There’s an anecdote my Buddhist teacher shares with us frequently, and the context of sharing the anecdote is that everyone tends to only think from their perspective. So he will say,
Early in my public speaking days, I would get invited to prison to do a dharma talk. And in those events I would prepare talks about proper repentance, how to get over temptations of the past ways, or dealing with guilt and such. I would prepare these talks rigorously but whenever I actually do the speaking it wasn’t well received.
Then one day I had a realization and decided to change the tone and open with this: “It’s so unfair that all of you are here, right?”. Then the entire prison roared with support.
Today I had a short conversation about prisoners, and specifically lifers — people who are serving life sentences — with my jiu jitsu friend Skip. He said this in passing but it left a mark on me: “for these guys, it takes about 10 years of prison for the life sentence to actually land and realize that they’re going to spend the rest of their life in prison”.
Because we get so consumed in our viewpoints, we keep thinking our lives are so special it operates under a special set of rulesets that don’t apply to other people. When other people do bad things, they deserve to rot in prison or get harsh punishments. But when we do bad things, chances are we won’t even recognize that we did bad things; of course we have to act this way because it was instigated upon me.
This simple human trait is responsible for so much suffering in this world. Everyone thinks they’re surrounded by assholes, but to another person you’re also the asshole. These unconscious relationships defined by hostility will, over time, come to a point where the temperature will rise so much that there will have to be a strife.
What makes this trait so sticky? This trait that is responsible for so much of our anger, so many misunderstandings, so much confusion, self-hatred, unpleasant surprises… That seems like a fairly tall order for a simple fact of life that we see life from our perspective, so let’s verify it:
- Recall the last time you were so angry you could feel your blood boil. Why were you angry?
- Count the times where you can remember being severely misunderstood. Count how many times you remember misunderstanding somebody.
- How much bureaucracy-paperwork-related money do you think you wasted (meaning, you would have not spent that much money had you known better) in your life?
- When you judge yourself for being a certain way, why do you judge yourself for a quality that YOU have, obviously, for a reason that makes perfect sense to YOU?
- Think of a time when you felt blindsided by an event. Were there truly no indications that it was going to happen to you?
The common thread that ties all of these experiences are, we are too reliant on our perspective being the only thing that matters in our experience of life. We seldom consider the fact that we can flat-out be wrong about things. Because these experiences are so unpleasant we rarely put ourselves in situations where we can be wrong.
Humiliation, shame, these emotions keep us sheltered in the safe zone of knowing. As long as you stay in your sphere of knowing, where you understand everything that happens because you’re so in your own bubble, you are safe from the big bad feelings that make you feel so… Invalidated.
Unfortunately not only does this safe sheltering keep us from new, meaningful experiences of life, it also leaves our happiness dependent on conditions: “OUR VIEW OF THE WORLD SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!”. But because nothing is permanent there inevitably comes a point in time where you are faced with world changes that directly confront your point of view.
Do you know what to do in these situations? Are you willing to look in the mirror today and say, “I can be very, very wrong to the point of me having deep remorse about my life”? Or would you rather live another day believing in your invincible, infallible point of view of life?