that it be tamed, the mind wants to run away.
Don’t run away. Tame the storm by facing it and turning that storm into a written account of your life. Your consciousness is the pen and language is your ink. The storm of life demands that you tame it because no one else will do it for you.
So if you ask me if I can read your mind, I will counter that question with another one.
“Have you written your mind?”
Will you open your mind up for me to read and help me flip the pages?”
You are quite literally the author of your life. When do you want to start writing it?
Until next time,
Arjun Gupta
This is everything I needed to hear today. Makes so much sense!
Intersting post. I would love to see more posts like this.
Keep going..🙌