a reply to:
eluryh22Indeed I do.
One thing that I have found in conversations like we are talking about. Years ago with two different friends who liked to engage in this manner we I
found that our conversations were not conversations but rather ONE conversation. We would talk about this and talk about that circling many topics.
Each occasion we had to engage like this always seemed similar and it dawned on me that as I said it wasn't numerous topics but rather one topic as
approached from far corners of our own perspectives.
I think that when conversations and debates and arguments can take this form, of being one topic viewed from different perspectives rather than little
battles of conquest of right and wrong we are all the better for it. That battering ram approach is pretty useless I think. Things take time to
percolate I think. I also think there's way to much me/us vrs you/them in our approach to communicating. To much emotion.
That percolate notion. If you have the time.
When I was much younger I had read a book called the Primal Scream. The quick gist of it was that all of us are to one extent or another neurotic.
This stems from a ''split'' in our emotional and logic being when we are way to young to know what is happening to us, commonly between 3 and 5. That
a child encounters a situation where their total being can no longer make sense of a situation or confrontation with the rest of the world. Until that
time it was suggested, there was no real differentiation between the child and the rest of the world. That's to simplistic but I hope it works for
this so far.
At that point the child has the choice of admitting that the world it exists in is not a unified world OR that the child itself is somehow not capable
as a single consciousness of dealing with that apparent unified environment. Again pretty general.
However having read that book I took it upon myself to carefully watch my children as they passed through this period.
Well one day I came home from work, tired and shagged out and needed only to take a nap. My 4 year old son approached me with something he felt was of
great importance. He wanted my attention past his first attempt to get it and I rebuffed him a second time, this time more soundly than the first and
sent him to his room.
Moments later, I realized that I had taken a step to far and went and found him in his room. And here I am very clear on what had happened. One of his
eyes was askew, that it when he looked at me, one eye did and the other didn't. This had never been the case prior to that moment.
So I took him on to my bed and we talked. I talked to him as if he was a fully conscious being, even being a young child, and asked him questions
about how he was feeling. I didn't tell him what he was feeling or what I thought had happened to him. I explained slowly what was going on with me in
general and talked about the bigger world of an older person. I waited and waited as he would make small grasps at understanding what the hell I was
going on about but somehow he was engaging with me. Then I could see that he was somehow coming to grasp my points to understand them both logically
and emotional when all of a sudden that one eyeball did a spin around, almost like an eye roll, and looked back at me in unison with the other eye.
And I knew he was back together. That conversation, after only a brief moment of rebuff earlier took over an hour and a half. Hence my notion of
''time to percolate.''
Imagine adults trying to unify our selves with one another. Much time to percolate.