Communication 101 and the Bodhisattva Vow

hi..ok...so this is quite a long blog...be warned :)

I had some communication difficulties with a good friend this week, and it has raised a lot of questions for me, which is good. I need to be questioned, I need to have good problems to solve that can solve me as well. I need to write this, to express the drive that wants to share learning, to explore my thoughts on communication, and what communication means to me. What does it mean? What does it entail? I write this with the hope that my learning may be helpful for others.  

The issue was simple on the surface. My friend and I were not connecting, and we bashed heads in a way. Maybe I bashed my head against her. Maybe she bashed her head against me. When heads are being bashed, each person is convinced that they are right.  She felt I wasn't listening to her. She felt I invaded her boundaries. Maybe. In my world this was not so, yet in hers, it was. So, a good first assumption is that everyone is right if they are convinced that they are not lying.  I just don't do the ‘I am simply right and you are simply wrong' thing, as that is a denial of the truth of one expression (even though it may be flawed). I am in favor of honoring the truth, and then seeking a more accurate truth through investigation.   So, why do heads bump into each other. I spent a few days resting with this, just trying to understand all sides of the situation. 

I came across these words by Krishnamurti..   How can I find a true answer when I am confused? Do you understand? If I am confused, I can only receive an answer that is also confused. If my mind is confused, if my mind is disturbed, if my mind is not beautiful, quiet, whatever answer I receive will be through this screen of confusion, anxiety and fear, and therefore the answer will be perverted. So what is important is not to ask "What is the purpose of all this?" but to clear the confusion that is within you. It is like a blind man who asks ‘What is light'. If I tell him what light is, he will listen according to his blindness, according to his darkness, but suppose he is able to see,  then he will never ask the question "What is light?"  It is there.  

I don't wish to fight, but sometimes I do? Why? Because I get stuck in a perspective, in a way of seeing the world, that makes perfect sense in my world, yet has no meaning in anothers world. To understand the other, to see what she sees, I cannot ask "What is light?" I have to see with my own eyes through her eyes. The first thing is to step out of my perspective, out of my screen of seeing the world.   So, I try and step into hers. She was frustrated with me, angry that she had told me many times how she experienced the world, and I kept on saying I wanted to understand. I couldn't do that while stuck in my frame of reference. First, I honored my frame. Then I felt her perspective, and it started to make a lot of sense. My friend T. has been a psychotherapist for many years, and connects to people through the experience of her feeling in her body and by sensing what they are feeling. She is highly skilled at doing that, and has years and years of practice and results to validate the importance of being in the body, and by doing that, she has reduced the suffering on this planet. I respect her deeply for that. Being in the body holds tremendous value and integrity and goodness in her world. That's her strength, her connection to others. She is able to inhabit the body with natural ease, to know what she is feeling, and to name her feelings with accuracy, and she is very capable of healthily expressing those feelings.  That's why she kept on telling me to describe how I felt, even if it's bad feelings. That's how she connects to the world, how she best interprets the world, and what motivates her actions in the world.  I get that now. I get that to step in to her world and connect, I need to feel, to resonate, I need to be in my body and to respond from that presence, from that body awareness.  It's a learning curve for me, for someone whose strength and habitual frame is ideas and the mind.  

This brings up an interesting point. We have a fundamental desire to connect to each other. We desire to find another who can share our experience, who can resonate, where we can come together. It's built into our fabric of being, its built in to want to share in that miracle where two separate bodies can say or feel or share an experience, to say ‘I know what you mean.' This shared experience can be somatic experience, such as a feeling of love or fear or hunger. It can be a mental experience, such as a shared inspirational idea, a shared way of compassionate understanding. It could be visual, such as looking at the same beautiful mountain together, or sound, hearing uplifting music, or a sacred spiritual experience where both people exist in the bliss of divine love. It may be angry and hate filled, as in two Nazi's speaking about genocide, or loving and caring, such as two mothers overflowing with unconditional affection. The point is, loving or hating, we desire to connect. We have a desire to seek others in the same space we are in, to be supported and to be understood, and that is a source of strength when found.

The problem arises when we try and connect exclusivly from our frame of reference, from our perspective, in which me may be unconsciously or habitually embedded.   Does this mean that one is needy or desperate or wants to cross another's boundaries in the desire to connect? It's a problem if one tries to insert ones worldview on other, to force a perspective onto another perspective that is different from the first. That would feel like an invasion of boundaries, like an unwelcome penetration into a space that is not ready or willing or receptive to receive that approach. In its most brutal form, it's a type of psychic rape. I was coming strongly from my perspective, coming from a fierce learning mind, trying to engage from that place, and  I can see now how that would have been felt as a violation, as she was not open to it, being embedded as she was in her feeling perspective.  Yet, it's not a problem if two people are inhabiting the same perspective, such as being in the body, and then boundaries naturally collapse and openness arises as each knows what the feeling means. There is a reference point, I.e. we both know what joy means and the two beings, for a while, can merge, and experience the miracle of connection.  

