How to Jailbreak the Life Operating System?

by | Dec 15, 2022

The sense of “I” is the greatest deception that mankind is condemned to. Talk to anyone and you hear the story of obsession with money, power, name, fame, attachments, achievements, love, and dependency. We live a life driven by our likes and dislikes. Every moment we are moving “towards what we like and love” and “away from what we dislike and fear.” We put ourselves in the center and look at the world as a great circle, disappearing into the unknown beyond a point. The more we think about it, the scarier it gets. Is the situation so bad, or there is a problem within our own selves? 

When I was writing Wings of Fire with Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam in the late nineties, when he would go down memory lane, his eyes would as if stare into the horizon. He never appeared scary and almost always peaceful. He was most grateful to his parents, teachers, and especially to Dr. Brahm Prakash, the first Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), who indeed mentored him. Dr. Kalam writes, “He had always been my sheet anchor in the turbulent waters of VSSC. His belief in team spirit had inspired the management pattern for the SLV project, which later became a blueprint for all scientific projects in the country.’ (p. 52) 

Recently, I assisted D A Prasanna, my senior and friend of more than two decades, to put together his memories as a book. Prasanna had been the first CEO of WiproGE Healthcare, and a pioneer of the Indian MedTech industry, which now in the 2020s, is a more than 10-billion-dollar enterprise. The book, Innovate Locally to Win Globally, was released in a glittering ceremony at the Bangalore international Centre, on December 12, 2022. It was as if the “stars” of the Indian MedTech industry had descended there. It was indeed a celebration of the transformation of MedTech from a 100% import dependency in 1990 to the dominance of India-made ultrasound machines and CT scanners in the global market and crossed $10 billion in size.

The book carried a picture of Dr. Kalam, then the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, arriving at the John F. Welch Technology Centre in a “Made in India” Tata Indica car in 1999 to discuss the outreach of cardiac diagnostic services.  Of course, the book has many “superstars” Azim Premji, who hired Prasanna while starting the Wipro computer business in 1978; Prasanna’s colleague at GE, Omar Ishrak, now the Chairman of INTEL Corporation; and Ramdas Madhava Pai, the incumbent Chancellor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, who opened the Manipal hospitals to GE. Prasanna remembers them with gratitude. 

So, if there is no “I,” what is this mentoring, this gratitude? Why build this entire basket of memories? I consider the autobiography of the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875-1961), with the title Memories, Dreams, Reflections as perhaps the best “story” about human life. All three words in the title of the book are intangible, nowhere to be found except in one’s mind. And yet the words of writers and poets, paintings, and sculptures of artists, inspire people after they have gone, and that inspiration leads to many other great works and noble deeds. There is something unseen and unexpressed that clicks and creates the seen and felt world that is lived. 

In his famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, the American writer, Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), describes the “plot” of human life. Every hero belongs to the normal world, living an ordinary life. A mentor arrives on the scene. The mentor takes the “hero” into unfamiliar territory and leaves him alone. Hereafter, he is tested, faces ordeals, and meets both friends and enemies. There comes a time of “a brush with disaster,” which must be “survived” and then the hero returns to the ordinary world with a great boon. This is the “story.” In some cases, it does not take off at all without a mentor. In most cases, people do not survive the trial, mistake friends for enemies and vice versa, and fail. Very few people return, but these are all heroes.  

The point is, we are all heroes, unfinished products mostly, stuck up at different levels. How do we know this? I recently read a little difficult-to-read book, “The Embodied Mind.” It is written by three specialist authors – Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Evan Thompson (b. 1962), and Eleanor Rosch (b. 1938). I have read the Silver Jubilee edition, published in 2016. The two surviving authors have written new introductions, capturing the advances made by cognitive science in the meantime. The book offers the key to making the best use of one’s life, in three simple steps. 

First, know yourself as a product of your “present situation.” There is no other way that it could have happened. That you are alive today is a “survivor story, even if you hesitate in calling it a success story.” Second, your future is embedded in your “present moment,” maybe like seeds buried in the ground, waiting for water to sprout and emerge. Third and finally, the decision whether to continue to act as per your habits or change, rests with you. No one is responsible for your success or failure other than your decisions of staying with your habits or stepping out of them. The three actions are summarised as enactment – to achieve, execute, depict, discourse, do, and perform – by living mindfully. 

Defining mindfulness as the opposite of mindlessness, the book mentions the principle of co-dependent origin in Buddhism – originally called Pratītyasamutpāda – where pratītya is the Sanskrit word for dependence and samutpāda means originating conditions. We are all caught in a closed chain of cause and effect. Each moment is created from its past and our action at that moment creates the future. Except for one crucial step – this present moment – nothing is in our hands. At this moment, I must be awake, and out of my sleep – the conditioning by my feelings and thoughts – and act, not on my impulses but on my reason.

It is declared loud and clear in the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita:

एवं बुद्धे: परं बुद्ध्वा संस्तभ्यात्मानमात्मना |

जहि शत्रुं महाबाहो कामरूपं दुरासदम् || (3.43)   

Using Intelligence, control your own life. Your desires are your invincible enemy; kill them. 

And how do I know about my desires? How do I differentiate between the Supreme Intelligence and my own stuff? Again, the answer is very crisp and straightforward. Each one of us is endowed with completeness – learn to be satisfied in yourself, by yourself, at every moment and allow life to unfold. 

प्रजहाति यदा कामान्सर्वान्पार्थ मनोगतान् |

आत्मन्येवात्मना तुष्ट: स्थितप्रज्ञस्तदोच्यते || (2.55)

Gives up all desires in your mind, O Parth! One who is satisfied with himself in himself alone is called steadfast in intelligence. 

In this non-acting upon your desires, lies the key to all further actions of your life. Jailbreaking is the popular name given to the process of accessing locked electronic devices, like cell phones. Jailbreaking allows one to gain full access to the root of the operating system. In life, however, there is no lock on the outside of the prison door. Open the door from the inside and you are free. The event concluded with a determination to make Indian MedTech a $100 billion Industry by 2030. 

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