I have often heard students and others offer me this most remarkable interpretation and diagnosis: "I knew what she/he was thinking." As when people resort to using the phrase "human nature," I came to notice that whenever someone read the mind of another, knew the other's thoughts, the next thing she/he said about those thoughts would almost if not always express a negative realization. In terms of the interview class, in an employment interview, the interviewee interprets and simultaneously diagnoses the interviewer's thought, with nothing tangible in evidence whatsoever, as, "She/he didn't like me." I sometimes asked the person who asserted she/he could read minds why they were looking for work at all. With an ability to read minds, there must be some very interesting ways of making a very substantial living. I hoped that would bring a laugh or, at least, a smile.
In class, we discussed how this worked. I asked, "What can we really know about what goes on in someone else's mind." The honest answer after reflection said, "Really nothing." "What can we mean when we say we know someone else's thoughts?" I would also ask. Generally, the answer came, "What we're thinking they're thinking." When we put our own thoughts into the head of this other person, we interpret ourselves. When we interpret our own thoughts in that way, we might find it remarkable that what we perceive comes in the negative, comes in rejection. We could easily perceive this process as a rejection of not the other person but ourselves.
This almost inevitable process stems from what we have discussed about meaning perspectives and our secret fears and discomfort with ourselves. Many of us, if not most of us, live with a very powerful intuition that we live and act in the world as inadequate people. We live and express our failings to ourselves all the time. Because of this unspoken but tangible part of our meaning perspective dominated identity, our ego constantly stands on the ready to protect that identity from the discovery of our inadequacy and the rejection that would follow. Our ego sometimes defends against rejection by rejecting others before the others can reject our identity. We read our own thoughts when we claim to read others' thoughts. The thoughts we read may well, if not certainly, represent our unquestioned meaning perspectives.
In response to this writing and in talking with Silvia as she reads along as I go, I came to a realization about interpretations and diagnoses. They almost never have anything good to say. When we seek to make an interpretation followed by a diagnosis, we almost always see something negative in what we are meant to simply observe. In the same way we read others' thoughts as negative, we read and understand their actions as negative as well. We don't have to, and it is not inevitable, but it often happens that way. Indeed, we might see these almost inevitably negative observations as inauthentic. Our authenticity expresses itself in fully engaging with the moment and the elements of the moment without making judgments which distract us from the wonder and energy of the immediate.