April 24, 2015 8:26 am

Why Should Anyone Understand You? You Understand Yourself, That’s Enough!

B 339 English

 

This also is one of your very peculiar desires. Why should anyone understand us at all? Could Buddha’s father ever understand him? Did Mahavir’s daughter Priyadarshini not have complaints about him? Had Meera’s husband ever understood her? Was Socrates’ wife ever able to understand him? Then isn’t this insistence of yours that someone should understand you, quite baseless? Forget about others not understanding you and consider that all of them achieved greatness simply by understanding themselves. Like us, if they too had insisted that ‘others understand’ them, then nobody would have even known them today. So, even you need to stop insisting that others should understand you and thoroughly understand yourself instead. …Your life shall be reformed!
-Deep Trivedi