I have no argument with these conclusions, but do want to add that our dependence on mutually understood contexts very often confines us to conventional semiotic interpretations. This is fine in many social settings–academic, religious, professional, etc. But with close friends or loved ones, it is a formula for interpersonal disaster.

As mentioned in other posts, the fundamental ambiguity of so much of our interpersonal speech requires us to form interpretations of what others are saying to us based on lousy data. We have to guess what they mean through context, facial expression, tone of voice, word choice, etc. And this means we are very likely to form false impressions even of those who are closest to us. Our false impressions will invariably lie somewhere on the spectrum that spans conventional semiotics to private neurosis. If you are guessing about what your interlocutor means you are almost certainly going to be wrong.

Being a little wrong can be fine for a while but it rarely stops there. The vast majority of us keep adding to our mistakes, eventually creating deeply erroneous impressions of each other.

This is so because non-FIML individuals cannot attain interpersonal certainty; they can only attain a semblance of interpersonal certainty that is necessarily made up of many erroneous interpretations of the world around them, their loved ones, and themselves. Their understanding of themselves and of others will necessarily be made up of either private interpretations (that are sure to be largely false and thus neurotic) or public/cultural interpretations that are similarly just as false and/or too narrow or generalized (science, mainstream psychology, professional societies, religious or ethnic allegiances, etc.) to be fully satisfying to the profound needs of the individual. This is not to say that many individuals living in conditions like that are not happy, but rather that their sense of who they are and what they are doing is false, utilitarian, exploitative, slavish, or otherwise limited in one way or another. Individuals in conditions like that cannot but offend their deep-seated needs for interpersonal honesty/certainty by compromising their individual understanding of what the world around them means by accepting either prepackaged public explanations (public semiotics) or making up their own (private neurosis).

Most individuals in the world are, thus, contorted in some way. Some are deeply unhappy because they can sense something is wrong but have no way to grapple with it. Others decide to make their way in the world as it is, fully accepting, even enjoying, their perceived “need” to deceive themselves and others, to manipulate others, to take advantage of them, etc.

I think the above roughly describes a big part of what is meant by delusion and suffering in Buddhism. Delusion and suffering constitute the first two of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth says unenlightened life is characterized by suffering or dissatisfaction. The second explains the first by saying, briefly, that people suffer because they become attached to delusions. Delusions can be egocentric, sociocentric, or both. They can be a private neuroses or the very public madness of a whole society, or both. However you look at it, individual human beings will suffer and experience discontent under these conditions because their core sense of what is true is almost constantly being violated.

In the Buddha’s day, you fixed this problem by becoming a monk. You can still do that today, or you can practice Buddhism as a lay person. My feeling is that if you only practice Buddhism and do not do FIML practice, you will make a lot of progress but remain unsatisfied. Societies today are so large and complex, it is nearly impossible not to be influenced constantly by them. If you can join a monastery or build a cabin in the woods, lucky for you. Most of us, though, will continue to live among unenlightened people and will continue to have deep needs for highly satisfying interpersonal communication with our loved ones and close friends. FIML practice fits in right there. Since so many monasteries today are burdened with the weight of their own semiotics, FIML practice probably would be a very good practice even for monks, if it can be arranged.

In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, there is a story about heaven and hell. In hell people sit at a dinner table to eat but are forced to use chopsticks that are so long they cannot put any food in their mouths, and so they go hungry and feel miserable. In heaven, conditions are exactly the same, but people there use their long chopsticks to feed each other, so everyone if well-fed and very happy.

FIML practice is like heaven. By doing it we feed each other and grow more satisfied as we come to understand what the real conditions of this world truly are.

Incidentally, I am of the opinion, and many share this opinion, that Buddhists can and should work with the basics of the tradition to make it speak to them. I am fully convinced that FIML practice will open a very large door for almost anyone who tries it. Non-Buddhists can do FIML, but so can Buddhists. I do not see any contradictions between FIML and Buddhist practices. And I do see many advantages to augmenting Buddhist practice with FIML.

