The simple fact that this piece is posted in 2013 and you are reading this sentence tells that we both have
survived 2012 and its doomsday psychosis.
Congratulations!
Now let's buckle up and prepare ourselves for the set of neuroses that 2013 has brought for you.Well that statement may not be very accurate. Fact is 2013 is just a number that identifies certain number of days that our present civilization started counting from the 1st of this January (for historical reasons) and the neuroses are our gift to ourselves to make living that period more meaningful! After all, life is all about crossing milestones, achieving targets, isn't it? Now that running behind targets, goals, ambitions, has its cost, which we keep paying, most certainly, remaining unblissfully unaware of it.
- Ravi, an employee in a large IT company, is finding his office environment too political for him to survive. But he carries a large EMI so he cannot leave his job till he finds another job. But market is bad and he lives almost every moment with an unconscious fear, fear of losing job. He has taken to heavy drinking; he drinks almost every evening, six days a week. His kids complain to their mom about their Dad, his wife complains to him that he has become more inaccessible to his family. Ravi accepts that his interaction with family is lot less that what should be, but he simply cannot help. They do not know that drinking is his only escape from the constant fear that he lives with, every sleepless minute of his day.
- Anusha is a bright young working girl. She was promoted to a manager last year and got a new boss a couple of months after assuming new role. For last few months, she lives under a constant agony. She is almost sure that her new boss does not like her much and wants to replace her with one of his cronies. She thinks that he is after her career and is always trying to do something to show her in bad light. Every Friday she has a meeting with him and her heart starts besting faster before she enters the meeting room. Whatever they discuss in the meeting turns up negative for her. The dejected feeling remains with her long after the meeting ends so much so that she prefers to stay in her room during the weekends. She loves her job but she gets very stressed whenever she thinks about her boss. Rarely there is a night for her that passes without a nightmare. In fact she often wakes up in the night sweating profusely.
- Murali is a VP in a mid-size marketing firm. Last year, he barely reached his target and this year he is not even sure if he will meet last year's target. If he cannot, he knows it would be end of his .....He refuses to think what will happen if he cannot. In this market there are very, very few positions in the market particularly at his level and there are always too many contenders, the younger, the more preferred. These days he hardly manages to get sound sleep. He lives with a constant fear everyday and he cannot even dare to think what he is afraid of.
All these scenarii [names are unimportant, in any case they are fictitious names], above, have one thing common, everyone of them is suffering from high neuroticism; there is a constant tension that each of them is living with. Tension, we know, is an effect of two opposing forces on the subject. A rope, that is pulled by two warring parties in a Tug-of-War game experiences a tension which in language of physics, is proportional to the non-differential components of the forces applied on it in two opposing direction [Differential component will pull the rope to one direction, likely to be winning team's direction]. But for Ravi, Anusha or Murali, or for that matter, you, where are the two opposing forces coming from? They are being generated by one's own mind. When one lives in two different realities at the same time, one inevitably feels the tension.
One reality is created by one's desires, one's ambition and the other is the effect of the fear generated by one's reading of the situation and the environment one is living in.
Quoting Dr.
C. George Boeree, an eminent psychologist, "Generally, neurosis means poor ability to adapt to ones environment,
an inability to change one’s life patterns, and the inability to
develop
a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality.
The first point to note is that there are predisposing physiological
conditions, for the most part hereditary. Most obvious is the
temperament
trait (or traits) referred to as neuroticism or emotional
instability. Other
traits
may also contribute, such as extremely high or low
conscientiousness.
It may be that any inherited trait, when present in the extreme, makes
the person more liable to develop neurotic problems.
The second point is that one’s culture, upbringing, education, and
learning
in general may prepare one to deal with the stresses of life, or
not.
These factors may also serve to override any predisposing physiological
conditions, or to exacerbate them.
The third point concerns the triggering
stressors in people’s lives
which lead to the various emotional, behavioral, and cognitive symptoms
of neurosis. These stressors can be understood as consisting of
situations
of uncertainly and confusion, usually involving interpersonal
relationships,
that overwhelm the person’s capacities, learned and/or inherited, to
cope
with those situations.
