Monday Musings 262: The hurry to understand others

Monday Musings 262: The hurry to understand others

I come across quite frequently many who profess to understand others.  An equal others if not more are those want to learn to understand others. In m y profession particularly a window into the dungeons of the human mind and human behaviour is considered a holy grail and there are not many to fall for the charms of mastering it – at least the notion of it. There in hangs this musing.

The idea that we understand others, their behaviour, and their motives is so intoxicating that before we know it we fall for it. The notion that it is even possible to do so is enough to suck us into believing that we can actually do it. One of the reasons why we fall for it is because it gives us a sense of power. What can be more gratifying than the idea that we can understand others and their actions – and in that knowledge lies the mistaken belief that we can play with it, influence it and control it.  Some elemental study around mental models, pop psychology and juvenile theories and oops – ladies and gentleman we have got a psychologist on the house!

The idea that we can even begin to unravel the recesses of a human mind and then tie it up with its manifestation is overconfidence, unless one has devoted an entire life to study it.  For everyone else I guess the whole thing is tantamount to armchair hunting. It gives a nice feeling and a high, but at the end of it all it, it’s notional and really unreliable. However many fall for it. I wonder why?

This whole thing becomes ironic because while being interested and even passionate about pursuing the study of another mind keeps so many of us busy; the dungeons of our own mind remain unexplored. The physician remains ailing!! I also reckon that the lack of understanding of self remains an ignored pursuit not as much because of ignorance or inability but more because of arrogance – which one knows enough about himself/herself.

As Kabeer says,

Padhi guni Pathak bhaye, samjhaya sansaar

Aapan ko samjhe nahi, britha gaya avatar

(Study and teaching the world is of no avail, // Unexplored and un-understood self - such a wasted life!)

So the question to muse over is not the sermon of needing to spend more time and effort to understanding ourselves rather than wasting time on trying to understanding others, but the question what makes the latter so charming and the former so repulsive? I use the strong adjective repulsive rather than my first choice, ‘unattractive’ because I reckon such large scale denial definitely must have its roots in something fundamentally disturbing. Perhaps we are too afraid to study self for the fear of what we may find – perhaps we already know in some strange way what we will find.

I think it was Carl Jung the famous psychologist who had said – ‘’Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves’’. A twist of that could easily be, the more we are interested in know about the minds of others indicates that we running away from understanding ourselves. !!