December 13, 2013

December 13, 2013

Dear Reader, 

If it is true that what we believe to be our spoken communication – what this writer calls Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) – is a process which unknowingly takes us further and further away from reality, there is nobody to be blamed for the fact that we can’t attain Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). If there is no standard to base our way of communicating on, we are allowed to do just about anything and still call it communication. How absurd can our communication be? If we move into spoken communication knowingly and deliberately, with the understanding that most of it was simply not working, how can we keep calling it communication? Is must be called something else. We should call it NVB because even though we may behave verbally, we are not communicating. We have to call it noxious, because our way of communicating couldn’t prevent and therefore only created problems. When we take a closer look at how we actually communicate, we find that it has only made things worse. The tragic complications of our human relationships have only increased due how we communicate. 

Our inability to recognize that we have failed in our communication has prevented us from learning how to communicate. Since talking about this continues to be such a challenge, reading about this is not to be taken lightly. To read this in the way it was intended by the author, the reader is asked to consider these written words as spoken word. Then, the reader is the listener. This becomes more evident when the reader reads these words out loud. Although this author provides the words, the reader would provide his or her sounds to these words. As the reader listens to the sound of his or her own voice, he or she understands these words differently from when he or she would not be listening to his or her own voice. In the case of the former, the reader experiences SVB, but in the latter he or she would produce NVB. As the reader becomes the speaker, who listens to himself or herself, while he or she speaks, he or she will add new meaning to these words, which make clear the great difference between SVB and NVB. 

The meaning of our words depends on how we sound. Our lack of attention for how we sound is because we are not used to listen to ourselves. It is not that we can’t, but nothing in our environment stimulates us to do this. We are conditioned to listen to others or to make others listen to us. In both cases self-listening does not occur. 

While listening to others, authority always resides outside of ourselves and our listening behavior is determined by a (NVB) speaker. In SVB, however, it is the other way around: the speaking is and has always been a function of the listener. Due to outward orientation, however, we are not in touch with ourselves and incapable of being in touch with others. In the situation in which the communication is done for us by some professional speaker, who assumes authority, we lose touch with ourselves. Our unresolved issues with authority have perpetuated our NVB. We are only participating in communication once we ourselves become the speaker and do not let others do the talking for us. When others do the talking for us, we are primarily listeners. While we mainly listen to others, read their books, see their movies, vote for their policies and pray for their blessings, we only imagine to be part of the interaction. 

This writer only became a writer because he felt he had something very important to say. His knowledge is understood only if the environment is recreated in which he obtained it. The stimuli that resulted in this knowledge must be made available. In SVB we listen to ourselves while we speak. We can do so by simply saying whatever comes to our mind or we can read any text for that purpose. To develop the habit of listening to ourselves while we speak, it does not matter what we say.. This doesn’t mean that what we say loses its meaning. To the contrary, it will only become more meaningful that way. When the stimuli that make SVB possible are there, it will occur, instantly. Your sound and the interoceptive experience of your body are such stimuli. By focusing on these stimuli your attention is effortlessly in the here and now.