how to save the world

This is the second part of a two-part post; part one is here.

(photo of Killarney Lake by fellow Bowen Islander Jason Wilde)

If I stay here long enough
I will learn the art of silence.
When I have given up words
I will become what I have to say.
— Richard Shelton, Desert

Conversation, in the rare cases when it brings to the table the attributes I described in the first part of this article, can at least succeed at surfacing insights, helping us see different perspectives, attaining consensus on decisions, and helping to resolve conflicts. But when the necessary attributes for effective conversation are not present, or when the objective of talking is not one of these four purposes, I would argue that talking is pretty much a waste of time, and silence would be a better prescription.

But how, you might ask, can anyone advocate for silence when it is so often the handmaiden of abuse, oppression, patriarchy, enslavement, corpocracy, and desolation?

When these atrocities happen we must of course give voice to calling them out, stopping them, and condemning them. Although silence is not their cause, it is complicit in their continuation. Inequality of wealth and power, patriarchy, stress-induced psychopathy, and our obsession with ‘privacy’ and secrecy allow outrages to be perpetrated, shielded from our awareness, and covered up. These are the fall-out of our collapsing, exhausted, well-intentioned civilization, and I don’t believe we can ‘fix’ them until this terrible, unsustainable civilization has breathed its last — which won’t be long now.

Calling them out, naming them for what they are, and refusing to condone them, however, is done through exposition, not conversation. There is no decision, no consensus needed to make it clear that these outrages are not acceptable and must stop. Exposition — the stories of those who have suffered, the calling to account, the understanding of what has allowed this to occur and how to prevent its recurrence — these are not matters for deliberation, but for obvious action. In this, we may not always succeed, but we can never remain silent.

But only a tiny proportion of the massive firehose of talk that pervades our dying culture has anything to do with calling to account, or with real conversation as I defined it in part one of this article. Almost all of it, I’m coming to believe, is just noise, the wail of a species endlessly lamenting its unhappiness and its incapacity. What purpose does any of it serve? It fails to make us feel better, or even feel heard. It fails to bring about any real change, only hopelessness and helplessness and useless rage. It fails to inform, only to inflame, to deceive, to excuse.

I am lying on the beach, basking in the warmth, listening to the ocean, watching the birds, feeling the breeze, smelling the earth after a brief rain. Here, now, is a moment without the need for thought, for reactive emotions, for seeming actions. It is a time for love, for sensation, for joy, for paying attention, for play, for just being. Of course I could be doing something more ‘productive’, more directed at making something better. But I am no longer sure I believe that productivity and striving to make things better actually accomplishes anything, or at least nothing that lasts for long. Change happens when the generations attached to old ways of doing things die, and new generations, with somewhat different conditioning, take their place.

I listen to the supposed conversations of the other beach-goers. The conversations are vapid, meaningless, banal, unnecessary. They are about consumer decisions, unactionable news (political, economic, sports, weather), what someone supposedly did or said or should do or should have done or wants to do. They seek (with quiet or not-so-quiet desperation) reassurance, appreciation, attention, relief from the gnawing sense that something is not quite right, that they are somehow not quite right, not enough, missing something, all alone, owed something, needing something.

They — and all of us — are striving to heal ourselves from civilization disease. But words aren’t the path to healing; they just take us further inside our heads, inside ourselves where the disease lives. We find true healing in love, in laughter, in eating well, in exercise — and in silence, in paying attention without judgement, without evaluating, without expectation, without trying to ‘make sense’. Without thought, and its noisy partner, language, rehashing and second-guessing and re-living and lamenting a fictional past and dreading a fictional future. When it comes to our selves’ endless and incurable bent for suffering, words don’t help.

I don’t buy the hackneyed CBT/mindfulness/12-step orthodoxy that claims that by changing our thinking we can change ourselves, ‘re-program’ ourselves. There is no credible evidence that these acts of wishful thinking work. Wild creatures don’t need language to heal from their disturbing experiences, their tragic lives. Their therapy is wordless, silent, and it actually works.

