Reshaping Reality

While explaining Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the physicist Brian Greene said, “Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on.”

The word “warp” means distortion. If that be so, we are defining a reality, in this case, the spacetime contour, with the word “distortion.” Unfortunately, that’s the reality. The truth appears distorted to the unwise, uninitiated, unenlightened, and unawakened. And it takes the likes of Einstein to distort what we believe is our “reality.”

In his excellent biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson talks several times about what Jobs would refer to as the “Reality Distortion Field.” Let us explore what Reshaping Reality or rather Distorting Reality is, what it takes to do so, and why it’s all that important for humanity. And we will do all that through the life examples of three personalities – a nun, a monk, and a scientist.

It could be blasphemous to say that the most essential trait for reshaping reality – and this is contrary to what most B-schools might teach – is to be selfless and fearless enough to do everything we believe should be done, rather than something, which might merely yield a definite outcome.

To start with, like the character Santiago in The Alchemist, we must first identify what Paulo Coelho calls a “personal legend.” It is nothing but a purpose in life, the quintessential “WHY”. Once the “WHY” has been realised, and we have resolved to follow the legend, come what may, irrespective of anything and everything, the whole universe conspires to make it happen. So, in the end, the outcome just happens as a by-product. And that's when reality gets distorted.

Thomas Alva Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times – I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Had he had targets to be met, margins to be maintained, KRAs to be fulfilled, we would still light a candle every evening: there wouldn’t have ever been an electric bulb. Had Edison been result-oriented, the reality of candles and dark nights wouldn’t have been distorted.

Gandhi’s personal legend was to lead a non-violent movement. So, when an angry mob set a police chowki on fire at Chauri Chaura, killing 22 policemen, Mahatma Gandhi immediately called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. That was the first time he was leading a country-wide agitation in India, and still, he did something which could have sealed his fate as a national leader.

In corporate parlance, that was not a “result-oriented” action. And what happened after that? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind!

When the first iPhone was close to its launch date, Steve Jobs suddenly realised the glass was not the quality he believed it should be. Hell broke loose in the Apple headquarters in Cupertino as the eccentric boss wouldn’t proceed a bit unless he found the right glass. The timeline went for a toss. The outcome seemed to be in jeopardy. But that didn’t bother Jobs. He came across the company Corning Glass, which had developed an ion exchange process in the 1960s that led to what they dubbed “gorilla glass.” It was incredibly strong but never found a market, so Corning quit making it. Jobs wanted Corning to manufacture that glass again after 40 years.

“Yes, you can do it,” Jobs said to Wendell Weeks, the young and dynamic CEO of Corning Glass. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.”

The rest, as they say, is history. The reality was distorted. Weeks pulled off the “gorilla glass” in a record six months. Interestingly, people in the know had warned him against Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field, under the spell of which, they said, people often started believing in the distorted reality.

But many don’t realise it’s always the belief and the “mind” around something that makes it happen, or rather compels the universe to conspire to make it happen. Compared to this, chasing the outcome is much less potent and is left to the mediocre that might never get to distort reality and do something useful for the world and humanity.

According to the modern thinker Yuval Harari, “ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have […] been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”

Yuval’s concerns about the survival of the lions at the mercy of the imagined entities become more evident when we realise that the English poet Lord Tennyson had written more than a century earlier, “let the ape and tiger die.” As we can see, the poet laureate suggested unabashedly and unapologetically that killing “the ape and tiger” is an acceptable price for humanity's upward movement.

And that’s why we need the imagined reality to be distorted even more now.

Now let’s go to the stories of the nun, monk, and scientist.

A remarkable young Irishwoman, twenty-nine years old, ran her own school for children in Wimbledon. She was also a firebrand journalist. But her own life had been shattered. Twice love had come to her, with its beauty and promise, and had gone. Now, she was entirely free: free to become the right hand of her Master, an Indian monk. She realised her personal legend was to serve her Master’s cause, to unite her life with his. The outcome or repercussion of such a drastic thought didn’t bother her at all.

“I’m a monk,” the Master said to her. “You do not realise what awaits you out there. Like the ‘Son of Man,’ who had no stone on which to lay His head, so the sanyasi, the wandering monk, lives with no roof over him, always on the move under the torrid sun…”

At that time, the scientist was staying in Maida Vale and the monk a few miles away, at Greycoat Gardens in Westminster. A large room on Victoria Street was arranged for his public lectures. One evening, the monk delivered a talk there on Maya and Illusion. That day, the scientist noticed the distinctive young Irishwoman with an alluring smile in the audience. After the lecture, the scientist met the monk for the first time.

That was how the three characters of our story were all assembled at the same place, at the same time, by some providential connection. And soon, the universe conspired, and the trio distorted the reality, the “imagined reality” of India. India would never be what she had been relegated to over the past two centuries.

The wandering monk was returning home after a few years in the US and Continent, where he had passionately talked about the India that most of his own countrymen and the West had started believing neither had culture nor civilisation: that was the prevailing imagined reality of India, which the monk had to distort.

