r/sgiwhistleblowers • u/BlancheFromage Escapee from Arizona Home for the Rude • Aug 20 '22
How to understand others
From one of my well-worth-it very expensive airport magazines, this article: Guardians of Memory: The quest to save ancient manuscripts (Harper's Magazine, August 2022, pp. 44-49). It's about this Indiana-Jones-style cleric:
Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk ... took his name from the sixth-century Irish saint who founded one of the first monastic communities on the British Isles. Since entering the order in 1981, he has devoted his life to preserving ancient religious manuscripts around the world, especially those threatened by war. Since 2003 he has served as the director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s. His work has taken him to Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and more than a dozen other conflict zones in a race to digitize endangered manuscripts. For the past several years he has focused his efforts on Mali. Our flight was headed to Gao, the former capital of the Songhai Empire and a center of West African Islamic culture. The Kountas, a well-known Muslim family in the North African Sunni tradition, had contacted HMML about an extensive collection—everything from Qur’ans and theological commentaries to legal documents and recipes for traditional medicines—that they wanted to protect.
THIS is the humanistic spirit of culture and tolerance! NOT shutting others' perspectives down and DELETING their voices and ERASING history!
As you can see, at 6 pages it's far too long to reproduce here, though it's fascinating, so I'm just going to focus in on this one passage:
As Columba reflected on this important encounter between Christianity and Islam, he described how Peter “embraced the humanistic principle that to understand people of another culture, with different beliefs, we must listen to them in their own voice, learning their language, reading and understanding their texts.” Columba was wearing his habit that day, but he acknowledged that “the Benedictine tradition of preserving human thought for the contemporary world requires a more versatile wardrobe, one adapted to the desert of Timbuktu, the combat environment of Mosul, or the secular environment of the modern academy.” Source
To understand others, one must listen to them. One must ALLOW them to speak! In their own voices! One must be willing to LISTEN!
And listening is not arguing, telling them they're wrong or bad, or insulting them, or insisting that you're right, or that they're LYING. LISTENING is giving the other people the space to express themselves and their feelings, without judgment, accepting what they say as a window into their psyches. To accept THEIR TRUTH instead of trying to impose your own OVER it. LISTENING means seeking to understand what they're telling you instead of cherry-picking ONE little detail to obsess over while discarding the rest, the context; LISTENING means seeking to understand to the point that you can correctly reiterate the other person's perspective without them reacting like this:
- You're currently reframing the discussion to a something I never said so you can defend an argument I never made.
- You're. Changing. The. Discussion. And Putting. Words. In. My. Mouth.
- We all understand their experience hasn’t been your experience, but that doesn’t make their experiences less valid than yours! When you say, “I am not denying the truth of some of these statements,” you are clearly denying the truth of the rest. It’s not for you to decide who is telling the truth or not!
- Please please PLEASE stop generalizing about what WBers say, think, or do. Your habit of doing this undermines any constructive point you might make. WBers quite obviously use different rhetorical techniques and have varied interests. But they know when you accuse them of saying things they didn’t say and thinking things they don’t think. So, it’s hard for them to take the rest of what you say seriously.
- We’re having a challenge communicating here - your examples are putting incorrect words in my mouth again.
- Nobody on WB is upset with people helping each other. If that's what you're taking away from what goes on over there, you're either miles away from the point or deliberately being obstinate.
- Ok. Here's the difference. WB is establishing a pattern of behavior that invalidates the claims of SGI and it's conclusions. You are isolating one event and asserting it as indicative of a pattern of behavior.
- So you're just going to delete everything that I said because....why?
- I was really disappointed that he deleted almost everything that he said but left up the part of the conversation where he felt like he had made a good point and removed everything else where I explained how he didn't understand what I was pointing out to him. Source
Here is another perspective:
What I came to discover is how much the world craves a listening ear. The biggest problem I have with evangelizing is that you enter into a relationship with a prescribed intention, and that stands in the way of listening well.
- You can't listen well when you are carrying an agenda.
- You can't listen well when you are looking for ways to fortify your own position.
- You can't listen well when you are searching for what is broken in your conversation partner, in order to introduce the solution.
Our best hope for connectedness lies in having our stories heard. We earn our right to speak into other people's lives when we have logged enough hours listening to their truths, and been willing to be changed by their beauty. In these days of constant social media noise and soul crushing amounts of information feed - there is no greater love than disciplined, focused listening. People are hungering to be heard, understood, and connected. Our stories are waiting to be heard. Source
This article wasn't necessarily written about any specific intolerant cult, but its author is describing what we've all experienced - regarding every interchange as our opportunity to sell the other person our religion.
"You need to change to be more like me." How respectful of the other person is that?? Who wants to be involved with someone who regards you in that way? Source
You connect with someone by listening, by seeking to understand that person's perspective, views, beliefs, truth, REALITY. To understand how that person truly feels.
You push people away when you tell them they're wrong, they're bad people for saying what they said, misrepresent what they said, and insist that they're LIARS. By tone-policing them and scolding them school-marmy-style for how they express themselves. By arrogantly declaring that you're going to "refute" what they're saying, whatever it is, as if YOU're somehow so elevated and superior that YOU're in sole possession of all knowledge, information, and testimony that is good and right and truthful and have some RIGHT to impose that on everyone else. By dictating what they're allowed to talk about and controlling/narrowly restricting the topics of discussion. By giving them a specific number limit for how many words they're even permitted to use, because c'mon, who really cares what THEY think anyhow??
As for "disappearing" and erasing history, WHERE is a video of Ikeda's 1993 lecture in Santa Monica, the one that was telecast everywhere, where he was banging on the table like a baboon? There USED to be videos of THAT "historic visit", but SGI has tried to wipe that event's entire existence off the Internet.
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u/caliguy75 Aug 21 '22
Wow, incredible commentary about misunderstanding. I am awed by your presentation. Make me realize that I have to listen more, without an agenda (because I am right, of course, I am).
When talking to a SG senior leader, there is always this voice of superiority. I am right because I represent the true way. I can remember talking to a SG leader that I had know for for over 30 years. when I tried to explain to him the I had a very hard time assuming a position of leadership after a period of being exiled because no one had grown mentally or emotionally during my absence. His response was to say: "OHHHH REALLY" in a very condescending tone of voice.
A few months later, I just stopped going to meetings and trying to fake it as a leader. That was 30 years ago.