I smile at those sitting or walking on the beach who have the good sense to just be silent, to just take in the mystery and wonder of everything just as it is. To notice, to pay attention, to stop thinking and reacting and judging and just open themselves to perceiving, sensing, being a part of all that is. And admittedly it is easier here on a quiet tropical beach with the surf pounding in than amidst the terrible knowledge of cities.

I smile at them. I salute them. If only for a moment they are, like me, beginning to begin to learn the humbling art of silence.

Of course silence is terrifying to those who have not learned the comfort and joy it offers. So many people have to fill the emptiness and pain inside with noise, with distraction, with entertainment, with anything that will help them even for a little while avoid the terrible feelings of hopelessness, of shame, of emptiness, of grief, of helpless rage, of terror and dread and regret that otherwise consume their waking hours. Silence is not for everyone, at least not until they have come to grips with the incurability of civilization disease.

And this is not to say there is no place for prose in our world. While it is should not presume to be conversation, thoughtful and well-crafted and non-manipulative writing, music, stories, poetry, films and videos, and other expository compositions (even blog articles) can, unlike twitter or facebook or texting or telephone blather, move us. Rather than taking us deeper into our heads and triggering our reactive emotions, such compositions can take us outside the suffocating default pathways of the brain and to other places, other ways of being.

So give me that rare creature, an excellent, purposeful conversation, or give me a composition that transports me, delights, fills me with possibility, or scream out your truth that shines a light on a terrible and outrageous reality. But if you have something else to say, fellow humans, please, for everyone’s benefit, just STFU, and give yourself, and all of us, the gift of silence.

This is the first part of a two-part article.

photo by Maren Yumi on flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s been a few years since I last wrote about conversation. I don’t see nearly the value in conversation that I used to. I still talk too much, and seemingly converse a lot, still mostly about subjects that are unactionable and don’t really matter. Old habit I suppose; this is long-conditioned behaviour. Language ties up the brain in comprehension and conception when the brain could be used, silently, for perception, for sensing and intuition and letting things come, and for demonstration and attention, which, even before embracing radical non-duality, I’d come to believe are much better uses of our bewildered brains.

I have come to distinguish real conversation (which etymologically means “turning with”, almost like dance, and which is a collaborative, interactive, iterative activity), from non-collaborative, one-way forms of talking including performance (relating something), instruction, and inquiry (Q&A), whose purpose is to tell a story, entertain, or give or get clarity, and which has a clear “audience”. These might be serial, with one person at a time spouting forth, but they are not really conversations. And if the back-and-forth results from a need for clarity due to inarticulate or lazy exposition, or a craving for reassurance, that’s not really conversation either.

So why should we ever need to converse? If not to relate information, tell a story, get clarity (ie learn), reassure, show affection, or entertain, what purpose does real, collaborative, interactive, iterative conversation serve?

I think real conversation can serve four purposes: to surface insights, to see different perspectives, to achieve consensus on decisions, and to resolve conflicts. These purposes are related: Seeing different perspectives and surfacing insights can help resolve conflicts and achieve consensus. They are about using a deliberative process to move beyond the fixed thoughts and ideas in our own heads and to appreciate others’ ways of thinking and seeing, with the goal of achieving agreement and cohesion with others we live and work with.

