One thing I have noticed throughout my life is how I tend to and have been very absolutist or extremist. This has led me to create my own conflicts whenever I try to ‘fit’ something into a very ‘black-and-white’ mindset where I don’t consider or allow shades of gray. And what I have not realized or considered is how it is only myself as my mind that is configured/set up to work this way, in an extremist and polarized manner where there is no further embracing of the multi-dimensions or multiple aspects/sides that exist to everything and everyone that is part of life on Earth.
A sentence that made me realize this with clarity was one of Anu’s statements on the explanation of the nature of our beingness and how to understand the ‘good and evil’ nature of who we are/have become and so seeing that, yes as much as it can be ‘narrowed’ down to saying ‘good and evil’, it also depends very much on ‘the eye of the beholder.’ This bit of sentence enabled me to realize how I am the one that can decide to see things in one way or the other; I can decide to remain in a narrow focus with which to approach people, situations, information and I am the one that places these very narrow and inflexible ‘frames’ upon everything, with which I then go categorizing, filing, defining something or someone according to these very absolutist, narrow, inflexible, extremist and short-sighted ways to be honest with which I had learned to see the world thus far. Why do I do this? For the sake of creating a notion of ‘knowing’ which gives a form of ‘control’ over something/someone or reality itself, because who we are in the mind seeks this kind of ‘power’ – lol – to know, to have already ‘digested’ and so concluded to have a particular view or conclusion about someone/something in reality; yet here I will share why I’ve realized this is actually not so at all.
What does this practically mean? It has a lot to do with having an ‘either /or’ mentality, it can be morality when having to define something as either entirely ‘good’ or entirely ‘bad’ and so kind of go making this ‘final judgment’ upon things. An example, there’s a ‘selection’ of foods that I eat now, yet with those same foods throughout time I have gone through a back and forth several times in wanting to ‘cross-out’ some of them based on defining them – according to knowledge and info – as ‘bad for my health’ and then I come across some other information and then I incorporate them again and place them on the ‘good for me’ list again… what is missing here?
To begin with I am following (fall-allowing) information only, I am not being the directive principle in testing things out for myself and seeing how my body does with each food, but instead I take the knowledge, make a religion out of it where I follow it as ‘how things work’ only to then have that same ‘religion’ be debunked by ‘another religion’ I can encounter on such as an explanation of how this particular food has been demonized by ‘mainstream health care’ information and the opposite effects are to be expected with this one food… and so where do I end up? Caught up in information, mis-informing myself based on how I blindly cut down my own practical investigation and immediately start following it, jumping from eating it all the time, to not eating something at all and vice versa.
This is what happens when we are looking at reality more through the eyes of information and making quick knowledge and information assessments on ‘how things work’ and missing out the practical physical reality testing out phase; and this is not only related to ‘deciding what to eat’ but it can be also related to people where we for example tend to immediately create an experience or very rough perspective on a person we just met based on what we ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’ in a 5 minute interaction… lol I mean this in itself already should speak volumes of how Narrow-viewed we are when immediately being very quick to upon 5 minute talks decide to like or dislike someone… here there is again this ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ approach in a polarized manner where we jump into conclusions, where we don’t allow ourselves any actual consideration of ‘another being’ in their entirety, their life context, who they are in the moment, the phase/situation of their life they’re at, their day, their physical experience in that moment of interaction, other/external factors to the interaction and a plethora of other aspects that we cannot even fathom exist in that one single moment of interaction with another.
Yet in our minds, we have not programmed ourselves to consider space-time physical reality and all of the multi-dimensions of it, nope. We only live ‘up there’ in our minds that in my case I’ve noticed works in this yes-no/ like-dislike / true-false/ right-wrong/ good-bad/ type of mentality, most likely it works like that in us all considering our minds work exactly the same.
So, here using the word ‘deliberately’ again as in making a conscious, considerate, intentional and willing decision to step out of the ‘absolutist’ mindset when it comes to how we are interacting with anything or anyone in our world. I have written about ‘assuming’ many times in this blog, because it precisely involves that ‘jumping into conclusions’, immediately ‘assessing’ things in this mind of mine, cutting-corners to expand my vision and just want a ‘quick outcome’ to then decide ‘who I am’ in relation to something or someone.
