Person to Person

2000-1-6 11:20:00

Welcome back Lelona. Hope you stay a while.

Let us continue our discussion on the Principles of discovery. Here are ten points covered so far.

(1) Take the things you know (for reasonable surety) to be true and use them as a foundation or stepping-stones for testing additional truths.

(2) Be willing to let these foundation beliefs be either altered or dropped, as some of them are replaced by higher vision.

(3) The teaching should be in harmony with common sense

(4) It should increase the power of Decision and free will.

(5) It should bring you to a new level of awareness and usefulness.

(6) Seek out true sources of knowledge, study and incorporate them into your life. Knowledge dispels error and illusion.

(7) Gather all the reliable information you can about a subject of interest and try and see the principles suggested by the data. Then draw conclusions and run the conclusions by your soul and see if you receive a response.

(8) Follow all the aspects of the Will of God that is within your perception, and your sensitivity to the truth will increase.

(9) Another instrument of discovery of truth is the Process of Elimination.

How do you suppose this principle works? Have you used it yourself to discover truth? Many of us have used this in the game "Twenty Questions."

(10) Effective Communication
(A) Communication through perception of the outside world.
(B) Person to person communication.
(C) Communication through the soul.

In the article I called "Distortions from the Past" we covered how our perceptions and memory can distort our communication into illusion.

Now, let us go to the second category - Person-to-Person communication.

If a teacher has a truth to reveal, but finds that he is unable to communicate it in such a way that his vision is perceived correctly, then the truth stays with the teacher and nothing is given out. Perhaps the student, through misunderstanding, will decide the teacher is out to lunch and shuts off any reception that he previously had - all this because of lack of effective person-to-person communication.

Listen to any two friends have an argument. Often they are both making good points, but just don't understand what the other is trying to say. If they could only understand, perhaps they would realize that they do not disagree after all.

It is interesting that many of the arguments that have happened on this list have occurred because of lack of understanding of another's point of view. I'd say that over half the time I spend in handling confrontations is merely spent in clarifying something that I have already said, but is misunderstood by someone out there. This seems to have intensified lately.

The past couple weeks I believe I have had more of my teachings and thoughts misunderstood than any time since the list began. Thus this person-to-person communication subject is quite timely.

One of the key ingredients to effective person-to-person communication is that those attempting to so communicate use the same definition of words. This was the reason that I defined the word "channel" a while back so the group could use the word with unity of definition.

Let us pick a popular word and demonstrate how even our fairly enlightened group will have different definitions of it. That word is LOVE. The assignment for today: Give your definition of Love in 100 words or less.