iDUMB

By Nidhi Bhatia

I had become a heartbroken, defunct and predictable kind of robot, devoid of any desire to continue living. Mr Whippy’s smooth and creamy ice cream wasn’t even exciting me any longer. Something was seriously wrong. Life was happening to me and I was obediently showing up every day for the next chapter.
...Until one day, sat in a coffee shop, my brain metaphorically exploded whilst chomping on a slice of blueberry cheesecake.
After 25 years of delirium and sporadic bouts of frenzied excitement, it suddenly all became very clear. It turned out my words, thoughts and feelings had a physical expression.
OMG! I had morphed into Green Lantern without the power ring! Simply put, and trying not to sound like a whack job, I was creating my reality and I didn’t even know about it.
Stay with me folks.
I welcome you into the weird and counterintuitive world of idumb, where the things you innocently say, think and feel metamorphose into material reality.
idumb exists to highlight the unconscious and excruciatingly dumb things you say, think and feel into your reality. It’s all about to make sense. You’re about to come face to face with the field of ultimate bodaciousness and it might just shift your life...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nidhi Bhatia
• Release date: Aug 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301084029

Book preview

Title Page

Introduction

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

On Life part 1

On Life part 2

On the Voice

On Parenting and Adults

On Love

On Happiness

On Money

On The Impossible

On Generally Dumb Phrases

Round it up

Glossory

idumb

by Nidhi Bhatia

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 Nidhi Bhatia

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only , then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

Eternal thanks and love to my brother, best friend, guru and partner in jokes, (you're almost as funny as me) Vineet (www.gurucoach.com). You revealed the magic of our universe to me and I've been hooked ever since.

Thanks mum and dad for being the parents I needed.

Thank you mother for introducing me to myself and him.

Field of ultimate bodaciousness, thank you for trusting me enough to reveal yourself to me.

It won't make sense, until it makes sense

Introduction

The realisation that I was an inhabitant of a floating ball in an infinite space suddenly warped the importance and panic of fearing my teachers at school, getting a well-paid corporate job, ironing my Elmo tee before wearing it and paying my taxes.

I was the fat kid that enjoyed the simple things in life. A can of fizzy goodness, a double-decker chocolate bar, chasing after the ice cream van regardless of excessive chaffing, watching my favourite WWF wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior and innocently wondering why his face was coming off as he sweat, waving at strangers, laughing very loud and knowing that whatever I did when I got older would be fun and would make me as happy as I felt right then.

Being a kid were the days when I followed a whim as illogical as it may have been, ending up on an unknown adventure that was as scary as it was alluring. Those were the moments where we were morphing into the adults we could have become, cell by cell, neuron by neuron... and then it all went wrong. The burdensome and insidious preparation required to become a productive member of the robot mill began.

The following is a list of stealth conditions put on my head like a bounty. The construction of my cage had begun just as I ran after the ice cream van as free as a bird for the final time.

One Conditioned to look forward to the weekend, then conditioned to feel depressed that Monday was here, which meant I had to get my depressed butt to work (somewhere during the programming process, days got labelled as the happy days to look forward to and the evil days we couldn't wait to be over, like Mondays). Think about how many potentially great Mondays we've been cheated out of!

Two Conditioned to gossip about what a loser so & so is but equally conditioned to act like so & so's best friend when in the company of so & so. Conditioned to keep my mouth shut if an intelligent thought occurs to me. Conditioned to complain about all the things I didn't have as I gorged on pizza, Blackberry in one hand, iPad in the other, watching a Christian Aid advertisement.

Three Conditioned to always be suspicious of others' intentions and that adults were always right and that we needed to watch the news on an hourly basis to keep up to date with all the rapes, murders and news on the recession.

Four Conditioned to use phrases like:

'Knowing my luck I'll never get that.'

'Life's a bitch.'

'No pain no gain.'

'Good things don't last.'

Five Conditioned to take my anger and frustration out on friends and family because I was conditioned to believe that you accept the cards you're dealt and have you noticed, they're always the crap ones?

Six Conditioned to believe I was the only one from my school friends that was an utter failure and I'd be the one serving them their burgers at lunchtime as they came to a famous burger joint to pity me because they were earning £50,000 whilst I was on minimum wage.

Seven Conditioned to believe that dreams only come true in Disney movies and also conditioned to believe that Walt Disney was a Prat for creating talking teapots and man cubs!

Eight Conditioned to think that life was a succession of random events, somehow happening to me, which were controlled by the master puppeteer. Also known as the judgemental man (feminists would disagree) that some say is white, others say is black, some say brown and some even say blue. But the point is, this man/woman was a loving, omnipresent being that would kill all of us through natural disasters, so he doesn't have to sit on the judging panel, along with Satan, Joker, Batman and for good measure, Minnie Mouse, to decide who passed through the audition stages to get into the knock out round of Final Chance for Heaven.

