Category: Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML)
Morality
The physical universe is probably amoral.
The laws of the physical universe—the ones we know—do not say much about the evolution of life. And they have even less to say about the evolution of human societies and human consciousness.
Good moral behavior is essential for the scientific method to work. If many scientists lie or cheat, we won’t get good science.
On the interpersonal level, FIML practice both requires and encourages moral behavior. At first, partners may only notice that they are required to tell the truth, but as they continue practicing, they will come to want to tell the truth.
This happens for very concrete, even objective, reasons. I know that if I don’t tell my partner the truth, we will both lose. And if I do tell her the truth, we will both gain.
Morality in FIML practice—i.e. telling the truth—is not difficult because the units of a FIML discussion are typically very small, usually entailing just a few seconds of conversation/communication. The payoff for telling the truth in FIML practice, however, is huge. Partners will notice profound and beneficial changes in all aspects of their psychologies. This happens because partners’ senses of who they are will shift from a core with a secretive ego to a core with an interactive truth-telling process. Clean, clear language and a clear conscience transform human being.
FIML may prove that morality is fundamental to human consciousness. This statement is not based on feeling or wishful thinking because you have to behave morally to do FIML at all. For individual psychology, the payoff from FIML can be greater than from science in many important areas.
FIML notes
- FIML may look like low-hanging fruit, but it isn’t because the basic technique goes against normal linguistic behavior and can cause anger in someone who is not trained or has not entered a prior agreement to do it.
- FIML is based on simple principles:
- the basic communication group is two people
- the basic unit of communication is the “psychological morpheme,” which arises/occurs at a discreet moment in a conversation
- psychological morpheme are identified and discussed as soon after they arise as possible (within seconds in most cases)
- this is to avoid having them index large libraries of habitual thought and feeling
- partners must care about each other
- partners must agree to be honest about their listening and speaking
- this kind of honesty is quite simple; you don’t need to tell all but only what has bearing on what you said or heard
- if partners are honest with each other and sufficiently skilled to catch psychological morphemes very soon after they arise, they will come to see how fundamental to their their view of themselves and each other are the many mistaken interpretations they make concerning each other
- With practice, FIML insights can and will replace static assumptions about personality, ego, internal autobiography, and psychology.
- This happens because FIML practice will show both partners how mistaken interpretations occur and what their effects are.
- FIML encourages and greatly supports honesty or ethical behavior between partners.
- FIML ethics can be stated objectively.
- As partners practice more FIML, they will come to understand/experience how important basic FIML ethics are for both of them.
- FIML will not work if one or both partners is lying. A little bit of fudging will work for a while, but partners will soon realize that there is no need to fudge. Much greater gains for both of them will be made if they always do their best to tell the truth.
- Good ethical behavior is not hard in FIML practice because the “psychological morphemes” that are its basic subject matter are so small it does not feel threatening to talk about them honestly. Indeed, it is a great relief to talk about them and discover that they are/were mistakes, which is usually the case.
- FIML can be understood as a game between two people who have chosen to be honest with each other.
- As such, this game has rules that help partners deal with communicative ambiguity and misinterpretation as it occurs and in its smallest units.
- Playing the FIML game will clear up communication mistakes between partners.
- It will also clear up many emotional problems between partners, and the world(s) they live in.
Some basic points about speaking and listening
- Virtually all speech is ambiguous or subject to misinterpretation. This is especially true for interpersonal speech.
- Virtually all listening is hazy, leading to frequent misinterpretation. This is especially true for interpersonal listening.
Therefore, a major part of interpersonal conversation should involve clearing up misinterpretations that stem from speaking and/or listening mistakes.
It could be argued that clearing up such misinterpretations is a waste of time; that it is inefficient. In some practical situations, this is true. But in many/most situations it is a very efficient use of interpersonal time. If you don’t care about the person you are speaking with, there is not much point in clearing up misinterpretations. But if you do care about them and they about you, it is a wonderful use of time. What could be more interesting than discussing how you listen and speak to each other?
