Observation Vs Judgment
The effortlessness of the quite creeping of judgment to cloud your thoughts dawned on me while watching a movie called “Legally Blonde” this weekend. The movie was based on a blonde girl struggling against the attached labels insinuating at the lack of grey matter and making a successful attempt to become a lawyer contrary to all expectations.
Irrespective of the logic being sucked out of the analogy of a blonde with a bimbo in today’s world of ubiquitous hair colors, the crux is that in the tug-of-war of ‘neutral observation’ and ‘colored judgment’, judgment always wins.
At the first trigger of any external stimuli, our mind instantly gets into action to categorize the object of the stimuli into one of the many boxes we have created unknowingly. The person being labeled is ‘expected’ to act according to the specifications of the category we have clubbed her into and any deviation is seen as an aberration and ignored. Most of us indulge in what Sigmund Freud called as ‘Projection’ where we attribute to others our own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or emotions.
Fortunately individuals are much beyond their actions. As Osho says in his ‘Book of Understanding’, actions are trivial but a person is a tremendous reality. Thus, attempting to predict the being of an individual by classifying into pre-defined groups is an act in vain. If even the fingerprints of two individuals can never be alike, categorizing a person in totality is nothing less than ludicrous. In retrospect, each of us can come up with multiple occasions where a person to our judgmental surprise has behaved not even close to what we were expecting – so a beautiful, extremely modish girl in class would ‘surprisingly’ also be very bright and intellectual; a pierced, pony-tail donning twenty something would ‘surprisingly’ have deep thoughts borne out of propensity toward spirituality; a garishly dressed member of a supposed low intellect and low income race would ‘surprisingly’ be sophisticated and classy in her whole demeanor and a timid, shy and weak individual would ‘surprisingly’ exhibit huge assertion in her actions.
Every time we form a judgment we are proved wrong. Unfortunately, the times when we are right are the times when unknowingly we have provided the impetus to the person to behave in the way specified by our audacious judgments. The covert or overt signal that the majority sends to the person being classified becomes the road map for that person to act. The power thus being held by the crowd in shaping the persona of the individual is almost lethal.
This bestows the huge responsibility on all to shun judgments and make discolored observations a habit. Neil Donald Walsch in his book ‘Conversations with God’ delineates the difference between the two. He beautifully states that acknowledging the fact that if a driver had to go right but has taken a left turn he is going the wrong way is what a discolored observation is. We have not formed any judgment about the driver per se, but have made a neutral observation. Our thoughts must be discolored in similar hue, trying to look beyond the wall of opinions built by years of conditioning.
Flipping the coin on the other side, we must also do a periodic reality check to gauge if we are sending a signal that is actuating another to crystallize her opinion about us. I once saw a TV show where a group of very beautiful women were whining on their plight of always being mistreated by the members of the same gender. The conclusion after a thirty minute discussion was that at some level most of them were putting a tacit message across in each interaction that froze all the labels attached with being physically endowed. If we have subconsciously classified ourselves into a certain category, we need to break out of it first before we can hope that others would make a similar attempt.
Like all good things, neutral observation can only become a part of us with continual practice. But if we wish to understand and encourage the multiple facets of an individual, looking beyond the actions and acknowledging the diversity in her being is a worthy judgment-free start.
The effortlessness of the quite creeping of judgment to cloud your thoughts dawned on me while watching a movie called “Legally Blonde” this weekend. The movie was based on a blonde girl struggling against the attached labels insinuating at the lack of grey matter and making a successful attempt to become a lawyer contrary to all expectations.
Irrespective of the logic being sucked out of the analogy of a blonde with a bimbo in today’s world of ubiquitous hair colors, the crux is that in the tug-of-war of ‘neutral observation’ and ‘colored judgment’, judgment always wins.
At the first trigger of any external stimuli, our mind instantly gets into action to categorize the object of the stimuli into one of the many boxes we have created unknowingly. The person being labeled is ‘expected’ to act according to the specifications of the category we have clubbed her into and any deviation is seen as an aberration and ignored. Most of us indulge in what Sigmund Freud called as ‘Projection’ where we attribute to others our own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or emotions.
Fortunately individuals are much beyond their actions. As Osho says in his ‘Book of Understanding’, actions are trivial but a person is a tremendous reality. Thus, attempting to predict the being of an individual by classifying into pre-defined groups is an act in vain. If even the fingerprints of two individuals can never be alike, categorizing a person in totality is nothing less than ludicrous. In retrospect, each of us can come up with multiple occasions where a person to our judgmental surprise has behaved not even close to what we were expecting – so a beautiful, extremely modish girl in class would ‘surprisingly’ also be very bright and intellectual; a pierced, pony-tail donning twenty something would ‘surprisingly’ have deep thoughts borne out of propensity toward spirituality; a garishly dressed member of a supposed low intellect and low income race would ‘surprisingly’ be sophisticated and classy in her whole demeanor and a timid, shy and weak individual would ‘surprisingly’ exhibit huge assertion in her actions.
Every time we form a judgment we are proved wrong. Unfortunately, the times when we are right are the times when unknowingly we have provided the impetus to the person to behave in the way specified by our audacious judgments. The covert or overt signal that the majority sends to the person being classified becomes the road map for that person to act. The power thus being held by the crowd in shaping the persona of the individual is almost lethal.
This bestows the huge responsibility on all to shun judgments and make discolored observations a habit. Neil Donald Walsch in his book ‘Conversations with God’ delineates the difference between the two. He beautifully states that acknowledging the fact that if a driver had to go right but has taken a left turn he is going the wrong way is what a discolored observation is. We have not formed any judgment about the driver per se, but have made a neutral observation. Our thoughts must be discolored in similar hue, trying to look beyond the wall of opinions built by years of conditioning.
Flipping the coin on the other side, we must also do a periodic reality check to gauge if we are sending a signal that is actuating another to crystallize her opinion about us. I once saw a TV show where a group of very beautiful women were whining on their plight of always being mistreated by the members of the same gender. The conclusion after a thirty minute discussion was that at some level most of them were putting a tacit message across in each interaction that froze all the labels attached with being physically endowed. If we have subconsciously classified ourselves into a certain category, we need to break out of it first before we can hope that others would make a similar attempt.
Like all good things, neutral observation can only become a part of us with continual practice. But if we wish to understand and encourage the multiple facets of an individual, looking beyond the actions and acknowledging the diversity in her being is a worthy judgment-free start.
posted by Garima at 1:16 PM
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