I was reading an article which summarises the book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” today. One of the habits is getting a proper understanding of the other person in any situation or dialogue. The point is made that we all want to be understood, but we don’t try to truly understand. I think this goes for more than just people and applies to working practices, technology and belief systems as well as everything else.
It’s a well made point, in my view, we never really see, hear or understand clearly. Everything is coloured by our minds desires prejudices or conditioned thinking, that we rarely see clearly, if ever. This point if made by Steve Hagen as well, that a fundamental point of Buddhism is to simple see properly and that a Buddha is simply someone who has awakened and sees clearly.
One thing I noticed was that speech wasn’t mentioned in the article, which is odd as I think that the factors that cloud our perception also cloud our speech. Seriously, how often do we say what we really mean?
Think of all the times the message didn’t get across when you were talking or when you said something that just came out completely wrong. The more I think about it, the more I realise how right the Buddha is, our speech is not from a position of awareness, how often do we stop and actually consider what we mean to say properly?
October 25th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I tend to consider my words carefully whenever I can. I think a lot of it has to do with how plugged into language itself each person is. I certainly don’t always succeed in getting across my exact point, but I think it’s a writerly habit to try as often as possible. In conversations, that usually results in my being talked over because no one’s willing to wait for anyone else to frame their thoughts, but many times that turns out to not be so bad a thing.