Fundamentalism

Last decade's favorite word. I never tried to understand the volume and inner meaning of this simple word. To me this was something that is attached to the fanatism or madness of a religion. As I tried to interpret it the facts turned out sourer as somebody said most of the things change their meaning each time you read. These are my interpretations of the word Fundamentalism.
How many have tried to influence any other person? How many used tangible sources to support their arguments? How many feel low when someone downplays your suggestions or beliefs? How many listens to others so as to get a different perspective or anything or everything that you have believed so far? How many think?

Fundamentalism is a human behavior to preach anything that you believe or assume or predict to another person mostly with an intention of influencing and attempting the other person to come in terms with your terms. Fundamentalism can be of any kind, Religion, caste, political, business, team spirit etc. The list is long. Now going back to how.

How does one become a fundamentalist? Everybody in this world is driven by something, at any moment there will be something that is stirring up in the mind, it could be love, money, pity towards the unfortunate, devotion to god, a sight of injustice etc. Your mind would seek a reason for why you couldn't achieve it so far and a solution to reach there. One thing that happens unknowingly is that the alley towards the mind becomes narrower concentrating only on the cause, reasons, solutions, issues. Then one fine day you meet a person with a similar thought. They tell why you are unhappy, they will be able to produce some instances from the history to substantiate it and along with that inevitably his passion gets added, a very contagious weapon. This agent provocateur needn't be a person it could be stories, writings in newspaper, the things or events that you happen to see around. The moment to take side, there will be an urge to look out for more and more sources to concrete your belief and the moment you get convinced with the idea the fundamentalism wins. Then you meet a person in doubt, you tell him everything you believe with utmost passion and confidence and conviction and then two things could happen, this person might either agree with your thought or might disagree, when he disagrees at that stage if either of them keeps their minds open for all thoughts then it is a defeat for fundamentalism, but if both of them decides not to budge from the foothold of faith then at that moment the discussion turns into a debate and either sides will try to put their gut limit to win the debate. All these vicious circular proceedings bounce over one common thing...the EGO.

Ego can defeat anything; ego is a result of the years of narrowing of mind. Ego as we know is a senseless, odorless, colorless property of the mind to achieve an identity. It is the owner of all the beliefs and faiths that a person has in this world and it will try its level best to defend it. So in the above situation in the first level of discussion the Ego has full confidence in its beliefs and spell out all that is understood of that belief (from some sources) now say that the second person puts out a point loud enough to be a real challenge to the belief, in that case instead of opening up the mind the ego will abandon reasons and try to find out excuses to defend this time. This goes on and it might either end in the defeat of ego, ego reaching out to any level to defend (like violence, subjugation, censorship etc) or a breakdown.

The solution to this problem is to keep mind open, or to encourage keeping mind open, encouraging the people to question you by whom you could save yourself from being a fundamentalist, Never ever bringing in the weapon called fear; Fear is probably the favorite weapon of any fundamentalist. As it is said, maturity doesn’t come with age, it comes with the broadness of the mind. Keep your mind open to everything, use your wisdom to pause and think on what you are doing is correct in all the sense? Whether I am doing something out of fear or a belief blinded by 'wants'. Broadmindedness helps you to see the soul of everything, it will on its own open up all the doors shut by our self due to blindness.