I post this not so much for political reasons or to support Napolitano, but rather to illustrate how mass semiotics are manipulated by the corporations that control our news media. This is one aspect of the modern version of the First and Second Noble Truths. Delusion in Buddhism absolutely does not just mean being psychotic or “delusional” in the modern sense of the word, but also being ignorant or fooled by false information, manipulated into believing things that are not true. Modern Buddhists must have a sophisticated sense of where their news comes from and what the bases for their social/cultural beliefs are.

All words have words associated with them. Though we all share many of the same word-associations (coffee/beverage; booze/drunk; etc.), we also all have an abundance of word associations that belong only to us. I suppose this is fairly obvious, though I am not so sure it is well enough appreciated.

For example, we all know that coffee is a beverage and that booze can make people drunk, but beyond that each one of us has many other associations connected with these words, unique associations that have been gathered through years of experience. You may have pleasant associations with coffee and unpleasant ones with booze, or it could be the other way around. You may visualize the Caribbean when you think of either of these words, or Alaska. As the associations become richer and get further from the word that generated them, the psycholinguistic network they create will become increasingly complex.

If we could put diagrams of these associative networks on paper–including all of the images and feelings that go with them–I am sure that each person would be uniquely identifiable from just a few of them, in much the same way that we can be identified from our fingerprints. No two of us are alike in how we use and understand language.

The ways in which words, phrases, word-associations, gestures, tones of voice, expressions, dramatic poses, and so on strike each one of us is unique. This point is is more than touched upon by an Emory University study, Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex, that demonstrates that “texture-selective somatosensory cortex in the parietal operculum is activated when processing sentences containing textural metaphors.”

What this means is that when people hear a tactile metaphor (soft as silk), the brain responds, at least in part, as if the person is feeling silk. I would contend that this and similar sorts of extended responses within the brain (and body) are a huge part of virtually all interpersonal communication. In this context, what FIML does is allow partners to access these deep associations and sort them out rationally without becoming lost in different associative versions of the “same” linguistic event.

FIML does not have to always depend on language, but it helps to bring it back to the actual words spoken as much as possible because the other sorts of associations and emotions that are generated during speech events are simply too complex to sort out without a stable reference point most of the time. Actual short bits of speech provide partners with the best data that both can readily agree upon. The many associations that are connected to that short segment of speech are often a big part of the material of a FIML discussion.

The researcher, Anthony McCaffrey, says of his theory: “I detected a pattern suggesting that something everyone else had overlooked often became the basis of an inventive solution.”

This is exactly what FIML does. Normally, we all overlook the indisputable fact that we simply do not understand one another a good deal of the time. We get impressions, we get the general idea, we trust, we love. But we don’t have good, clear understanding of the small units of communication, out of which our impressions of others are built. With most people in professional or formal settings, this does not matter greatly (or maybe it does but it is hard to fix in those contexts), but with close friends, and especially loved ones, not having a clear idea of what they are saying can and often does have very serious consequences.

What FIML practice does is show us how to notice what we are overlooking in our communications with our partners. Since both partners are equal participants and both are active in the practice, it doesn’t take very long to get good results.

We have spell-checkers for writing and when they kick in most of us calmly–even gratefully–attend to the red lines under misspelled words. In speech, though, very few of us have the habit of even noticing when a mistake has been made, let alone correcting it. In fact, if one is pointed out to us, we might even deny it or try to justify it. Once we say something, we generally have a strong tendency to want to stand by our words as if we meant them even if we did not mean them, or only sort of meant them, in the moments just before we spoke.

What kinds of mistakes will you find through FIML practice? Pretty much any way you can think of to describe or categorize speech will constitute a way that mistakes can be made. A mistake might involve word-choice, tone of voice, pronunciation, a dramatic stance that doesn’t suit you or is misunderstood by your partner, not hearing, missing the main point, becoming distracted, using or hearing a word that carries an idiosyncratic emotional charge, speaking or listening from a point of view that is not well understood by your partner, and so on. Mistakes can and will occur in as many ways as you can think of to describe language and how it is used.

