Tag: psychology
Humans are fractals of their societies
The microcosm of the individual human is made of the same stuff as the macrocosm of the society to which it belongs. The two are a fractal set displaying similar patterns.
This makes sense since both individuals and their societies use the same networks of semiotics to communicate.
In many ways, societies are less complex than individuals. In the sense that a society is an assemblage of many individuals, society is more complex. But in the sense that a society is held together by a network of communicable ideas, or semiotics, society is frequently less complex than many of the individuals living within it.
For example, most societies have very simple “biographies” (their always slanted histories), while many individuals have nuanced biographies that encompass change, growth, and contradiction.
A recent study of people’s attitudes towards atrocities points to this truth by showing that “…the way people’s memories are shaped by selective discussions of atrocities depends on group-membership status.” (Source)
In-groups forget bad things they have done—or “morally disengage” from them—while clearly remembering bad things that out-groups have done. This is a major element of all group stories.
I bet you cannot name a single society that has anything even approaching a fully nuanced view of itself on almost any matter, let alone its history. Individuals often “morally disengage” from their past acts, but it is not common for them to do so to the same extent as the societies they live in.
It hardly matters, though, if the social story is about atrocities or trivia. I have actually witnessed fairly heated arguments over who first invented pasta, the Chinese or the Italians. And another one on who first invented dumplings, Poles, Jews, or Chinese. The origin of beer is another subject that can get people going.
It makes sense that societies’ stories about themselves be as simple as they are false because they serve as lowest-common-denominator social bonds. Indeed, it probably even helps that these stories be knowingly false as the bond will then require an even deeper level of commitment.
Of course, some of the energy for falsification and simplification comes from one group’s story needing to counter another group’s story. Yes, we did that to you, but you did this to us first.
In that, societies further resemble individuals because that’s what we do as individuals, too. Only individuals who are very well disposed toward each other and who try hard ever overcome the need for false stories between them.
FIML practice provides individuals with a means to observe the smallest fractal details of their individual stories and correct them where they are wrong. FIML partners would do well to take what they have learned as individuals and apply it to the stories told by the society in which they live. You will surely find a macrocosm of yourself in the absurdities of whichever group you “identify” with.
Maybe people in the future will be better able to see how ridiculous our stories are and better able to deal with the complexities that lie beyond them. For now, maybe we can at least start getting a fuller, truer view of what is happening in and around us.
I doubt we can do this on a societal level any time soon because the LCD stories will always reassert, but as individuals with a good partner I believe we can. This is probably a main reason that monastic and reclusive traditions have been practiced all over the world. Groups are ignorant, violent, stifling, and crazy. Individuals simply have a better chance at going beyond their simple patterns by acting on their own.
The fractal of the individual is generated by society but it is prone to being trapped by it as well.
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Edit 6/13: When good people do bad things. We all know that people in groups can behave badly. This article is about a study that uses a plausible fMRI method to measure some of the basic processes underlying immoral behavior. In my view, the situation is not much different when the group is a large culture, rather than a small number of participants in a laboratory experiment. Cultures not only permit bad behavior toward out-groups, but they also numb us to what our in-group is doing.
Do we have an inner child or an inner dog?
Inner child is a widely recognized term that implies the presence in adults of unresolved problems or underdeveloped traits rooted in childhood.
Inner child further implies that full development of the adult requires “reparenting” or “retraining” the inner child as a way of resolving juvenile problems and advancing to full adulthood.
My FIML partner has been studying dog training and last night told me how much she thought effective dog training resembled FIML practice.
In a nutshell, FIML practice trains your inner dog, not your inner child.
For example, to stop bad behavior in a dog—say, barking at cars going by—its human trainer has to know how to intervene as quickly and as calmly as possible the moment that behavior arises. Quick intervention ensures that the dog knows what the trainer wants them to do. If you wait too long (as little as a few seconds), the dog won’t know what you want them to do. They will have forgotten the precise source of their behavior and thus any corrections they try to make will not address the root problem, which is they have interpreted a signal in the world (cars going by) as something they must react to.
When the trainer is calm and friendly as well as quick to intervene, they will prevent the dog from reacting to their (the trainer’s) excessive emotion, be it anger, panic, or an unskilled flustered state of mind.
The same sort of thing happens in FIML practice. When one FIML partner queries the other, the first thing they are doing is stopping their (own) inner dog before it starts behaving badly. They are intervening as soon as they feel their inner dog stir and start to rise from the floor (but before it starts barking).
