The
communication cycle is fairly easy to
understand.
Within any noisy universe,
a sender encodes a verbal or nonverbal
message, sends it through any message channel
to a receiver, who decodes the message. The
receiver then encodes a reply, which is
returned through a feedback channel to the
sender, who decodes it, deals with it
somehow, and perhaps sends another message.
Without a full loop, communication is
incomplete.
Our individual acts of
communication are how each of us makes sense
of reality. Our "sense-making" communication
habits form all our relations.
The way individuals
interact in families is reproduced within the
formal and informal organizations in their
lives. These groups construct the
institutions comprising the communities
composing the diverse cultures and societies
constituting our nations and our world. As
the dominant species on earth, our habitual
ways of interacting are imprinted on the
planetary systems, reflecting our choices.
Witness global warming amid global
whining.
Communication spins the
web of life. All life is interactive.
How we communicate with
ourselves and with others produces the nature
of the society and environment where we live
and breath and have our being. "Senders" and
"receivers" interacting (like yin and yang)
generate life itself. Our interactions create
our realities,
Conflicts can stem from
encoding and decoding errors or assumptions.
A filtering system has evolved to help us
humans deal with sensory overload. Every
outgoing and incoming message gets filtered
through the cultural and genetic biases
implanted in our minds for pattern
recognition. Unconscious barriers to
intrapersonal and interpersonal communication
tend to fragment our awareness. We filter out
data incongruent with our mindset. Divisions
persist between our perceptions and reality
(if "reality" may be known).
We tend to evolve what I
call split perceptions to hide from
ourselves the truths about reality that we
wish to avoid. Our split perceptions enable
us to believe that we live separate and apart
from others in our world, that we can get
away with any outrage to ourselves or to
others. We suffer from the delusion that we
may escape the consequences of global
interactivity. We see what we want to see and
hear what we want to hear. We pretend we are
not pretending. We are blind by choice.
Ignorance is bondage.
Understanding
interactivity is the key to healthy
communication. We can transform our selves
and our world by changing the way we
communicate with others and ourselves. Every
thought, word and deed sends out ripples
altering life for everyone. That's the nature
of communication. That's the nature of life
in an interactive universe. Why not accept
it? A global sense of our deep interactivity
inspires responsible and mindful self
rule.
--
Judah
Freed . .
. . . . . . . . . .