Here are the most important prerequisites, in my experience, for an effective conversation to achieve one or more of the above purposes:

1. Capacity to be open to other and difficult ideas and perspectives: There is no point trying to collaborate with someone who is either incapable of considering or unwilling to consider different possibilities. If someone is totally set in their beliefs, or utterly lacking in imagination, conversation is futile.
2. A basic level of capacity to articulate, and of social fluency: Articulation is the ability to convey one’s thoughts, ideas, beliefs and perspectives clearly. Social fluency is the emotional engagement and sensitivity to appreciate (and show appreciation for) others’ thoughts, ideas, beliefs and perspectives and see how and why they might be different from one’s own.
3. Critical thinking skills: The capacity to draw inferences, challenge assumptions, weigh evidence, and synthesize information is essential to the development of a rational and thoughtful worldview and belief system. If you, or those you are conversing with, lack these skills, you can’t possibly hope to reason with them.
4. Curiosity and creative/imaginative skills: Some people, for various reasons, are just shut down and unwilling to consider anything that doesn’t jibe with their ideology or belief set; others, through lack of practice, have lost the capacity to imagine anything that isn’t simple and obvious, or to put themselves in another’s shoes. Conversations with such people are likely to be just frustrating and pointless.
5. Attention skills: We live in a world of attention deficit, distraction and information overload. In such a world, listening and paying attention are challenging and take practice. If those you’re conversing with don’t have and use these skills, they won’t hear you, so you’re wasting your breath.

You’ve probably noticed that these five prerequisites to effective conversation are all capacities; the people in the supposed conversation either have them or they don’t.

What I’ve discovered of late is that in most of the discussions I have (a) people don’t have one or more of the four purposes (to surface insights, to see different perspectives, to achieve consensus on decisions, and to resolve conflicts) for which conversations are well-suited; and (b) few of the participants have the five prerequisite skills for effective conversation.

Small wonder, then, that I find most attempts at real conversation fail. In the rare cases that true conversation occurs (often with the help of a skilled facilitator, who might also be one of the participants) the result can be magic.

Alas, as the world becomes more stressful, less attentive, more polarized and less socially fluent, such conversations seem to be increasingly rare.

Perhaps that is why some of us have been shying away from social discourse and spending more of our time in silence. I’ll explore that more in Part Two of this article.

Thanks to John Kellden and Michael Dowd for inspiring this post

The character that is not me lies in the sun on the warm tropical beach, listening to the roar of the surf. It has no choice in this — it is conditioned to prefer warmth and sun and surf over cold and wet and concrete, no matter how masterfully constructed and adorned the latter may be.

‘I’ of course presume these to be my choices and my preferences. ‘I’ have recently returned from a trip to console a loved one dealing with grief. There was no choice in this trip either, though it seems there was to ‘me’. It seems to be in the conditioned nature of this character (a character that is only an appearance, but nevertheless is ‘real’ in the sense that the illusory ‘I’ can never be) to want to help those I love. That seems to be a preference of human characters in general, which I suppose has helped the species survive and evolve. Humans seem inherently preconditioned to care for each other and for the place they live and its resident creatures (biophilia), and to act altruistically. Seems a sensible evolutionary trait.

Another quality that seems inherent in human characters is honesty. It makes sense for the members of a tribe to be straight with each other, and with themselves, rather than deceptive. Honesty with tribe-mates leads to trust, and vice versa, and without trust the tribe cannot thrive. Likewise, it seems to be human conditioning to distrust outsiders who might, until it is proven otherwise, threaten the peace and equilibrium of the tribe.

But the world in which almost all human characters now live is decidedly non-tribal and decidedly untrusting, and that situation is getting much worse very quickly. There is no point rehashing how humans got to this point, but the current apparent reality is that lying pays. In our modern global human culture there are huge rewards for dishonesty. You can get away with cheating, murder, theft (on a grand scale), desolating the planet, and the accumulation of massive and dangerous levels of wealth and power, as long as you know how to lie effectively and consistently (including to yourself).

And now, as ‘I’ sit on the beach staring at the horizon, I worry about what seems to be the death of truth. Leaders — corporate, political and other — lie blatantly, and deny that they are doing so. As the intermediaries (media etc) through which we now get almost all our information become further removed from direct experience and personal iterative conversation, they also become more suspect, and liars are doing their best to make every information source suspect so that they have cover (plausible deniability) for their lies. It is now possible to create a video that ‘proves’ anyone said or did anything, with careful photoshopping, digital manipulation, CGI, and editing things out of context. And we believe what we want to believe (as evidenced by the recent surge in conspiracy theories, cults and nutbar gurus). We are terribly gullible when it comes to accepting as true what we wish to be true. And we want things to be simple and straightforward, when nothing is.

