Evan Renaerts

Letting Go

October 18, 2007

Rainfall last night had the streets running like rivers; the storm drains plugged with autumn leaves. Everywhere there is a freeform mosaic of large and small leaves, orange, yellow, rust and ten shades of green.

I love the trees in every season and there is something of stark magnificence in their winter nakedness – striped of all fine presentations; their essential strength and texture revealed, and I’ve been wondering if it’s possible for humans to shed old ideas as quickly and freely as the trees shed their leaves each year.

When I say ideas I am including all of our assumptions and opinions and all of the various positions we all seem to relish taking up. Can we learn to drop them or to hold them so lightly that they do not confine or oppress us and others?

The thing I notice about our thoughts is that once a thought enters our minds, and we find it to be acceptable, we then begin to fit it into the already existing story that we have created about reality and this thought-story becomes a part of our identity. We see all of these thoughts, assumptions and opinions not as concepts we’ve taken on but as who we are – “attack my thoughts or beliefs and you are attacking me.”

What’s particularly troubling about this phenomenon is that the core of our assumptions about life and reality are all in place by about age five. By then we have taken on the culture we were born into, an entire set of unquestioned assumptions. We have taken on the experience of childhood, as seen through the eyes and consciousness of a child, with every fear and belief locked away, to be used for weighing the validity of all future concepts.

These primary experiences and the template they create function as an unconscious filter, sifting our moment to moment experiences and selecting what we will even entertain as possible ideas worth retaining. Whatever doesn’t match our template is rejected out of hand; in fact it may not even register. We may be deaf and blind to concepts that are too much at odds with our core belief system.

We are profoundly subjective beings, each of us seeing a slightly different world (maybe even radically different). How can any of us say that the other perspectives are wrong – who’s subjective experience of reality is the “right” one?

This is why people who speak the same language, maybe even from the same culture, have such difficulty communicating. We share a language but have no shared meaning. How much greater the challenge of communicating across genders, generations and cultures?

David Bohm, the physicist, had a particular interest in penetrating thought and language in search of shared meaning; he saw this as an aspect of finding the wholeness in existence. He called his work “dialogue,” finding meaning through words. This work has been picked up by many others and grown into what is now called “generative dialogue,” which might translate as, finding life-giving meaning through words.

The practice in this discipline is to be present, to make your own thinking transparent (here’s what I think and here’s why I think this), to suspend judgement about the thinking of others, and to remain open and curious. When people are willing to gather in this way their ways of seeing, understanding and thinking tend to transform significantly.

We are capable of deeply examining our ideas, assumptions and beliefs and we are capable of releasing them. New ideas and new understandings come to take their place just as new leaves emerge in spring. All that’s required from us is openness to the changing seasons.

Evan Renaerts
604 314 0835
evan@evanrenaerts.com