The Pansophical Psyche
How many times have you woke up from sleep feeling emotionally drained or irritated (not because of a Monday-morning or an increasingly loud and annoying alarm clock) the reason of which is completely unknown to you? Some may say culpable dreams are the root cause of this not-so-well-explained phenomenon. Though dreams may be a cause of such irksome and itchy feelings, there may be invariably many reasons for such phenomena.
Many will agree, if I say “good upshots are talented escapists”, right? More frequently in our daily life, we forget to realise the greater extent and consequence of what is meant by ‘violence’. A generic definition of violence will many a time inconspicuously exclude its ‘thought’ version. In our daily lives we come across a saying ‘You sow what you reap.’, but have we ever perceived the stretch of this saying? Once Buddha said, violence isn’t just physical or verbal, it may be more powerful when committed through thought. Simplifying a bit, whenever we offend someone, we send a negative vibe to him/her which is bound to return back to us as said by innumerable saints around the world. This is where twist lies. Even an obscure sense of sulk in that person’s mind, against you (even when you tease them for their poor marks in exams!) can hit you hard. How? That’s the power of thought. Every single insult or an acrimony takes up its space in the part of the mind we call — — — -‘unconscious’ (though its more consciously maleficent than thought).
Sigmund Freud believed that while the unconscious mind is largely inaccessible, the contents can sometimes bubble up unexpectedly, such as in dreams or slips of the tongue. Whenever we dream, specific impulses get transmitted through our neurons. Every single time we go down our memory lane, exactly same arrangements are created in our brain and those impulses which aroused negative feelings in us, then, flow once again giving rise to the same thoughts which were created in our mind when things actually happened.
Assume that Anil is an employee and Rohit, his boss. Rohit insults Anil one day but Anil is not able to protest, fearing the consequence of he being fired. Anil returns home, eats his dinner and goes to sleep. Before sleeping, he relives Rohit’s bad behaviour. When he falls asleep, he continues to re-experience the instance of Rohit insulting him. The same thoughts of embarrassment are being produced again and again in Anil’s mind. These thoughts are then reflected back to Rohit and consequently, next day in the office more often than not turns out to be total disaster for Rohit without any apparent reason.
Doesn’t all this feel obvious? If you hurt someone, you are bound to repay for your misdeed, however unintentional be it. Therefore, each time the person is hurt or happy, for a specific person, even when he/she remembers somebody’s good or bad behaviour, these powerful thoughts affect that ‘somebody’. Ever felt disturbed for apparently no reason? If yes, somebody’s sad because of you. Again, when you are happy for no reason, you must’ve done something which made someone happy, and in turn when that person remembers you, and because of the good you have done to him/her, he/she re-feels the happiness and produces such thoughts, which when reflected back to you make you happy. It’s not that complex as it seems.
This is why we must never hurt or offend someone intentionally as it gives rise to an endless cycle of reflection of negative vibes which are anything but good. On the other hand, even if someone wants to delete memories of such stingy situations it doesn’t happen. Such memories can be removed from the conscious mind but never from the unconscious part. These dreams of bad memories are shown by the unconscious mind and these memories are permanently stored. This is why it is said “Heart takes note of everything”. We never forget how we felt or for whom we felt bad when a bad situation knocked the door.
“….ওটা কেবল কথার কথা,
মন কি কেহ চিনিস?
আছে কারও আপন হাতে
মন ব’লে এক জিনিস?
চলেন তিনি গোপন চালে,
স্বাধীন তাঁহার ইচ্ছে.…”
The above lines by Rabindranath Tagore from the poem ‘Achena’ (Bengali: অচেনা) mean that, ‘Do we really know what heart is? Do we have something called heart in our hands? It treads as it likes and does what it wants.’ And hence we can’t erase instances when we were hurt, giving rise to so many thoughts which have the potential of creating powerful consequences.
Then isn’t consciously hurting someone brings in a far-reaching consequence of unfathomable proportion and on a different note, don’t mere positive thoughts make the world a better place?
