Saturday, February 2, 2013

Pressure to stick to a group, company, or career

There is pressure from society to construct an identity. Depending on what identity you construct, you accordingly get experiences. I find this a very difficult choice. Changing identity is not easy. Investments accumulate over whatever identity you choose. Just like, if you were a nomad, you should let go of a lot of things before you decide to move – changing identity would involve losing all your accumulations/investments to the extent to which you change. People try to further their own identity by making more and more connections having the same social mimes, which leads to the formation of groups. If you want to change the group, then in the changed group suddenly all the stuff you had previously would become irrelevant. Kind of like, if one group was totally into bitching, gossiping and trivial social information and another one discussed philosophy and abstract ideas, they are quite incompatible. So the skills you acquired in your previous group cannot be used here much. Another analogy would be, if I worked as a carpenter for many years and then I suddenly want to switch to being an electrician then there would be little transferable parts. The same issue occurs in marriage, it’s a contract with accumulating investment over time. If you suddenly decide to break out of it, all the relationship investment collapses. Switching a career would also mean losing a lot of your investment like the carpenter-electrician example. There are transferable skills but a drastic switch could leave very little commonality. If you decide to leave your company, again all the internal knowledge, processes and the relationships you acquired in the company would be lost. Certain patterns could be metaphorically applied in other companies too, but this would be an abstract learning for the most of it. Basically, you would have to start all over again in the new company with the abstract learning from the previous company experience.

This is the dilemma of an explorer.  There is a force trying to make us move towards investments, security and consolidation and there is another counter force which aims at diversity of experience and seeks exploration. If I take my personal case, I have moved in and out of so many groups, so many social mimes, so many intellectual ideas, concepts, fantasies and experiments. But at a given time, my mental state is in a specific configuration and I can only access a very tiny fraction of all that’s there in my experiential memory. When I go into totally new groups, I am suddenly returned to square one. There is no investment, they don’t know me or trust me, and carry a very rudimentary image of me. The passing away of all that I experience makes it easier for me to understand of all this as an illusion and the emptiness of my essence. But the entire societal/cultural layer we have over reality works in exactly in the opposite direction by language and a conceptual layer where things exist inherently in and off themselves. What do you tend to choose: investment or free exploration?

Qualities of a diamond mapped to experience

The ideal +ve experience is where the mind is like an infinitely large diamond that is clear, does not hold anything but yet, reflects/refr...