‘Our real problem is that our judgements and assumptions are so satisfying.’ Photo: by Ansgar Schefford On Unsplash
Talking out of your assumptions: Tony D’Souza on overcoming prejudice
‘Nobody can change their beliefs without motivation.’
In this famous story from the middle east, a father and son saddle their donkey and set out from their village to the local city of Konya.
As the sun rose in the sky, the heat of the day built up. The father sat on the donkey’s saddle while the boy walked behind. They passed through a village and people said: ‘Look at that selfish old man, riding on the donkey and making that poor boy walk. What a disgrace.’
After few miles, the father got off the donkey and let the boy ride it. They passed some farm workers in a field who shook their heads and said: ‘Look at that young boy, riding on the donkey and making that old man walk in this heat. Young people today have no consideration. What a disgrace.’
A few miles further on, the boy got off the donkey and walked behind it with his father. They passed some fruit pickers in an orchard who laughed and said: ‘What a sight! A perfectly good donkey with a saddle on it, and those two walking behind it like a pair of fools – in this heat!’
This story is an illustration of the fact that you have no control over what other people think. People who do not know you will think whatever they want to think of you, whether you like it or not. This truth cannot be stated often enough in the age of social media. The assumptions people make about you may be good, bad or indifferent. You have to accept them because you have no control over their assumptions – precisely because they are their assumptions.
When people make judgements about you, they are invariably wrong. In part, they don’t know any better, and in part their judgements are projected onto you. Whatever they think about you is a judgement made with their mind, which is born of experience. Mind, or everyday consciousness, is conditioned by the past and other factors such as the prejudices of parents, family and culture. For this reason, whatever other people think of you very rarely has anything to do with you, it’s usually much more about them.
Everyday consciousness is conditioned by the past. Whether it is the personal past, the family past or the cultural past, the past creates everyday consciousness, which is why it is known as conditioned mind. Take racism for example. Nobody is born a racist – racism is learned, usually from parents, peer group, and culture, and because of this it is often handed down from generation to generation. Racism will not go away until we do something about it, and one way to do that is to question our false assumptions. We need to cleanse our hearts of them. But how can we do that?
To begin with, nobody can change their beliefs without motivation. In the case of a racist, this motivation is often some kind of epiphany. This might be a personal encounter with a member of the hated group, which leads to questioning and eventual rejection of the racist assumptions they have been brought up with. An epiphany such as this is the exception, not the rule, however. The good news is that in our time the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has created a historic moment of motivation to change for many people. It has forced many people to question their assumptions. In this alone, the movement has been a resounding success.
Our real problem is that our judgements and assumptions are so satisfying. They are automatic and relieve us of the need to think. They are also very rewarding. Our judgements and false assumptions allow us to feel right, and feeling right is the most empowering thing for the ego (another term for the conditioned mind). It puffs it up no end. Judgements allow us to feel superior, and feeling right and superior is a powerful narcotic for the ego. For the convinced racist, it’s a high that is almost impossible to give up.
This is why the conditioned mind is such a great human tragedy. An entire life can be lived under the influence of false assumptions. Millions of lives have already been lived like that, and millions more are to follow. False assumptions (and the belief systems that often accompany them) have caused countless disputes, wars and untold suffering throughout history. When your entire life is coloured by the assumptions you make (or, worse, that you have been told to make) about whatever you set your eyes upon, you are not seeing clearly. You do not see reality, but a screen upon which your prejudices are played out. You make your own reality, and then you go on to ‘experience’ it, even though your ‘reality’ is made by your own preconceptions.
If you want to see clearly, you must learn to see things as they are, which means seeing them stripped of all assumptions, judgements, ideas and prejudices. The first thing to do is to make the decision not to make false assumptions about anybody. Remember, you have no control over other people’s assumptions about you, but you do have complete control over your assumptions about them.
Here is an experiment for you. Get a flower, put it in a vase and sit in front of it. Just look at it, nothing else. Just look. Now, begin to strip the flower of all your ideas about it. Ideas such as what kind of flower it is – a ‘rose’ or ‘geranium’, even the idea ‘flower’. Just look at it. Let it be just as it is in front of you.
If you practice this just once you might get a glimpse of an object without the mental baggage your mind brings to it. I know it sounds weird, that a simple thing like just looking at an object without thought can begin to liberate you from the conditioned mind, but it’s true. In the beginning, try practicing with things like a flower or a pebble (natural objects work much better than artificial ones). When you are ready, try it with a human being. Just look, without judgement, without assumptions. Start with someone you don’t know, perhaps at a bus stop or in a supermarket, but be careful, don’t creep people out by seeming to stare at them. Be sensitive.
After a while, you can try it with someone you know well, like a family member. Try looking at them without judgements, without past, without future. The more you try it the easier it gets. Even trying it once can be liberating. After a while, you might begin to see things differently. The innate beauty and the hidden unity of all things will be revealed to you in direct proportion to how much you can strip away the ideas, judgements and assumptions you have projected upon them. ‘Only cleanse the doors of perception’, as William Blake said, and you might:
…see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
