Shaking Off the Delusion

Now, as this is being mentioned, a follow-up question arises as to what qualifies as a delusion. To me, it might qualify as citing a religious belief like that of observing a fast, and to others, the concept of atheism or choosing to remain an agnostic might appear to be quite bizarre. Now, how could delusion be personified in that regard, and who’d be the one responsible for shaking it off? Most importantly, it might appear that what could be the need for shaking off delusion in the first place?

Researchers say that there is a pressing need. Unless one can have cognition of the fact that a mirage is a mirage only, and not a desert, he’d be doing injustice to oneself. In one of his verses, Swami Vivekananda said, “...”Shake off the delusion that you are sheep, you are souls immortal, spirits free..” Now, here this delusion is one, where if it’s not done away, it would turn out to be highly detrimental to the self, and to the society eventually. 

To analyse it more deeply, it would come to the knowledge that more often than not, being deluded or acting under delusion per se, crops up majorly from ignorance. In the previous anecdote cited above, where it talked about the desert and mirage, it clearly showcased the case of ignorance, and being or choosing to remain oblivious of mirage, and thus mistaking it for water. Often as examples from spirituality, time and again it had been mentioned about the delusion where an individual mistakes a rope for a snake, and he refrains from it of course much later when he gets to know that the snake wasn’t real and that it was just rope. 

In our contemporary, rather humdrum lives we somehow attribute some of our overthinking patterns to be one with delusion. Boss texting on Friday late evening means him asking to work over the weekend. While with the courtesy of remote working and working from home, overthinking, in this case, might not look absolutely far-fetched, but there could be thin chances of him texting randomly, just to check on his team members? Not entirely impossible, right? 

Well, if in case impossibility overrides possibility, then we may safely conclude that delusion could, at times be quite carcinogenic, and could have far disastrous results if that’s being coupled within overthinking. 

The pessimists reading this piece would argue that it wasn’t delusion that acted as the culprit here, it was actually the realist inside that made such predictions. However, the intense realist inside knows that in most cases, delusion is detrimental and that it needs to be shaken off, if not as a lion, and maybe as a sheep. Yet, amid all this, the point is to identify the subtle place, where the lacuna lies, work on it, and nip it in the bud there itself. After all, the proverbs “Seize the moment”, and “Opportunity knocks at the door but once”, aren’t that bad when fructified indeed.