By Dr Rajan Sankaran, author of Dog, Yogi, Banyan Tree

Arriving at the lift of my building one evening, I met a neighbour who was known for his rudeness and for putting others down, while blowing his own trumpet. If someone from the building met him somewhere he would ignore them and walk away with his nose in the air. I tried to be a good neighbour and greeted him in a friendly manner asking him how he was.

When he perfunctorily asked me how I was, I thought it might help bridge some of the gap between us to share something. I said, “the younger of my two sons has gone to the USA to study, and with both my sons gone I feel an emptiness in the house.” Instead of some words of empathy or enquiring what my sons were studying, he pointed out that now my sons had left, the alterations that I had made to my apartment, which he had advised against, were now useless. He went on to mention that the alterations were probably illegal.

I was taken aback by this comment. I had tried to be a good neighbour and this was the response! This thought kept going on in my mind all day. So, when later I met another neighbour who is a friendly person, I told him about the incident. I wanted to share with him my experience of the rudeness and insensitivity of the other man.

Instead of seeing where I was coming from, he immediately was concerned about the plans of my apartment that he said he had seen some time ago. He told me that he was quite sure there was nothing illegal about the changes I had made to the apartment.

Stepping back from these experiences; I observed how the three of us saw the same thing in entirely different ways. I was lonely because my sons were away. I tried to convey this to my neighbour, who wanted to find some way to put me down. Then the second neighbour who heard all this, saw it from a completely different perspective: namely, the legality of the changes in my home.

Though I know somewhere that each one of us has his own perspective and that there is no objective reality, my mindfulness in the above incident made this very clear. Each individual comes from who they are and how they perceive things.

There are so many perceptions in one reality. When we communicate with each other, it is actually each one of us talking to himself. We hardly hear the other one. We are hearing ourselves all the time. It is like an orchestra where each musician is playing his own melody.

By stepping back and becoming a witness to the whole phenomenon, I got an insight into how stuck each one of us is in his own inner pattern of perception. I also realized the crazy nature of human communication.

Dr Rajan Sankaran is an internationally-famed homeopath, spiritual thinker and practitioner of holistic healing. His new book, ‘Dog, Yogi, Banyan Tree’ is an insightful and inspirational chronicle of personal and spiritual self-discovery. It is available now in paperback from Amazon UK, priced £21 and published by Homoeopathic Medical Publishers. For more information visit www.dogyogibanyantree.com

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