The second thing they are doing is calmly asking their FIML partner a question about a very specific and precisely identified moment. They are gathering good data on that moment from their partner and will compare it to what their inner dog thought it saw or heard.
A FIML partner is in essence asking, should I be reacting right now as my inner dog is telling me or has my inner dog misinterpreted a signal coming from you?
The dog for much of its life has barked at cars going by, while the person for much of their life has reacted with sadness or anger to their interpretation of certain signs or signals (semiotics) coming from other people.
When you query your FIML partner about a sign that you have been reacting to for much of your life and discover that the sign you received was not the sign they sent, you will be like the dog who comes to understand that there is no reason to bark at cars going by, no reason to rise from the floor at all.
People are semiotic animals more than dogs, so we react very strongly to social semiotics. But we are just like dogs in that most of our reactions to semiotics can be changed without much effort as long as we arrest those reactions quickly and replace them with a more reasonable response.
My partner remarked last night especially on how easily a great deal of bad dog behavior can be corrected if the intervention of the trainer is quick and the dog is shown a more appropriate response. Oftentimes, just a few good interventions will correct the bad behavior.
What are some classic mistakes bad dog trainers make? They try to comfort or calm the barking dog by holding it and telling it everything is OK. That is, they treat it like a child. But all that actually does is reward the dog for the behavior they want to stop.
So if you reward yourself (your inner child) by indulging in childish feelings of abandonment when you misinterpret or over-interpret a sign of rejection, you are actually rewarding yourself for being wrong, for having an erroneous (or neurotic) interpretation of communicative signs.
It is better to treat your rapid and unthinking “limbic” responsivity like a dog than like a child. And rather than reparent your inner child, it is better to use good dog training techniques to retrain the actual semiotic responses that are the real roots of unwanted behaviors.
The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)
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Triggers and microaggression
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
Memory is not reliable but changes to fit present circumstances
“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (Source)
The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.
One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.
If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.
Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.
Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.
In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.
All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.
Subjectivity and speech
What is the relationship between subjectivity and speech?
Speech is a narrow band compared to subjectivity.
When we awake early in the morning and lie alone in the dark, we often experience the richness of our subjectivity. It can be scary or peaceful or angry or blissful. It can be rich with imagery or memory, sounds, music, emotions.
Then something in us moves and we get up.
Normally, our subjective world starts to close down at this point, especially if we are living with someone. At some point, we will start talking, maybe drink some coffee, while we begin the process of fully awakening the communicative mind. I want to avoid calling this communicative aspect of our minds “objective” because there is nothing particularly objective about it and there is nothing particularly non-objective about our “subjective” mind as described above.
The subjective mind that we experience before arising or in meditation is like a vast mountain range, while the communicative mind—the speaking and listening mind—is like a tiled patio with a few chairs and a table within that mountain range of subjectivity.
Neither of them is better or worse and neither of them can be avoided or removed. Still, the speaking mind does tend to ignore the mountains, our subjectivity, while the subjective mind generally finds it hard to speak at all.
In FIML practice we place great emphasis on removing mistakes while we are speaking, listening, or communicating. This is like cleaning up the patio, making sure the chairs do not have rain on them or that the table does not wobble. Once the patio has been cleaned up, it is time to bring in more communion with your partner about the mountains all around you.
When your partner looks at the mountains—their subjectivity—it’s not the same view that you will have of your subjectivity. But still you are both human and you surely care about one another, so in many respects your subjectivities are not so different. Can you find more ways to share them? Can you find more ways to refer to them as you speak and listen?
FIML practice is capable of completely removing the snowball effects of inevitable mistakes in communication. Once you can do that, start adding more subjectivity, more of the mountains and happy clouds around you.
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A very simple example of what FIML does
This is a simple, concrete example that is best understood as a material analogy for what happens in a FIML discussion or query.
I wanted some fresh local yogurt and we also needed some cheese. The place that sells the yogurt I like has only a few kinds of very expensive cheese.
My partner and I discussed the merits of going to the yogurt store and paying extra for cheese versus driving to a different store that has a better cheese selection but does not have the fresh yogurt.
Since the yogurt store was on the way to the cheese store, we stopped in but found that they were out of yogurt and also had no cheese.
Oh well. We went to the cheese store and got the cheese and a couple of other items we needed.
In the car we noticed that our having stopped to look for the yogurt in the yogurt store made it possible for us to dismiss that option completely from out minds. Had we not stopped, we might have wondered if we had missed a chance to get the fresh yogurt and probably would have wondered about it.
