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Permalink Reply by Keith Saylor on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 12:36am

That better way to put something can often further diminish relations even further. It could be that God's help in translating results in such clarity that those who disagree, disagree even more because they better understand the ramifications of what is being put ... so to speak.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 12:54am

No, it's very easy to express hostility -- and finding a quick place to attack someone else's position has the same effect, even if you're just tongue-wrestling.

To respond to the other person is harder, demands some effort to see him rather than just an uncongenial belief.

Disagreeing more is all right, if everyone involved has a better sense of why they disagree. Much of the time it's like arguing about that classic gestalt picture, whether it's an old lady with a big nose or a young woman with a big throat.

For good relations, you don't want you and another person to be complete Martians to each other -- & neither do you want to agree perfectly. It's better to have a relationship that gets people to stretch the ideas they came in with... 

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 7:25am

I suppose I am an Aristotelian. I look for the Goldilocks-zone between the extremes.

So as a general rule, if your goal is to connect with the other person and to be heard by the other person, using the language of the other person makes for best practice. Furthermore the old trope about having two ears and one mouth is also good for relationship building. But there are limits. There comes a point when using the other person's language distorts what you want to say and becomes hypocritical. It is always hard to know where to draw the line. It is like there is a constant battle between integrity and connection.

Keith Saylor said:

David, thank you. So, when you write:

If I'm so busy trying to build solidarity with "my people" by strengthening the boundaries between you and me, then I start to define myself by the ways I'm not you. That makes relationship-building difficult.  

Are you suggesting that distinguishing one's experience from others makes relationship-building difficult? For example, when I write that the conscious and conscience of many of us is not formed and informed by outward language, sensual objects, and ideological constructs, are you suggesting that doing so makes relationship-building difficult? I am specifically asking you these question so as to not jump to conclusions. 

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 7:34am

I would tend to agree. I might add a caveat that in the end it's all packaging — but perhaps I'm being cynical here.

Context. I run workshops for people on how to get ready for job interviews. One of the slides has a pie chart saying it's 93% packaging! We want to believe that the impression we make on people is in what we say. This is especially true in religious communities. We believe it's our beliefs or the warmth of our communities that constitutes our real difference and our real attraction to others who are seeking. And they play a part. But oddly enough a smaller part than we assume. It is the unconscious things we do — the tone in our voices our body language — more how we say than what we say which creates the first impression. And that impression tends to stick unless someone industriously goes forth to unstick it.

Forrest Curo said:

That 'us vs them' flavor of antilanguage in 'John' would naturally work to make anyone who doesn't feel included in it edgy...

It isn't that more secular subgroups of Friends don't have shibboleths of their own, just that they take these for granted and therefore don't realize that they're pushing anybody out.

So, how much of the alienation between 'Christian' and 'other' Friends is based on real differences in outlook, how much on how their beliefs have been packaged? I'm sure there are real, significant differences -- but these aren't quite what people tend to think they are.

(?)

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 7:42am

I think the traditional Quaker plain speech is a good example of this. From the beginning it was a witness. As witness it triggered deeper persecution rather than a week and it. Eventually it became a distinctive characteristic of the community — what I have called boundary-markers. As the liberals on one side and the evangelicals on the other began to see those boundary-markers is no longer functional they dropped away.

The trouble I have of course, is that I spend far more time in my local Protestant church than I do amongst Quakers these days. In fact the sore Quaker interactions I'm having right now are online — and online communities have their own characteristics to them. But the Quaker roots of plain speech are with me even though I was never a practitioner of plain speaking.

In the church I'm attending right now, there is a recitation of the Lord's prayer as part of the service. I don't even see it as praying. It is a recitation by rote. And it irritates the Quaker and me. And in particular the insistence on using 400 year old language to speak to God with in a prayer we've memorized by heart seems particularly ironic when the early Quakers were being imprisoned for saying the and thou to their social superiors while their social superiors were saying the and thou to their God. I've come to make the Lord's prayer a regular part of my private prayer practice — but I use contemporary language, and frame each petition in the words that come to me in the moment — often very similar through frequent repetition but still altered by the moment, the mood and the context.

