Coup de La Grace of Silence: s'il vous plait!
Admittedly, the hardest thing to do when you have a lot of information is not give it to someone. Keep in mind knowledge is only valuable when you can stay silent long enough for your information to be appreciated. It's the same reason that God himself stays silent and watches over you. I mean if God wasn't so silent, how could he possibly answer all of our prayers simultaneously. This means the creator of all creations spends a lot of time listening and observing.
You see the only thing that raises high blood pressure quicker than salt, is two people constantly talking over each other and never taking a break to listen. It's like oil and water. In fact, if two people are not listening during a mediation to solve their own disputes, their thoughts will go exactly nowhere close to inspiring rationality and bubbling up the warm inspirations for a peaceful resolution. I mean if we're suppose to example ourselves after the creator of all creations, we need to start spending more time listening and observing others.
As they say, the paint is already dry.
The point is that we have entirely too much knowledge and plenty of it available to us all over the internet. And, seldom do we ever need someone's professional or legal advice as much as others might think we should. We are bombarded with so much free advice and marketing that we have no brilliant ideas of our own, and much better or less to solve our own specific and uniquely complex problems.
The overall availability of legal information, human biases and marketing have made us highly incapable of concentrating and focusing to stay calm enough to resolve a fight or battle, or war with peaceful resolutions or accords. Sometimes other people's misleading information simply encourages our conflicts. Other people's advice can never be as specific to our problems as our own understandings of them.
Do you know how many conversations and distractions can happen around your major life events, disagreements and conflicts? Let's say too many to count them. However, the most important person that should have been listening, is you during your own conflicts. This is why it is so important to foster silence in your everyday life so that your own thoughts and theirs can fully register in your brain.
Office gossip is the main result of our major work disruptions and distractions. It's a well-known example of grammaticalization. Where the office now becomes the local pub. Where the organism experiences the surrounding environment and selects relevant stimuli to create more chaos. Office conflict is pure intoxication. Where everyone is walking around with water on the brain and not thinking clearly about what they've come to work to do. Nothing gets done as efficiently as it should, when we have so many working biases and barriers clouding up our abilities to fully function, think and listen.
Admittedly, who doesn't want to hear about other people's drama. That's why we love watching movies and the grammaticalization of theater plays and bloody wars. It's complete entertainment. Actors give us a reason to be happy or sad, whether it's completely rational or not, however. Not when it comes to real life events, wars and violent crimes. Believe me everyone wants peace in real life situations. Maybe they don't know how to achieve it through listening.
In this case, what I've identified in others, is that when they stay silent and calm, it appears that they can actually see their own way out of their problems and achieve whatever works and what doesn't for them. Silence is kind of a reverse grammaticalization. Hence, people who listen and register their own thoughts first and before speaking them out into the air we breathe, tend to be a lot more successful than others who are always talking and never really listening to anyone.
Laozi (Lao Tzu) has an extremely powerful quote about understanding yourself. He says, "knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power." I say when we can fully understand ourselves better, we can exercise the power and true wisdom to accept and understand others. Which gives us the inner strength and intelligence, to listen much better.
Another fascinating point, I learned from Quaker mediators is that silence brings mystical knowledge to our problems. In fact, I've learned that by using silence in the mediation practice, it tends to bring in fresh insights about human behavior and our interactions. You see as conscious enlightened humans, we're really not all that bad. Too much noise and emotional persuasion, tends to overly intoxicate our good senses, and our natural human abilities to reason with anyone.
Keep in mind the comfort of hearing our own words feels pretty good to us, however, it sidesteps our problems and resolutions by retreating to immediate full arguments and outrageous explanations rather than listening to the other sides actual narratives about their problems. As a result of this the other person dives right into the fight, without ever listening to one word of what you've said to them. The courtroom is a further example of hearing our own words. It's no different than a theater. There's clearly more arguments, acting, fear and emotional persuasions than resolutions going on inside of the courtrooms. The most difficult part is being the presiding judge observing people's frustrations, people's inabilities and choices, not to ever work together to solve their own problems and then trying to somehow hand out a fair ruling on the matter.
To put it more poetically, our disputes, wars, debates and personal conflicts are the main results of our narrow attention to other people's words, either in writings, rules, laws, policies, mandates, memorandums and supervisory instructions and self-reports. We simply always doubt the versions of the storyteller. I've seen less conflicts happen between two year olds. Ultimately, we need to learn how to stop criticizing each other and listen more carefully to the full narratives.
We can't continue to pretend and argue what people are telling us in their own words, is not them being truthful, as if we've somehow hijacked their memories from their brain. If that's the entire case logic, why collaborate, cooperate, form a corporation or any legal entity, and marry someone or anything else, where it certainly takes two or more trusting individuals partnering, listening, carefully planning together and fully cooperating.
Test the theories for yourself. Learn to listen and trust people's narratives. Don't end up in the courtrooms when you could've listened early on. Learn to trust the complete narratives. Look for the warning signs. And, if you can't explain it to a 7 year old, you're more than likely the culprit of an untruth. Again, the most difficult tasks of listening, is you learning how to stay silent.
Undray Veranda Moore, The Mediator
"Silence is the only way to know that someone else, is actually listening to you" Undray Veranda Moore, The Mediator.