TRUE COMMUNICATION

The Bridge ~ Step 96 ~ True Communication

You don't really have it unless you can give it away


We have a stereotype of the Master Teachers as being calm, cool, and collected all the time, without a predilection for emotional behavior. Well, BJ wasn't that way at all. In fact, he wouldn't hesitate to raise the intensity level in our conversations, and it wasn't until years later I realized that that was what he had to do simply to get my attention.

He used to say that communication is much more than talking. We can talk until we're blue in the face and never really communicate, Communication, he said, is the art of taking an idea or point of view that is in our head and doing whatever we have to do in order to get it into the other person's head. Unless that happens, he said, we were just talking, not communicating. And, in my case, if talking wasn't working he would invariably devise some sort of challenge for me to go through so that I'd have to experience what he was talking about. In other words, he used every means available to get his messages across.

One day while we were building a large wooden rack to store our lumber and tools so the Kona rainforest wouldn't reclaim everything right away, BJ was talking about the three stages we must go through if True Communication is to occur. The initial stage was called Agreement, and he said that we'd never get our ideas across to someone else if we didn't get into agreement with them first. His example was, "Oh, you're interested in Economics, well, so am I," and we would talk about Economics long enough for me to get comfortable with him and his points of view. According to him, sometimes getting into agreement took a long time and sometimes it happened right away; it all depended on the skill of the person who was committed to communicating their ideas. Likewise, it didn't matter what the subject matter was. It could be Economics or the Philadelphia Phillies. A Master, he said, was adept at discussing a wide variety of subjects, and it wasn't the subject at hand he cared so much about, but that he stayed in agreement at this stage of the relationship. I remember he used to say, "Tony, the symbols (or subjects) always change, but the functions remain the same."

After we were in agreement long enough for me to be at ease with him, he began to go into the second stage of true communication: Reality. Reality, he said, is exemplified by, "I like the Phillies and you like the Mets." Those are our realities, and it's okay if they differ from one another. At this stage, he asked my permission to go on because he didn't want to be manipulating me or doing anything I didn't want him to do. We had reached an understanding that it was okay express our own ideas. In short, we had agreed to disagree. Later he told me that if we disagreed with someone too soon, they would be apt to tune us out, and our chances from then on of communicating with them got much slimmer. But if we stayed in agreement to the point where we could openly discuss our individual realities, then we could safely move on to the third stage which he called True Communication, or the true taking of a thought or picture that's in our mind and transferring into someone else's mind.

True Communication, as BJ described it, is much trickier than most of us give it credit for. Patience, perseverance, and commitment are required, and it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few years for us to successfully pass our ideas along to another person.

The truth be known, BJ and I were together for over seventeen years, and when he disappeared, there were a couple of his ideas that I still hadn't gotten yet. My guess is that he's in another reality somewhere, doing his best to get my attention from that level.




My Intention for today is:

I Intend that I am becoming adept at communicating my ideas to others.


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