The Particle Waves Goodbye

"Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren."

- Dr. Paul Watzlawick

The above quote when translated means One cannot not communicate. I was thinking today as I almost drifted towards sleep and was startled by a thought involving one of my childhood friends who is now moving away to start his career elsewhere. What piqued my interest especially was thinking of his communication as behavior and vice-versa - the dual function that language wields - as a means of communication and as a behavior. Of course language is not limited to our verbal modality, it extends to visual and kinesthetic behaviors; body language and touch and the like.

Recently, though a partial transformation of attitude - whether self-created or assisted - he has changed the nature of the communication "ritual" as Dr. Eric Berne would call it. The metacommunicative "ritual" was structured on a friendly game of masculine competitiveness - a verbal game of oneupmanship through put downs or "bagging" in the parlance of our times. Recently, this friend has refused to "take the bait" i.e., reciprocated the insults in a manner befitting the well established ritual. This non-communication as a behavior has in fact communicated to me that this friend perhaps has become annoyed with me or no longer wishes to continue the relationship. This behavior validates the axiom of "looking at what [one] does instead of what [one] says." According to some scholars, the choice of words comprise only 7-10% of total communication with the remainder divided equally between voice tonality and body language.

To outsiders, our communication seems scornful and vindictive when in fact the parameters for our friendship has been established in such a fashion that provides us with the maximum amount of pleasure; while we disparage the fidelity of our mothers, we are actually enjoying these little games as an adjunct of the total relationship. The dual function abounds everywhere and reveals itself differently to the partners in the cycle of communication and outside observers. If we remind ourselves of the wave/particle duality of light we can apply it just as easily to human interaction. What we do is what we say and what we say is something we do. Both are inseparable but distinct; both and neither, all at the same time.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

A Key to Fit None and All

A lot of what is written and said primarily concerns itself with what people believe in. God, socialism, progress, the almighty dollar. These are all abstractions that many people will gladly throw their lives away chasing and performing deeds in the name of. If we consider the human brain a void which gradually accumulates knowledge with to fill it, we can figure that belief and conviction are like a solid fuel and true-to-fact, verifiable knowledge is liquid, the hypothesis is like a gas.

Unimaginative people cling prefer to the familiar and the repeatable. Flicking a switch will produce light - if darkness persists, we panic. In my home town of Melbourne, Australia the public transportation system is dismal. Trains are routinely delayed. If the trains ran on time, I would figure an uneasiness would grow in commuters due a disruption to their routine of feeling upset at an abstraction. Perhaps divorce rates would soar if the trains ran on time as passengers would have more time at home to complain about their partner instead of to the partner about the tardiness of the train. However, that is not entirely relevant to this post.

If we use our model of belief as solid, we can see that solid objects are immovable and static - they retain the same shape unless they are moved by an external force. If belief occupies the mind of a devout believer, outcomes are more or less repeated. Beliefs about oneself breeds the self-fulfilling prophecy, as Watzlawick posits:

'A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own "accuracy."'

Imagine you think your friends no longer wish to be friendly towards you, the starting point (A). As a result you start to resent them and refuse to take their phone calls and start to spread rumors about them at point (B). Your friends taking affront to your malicious overtures, they stop making phone calls and inviting you to social events (C), which confirms the belief (A). If at Point A a less solid but gaseous hypothesis was given rise at (A) and was allowed to heat up with the fire of action, your friends may confess they have been busy with their own projects or work at (B). With curiosity satiated, the gas condenses as an aqueous true-to-fact knowledge at point (C). The liquid can swirl around one's head, never resting firm and always subject to change as its environment changes. Things look less light they "ought to" and more as they "are" and preferable to one's own person.

The solid brain and the liquid brain are almost diametrically opposed to one another, but one can thaw his thinking by realizing that things will never return to "normal" since "normal" does not exist. In constant flux, our bodies and the world around us changes from second to second. It took me, after six or so years of struggling with depression, that "normal" or the routine, comfortable state of being - that of misery, repressed desire and frustration - was all I knew as the correct way. It was never the correct way, but merely a way out of one of multi- or infinitely valued states of existence. The belief projected on to something is the ultimate fallacy that stops us from living fulfilled and happy lives. It all stems from Korzybski's fundamental principle - "whatever you say something is, it is not!" If you ever catch yourself blindly believing, ask your self - how do I know that? The realization will soon enough "click" inside your rapidly thawing head.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Wreck Ignition

In my daily self-reflection, I was thinking about some points raised with my therapist Geoff. We hit upon past relationships and how I felt about them now, after so much time had passed by. He suggested that if I still had residual feelings, I should write them down or initiate a conversation with the partner. I told him, in all honesty, I have little desire to do so. What is done cannot be undone - I doubt it would make any difference to my emotional well-being (especially when I have chronicled relevant parts in my blog on occasion).

Thinking back, I thought all of my partners were unequivocally "amazing" and beyond reproach - I would refrain to enforce boundaries with them even to my own detriment. As I rose from the bed today, I hit a salient point - the mistake I and others make is seeing their partners as "special" rather than unique.

This is not to say my current or former partners weren't interesting or pleasant or etc. - I loved them, I cared about them and strived to treat them with the respect and devotion that I expected within a romantic relationship. But keeping the irrational thought that their partners were somehow imbued with an almost sense of the divine - that they were so fantastical that another one like them surely does not exist anywhere else in this world - will only lead to heartache and counter-productive behaviors such as pining for the good old days when you and your partner were together and waiting for them to magically return to you.

Of course, affairs of the heart are seldom ruled by the head, but the aftermath certainly can be a rational, cognitive process. Its a case of differentiating from "a" girl (or boy) and "the" girl. We can evaluate them as a complex matrix of both good and bad attributes, viewholders, etc. and accept them all as part of what makes them unique - but not special (in the aforementioned sense), of course.

Swedish vocalist Krister Linder in his song "Mixed Blood" sings thusly:

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not depressed / but my melancholy is existential / no remedy or antidote / Don't bother with a cure or rescue"

Some people cannot grapple with the thoughts of the "givens" of existence - that life is chaotic and nothing has inherent meaning apart from the ones we ascribe to events and people. Even a married couple of many years must concede that their encounter was dependent on chance and at one point, they were oblivious to the existence of one another. If a relationship goes sour, one can take comfort in the fact that it was yet another FGE (fucking growth experience) and perhaps even learn from their mistakes.

During an acid trip, I once wrote down that the "universe was created so me and Elyse (my former partner) could meet that one time and carry on together into perpetuity" - while that cannot be proven or tested, it's an irrational belief that cannot be held up by any real fact. I am the only person I have to please - it was not my responsibility to solve her (or anyone's) problems or take care of her as if she were dependent on my benevolence and love. As human beings we all have the ability to choose and mold our own destinies; be it with work, hobbies, interests or even intimate partnerships.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor