“What is happiness? Why is it so elusive?”
“Who am I?”
“Why do we meet the people we meet? and why do we not meet and get to know all the 8 billion human beings on this planet?”
“Where are we going? What are we doing?”
I know you have stayed awake with these questions. And I do not know all the answers yet. I am a seeker of the answers to these questions and many other such questions myself. Are there perfect answers to these questions? Well, it depends.
“Depends on what?”, you may ask.
I know you have stayed awake with these questions. And I do not know all the answers yet. I am a seeker of the answers to these questions and many other such questions myself. Are there perfect answers to these questions? Well, it depends.
“What do you mean?”, you ask again.
The idea of shortcuts can be also described as biases or tendencies, i.e., tendency to jump to set pathways of behaviors or conclusions. In the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, author Dan Kahneman calls this quick and impulsive thinking as System 1 Thinking vs. more organized and thoughtful thinking as System 2 Thinking.
System 1 Thinking also increases over time with formal education and life experiences, while System 2 takes more effort to build new thinking pathways a.k.a neural networks (which is a popular term now-a-days given the surge in AI applications such as ChatGPT).
You also need to consciously create a different type of environment, internal and external, to stop System 1 from getting auto triggered and activate the System 2 Thinking process.
Undoubtedly, System 1 is useful when time is of essence, like applying brakes as soon as the traffic light turns red happens almost subconsciously- like muscle memory. But it is not worthwhile to apply it for all situations.
The starting point of System 2 Thinking is to inculcate a sense of humility to learn new things and unlearn many of the older limiting beliefs that do not work for you. It is called as the ‘Growth’ Mindset too as against the ‘Fixed’ Mindset which is System 1.
A Fixed mindset makes a fixed type of personality, and a Growth mindset allows you to explore the extent of your questions more broadly and help you have a richer experience of life.
I’d like to share something that I’ve been pondering upon since last week.
This above picture of Golden Buddha statue is from the Royal Ontario Museum Toronto that I had clicked almost 2 years ago. It indeed has such a serene and peaceful aura. I found one powerful imagery of a similar golden Buddha in the book “Radical Compassion” by Tara Brach. A gold statue of Buddha was covered with clay to save it from the plunderers. And then it was forgotten that it was a gold statue, until the clay covering somehow got cracked one day. This is such a beautiful message — that one covers one’s own golden (true) self to protect oneself from external forces at play and then forgets all about it. To take this one step deeper, the clay symbolizes System 1 which we have acquired over time, which had its purpose of helping us with self-preservation and survival. But are you working to reach your System 2, i.e. the golden essence that is the core of your being?
Let me know your thoughts.