The root meaning of the word experience is ‘knowledge which comes from trials and tests. We are born with biological impulses and various capacities and abilities like learning language, but without any experience or ability of surviving in the world- both physical and the world of abstractions, on our own.
As children, we rely on the experience of others, while simultaneously accumulating our own experiences. Physically and emotionally, we are reliant on the external world. We are curious, but we are also helpless. We implicitly trust our environment of elders to feed us, protect us, hold our hands when we learn to walk, to hug and caress us when we are upset or scared, and so on.
As always, what works well in the outer world doesn’t always work well in the psychological world. The hands that hold us and guide us turn into crutches when they are transported to our intellectual world. We ask questions about the world that seems incomprehensibly complex and in the best cases, our elders are happy to oblige, giving us all the explanations and answers that they can. We are bombarded with answers to questions that we, in most cases, don’t even get to ask. Like how to live life? Or why should I believe in a god? Or why is money so important? And so on. We begin to experience the seductive power of answers. And before we know, we are hooked.
The more they give us, the more we expect to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe in, and in general how to live and be in the world. We receive templates that will supposedly help us to navigate the world, the templates that our elders themselves received from their world. And we love all of it.
By the time we reach adolescence, these templates are so well internalized that they become our internal voice, the chatter in our heads, the default lens through which we see the world and ourselves. The templates are beyond all questions and doubts now. The most real and pressing question now for us is to figure out the ways to stick to the templates as best as we can in order to be ‘successful’. To ace the templates becomes the primary striving, the primary purpose of life.
But now that we are here, inquiring together, we must look into what the template does to us.
The explanation of the outward phenomena helps to build up an intellectual understanding of how the physical world works. When the time comes, we can then build upon this acquired knowledge, that’s how science and technology move ahead. But when it comes to questions of life and how to live, on our relationship with the world, what is there to build upon? The template that is passed around at any point in time is more or less the same template that has always been passed around since forever. While in the fields of science and technology we have made immense leaps, in the psychological and social world it seems like we are stuck in a time capsule. Greed, envy, conflicts, perennial dissatisfaction with our lives, quest for power etc.- the essential causes and effects of the templates, have been part of the human condition since forever. The templates lead us nowhere except along the same old beaten circles traversed by our ancestors.
Why do templates lead nowhere?
A template works for fixed mechanical processes- like building a car. The ‘how’ of building a car remains unchanged, because what is observed i.e. the parts of the car and the ways to put them together don’t depend on the observer. The process of putting together a car remains unchanged no matter who or where. However, to put a machine together is different from living one’s life. Life is not a limited, mechanical process like building a car. Life is dynamic, it moves in multiple dimensions at once, and requires constant attention and sensitivity. No formula or recipe can capture life’s essence.
The experience that one does gather by being and acting in the world, the knowledge about oneself and about other people that one acquires first hand is subjective, i.e. it is shaped by the templates one was born into, by one’s formative experiences as well as the genetics. Therefore this experience that one gathers after a lifetime’s toil maybe absolutely useless for another person. And then the medium in which this experience exists and is shaped by, i.e. language itself is a source of endless confusion. Even the understanding of words like good or success varies with each person. The know-how of living as received from elders is thus merely a collection of words whose meaning and interpretation keeps changing and is non-transferable.
The one who passes on the templates is as clueless, if not more, as the one to whom it is being passed. The arbitrary, prejudiced and limited interpretations of their experiences gathered by the grown-ups through years of conflicted existence, supported by nothing more than anecdotal evidence and put together into seemingly all encompassing yet ultimately incoherent narratives, are often talked up in our world as pearls of wisdom that the young ones must gather and cherish. Surely, there may be some valuable learnings about this or that matter, but the litmus test of any such ‘wisdom’ must be – is it able to inspire an inquiry into the nature of the template itself ? If not then all such wisdom needs to be kept aside and seen as what it really is- highly personal interpretations of encounters with living. The moment we accept and adopt someone’s ideas, explanations as universally applicable and non-fallible, we have fallen into that same old pattern that hasn’t led us anywhere psychologically in hundreds of thousands of years.
A template to live life is a logical impossibility. All the so-called templates are thus imaginary templates i.e. they are templates only because we have been told so and have accepted them to be so.
What is better – to live with an imaginary template, or with no template at all?
The answer is clear. It is only when we have no template at all that we can pause, stop, listen and look like we have never before. It is only then that we can be fully alive to the supple, ungraspable, incomprehensible life. It is only then that wisdom and insight to be really alive can come to us, which unlike knowledge cannot be transferred or built upon. The authority figures- starting from our parents and teachers to the famous men and women of the world, the writers, the poets, the gurus, the holy men, the philosophers, the scientists, the leaders, the saints, the CEOs and the entrepreneurs – none of them can give us this wisdom or insight to be fully alive. All these, along with our own first hand experiences, must then be put aside. To rely on any authority – external or the authority of one’s own body of experiences is thus to fall in the same trap.
But we are used to relying on authority. Figuring out all this by oneself is too much. None of our elders or our education prepared us for a life without authority figures or the templates given by them. We love templates because they are supposed to save us from confusion.
But do they really save from confusion?
The template is always in constant conflict with our life as it unfolds in each moment. The uncertainty and unpredictability of life challenges our templates time and again. But we go on hoping to tame life with our plans and schemes. Then also, on one hand we wish to accept the template unconditionally but at the same time we repelled by its lifeless, mechanical nature. So, we seek to escape from it via drugs, alcohol, sex, entertainment, travel and countless other such diversions. We desire the template, but we also fear being sucked into and getting forever lost in this lifeless, mechanical monster. Our greatest desire is also the source of our greatest fear. This is the paradox that drives our lives.
So, the question then is if it is possible to live without authority? What would it mean to live without any authority? What would it mean to stand alone, and seek to figure out one’s own life and living, on one’s own? No philosophy, no gurus, no self-help books, no words of the wise or books, no religious scriptures to rely on. It would mean living with uncertainties and confusion, without escaping or without succumbing to them.
All this must be possible or else we are doomed to go around in circles until we destroy ourselves. If see all this, not just intellectually, but in our life as it happens- how template leads us back to itself, if we can observe this clearly, non-intellectually, then what happens? Then is there any place for template in our lives?
What would be the quality of a life without template? Where would the actions arise from, if not from the template? What would be the nature of such actions?
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