August 21st, 2022
- God sees everything you do, but "watching" is misleading, since it implies God sees it from the outside. God sees it in first person, out of your eyes.
What makes it like watching though is that God isn't steering, you are. That's what it means for there to be a you! - God is taking all the paths. God IS taking-all-the-paths.
And You take all the paths of your life, but you takes only one.- Choosing is Being
- Choice is not about which story plays out. In some sense, they all play out. Choice is about which story you want to see play out. Which story you want to live in.
- Sometimes I've started to think "fuck I made a mistake here" but some part of me senses that there's more of the story I need to watch before I try to undo the mistake.
- Like, "maybe this part of my story is a tragedy, but worse than watching Romeo & Juliet die is if the play gets called off in act 3 due to rain and you never see the ending at all"
- first of all there's a need to clarify if you're talking about something objective, that a video camera could have captured, eg "did the trash get taken out before 10am", and if you've got a difference there then either:
- someone is flat-out lying
- in which case you have a whole different kind of problem
- perhaps a compulsive liar or a sociopath, in which case you'd expect to see some a pattern of chaos in someone's past
- or perhaps someone is afraid of being punished if they tell the truth
- perhaps this is a realistic fear
- perhaps it's totally projection
- perhaps it's somewhat true, in the sense that they'd experience unbearable shame if the truth came out, even tho nobody externally would intend to punish them
- someone has a memory problem
- not particularly common in my experience, and usually in this case one of both people have enough uncertainty to be able to say "well I was pretty sure xyz, but maybe I missed something idk"
- the people involved are somehow confused which trash is being referred to or something
- standard rationalist operationalization of terms can basically solve this
- ie just get more specific until you find the confusion or you become confident there isn't a confusion
- But more commonly the gap is somewhere in frames
- like
- "did A shout at B"
- "was C disrespectful to D"
- "was E just trying to win status points over F in front of G"
- And so then you can find compatible worlds
- by reframing something like
- > F says > "from my perspective, I can't trust that you weren't just trying to win status points"
- +
- > E says > "from my perspective, I can't trust that you're not just projecting past coworkers onto me"
- This is not a great state of affairs, but if it's in fact the state of affairs you're in, this is at least a description of the situation that both parties can acknowledge!
- Like both parties can now go "okay, F can't trust there wasn't statusy stuff, and E can't trust there wasn't projectiony stuff. that's where we're at. what now?"
- and then there are moves available like
- respecting that each other can't trust that
- and expressing that they wouldn't want the other person to naively trust that
- and once each person feels sufficiently secure in their own perspectives (internally and in the social space) it becomes a lot easier to explore what truth their might be to the other person's
- like to explore whether there was some status move being attempted, or some projection occurring
- and of course, on the way, the participants can explore whether eg
- a new pithy articulation of why NNTD matters
- collective agency matters
- common values and goals are vital to collective agency
- but they're insufficient—you also need common ground in terms of perceiving the world together
- finding common ground is an important skill
- but you may also need to make common ground
- this involves welcoming different perspectives and holding them until a larger perspective emerges
- certain types of perceptions are hard to integrate and share
- particularly judgments, blames, and sometimes apologies
- part of why this is is that often these perceptions are closely tied in with some sort of emotional flashback that the person is bringing, that other people can tell isn't about them, and they don't want to participate in being inside it
- but that doesn't mean that the perception is invalid or "just projection"
- it is in fact that person's best attempt at making sense of the situation
- and telling them to set it aside is telling them not to trust themselves
- NNTD functions as a universal interface-creating process for allowing judgments, blames, etc to be welcomed, without having to diminish the meaning in them or shoehorn the perspective into some other language
- the simple transformation is just from "X" to "I can't trust that not-X"
- but X can stay as it is
- eg from "you're lying" to "I can't trust you're not lying"
- this transformation can also be performed mentally by the listener
- eg "she's saying I'm not listening... okay, she can't trust that I'm listening"
- (and this isn't so much a verbal transformation as simply a recognition of the actual state of experience of the other person that would cause them to say such a thing)
- being able to respect other peoples' distrust is in some ways an easy move since it's a simple matter of fact
- it keeps the statement full strength while completely removing the accusatory quality
- contrast "I think you're lying" which feels weak somehow
- it seems like an opinion
- "I think you're lying" "well I'm not; you're wrong"
- whereas "I can't trust you're not lying" ..."well I'm not, but okay I guess you can't trust what you can't trust"
- it's not an opinion, it's a perspective
- contrast NVC "I have a need for #unfinished
- (I'm actually not sure how to render this, but I've tweeted asking for someone to fill it out for me)
- but it's a very powerful move because it establishes a baseline of everyone's perspective being valid and welcome, and nobody being asked to trust something they can't
- which means that trust-building can proceed as fast as non-naively possible, which may be slower than people hoped especially if they're calibrated on naive trust
- but it means that the trust that is built is robust
- and the system is fully recursive
- eg if A says they respect that B doesn't trust them and B is like "I don't buy that" then A can then accept that B can't buy it. B may not be able to buy that either (in which case A & B might need some space) but nobody has to lose or back down
- or perhaps C says that they think all of this language about trust is secretly manipulation, and D internally goes "okay, C doesn't trust that I'm not trying to manipulate them by talking like this, so I guess I'm gonna have to find another way to talk" and externally says some other thing that makes sense