As I watch the waves I think about the savage and ludicrous Rwandan civil genocide, and about the improbable ‘success’ of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Cheney, Trump and other pathological liars and hate-mongers who have ‘persuaded‘ people to believe, and to do, monstrous, insane things. I think about the zealous apologists for, and deniers of, the accelerating ruination of our planet’s biodiversity, health, soils, water, air, the destabilization of our climate, and the massive suffering our unsustainable and inequitable industrial growth economy inflicts on almost all the planet’s inhabitants.

And I wonder if any of these things would have been possible without the emergence of our sense of being separate selves with self-control and choice and responsibility, and all the anxiety and fear and anger and sadness and desperation and disconnection, so easily exploited by tyrants and liars, that this illusory sense of separation provokes and sustains.

Of course, I know that since selves do not really exist, they cannot have changed or caused anything. But our brains are constantly looking for patterns and connections, and reasons, when there are none. There is no meaning or purpose to anything, no reason ‘why’, no causality, and no time in which things change or evolve, although we want and believe there to be. So the seeming recent perfection of the processes and technologies of lying are just what has apparently happened, for no reason. They may seem to lead to massive wars, global and civil. They may seem to lead to the end of large-scale human civilization, and to the sixth great extinction of life on earth. But it is all just what is apparently happening, outside of space and time, without direction, agency or import.

That’s a message that the self-afflicted individual cannot possibly accept. It is too dark, too hopeless, too out-of-control. Too outrageous a truth. We can’t just shrug and accept it. It has to be another lie, a self-deception to make us feel better about our apparent failure to make the world a better place.

But it is the truth, even in this terrible world in which the truth seems dead, and in which lying pays so handsomely.

I sit on the beach, watching the occasional beach-wanderer trudge by, watching the sun set and the moon rise. Full moon tonight, and clear skies. The warm breeze carries the fragrance of plumeria and jasmine. The mynas natter to each other. The feral beach cats, neutered early in their lives and released into the wild, await the kindly volunteers who bring them food twice daily. I will return to the water’s edge after nightfall. I will shrug, and sigh, still lost and scared, but each day, a little more accepting. This is what is apparently happening. This is all there is.

image from pixabay CC0

I’ve written about body language before. It’s fascinating to study the unspoken messages we send with our eyes, our faces, our tone of voice, our hands, and our whole bodies. But it can be dangerous (and not only to poker players): these messages vary enormously by individual, and between genders and cultures, and it’s not uncommon for people to send ‘fake tells’ — false messages to fool us — sometimes quite unconsciously.

Since writing my short story The Fortune Teller I’ve actually tried practicing making eye contact, as well as honing my listening and attention skills, and smiling more. And while everyone seems to appreciate getting authentic attention, eye contact seems, well, vastly more complex.

To start, obviously, more eye contact is not necessarily better. Staring and leering are rarely appreciated, and some people are just uncomfortable with eye contact, period. So I did some online research on how supposedly to make eye contact well, and discovered that, basically, there are no hard and fast rules, and the ‘research’ seems mostly sketchy, anecdotal, or sheer guesswork.