How often do mistakes occur? Often. In an hour of normal speaking you will surely encounter a few, if not more. Many of them are not serious and are of little or no consequence. That said, even small mistakes can have huge ramifications. If I misunderstand your respectful silence as indifference, my misunderstanding could start a division between us that is truly tragic because my mistake (however slightly I notice it) is 180 degrees off. If I see you behave that way again, I will be more likely to make that same mistake again and to feel it more strongly. It is tragic because I am interpreting what is in your mind good behavior as something that reflects negatively on me.

A speech act or an act of listening can lock our minds into a position that is dead wrong if we are not careful.

FIML practice prevents this from happening while at the same time providing a great deal of very interesting subject matter for partners to ponder and discuss. Speech can lock our minds into mistaken impressions, but it can also free us from limitations if we use it to do FIML.

In other posts we have called neuroses “mistaken interpretations” and generally used that definition in a context that supports the meaning of an ongoing mistaken interpretation. A neurosis is a mistake in thinking or feeling that manifests in listening or speaking and that almost certainly originated through speaking or listening. I would contend that many neuroses begin with nothing more than an innocent mistake. Once the mistake is made, it snowballs (especially in the mind of a child) until it becomes an established way of listening and speaking.

Whether that contention is right or wrong, only time will tell. For this post today, all I want to say is that FIML partners can and should expect to notice a good many small mistakes occurring almost whenever they speak together.

Generally, mistakes occur most frequently when we start a new subject or add a new factor to an old subject; when we want to say something slightly different from the norm; or when we want to add a slight nuance or qualification to something that was said. This makes sense because in these cases the innocent kinds of mistakes described above will be more likely to cause larger disturbances. If we are talking about something ordinary that we do everyday and I pronounce egg as aahg, my partner might not even notice. If the subject is new and we are still trying to get a handle on it and I mispronounce exaggerate as aahgzagerate, my partner might interpret that emotionally as an emphasis directed at something they had said. And this might lead them to speak with unexpected energy, leading me to conclude they were being defensive, etc. It just takes a small mistake to throw everything out of kilter.

FIML will get you to see how common these mistakes are and it will help you correct them. As you do this, both partners will gain great insight into how they speak, listen, and perceive each other. Once you get going, it is a lot of fun. I cannot think of any other way to accomplish what FIML does without doing it.

From a Buddhist point of view, FIML can be thought of as a sort of dynamic mindfulness done between two people and using language. It is a very intimate and beautiful way to be deeply aware of your partner and yourself. Those who have practiced traditional Buddhist mindfulness for a year or more will probably find FIML fairly easy to do. I hope that Buddhists will also notice that doing active FIML/mindfulness practice with a partner provides a way of checking each other–someone else will have something to say about what you thought you heard or said. It takes you out of yourself and provides wholesome feedback about the mind you are being mindful about.

Another way of looking at FIML is to understand that you and your partner are creating your own micro-culture. What is in your culture and how it works is up to you. I don’t think it will work well or last long if you do not have an ethical basis for it, but beyond that, the rest is up to you. As a side note, FIML cannot possibly work if one partner is dishonest. There is no point in doing it if you plan to lie. Please see How to do FIML for a complete explanation of what is meant by honesty and what its limits within FIML practice are.

As partners progress in FIML practice, they will notice that each FIML query becomes a sort of example that expands within the mind. Once you notice a mistaken impression in one area and have dealt with it, you will probably notice that that same mistake is being repeated in other areas. This will strengthen your initial insights and make it easier to correct other occurrences of that mistake. Once you succeed in this a few times, you will experience significant feelings of relief and an increase in mental and emotional energy because your mind is no longer working against itself in that area.

And all of this will make FIML practice easier and more fluid in any other areas that come up. Just knowing that you have done FIML successfully and that both partners are willing and able to benefit from further FIML discussions is a huge relief. Not much is going to bother either one of you because you both know that you have the tools to deal with whatever presents itself.

