You are probably familiar with the legend of the six blind men and the elephant.
In that story, all six men approach the elephant from a different angle, each one touches only one part of that large animal, and each man's understanding is limited by the one limb that he has touched.
After returning home the six men argue heatedly about their perception of the elephant.
With their fragmented perceptions, they cannot agree with each other and argue without end.
Aren't we all guilty of the same mistake? Like the six blind men, each one of us has only a narrow, limited vision of life.
With this tunnel vision, we tend to see every thing from our own, fragmented viewpoint and perspective.
While inhabiting the same world, as 6 billion inhabitants we have 6 billion different perceptions of reality.
Accordingly, we all have different priorities, a different sense of right and wrong, of important and unimportant and of the appropriate or inappropriate response to every situation.
As a result we have needless conflict between individuals and groups.
Thus we have trivial and endless disagreements: young against old, rich against poor, management against labor, one culture against another culture, men against women, and so on.
Further, we all like to reinforce our own beliefs and discount or ignore the positions of others.
This is probably, the caveman in us.
We want to "stand our ground" and defend our territory, our caves.
This was probably necessary for survival at one stage in our lives.
This behavior pattern is reinforced by competition.
Granted, competition is responsible for much of our progress in science and technology as well as improving our standard of living.
However, competition has two facets.
One aspect of competition, true competition, is the striving for excellence.
A true competitor is ceaselessly striving to better his performance, his product or his service.
This effort brings out the best in a person or organization.
The second facet, commercial competition, is concerned not with performing at one's best but with being perceived as the best.
This is simply show business.
Unfortunately, this grandstanding, which is a poor substitute for true competition, becomes a habit.
This sort of silly competitive mindset, is only interested in "standing its ground" and is the modern version of the caveman mentality.
In war, and its civilized equivalent-competition, defending one's territory, is essential to survival.
However, when it comes to learning, increasing our understanding and growing as a person, the reverse is true.
In this case, giving up ground, falling back and giving conflicting opinions their due, leads to progress.
"Defending your territory" is tantamount to intellectual suicide.
"Losing" an argument or "giving up" a position represents a gain, while "winning" an argument is a no win situation.
The competitive mindset often corrupts relationships which are designed to be partnerships, and degrades them into mini rivalries with the participants mutually undermining each other's efforts.
Thus spouses compete against spouses, siblings against siblings (sibling rivalry), friends against friends and even children against parents.
In a competition, there is only one winner and one or more losers.
The losers may end up with feelings of jealousy and hostility and most of the participants end up with inferiority and superiority complexes.
A competitive mind is therefore a silly mind.
It is often said that two minds are better than one, and this is true, but only if they are cooperating, not when they are competing.
It is somewhat ironic then, to hear the types of debates that are held in school and college debating societies, where each contestant is asked to defend one position.
This is just a civilized form of warfare, concerned primarily with defining a winner and a loser and is a zero sum game.
Also, this process is obsessed with and determines who is right, rather than what is right.
Such "debates" do not promote intellectual growth, but only exercise the intellect as a form of ego satisfaction.
The six blind men in the legend were also involved in a debate, six sided instead of two sided, but equally futile and meaningless.
Revisiting the legend of the elephant and the six blind men, the original story ends with the six men arguing and fighting amongst themselves.
What if the six men had actually listened to each other's account of the elephant? What if each one believed that the perceptions of the other five, in addition to his own perception, were all valid parts of a unified whole? The moment they started thinking this way, their understanding would evolve from a fractured, fragmented perception to a composite understanding of the elephant.
Immediately, they would start growing in their understanding.
I really wish that the legend had a Chapter 2, or a prologue, to include such a development; it would not only illustrate the problem, but also point to a resolution.
Ultimately any individual who wants to grow as a person owes it to himself to understand and appreciate viewpoints that differ from his own.
After all, a two dimensional understanding trumps a one dimensional view, and a three dimensional view is still superior and so on.
However, making any change is inconvenient, unsettling and confusing.