Our ability to dismiss the yogurt option and not have it be a small shadow in our minds was gained only because we had actually stopped at the yogurt store. If we had not stopped and gone only to the cheese store, we would not have known that the yogurt store didn’t even have any yogurt.
Like I said this is a very simple example.
Now, consider that instead of yogurt or cheese we are working with emotions and human perceptions. A FIML query works in a way that is analogous to stopping at the yogurt store.
Yes, it cost us some energy to stop at the store, but it saved us the energy of thinking that the yogurt was a possibility.
If instead of yogurt, I am wondering if my partner disapproves of something I said, I can ask her (stopping at the yogurt store) or refrain from asking her (not stopping).
If I ask her, it costs us both some energy, but saves me some worry and possible defensive behavior which will likely snowball and cost us even more energy.
Please put in your own emotions or concerns into this example. Isn’t it better to ask about them than not ask?
When we have many small things in our minds that we never ask anyone (including our partner), we begin living in a fantasy world or a world that is simplified to conform to simple standards made up by other people.
FIML clears up problems by catching them when they start. The FIML technique is designed to facilitate quick interventions so snowballing never gets started.
It’s not hard to do FIML if you understand what its purpose is. The hard part about doing FIML is it goes against a great deal of normal human training. Rather than ask, most of us will skip going to the yogurt store.
When we do that hundreds of times with someone, small divisions get larger and larger. When they get really big it is very hard to analyze them and we become their victims.
From a Buddhist point of view, FIML can be understood as partnered-mindfulness. As such, it helps partners not slide into solipsism but to accurately bring objective information into their subjective worlds.
Some basic ways to understand FIML
FIML practice first generates and then depends upon clear communication between partners.
When clear communication is established, FIML increases mental clarity and positive feelings. Another way of saying this is FIML practice reduces both mental confusion and neurotic feelings.
Thus, FIML can be fairly easily explained or understood by referring to these three basic outcomes:
- clear communication
- elevated or enhanced mental clarity
- increased positive feelings
Stated in the negative, these same three basic outcomes of FIML practice are:
- elimination of communication blockages
- reduction or elimination of metal confusion
- reduction or elimination of neurotic feelings
FIML practice does not emphasize a difference between private confusion (neurosis) and public confusion (irrational semiotics of a culture or society). We do recognize that there is a difference between the public and the private, but this difference lies on a continuum: a private neurosis is often shaped by cultural semiotics while cultural semiotics are often grounded in the neurotic feelings of many individuals.
A good deal of psychological reasoning today is based on what is “normal”, what “most people feel”, and/or what deviates from that or interferes with an individual’s ability to function within “normal” ranges. FIML recognizes social norms, but partners are not asked to judge themselves on that basis. Nor are partners encouraged to label themselves with psychological terms. Rather, partners are encouraged (and shown how) to discover for themselves how to understand themselves based the three outcomes described above. We are confident that the high ethical standards required to do FIML successfully will show partners with great clarity that sound ethics are essential to human fulfillment.
FIML is a liberative practice because it frees partners from mental confusion, emotional suffering, and the hardships of unsatisfying communication. Since FIML works with real data agreed upon by both partners it avoids idealism and wishful-thinking.
FIML enhances traditional Buddhist practices because it allows partners to share their introspections while checking each others’ work. When we speak an inner truth to someone who we know will understand and who cares about us, that inner truth will deepen and benefit both partners. Based on the three outcomes described above, FIML partners will be able to create a sort of subculture of their own founded on standards that they both (all) find fulfilling and right.
In most of our descriptions of FIML, we have tried to use ordinary words while providing clear definitions of them if they have a special meaning in the context of FIML. One word that is especially important is neurosis. By this term, we mean “mistaken interpretation” or “ongoing mistaken interpretation.” We use the word this way because it is a basic tenet of FIML that most, if not all, mental and emotional suffering is generated by communication errors. We proudly use the words error, mistake, wrong, erroneous, incorrect and so on when describing communication problems because communication problems almost always are grounded in mistakes: someone heard wrong, interpreted wrongly, spoke wrongly, and so on. FIML practice shows partners how to identify and correct these mistakes the moment they appear, thus forestalling the generation or perdurance of full-blown neurosis.
FIML is less concerned with long explanations about the past and more concerned with the dynamic moment during which partners communicate and react to each other based on real data that can be retrieved and agreed upon by both of them. The mental and emotional clarity that results from this practice is highly rewarding and within the reach of most people with the basic necessary conditions–a trusted partner, enough time to do the practice, mutual caring.
