Being Effective with Yourself

We are fully surrounded by the noise about how to be good to others that we forget the most fundamental question i.e. how to be effective with ourselves.

What do I mean by ‘being effective with oneself?’ In simple words, it means asking the fundamental question to yourself that whether life is working for you?

Though all of us are fundamentally made to serve our best interests that is the way nature has made us but in the name of some false morality or pseudo-religious traditions, we are taught not to think about ourselves. Our teachers have good at teaching us so. They think that these teachings will make us better but in reality, such teachings make us hypocrites. Such teachings are against the basic impulse of life – self-preservation. So, the first virtue is self-preservation. We can build on that insight. Anybody who preaches that it is okay to think about ourselves best interests adversely is not our true well-wisher. They are either a well-intentioned fool or a manipulator.

So to be effective with ourselves, we have to respect ourselves. We have to honor ourself. We have to celebrate ourselves as we are. We have to accept ourselves with all our strengths and weaknesses. We have to enjoy our being instead of rushing for becoming.

The tragedy of life is that we are made to feel inferior, inadequate and unworthy due to the constant propaganda of the market. The product’s producers make us feel inadequate unless we have their product. They compare us constantly with their superimposed role models. They sublimely suggest that unless you have the car which so and so possesses, you haven’t made it. Unless you look like a supermodel, you’re not beautiful enough. Unless you can’t buy a house like the top business tycoon, you aren’t rich enough. They don’t let you be. They do so to sell their products. The philosophy behind this marketing strategy is unless you make the customer feel inadequate without your products, they won’t buy it. Firstly, they create a sense of inadequacy and then they come out with a solution to redress your pseudo inadequacy by proposing to sell their products.

The same goes on in the area of our spirituality or religion The so-called spiritual gurus and religious preachers play the same game in the area of your spiritual life. They suggest that without god, you’re nothing. All your wealth, your success, your beauty will come to nothing when you die, without god, you’re just a pack of dust. They raise the specter of heaven and hell and they claim to hold the key to it. It isn’t that they have any special knowledge or any access to god but it’s just their claim and we human beings are so gullible that we start believing them without even questioning their bogus claims. This fact explains why Hindu gurus, Christian missionaries and preachers of other religions are so financially successful.

Media also plays the same game, they compete with each other to gain control over your mind. In the name of giving you news and views, they sell their products as per the dictates of media owners. What we get as news and views are all motivated by the vested interests of media owners.

The lesson from these exposures of false claims Is this. Be robust and independent in your thinking. Don’t believe the propaganda like a child. Believe in yourself and don’t allow anybody to undermine the trust in your power of observation. In simple words, don’t be ignorant and be enlightened.