I believe that what we now call “personality” should not be defined in terms of largely permanent traits (the Big Five) but rather in terms of how we deal with speaking and listening mistakes in our interpersonal relationships. I say this because when you deal with these mistakes, your sense of who you are will change. Your behaviors and feelings will change because you will discover that much of what you thought you were was based on misunderstanding what you were hearing and how you were being heard.
From my practice of FIML, I have become deeply aware of how common speaking and listening mistakes are between people. Five or six of them in an hour of conversation is not uncommon. Since most of us have no idea how to identify and correct these mistakes, we use silence, avoidance, fake agreeableness, conventional behaviors, and so on to deal with them. But that way lies disaster because mistakes very often compound and cause even more problems. Not fixing them is like not fixing termites in your foundation.
Why is all of this not clear to everyone in the world? I do wonder. What could be more obvious than the irrefutable fact that we often speak imprecisely and listen carelessly and that even when we are precise and careful we still make many mistakes in understanding each other? How can it be that no one has figured out what to do about that (besides the dodgy stuff mentioned above)?
Sometimes I wonder why the ancient Greeks didn’t figure this out. They talked a lot but no one ever figured out how to talk well? I think the reason they didn’t is their society was hierarchical and so the hierarchical paradigm ruled even the speech of philosophers. In a hierarchy, the top dog is usually treated as if they are always right, though of course they are often wrong.
If you want to correct the inevitable misunderstandings that have occurred and will continue to occur between you and your SO or closest friend, do FIML. There is no other way to correct them. You have to use a technique that catches the mistakes as soon as they happen and corrects them quickly. If you can’t figure out how to do FIML from this site, send me an email and I will do what I can to help. FIML can be difficult to learn, but only because virtually all of our speaking and listening habits point away from it. Once you understand the deep significance of interpersonal communication mistakes and how to fix them, you will find FIML practice rewarding, efficient, and most interesting.
Repost: FIML and Bernard Lonergan’s GEM
One aspect of FIML that continues to delight me, even after years of practice, is how so little can give us so much. In a nutshell “all” FIML does is stabilize and clarify our communication with one other person.
FIML does this by removing error and resolving ambiguities between two people. FIML cannot do this perfectly, but it does it well-enough that partners will experience a level of mental and emotional clarity that had not been available to them before.
Repost: FIML over time
Long-term practice of FIML generates deep change in the human psyche. Social relations, habitual traits and attitudes, as well as ingrained emotional responses may all be subject to profound transformation.
The reason this happens is the basic FIML technique provides consistently good counter-evidence to habitual mental and emotional reactions. In addition, the technique itself teaches the practitioner’s mind–or shows it by example–to apply similar kinds of reasoning to many other situations that are not open to FIML dialog.
Reasons To Reject
Good post by Robin Hanson, well-worth reading.
An excerpt:
…we are in the habit of collecting reasons why things might be bad ideas… With a library of reasons to reject in hand, we can do simple pattern matching to find reasons to reject most anything. We can thus continue to pretend to be big fans of innovation, saying that unfortunately in this case there are serious problems.
The semiotics of rejection neatly explained: The “sign” (the new idea) “calls up” (indexes) a “library” of (preformed) “reasons” to reject it.
FIML practice, of course, greatly alters the status quo of how partners communicate with each other. And that changes how partners understand each other and themselves. And that is a huge benefit, but why believe me?
The temporal, semiotic matrix we all live in
The temporal, semiotic matrix we all live in is a work of imagination.
We project the future, imagine the past, and are restricted in the present. Another way to say that is we imagine all three, quite poorly.
The present is restricted, especially, primarily, because we rarely can speak freely. We can’t speak freely because we fear that what we say might be misunderstood, misremembered, remembered for too long, or told to the wrong people.
What we say today in a spirit of creative exploration may harm us in the future when it is taken out of context or given a different weight than we had intended; also, times may change and our words won’t sound right any longer.
This is a terrible situation for humans to be in. We do it to ourselves in many different ways. Speech should expand our degrees of freedom but it generally only limits them in most situations.
