Friday, March 24, 2006

The One True Gift

On an almost daily basis I lament that I cannot climb into the head of my fellow man and using his eyes peer into my own. As I sit on the couch trying to avoid reading some text that is entirely too dull to hold my attention, I often reflect on my own internal workings and attempt without success to compare them with those of other humans. For without having experienced those workings on the same level that I experience my own it’s totally impossible to make a proper comparison.

Tonight, for example, I was reminded of my own tendency towards misanthropy. For every single person I know, I can rattle off some significant number of things that I utterly despise about them. Now, as a counter-balance I can generally also rattle off a number of good things about them too but I wonder just how much of this goes on in the average human mind. I realize, of course, that people like or dislike each other for various reasons. It’s only natural that people will gravitate towards people of like mind and tend to fall away from their antipodes but do they generally know why? In the mind of everyone I know, is there a pair of equivalent lists, one labeled “Rob’s good things” and one “Rob’s bad things?” Is the whole world doing this or is this just a product of the real asses?

It should also be noted that while I’m compiling the list of good and bad about other people I’ve reserved the longest lists for myself. I am keenly aware of my ability to come across as a complete and thoughtless ass along with a litany of other equaling damning qualities. I have no delusions of perfection whatsoever but despite my own judgments, there’s absolutely no way for me to know what the rest of the world thinks.

Now, this is not to literally say that in practice I actually dislike anyone. I’ve often tried to think of someone who, if I saw them in some dire circumstance, I wouldn’t try to help. I’ve yet to actually come up with anyone for this position. Even those people whose ‘bad’ list far outweighs their ‘good’ don’t qualify for real genuine hate in my book. The world seems outwardly to have a high capacity for hatred but I can’t personally relate to it. Everyone has something on their ‘good’ list or at least everyone I’ve gotten to know. I suspect that despite their rough exterior, the average human isn’t nearly as capable of real hatred as the news might have you believe. Or perhaps I’m just being dangerously naïve and need to watch my back.

One reason this is all such a mystery is that people simply don’t want to talk about it. People don’t really want to know what you think of them. I, on the other hand, would be completely fascinated to have someone follow me around for a month and tell me every annoying and endearing thing I was doing. What greater gift could you give a person than the complete and unvarnished view of themselves? It’s a bizarre kind of gift too because everybody you know is capable of giving it to you for free but you absolutely can’t get it by yourself. You have to get that truth from another person; you’re too closely involved with your own actions to judge them with anything approaching impartiality.

It’s also important to note though, that not everyone is ready for this gift. Obviously, some people… well, probably MOST people will never speak to you again after you give it to them. Perhaps it’s because most people see themselves as generally better than others and any crack in that perception is offensive. I have to wonder, How do people in the world see really view themselves? Take away the machismo, take away the pride and the fear of other people looking down on you for what you say. What do you really and truly see when you look in the mirror? Sniveling little mouse? Mighty lion? What? Are people even capable of separating their mental processes from their identity long enough to make such an assessment?

Only when you can be honest with yourself and have your own perceptions clearly and honestly set in your mind, are you ready to receive the gift. When you think you’re ready, ask the people around you. If they’re really your friends (and if you make them read this blog entry perhaps) then they’ll tell you. Once you know how the outside world truly sees you, then you can use that information to make yourself a better person. What greater gift could you ever ask for?

6 comments:

Dan said...

Another wonderfully written, thoughtful article. But I disagree with the premises upon which you base the discussion.

You say "What greater gift could you give a person than the complete and unvarnished view of themselves?"

A complete and unvarnished view? You have to be God almighty to provide anyone with a complete and unvarnished view. As you indicate, we can't even do this to ourselves.

Every statement Person A has ever made about Person B in the history of civilization has been totally filtered through the complete history and experience of Person A. In fact I would go so far as to say that Person A's "complete and unvarnished view" of Person B tells us more about Person A than it does about Person B. Plenty more.

And while you say "Once you know how the outside world truly sees you, then you can use that information to make yourself a better person. What greater gift could you ever ask for?"

I would say that this is highly-debatable. Given that Person A's assessment of us tells us more about Person A than it does about us (my view), if it ends up helping us it's merely coincidental.

