There’s an awful a lot of personal development involved when you practice The Thinking Environment. We’ve already talked about, in other videos, how this work is ontological in nature. It is work that has at its’ foundation a way of being. Who you are being in the world: and to practice being in a way that is in many ways a little bit like a salmon swimming upstream, going in the opposite direction to the way in which we have set the world up.
If you think about the Ten Components of a Thinking Environment, there’s attention – practicing attention in a world that’s full of interruption; there’s equality – practicing treating yourself and others as equals in a world that’s full of power differentials. There’s practicing ease and the discarding of rush and urgency in a world that is hurtling in the direction of “hurry up!” all the time. There is appreciation in world that lauds critical thinking, and thinks of critical thinking as the most intelligent kind of thinking (when so often it is toxic competition masquerading as intelligence), whereas appreciation is thought of as something that’s pink and fluffy and not that serious.
So practicing being a Thinking Environment is really a massive amount of conscious awareness in a world that is constituted around conditions that are pretty much the opposite of it.
And I think one of the places where this person development becomes most strongly highlighted for me is around the question of what do you do when you can’t listen any more? What happens to you as a thinking partner, as someone who is committed to being a Thinking Environment in the world, when you actually can’t listen to what a person is saying? I think this is quite an extreme situation when it happens. I think those of us that choose to be thinking partners and have it as a practice in our lives, we learn a lot about being genuinely interested whilst at the same time not being attached to the content or indeed the outcome of where a person’s thinking is taking them.
There are many ways in which this issue of not being able to listen any more might rear its’ head, and there are two that stand out for me in particular.
One is around an ethical dilemma. What is the content of what you are listening in to in someone’s thinking causes you to be concerned about them and about their wellbeing in a way that becomes very difficult for you to manage that second stream of attention that we’ve done so much talking about on this YouTube channel. And I think if that happens, if you do get to a place where you have concerns about someone’s wellbeing, about their safety, or indeed around the logic and the reasoning that they are applying to a topic that has ethical boundaries to it, let’s say to do with legality or the safety of others, then really the thing you have to do is say that you can no longer keep the contract that you have made as a thinking partner, which is to keep this person thinking and to keep them going as far as they can go for themselves in their own independent thinking in the contracted amount of time that you have agreed to up front.
Another place where you might find you can’t listen any more is if the topic that they are thinking about, and what you are listening to, is something that triggers you. What I mean by that is that what they think about their topic, and the direction they are heading in in their thinking flies in the face of your own perspective around that topic, and where your own perspective about that topic is something, where – if we were to put it frankly – you have an attachment to being right about your perspective.
I think this is an area of enormous growth and development for us as thinking partners is the extent to which we can be willing to suspend our point of view around things in order to be able to listen with genuine interest to someone else’s perspective about something and stay interested in their thinking, and where their thinking is going, even when we don’t agree.
In many ways this is one of the aspects of the invitation of the Component of Difference. We know through the Component of Difference that reality is diverse and that the mind thinks best in the presence of diversity, and that therefore if we want to foster the conditions for the best independent thinking in the world we need to be able to create environments that are open to divergent thinking and be open to as many diverse perspectives on topics as we can generate.
But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it, when it’s a topic where you have very strongly held views and now you are listening to somebody who’s thinking about this topic and they are thinking about it in ways that are diametrically opposed to the views that you hold.
So there’s a challenge here, isn’t there? Can we extend ourselves into a willingness to be wrong? Can we be genuinely interested and listen into places that have difference to the way in which we think about something? But if we can’t, then I think the thing that we have to do in order to be respectful of the agreement that we’ve made with someone and in order to sustain as much as possible the conditions of a thinking environment that we have committed to in our relationship with that person, is to be able to acknowledge that we are no longer able to listen. We need to be able to say to that person “I am no longer able to listen to you, not because there’s necessarily anything wrong with your thinking but because you have hit up against a place in my own thinking where I am not able to see difference with regards to this at this stage.” And I would say that as Thinking Partners that we are then being invited into in terms of our own personal development is to have our own thinking sessions on that topic and to discover “what is it that I am assuming that stops me from being able to listen to what this person thinks? And is that assumption right? What evidence do I have for thinking that my assumption is right?” I suppose at the end of the day we have to acknowledge that we all have limitations as human beings and that there be some topics where we are not able to be a thinking partner for someone else. But I think the idea of seeing this as an area of our own personal growth and development as opposed to thinking that the other person wrong is a very useful way to approach this challenge.
With Love,
Trisha
Comentários