Trust Me Yes, Believe Me Not
July 26th, 2007By: G. B. Singh
I trust you.
For whatever you say!
But I do not believe you.
Whatsoever you say!
What am I up to?
I am simply up to differentiating between trust and belief psychologically.
You come to me and say you have stopped doing all the wrong things you had been doing since long.
I listen to every single word of yours fully.
Fully means I do not entertain any prejudices in favor of or against you as I listen to you.
I do not let myself color the content of your assertion with your previous image in my mind.
I listen to you as if I have seen you for the first time in life.
Hence I trust you for whatever you say right now at the moment.
Hundred percent!
But I believe you not.
Zero percent!
Another person comes to me the next day.
S/he tells me about you that you did the same wrong thing today again.
Do I listen to her/him?
I do.
Hundred percent!
But I believe her/him not.
Zero percent!
Now I trust both.
But I believe neither.
Was I right yesterday when I listened to you?
Why not? You might have said right!
Am I right today when I listen to her/him?
Why not? S/he might be saying right!
So, when I listen to whatsoever it is, I take whatever is there right now at its face value without any ‘if’ or ‘but’ attached to it.
What would happen if I did not do that?
Either I would listen to one of the two - any one - or I would listen to neither.
If I listened to neither, I would sure miss the truth, since at least one of them is bound to be right.
So, I cannot afford to distrust both if I am interested in them and hence, listen to them.
If I listened to any particular one out of the two, there are all the chances on earth of my getting the wrong picture altogether!
So I trust both.
Hundred percent!
Puzzling! Is it not?
But wait - I believe neither!
Had I started believing what YOU had said yesterday, I could never have listened to HER/HIM today - I would immediately have refuted her/him in the very beginning of her/his assertion and refused to listen to her/him.
But s/he may be right in what s/he is saying today!
But then again, her/his being right today does not make it mandatory that you were wrong yesterday.
Why can you both not be right?
You might really have meant what you had said yesterday, but then today - quite possible - you could not keep up to it and did the wrong thing again!
You spoke the truth.
Even s/he spoke the truth.
I listened to both and I rightly did so.
In fact I trust your being a human and realizing that whatever a human does at any given moment is THE BEST as per her/his analysis of the situation.
You do your best.
S/he does her/his best.
So, I do my best too!
I honor your best!
I trust you!
But I do not believe you.
That would stop me from listening to the one who says contrary to you.
Your assertion is not the final truth for me whether you are Newton, Jesus Christ, The Buddha, or even Albert Einstein for that matter.
Had I started believing what Newton said to be the ultimate truth, I would never have listened to - and hence trusted - Einstein.
Even If I start believing Einstein today, I will be closing the doors to what you might be saying tomorrow.
If you say something tomorrow, I will certainly listen to you and I will fully trust you at its face value, but I will never take your thing to be the final word - I will simply not start believing you.
What happens generally, otherwise, is just the opposite.
People believe fast, but listen not at all!
It always happened so in the past in various different chapters of the mother of all subjects on earth - The Human History.
Like Aristotle said that a 10 kilogram piece of iron would hit the ground 10 times earlier than a 1 kilogram piece of iron if both were simultaneously dropped together from any height above the ground. People believed it as an irrefutable scientific fact of physics. Galileo disagreed and demonstrated his assertion, that both would hit the ground simultaneously, in front of a big crowd of people proverbially dropping them from the leaning tower of Pisa. It was proved to be a fact in the very front of their eyes but people would not accept! They still believed Aristotle because Aristotle was the authority. Galileo was not. They charged Galileo of doing the black magic. It took him a long time to get his assertion - a clear scientific fact - accepted and approved by the scientific community.
I keep my mind open, so I do not believe.
But I also keep my eyes and ears open; hence I see, and I hear, and so, I trust.