A woman complains to her husband that her haircuts are more expensive than his, even though they essentially have the same haircut. The husband is honest and agrees that he has always felt it a bit crazy that the female clients of salons were essentially subsidizing the fancy decor and products that the men also shared in.
She understandably thinks it’s unfair that women should be paying for the decor when men see the decor and use the products too, but he rightly points out that if it were up to the men it would often just be a chair and mirror and a barber with good conversation skills, so there would be no need for the extra expense.
And that all makes sense. No one is wrong or lying but they entirely disagree. It’s only because they are individuals –defined by valuing things differently– that they see a different version of what’s fair. They both have very respectable points. The problem with believing in a central reality is that people could pick either of their ‘sides’ and argue with facts but to no good end.
This is why a greater level of understanding other than just facts is needed, as is further demonstrated by taking the example further. Now imagine that the husband might later bring up the conversation with his wife while he’s at work, but he’s surprised when his co-worker agrees with the wife.
The co-worker might note that his daughter is a hairdresser, and that the nice surroundings and fancy hair-dos are more than just ego to him, because he watched his daughter, watch her mother lose her hair before dying of cancer. So making women feel important, and focused-on and beautiful means a great deal to his daughter the hairdresser. That adds a lot of value to a salon for her.
None of that makes any of the facts the husband said false, but we can see it greatly complicates our idea of what a hair salon can mean to different people. That’s because hair salons are made of thoughts, not of sinks and mirrors and paint.
Going even further, we could talk about the salon’s designer, and how this was her first job and it how won an award that launched her career and made her parents proud of her, and also helped her and her husband weather a job loss of his. Those are all huge things that will make that salon iconic to her.
Despite the tremendous value in the design to the designer and hairdresser and wife, the husband cannot appreciate any of their values by simply looking at the designer’s creation a year later. The only sign of her work is beauty and the invisible efficiency of the people using the space.
Do we really think the wife, the husband, the co-worker and hairdresser-daughter, and the designer all see the same salon? No. Absolutely not. They never did. They ‘see’ something similar, but their thoughts turn that reality into entirely separate ideas.
The problem is, good people could easily argue over those valid ideas, all while saying that they are representing the true value of that salon. But we can’t solve the problems of the world if we can’t appreciate the reality of separate realities.
Everyone looks at everything in life through their lens of their own experience, and they weigh what they see based on the values their life experiences left us with. If we understand that, we understand that everyone always did see a different salon.
Now that we know that, we can stop having arguments over hair salons (or anything else made from thought), unless the arguments themselves are enjoyable to have –because we also must remember that some people’s life experience means debating itself is a joy to them.
peace, s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Maybe it’s a few friends of yours. Maybe it’s you and you know it. Maybe it’s you and you aren’t aware of it; but we’re all somewhere on the self and other spectrum. Regardless of how various individual people define us, we can all appreciate that some people will be more selfish than others, just as we know some will give beyond their capacity to give.
Most of you will know these varying spiritual states as political distinctions. People seen as over-generous and foolish by one side are seen as compassionate and generous by the other. Likewise, the ones viewed as selfish and careless are seen by their own side as focused and successful. Each of these opinions and every single one in between are all largely valid, which helps us realise the truly meaningless nature of opinions, because what we’re really talking about is the many ways people are.
Can you accept that your nature is to move toward balance and that is the pull of life you feel each day? And can you simultaneously accept that your nature includes the idea that where you’re headed isn’t better than where you are, it’s just a different balance point with different challenges? The point isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to go; to live; to be. External outcomes ultimately don’t matter. It’s what Shakespeare meant with that “To be or not to be,” stuff.
Bruce Lee (and I’m sure many others) said that we should study ourselves in action with others in order to better-know ourselves. Many people will hear this and do a cursory glance at their lives, literally looking for examples of them being polite or generous and that will be it. They’ll have self-passed themselves when really what they did was forgo an opportunity for valuable self-reflection.
We have to learn to not accept these mental headspaces. We have to learn to pay attention to that suffering more. Yes, I’m suggesting that we focus on when we’re taking a crap between our own ears. Because that’s what we’re doing when we think uncharitable thoughts about ourselves or others. Other people don’t feel our brain chemistry, we do. Seriously: if we know these thoughts are painful, then voluntarily thinking them is like choosing to open spoiled food so we can smell it better.
If you watch yourself closely, you’ll soon realise that you’re likely to do the same thing one of your parents did (or in rarer cases, the exact opposite). That’s your ego following programming. To be free you have to make that programming conscious. It’s usually painful, so that helps you spot it when it shows up so that you can change direction and end that suffering.
Once we ignore our own thinking long enough we start to feel how ephemeral and meaningless thoughts are relative to action. Once we have that, we develop a better sense of time, where we realise we cannot possibly change things from the past, and so thinking about painful mistakes in the present makes little sense. If the thought stings then the experience has done its job and we have learned. We don’t need to add beating ourselves up with our word-based thoughts. By feeling badly we’ve proven that’s not the direction we’re naturally inclined to go.
There were other smaller signs steadily after the accident, but it wasn’t until Junior High School that I started to have mature enough experiences that the differences between me and others was becoming strange. I was confused hearing people described as too…. Too tall, too fat, too talkative, too mean, too quiet, too untrustworthy, too smart, or their stories were too big.
Of course, eventually I figured out that the thing they were comparing everyone to was their own personal ideal. It wasn’t even how they thought the other person could be a better person. The frustrations and demands and judgment was all about the other person doing what the person judging them wanted them to do. I went through those motions sometimes, but it never occurred to me to see my perspective on it as a universal truth.
It’s a lost art. So many are caught up in a need to oppose and conquer. We have not improved the world by converting people to our way of seeing things, we have only manipulated their perspective to temporarily align with ours. But over time their view will develop nuances ours doesn’t have because ultimately their perspective is not ours and never will be; they are them and we are ourselves. 
Take today and search for an opportunity to feel your resistance to an idea, and then understand that your resistance is created by your unaccepting thoughts about their idea. That’s natural–those aren’t ideas that you feel are compatible with you. But that’s a much different thing than saying they aren’t compatible with the other person’s way of being.