Basically,
we deal with the world by using our previously acquired
knowledge
of the world, in coordination with our inherited capacities, to solve
the
problems presented to us as efficiently as possible. When we are
up to the task, our emotional responses are kept to within tolerable
limits.
When we are not up to the task, we experience anxiety. This
anxiety
may develop into other emotional responses as well, depending on the
details
of the problem, our inherited traits, and our learned patterns of
response
to problematic situations.
When we experience repeated occasions of stress and anxiety, we
begin
to develop patterns of behavior and cognition designed to avoid or
otherwise
mitigate the problem, such as vigilance, escape behaviors, and
defensive
thinking. These may develop into an array of attitudes which
themselves
produce anxiety, anger, sadness, etc."
Interesting aspect is those who have complete faith in oneself or on the conjecture that everything in this world is happening as per a divine plan and is orchestrated by as one would call, God almighty, hardly goes through this trauma of neuroticism. There are plenty of examples where those who have overcome impossible hurdles or impossible targets against overwhelming odds demonstrated supreme faith in their abilities or God. Only those who do not fall in either category, is seen to be victim of neurosis.
Carl Jung observed many years ago, "[Contemporary man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality
and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control.
His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got
new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague
apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for
pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of
neuroses."
So, it appears that rationality, an extraordinary gift to mankind, which is central to all the scientific and technological progress that the humankind achieved so far, inflicts equally difficult challenges to a man's (woman's) existence. Rationality helps us to comprehend the world around us but it has its limitation on its capacity to absorb information. 21st Century with all its connectedness and hyperactive information flow, continuously bombards on our senses but our limited capacity of information processing creates incomplete description of the world around us. Our emotion tries to bridge that gap by creating a belief system or a system of faith which filters out any information that is incongruent to world-view of the mind. That in turn simplifies the reality but more importantly helps us to remain consistent in our thoughts and feelings. But if that belief system gets weakened by one's rationality what we are left with is a neurotic mind, a mind that has lost all the surety of its beliefs and faith. Is there a possibility that this mind will evolve into something better, something that is more advanced from the evolutionary perspective? Is there a possibility that this neuroticism can act as enabler for one's personal evolution?
What happens when a neurotic mind suddenly becomes aware of its own neuroticism? It is quite similar to when someone, who always criticizes about others' clothes and looks, suddenly becomes aware of his/her own grotesqueness. All pretenses fall, a solemn realization sinks in, the person evolves into different emotional being. That opens up the path to freedom from one's own neuroticism.
Not quite surprisingly it is similar to what Gautam Buddha taught 2600 years ago. Buddha told people, that one must accept the reality the way it is. Buddha called it living in suchness, tathata. The world is just the way it is, it is perfect in the way, it is. The problem is rather in the way we interpret the reality; in terms of good and bad, desirable and undesirable, long and short, left and right, right and wrong, positive and negative, always brewing tension between the two opposites. Reality however is not separable between two opposites. Just like there is no magnetic monopole, without 'wrong' there is no meaning to 'right', without 'right' there is no meaning of 'left' and vice versa. We must learn to be conscious of the world that is created inside our head by our senses and emotions and know both factually and emotionally that the world that we carry inside our head is not the same as we interact with our senses every moment. Reality at any moment is far too rich and too complex to comprehend with our limited information processing capacity. As that understanding comes in, one slowly becomes aware of one's own neurosis and at that very moment the mind becomes ready for the next evolution. It sees the essential nature of its own self vis-a-vis others. It sees the same energy that once exploded with big-bang around 14 billion years ago (or 14 billion light-years away), manifesting itself now (or here) as the face of one's dearest person and also as the face of one's worst enemy. In that it finds its own zen moments, the moments of true freedom, freedom from all ignorant differentiations, freedom from all futile and senseless attempts, to separate its own existence from the reality as a whole, the very seed of one's own neurosis.