Interpersonal speech should be creative, exploratory, very often non-conclusive, wondering. Then why do we fear being misunderstood, misremembered, remembered correctly but out of context? Even by those closest to us? The reason is we do not know how to fine-tune our speech, how to adjust the erroneous minutiae of speech that lead to huge misunderstandings. A single word, a single expression can get you killed in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “polite society” it can ruin your reputation, cause you to lose your job. How can any of us be creative speakers, vibrant human beings, if we are afraid of making even a single misstep?
The place to look for fixing this problem is in the moment-by-moment exchange of ideas/memories/feelings that happen during communication with the person or people who are most important to us. And the way to do that is practice FIML. If you cannot bring the present under conscious control—that is, if you are forced to imagine what someone means rather than ask—you cannot be free. Your imagination will be filled with mistakes and self-deception. The same will be true for your partner. There is no way out of that trap except FIML or something very much like it. When the present is filled with illusions, so must be the past and future, everything.
FIML is practical semiotics applied to the psychology of intimate human communication
A “psychological morpheme” can be identified with or stimulated by a “sign” that “indexes” a “library” of “meaning.”
FIML practices interrupts the indexing of the sign before it calls up meaning from the library. This is a technical way to say what FIML practice does.
The terms used above, indicated by quotation marks, can be defined as follows:
A psychological morpheme is the smallest unit of psychological meaning. It is analogous to a morpheme in linguistics, which is the smallest unit of meaning in a language, or the smallest semantic unit in a language.
Signs are the basis of semiotics, which means “the study of signs.” Signs are generally understood to have three aspects to them: 1) the sign itself; 2) what the sign refers to; and 3) how it is interpreted.
An index is a sign or a part of a sign that indicates something else. An index in a library may refer to “Greek history” or a similar broad subject. When a sign is a psychological index it refers to a library of thoughts and feelings held in an individual’s mind. Your psychological indexes will be different from mine.
The meaning of an indexical psychological sign is the library of thoughts and feelings that it refers to.
Thus, using technical language, we can say as we did above that: A “psychological morpheme” can be identified with or stimulated by a “sign” that “indexes” a “library” of “meaning.”
That is a very dry statement. The value of that statement lies in this—during interpersonal communication, people very often misidentify signs or index them incorrectly. Therefore they call up libraries of meaning that do not apply to what was actually said (or signed) by the other person.
It is very common that a listener in an interpersonal communication will perceive a psychological sign as indexing a library of meaning that the speaker did not intend.
FIML stops this mistake as it starts to happen. When one partner believes they have perceived a sign that is identified with, or stimulates, a psychological morpheme in them, rather than call up the library that seems to have been indexed by that sign, they instead stop the conversation and ask their partner what they meant by the sign.
It is rare that the speaker meant to stimulate the psychological morpheme the listener thought they had. By doing FIML, the listener stops the complex indexing of that morpheme. By stopping indexing mistakes as they happen, partners will discover a level of freedom and mutual enjoyment that is unlike any other. When enough indexing mistakes are stopped, partners will discover that their “interpersonality” has changed for the better, as have their individual “personalities.” This happens because our senses of who we are are deeply dependent on our relations with other people. When the quality of your relationship with your partner is greatly upgraded, both of you will experience upgrades in many other areas of your lives.
In the context outlined above, we can say that FIML is practical semiotics applied to the psychology of intimate human communication.
How we process big ideas and the semiotics behind this
I want to discuss a few big ideas with the intention of showing how our internal or culturally underlying semiotics determine how easy or hard they are to accept.
Most thinking people can accept the possibility of atheism. And most atheists can accept the possibility of there being a God or gods or other realms. Atheists who are staunch physicalists may find it harder to do this, but most of them can.
Most thinking people can accept the theory of evolution.
Most thinking people can and do accept the scientific method. Fewer, but many, people understand the limitations of the scientific method.
The theory of evolution and the scientific method can both be stated briefly and in simple language. They are not hard to understand. The limitations of the scientific method require a bit more thought as do the nuances of evolution, but a crude understanding of either is not hard to achieve. Similarly, physicalism is not hard to state or understand.
The simulation argument (that we are living in a computer simulation) can also be stated briefly and is not hard to understand. Many people now accept this argument and admit that it is possible that we are living in a sim. In fact, some physics departments are actually studying the idea. Here is one example: Scientists plan test to see if the entire universe is a simulation created by futuristic supercomputers.
