December 8,
2013
Dear Reader,
In NVB we
always come up with some kind of problem, which, supposedly, needs to be
solved. In SVB there are no problems and we like to keep it that way. SVB is
effortless and can only be maintained by being natural and at ease. We have not had much SVB. We have had moments in which
aspects of SVB were available, but we have not had it in the sense that it
continued. It could not continue,
because it was not clearly defined. The belief that everything has already been said is
a falsehood that is produced by NVB. At best, we had bits and pieces of SVB,
but we can only know what it is unless we are capable of maintaining it for a period
of time. Although our partial experience indicates the possibility of SVB to us,
it can never really lead to it. In fact, partial experience of SVB has only caused us to have even more
problems.
It is
crucially important that we recognize that SVB does not cause any problems, but
that accidental, momentary experience, as opposed to continuous, deliberate
experience of SVB, creates problems. We think it solves problems, but it
doesn’t. To only have glimpses of SVB is a curse from which we will not be liberated
until we have the necessary skills to produce it on an ongoing basis. This
curse is at work under circumstances in which oppressed people push for change.
They want to have the power, because they think it will allow them to force the
change they want to see happen. Historically, much, if not most, change was, in
one way or another, coerced. An inevitable, long-lasting aspect of this process
is that it is verbalized. However, that we can verbalize things does not really mean that
we communicate. In NVB, we are verbally very busy, but we are not communicating at all. Again and again, the
illusion is created that we are communicating, but sooner or later the bubble bursts
again.
SVB
demonstrates that our political way of interacting is totally ineffective, destructive
and outdated. It does not matter which political view we represent, as long as we produce
NVB, we predetermine our communication
in such a way that we will continue to increase our problems. Even the practice
of non-violent communication is NVB. Regardless of what wonderful plans we have
had to create a better world, our communication has not changed and could not
change, because we did not know the difference between SVB and NVB. Indeed, the
biggest opponents of SVB are those who are into peace and justice, who are
religious, righteous and zealous.
Ultimately,
our claim to power is our belief and conviction that we know how to communicate.
Because something more than this assumption is needed, we have remained
incapable of changing our ways of communicating. All claims to power are false,
because they signify that we do not know what communication is. Those who, with
their wealth and influence, dominate the communication agenda, are as incapable of establishing and
maintaining SVB, as those who believe that they are in the process of achieving
wealth and influence, only in order to do exactly the same.
Rich and
poor, educated and uneducated, men and women, are equally deprived of SVB. The
notion that we do not know what communication is, is embarrassing. It is
appalling what we are capable of doing to escape our embarrassment about this.
We kill each other over this matter. Our refusal to communicate is our most
destructive habit. We believe our way of communicating is right, because others
can be made and have been made to communicate our way. In NVB we believe in our own
lies, because these lies have been reinforced. It is not that these lies can
exist by themselves. Lies are maintained by people who were taught to have
NVB.
Once we are
having SVB, we see that our religion, country, culture, political view, in
short, our identity, is nothing else than our way of communicating. Once SVB is
established, we can put our finger on things which previously we were incapable
of addressing. Since our theoretical perspective will have changed, we can then
finally have the conversation in which we together let go of our identity,
which was verbal, not nonverbal. We will no longer be hypnotized by and fixated
on the words, which refer to things and experiences, but which themselves are
not these things and these experiences. We will re-establish the importance of the
spoken word with SVB.
We are carried
away by written words, which supposedly describe and represent our reality. Our
reality is more evident when we listen to the sound of our voice while we
speak. Because production of sound is in the here and now and listening to our
voice is in the here and now, SVB is making
us and keeping us conscious. NVB was
keeping us unconscious. We are disembodied communicators as long as our language
is believed to exist separate from us. We are the givers of meaning to our
words, which don’t make any sense in a language in which we are not skilled.
Let me go
back to speaking with you, my dear reader, in a more personal fashion. We both
know when we have communication with each other or not. As long as one of us
doubts whether we have communication, we are not having it. That we have not
paid any closer attention to this very common situation, in which one of the
parties involved in the communication is losing track of the other, is because nothing was stimulating us to do this. Now that you know the difference
between SVB and NVB, you listen to your own sound while you speak. If you do
not do this, you lose touch with yourself and others. Moreover, you will not
even notice that you have lost contact. You will only notice that you have lost
touch with yourself and with others after you restore it, by listening to your
own sound.
SVB is so
simple that we fail to notice it. We miss it because we are conditioned to
listen to others. We do not have much behavioral history in listening to
ourselves. As already stated, the extent to which we were listening to
ourselves has created more problems for us than it solved, because it did not and could not lead to the learning process that must take place so that
we can maintain SVB for longer periods of time. Consequently, we associate self-listening with mental
health problems. Since our experiences that make up our behavioral history have
over and over again strengthened the link between listening to ourselves and
all sorts of problems, we are not inclined to listen to ourselves. Furthermore,
because listening to ourselves also signifies our failure in making others
listen to us, we avoid it like the plague. Self-listening is considered to be
for the weak, while NVB is for those who are strong, who can dominate others.
NVB therefore is always based on the false promise that at one point in the
future, the speaker is capable of completely dominating the listener.
The wish of
the speaker for absolute control over the listener is why most spoken
communication is based on an ongoing struggle for attention. We want to be listened to
and in our coercive attempts to make that happen, we create and maintain NVB.
The control we seek in our communication is based on our misunderstanding of
it. In SVB there is no need for control. Since we are not aversively
influencing each other, the issue of control is considered as preventing SVB.
NVB prevents SVB, it is just that simple. NVB has to be stopped before we can
have SVB. If we accept NVB and prevent
ourselves from seeing it for what it is and what enormous havoc it has done, we
again, like we have done before, will prevent SVB, real human interaction.
