Almost every weekend my friends and myself get together for a couple of beers at the bar. And while we chug down beers like water, (Yes, I shamelessly admit we all are alcoholics) we ruminate and discuss the mundane thoughts in and around life. In our previous meet up over drinks, a friend of mine told me that he feels uncomfortable around me because I keep changing my views/ideas every once a while. He said this periodic change of views make me indecisive and lack in character. All my friends are very loving and they take good care of me. They all have good intentions for me and I am certain about that, but upon hearing this statement , my mind was instantly put into an introspection mode.
To be honest a part of what he said is true. Indecisiveness is indeed unhealthy and is a consequence of constant change of ideas in the mind. But what I disagree with is he's remark about lack in character. Changing ideas from time to time in my opinion is not a flaw or a bad trait in anyone's character. I personally believe that in this ever changing complex world , changing your ideas every once a while based on solid rationale is a sign of learning.
Personalities Exist On A Spectrum
Lately I have come to a realization that over the past couple of years I have been unconsciously living multiple personalities that represent a particular idea or a view. Okay wait !!! before you start to think I have some sort of multiple personality disorder, let me stop you . I don't. The multiple personalities on a spectrum are just personalities of mine, that represent particular ideas or views without any bias of my own. Let me explain this with an example to help you understand this better.
Consider a spectrum as shown, it is filled with bright colors from Red to Violet. Each of these different colors represent a different unique personality that is able to fully absorb its corresponding ideas. For simplicity sake lets assume the color green. Now Green for me mostly represent a personality that is associated with being religious.
So basically what I do is every time when someone tries to tell me something about any religion, I switch myself from my normal personality to a personality that is able to absorb the conversation about religion. This helps me absorb the dialogue fully without bringing in any biases of mine. This way I am able to put myself out there, in their shoes and view things from their perspective and get full essence of the idea.
Okay now you might ask, How can any idea of a religion be backed by a rational thought ? If you have been following my pervious posts you know I operate very rationally and if I operate rationally I should be having a rational backing to ideas about religion right ?!
Science argues that religion is institutionalized fiction. And I understand why they say that. But for me I do not question the existence of God because for sure, I do not know and nobody does. Also science still can't explain all the mysteries that occur in our cosmos. Hence from what I know right now and what I am able to rationally process right now is Why does religions exist and the need of it?!.
This changes the narrative from questioning the existence of god or any higher order energy that controls the universe, to coming close at understanding the reality. For my religious personality it is all about changing the narrative and asking different questions when there isn't much observable evidence. This technique lets me absorb in ideas which I believe are relevant to me and discard the ones that don't make much sense to me.
Personalities can be literally anything on the spectrum , it could be a personality that is associated with a particular Philosophical idea or a personality that is associated to a particular cultural idea.
You see, I live in India and India is culturally diverse. Stubbornness with one idea and not letting yourself open to other ideas in my opinion is ridiculous. The point here is to have multiple personalities for each culture without any own bias this helps you fully experience the beauty of each culture.
Merger Of Thought Processes
A personality can also merge with other personality to form a new personality altogether. This personality can give rise to new ideas. Take for example the simple act of thinking , the voice in our mind in just one language that we all are comfortable with, which is our mother tongue (English for me).
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash
If we learn different languages and force the voice inside of our brain to think in a different language, then the thought process will be different. Merge the different language voices in your head and boom!!!! You have taken your thought process to a whole new level.
Society disdain the act of changing mind often
Once an idea is fully understood the next step is to change your mind. And changing your mind often, is looked down upon in the society. The people around you, want you to be confident and decisive with every thing you do. Changing your mind often gives away that you don't really know what you want. You see, the point here is that we live in this highly complex society and it is never possible to be fully confident at any given point of time. There are always things we aren't aware off and that is why its important to put yourself in other's shoes and view life / ideas from their perspective.
Final Notes
The goal with multiple personalities on a spectrum is to aid in understanding any absurd idea better, but sometimes overload of information can paralyze your thought process. Another downside is being way too much open may result in you being frequently influenced by others. The idea here is to strike a balance between both worlds and this can be mastered only with practice.
You can check out my read.cash blog here
Here are links to my other post
Contracts run the world
Virtue Signalling Is Vice And Virtuous
Astronomy : The antidote to Arrogance
Ethics In Artificial Intelligence : Why we need it ?
Our Flawed Morality
