It's not difficult to imagine the possibility of us being in a matrix executing pre-programmed code and hardly ever realizing it. It's tough to be Neo. That's why he is the only oNe. The reason I believe its not difficult to imagine a matrix is the fact that I can see a multitude of live experiences from my own and many of your lives which provide substantial evidence.
We are born with a code and as we move on more code is added, sometimes explicitly while sometimes in a subtle manner. Although there are multiple evidences to show that we follow a code; some consequential, some not so much so, the most fundamental one that strikes me is religion.
I was so influenced by the pre-programmed code that it took me 25yrs to even think that their could be something beyond it. I asked myself the other day: Why do I belong to a religion that I didn't choose but the one which I inherited it from my parents? They in turn inherited it from their parents and going further we would be down a trail with an untraceable source.
An even more fundamental question to be answered is: Why do we need religion in the first place? There could be as many answers to this as the number of Sudoku puzzles possible but here is the way I think about it: Religion to me is a means to avoid burdening ourselves with the responsibility of all events in this universe. Someone who takes the responsibility of all events in space and time is God according to me. Since I am neither capable of nor willing to taking this unsurmountable responsibility, I need a religion. It is a means of setting extermal expectations from me at par with my self-perceived capabilities. Many of us could potentially have the same answer to this question.
Having answered (or attempted, at least) the most fundamental question about religion, it's time to come back to the first question that came up: Why do I belong to a religion that I did not choose? There could be several ways of thinking about this too and the way I think about this relates to my definition of God. Since it is about shedding away responsibility from ourselves to something extra-personal about which we dont know much when we start our lives, the natural choice is to go for the 'tried-and-tested' option, namely the one our lineage has been faithful to. This, although very convenient is far away from the natural process of making a well-informed choice. A well-informed choice is made when all possible (or known) options are idenfitied, analysed, criticised and finally compared. The final step ofcourse requires a set of metrics which ,to a great extent are personal.
In an ideal world conducive for natural choice, one would come into this world untagged and choose his/her religion based on a well-informed natural choice process, comparing option based on personal metrics and making a choice finally. But someone who is in the mode of challenging underlying assumptions (like I am right now) would be tempted to question whether it is necessary to finally make a choice at all. Why can't one have a platter instead, or more interestingly come up with a new choice of his/her own?
This leads me into a set of thoughts which seem to be natural to me but due to my ignorance of the subtleties of various religions out there do not seem to fall into any particular basket. The thoughts are related to the way I was led into defining God. It is my sheer incapability and unwillingness to take responsibility of all events in the universe that leads me to think there is God or more aptly put, there is a need of defining God. Once this need is identified, one tries to address it and that's what I have tried to put in words here. Now since it is a matter of responsibility, there lies a spectrum of possibilities out there. On one end of the spectrum is God himself/herself who takes all responsibility and on the other lies someone who assumes all responsibility to be outsourced to God. Most of us fall somewhere in between and life is a journey intended to travese different paths on this spectrum. A thought that really struck resonance in me came from the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl. It says its not happiness that we search for in life but its meaning that we search. It advocates life as a source of opportunity to look for meaning of events in this universe (more specifically events that seem to affect us). In this context, different people can have different definitions of 'meaning' but to me, its about attempting to traverse the spectrum towards increased self-responsibility.
Now that's the stem of the tree and naturally there exist many branches to be explored. One of particular interest to me (and probably to a lot of people) is the one that relates to happiness and regret. Once it is accepted that all responsibility of events in space and time does not lie on our shoulders, a constant state of regret can be avoided. There are things we have control on (for which we should take up the responsibility) and there are things which we cannot control (for which we outsource responsibility). Take an event that occured in the past and upon analyzing it, if it is realised that things potentially under our control went wrong, a regret sets in. If it turns out that things were not in our control anyways, there is no sense of regret. However, the perception of what is infact in our control and what is not itself is grey and fuzzy. And the search for meaning is to be able to minimize this fuzziness.
It would be quite interesting to think about and explore other branches of the tree but right now the search for meaning ends at the professional responsibility I am supposed to assume at this desk :)