Remember that FIML is not about judging. FIML is not about consciously or unconsciously importing structures or judgments from the large culture around you into the micro-culture you are co-forming with your partner. An example of what I mean could be tone of voice. If your partner’s tone of voice bothers you, start a FIML query, but do not expect or look for them to apologize for it. Rather, look for them to explain it while you explain to them what you think you heard. If you heard derision, say, where none was intended, the mistake is probably all yours, though your partner may want to reflect on that tone of voice anyway. Both of you can decide how to deal with that tone of voice in the future. Do you want it removed from your micro-culture? Do you want to keep it but understand it differently? The choice is entirely up to the two of you.

Notice how important it is in this example that both partners be completely honest about what they meant and what they heard. If one partner lies and says there was no derision in their voice when there was, your FIML practice sucks. This is so very important because partners not only can but must co-form their own micro-culture. Another way of saying that is we do not want to import anything thoughtlessly from the larger culture. We want our micro-culture to be clean, clear, and honest. We want it to be something that both partners agree on without reservation or hidden motives. If one of you is lying, none of this is possible. A lie is essentially a hidden standard, a standard one partner imports in secret without telling the other.

Naturally, mistakes happen and people have their failings. If you are lying, reread How to do FIML and and stop it. Read also On the Importance of Honesty and the Decision to Believe. It is not that hard to be honest in FIML practice. But it is absolutely necessary.

To continue our example, another important point can be made about tone of voice in this context. Basically, who can say what is “derision” in someone’s tone or not? A flat sounding, no-nonsense, here-is-the-info tone of voice can easily be misinterpreted as derision when it is not. If you import the false notion that any flat, no-nonsense tone is derisive, right there you are placing a huge limit on you and your partner’s capacity for full and open communication. Not having any strong, no-nonsense tone in your micro-culture more or less condemns you both to not being able to get your own facts and make your own decisions for yourselves. It may very well cause or perpetuate a passive attitude toward your existence and your place in the world. Decide for yourselves what your tones mean and how to deal with them. Of course, we have to keep the standards of the larger culture in mind, but not so much that we surrender our wise autonomy to them.

FIML practice works because it integrates and focuses linguistics, psychology, sociology, and interpersonal communication all at the same time. We use our speech to find sound data points that can be calmly and reasonably discussed. This exposes our psychology while providing us with sensible feedback from our partners. This helps partners co-form their own culture without having to conform unnecessarily to the culture of someone else. And all of this frees our interpersonal communication from blockage, misunderstanding, fear, and so on.

Some of the common ways that contretemps are generated are:

• you are dealing with a new subject
• you are dealing with a different aspect of a familiar subject
• one of you is saying something close to but not the same as what the other is hearing
• one of you out of curiosity wants to revisit a subject but to the other it sounds argumentative
• one of you is not getting sufficient confirmation from the other about what you said, so the point gets repeated

Notice that the origin of all of these contretemps is mental; that is, not terribly emotional. Once the mind becomes confused, however, even if only slightly, it begins to mishear and misspeak, thus compounding the problem while adding emotional elements to it. This happens because interpersonal communication is a complex system. By complex system, I mean it is a system that changes very rapidly and which is characterized by initial starting points not providing sufficient data to predict later outcomes.

Once you understand these points, it should become clear why interpersonal relationships can be so difficult without FIML practice. In non-FIML speech, even very simple contretemps can, and often do, lead to deep frustration and strong emotions. Whether those emotions are expressed or not, they exist. Partners may feel resentment, anger, blame, self-blame and so on due simply to a mix-up of very trivial meaning.