For most educated people in industrialized regions of the world, it is not difficult to accept or seriously consider any of the above theories or ideas.
All of the above ideas can be very revolutionary if you go from not accepting them to accepting them. They revolutionize our metaphysics, our sense of existential reality, our sense of what kind of a world or universe we are living in.
In contrast, ideas that are socially revolutionary are harder for many people to accept, or even consider.
It can be hard to have a calm discussion about inherent problems in the American capitalist system, for example. Or to have a reasonable discussion about the anomalies of 9/11. These subjects, though fascinating, are difficult for many people because they fundamentally threaten the power-and-money hierarchy upon which their social and psychological beings rest.
FIML is an idea that, like the ideas above, can be stated briefly in simple language. This does not mean it is not revolutionary. And this does not mean that FIML will not be difficult for many people to accept. It can be difficult because FIML practice revolutionizes interpersonal relations. I know that if it is done correctly it will bring about a revolutionary improvement. But viewed from a distance or as a mere idea, I also know that it will appear threatening or trivial to many people.
The sim idea was dismissed as trivial by many people just a few years ago. It has gained much wider acceptance since then. It is a delightful idea and not threatening or dangerous at all. It can renew your sense of who you are and where you are.
FIML practice is much like that. It is delightful and not threatening or trivial at all. It will renew your sense of who you are and how you relate to other people in wonderful ways. Just because an idea looks simple does not mean it does not have deep implications. If a new idea challenges our sense of who we are socially or psychologically, it will be more difficult to accept than if it challenges “only” our metaphysical or existential sense of who and where we are.
FIML changes your personality and sense of group allegiance
FIML practice changes your personality, your sense of yourself, because the basis of who you tell yourself you are changes. It changes from a more or less set story or static ideal of an elusive ‘me’ to an active function.
This happens because when you do FIML you interact with your partner on a dynamic, experiential basis. This basis is guided by a mutual agreement which admits far more objective data into your core self-assessments than is possible without FIML.
FIML teaches both partners the value of micromanaging their communication and being completely honest about every moment of communication, every ‘psychological morpheme’ that transits between them.
FIML practice changes your sense of group allegiance by gradually allowing partners to shift their sense of allegiance away from the static ideals of an external group to the dynamic, and deeply truthful experiences discovered through FIML practice,.
For example, if both partners are Buddhists, they will be able to gradually shift their understanding of the Dharma away from static, imitative notions of how to be, to much richer insights based on their honest interactive experiences.
They will grow away from reliance on two-dimensional ideals toward a mutually understood, multidimensional experience of Buddhist truths.
There is nothing wrong with ideals at the right place and time, but individual Buddhists must advance beyond merely acting them out, pretending they feel ways they don’t. The core of the mind is accessed in FIML practice because FIML accesses core communication processes. An individual all alone can gain many insights, but without the help of a FIML partner how can they check their insights?
Buddhists who practice FIML will find their practice informed by Buddhism at almost every turn, but this is different from modelling a static personality on static Buddhist ideals. It is so radically different, I suspect it is much closer to what the Buddha actually meant and probably a major reason monks traveled in pairs for most of the year. How can you know yourself, your being, your reality, if you aren’t sure of what people are saying to you or how they are hearing you? Not only not sure, but wrong much of the time? The answer is you cannot. It’s not possible.
FIML will wake you and your partner from that aspect of the dream. As the Diamond Sutra says:
All conditioned things
are like dreams, like illusions,
like bubbles, like shadows,
like dew, like lightning,
and all of them should be contemplated in this way
Psychology recapitulates sociology and vice versa. Groups of people when they are bound by static ideals/beliefs can be worse than individuals. Bad groups—and there are many of them—act like psychopaths.
Individuals within such groups may be ‘nice’ to other group members, but the group itself rarely will eschew all ‘callous disregard’ for other groups, the very definition of a psychopath. Even Buddhist groups can become like this.
The only ones that don’t are so small and weak, they dare not.
