Month: December 2005

Thank You, Marshall.

“Non-violent Communication,” a theory/technique/philosophy of communication (and of life) created by Marshall Rosenberg, has changed my life in really positive ways in the past year. It’s given me ways of looking at myself and others and my relationships that I don’t know if I’d ever have discovered on my own. It’s helped me as a parent. It’s shown me a way out of the pain of constant anger over the nation’s political system.

And now it’s time for me to say goodbye.

Well, not really. I don’t think I’ll ever leave behind the lessons I’ve learned trying to practice NVC. I don’t want to stop learning more about this way of relating to people. It’s done good things for me and I’m sure it’s got more to teach me.

But it’s hurting my effort at living mindfully.

Yep, this is another post about mindfulness — see my first and second. It more relates to the second — the “map is not the territory” phenomenon.

You see, for all it bills itself as a technique of communication, NVC is also a worldview, a way of understanding human life. It’s a picture of the world. And I’m a sucker, as I’ve said, for worldviews, theories, that claim to be “the real truth,” the little-known inside scoop on reality which if you know it makes everything easier. And accepting a particular model of reality, a particular way of understanding the world, as *the* way of understanding the world, is a mindfulness-killer.

Here’s the tip-off: you’re following instructions and you don’t get the results they promised. You don’t question the value of these instructions for you, you question your own value, ability, competence, worthiness. That’s a dead giveaway.

So I’m gonna back off. I’m going to stop making a conscious effort to use NVC in my parenting and other parts of my life, at least for a while. I’m going to open my mind to other ways of thinking about things. I’ve got it there as a way of looking at things but I’m not going to make it *the* way of looking at things.

I think even Marshall would approve. After all, he called his book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, not Nonviolent Communication, The Language Of Life.

Mindfulness 2

Thinking about it later, I think I could sum up the central change for me in reading “mindfulness” in my understanding of the world as something like this —

I had always, my whole life, thought of the world as something which had an inherent structure, and you came to understand that structure, you could then interact with it competently. Most typically, I would understand it to be structured as a machine whose parts interacted according to the laws of physics and other sciences.

I was always looking for the One True Theory which would help me understand things. Apparently there are other people susceptible to the same bug, because a lot of people are selling One True Theories. For example, check out the book ??How Nature Works?? by Per Bak. He says that everything we see everywhere is a matter of “self-organized criticality,” and history is bunk, because the causality which history traces is all unimportant; the bigger organizing principle is self-organized criticality. Oh, economics is bunk too, and so on and so forth.

In the late 80s, “Chaos Theory” and fractals were the hip One True Theory. (There are points of contact between them and SOC.) I understand that when I was a kid people were raving about Catastrophe Theory.

I joke sometimes about how every few months, when I’m doing art, I will have a breakthrough and discover, finally, once and for all, the *real* trick to doing cool drawings. It will last a week or three and then life will go back to normal.

I think that where good stuff comes out of discovering a One True Theory of Everything, it is not so much because we’ve finally got the real answer, as because we’re suddenly looking at things differently — we’re open to new possibilities; in short, we’re mindful.

Is Mindfulness a One True Theory? Well… if it is, there’s not much to it. It doesn’t tell you how the world works, it just asks you to think about the world in a variety of ways. I guess if it makes a theoretical claim about the world, it is that the world is not actually amenable to summing up in theoretical claims.

Anyway, the change in my thinking upon reading ??The Power of Mindful Learning?? was mainly that I started taking seriously the old saw about “The Map is Not The Territory.”

UPDATE:
Michael Hall “comments”:http://mph.puddingbowl.org/archives/2005/12/lies_trotsky_to.php on the whole “now I FINALLY understand it all” phenomenon, invoking the Matrix and shopping malls. Go read.