Cognitive Dissonance & The Seeking

Yet again I got into the whirlpool of questioning, this time around “Attachment”

One side of your life you have wonderful job, friends, love which forms the epicenter of joy and misery. And on the other I’m drawn more and more towards the quest or search for self which also lead me to find what a true bliss of joy and love is like. For simplicity let me call this bliss as Krishna J.

So when I’m pulled on both directions of life, I get tattered apart miserably and wish that I chose one path either on my left which is materialistic where there are several beautiful & lamenting moments in it and on the right is my Krishna where only his bliss of love and joy exists. The ambiguity OR rather failing to completely subscribe to one path of life is what I call the cognitive dissonance.

Let me explain this a little more ,

Material Life –

So let’s say I appraise myself to getting married or committed to seek love and happiness, I then seek more love and more happiness by having a home, and a Kid and a family. There is no denial that when a kid smiles at you, your hearts melt away. You go and lift the kid in your arms and at some point you have to let it go. Or may be at some point you have to walk out, HOW do we confer these moments of joy and misery on each other should be viewed critically. One must realize that all these moments of joy and misery are extremely transitory by their very nature.
After having a kid, you seek more fulfillment by seeing the kid getting married and feel more content when I play with my grandchildren. Doesn’t stop here, I will then start yearning for pilgrimage and reading and all sorts of divine rituals at the far end of it because there is still a sense of more happiness and joy left to achieve. This word “More” stands on the theory of incompleteness or constant search which happens every day to everyone in varied degree and forms which I experienced and shared in my last write. It takes out a lot of time from one’s life until he spins out of it to say “I Don’t Know what I’m searching for”. “ I don’t know if this much is enough”. “ I don’t want to let you go, but yet I have to” . Let me call out a statement that we often use, “Love is Blind” bullshit I feel, I think one doesn’t know what he wants from that love or what is love. There is nothing called as love, there is only “SEEKING”. So love is feeling of seeking or desiring materialistic or emotional gains. Nothing else. And that’s y I feel even all these are manifestations of materialistic seeking. It appears to be a terrifying idea to give up what we love. We need not give up; the so called loved ones will themselves give us up in time because the worldly love and matter is extremely superficial and constructed. The quest takes a different direction here and if one is able to channelize this in the right direction, the journey to spirituality dawns on him. You could be the monk who sold his Ferrari.


Nevertheless infinite moments of joy are indeed sandwiched in this journey. What is also a part of this package is people, objects, experiences, transiting constantly and therefore one falling under the vicious cycle of constant bondage and demise of bondage, excitement, happiness, devastation or stressed out of a bereavement. This constant circle of arrival and departure is the truth of material life which should be accepted. It’s extremely transitory and not the absolute and therefore it will exhibit its true nature. Again things of the world will themselves tell us they are not be depended upon.

In my personal experience I fall in love very easily from the depth of my heart and get completely attached and give into what or whom I love. This, at different points of life raises some sense of belonging, happiness, security and insecurity, fear, jealousy anxiety etc etc which is as unpleasant as the pleasant times. Feelings like jealousy, anxiety, fear, insecurity stems from the subconscious mind which can be easily corrected sometimes. All these feelings are a result of materialistic obsession or indifference. Correcting the unpleasant ones and equally knowing the pleasant ones requires “EXISTENTIAL AWARENESS” . You could be happy and painful or oblivious to these in different ways at different times.

So when you know all of this is so fleeting, there are the following set of cognition's I have come across.

1. Live and sustain each moment , meaning savor the love and mourn when someone or something leaves you. i.e. Live and sustain both pain and glory, Live each moment.
2. Don’t be excited when you are happy and don’t be attached to the grief, imagine you are a third person and both these are a passing fad on your body.
3. Seek , search for yourself who is beyond these material objects and connect with Krishna’s bliss therefore you are completely detached to transitory feelings.

