"E", the Visualizer

As a teenager, I had a friend named "E". For the most part, he maintained the persona of a tough guy, with the selling of drugs, carrying guns, and general intimidation. Before recently I never thought of him as someone to learn from(which, in turn, became a lesson in itself, ironically). There was a little quirk about E: At any given time E could describe how a situation was about to take place, even including events that he was not physically involved in! I witnessed this on several occasions. If we were out for the night and a dilemma were to arise, E would be the first to vocalize his ideas to fix things. He would lay out a whole scene, making sure that everything connected to make the outcome that we wanted. Some times there would even be dialog. Most of the time we would be in agreement, and the evening would proceed as foretold. Typing this now, I wonder if it was a combination of his wishes and our agreement that helped. It was infectious. Before we knew it we were all doing it. It kind of made E a sort of spiritual teacher. None of us had ever even heard of the word "visualization", much less known what it entailed.

Today I use it as an example of how consciousness exists even when one is not conscious of it.

The Plight of Semantics

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.