You smiled but your acquaintance just walked past !

What happens in us when somebody we know doesn't acknowledge our smile or a shakehand but just ignores and walks past ?

The first inner reaction is my ego gets hurt. In this situation what happens to him/her who didn’t smile is less important. S/he may be in his/her own world of bliss or mess. Why that should put me in a mess? Mind starts wandering. It thinks, is it that somebody told her something against me and that’s why she didn’t smile? Is she under some pressure and hence she ignored me or doesn’t want to share something with me? Is something wrong in my face, my clothes today? Is she ignoring me? Our ego-factory can produce a lot of such crap. That’s by design. What happens to me with all these thoughts is more important. WHICH specific output of my ego-factory have I latched myself on to and HOW MUCH have I latched on to? These 2 factors will decide if we can be free even if you smile and the known person ignores. Last time this happened to me I got latched to a thought that the other person is ignoring me but he seems to be in his world of problems that’s why he’s doing so. That evening I just walked to him and said hi! We got onto regular talking terms, cracked jokes and departed. I learned a lot with this experience about the functioning of my mind, its unbeatable ability to create nonsense in my head even when everything was really fine.

In another incident the problem began when I smiled at an unknown lady misunderstanding her as an acquaintance and she smiled back with a question in her eyes. Now I’m thinking hard ;)

Selection, Rejection and Dejection in a Job Interview.

My interview was going great. I was almost sure I’m in. The final question from the interviewer was, “Do you want to go for higher education?” I said “Yes” and was disqualified. This is somebody’s true incident.

How does our flow of thoughts operate from now on hearing this incident is very important? We will easily conclude that we will say “No” if we are asked such a question. I want you to understand the dynamics of the situation and of the mind. You will find an exact negative story where person said “No” and he was still disqualified. Now where does your thought flow take you? We always feel that we are opening a gate by learning from someone else’s experience but remember that by trying to open one gate you have actually closed many other gates. With a knee jerk reaction we concluded that “Yes” created the problem. Can we look at the situation deeper than that, free of what we think is right?

The result of not getting a job is a function of both, the interviewer and the one who was interviewed. Why are we deciding beforehand what’s going to be our reaction if we encounter such a situation. Any small noise around and we immediately have a conclusion ready how I am going to behave and how everybody else should behave in that situation if s/he faces it. With these conclusions we fail to see the situation in totality because 100 such situations happen and we have 200 walls built around us. If your true answer was “Yes” then what’s wrong if you got rejected? We always love the outside result and fail to nurture the inside growth. Do we see the inside growth at all? We want best from everything, job from an interview and higher education from studying and there's nothing right or wrong about it. Problem is not with rejection, it’s with dejection of having lost control of the situation which I thought was earlier under my control. Somewhere the interviewer doesn’t believe that she can influence you to change your decision of going for higher studies and you don’t believe that you can change her decision to get you in. If you go beyond your belief only then there are higher possibilities. Then thoughts will happen to you, you don’t have to think. Can you allow things to happen to you..? Can you still win the interviewer's heart if not a job ?

The Yes-Yes fun!

One evening at 6:00pm I declared in my home that till the end of day I am not going to say “NO”. Whatever you tell me I will do it. Friends, it was an amazing experience to realize how much conscious was I about everything then on, how much no’s are a part of my being. When my 9yr and 5yr children understood what it meant they made me play all that they wanted. My wife and dad played small tricks in their sentences and made me say “yes” to everything. In spite of all this I pronounced “NO” 6 times in 5hrs. I also learned many positive ways of saying “NO”.

Just close your eyes and say “Don’t climb a tree.” The picture that the mind creates is “climb a tree” and then deny it. As students, teachers or parents if we can find clever ways of telling the other “what to do” than “what not to do” we are veeery differently empowering that person. Moreover, if you convert it into a question for right situations then you are not only empowering him/her but also giving a freedom of choice.

If we play yes-yes with self then we move into a different paradigm. Lets see how this evolves when we talk about concentration. One definition of concentration is “If I am reading something, I should be lost in the world of reading. I should not know what is going on around me.” We tend to deny everything that stops me from concentrating in my studies e.g. sexuality, TV, internet, SMS. We are stuck to this definition because we have borrowed it from elders, neighbours, books and maybe, previous experience. The other definition could be “If I am reading something, I may or may not get lost in the world of words. Am I aware of every thought (we call it distraction) that happens when reading?” There are two types of thoughts viz. those which are created because of reading the subject and those which are just coming to me without asking. Can you find your definition of ‘concentration’ and question it to the core? There are thoughts that happen to us, don’t deny them. Have Yes-Yes fun with them. They are not the voluntary ones as they seem to be.

If you are filled with a lot of questions after the read, be with them.

(please go through the article that triggered the above thought process at: http://www.citehr.com/863-toxic-thinking.html)