I find the predictability of people to be very interesting—how easily you can predict what one person will do, and how hard it is to predict what another will do.
Even though, for example, we may be able to predict a co-worker’s behavior in “the office” every day—and we probably make assumptions and judgments about him based on his observed behavior—does that give us any solid knowledge about, or basis for predicting, his behavior outside the office? The person who you thought is a computer nerd at work may be a club-hopping fiend at night.
But how often is that the case? More often than not, we can predict a lot about a person based on our observations of them. And yet, I think part of the problem here is that we are not used to thinking about, judging, and treating people as works-in-progress. We get an impression of someone, and that is who and how they are to us. But the”‘to us” is of great, if not ultimate, importance, for that is what we act on. The point being that while there do seem to be people who never change, we do not necessarily know why they never (at least, seem to) change, or even how much change has gone on inside them, privately, behind closed doors, how many seeds of change may have sprouted tentatively only to wither away or be mowed down by a harsh and un-nurturing environment. But I think that life is change, that it is seething and teeming with change, always. And so the person whom we have judged may not be who or what we think they are when we judge them, let alone the next day, or the next year.
But all we have to go on is our impressions of them, and the processing those impressions go through in our minds, to arrive at a judgment. How much of who we think someone is is from them, and how much is actually from us, a projection of our own prejudices, preconceived notions, assumptions, fears, experiences, beliefs, etc.? In other words, how much of our thoughts about a person is really a product of our own (conditioned) conceptual frameworks, meaning that it’s really about us, not them, since we can’t see/get past our own ego-system/conceptual framework in order to see who they really are.
We understand each other—and everything, for that matter—in terms of ourselves, in terms of the conceptual frameworks we have accumulated thus far as an ego-self. My understanding of you is utterly dependent on the conceptual framework/context by/through which I see and understand anything the way I do. Someone else will see you according to their “perspective.”
We see/understand people and things according to the illusions of our conditioned existences. What we think is about them is really about us. Who is really being judged, the perceived or the perceiver? In other words, when you judge me, are you really judging me, or are you really judging you? I think this is an incredibly interesting and important question. It shows how we cannot hope to directly experience reality without shedding these inherently obstructive illusion-based ego-selves. It shows how little we actually know each other.
.
From my personal notes, 6/1/00
