COMMUNICATION

It could be said that if you would get a person into communication you would get him well. This factor is not new in psychotherapy, but concentration upon it is new, and interpretation of ability as communication is entirely new.

     If you were to be in thorough and complete communication with a car on a road, you would certainly have no difficulty driving that car. But if you were in only partial communication with the car and in no communication with the road, it is fai~y certain that an accident would occur. Most accidents do occur when the driver is distracted by an argument he has had, or by an arrest, or by a cross alongside of the road that says where some motorist got killed, or by his own fears of accidents.

     When we say that somebody should be in present time we mean he should be in communication with his environment. We mean, further, that he should be in communication with his environment as it exists, not as it existed. And when we speak of prediction, we mean that he should be in communication with his environment as it will exist, as well as as it exists.

     If communication is so important, what is communication? It is best expressed as its formula, which has been isolated, and by use of which a great many interesting results can be brought about in ability changes. The formula of Communication is: Cause, Distance, Effect, with Intention, Attention and Duplication.

There are two kinds of communication, both depending upon the viewpoint assumed. There is outfiowing communication and inflowing communication. A person who is talking to somebody else is communicating to that person (we trust), and the person being talked to is receiving communication from that person. Now, as the conversation changes, we find that the person who has been talked to is now doing the talking and is talking to the first person, who is now receiving communication from him.

     A conversation is the process of alternating outfiowing and inflowing communication, and right here exists the oddity which makes aberration and entrapment. There is a basic rule here: He who would outflow must also inflow - he who would inflow must also outflow. When we find this rule overbalanced in either direction, we discover difficulty. A person who is only outflowing communication is actually not communicating at all in the fullest sense of the word, for in order to communicate entirely he would have to inflow as well as outflow. A person who is inflowing communication entirely is again out of order, for if he would inflow he must then outflow.

     Any and all objections anyone has to social and human relationships is to be found basically in this rule of communication, where it is disobeyed. Anyone who is talking, if he is not in a compulsive or obsessive state of beingness, is dismayed when he does not get answers. Similarly, anyone who is being talked to is dismayed when he is not given an opportunity to give his reply.

     Even hypnotism can be understood by this rule of communication. Hypnotism is a continuing inflow without an opportunity on the part of the subject to outflow. This is carried on to such a degree in hypnotism that the individual is actually trapped in the spot where he is being hypnotized and will remain trapped in that spot to some degree from there on.

     Thus, one might go so far as to say that a bullet's arrival is a heavy sort of hypnotism. The individual receiving a bullet does not outflow a bullet, and thus his is injured. If he could outflow a bullet immediately after receiving a bullet, we could introduce the interesting question, "Would he be wounded?" Ac cording to our rule, he would not be. Indeed, if he were in perfect communication with his environment, he could not even receive a bullet injuriously.

     An unfinished cycle of communication generates what might be called "answer hunger". An individual who is waiting for a signal that his communication has been received is prone to accept any inflow. When an individual has, for a very long time, consistently waited for answers which did not arrive, any sort of answer from anywhere will be pulled in to him, by him, as an effort to remedy his scarcity of answers.

     We have seen an entire race of philosophers go out of existence since 1790. We have seen philosophy become a very unimportant subject, where once it was a very common coin amongst the people. The philosophers, themselves, put themselves out of communication with the people by insisting upon Using words of special definitions which could not be assimilated with readiness by persons in general. The currency of philosophy could not be duplicated readily by those with relatively limited vocabularies. Take such jaw-cracking words as 'telekinesis"(*). While it probably means something very interesting and very vital, if you will think back carefully, no taxi-driver mentioned this word to you while you were paying your fare or even during the more verbose moments of the ride. Probably the basic trouble with philosophy was that it became Germanic in its grammar, an example set by Immanuel Kant. And if you will recall that wonderful story by Saki, a man was once trampled to death while trying to teach an elephant German irregular verbs. Philosophy shed some of its responsibility for a cycle of communication by rendering itself unduplicatable by its readers. It is the responsibility of anyone who would communicate that he speak with such vocabulary as can be understood.

     Now, let us take up the individual who has become very "experienced" in life. This individual has a time-track(**), it isn't anyone else's time-track. The basic individualities amongst men are based upon the fact that they have different things happen to them and that they view these different things from different points of view. Thus, we have individualization and we have individual opinion, consideration and experience.

     Two men walking down the street witness an accident. Each one of them sees the accident from at least a slightly different point of view. Consulting twelve different witnesses to the same accident, we are likely to find twelve different accidents. Completely aside from the fact that witnesses like to tell you what they think they saw instead of what they saw, there were actually twelve different points from which the accident was viewed and so twelve different aspects of the occurrences. If these twelve were brought together and if they were to communicate amongst themselves about this accident, they would then reach a point of agreement on what actually happened. This might not have been the accident, but it certainly is the agreed-upon accident, which then becomes the real accident. This is the way juries conduct themselves. They might or might not be passing upon the real crime, but they are certainly passing upon the agreed-upon crime.

     In any war, it takes two or three days for enough agreement to occur to know what took place in a battle. Whereas there might have been a real battle, a real sequence of incidents and occurrences, the fact that every man in the battle saw the battle from his own particular point of view, by which we mean severely "point from which he was looking", rather than his opinions - no one saw the battle in its entirety. Thus, time must intervene for enough communication on the subject of the battle to take place so that all have some semblance of agreement on what occurred.

     Of course, when the historians get to this battle and start writing different accounts of it, out of the memoirs of generals who were trying to explain away their defeats, we get a highly distorted account, indeed. And yet this becomes the agreed-upon battle, as far as history is concerned. Reading the historians one realizes that one will never really know what took place at Waterloo, at Bennington, at Marathon. In that we can consider as a communication one soldier shooting at another soldier, we see that we are studying communications about communication.

     Now we come to the problem of what a life unit must be willing to experience in order to communicate. In the first place the primary cause point must be willing to be duplicatable. It must be able to give at least some attention to the receipt point. The primary receipt point must be willing to duplicate, must be willing to receive, and must be willing to change into a source point in order to send the communication, or an answer to it, back. And the primary source point in its turn must be willing to be a receipt point.

     As we are dealing basically with ideas and not mechanics, we see then that a state of mind must exist between a cause and effect point whereby each one is willing to be Cause or Effect at will and is willing to duplicate at will, is willing to be duplicatable at will, is willing to change at will, is willing to experience the distance between, and, in short, willing to communicate.

     Where we get these conditions in an individual or a group, we have sane people. Where an unwillingness to send or receive communications occurs, where people obsessively or compulsively send communications without direction and without trying to be duplicatable, where individuals in receipt of communications stand silent and do not acknowledge or reply, we have aberrative factors.

     A man is as dead as he cannot communicate. He is as alive as he can communicate. With countless tests I have discovered, to a degree which could be called conclusive, that the only remedy for livingness is further communicatingness. One must add to his ability to communicate.

     For a great many years I asked this question, "To communicate or not to communicate?" If one got himself into such thorough trouble by communicating, then, of course, one should stop communicating. But this is not the case. If one gets himself into trouble by communicating, he should further communicate. More communication, not less, is the answer, and I consider this riddle solved after a quarter-century of investigation and pondering.

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*telekinesis. The production of motion at a distance by means beyond the range of the senses.

**time-track. The entire record, complete with all perceptions, of the individual's existence in the physical universe.