It also requires some degree of imagination.
It also involves de-identifying oneself from his present position or you might say divorcing oneself from his present habits.
For a mature person, the easiest way to initiate this process is to see how he himself has changed with time.
For this he has only to reflect on his own life, starting from the earliest recollections of childhood, through youth, to the present, and try to recollect what was most important and what was least important at various stages of life.
This is a humbling but educative experience, as the individual realizes that what seemed very important at one time, now seems quite trifling or even stupid with the benefit of greater wisdom and hindsight.
Conversely, the advice handed out by elders, which seemed useless in the past and was not heeded, turned out to be very relevant later.
The realization that our once cherished value systems were not perfect or at least failed the test of time, makes the individual more open and flexible in his evaluation of other people's perspectives on life.
About 20 years ago, I used to get together with some friends, and shoot some baskets on a net I had set outside my house.
One of my neighbors, Mr.
R.
, a senior citizen, requested us to stop, since he was trying to take an afternoon nap.
Although we complied with his request, it then seemed odd to us relatively young people.
Now I have reached the same age as Mr.
R.
and when children play a noisy game outside my house, I sympathize with Mr.
R's position, but I also realize that young children need to play and so I simply retire into a room at the back of my house.
This same realization makes it easier for me to tolerate the different behavior of younger people, as I mentally recount the stupid things I had done in my youth.
The reverse process, which is for a younger person to imagine the feelings of an older individual, is more difficult.
It is always harder to judge what lies ahead in your journey, than to remember the paths that one has traversed.
Perhaps this is why, the traditional cultures of the Orient, insisted that younger people simply obey their elders, who had a better understanding of life's elephant than the young generation.
Appreciating another person's position, different from our own, requires some personal attributes.
For one thing, it requires sensitivity.
Further, it requires the humility to give up cherished beliefs and come out of one's comfort zone.
It may also involve losing the approval of friends and acquaintances.
However, this is a prerequisite for expanding one's mental horizons, for being at peace with other individuals, and for growing as an individual.
In that story, all six men approach the elephant from a different angle, each one touches only one part of that large animal, and each man's understanding is limited by the one limb that he has touched.
After returning home the six men argue heatedly about their perception of the elephant.
With their fragmented perceptions, they cannot agree with each other and argue without end.
Aren't we all guilty of the same mistake? Like the six blind men, each one of us has only a narrow, limited vision of life.
With this tunnel vision, we tend to see every thing from our own, fragmented viewpoint and perspective.
While inhabiting the same world, as 6 billion inhabitants we have 6 billion different perceptions of reality.
Accordingly, we all have different priorities, a different sense of right and wrong, of important and unimportant and of the appropriate or inappropriate response to every situation.
As a result we have needless conflict between individuals and groups.
Thus we have trivial and endless disagreements: young against old, rich against poor, management against labor, one culture against another culture, men against women, and so on.
Further, we all like to reinforce our own beliefs and discount or ignore the positions of others.
This is probably, the caveman in us.
We want to "stand our ground" and defend our territory, our caves.
This was probably necessary for survival at one stage in our lives.
This behavior pattern is reinforced by competition.
Granted, competition is responsible for much of our progress in science and technology as well as improving our standard of living.
However, competition has two facets.
One aspect of competition, true competition, is the striving for excellence.
A true competitor is ceaselessly striving to better his performance, his product or his service.
This effort brings out the best in a person or organization.
The second facet, commercial competition, is concerned not with performing at one's best but with being perceived as the best.
This is simply show business.
Unfortunately, this grandstanding, which is a poor substitute for true competition, becomes a habit.
This sort of silly competitive mindset, is only interested in "standing its ground" and is the modern version of the caveman mentality.
In war, and its civilized equivalent-competition, defending one's territory, is essential to survival.
However, when it comes to learning, increasing our understanding and growing as a person, the reverse is true.
In this case, giving up ground, falling back and giving conflicting opinions their due, leads to progress.