Howard Brod said:

David,

This point about "anti-language" is one reason many in my liberal Quaker meeting are attempting to discontinue using the "anti-language" established by Quakers long ago.  Once it outlived its usefulness, Quakers have been reluctant to join the rest of the human family in linguistic terminology (at least within our own Quaker associations).  It has slowly undergone slow abandonment over the decades and centuries, but many liberal Friends are now attempting to purposely use more common terminology in writing and speaking - even with our own minutes and communications inside the meeting community. 

In doing this, we have found that more new ones are willing to check us out - resulting in them listening to our spiritual message (which is full of Light) instead of our peculiar terminology (which is often a first-impression turn-off).

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Permalink Reply by Keith Saylor on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 9:38am

David, I have been focused on these words your wrote earlier in answer to my question about what is the "this" that we all do.

Language actually performs a much broader set of functions than simply referring to things that are real. It has a social and anthropological function. Consequently when we become participants in certain groups or activities over the longer term we tend to appropriate the ways of speaking of those groups. ...

What the discussion about "anti-language" relates to is how groups that feel pressured by the larger society to conform often develop ways of speaking that reinforce the boundaries between them and the wider culture as a way of insuring survival of the group but also conformity within the group.

I'm still not clear on what the "this" is that we all do. Are you saying that we all are to some degree part of subgroups and that therefore we all create and reinforce linguistic boundaries between the subgroup and the wider culture? If so or if not, what do you say about that who do not share the experience of language as a social or anthropological function? That is, what of those gathered around a shared experience not established in a particular or specific outward linguistic form? 

It is true that language does perform a social and anthropological function and that there are those within a particular linguistic context which will create boundaries within that context to distinguish themselves from the wider culture. It is also true that there are those who experience society in a context that is not linguistically based. These people are often not recognized and are often grouped as a subgroup of the wider culture when they do not participate in the outward linguistic context of the broader culture at all. I suggest this is the Jesus of the Gospel of John. The Jesus of John is showing a social way that is, in its very essence, different than that of the outward linguistically based wider culture or the subgroups who work within the broader culture. To place the Jesus of the Gospel of John into a subset of the larger culture, if that is what you are doing, misplaces the significance of the Jesus of John. It assumes him as a subset within a wider culture. However, mainly, he does not participate in that culture regarding conscious, conscience, meaning, purpose, and identity. 

There is a way of conscious, conscience, meaning, purpose, and identity that weaves in the context of direct and immediate imminent awareness and which performs the societal function that language performs in outward cultural contexts. People gathered into this looming knowledge are not a subset of a culture wherein society weaves together through the role of outer language; they are of an entirely direct conscious and conscience. They are, in fact, not a subset but participate in an entirely different way of being.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 10:23am

David, I think your grammar-correcting software is befnurgling your sentences & spellings; better to be freely antigramatical within the limits of intelligibility!

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Keith, I know that you describe your way of being differently than most other people do; and I believe that you do experience what you experience in a different mode... but there does seem to be a very wide range in the modes of people's thought-processes and the ways in which they experience life.

If you're aware that 'what' you're experiencing is Spirit, that is different from the way most people interpret their experience; but in online messages you are in fact interacting socially with people on this list, while using your particular form of description as a boundary marker, marking off 'we who are anchored thusly' from everyone else;

and while 'we who are anchored in this rather than that' may be a valid distinction between yourselves and those who put their trust in externals more than they should; and you  sincerely do want to help the latter group out,

I believe the actual distinction is more a matter of being 'we who think of ourselves as anchored in' than you realize. 

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 10:50am

Um, to try to take this a little farther along...

If someone feels & responds to a spiritual 'nudge' to stand up and speak in Meeting, there is definitely a 'nudge' there but it's very very hard (at least for me) to know "what" that feels like or "what" it is; it just (perhaps quite suddenly and unexpectedly) becomes clear that this is from God and I should say it.

Perhaps (Since I don't experience "anyone else's" experiencing from inside, I don't know)  you would, in that same event, be more clearly aware of that nudge and its Source.

But should that difference be treated as a difference of kind?

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 6:16pm

befnurgling. I like that word!