Ultimately we are who we are. When we sit quietly, and not think about it, we might be able to feel it. I have obtained some success with this in the past. And, not surprisingly, when I end up over-analyzing those rare moments of lucidity I once again lose myself in endless thinking which brings me further and further away from the true me. I really believe that. The more I think about who I am, the further from the target I get. The less I think about it, the closer I get.

I need a big on/off switch for my head! :)

Trebor Nevals said...

Alright, technically, we can't get the 'complete' truth about ourselves but really, we only have two choices. Reality is a summation of viewpoints (hopefully anyway... if not, observation itself is pointless) so we really have two choices. Either I am closer to what I see in myself from the inside or I am closer to what people see in me from the outside. If you take those two sides and sum them up then they're the closest attainable version of 'reality.'

We already know the 'inside looking out' half of this. That's easy, we've been stewing in that for our entire lives. What remains is the 'outside looking in' part. But once you add those things up, is it really The TRUTH? Heck no but it's certainly better than random speculation and if you take enough outside viewpoints then what they have in common is not a reflection of observer A or B or C but probably a part of the person being observed.

If we had this information would it be useful? Again, it would be better than utter ignorance. If I walk around all day spouting crap that people don't even understand half the time and they think I'm some sort of intellectual snob (ahem) then I'd like to know about it. Will it change anything? Maybe, maybe not, but at least I have the chance to just keep my mouth shut for a while.

You seem to suggest at the end that we already know the truth about ourselves on some level, buried in layers of psychological padding to protect us from ourselves, perhaps? I'd say that's true to an extent and that's why when we get the viewpoint of an outside observer it's generally really easy to tell the difference between something that's really inside us and something that's just inherant in the observer. We do already know the answers to these riddles but sometimes it takes an outside opinion to jiggle them free in our minds.

As for the big on/off switch, I'd prefer one for each sub-section of my mind. Imagine if you could just turn off your ego or your ID and be left with nothing but raw memory and intellect. Problem is, would we ever bother to turn these things back on once they were turned off?

Dan said...

You may have missed my point because I was being (maybe necessarily) a bit abstruse. I believe that thinking often takes us further away from reality. Thinking is actually very helpful for lots of things -- but not for knowing our true identity. Every thought is a concept, and all concepts are approximations. When I think of "table" I am picturing something most likely different than what you are picturing. Sure they're both tables, but not exactly the same. But suppose I think of "good book" -- it's most likely totally different because then we're getting further personalized, into the realm of opinions. (Though one may rightfully argue that opinions also play into the thought "table" because I may be thinking of my ideal table.)

Thoughts about thoughts further muddy the waters. Person A's "assessment" of us is a bunch of Person A's thoughts. They go in our ears and we "think" about Person A's thoughts about us, filtering their assessment through our own history and experience. Consider that they were already filtered through Person A's total experience and history before they even shared them with us. So why do we give such credence and importance to this? It just makes things messier and messier, and brings us further and further from the truth of who we ultimately are.

Sure, if Person A tells us that our fly is open, that's useful information. But if Person A tells us we blather on too much, suppose Persons B though Z tell us we don't blather on enough. Do we come up with some mathematical equation for weighing the varying opinions? Note also how quantum physics proved that the observer influences that being observed. We probably value the opinions of those who know us best -- which means, of course, that their opinions of us will be more subjective than those that don't know us as well. And for those other folks, can they really give us good feedback if they hardly know us?

I think we find ourselves lost in an orgy of thoughts and opinions. The objective value may be totally random. We may end up with countless varying and competing opinions, each filtered through countless histories and experiences, and then we stir the entire pot and filter it through our own history and experience. Whew! What's left? An assumption that somehow all of this will get us closer to the reality of ourselves. I wonder.

I am not advocating endless rumination about ourselves (what you call stewing). And I don't advocate adding Person A's through Person Z's stewing about us into that mixture. I don't agree with you that it's one or the other. I advocate a third alternative -- doing neither.