The first one is completely fit if I chose the path on my left. There is no question of quest here and says to only enjoy and live each moment whatever it is.
The second and third are more or less the same but just the articulation is different - “The quest for the bliss” I don’t know yet how this search for self and bliss is related closely. I know that “Self” is something that I can’t express as yet but definitely not bound by a definition of 250 characters. I’m like the air which is universal , I’m like the mirror which reflects what is shown in front of it. I have experienced these feelings momentarily and I’m flabbergasted to articulate such an experience.


The seeking

What is the purpose of life? Does it need to have a purpose? Do u need a reason to wake up in the morning? Do you need someone in the room to go back to? Do you need a billion to be happy? Are you happy if you have kids? Are you happy if you have a date? Why do you need more and more all the time? What is an answer, what is truth, what is true love, what is love, what is jealousy, what is happiness, what makes one sad, Etc etc

I feel my answer to all these is in seeking of his bliss, I strongly get pulled towards this as it’s the only truth that you will arrive at if you were pass through a deep and critical examination of all or any paths of life. It stops when you reach him, you fall in the bliss when you arrive at the scene. You will see him in everything you do, see, touch, smell whatever. You are not connected to the physical manifestation of yourself and thereby you are isolated from the joy and misery that flow past your body. When I run behind you o Krishna, I feel no joy I feel no misery I can only feel you which I cannot explain. Things like love, relations, money, luxury, characteristics crumble down with shame and incompleteness in front of you, my purity of soul and my love to you is the only thing that I can give you for it is me!. Accept me!

I also feel that I must seek help and help all my co passengers who are in this journey to reach him. I feel like I need to help those who are despondent in this vicious circle of materialism and are seeking themselves and Krishna. If I call the seekers as “Class apart from the Mass” , Well then class is still present in the mass, Krishna loves both mass and the class, then why help only the class not the mass too? I feel the answer is its meant to be a mass. One is meant to be living the materialistic world until a threshold point. After which he graduates to the class. If you imagine a melting pot of energy that contains both positive and negative particles, I feel there is so much a imbalance between the positive and negative energies, good and bad, poor and rich, material and divine, class and the mass etc. But both positive and negative energies are still a part of the concept. Positive is positive in reference to negative and negative is negative with reference to positive. May be the imbalance in required to reach a balance or may be balance is not meant to be balanced. Mass is meant to be mass until it graduates to the class, It’s like the circle which never ends. Then why help the class seek the bliss? Let them be the mass till they graduate to the class!!

Now the Dissonance part of it!

5 days during a week, I love my swanky job, I like the little bit of money, I like to see my parents happy, , I love to experience the moments when
I sing and sink in my tunes, I love to be belonged to someone close to my heart, I like to party, I like to go watch a movie, I love to be in love, I feel hard to let go of people whom I love, I’m very passionate about certain things, I LOVE kids,

When triggered by a event, when i win something, when I achieve something, when I see misery, when I fear of losing, anxiety, or nowadays when something really good happens or someone just comes along, it start slyly pricking my conscience and I go into this questioning mode and try to be oblivious to both sides of life. Then it starts , all of the above comes crumbling on me. It seems meaningless to me, I get drawn towards him more strongly. I feel like I should shut all the doors and completely get detached of all the above, I feel like walking out on all of it, I feel like running in search of him,. Yet my feet stumbles, yet my thought twitches, and the streams of reasoning lose its way in the midst of this unreal beauty, unreal joy and unreal smiles.

I’m muffled in the noise of a crowd, I’m stuck in the void between this running maniac and seeking maniac in a dreary desert. It’s like a crying child in a locked door, suffocated completely, while I see the door open I can’t run and when the door is shut I can’t live. How then do I carry myself oh Krishna, please show me my way, please guide me into your heaven of freedom and joy. Show me the path to the absolute. You either throw me in the circle and make me enjoy or mourn all materialistic gains and losses, or you call me unto you.