I don't trust Microsoft Office's grammar your check system. I'm using voice recognition software (Dragon NaturallySpeaking). And yes when Dragon gets it wrong it gets a REALLY wrong. Apologies.

Forrest Curo said:

David, I think your grammar-correcting software is befnurgling your sentences & spellings; better to be freely antigramatical within the limits of intelligibility!

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Keith, I know that you describe your way of being differently than most other people do; and I believe that you do experience what you experience in a different mode... but there does seem to be a very wide range in the modes of people's thought-processes and the ways in which they experience life.

If you're aware that 'what' you're experiencing is Spirit, that is different from the way most people interpret their experience; but in online messages you are in fact interacting socially with people on this list, while using your particular form of description as a boundary marker, marking off 'we who are anchored thusly' from everyone else;

and while 'we who are anchored in this rather than that' may be a valid distinction between yourselves and those who put their trust in externals more than they should; and you  sincerely do want to help the latter group out,

I believe the actual distinction is more a matter of being 'we who think of ourselves as anchored in' than you realize. 

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 6:33pm

To speak from my own experience of being led in the spirit so to speak. I sense a nudge in the silence, or sometimes at other points. And while there are a number of discernment practices I might apply to try and weed out the creaturely, in the end whether I deem that nudge to be of the Spirit or only from my spirit is a judgment call. And often confirmation only happens post hoc.

My conviction that at times and places I have been spoken to by God, lifted up and sustained by God, has in no way led me to claim certainty or inerrancy for any of my openings. Confidence is based on trust and our own commitment to be as faithful as we as finite beings are able to be in our contexts. Certainty (especially certainty without qualification) is usually rooted in a metaphysic/metaphysical system. And while the reality referred to by that system may be infinite and unqualified our descriptions of it cannot be because it is little old us building the systems. As humanly engineered ideologies they will always be subject to future revision to better approximate them to the truths they claim to describe.

Forrest Curo said:

If you're aware that 'what' you're experiencing is Spirit, that is different from the way most people interpret their experience; but in online messages you are in fact interacting socially with people on this list, while using your particular form of description as a boundary marker, marking off 'we who are anchored thusly' from everyone else;

and while 'we who are anchored in this rather than that' may be a valid distinction between yourselves and those who put their trust in externals more than they should; and you  sincerely do want to help the latter group out,

I believe the actual distinction is more a matter of being 'we who think of ourselves as anchored in' than you realize. 

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 7:36pm

Is this distinction helpful to people other than me?

1) There are the things that seem to be revealed to me through some kind of spiritual agency. In my experience these tend to be a very practical things, go there, do that kinds of stuff. But I am well aware that that isn't true in all cases for all people.

2) Then there are the things that I believe are true about God/Spirit by looking back at my experiences of those revelations and connecting the dots. An example of this would be my awareness that one God speaks it tends to be in quite specific practical ways rather than in revelations of deeper truths.

3) Then there are the things that I have learned by studying other people's writings (including scripture). This kind of learning is very similar to the second kind of learning I mentioned above — where I look for patterns and agreements or disagreements connecting different offerings.

I think these three ways of knowing things about God are helpful in that it distinguishes between what here is been referred to as "immediate" knowing and what for want of a better term we might call "secondary knowing". But in another sense all three are made possible by the grace of God. Consequently they have the same source.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 1, 2016 at 7:55pm

I think the distinction does matter --

but in 2) and 3) there is also an 'immediate' discernment taking place:

You believe that you are connecting the dots appropriately -- or that what you are reading is true --

because you're also getting one of those 'nudges' that tells you that what you're picking up is bringing you closer to truth from your current starting point...

All these things are from the same source, intended to nourish (at least some) people spiritually -- but in 1) the impulse is direct, in 2) you're connecting your own dots, & in 3) you're relying on what matches your sense of itall so far.

In all of these, I think that what Keith is talking about is also present & operative [?] but not necessarily seen in the foreground... and there remains that possibility of misinterpreting a leading, missing a cue, receiving a partial, tentative insight or revelation.

(This is why people are born needing to learn, rather than being hatched with everything we need wired in? So we can have the pleasure of working things out, together and/or separately?)

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