Nine I was conditioned to believe a belief that was once a belief, originating from a belief.

Ten Conditioned to think that life prepared us to pay our bills and conditioned with epic proportions of fear that each government official was armed with an electric cattle prod that would be used if we default on payments.

Eleven I was conditioned to believe that I needed a degree, a masters degree, a Phd and an AbCd to succeed in life, otherwise the only jobs available would be toilet cleaner, bin man or burger flipper. To make matters worse, before the degree lecture, I had just been conditioned by a teacher that I was a dumb ass and so I better get a head start on the burger flipping.

Twelve I was also conditioned to believe that we couldn't be happy all of the time, it was simply a statistical impossibility. Out of 100%, we could hope to be happy for 20% of the time and out of the remaining 80% we could choose from sadness, anger, jealousy, hopelessness or confusion.

Thirteen I was conditioned to believe that nobody in the history of jobs has ever liked their job so just shut up and get on with it, bar all those that do actually like their job – they're all Disney characters, members of the Illuminati or just lucky.

Fourteen I was conditioned to fear failure, for failure was the habit of failures. Fear embarrassment, fear expressing myself, fear new experiences, fear strangers and generally fear the world. 

I had become a heartbroken, defunct and predictable kind of robot. I was in good company, devoid of any desire to continue living. Life was happening to me and I was obediently showing up every day for the next chapter.

I had transformed into a 17-year-old overweight, over-opinionated, insecure, painfully quiet, scared, reclusive, depressed and almost suicidal type of kid. I would have done it but I didn't like the taste of paracetamol.

I had been well and truly dumb-slapped on a one-way bullet train to Dumbville.

Amidst the suffocating dumbesphere I had found myself in, a very faint phantom whisper would talk to me. After years of trying to dismiss it as madness, it eventually introduced me to something so unreal, even God wouldn't have believed me.

One day as I sat in a coffee shop, my brain metaphorically exploded whilst chomping on a slice of blueberry cheesecake. That was the moment I was bought nose to nose with the field of ultimate bodaciousness. This is not the scientific term for those of you trying to google it.

It turns out I had become a redundant superhero in disguise. Twenty-five years flashed past pretty slowly to reveal that I was able to affect what I was told was unaffectable, that meant life wasn't happening to me, I was happening to it. WOWZER! Brain gymnastics on vodka! (I'm aware 'unaffectable' may not be a recognised word but who cares, I create my own reality now.)

So if all this was true, that would mean we weren't just dropped into a floating ball expected to fend for ourselves against our own stupidity. It meant we were communicating with something around us that we'd become too dumb to see and too numb to feel. So I looked into it and found that science, religion, philosophy and Disney movies were all saying the same thing but we were either missing it, misunderstanding it or it felt like a theory extracted from a mythical text used to put children to sleep.

So it turns out that the empty space around us isn't empty after all. It's a responsive intelligence that's also an impeccable listener. It also turns out that 99.9% of the universe is waves of energy and 0.1% is matter. This means, the physical investments we're so heavily devoted to, like fabricated dramas and paying our bills only amounts to 0.1% of what is really available.

I know I've just made the biggest statement you've probably heard in a while. I'm merely delivering it. It's the science heads that discovered this. Your brain just melted and perspired out of your armpit didn't it?

This energy is highly malleable, mutating into anything, like Mystique from X-Men. Imagine it as if it were a fast food drive-through. You suddenly feel like eating a juicy burger dripping with grease and cheese with chips. You find the nearest drive-through and drive through. Looking at the menu, your mind starts ticking, thinking of what would best satisfy your raging hunger at this time of night. You decide and make your order through the speaker.

A few minutes later, the end product that is your order is passed to you from the window to your car but you haven't seen all the work that's gone on in the background. The meat being cooked. The buns being sauced. The employee reaching for the pickles, cheese and onions whilst bopping to the orders filtering through the radio.

The next customer in line chooses what he wants from all those possibilities. The new order once again filters through the radio and the employee gets to work, ensuring the customer gets his order just like he ordered (most times).

That's how the world works. We're the customer and the kitchen staff are the universe. 99.9% is the background kitchen stuff that we'll never see nor appreciate, but it is here where all the magic happens (forgive me for the cringe cliché – it was too good an opportunity to pass by) that creates the physical you experience as your world.

Every possibility you can possibly think of and even the possibilities you can't think of already exist in energy form in the field of ultimate bodaciousness. If you or I want to bring it into the 0.1% of tangible matter or experience, we need to give it some serious strong thought and feeling like we did the burger, by means of an electrical signal sent out into the field. The field eventually matches our thoughts and feelings to the possibility in its energy form and brings it into our environment as a tangible object or experience.

I've decided to affectionately name the responsive