Using Percentages: Thinking in Shades of Gray
Most beliefs, emotions, and behaviors aren't absolute. Psychology and spirituality each offer about 60-70% benefit. Using percentages instead of 0 or 100 thinking sharpens self-awareness, improves how you talk to others, and cuts the black-and-white reasoning that drives conflict.
In the years I've known you, the decades long relationship I've known you, the word percentages has been one of your favorite words. And there, there doesn't seem to be anything that is absolute zero or 100.
Very, very rare.
How is that? Well, it seems like when we look at any situation, it's always shades of gray and like you said, almost always. Because if it's always, then it's a.
Hundred and occasionally it's a hundred.
And I love so much being able to have an intuitive feel of how sad are you.
How afraid are you, how much is your faith that we're going to have an afterlife.
So we're not just saying, well, I have faith or I don't have faith or I have understanding of what's enlightenment or I don't. So the sense of being able to feel into it allows an intimacy and an authenticity that's very hard to get to when you're just speaking in black.
And white terms.
Like how much do I believe in psychology as being the path towards healing and how much do I believe in spirituality?
And the truth of the matter is.
I think that psychology has maybe 60 or 70% to offer, and I think spirituality has maybe 60 or 70% to Offer.
Sounds like more than 100% there.
It does, doesn't it?
Yeah. The point is that I don't take anything as 100% complete in itself. So there's a lot of psychology that has benefit and there's a lot of spirituality that has benefit, and there's a lot of simply not knowing anything and just being innocent or sincere and not being learned in the field of psychology or not being learned in the field of spirituality. That also would be another 60 or 70%. Just an innocent sense of being a good person. That would be as much of an advantage as it would be to be really studied in either one of those two fields.
Are you saying there's a downside to certainty?
I was going to say definitely, and it's pretty close to definitely.
We may have found the close to 100 percenter there.
Yeah. There are almost no things other than sometimes I experience something and I know I'm afraid or I know I'm sad. I could maybe say I'm certain about that. But when it comes to the ultimate beliefs about life, certain I'm not certain. And I'm also certain that the people that have certainty, or at least the vast majority of people that have certainty, I have doubts about. So I love to be able to talk about percentages because I have the feeling that were each looking inside carefully and saying, well, what is it I really feel? How much do I trust this friend to not gossip behind my back? What are the percentages? Now, one could get very anal about it and say, well, do you literally mean 74%? And it's much more of an intuitive and a loose and playful thing, yet at the same time it's sincere and authentic, and then it's fun.
If you have a pain, it's pretty easy to ask somebody and ask yourself, on a 1 to 10 scale, is it a 1 or is it a 5? And that's very helpful because then we can know what level of attention is needed to care for it. And if we're hurting and we're with our loved one and we're being asked on a 1 to 10, how frightened are you? And it's an 8 or it's a 2, it requires a very different response. So as we develop the capacity to see our world not in black and white terms, but in various shades of gray, we have the ability to communicate and to commune with ourselves and others in a more refined way. So, for example, when I have been in the most challenged states of my life and have been, let's say, in a withdrawn state, was that 100% of me? No. When I can see that I'm withdrawn, there's a certain percentage of me that's actually the seer. And being able to have a sense of a part of me, being able to be the seer allows me not to be absorbed in. In the state that I'm in, that's incredibly beneficial. Now, what percentage of me is the seer?
What percentage of you is a seer?
Can you see what I'm talking about right now? Does it make sense to you? Can you. Do you want to reinforce that capacity inside yourself? And with friends asking these sort of questions about percentages and being able to see a rainbow of places inside yourself makes the world be more alive, in my experience. Now, I realize only a certain percentage of you are going to respond to what I'm saying. And in my life experience, as I've attempted to talk about percentages, a lot of people have looked at me like.
Hmm, this guy's really in his head.
But my experience is, it's exactly the opposite. That when you actually are able to experience the texture and refinement of different parts of yourself, then you're actually more in the inner experience itself and not locked into your head. So one of the things I love to do is to be able to ask friends or People close to me, how much do you feel that? How sad are you really? How much would you like to be able to be supported while you're in that state? And what starts to happen is life is not either a dimension of just emotions, and it's certainly not just a dimension of having faith or transformation. We start to be able to realize that coexisting at two different levels at least, is a very normal thing. One part of us is able to want to feel better, while another part of us doesn't feel very good. And we can start to have a sense of percentages between those places. So I'm hoping that you might find benefit out of looking at your world through the lens of having this capacity to see different sides of yourself. And perhaps, again, the best way of this really deepening as a practice inside you is to see whether or not the seer inside you can experience the emotional states. And if so, how much of a percentage is that seer? Because the more we deepen our capacity to have a higher percentage of witnessing where we are, of wanting good for the world, wanting a sense of well being, being in a state of prayer, being in a state of asking the most important questions of our life, the more, again, we're able to deepen that percentage, the more rich our life can be. And also, paradoxically, the more we can see the emotional states and the percentages that exist there, the more material and more raw, earthy experience we have to work with. So I hope and ask you to consider whether percentages might be of benefit to you in your life. Not being able to see the world in shades of gray is the source or one of the great sources of war, disharmony, bad relationships and struggles on the earth. And has always been seeing things in black and white pictures, thinking that so.
And so is good and so and so is bad, that Israel is good.
And Palestine is bad, or this country.
Is good and this country is bad.
Is the source of suffering, is one of the great sources of suffering. And being able to start to see the world and our world in percentages is one of the great reliefs from suffering. So when we start to see that, it might be that the various countries throughout history might have had 50% responsibility a lot of the time that it wasn't anywhere near a good bad world. And occasionally there might have been a Hitler where they really were 100, and that's the virtual exception. But so often there's a struggle regarding boundaries and then a war and then another war. And it's understandable why our family being killed or the other's family being killed is such a mutual pain. And that the real healing is going to be when we can see that all of us want to be happy. And we're all exposed to percentages of our life that are unfair and that are difficult. And that the more we can start to see these shades of gray of our responsibility relative to others, the better chance we have of good relationships. So if we're a parent and we have an attitude towards our kids, and our kids have an attitude towards us, well, what percentage is it of our attitude versus our kids? Similarly, in a love relationship, if we have a percentage of us, let's say, that withdraws our love and our partner has a percentage that's very upset and emotional, can we see the percentages of responsibility and gain the benefit from. From loving that precise truth? Hopefully, as these words are being spoken, you're looking at your life in percentages and saying, well, what percentage of responsibility do I bear as I look at this relationship or these relationships that are so important to me and that you see that starting to visualize your world more and more as percentages and less and less as black and white pictures is going to benefit you and those around you?
