So Many Other Realities Exist Simultaneously

In “Not knowing is most intimate”, I lamented people whose style of communication rubs me the wrong way.

Here, I want to give a brief sketch what, as of today, I consider good communication.

Universal Tunnel Vision

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”
- Franz Kafka

Our life worlds are full of premises we don’t acknowledge while we go about our days.

A vast collection of explicit and implicit beliefs about how the material world works, about human nature, about right and wrong, good and evil, about what’s worth doing and what not and why.

As Timothy Leary and after him Robert Anton Wilson put it: All of us live in different reality tunnels.

Let’s hear it in RAW’s own words:

I show you mine and you show me yours

So - what does the existence of different reality tunnels mean for the way I communicate?

I just don’t bother with debates.

Instead, I make a clear-cut difference between when and how I explore my own reality tunnel, and when and how I explore those of others.

When someone shows genuine interest in understanding my tunnel, I speak. Casually, confidently, not bothering to hedge each single sentence with “[…] but this is just how I see things, I may be wrong.” Either you trust me to know I know nothing and wants to hear me out anyways, or I don’t bother talking to you. If I don’t understand your question or think it is based on false premises, I swap roles and start probing your reality tunnel instead of explicating mine.

When someone’s reality tunnel intrigues me (or when they won’t stop talking at me and I don’t have a convenient escape), I listen and ask questions. In order to actually understand, not to persuade. My key markers for where to inquire further are curiosity and confusion.

Sometimes, I grow so fond of someone that we spend many, many hours playing “I show you mine and you show me yours”. Then, the inferential distances between us will shorten and our respective reality tunnels will become more and more similar while we continually integrate each other’s perspectives. But even then, both of us bring different genomes and different lifetimes of learning how to see and how to think to the table. It is inconceivable that we would ever live completely in the same world.

The best we can hope for is symbiosis, not merging.

The worst, hower, is when others try to drag us into their own reality tunnels. As Aella calls it: Frame Control. That’s the kind of behavior I lamented in “Not knowing is most intimate”.

Can we operationalize that?

No.

It’s a dance. If you want to become any good at it, you will have to develop a taste for the music and the movements and find your own style.

But as with every dance, there are individual moves and patterns you can practice. So here you go for some things I found helpful:

Understanding my own tunnel

Some things I found helpful for understanding my own reality tunnel better:

• Learn Gendlin’s Focusing. The best in-road I’ve found is to get the audiobook versions of Gene Gendlin: Focusing and Anne-Weiser Cornell: The Power of Focusing. Both of them contain a mix of theory and guided exercises, and slightly different spins on the technique of focusing. Listen to both of them one after the other and do the exercises until it clicks. Then, keep working with a diary or a partner.

• Meditate. That’s helpful for getting more awareness of how you habitually construct reality. Particularly shikantaza/do-nothing meditation is helpful for this.

• Read enemy newspapers. For anything you hold dear, there’s someone smart, eloquent and actually kind of likable out there who believes the opposite. Seek out their writings, talks, video essays. Genuinely try to understand why they think how they think. Through the contrast, you will understand your own reality tunnel better. (Going on backpacking adventures to other countries and immersing yourself in the local culture also counts. And so does reading literature from cultures and epochs other than yours.)

Understanding others’ tunnels

The art of understanding others’ reality tunnels is traditionally called active listening.

Some things that may help with getting better at that:

• Volunteer at a helpline. They’ll give you training in active listening upfront, and then you’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice it on a vast variety of distressed people.

• Learn Street Epistemology. Street Epistemology is a method for helping others examine what they believe, and why they believe it. For great examples, you can check out Cordial Curiosity on YouTube. To actually learn it, the Discord server might be the best address.

• Learn Circling. Circling is a social meditation. You sit together with a handful of other peoples, and have a massively decelerated conversation about what’s happening right here, right now, using sentence stems like “Being here with you, I notice…” That way, even the slightest reactions you have to what the other people say become visible. And, you get much more fine-grained feedback on how you show up in interaction. Good addresses are https://www.circlingeurope.com/ and https://www.relateful.com/.

• Read the NVC book. While NVC as a communication technique is not so easy to pick up from books (and I find most instructors of who I’ve seen videos annoying), sentence after sentence in the book contains remarkable insights on human nature. My personal favorite: “Every action is the attempt of satisfying a need.” If you understand German, you might appreciate Marcus Fischer’s “Die neue Gewaltfreie Kommunikation” as an adjunct to avoid a bunch of common pitfalls.

Conclusion

This is a more distilled and comprehensive curriculum for how to people than I thought I could ever write. Not intended, but I guess that’s how it is now.

The main missing bit is Perls/Hefferline/Goodman’s “Gestalt Therapy”, and maybe something by Joanna Macy. But those are stories for another time.