A friend of mine has a phrase which has always jarred a bit with me: ‘If you squeeze an orange you get orange juice; if you squeeze a person what comes out is what they’re really like.’
It seemed to be a bit like that other myth – for which read, load of old cobblers – that a person’s true personality is revealed in drink.
Learning about the 3 principles has given me a much more complete understanding. Everyone’s moods or states of mind vary, all the time. In a low mood people tend to behave badly. At a higher quality of mind people behave more kindly and effectively. And our default state is that higher state of mind, to which we always return, when our minds clear.
Last night I saw an example of this. Walking along a busy street in Malaga, I heard a loud, yet musical crash, followed by a woman shouting furiously. A man in his 60s had been attempting to move a display of alphabet ceramic tiles, when the whole thing had tipped over and 100s of tiles had cascaded to the pavement. The shouting was coming from the shop-keeper, presumably his daughter.
I crouched down to help her. For a couple of minutes she turned to bark the occasional remark at dad, then she reverted to sorting. Her son joined us. The 3 of us settled into a kind of flow state, wordlessly turning over tiles, stacking and sorting them. Engrossed, I lost any sense of time but it probably took us about 20 minutes. As we reached the last tiles I said, ‘Adiós.’ The woman’s smile was radiant as she said, ‘Gracias.’ And I left.
So was that woman displaying her true nature when she was ‘doing her nut’ (as we say in Glasgow) with her dad? Almost certainly not. She was just in a low state of mind. And it evaporated in moments when her thinking moved from the crash to the task in front of her. To me her true nature was seen in the connected flow state, as we rhythmically sorted, and in the radiant smile.