Do You Consider Yourself Narrow Minded....or Not?

"Narrow-minded people are not evil, they just have a limited sphere of thinking. While some of these people become narrow-minded after being exposed to harsh realities of life, others just lack education, varied experiences and most importantly – unconditional acceptance and love they deserve. Narrow-mindedness is not a permanent condition. You just need to do an honest self-analysis and start working on your thinking habits, one step at a time."

So, are you narrow minded?

1. You tend to generalize everything.

2, You're judgmental. Having pre-conceived notions about people, events and several other things without valid reasons is a common sign of narrow-mindedness. If you judge a person, movie, book, leader, officer or anyone else very quickly, it’s possible your mind has become habitual to ‘presume’ than to analyze and discover. A narrow-minded person tends to see a dozen things the same way he found the first one.

3. You tend to pinpoint short comings. A large number of people enjoy pin-pointing wrongs in the society a lot more than they appreciate things that are just as they should be. Even if you consider the last 48 hours of your life, you can easily analyze if you’ve been mostly whining or feeling grateful. If you have been complaining about corruption, public callousness, poverty, crimes etc. 20 times a day, you’ve probably narrowed down your thinking to everything negative in this world. This is one of the easiest signs of narrow-mindedness that you can recognize.

4.You aren't open to new ideas or other's ideas.

5. You do not like anyone who disagrees with you. If you like everyone to be in perfect agreement with everything you believe in, it is possible you haven’t rationally considered their life experiences.

6. You're obsessed with righteousness.


I had a discussion with my friend about this yesterday and she sent me this last night....interesting.

 

At every step of the way, I've always thought I was open minded and non judgemental. Every step of the way something or someone comes along to show me how much more open I can get, and how less judgemental I can become.

 

A better post than i expected when I saw the thread title.

As nobody who likes to use rhetorics on here would answer this question with yes Now it is hard for judgemental and generalizing peeps to deny

Very righteous :-D

 

When we stop being affected or learn something new from people we normally wouldn't associate with, we become narrow...very narrow. Understanding....just to try some understanding of people, it opens doors to your mind ya never knew were there.

IMO...not enough understanding...standing together as flawed humans....instead we divide. So much easier for those in power to overcome when we are divided, the powers that be love the narrow minded.

 

I find my self to be single and simple minded. I cannot deny the existence of anything. I cannot erase the genie of experience from any mind nor would I want to deny the one mind any experience. The terms I must deal with in life are my own and with these I am very liberal, not promising nor expecting anything in return for my attention, i find the world to be what I attend to. If I would have a world free and happy then free and happy I must find myself as no measure suits me but or as well as my own.

As a practical matter to be free is to be free from harm. Harm is a conditional perception not a fact of nature, the conditions of which are set by the perceiver. To be free of conditional/conditioned perception, learn to hold harmless the phenomena of life no matter what they be. The only verdict that liberates from the yoke of condition going forward is not guilty.

To expect pay for time you render to life is to enslave yourself to the past which in real terms exists only as artifacts and memory. Documents and personal narrative then become the standards for which you live. You prove your worth through documents ownership and contracts of service. You defend your reputation in turn as though your life depended upon it. These things however are inventions of the mind and to regard them as immutably, "the way things are" accounts for the really sinister in terms of artificial intelligence. The minds perception of real things is truly co-opted by such vanity.

How much is a ray of sunshine worth?

 

sounds oddly familiar

Johnny is that you?

 

The older I get.. the less I am certain about ANYthing. My mind isn't narrow. It's befuddled. Flummoxed.

Too early for Irish Coffee?

 

lol flummoxed....you rock gal! never too early...let's have one

 

What in the world does that ^ have to do with the OP? lol yeah, I believe I've seen someone else on this forum jibber jabber like this.

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In response to the OP:

I'm glad you posted this...the different examples given to contemplate are most interesting.

I consider myself open-minded, much to the dismay of many of those that live in this area of SC. I find it difficult to be around close minded OR narrow minded people, and they exist on both sides of the coin, as was so well-expressed in several of the examples.

I also wonder if there will ever come a time I will cease to be shocked by people...what they do and say. I thought by this point in time people would not truly surprise me anymore but I was wrong <---------- sorry went off topic there

 

A tendency I notice in people of around my age is that they become more narrow minded as they grow older. It's not across the board, but a marked thing in some people I know.

I think it's linked to a certain kind of inflexibility. Older people may be more prone to that, but some younger people are too, to judge from some of the posts I read on here, and some younger people I know.

But there I go being judgemental again...........

