When we think of decentralisation, we think of some kind of organisation. When we think of decentralisation, we also kind of think of distribution of hierarchy. Although we wish to see a functioning decentralised organisation, often time we dismiss the idea by thinking perfect decentralisation is not achievable.

What if we do not believe in decentralisation because psychologically, we like being centralised within our confined views. What if our thought patterns are organised in such a way that we can only think in terms of hierarchy and centralisation?

To discuss this issue, we should look into ourselves.

We can self-contemplate: When we like or dislike something; does that liking, and disliking make us who we are? Is the ‘self’ aggregate of what we like and dislike? In the first glace we might think the aggregate makes the self. But then, what we like and dislike changes all the time. What you liked 10 years ago, you don’t like anymore and the things you like now, you might not like in the future. The ‘self’ is changing all the time. So, we could prove that we are not what we like or dislike because our likes and dislikes change all the time.

This might not be a good feeling to find out that we are not what we like and dislike. It is not a good feeling because we tend to identify ourselves with the things we like and dislike. We identify our self with political system, religion, husband or wife, parents, culture, nation, our own body, job, race, sexuality, society etc. When we identify our self with an object it gives us a sense of security that these objects make me “ME”.

As mentioned above, things change. Political systems change, religions split off, husband and wife or parents gets divorced, nations, cultures, societies change, we lose our job, our body changes and we get old. When these changes happen, our identity gets shattered and we feel left out and depressed.

When we identify our self with an object our intellect attempts to preserve that identity. People are ready to kill and die for some geographical region(country), or for a piece of cloth(flag), They are ready to kill other who look different or who hold different opinions on imaginary friend (god) or different political opinion.

If we do not get attached to the identity with anything like country, culture, race, society, religion, body, politics etc, we are free. Intellectually we could be anyone and we won’t have any prejudice against or for anything. Then we become everyone or everything and everything becomes us. Then only we think in terms of oneness and not as separate. Then we won’t need someone to be above us and dictate us to be within some system. We become more vigilant of what can bring good to overall humanity and society.

Self-acceptance:

If we do not identify our self with the objects outside, then how do we see the world? As you might have heard from Buddhism to look at things “as it is” without any personal concept or judgement behind it. It might sound very simple, but it is not easy to grasp. We have been trained by all means to have our own concept behind everything. When we look at things, we certainly add our own personal belief to it then we interpret according to our values. It is certainly not easy to disregard our values and beliefs.

I tried to understand the concept of looking things as it is without judging for many years, I did not achieve, I always found myself judging no matter what practice I followed. Just recently I found out that we are actually judging ourselves rather than judging others, we are in constant battle within ourselves with the values and ideas that we have acquired.

I want to share my revelation; I was in Bombay in 2004. One day, my mate suggested me to go to a satsang(spiritual lecture) from a guru that he follows. I don’t remember the name of the guru, anyways its not important.

The satsang was on a beautiful garden by the beach. It is very rare in Bombay to have a big lawn that too by the beach. The place was lit with bright lights, well decorated, stage was beautiful with full of garlands, they were serving free food to everyone. There were over one thousand people gathered to see him speak. We reached there half an hour earlier, all the seats were taken. People came before us and were waiting.

The guru came on the stage everyone got quiet. Person who was standing next to me got his pen and note book out to note. Guru sat down, he was silent for few minutes, everyone got really quiet. He spoke, he said, whatever you are feeling, just say it’s fine, ‘it is all fine’, that should be your mantra. The guy next to me quickly wrote on his notebook ‘it’s all fine’. After that he got quiet again and we all waited for him to say something more. Then after few minutes of quiet time, he said, that’s it for today and left the stage. I had never been to any satsang and that was my first one. I was quite disappointed; I was hoping I would learn something profound. We left from there, we laughed that how weird it was.

Fast forward 2019. I started to meditate more regularly than before. If you have been meditating, you would know that meditation can surface things from within you; like your forgotten past traumas or past habits within you. After few months of meditation, I started to get really horny. Probably it was because I learned to relax, my cortisol level went down and when my cortisol was down my testosterone could work. But this phenomenon was getting very uneasy for me. I was constantly horny. I did not want to jerk off to cool it off, I just wanted to see where this intense feeling would take me to. I started to look at the horny-ness as an object. This was making me even more focused on horny-ness and making me hornier. Few days went by and the feeling was getting intense. Before when this happened, I had sex and the feeling went away. This time I wanted to find out if there is more to this primordial urge. I started to google why this is happening, I found hundreds of posts online, many good suggestions. Most of the posts were saying observe the feeling. I kept observing. After few days, I found a post on reddit that someone suggested that being horny itself is not bad and we suffer from it because of our guilt and social conditioning, just accept that you are horny. After that I did accept that I was horny, and I admitted from within that it is fine to be horny. That was one of the most revealing things that I have experienced. The horny-ness did not bother me anymore. It was there but I did not have to think or to do anything about it, it was not bothering me anymore.

