Objectivity

What follows draws on the teachings of Swami Parthasarathy, as explored through Shri Vinayagam’s exposition of them. The articulation here is our own and doesn’t claim to be a faithful restatement — any deviations, and any errors, are ours alone.

Objectivity means seeing a person, an activity, or an event exactly as it is — recognizing what’s actually there rather than projecting onto it what you think it should be, or coating it in your own emotional reaction. Nearly all grumbling, looked at honestly, comes down to some version of “why isn’t the lily an oak” — a quiet demand that reality conform to a picture it never agreed to match. We want people to shape up the way we’d prefer. We want our efforts to yield exactly the results we expect. We want problems to stay away. Life is under constant, mostly silent pressure to behave the way we’ve decided it should.

Assessment is not judgment

There’s an important difference between assessing something and judging it, and it’s easy to blur the two. A judgment colors the whole person: call someone miserly and the label quietly recruits a verdict — what a bad person — that spreads over everything else about them. An assessment stays factual: this person is miserly, as far as I’ve observed, most of the time; it’s possible circumstances made him that way and he could change; otherwise he’s honest, careful with money, and pleasant to talk to — and he is miserly. That’s simply describing what’s there, the same way you’d note that a tiger eats deer — a fact, not an indictment.

This distinction matters practically, not just semantically. Assessment keeps you calmer, because you’re no longer emotionally implicated in every observation you make. And it makes you more effective, because you’re now responding to what’s actually in front of you rather than to the story you’ve layered on top of it.

Why we really want to change people

Notice, honestly, what usually motivates the urge to change someone. It’s rarely pure concern for their good — it’s that their behavior is inconvenient, embarrassing, or effortful for us. A child who won’t wake up or study creates real work and worry for a parent, and that friction, if we’re candid, often drives the pressure to change them more than any careful assessment of what’s actually best for the child. Seeing this plainly — rather than dressing the motive up as pure altruism — is itself an act of objectivity.

None of this means giving up on wanting things to improve. It means separating the reactive route from the objective one. Reactive change is shouting, repeating, venting frustration dressed up as instruction — it rarely addresses the actual cause and mostly just discharges agitation onto another person. Objective change starts with analysis: someone who can’t wake up on time might simply be sleeping badly, and the useful move is adjusting the conditions — more exercise, an earlier wind-down — rather than repeating the same complaint louder. You still have every right to act, to nudge, to contribute toward someone’s improvement. What has to be released is the emotional stake in whether they respond the way you’d hoped — precisely the territory the Gita’s teaching on acting without attachment to results is pointing toward.

The greasy layer

Some relationships make objectivity far harder than others. Dada Bhagwan’s language for this is useful: “sticky” relationships — family, romantic partners, a boss — are sticky because of how entangled they are, which is exactly what makes it so tempting to need the other person to behave a certain way for our own peace of mind. More transactional or lightly-held relationships, like ordinary friendships, rarely trigger the same pull, simply because there’s less invested.

What loosens the stickiness isn’t emotional distance — it’s the absence of expectation. Picture an inner coating, a kind of greasy layer, that lets you engage fully with people and situations without anything sticking to you afterward. You can still care, still contribute, still show up completely — but you’re no longer catching and holding onto every outcome as if it were evidence about your own worth. Interestingly, people often become more drawn to someone who carries this quality, precisely because they sense the absence of a hidden agenda. That draw is their business, not something you need to manage or cultivate.

This same objectivity already exists, functionally, in places we don’t usually associate with spirituality. Someone skilled at filmmaking may understand precisely what stirs an audience’s emotions without being swept up in them personally while shooting — if they were, the work would lose its precision. Someone skilled with money understands what moves people without becoming emotionally entangled in the transaction — the moment they do, their persuasiveness usually collapses, because people can sense it. The clarity these skills depend on is the same clarity objectivity asks for everywhere else — it simply isn’t usually called by that name.

Objectivity toward events, and toward yourself

The same principle extends outward, to activities and events, and inward, to your own choices. Being genuinely prepared for a range of outcomes is objectivity; assuming only the worst is pessimism wearing objectivity’s clothes. Knowing, mid-crisis, that this too shall pass is objectivity; saying the same words only after the difficulty has already ended is closer to consolation than insight. With any activity, the marker to watch for is bondage — agitation, excessive elation, frustration, a mood that rises and falls entirely with outcomes. Almost anything is fine to pursue as long as it doesn’t own you in this way.

Turned toward yourself, objectivity is often the hardest application of all. The instinctive response to your own laziness or a missed morning is frustration and self-criticism. The objective response is the same diagnostic process you’d extend to anyone else: is it poor sleep, low discipline, physical inactivity, mental fatigue? Even something as small as ordering ice cream illustrates the difference — most people see only the flavors; an objective person sees the flavors and, in the same glance, the cost, the health trade-off, the time involved. Objectivity doesn’t forbid the ice cream. It just refuses to let the flavors be the only thing in the frame.

Emotion isn’t discarded — it’s information

None of this asks emotion to be suppressed or denied. Emotion is treated as input: a signal that something needs attention, worth examining rather than either blindly obeying or dismissing. The sequence that objectivity actually follows is observation, then verification — is this feeling pointing toward something genuinely useful, something aligned with what would actually help, over time, both yourself and the people involved — and only then, action. This is not emotional suppression; it’s emotional integration, where feeling still has a seat at the table but no longer holds the only vote.

The practical payoff is considerable. So many decisions get made from compulsiveness, infatuation, or simple overreaction — decisions objectivity quietly interrupts by first making you aware of your own pulls and pushes before you act on them. A calmer mind that results from this is, almost as a side effect, a more creative one, often finding a workable third option in situations that a purely reactive mind would have turned into a straightforward conflict. None of it requires becoming unfeeling. It only requires seeing clearly enough, often enough, that feeling stops being mistaken for the whole truth of a situation.