Let me give an example. This morning I noticed that we had very few clean dishes (of a certain type) in our cupboard. They were all in the dishwasher. In my memory, that was the smallest number of clean dishes of that type I had ever observed in our kitchen. I felt curious about it and asked my partner why she thought there were so few. She said it did not seem unusual to her. I asked again, she repeated her answer and we went on to other matters. Sometime later, I became curious about the dishes again and asked her again if she knew why we had so few clean ones. This is where the contretemps began. When she answered, either she had an unconscious tone of impatience or I mistakenly heard a tone of impatience (neither of us is sure). Whatever the case, I thought she was probably feeling that I was blaming her and so my voice rose slightly with the vague intention of putting out a fire before it got going. I wanted to emphasize that I was just curious. Of course, that tone did not work at all but only made matters worse. At this point we began a FIML discussion and within a few minutes established a mutual understanding that was satisfactory to both of us concerning what had just happened.

The basic type of contretemps that led to that discussion was the second-to-last one of the bullet points listed above: one of you out of curiosity wants to revisit a subject but to the other it sounds argumentative.

I hope it is clear to readers that even small stuff like that can cause problems. And I hope it is also clear that you really have to take the time to figure it out with a FIML discussion. If you don’t, both of you will draw wrong conclusions from the incident or at least be vague about it. If we had done as most people do and just dropped the subject when it got a little out of control, I might have concluded that my partner was mad at me for being petty or blaming her for something when, in truth, I was only curious about a small domestic anomaly. She might have thought I was angry about something else and was using the dishes as a way to get in a dig. Even more to the point, neither of us would have had any way to be sure we understood each other or the incident in question. Most couples would probably go on about their day, ignoring the issue while waiting for positive feelings to arise again.

But that doesn’t work so well. It’s an OK way to go once in a while and for some situations, but if you do that a lot, you will develop deeper and much more serious contretemps in the way you relate to each other. In engineering, I believe, there is a saying that cracks never get better but only worse. In interpersonal relations, contretemps similarly don’t usually get better because they almost always lead to further mistaken interpretations. She is too sensitive. You are too argumentative. Etc. Fill in your own blanks. Once the contretemps develop and are not addressed through FIML practice, at least some of them will get worse.

To repeat: almost any particular contretemps is in itself trivial. But if we do not figure it out and resolve it, it stands a good chance of having deleterious effects on our relationship. Interpersonal communication is a complex system. It is dynamic and moves very quickly. We ourselves are often not aware of why we said something, let alone why our partner did. If we do not deal intelligently with those levels of communicative reality, we will run into problems, many of which will not later be soluble.

I can’t think of any other way to successfully deal with the complexity of interpersonal speech than FIML. Even if we have a video and a perfectly accurate transcript of what was said, when we play it back or read it, there will not be any way we can be sure of what was in someone’s mind as they spoke. The really deep and true–the most valid–level of interpersonal communication can only be accessed by quickly recalling the few seconds of speech that have just passed. Then, these few seconds must be discussed using FIML techniques. With practice, slightly longer time-frames can be accessed, and narrative and episodic memories can also be accessed and used, but that can be difficult and won’t work if the basic FIML technique is not part of your interpersonal foundation.

This is one area where I have a fairly serious disagreement with the way Buddhism is often practiced today–with it’s overly strong emphasis on being inoffensive when we speak. If I had done that when I became curious the second time about the dishes, I probably would not have said anything. But if I had not said anything, I would have not done so because I was falsely assuming my partner was overly sensitive and I would have been falsely assuming that my curiosity was somehow wrong or that I would not be able to make myself clear to her. That would have constituted a silent contretemps, a crack in our understanding of each other. On some later day, secure in my conclusion that my partner is overly sensitive, I might have widened the crack by withholding something else from her.

The preeminent virtue in Buddhism is always wisdom, not compassion, not being inoffensive, not necessarily being silent when you aren’t sure. I think FIML gives us a way to do wise Buddhist practice with our partners without resorting to external semiotics or judgements, or misapplied slogans.

By the way, the example of the dishes is a pretty good example of something that might prompt a FIML discussion. It was a trivial incident that, like so many others, might have seemed to be of no special importance. But it was also sort of a trap, one half of which was the incident and the other half of which was our, we humans, poor abilities at speaking, feeling, and thinking. If the incident is so trivial, it ought to be easy to figure out, right?