Then I used same technique to other things. I was really hating someone I know for his behaviours. Whenever hate would arise in me, I was feeling very bad and feeling heavy on my chest. The feeling would go away and it would arise again and again, and I would suffer. I wanted to get rid of the hate feeling but it would not go away and I was suffering over and over. After that horny incident, I accepted that I truly hate this person and I said, “it is fine”, it is ok to hate, I accepted the hate without any judgements. Then that hate stopped bothering me. After that, I went and met that person just to see how I will react. The person had not changed but I changed, his behaviour did not bother me. “it was fine”.

Finally, after 15 years, I understood what that Indian guru in Bombay was talking about. I could hear him saying ‘it is fine’ every time I was accepting my emotions. I would completely accept, not judge or criticize any emotion and it would not bother me anymore.

I understood what buddha meant by looking things ‘as they are’. I always thought it meant not to judge others, but it was not happening for me. I understood, it was not judging yourself, not self-criticising and completely accepting your negative and positive reactions to objects. As I accept my emotions completely without any self-judgement; the emotion that I have against others have no ground to stand upon and it would just disappear.

If someone acting like a dick, you will get angry, it is natural to arise. It’s not bad that you are angry, accept the angry without any self-judgement, that anger would not bother you anymore. If someone had done something bad to you, it is natural to hate that person and if you do not judge yourself for hating them, you would stop suffering from that hate. Similarly, if a beautiful girl or a handsome guy flirts with you, give you a smile and you really like it; accept that you feel good without any self-inquiry or self-judgement, embrace that emotion, that emotion will not bother you anymore. May be then you could have a normal conversation with that person who you want to flirt with without getting into mental games and feeling uncomfortable. After that you will be fine if something good happens and you will be fine if nothing really happens. The results won’t matter to you. Accept all your emotions without judgements and say “it’s fine”.

The trick is to internalise your feelings. See where it feels, and look at the feeling as it is, without adding the object. Then accept the feeling totally without any judgements.

This is what emotional intelligence really means, emotions are not controlling you. If you dig deeper, when your emotions are not controlled by outer reality, you do not identify yourself with the objects on outer reality.

Nature of reality:

This phenomenon really made me think of the nature of reality. If we really think about reality. We perceive reality only from our six senses; hearing, smelling, seeing, touching, tasting and thoughts.

When we see, light reflects from an object we perceive, that reflected light goes through our eyes, it gets converted into an electric signal and our brain converts that signal as seeing. Same when we hear, sound gets converted into electrical signal by our ears and our brain perceives it as sound. So, at the end, like how Morpheus in the Movie Matrix says “reality is electric signal interpreted by your brain”.

When we see or hear or smell or taste something from outside reality. Depending on our conditioning, we interpret it as good or bad and react to it with our emotions.

If we even dig deeper, and really look into our thinking mind. We can see that our mind is not under our control. It thinks about random things and flies all the time. Almost all the time unless when your intent to control your thoughts.

You can try this by yourself; close your eyes and try to concentrate on your breathing. Try to focus on your breathing without thinking of anything and keep your thoughts focused to breathing. You will soon find out it is very hard to keep your thoughts under control. Your mind just flies off somewhere else. And soon you notice that when your mind flies off to a pleasant thought, you get pleasant emotion somewhere in your body and when your mind runs off somewhere unpleasant, you get unpleasant emotion somewhere in your body. Even when your mind is not thinking, your sensations just arise and ceases in different parts of the body. We can hardly predict which sensation are going to arise next good or bad one.

Not only our thoughts and emotions arise by itself and not under control, we are not in control of our body either. We cannot control when we get sick or not. We are born we get older and we have no control over it.

So, if we are not our thoughts since it is flying freely, if we are not our sensations which arises and ceases by itself, if we are not our body which is not under our control, then who is that “I” we refer to?

The ‘I’ is what we identify ourselves with. We identify using our pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and emotions.

Conclusion:

When we look at the thoughts and emotions as it is, without any judgement and accept them whole heartedly, we start nonidentifying with outer objects. When we do not identify ourselves with outer reality, we find out that the “I” is a self-construct through our identifications. When we understand ‘I’ is a self-construct, we could see that there is no central self. Everything is just arising and ceasing, it comes and goes. That way we can truly understand that we are decentralised in nature.

From here we can see the hierarchy in outer reality is a self-constructed identification system. We built this system in our mind to find the self in the system. When we realise that we are decentralised in nature, centralisation is just a self-constructed illusion.