The following list draws on about 40 articles, few of which cite significant scientific support for their claims (and what research has been done seems mostly of dubious quality). So it may well be wrong. But there seems so little credible guidance on the subject that I thought anything would be worse than just reckless and discomfiting trial and error. So here’s what I’ve ‘learned’:

• How long: Holding eye contact is a dominance display. But so is deliberately looking away first. Staring, in any culture, is just rude. Rule of thumb seems to be 3-5 seconds (about long enough to mentally note their eye colour). After that, rather than looking away, show attention by briefly looking down or off to one side and then immediately return to their eyes. It’s about gazing, which is very different from staring. Etymologically, gaze means give attention, while stare means stiffen. There’s a very subtle point at about the 5 second mark when an extended gaze may signal affection, reverence, or romantic interest, but even a second or two beyond that is into staring territory. And very short eye contact can come across as brusque or indifferent.
• During conversation: One rule of thumb is to make eye contact 50% of the time when you’re talking and 70% when you’re listening. Seems a bit of a generalization, but try it and draw your own conclusions. I have noticed that breaking eye contact (suddenly, or for a prolonged period), or failing to provide enough eye contact, is a conversation stopper.
• Smile: A genuine smile is a great complement (and compliment) to eye contact. But be aware people are usually pretty good at intuitively recognizing whether a smile is authentic (and not fawning or ogling or indifferent). And while a warm gaze combined with a warm smile is very engaging, receiving them together from someone else doesn’t necessarily signify anything more than politeness. Though it might.
• Staring: If someone keeps staring at you, a way to discourage them is to stare back between and just above their eyes, as if you’re looking right through them. Or just look away if you can do so deliberately rather than reactively — people can tell which is which. And if you can’t keep your eyes off some part of a person’s body you’re interacting with, don’t think for a minute they won’t notice, at least subconsciously. Depending on what it is that’s mesmerizing you, if it’s appropriate mention it, and if it isn’t, look elsewhere.
• Affection vs attention: Quick repeated glances, sideways glances, eyelids moving up and down, extended looks at the lips and mouth, and dilated pupils may (I repeat may) indicate affection or romantic interest or represent flirting (and may be taken as such if you instigate them, even unconsciously).
• Gazing into space: I’m one of those people who listen and think best when undistracted, so I tend to gaze into space (slightly above and beyond who I’m listening to) when I’m concentrating on what’t being said. That can easily be misinterpreted as inattention or disinterest.
• Body Position: It’s hard to make eye contact if you’re sitting beside someone else on a bench or sofa or long table. That’s why apparently dominants sit at the end of meeting tables, and submissives along the long sides. Maybe that’s one reason why ‘circle’ arrangements are so effective.
• Blinking: Rapid blinking may be taken as dishonesty, discomfort or evasiveness. Hardly blinking at all may come across as staring, even if the rest of your face is relaxed.
• Equitable eye contact: Giving most of your eye contact, just like giving most of your attention in any other way, to one person in a group or room, can come across as disrespectful, selfish, unfair, or distracted, to everyone else. (Then again, they might not care about you either.)
• Other body language: Be alert for what you (and others) are conveying with your eyebrows, hands, mouth, posture, voice tone and other body language when you are looking at someone (see earlier body language article linked above). Just because people are focused on your eyes and face doesn’t mean they won’t pick up on other signals, especially if they are conflicting messages.
• Eye movement: It’s much harder to interpret what the eyes (and the rest of the body) are saying in a still photo — movement is critical to our understanding; it tells a story, one that our intuition can ‘hear’ much better than our thinking brains. And coordinated movements (hand or body movements while you are just beginning to make eye contact, or while you sustain lingering eye contact) are supposedly major attention-getters.
• Lie-detection: One study suggests holding someone’s gaze while asking them a simple question will get a more honest answer, and doing so while making a request may get a more positive answer (unless they look away, which could also be a ‘tell’). I confess I’m skeptical.

A great practice is to look in the mirror and then imagine you’re trying to convey, or react to, each of the circumstances above. (You can also look at video taken of you speaking with/to others.) You may be quite surprised to find that your eyes are sending a different message from what you intended. Or that your smile doesn’t convey the warmth and honesty you think it does.

Bottom line is that almost no one is highly competent or well practiced at either sending or appreciating the signals our eyes and bodies convey in this ‘language older than words’. But it’s a language worth (re-)learning, don’t you think?