Therefore the correction and solution to this absolutist mindset that I’ve been applying is that whenever I see myself jumping into conclusions and wanting to frame something within an ‘either-or’ mentality, I have to take that deliberate step to consider the multiple dimensions, multiple factors about something or someone, and most of the time I’ve found it is actually quite enjoyable to kind of ‘prove me wrong’ in terms of seeing how actually narrow minded or tunnel-visioned I was when yes, going into a backchat about a person, a situation, a moment in reality where I am too quick to make a judgment and assessment of how I ‘qualify’ something or someone, instead of taking that moment to say “ok, can’t be black-and-white anymore, I’m stepping out of the absolutist/fascist mentality where I impose my own ‘view’ upon everything and everyone” – and this is thus the practical process of actually going embracing reality in its totality, whether it is a situation or event, a person I am interacting with, something I read/learn as knowledge and information, something that ‘happens in the world’ I mean, I’ve seen time and time again how we are all too quick to ‘side’ with one or the other side – usually it’s 2 based on our ‘binary’ system in the mind of polarities really, where there’s usually no space for multiple shades of gray.
See and this is where in a way this reminder of not being ‘black and white’ but dive into the multiple shades of grays is handy, because there’s in fact a lot of them– nope, not just 50 people, lol – and that is even a visual reminder so that whenever I see myself wanting to go from one extreme to the other, to take a moment to see further, to know more about the situation, person, information I am taking on, to test it out for myself, to engage more with a person for example and get to know who and how they are beyond a 5 minute interaction for example… asking more questions to really get to know who they are within the words that they speak and the statements that they make, it’s a whole different thing than just hearing something once coming out of their mouths and ‘filling out the blanks’ in our black-and-white mindset.
And so upon doing this, it is actually very cool to go expanding ourselves in really learning to See and Get to Know others, ourselves and so the reality that we create altogether and yes! Even understanding with more clarity the problems that we create based on how quickly we jump into our absolutist mindset, wherein then I can be the one point of solution and decide to go about life with a more ‘physical’ set of eyes, instead of only going mental doing this quick assessments of yes/no, love or hate and decide ‘that’s who we ultimately are’ in relation to something/someone.
As I said above, I actually enjoy being able to prove me wrong in my ‘rushed’ assessments about something, because it enables me to precisely go bit by bit letting go of this absolutist mindset and practically seeing how to start expanding or attaching these new ways of seeing/looking at things and people or situations in a more constructive way, in a more physical and real-time way other than ‘it’s either right or wrong’ type of thing.
It’s funny as well because throughout my life I actually disliked that people would only make a quick assessment on me based on certain ‘qualities’ that would be known by most, and yearned to be ‘truly known’ by another in a holistic manner, beyond what I was and represented as in my social environments or how people would usually ‘tag me’ as… and now I see that I had been reducing things/people/situations to that level of ‘either/or’ myself for the most part, which proves the point of how we tend to project onto Others that which we haven’t yet done/been/lived for ourselves.
So, this is also a form of righteousness to let go of, where we usually believe that ‘others are the problem’ instead of being able to sit back and look within ourselves to see that we haven’t precisely yet given to ourselves or lived for ourselves that which we are commanding, yearning, asking others to be for us or do onto ourselves. So in a way here practicing the “give to myself first and be for myself that which I would like others to be and do onto myself as well”. It gives me first that step of responsibility to myself so that I can then stand as the expression of consideration, of expansion and embracing something someone in its multiple-qualities, factors and dimensions that we all are.
This has also been then a new starting point when meeting anyone and having even ‘one time only’ conversations where I genuinely enjoy getting to know them and kind of understand who they are, why they are what they are and even in a limited-time frame possibility also push myself to not make a quick ‘conclusion’ as to how I ‘frame’ the person, but learn to see another in their multiple-dimensions and facets and uniqueness that all of us are as human beings, and so not to jump into ‘defining’ another, but rather seeing them for that they shared/presented to me in that one moment, and that’s been very cool to do as well.
So now I have to also learn to do this with information as well, to not seek to quickly ‘figure things out’ or be driven to understand something ‘to the T’ to then decide ‘who I am’ or ‘how I relate’ to something or someone or in relation to a piece of information, but instead always integrate this consideration of the multiple shades of gray, the multiple dimensions or aspects that exist to something or someone, and that way I can go slowly but surely ‘dissolving’ or letting go of my own ‘caged’ mindset of polarities and extremes, and instead continue to learn how to embrace reality in its multiplicity, which is in fact another way of letting of of judging in general, stand down from our ‘personal court’ and ‘drop the case’ and ‘drop the charges’ lol. It is a decision for me to let go of the desire to control, to ultimately know, to tag, to define, to categorize…. and so embrace things as they are.
Thanks for reading.
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