This is true of all groups, not just religious ones. National, ethnic, gender-based, racial, political, whatever; virtually all groups are based on static ideals and stories, which when internalized, reduce the functionality of the individual and corrupt their morality and capacity for deep insight, original being.
Science in many ways is an exception because as a group ‘science’ is objective, rational, parsimonious, evidence-based. In practice of course, the sociology of how science is actually done can be fraught with delusion. Science works very well at a high level of abstraction, but many individual scientists will feel low-grade sociological pressures and many of them will belong to groups that are based on ideals that are very different from science and that are sociopathic.
Yes, I believe all large groups are dangerous and will lead individuals to make serious ethical mistakes. And yet, we have to belong somewhere. It is difficult to be all alone. This is where FIML can help greatly. You can fulfill many of your group needs by making your FIML partner your core group.
FIML partners should continue being deeply informed by other groups—science, Buddhism, good politics, your friends and neighbors, wholesome religious beliefs, etc.—but they should not take in the sociopathic ideals of those groups.
Go to your temples, enjoy them, do the meditations, participate, but don’t be a robot. With the help of your partner, you will be able to separate out the dreams, illusions, shadows, and lightning of the Dharma from the profound reality of your actual lives as you are actually living them. You will discover, with the help of the Dharma, the suchness of your actual being, not someone else’s.
Ask your partner, ask yourself
Ask your partner: “How often do you deliberately send me ambiguous messages?”
If you have a good relationship, their answer will be “rarely if ever.” Some people may interpret humor or banter as a type of ambiguous message and answer differently.
To control for that ask your partner: “How often do you deliberately send me ambiguous messages that could reasonably be interpreted in a negative or unpleasant way?”
I hope that your partner will answer “very rarely, if ever.” If they don’t, maybe you two should pay more attention to the messages you are sending each other.
Let’s say that your partner answered “very rarely, if ever” to both questions, and especially the second one.
Now ask yourself: “How often do you receive messages from your partner that are ambiguous and could reasonably be interpreted in a negative or unpleasant way?” Or, more to the point: “How often do you receive ambiguous messages from your partner and interpret them in a negative or unpleasant way?”
You have to be honest with yourself and a good observer of your own quiet mind to answer that question accurately, truthfully. I bet most people are burdened with a fairly large group of ambiguous messages from their partner that they have interpreted in a negative or unpleasant way. You may not recall the actual message, but you will recall the interpretation.
Compare your feelings about those interpretations with your partner’s answers to the first two questions above. They told you that they “rarely, if ever” send you ambiguous messages that could reasonably be interpreted in a negative or unpleasant way.
And yet your mind holds many such interpretations. Either your partner is lying or you are doing too much misinterpreting.
Now turn the tables and take them through the same line of thought. I am quite sure that if they are honest, they will confess that they, too, are burdened with a fairly large group of ambiguous messages from you that they have interpreted in a negative or unpleasant way.
If you two have a good relationship, you should be able to get to this point, but even if you can’t get there with your partner, you as an individual, may be able to get there alone.
Now what do you do? If both partners see the problem, it’s easier to fix. If only one partner sees the problem, the fix is more difficult but still eminently doable.
What is the fix? Why do we have a problem like this?
The reason we have this problem is we do not pay enough attention to the minute bits of information that make-up all communicative acts. The fix for this problem is to pay attention to those minute bits of information.
How do you do that?
To answer, first let’s determine what we mean by a minute bit. Definition: A minute bit of communicative information in this context means the smallest discernible unit of psychological communication. Let’s call these units “psychological morphemes.” (In linguistics, a “morpheme” is the smallest semantic unit of language.)
A psychological morpheme is the smallest unit of communication between two or more people that carries an emotional charge, or that leads to an emotional or psychological interpretation. It is the smallest unit that can be interpreted by the hearer as either “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral.”
These units move between people very quickly. Within just a few seconds a psychological morpheme can move out from one partner, generate a new morpheme in the other partner, and get shot right back for a third interpretation. This is the primary origin of the vague and unreliable underbelly of so many interpersonal relations. If this underbelly is not addressed, it will grow and cause partners to suffer. The underbelly is the result of misinterpreted psychological morphemes, probably a great many of them. They tend to grow quickly and compound if they are not addressed.