I am advocating turning off the thinking completely -- our own endless thinking about ourselves as well as our own thinking about the thoughts others have shared with us about ourselves. Turn off all of it. Try it and see what happens. It seems abstruse, but I totally believe that we get a glimpse of our true identity and nature when we're not thinking about it. When the thinking is no longer front and center, we can begin feeling who we are.

There are some things you just can't think about but that require actually experiencing. If you never ate an orange, I can try to describe the taste for you (usually by comparing it to tastes you have already experienced) but utlimately you have to experience the taste of an orange for yourself before you know its taste. Same here -- you have to try turning off the thinking and feel your true self. Words fail in this case. It may sound like new age babble just it's just like experiencing the taste of the orange. Bite in!

I don't agree that when we stop endlessly ruminating about ourselves (via our own thoughts and our thoughts about other people's thoughts about us), that we'll start doing terrible things. I think life becomes easier because we stop immobilizing ourselves with endless thinking. And I believe our natural intelligence takes over.

As I said, thinking is great for solving series of differential equations, and for applying laws to observations in nature which yield predictive power that we can harness for the good of all. But it can also hamstring us. Animals don't spend time endlessly thinking about themselves and others. And they seem to get along just fine. I guess what I'm advocating is using our human brain for what it does best, and stopping it from getting in the way for all the other things.

I babbled enough. Time to stop the words ...

Trebor Nevals said...

Ya know... I'm not really sure what to say to this. Asking me to 'stop thinking' is just slightly less impossible than asking me to 'stop breathing.' :)

I agree that at times stopping the thought process is a good way to let new ideas creep in and you eventually have to go back to thought and action. If you just meditate on things all the time without any new outside inputs then chances are you're not going to get anywhere.

It should also be noted that the outside input can't just go unfiltered straight into the 'complete truth' file but I can't bring myself to believe that outside input is as worthless as you seem to think.

In any case, I'll ponder this... actually... I'll NOT ponder this. I'll completely FAIL to think about this and comment in... in a week. Yeah.

Dan said...

I agree that it’s impossible to turn the thinking off, and I used the comparison with breathing myself in this blog entry of mine. What I really meant was that we could turn off the thinking that we do have control over, like the endless ruminating we do after someone gives us a dirty look while passing us in the hallway. I also didn’t say that outside input was worthless – in fact I gave an example of where it was valuable. “Your fly is open” is outside input that is objective and valuable. “You talk too much” is one person’s skewed opinion at one particular moment in time and has passed through so many filters I can’t even being to list them. I was merely balancing your belief that this sort of outside input was a gift when in fact it should be taken with a grain of salt (perhaps a truckload).

As recent as five years ago I believed that thinking was paramount and science was God. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Math, a Master’s in Computer Science, am/was an avowed atheist with no tolerance for anything not scientifically testable or provable. But in the last five years I’ve been on a slow philosophical journey that has made me realize that there is a whole other world out there, with millennia behind it, just waiting to be discovered – Eastern thought, so foreign to me in the beginning, so different than Western thought. But I slowly came to realize its merits as I grew more comfortable with its language and style. And now I can say that it works better for me in describing the world, reality, than Western thought ever did.

I know you like to read. If Eastern thought is something with which you are not familiar and have any interest in learning more about, anything by Alan Watts is a plus – Eastern philosophy from the lips of a Westerner, and one who respects science and is surely scientific minded, works best for me. His introductions to Zen or Taoism or great. Easier yet, head over to the Alan Watts podcast (administered by his son) to hear the man. Short snippets that may get you hooked.

In any event, I hope some of this has gotten you thinking ... er, I mean not thinking about things from a different perspective. I know it’s made me stop thinking ... I think ... where’s the Advil?

Trebor Nevals said...

Alright, now you're starting to sound like Charlie, the other guy what reads this blog on occasion. Go read his blog here. http://on-the-breath.livejournal.com/

He's always talkin' 'bout that Eastern Religion stuff. I'm not actually convinced quite yet that them thar religions are really telling us anything new so much as telling it to us in a different way that we're a little more receptive to. I've got some Joseph Cambell on my short-term reading list, I'll tack something Eastern on the end too. Charlie also has a slew of recommendations in that arena so if the two of you could come to some agreement, that'd be helpful. :)