I had a small epiphany the other day which I have been playing with and it seems to make a lot of sense. I don’t pay enough attention to others with respect to their individual stream of consciousness and I see this come across in two ways.
The first way I have been aware of for a while but hadn’t really thought about the root cause. Here, I’m talking about assuming that a majority of people generally know what I know or understand what I understand. To a lesser extent there is the assumption that they think like I think though after delving into MBIT for a while this one has been easier to see as false. This unfortunately leads to some amount of disregard for my own thoughts as they are not seen as unique and also leaves me less likely to point out my thoughts in conversation unless someone is obviously holding a different opinion.
The second way, and this was really the start of the epiphany, was that I don’t imagine a stream of though for others when walking down the street or hall or what not. Basically, when casually encountering others. This might even expand to when encountering those close to me though once you have an emotional connection to a person this becomes less apparent. This leads to a level of distance from others since you can’t really connect to someone if they are appear to be a mindless physical being. Additionally, its harder to make an maintain eye contact when all you see is a blank face staring back with nothing going on behind the mask.
I’ve realized I’m quite good at intuiting peoples emotional states by their facial expressions (even very minor ones) and body language and I think this makes up for the above issue to a large extent. However, this only works once you are talking face to face and even then there is still a distance to be bridged.
The annoying flip side of this is that we can never really know what others are thinking so its kinda a crap shoot to imagine someone’s thoughts. However, between the Buddhist meditation class I’ve been taking where we have practiced the metta (loving kindness) meditation and a blog entry that I came across last week relating some teachings of the Dali Llama I have a potential solution. There are common thoughts that all people share and we can attribute those to everyone without concern that we might be off base. To couch it in Buddhist terms, since that is how it has come to me, everyone is trying to find happiness in and remove suffering from their lives. Just something as simple as that thought can bring you (or at least me) into someone else’s head. To attribute that to them is enough to feel a compassion towards them that can then be a launching pad for a deeper relationship.
Interestingly enough, I realized at grassroots a few years ago that if I saw someone doing something embarrassing I could simply say “they are just doing what makes the happy” I could switch my mind set from annoyance and mild condemnation to one of compassion. I have since tried to work that into my life but it was limited since it only worked for peoples actions and I didn’t always feel like people are really acting in a way that makes them happy. However, now that I have a new mantra of sorts that really can be said of all people there is much more potential for this process.
