Mental Assumptions in Relationships
Relationships. This seems to be the favourite area to work upon in young people. Relationship with family – especially the parents and siblings, with friends and more and more with that one special friend who acquires a special meaning as one enters the teenage years. Meeting young people, working with them, I am again and again asked for ways to work on one’s relationships. Here are some thoughts based on self-observation – simple things that can impact any relationship in a big way......
Mental Assumptions
I had some work with a colleague. She said we will do it on Saturday when she comes to the office.
Saturday morning – no sign of the colleague. My angst rising by the minute. “Why is she so irresponsible? She is just not interested in the work. Always tries to make things difficult for me. Why did she have to say that we will do it on Saturday?”
Hold on! Did she give a particular time? No. Then why did I assume one? Why did I imagine that she will come for the morning meditation and after that we will sit together and finish the work? This was not agreed upon between us.
My mind had made certain assumptions and given a lot of weightage to these. When these were not met – the other person of course had no role in these and was quite unaware of the turmoil caused in me (!) – the emotional nature began rebelling, ascribing motives, forming judgments, feeling insecure about the place I had in the other person’s life. My own focus no longer remained work – though I justified my angst in the name of work (a false belief of being conscientious) – it became me and my relationship, my importance in the other person’s eyes.
Have you observed such a pattern in your own lives? What effect does it have on your mood, your self-esteem, your response to the other person?
Then, when the other person actually arrived – obviously without any remorse for not having come earlier – I felt even more upset, “Look, she does not have even the courtesy to apologise!” So, you see, what a dance the mind led me and the negative impact it had on my relationship – for, such repeated experiences, without the discriminating self-observation, lead to a pattern of angst, anger, distrust, ascribing motives and gradually close all open doors between two persons.
Have you experienced it?
Now that I have caught myself in the act, I am practising mental quietude and organisation of my thoughts. I try and be alert about assumptions and disallow mental discussions in my own mind. I shoo away the assumptions by confronting them with the facts of the situation. This prevents the emotional turmoil and I can carry on with my work without disturbance, and the rest happens in its own time. When I meet the person, there is no noise. And that is one of the most important things in a relationship, I think.
- Anuradha (India)
First published in The Gnostic Centre's journal 'The Awakening Ray'
Beautifully written. Assumptions are the deadliest obstacle to progress. It is good to monitor them and get over it. It took me many years to master this technique as our brain is naturally wired to making assumptions.
ReplyDeleteYes... they continue... only, it is easier to become aware of them now and be on guard, question them, etc.
DeleteDear Anuradha,
ReplyDeleteThank you! This is a very rich topic both philosophically and also psychologically and even spiritually. I see assumptions as being substitutes for actual knowledge ( of facts, circumstances, etc.). It is an egoic production based on the ego's need to think or assert that it knows. So, assumptions take place almost always in the absense of facts or knowledge.
So, how to deal with this? It takes discrenment and self-observation. It is almost impossible to eliminate assumptions, but they could be identified, 'bracketed' and suspended. This simply means being aware of the assumption when it arises. This awareness will lead to discrimination.
But the deeper root is the ego of course, and its need to assert knowledge.
I have read that the Buddha on one occasion identified egoic activity as basically three types of thought processes: "I know and you don't", "I know more than you do", and "I am right and you're wrong". This subconscious activity may be behind a good deal of what happens in interpersonal conversations. To root it our requires almost complete silence.
How about trying instead to say that "I don't know" as a practice? This doesn't mean that we have to dis-acknowledge what we know, but any piece of knowledge comes in a context, and there are larger and larger contexts until one reaches some degree of integrality. So, even when we know something in one context, we may not know it in another, wider context.
So, it could be a good practice to be humble about what we know, in a realistic sense of course as too much humbleness is also another egoic manifestation.
In Her essay on Mental Education, the Mother adds another excellent exercise for becoming conscious of assumptions.
DeleteSay someone says something you reactively disagree with. Here's the exercise;
(1) Try as hard as possible to take their point of view, and find as many supporting facts, ideas, etc as you can for that view.