"Defending your territory" is tantamount to intellectual suicide.
"Losing" an argument or "giving up" a position represents a gain, while "winning" an argument is a no win situation.
The competitive mindset often corrupts relationships which are designed to be partnerships, and degrades them into mini rivalries with the participants mutually undermining each other's efforts.
Thus spouses compete against spouses, siblings against siblings (sibling rivalry), friends against friends and even children against parents.
In a competition, there is only one winner and one or more losers.
The losers may end up with feelings of jealousy and hostility and most of the participants end up with inferiority and superiority complexes.
A competitive mind is therefore a silly mind.
It is often said that two minds are better than one, and this is true, but only if they are cooperating, not when they are competing.
It is somewhat ironic then, to hear the types of debates that are held in school and college debating societies, where each contestant is asked to defend one position.
This is just a civilized form of warfare, concerned primarily with defining a winner and a loser and is a zero sum game.
Also, this process is obsessed with and determines who is right, rather than what is right.
Such "debates" do not promote intellectual growth, but only exercise the intellect as a form of ego satisfaction.
The six blind men in the legend were also involved in a debate, six sided instead of two sided, but equally futile and meaningless.
Revisiting the legend of the elephant and the six blind men, the original story ends with the six men arguing and fighting amongst themselves.
What if the six men had actually listened to each other's account of the elephant? What if each one believed that the perceptions of the other five, in addition to his own perception, were all valid parts of a unified whole? The moment they started thinking this way, their understanding would evolve from a fractured, fragmented perception to a composite understanding of the elephant.
Immediately, they would start growing in their understanding.
I really wish that the legend had a Chapter 2, or a prologue, to include such a development; it would not only illustrate the problem, but also point to a resolution.
Ultimately any individual who wants to grow as a person owes it to himself to understand and appreciate viewpoints that differ from his own.
After all, a two dimensional understanding trumps a one dimensional view, and a three dimensional view is still superior and so on.
However, making any change is inconvenient, unsettling and confusing.
It also requires some degree of imagination.
It also involves de-identifying oneself from his present position or you might say divorcing oneself from his present habits.
For a mature person, the easiest way to initiate this process is to see how he himself has changed with time.
For this he has only to reflect on his own life, starting from the earliest recollections of childhood, through youth, to the present, and try to recollect what was most important and what was least important at various stages of life.
This is a humbling but educative experience, as the individual realizes that what seemed very important at one time, now seems quite trifling or even stupid with the benefit of greater wisdom and hindsight.
Conversely, the advice handed out by elders, which seemed useless in the past and was not heeded, turned out to be very relevant later.
The realization that our once cherished value systems were not perfect or at least failed the test of time, makes the individual more open and flexible in his evaluation of other people's perspectives on life.
About 20 years ago, I used to get together with some friends, and shoot some baskets on a net I had set outside my house.
One of my neighbors, Mr.
R.
, a senior citizen, requested us to stop, since he was trying to take an afternoon nap.
Although we complied with his request, it then seemed odd to us relatively young people.
Now I have reached the same age as Mr.
R.
and when children play a noisy game outside my house, I sympathize with Mr.
R's position, but I also realize that young children need to play and so I simply retire into a room at the back of my house.
This same realization makes it easier for me to tolerate the different behavior of younger people, as I mentally recount the stupid things I had done in my youth.
The reverse process, which is for a younger person to imagine the feelings of an older individual, is more difficult.
It is always harder to judge what lies ahead in your journey, than to remember the paths that one has traversed.
Perhaps this is why, the traditional cultures of the Orient, insisted that younger people simply obey their elders, who had a better understanding of life's elephant than the young generation.
Appreciating another person's position, different from our own, requires some personal attributes.
For one thing, it requires sensitivity.
Further, it requires the humility to give up cherished beliefs and come out of one's comfort zone.
It may also involve losing the approval of friends and acquaintances.
However, this is a prerequisite for expanding one's mental horizons, for being at peace with other individuals, and for growing as an individual.
Source...