How do you address them? How do you fix the problem?
The way you fix the problem is both partners must agree to pay close attention to all psychological morphemes. Both must agree to pay close attention to very small units of communication, units that are measured in seconds. If you hear something your partner said and notice that your mind is interpreting it as unpleasant, negative, or ambiguous, you must ask them immediately for clarification. If you wait, the psychological morpheme will lodge in your brain and you may not be able to remove it later. Sometimes you can, but don’t count on it. Ask immediately.
It is of great importance that both partners understand this and make a prior agreement to allow each other to ask as often as they like. Both partners must also make a prior agreement to be honest about what they meant. Once you get used to it, you will find this practice to be very beneficial and a much better way to talk as it allows you to take up a great many new subjects that will touch both of you deeply. More information on this technique can be found on our How to do FIML page and elsewhere on this site. This practice greatly supports Buddhist practice.
Semiotics
Biology is the study of living organisms. Yet we also use this term to talk about the biology of the foot, say.
Psychology is the study of the mental functions, behaviors, and emotions. Yet we also use this term to talk about the psychology of employees, say.
In like manner, semiotics is the study signs, symbols, meaning, and communication. Yet we can also talk about the semiotics of automobiles, say. When we do this we mean all the signs, symbols, semantics, pragmatics, psychologies, and so on that can be meaningfully and significantly understood in terms of semiotics.
When we use the term semiotics in this way, we find that we can say interesting things about how people communicate, or fail to communicate. We can invent a term like “semiotic bundle” to indicate the rather messy tangle of signs, symbols, feelings, words, and so on that comprise some identifiable class or type of “meaning.” As in the example above, we can talk about the semiotic bundles that involve automobiles—racing cars, motorcycles, electric cars, small cars, trucks, etc. Each of these entities is a semiotic bundle that has identifiable clusters of meanings and psychologies associated with it.
You can study any semiotic bundle in great detail or you can move the whole mass around in your head in a way similar to how you may move the semiotic bundle of Chinese history around in your head. In Buddhist terms a semiotic bundle is empty, dependently originated, dependent on conditions, impermanent, and subject to delusion.
A problem with semiotic bundles is we become caught in them and can’t escape from them, especially on interpersonal levels. And this happens because the words we speak are always referring to one or more semiotic bundles; they are always right next to semiotic bundles, are generated out of semiotics bundles.
If I am not able to get you to explain what the semiotic bundle that underlies your words is, then I cannot know your meaning reliably. I have to guess. Go ahead and ask your partner or friend a question about the semiotic bundles underlying their words. You will almost always find their their semiotic bundle was not what you had thought. Your guess was wrong. In interpersonal/emotionally-charged communications, this is a crucial mistake.
Even if your guess is only sometimes wrong, it can produce big problems. If your interpersonal communications are not cleared of wrong guesses (mistakes), you will begin to have interpersonal problems based on those mistakes.
It follows, then, that clearing up mistakes as quickly as possible is of vital importance to a successful interpersonal relationship. If we don’t clear up the mistakes quickly enough (usually within a few seconds), we will forget the origin of the mistake. By ignoring small interpersonal mistakes, we force ourselves to depend on unexamined semiotic bundles. These bundles may be public (known to many people) or private (known only to you). Either way, if they are mistaken, the interpersonal relationship in question will become less true, more deluded, less satisfying, more dangerous.
There is no way around this because this is how language and semiotics actually work. They don’t work in some other way.
Science, Buddhism, and FIML
In some ways FIML practice is a science.
Partners seek the best data available to determine what is being said and/or how they are communicating with each other. Their communication becomes highly objective in the sense that each partner trusts the other’s description of what they said more than their own subjective/emotional impression of what they think they heard. Based on this data, partners are able to continuously upgrade their understandings of each other.
FIML uses an extrinsic formula—the rules of FIML practice—to make this happen, and in this it also resembles science. FIML has an objective, clearly stateable and testable method or procedure for attaining its results. FIML results are also objective in that great satisfaction and better communication are measurable. FIML can be falsified by having many partners do it and not get good results, and in this it is also scientific.