When India’s colonial rulers scoffed that the Indians were not “good enough” for higher studies in science, forget research and innovation, a District Magistrate’s horse riding, snake catching, and hunting and rowing loving son took up science as the means to serve and awaken his tattered country. Against all odds, he became the first Indian scientist in modern India.

He had already demonstrated one of the world’s earliest functioning wireless communication systems when he sent messages through the air between Presidency College and his home on Convent Road in Calcutta, thus paving the path for self-reliance through “Responsible Research & Innovation” in modern India for the first time. Soon, he would create the world’s most powerful receiver of radio waves and file the world’s first patent on a semiconductor device, whose later avatars, the electronic chips, are among the most powerful and omnipresent things in the world today.

In a short while, the Irishwoman travelled to Calcutta to educate girls, as her Master, the monk, wanted her to do. She became a nun and, soon, started a girls’ school in Calcutta, perhaps one of the first in modern India where the poor, and the ones no one cared for in the city, received a dignified seat of education. The reality of the girls in modern India was reshaped forever.

When an annual session of the Indian National Congress was held in Calcutta, all the top leaders went to see the monk, now only thirty-eight-year-old but already in frail health. They requested him to inspire the countrymen to come out of their shells and fight for freedom from colonial rule. But for the monk, political freedom was a mere outcome he never chased. The purpose of his life was to seek Mukti, the liberation from the bonds of imperfection – the British rule was just one of the innumerable imperfections that his country needed to be freed of. His personal legend was to create a Prabuddha Bharat, an Awakened India, of which political freedom would be a by-product, a mere outcome.

The monk died in a few months, but he had already distorted the reality of his countrymen. Many countries that gained freedom around the same time as us are shattered today. But Awakened India prevails, many wonder how and why. Despite all her follies, she still manages to sustain a one-and-a-quarter billion population, speaking 20000 languages and following a kaleidoscope of cultures and practices, some so alien from the others as though they are from different worlds.

The scientist, meanwhile, figured out that Marconi had plagiarised his radio receiver and used it in the much-publicised first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission between England and Newfoundland. The scientist did not protest. Neither did he speak about it to anyone while the scientific fraternity in London suspected that the receiver couldn’t have been Marconi’s. It would take a hundred years for the truth to come out.

The scientist’s silence was because his personal legend was something else now – to scientifically prove the age-old Indian concept: the real is one, ekam sat, the wise call it variously, vipra bahudha vadanti. Knowing very well that it could be academic blasphemy, he fearlessly went on to prove that the plants and animals are not different, that all are One, Tat Ekam, and that the whole world thrives as One. He claimed that all plants possess the equivalent of a well-developed nervous system, have an electro-mechanical pulse, a kind of vegetable heartbeat, and are capable of intelligent behaviour, memory, and learning – claims that would take more than a century to become mainstream in academia.

It didn’t matter to him that he was ridiculed for being disconnected from the prevailing state of knowledge, the prevailing imagined reality, which he attempted to distort. He didn’t care about the outcome. He was just pursuing his personal legend. And, by the time he died, he was considered a lapsed scientist, almost forgotten by his own countrymen. But a century later, when Suzanne Simard writes the best-selling book Finding the Mother Tree, uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest, and stressing the need to see the entire ecology as a single living system under duress, under the threat of greedy nations and corporations, it’s the scientist’s legacy that’s being propagated. Thank God that more people now think that the “tiger and ape” shouldn’t die for the sake of humanity’s upward movement. And this thought revolution was kindled by him - the scientist - more than a hundred years ago.

Interestingly, the one that helped the scientist the most in his pursuit was the nun, for whom it was her pursuit, too, the spiritual pursuit of the oneness with nature, the oneness that was perhaps more and more becoming the need of the hour, to save the world, to save humanity. At the same time, a group of young artists were inspired by her summons to give up the imitation of the Greek and Roman styles and create a new one from ancient Indian art. Thus, came into being a new school of Modern Indian Art, a vital element of Awakened India.

When the nun died at the age of forty-four at the scientist’s home in Darjeeling, she had lived a life dedicated to the service of India in many ways. Serving India, serving her Master’s cause was her life’s purpose.

More than a hundred years later, a third of Indian girls are still illiterate. A few states still have a mere 50% literacy rate among girls: for the poor, it’s even more dismal. So, whenever a poor girl child goes to a school in India today, in some way, it’s the outcome of the nun’s lifelong pursuit of her personal legend, the outcome she didn’t live to see.

The lives of Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita, the nun; Swami Vivekananda, the monk; and Jagadish Chandra Bose, the scientist, are examples of how one can distort the imagined reality by finding a personal legend, the purpose in life, and then working fearlessly and selflessly towards realising the purpose, without being swayed away or distracted by the outcome. To such actions, the outcome always happens to the benefit of the world and humanity. And, yeh dil maange more of such people that would reshape the reality all the time, and save us in all possible ways.

[Swami Vivekananda's 160th birth anniversary is on 12 Jan]