In this post I want to give a few examples of how this happens and then discuss how these examples are relevant to FIML practice.

Yesterday I took a walk with my partner. It was a sunny day and at one point the reflection of a leafless tree in the windshield of a car parked about thirty yards ahead of us caught my eye. Most of the car was in shade, so the reflection stood out prominently though I could not quite figure out what I was seeing at first. As I stared at the windshield, I saw the crude image of a human face. It flickered in my mind and changed several times as we advanced toward the car. Was I seeing a person sitting in the passenger seat, I wondered. Or was it something else? What I saw in the reflection was more of a proto-face than a real human face. My brain made several attempts to interpret the reflection as we drew closer to the car. At last, I saw that what I was looking at was a bright reflection of tree branches high above the car. The scene fooled me because the car was in the shade and the tree branches were in the sun quite high above the street.

This incident illustrates how our minds try to make sense out of what we are seeing even before we have sufficient information to do so reliably. Why did I see a person and not a cat or something else? The answer is probably that a person would be the most significant to me of the likely interpretations of what was there. In a kind of self-centered all-too-human way, I interpreted the reflection as an image that would have the most bearing on my life. In the case of that reflection, I was able to ascertain what the image really was. I remember being quite curious about it. It was kind of a delightful optical illusion which was fun to ponder once I understood it.

Another incident that happened yesterday also occured while I was walking with my partner. This time it was dark. On the street ahead of us she saw what she told me looked like a pillar that had fallen in the road. That would have been a real anomaly, so she kept looking at the object. Eventually she realized that it was a car parked in shadows in such a way that its outline had not been clear. Why she saw it as a collapsed pillar, I don’t know, but as I had done earlier in the day, she was quite curious about what she was seeing as we approached the scene. When she figured it out, she described what had happened and we discussed how it relates to FIML.

What she noticed is that since the anomaly was visual, it was fairly easy to figure out. She also noticed that her curiosity would have made her walk toward the pillar/car to see what it was even if it had meant going out of our way. Most of us, I think, would do the same. Visual illusions like that are not threatening and usually are fun to figure out.

If an illusion arises in what we think we have heard someone say, however, most of us will normally not pursue the matter. What kinds of illusions arise when we speak with others? Any interpretation that is wrong is an illusion. Any interpretation on the personal-public spectrum of possible interpretations that is not what our interlocutor meant is an illusion. Any interpretation founded on our own private neuroses or on public misconceptions instead of what the other person really meant is an illusion.

An example might be someone seems too familiar when they greet you, so you interpret their behavior as being disrespectful, flirtatious, or nutty when the person is just feeling good because of something that had recently happened. In real life, you usually can’t figure those sorts of illusions out unless they occur with your FIML partner. In real life, that sort of thing occurs many times per day and is compounded by as many people as we deal with. Just being “positive” and “a friend to all” doesn’t solve the problem either because maybe that person actually was being disrespectful or flirtatious or nutty or all of them at once. You will be deluded, to some extent, no matter what you conclude because you have no way of knowing what really happened, what was really in their mind. That is the vague and irresolute reality in which we all live. We deal with that poor level of mutual understanding by emphasizing professional standards, good manners, shared beliefs, and so on. This works well enough in the public sphere but will lead to sorrow in your private life.

A third incident occurred later that evening. As we were getting ready for bed, my partner noticed a car outside stopped near our driveway with its motor running. It was getting late, so she wondered about it. Was someone coming over? Were they turning around? The car was pretty rundown and noisy so it looked maybe a little suspicious. My partner kept watching. After a few minutes, our neighbor’s daughter got out of the car and waved goodbye to the driver. All questions answered. This is another example of how we can usually have our curiosity about visual events satisfied while it is much more difficult to do the same with verbal events.

If you can understand this and notice stuff like this in your own life, you will probably be able to see what the value of FIML is and how and why it works so well.