In some ways, though, FIML is turned 180 degrees away from science. This is so because FIML does not have any extrinsic belief or value system that requires submission of the intrinsic, individual, unique mind of either partner. Partners who do FIML can only look to themselves to free themselves from the constraints of extrinsic beliefs, values, semiotics, behaviors, ideas, concepts, and so on. (This does not mean abandon the extrinsic, but rather become free of the constraints of the extrinsic. FIML practice, by paying close attention to speech moments, will help partners do this because they will see precisely where the rubber of extrinsic values meets the road of their self expression and/or listening.)
The FIML method gives partners the tools they need to perceive what Buddhists call the thusness of their unique individualities. The thusness or suchness of being cannot be apprehended through extrinsic semiotics, but can only be experienced by the individual.
Science, in general, does not give us insight into our suchness. Yet FIML practice and Buddhist practice, by using methods that are similar to those of general science, can. FIML differs from science in that it does not make any claims about what is objectively true “out there.” But FIML does claim that partners will vastly improve their communication with each other, and following that vastly improve their understanding of their existence, the suchness of their unique being.
FIML may constitute an improvement on traditional Buddhist practices because FIML uses objective rules to unite two people in the pursuit of truthful communication. It is different from the traditional practice of one person pursuing “truth” alone in that FIML provides the means for each partner to constantly check his or her work against the other partner. An individual alone is easily subject to fantasy and illusion. FIML is also different from traditional group practices where a group is led by a master or guru. In these practices, the master may be subject to the limitations of solitary practice while the group may be misled by that. Additionally group members will have a very strong tendency to base their understanding on extrinsic semiotics provided by the master, not the true suchness of their individual being.
Snowballing in FIML practice
FIML practice may seem easy if you just read a simple description of it.
A simple description, however, communicates as much by what it leaves out as what it says.
Many FIML discussions do begin and end with a simple query about what one partner meant and a simple answer that leaves no loose strings. A resolution is found almost immediately. That kind of FIML discussion is extremely important and common, but it is also very basic. It can be thought of as an important tool in your FIML tool chest, and also as a simple model for more complex FIML discussions.
Experienced partners will find that many FIML discussions quickly generate secondary contretemps, or mix-ups, as we sometimes call them. A contretemps, as we are using the word, means some sort of discrepancy between what is said or heard leading to a mistaken interpretation in one or both partners’ minds.
When secondary and tertiary contretemps appear in a basic FIML discussions, it is important that partners recognize what is happening. It can be frustrating and unproductive to try to explain a primary contretemps when your partner is reacting to a secondary one that followed quickly upon the first.
The best rule of thumb is to avoid emotional reactions while trying to understand where and when the speech, listening, or meaning got lost.
The basic FIML query is a model for all FIML practice. If you and your partner find yourselves becoming confused as contretemps accumulate and start to snowball, do your best to stop everything and go back to the beginning. Then in a neutral state of mind try to explain to each other how your discussion got off track. When a FIML discussion becomes confusing, you will almost always find that more contretemps followed quickly upon the first. By the time you notice what is happening, it is very unlikely that both of you will remember everything with enough accuracy to gain a perfect resolution of all that happened.
What you can do, though, is see the rough outlines of how your discussion got off-track. Use this understanding as the basis for your resolution of the snowball that you just stopped. Realize that what happened will happen again. Contretemps can come fast and furious, especially as confusion mounts and feelings get out of hand.
Always remember, contretemps are part of language and communication. There is absolutely no way that you and your partner will not experience a great many contretemps. They are completely inevitable and entirely natural. In my experience, it is common for an hour of conversation between two people to generate five or more contretemps. Of course, there can be great variations in this figure depending on the subject matter and the moods of the participants.
Main point is contretemps absolutely are going to happen to everyone with great frequency. FIML practice is designed to help partners understand how and why they happen and how to fix them. If you don’t fix them, you will bring about suspicion, shallowness, or some other sort of unpleasant and destructive weirdness in your relationship with your partner. Fixing contretemps is very fulfilling and enjoyable. Not fixing them leads to suffering. I do not think there is any way around this. It is built into language and how we humans use it.
American Buddhist Net 