(2) Try as hard as possible to take a view as much the opposite as you can, and again, find as many supporting facts, ideas, etc as you can for this opposite view.
(3) work out a synthesis - a higher synthesis - that integrates both.
I don't know if you ever tried this, but when you do, it's astonishing how many unexamined assumptions, biases, prejudices, logical errors, reactive attachments, etc are revealed.
Don, that is great advice, and also the total opposite of what the ego wants to do naturally. To consider another point of view requires context switching- and that is the hard part for the go. But this exercise can help loosen the egoic boundaries. It's a great exercise in empathy.
DeleteWell, we could try it here, in public!
DeleteMaybe not with politics, or specific Yogic practices, or psychology, or.....
Hmmm, let's see - food?
exercise?
Sleep
I've been exploring people's willingness to consider different views with regard to losing weight. It seems to me that the last year or so, with millions of people using weight loss drugs that SOLELY work to reduce hunger, it turns out, it doesn't matter how many carbs, or protein, or fats, or even the worst junk food - as long as you create a calorie deficit, you'll lose weight.
I'm happy to take several opposing views. I've explored various sides of this with a number of people and it's amazing how wonderful the synthesis can be.
it could be even more powerful here, as we could take the general (mostly materialist) scientific view, and then consider (perhaps later!??) yogic options.
Or any other topic. Let's see, something simple and non controversial.....Auroville.....oops, ok something else?
Here's another related to food - in one letter, Sri aurobindo tells a disciple to put food in a corner and don't think about it.
DeleteIn another place, the Mother says we should study food scientifically and decide on that basis, rather than pleasure or vital need of any kind, take exactly what we need, nutritionally.
Then there's numerous places where They tell us the most important thing is the offering.
And yet in the Yoga of Knowledge, Sri Aurobindo says a point will come (more relevant to the Yoga of Self Perfection) where it has no bearing on the health of the body what food you take in, because it can all be transformed.
Which kind of implies, if one had the "right" consciousness, one could eat 5000 calories a day and lose weight!!
Any takers?
Thanks Bahman & Don. I was travelling, hence the delay in responding. Indeed, both 'I don't know' position as well as 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' exercise are great tools to loosen the mental rigidity and egoism. Have tried these. For synthesis, the awareness that 'truth' exists (and changes) at different levels is important, I feel. And even the synthesis one arrives at changes as one grows in consciousness and can synthesis from the inner, deeper self rather than the mind.
DeleteThat's a great point, about the deeper and deeper syntheses one may arrive at. It's interesting if one observes carefully (not necessarily with the ordinary mind). Often when people talk about the different levels of consciousness Sri Aurobindo and Mother describe, they'll say, "Oh, we don't need to know, that - that's all "mental."
DeleteBut actually (this has been my assumption and my understanding of it has changed over the years, of course:>) it often is the case that they're perceiving and/or understanding the description of the levels FROM the level of the ordinary mind.
I think of it sometimes like looking at a rainbow. If I say to you, "oh, look how beautiful the red is there - and look at the blue," I'm not using the analytic mind (at least not primarily), and most people understand this. But when you say, "I'm noticing an interesting mixture of the inner vital and the outer vital mind influencing me," if someone hears you, and those words are not as experientially vivid as the red and blue of the rainbow, it may sound like you're simply analyzing something, but if this observation is coming from a much deeper place, then one is simply using words to communicate something far more profound.
Not sure how clear that was.....!
Thanks for these reflectins Anuradha and Don.
ReplyDeleteHaridas Chaudhuri, founder of CIIS, who brought integral yoga to the USA wrote an interesting piece about how Sri Aurobindo's (what he called )"integral dialectics" is different from that of Hegel in that Hegel's synthesis was basically a mental operatin but integral dialectics is a whole person process. I like this and ultimatetly it is the psyhic consciousness that is able to do this. It is really a multidimensional process more like the Sri Yantra and the syntheis happens between diffrent planes (physical, vital, mental) as well as within each plane.