Okay, so I'm riding back to Atlanta with my family and my mother is at the wheel. We get into a discussion about spirituality. I am loosely describing to her where I come from with things of this nature. She is immediately offended. We go back and forth for a while, then I finally get a chance to actually describe what it is that I am talking about. She says "Oh, do you mean ____? That sounds like what you are describing." As always, I concur, and say that we believe in the same thing, we just call it by different names. I call it the "higher self", she calls it the "holy spirit". I call it the universe, she calls it "God". She calls it "sin", I call it "not recoginizing the power within". I read in a book about logic once that most times we even argue wrong. We do not decide on what the point of contention is, so it ends up being two people debating two completely different points instead of two different perspectives on the same point. If I'm defending "free speech" and you are speaking on "animal rights", there really won't be a place where we will meet with our arguments. This is how most of our disagreements end up, though. On another note, if you both "agree" on a topic to "disagree" on, it no longer becomes a "disagreement", but a discussion on perspective. Going back to the "free speech"-"animal rights" debate, we would probably meet more in agreement than in points we just could not see eye to eye on(which would either dead the argument or make it completely confusing).
Words are pretty much flimsy. It is the steal barriers and barbed intentions behind them that make them dangerous.
2 comments:
Indeed! All too often, words simply get in the way and complicate things. Words are like statutes attempting to capture the vibrantly alive concept they represent. They will never be sufficient alone.
I heard that music existed before words. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It is much harder to confuse how a piece of music makes you feel than the definition of a word. Music is more universal because it is "alive" to an extent. It can be more accurately interpreted because it is not static in nature as words are.
Great stuff!
Hello, I like what you have to say about this. It kind of makes one want to give up on trying to communicate with anyone. And still I want to so I decided and continue to decide to leave the hearing of the words up to the hearer and kind of make that part none of my business. And the business of the unconditional flow, that dance that brings things together and apart according to our desires and our vibrations. This requires that I stay in the flow myself. :)
Post a Comment