You must have heard about the Navy Seals, the US Special Forces unit. In their training there is a lesson on drown proofing. Here a trainee will have his hands and legs tied and will be thrown in a swimming pool. He has to survive for 5 minutes. Sounds scary, well it is, no one would like to be in such a situation. Trainees struggle to keep their head above the water. Most go down taking in water and have to be rescued and resuscitated. But some make it through.
There are two important lessons in it.
First is the more you struggle, the more you will sink. With your arms and leg tied the more you try to keep yourself afloat, the quicker you will sink. There is a trick. You have to let yourself sink and when you reach the bottom then you have to push yourself up using your legs. Once you reach the surface then you take in as much air as you can then again you go down to the bottom of the swimming pool. You have to repeat it for the 5 minutes. Here your strength and endurance and even your ability to swim is of no use. In fact you should not even try to swim though you are in water.
The second lesson is that if you panic more, you will burn more oxygen, and you will be unconscious and drown. Your natural survival instinct to get more oxygen will go against you if you do not follow the technique. The more you want to live, the greater chance that you will die. It is a test of your emotional control when you are facing a life and death situation.
Why I gave this example? It is because in life also we are doing the same thing.
You have to let go of the control when you want it the most. We want a proportional reward to our efforts put in a relationship. But it doesn’t work that way always. In my last article we have seen how the law of diminishing return works. When we are dealing with things that work in our mind in a subconscious level then there are often an inverse relation between effort and reward. When we consciously try to create a particular state of mind, our desire for it creates an opposite state of mind. This is ‘The backwards law’.
The desire for a positive experience is in itself a negative experience and accepting a negative one is actually a positive experience.
Let me put some examples which are generally applicable for this law:-
Our emotional life is like a roller coaster. The more we try to control it, the more helpless we feel. But when we accept it then it becomes easier to direct them in the right direction.
We have the freedom to do anything we want, but when we limit us to a few things that we wisely choose to do then we are actually using our true freedom.
When we are trying to be happy that means we are unhappy, but when we accept the unhappiness then we are actually feeling happy.
When we are feeling insecure then we strive to feel secure but when we accept insecurity as a part of our life then we find the real security.
When we try to make others love us then we are going out of our way to impress them. But when you are your natural self and someone loves you, that is true love. The more you try to impress others the more likely you will fail.
When we are trying to create a sense of confidence among us that means we are creating more anxiety and insecurity within us. When we accept our lack of confidence, our limits and our anxiety then we feel more in our skin.
The same is the case with respect, trust, change and other aspects of our life. The cause and the effect are played in the same playground of mind. It is the same as a dog trying to catch its tail and never succeeds because it doesn’t know that her tail and she is the same thing. The more we chase something the further it goes from itself. To teach the mind that it will get what it desires by giving up that desire. Just like the drown proofing example – to go to surface you have to sink.
It is to accept that it is not possible to grasp everything in this world. We will have to relinquish control – not because we are powerless but because we are powerful enough to let go. Then only will your life push you up from the bottom of the swimming pool.
Link to my last article-https://read.cash/@aniruddhasen/the-law-of-diminishing-marginal-return-c9c3a045
Thank you @Lou1e