So, does this then mean that communication is always one person giving up their perspective to inhabit the world of another? Is that really honoring all perspectives, or is it a sacrifice of the truth of one side in return for the miracle of connection?   I feel first I need to wake up to the world of emptiness, to see how my perspective is fundamentally empty. By seeing, this, the grasp of the separate self sense on that perspective is loosened, and I can relax. The perspective doesn't disappear, all that disappears is the grasping, the attachment to seeing the world exclusively through that lens. Once the grip is loosened, once I can rest in emptiness and see my world floating before my eyes without being caught up inside it, then I am free to inhabit the world of form.  I like these words, which to me reflect the liberating capacity of awareness.  (I used them in a previous blog, so if anyone is reading this again....sorry for the repetition).

'rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind.
Beaten helplessly by karma and neurotic thoughts.
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves in the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.
To find rest'  

After emptiness is again realized, and the perspective I was holding so tightly is seen to be just an empty play of phenomena,  a new movement, the descent into form, is possible. In my case, I am free to inhabit the body, and experience the world through feelings. I can hold my old perspective, or embrace a new one, and slowly (with practice and awareness) I can become fuller, more embracing, more encapsulating of this world, my world, our world, as I hold and dance through increasing perspectives.  A beautiful possibility then arises, the possibility of interpenetration, the possibility of communication being a radical loving inquiry where we think, take risks, experiment and explore another's world, as compared to forcefully inserting ourselves into another's sacred field.  There is the assumption that both worlds have truth to share, and perhaps it's possible to learn about others perspectives and find them in oneself. That assumption is based in integrity, in a compassionate embrace to honor the inclusivity of both worlds, of all the fields of human experience present,  including the body, the mind, the spirit and the soul. Anything less is partial, is fragmented, and leads to suffering.     

I felt suffering when my perspective was not honored. I know that I am dedicated to truth, to honoring and expressing truth, even though I may not always do it in the most skillful manner. Attempting to honor that perspective before it's released into emptiness just solidifies the ego, and leads to further suffering. Yet, not honoring my perspective, once that perspective had been released into emptiness, is a denial, a rejection of the world of form, a rejection of the whole picture in return for a limited embrace of one of the parts. In the call for truth, I feel compelled to call with love for all the voices of Spirit to be heard, for all viewpoints to be allowed into the light, including my own. Can my friends call me to honor their worlds? Yes. Can I call them to honor mine? I can only offer an invitation, in invitation grounded in emptiness.  And then, only then, can the viewpoints be understood in a clearer light. If all is not honored, and some perspectives are locked away, then a cycle of suffering starts again. I wrote this poem a while back. It was about the pain of disowning perspectives that have caused conflict and suffering, and locking them away inside ourselves. In my embrace of anothers world, I cannot reject my own any longer, for its equally valid and has its reasons for being there, and I feel one of the highest loves we can offer is the context in which another can be what they need to be and experience what their soul needs to experience, without our own filters blocking the light.  All perspectives seek for their liberation into emptiness, into Love. Isnt that what Bodhisattva's vow to do?

Big sky sunset, all golden.
I am exhausted from turning away.
Exhausted,
from turning away from myself.  

Oh, if you were watching from the outside,
you would think I was normal.
A 35 year old man, foreign looking, yet to have his 2.6 children,
riding a train,
writing who knows what in his book.  

You could not see how I have always been turning away.
It's not your fault, you see.
You could not see, how, walking to work,
eating, sleeping, stuttering, love making,
I have turned away and barricaded myself in.  

If, by magic, yu could travel through the air across the room,
and slit open the back of my skull
climb into the middle of my brain, watching my thoughts (being caressed by my feelings),
 you would begin to be haunted and repulsed by
my silent, subtle Self inflicted Brutality.  

News flash! "An Austrian man keeps his daughter captive in a cellar for 22 years, rapes her repeatedly, and has seven children through her."  

The world is rightfully horrified.
We rightfully scream outrage at this sick sick man.
Yet, you are not horrified at me,
hovering silently inside my head that you so secretly split open,
watching me?
(Did you know that you can hover within yourself too?)  

You are not horrified,
when you see how long I have pushed myself away
and held myself down.
Everytime I thrust to reach a goal to save myself,
everytime I pushed to be something I was not,
everytime I strove to get something and have something and satisfy myself through my desire, I silently fought myself.
I silently, relentlessly, pushed myself down,
keeping my unwanted self captive in my tortured darkness,
crushing my soul,
giving birth to slow madness upon slow madness.  

Love.
Love has penetrated.
Love has awakened.
I got too sick; I needed healing.
A voice in my soul called out to Love, and Love answered.
Silent, unwavering, Love answered.  

As you hover inside the slit in my skull,
you see. I see.
You and I, one, not two,
we see together, my violent oppression, my inner savagery.  

We are Love seeing.
We are Love, liberating,
ending this insanity.

A light shines into the darkness.
Torture cannot continue in the light.
The dark veil is lifted; the cellars opened,
and painfully, screaming in delight, fearfully, ecstatically,
the captives (my disowned and disohonored selves that were impossible to kill) Crawl into sunshine.        


It's a fun game, a fascinating journey.
Love Bruce