Talking and Texting: Two Reflections of Our Conditioning
Posted on Sep 09, 09 at 06:11 PM
I was recently speaking to my friend Bill Raineri about what it is like to communicate with our children now that they are in college or beyond. Bill has three daughters and I have two sons, so we were eager to compare notes on talking with our kids face-to-face, over the phone and through texting. The latter, texting through instant messaging, is especially interesting because it maintains some of the qualities of talking while excluding others. And it was here that Bill and I found we had had strikingly similar experiences. I’ll get to those in a minute, but first I want to build a larger context regarding interpersonal communication.
Much of the pleasure of being with others comes from our ability to verbally communicate with them. The pull of our desire to communicate has become all the more obvious over the past few decades as devices that support our doing so have proliferated. This pull can be witnessed most dramatically in the widespread deployment of cell phones in almost every conceivable place and at almost any possible time. And, of course, we are beginning to see this with texting as well.
Unfortunately, much of the difficulty people have with each other, and the suffering in our lives that arises, is also the result of interpersonal communication. One, if not the primary, source of such difficulty is that most every thing that we say and hear is filtered and reformatted by our highly conditioned minds. Now obviously, we couldn’t engage in such communication without our mind’s ability to process and organize the input. But above and beyond that, most everything that we hear and that we say is distorted by our conditioning as it is filtered by our beliefs, concepts, wants, fears and aversions.
Some time ago (before cell phones were in use), Jiddu Krishnamurti, in the introduction to his book The First and Last Freedom, spoke about the common state of affairs in human interpersonal communication this way: “But unfortunately most of us listen through a screen of resistance. We are screened with prejudices…or with our daily worries, desires and fears…Therefore, we listen really to our own noise, to our own sound, not to what is being said.” Much more recently, Peter Fenner, in his chapter on Nondual Communication in Radiant Mind, expresses it very similarly: “We’re constantly validating and invalidating what people are saying and doing…When we listen through a screen of judgments and assessments, we distort the natural flow of people’s experience.”
In addition to the fact that the way we communicate directly exposes our conditioning, is an interesting, though perhaps obvious, corollary that how our conditioning is expressed varies from situation to situation-both with whom we are communicating and the circumstance under which we are communicating. By noticing these differences I think we can learn some things about our conditioning, and that brings me back to what I was sharing with Bill and our similar experiences communicating with our children.
Earlier in the summer I was attempting to have a voice-over-internet conversation with my son Dan who was working in Ecuador. The internet connection we had was not good enough to support the requirements of voice transmission so we began texting to each other on the same web connection. I actually seldom use instant messaging but found it easy to work with my keyboard in my lap. So we proceeded for about a half hour.
As we continued, I became aware of how the texting conversation seemed to have a somewhat different structure than many of our phone conversations. Instead of the typical “Hi, how are you, what’s new.” type, this one, although starting with similar questions, yielded answers that were deeper, more complex and more disclosing. As the interaction progressed I began to see Dan more as the serious, socially conscious entrepreneur he is becoming. It wasn’t that I saw him in a better way, but that I saw him in a different way, and I think a more accurate way where his truer self and way of being showed through more clearly.
My responses were different as well. I shared information on a broader range of items I was working on at the time and went into greater depth than I would typically. Because of how my words flowed so naturally and without apparent encumbrances, it is difficult to say what might have gotten in the way in previous conversations. It might have been concerns of being scoffed at by the adolescent son who was no longer present. Or perhaps the leisurely pace of the conversation imposed by typing speed and transmission lag contributed to the more natural flow of words while texting. This is to say nothing of all the conditioned complexes that arise as a result of the nuances of voice that one perceives in a verbal conversation, even over the phone, or those that can arise as a result of visual cues in face-to-face conversations. All that either of us had to go on was the little animated pen that showed up on the others computer screen while one was typing and, of course, the words themselves.
Bill had had similar experiences. He too found that such conversations were more open and relaxed, and that sometimes there was a greater sense of connection. And both of us found these texting conversations surprisingly satisfying. In a later communication relating to this entry, Bill noted a study that indicated that only 20% of face-to-face communication is verbal and 80% nonverbal. So, apparently a lot of “...our own noise” is in response to something other than the words we hear.
I think one way to summarize all this is to say that in our important conversations with family, friends and anybody else for that matter (because they are all important, aren’t they) we need to become more aware of how our own conditioned minds filter and shape what we hear and say. With awareness we can then allow the underlying conditioning to fade and even dissolve, leaving our communication undistorted, probably more meaningful and certainly more supportive of good interpersonal relationship.
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