 

It is your perception of whatever, odd is as familiar as even as far as families go. In simplest terms you have it as you will regardless who comes or goes, regardless if I say yes or if I say no.

My desire is that it is recognized we have a choice in what will be and that what has been has already been accounted for ad infinitum. On a regular daily basis that accounting remains, Across the board, we would have it differently.

Then why the fuck isn't it?

Well there is decorum and reputation to uphold in the absence of standing in the sunshine, seeing and feeling the pulse of genuine nature. There is our ingenuous accounting to account for. The scores we keep, the things over which we weep. Reminds of the lucky strike commercial, we would rather fight than switch. It is the fatal attraction of the acceptance of the idea of guilt and on the side of right or well meaning guilt is necessary.

We all speak just words, wisdom is known by her deeds. The deeds of the day suggest our previous learning should be regarded as suspect, not sacrosanct. NOT WORTH SPILLING BLOOD OVER.

Putting stain the name of that game, ask me again i'll say the same.

 

OR could it that as you get older you gain wisdom and what may appear to be narrow-mindedness is in actuality a conclusion that has been reached after much consideration and contemplation.
also I notice that confidence is very often regarded as arrogance on the forums.

conversely young people often exhibit narrow-minded attitudes born of a lack of life experience more than anything else.

as for me personally I have always taken the song Perpetual Change to heart as a mantra to live and learn by;

"As truth is gathered I rearrange, inside out, outside in, perpetual change"

 

Question being do you consider yourself narrow minded or not. If narrow be singly or simply directed then yes. Narrow is a matter of focus when considering attentive points of mind. What in the world does your belief in having seen someone jibber jabber like this on this forum have to do with the op?

 

I think we are all narrow minded or non receptive to change in some way or another. Our perception of ourselves at times may not be how we are perceived.

Personally I feel that being narrow minded is more that you are not able to accept that there are differences in opinions. I find the reason people feel the way the do about something is more interesting than the differences. We all base views on personal experiences and hopefully data in some cases. Understanding differences may not change our opinion but it can allow for understanding those of others.

It is fine to agree to disagree.

 

In some cases I agree, as you get older you hopefully acquire some wisdom.

I wasn't thinking so much about that though, as certain people who seem to regress as they age into either conservatism which they didn't display previously, or stuff like football which before they weren't interested in. Things like that.

Where young people have narrow attitudes it's mainly because of their conditioning since birth IMO. Nobody is born narrow minded.

 

"The open minded see the truth in different things: the narrow minded see only the differences." anon

 

some people call it being narrowminded and judgemental

other people call it using common sense and wisdom aquired from life experience .

 

Regardless my effort as I become familiar I register inside out, outside in, a perceptual change.

I remain as I am created. Perception as an ongoing state of self consciousness is not knowledge but can lead to it. Effort remains effort. Learning is re-cognition and knowledge as information, is found the shared elements of being. Self can only be known by self and we are all of the same self.

The silence of so-ness contains room for every sound, and in it every sound mind.

All alarm fades with patience. Patience the practice of recognizing the facts of being. Impatience a pattern of mind engendered by nothing short of the fear of life and it's imagined potentials in death.

What is predetermined is the generic code. We are mutually determinate of our genetic code going forward. In that code are methods for occupying space and in a space time continuum it is incumbent to understand that there are no idle thoughts. Every one contributes to perception at some level. At one level a conceptual gestalt determines the type and quality of thoughts that you will have. Very often we find ourselves having thoughts we seemingly don't want to have.

All the same the world appears as it does because you say so.

The most glaringly obvious conceptual gestalts we entertain are the validity of our established cultural/institutional paradigms. It is very difficult for a mind so possessed to comprehend the meaning and validity of the phrase if you conceived of no crime there would be no criminals.

 

Depends on the topic/issue. I am fairly open minded for most things but I can identify with 2 and 6 to a certain extent.

Number 3 seems bogus to me, even by specifying "20 times a day". I think it's quite easy to note and consistently address social issues while still enjoying many other positive aspects of society. On the surface, "things are just as they should be" sounds like a prescription for complacency and I don't think (m)any social victories have been won with that mindset. On top of that, the first sentence of 3 basically contradicts 1, or they practically cover the scope of every single person.

 

Everybody who has ever changed their mind about anything (which is everyone) has to have some awareness that it could happen again, so we could be wrong now. Knowing that makes it harder to judge quickly and harshly. Also, travel shows us that there are plenty of people in the world who seem to be getting along just fine doing almost everything differently from us.