In the real world, we meet and interact with people of different backgrounds and belief systems, people with varying political views and religions. In the virtual world, we still do, except it’s so much easier to remove and block those whose opinions are different from ours, therefore creating customized communities of people who are just like us. We feed ourselves with information and opinions that strengthen those we already have, while shutting out those that challenge us and contradict us. It builds up the mentality of groupthink.
The thing is though, if we keep to ourselves or to curated communities where we only agree with each other, we miss out. We become one-dimensional, never expanding our perspectives, strengthening this illusion we hold so dearly that we are right and those who are different from us are wrong. Our black-and-white view of the world becomes strengthened, the othering becomes justified, and we become more judgmental. There is a “reward” of course. We never have to admit we are wrong, we don’t have to question our belief systems, we spare ourselves from the agony of our ideas being rejected. But there is also a “cost” to it. We miss out from the possible connections with people just because they are different from us. We miss out on seeing the beauty of other souls because we are attached to seeing the differences. We miss out on how expansive the world is because we are insistent it has to be only one way. The Sufi poet Rumi said: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
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Do you value obedience as a positive trait? A necessary trait? An admirable trait?
We have been taught early on to obey our parents, our teachers, our government etc. because they know better than we do, right? Who here would consider yourself an obedient person? A law-abiding citizen? A committed follower of rules? Could obedience have negative consequences? An experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University sought to understand what the human tendency is when given a conflict between personal conscience and obedience to authority. This experiment came about because the experimenter wanted to understand how it is that the Holocaust happened, how it is that immoral things were legal, how it is that causing harm to others is normalized. In this experiment, the participants were assigned the role of a teacher, where they had actors who filled the role of learner. So the participant/teacher would work alongside an experimenter, and when the learner made a mistake, the experimenter would give the order to the participant to administer an electric shock to the learner, between 15- 450 volts. There were 18 variations of this experiment done, and in 65% of the cases, the participants chose to obey the orders— even if it meant causing another person great harm. The results are very alarming, because it shows that atrocity happens not because we human beings are “evil” but because we are too afraid to disobey. Now there are a few things in this experiment that tilted the obedience factor. One, if the participant was reminded that the consequences of the actions are theirs to bear, they are less likely to follow an order that would hurt another person. Two, if the participant was able to see that another participant disobeyed, they gather the courage to also disobey. The yoga practice is a practice of anarchy, a practice of self-rule, a practice of looking within our own minds, our own compass, our own experience. The focus of the month in Jivamukti is “Big Brother is Watching Us”. Big brother is a fictional character and now a metaphor of authority, of conformity, of obedience. Let us not fall under the trap of obedience for obedience sake, conformity for conformity’s sake, groupthink for groupthink’s safe. The focus of the month in November is called Big Brother is Watching You, based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel entitled 1984. In case you haven’t read this book, it’s about a society wherein people are in constant government surveillance— their every action watched, where there is no true freedom, where individualism and independent thinking are persecuted by what is called the “Thought Police”.
At the pace we are going about right now as far as privacy goes, we can look into this novel not just as a work of fiction but as a cautionary tale. How much privacy do we still have now, when we upload all our photos online, where we check in to places we visit, where we log what we eat, where we track how long we sleep, where even our every single footstep is counted? We are so plugged in to the internet and social media that we’ve become people who are motivated by “likes” and “groupthink”. In our desire to conform and win the approval of others, have we lost both our privacy and individuality? The yoga practice helps us to regain both. In our yoga practice, we don’t have to wait for anyone’s validation. We practice as we are today, and that changes day by day. We learn to honor our own individuality, we modify or take variations as we see fit. For today’s practice, I’d like you to focus on your own internal connection. Let go of the need to look at everyone else in the room. Let go of comparing and being competitive and all that. Let go of this idea that you have to be achieving something else other than what is available today. Let today’s practice be a small act of rebellion— away from Big Brother watching you, away from your own criticisms, away from the desire to fit in to a mold. |
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