Reverend Ken's Blog: June 26, 2012: Post 532 (2012 Day 178)

June 26, 2012

Daily Comment

People's opinions and impressions of me, and who I was have rarely matched my internal picture. I guess this shouldn't be surprising; people usually have limited information to work with, and rarely hold off on forming impressions for a long enough time to ask questions. They take their impression, project, and don't question how accurate the resulting conclusions are.

I do it, too, of course. These days, though, I temper this with the knowledge that I am always wrong, either in the main or in any details I think I know. I stay humble in the knowledge that I don't know the whole story. Nobody does.

The tag on my email signature says,"A state of doubt is unpleasant, but a state of certainty is ridiculous." - Voltaire. That says a lot to me, all of it true. The first thing a person needs to understand is the limits of understanding, and why nothing is certain. Even beliefs, no matter how deeply held, are not absolute. There's always more to the story than our limited sensory input can perceive.

We gather information through our senses, as if this represented all there was to know about any thing or anybody. As if our senses were accurate and unlimited, which is incorrect, and what our senses don't tell us, we 'learn' in one of a few ways: We deduce it, or try to fill in what we don't sense logically; we guess, at some level (I'm including 'intuition' - which I happen to think is valid - as a guess); or we just plain make it up. Psychologists have shown a high percentage of what we sense is evaluated, primarily, by how much it fits with our preconceptions and expectations - that is, we will make up any damn thing that makes what we sense be consistent with our world view/beliefs.

So I shouldn't be surprised when I find that someone is relating to me based on an idea of who I am that is, to mee, at least partially, incorrect, compared to what I feel and know about myself. And that is based on a level of consciousness that doesn't normally access sub- and un-conscious thoughts and feelings, and these shape us as much as or more than our physical senses.

In the past, I've been surprised to find that various people thought I was aloof, standoffish, or emotionally cold. They have assumed attributes that I only wished I had. I have been overestimated and underestimated. They have taken traits that I believe I do possess, and exaggerated them to an extreme that I no longer recognized in myself. There have been mutually-contradictory ideas about me (naive and street-smart) (I'm not that much of either).

And, per yesterday's ideas about 'Glory Days', there are all those false/incomplete/partial/inaccessible memories, which mean I'm not even sure whether I have a valid self-concept, rendering the validity of anyone else's moot.

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