An (un)controlled spree of thoughts

A blog post after quite some time now. Had a lot in mind and the willingness to blog it out!

Some random abstract thoughts kept preoccupying my mind over the past few days, well, not too random though, i guess they do have some relevance. Now the basic theme in this post, as always, is about self, not myself but just about self!

Everyone wants to be the best, thus summarized as competition. No person is ever alone and hence, no one can be absolute, it is always relative. Thus, comes the desire to be on the top (no puns intended!) and comes forward the main consideration for this purpose – ‘confidence’!

Now in order to achieve things, people definitely want to have confidence, but ironically, many a times people are not confident of retaining their confidence and thus, avoid things that might ‘hamper’ their confidence! This gives rise to an apparently inevitable vice – ego! People believe that ego is necessary in order to have a spine and that confidence is inseparable with ego, rather confidence is a subset of ego. What is important and a little difficult to understand is that ego and confidence are two different things. The line of difference between the two is a very thin one but is enough to demarcate the two.

I was fishing through some undiscovered and mysterious places in my room where i found the packet that was given to us during admission and which had a collection of books by Swami Vivekanand. I, being an admirer, picked one up and started reading. And i felt as if i got a proper structure to my thoughts, the thoughts about ego being different from confidence and a piece of writing with coinciding thoughts and definitely much more authority (authenticated maturity) than mine. So I thought I should share them. So here it goes...

1) Blaming others for anything and everything has become a chronic disease with us. Why should we expect someone to come and help us? To depend on others is slavery. No good comes of blaming others, fate or circumstances.

2) A man of confidence says that he can do the work and others can also do it; whereas a man of ego says that he alone can do it and nobody else can.

3) A man of confidence always tries to encourage and help others in building their confidence whereas a man of ego tries to curb and discourage others when they try to come up.

4) A man of confidence always attracts people. Even the weak feel confident and elevated in his presence and get inspiration in his company; whereas an egoistic person creates repulsion in the minds of people who try to avoid him because of his boastful nature.

5) A man of confidence appreciates the success of others and shares his happiness with them whereas a man of ego discourages and humiliates others and feels jealous of the success of others.

6) There is joy in working with people of confidence because they can mix freely with everybody. In the presence of egoistic people even the men of confidence feel awkward and undesirable to work with.

7) A man of confidence always commands love and respect, whereas a man of ego always demands and expects love and respect.

8) In one word, a man of self-confidence puts his faith in the innermost divine self, the source of all power and energy, and also feels the presence of the divine in everyone while dealing with them whereas the egocentric person puts his faith only in his mental and intellectual abilities and skills while being aware only of the weaknesses and drawbacks and never realises that the perfect divine is hidden behind superficial appearances in everyone.

NOTE:- man of confidence and man of ego imply a person which is not limited to include only a man.

As regards my view on means and ends, now i've got a formal source attached to it. Forever i have maintained that means and ends are equally important, neither can take priority and a higher importance than the other. So the relevance of the above attempted distinction between confidence and ego is that both might get you the same ends, but means would be different. And in my opinion, real achievement is only when both means and ends are taken care of. As mentioned about the egoistic person, such traits as ‘discourages and humiliates others and feels jealous of the success of others’ only go to show that it’s not just about the judgmental importance of means and ends but it’s also about what you choose. Hatred comes in mainly because there is ego; the feeling of vengeance takes over the ability of reasoning only because there is ego.

I’m not going to say that ego is important. The old argument of ego being required to a certain extent is gone once you know the difference between ego and confidence and difference between ego and self respect (which is supplementary to confidence). Now for me, ego is a vice. It is not necessary that you get faith in yourself, self-confidence or even a powerful personality only if you have ego because that’s pretty much how people argue for the importance of ego. And in the process of defending ego rather than question it, people lose out on friends, thinking that spine is only there when it is stiff enough for you to compromise everything for it. Spine actually exists when it has tensile strength! After all, if achieving things is the only want for which people (like me) consider their existence, then I guess ego is not at all indispensible, rather, it is a vice.