If we can have illusions about our bodies, how much more can we about other people?
A recent study, The Marble Hand Illusion, demonstrates that by simple manipulation of perceptual input, people can be induced to change their perceptions of their own bodies.
The authors state that:
“This novel bodily illusion, the ‘Marble-Hand Illusion’, demonstrates that the perceived material of our body, surely the most stable attribute of our bodily self, can be quickly updated through multisensory integration.”
The full abstract says:
Our body is made of flesh and bones. We know it, and in our daily lives all the senses constantly provide converging information about this simple, factual truth. But is this always the case? Here we report a surprising bodily illusion demonstrating that humans rapidly update their assumptions about the material qualities of their body, based on their recent multisensory perceptual experience. To induce a misperception of the material properties of the hand, we repeatedly gently hit participants’ hand with a small hammer, while progressively replacing the natural sound of the hammer against the skin with the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of marble. After five minutes, the hand started feeling stiffer, heavier, harder, less sensitive, unnatural, and showed enhanced Galvanic skin response (GSR) to threatening stimuli. Notably, such a change in skin conductivity positively correlated with changes in perceived hand stiffness. Conversely, when hammer hits and impact sounds were temporally uncorrelated, participants did not spontaneously report any changes in the perceived properties of the hand, nor did they show any modulation in GSR. In two further experiments, we ruled out that mere audio-tactile synchrony is the causal factor triggering the illusion, further demonstrating the key role of material information conveyed by impact sounds in modulating the perceived material properties of the hand. This novel bodily illusion, the ‘Marble-Hand Illusion’, demonstrates that the perceived material of our body, surely the most stable attribute of our bodily self, can be quickly updated through multisensory integration.
If people can change physical perception of their hand in five minutes, our sense of the world around us must be as susceptible.
Our sense of our bodies in the world depends on the world around us. Our sense of our minds in the world depends on the people around us. We speak to ourselves with the same language we use with others.
If our core interpretations of self and other are wrong, we will make downstream mistakes and bring suffering to ourselves and others.
If those same interpretations are right, we will make downstream improvements.
The world answers us through science, reason, and imagination. Other people answer us on their own volition. We can get immediate truthful responses from them if they are willing.
Other people are the only entities in the world that can communicate in detail with us about their interpretations at a level commensurate with our own minds.
Since our interpretations include them, we can best improve those interpretations with the help of them.
Idiolects and idiotics
An idiolect is the “dialect” of one person. It is unique to that person. We all speak an idiolect unique to us. No one else speaks in exactly the same way as you do. In fact, the varieties of idolects among speakers of even the same dialect can be quite pronounced, to say nothing of speakers who have been acculturated to different dialects.
Virtually, the same thing is true for our use and understanding of semiotics. Each one of us has a unique tangle of semiotics even if we share the same culture. Even if two people were born and raised in the same very strict cult, they will have different takes on their “shared” semiotics; they will see thier semiotics in individual and unique ways.
The term “idiolect” is a blend of the prefix idio, which means “own, personal, distinct to the individual” and the suffix lect, which is taken from the word “dialect.”
In that spirit, I want to coin the term “idiotics” to mean “the semiotics unique to one person.” Each and every one of us has a very complex idiotics.
It is profoundly important to know this and to understand it deeply.
We can talk at length about the generalities of our idiotics and profit from discussions like that. But we will never fully grasp what our idiotics do, how they function, and when they come into play unless we tackle them the moment they arise.
This is so because idiotics are very complex, with many parts bonded and tangled together in unique ways. The only time we can really get anything approaching an objective view of them is when they arise as small bits within real-life conversations. We can only see them when they function in the moment, when they touch our emotions in the moment, when they determine how we hear, speak, or respond in the moment.
General discussions lead away from idiotics because general discussion by their very natures (being general) are not unique to the individual. By definition, generalities are not idiotics.
This is one reason it is possible (indeed, common, I believe) for individuals to feel horribly lonely while in the company of other people. Or to feel horribly lonely when trying to explain yourself as you get more and more lost in generalities.
If you are never able to deal with, contend with, analyze, or remark upon you or your partner’s idiotics, you will have a bad time.
FIML practice works because it works with idiotics. Ironically, working with your own and your partner’s idiotics will make you much smarter.
Dutch patriots turning the tables
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This response is inevitable. The sooner it happens full-bore, the better. The longer you wait the more violent it will be. These are not far-rightists. They are normal human beings sensing their annihilation and reacting. ABN
Being able to do FIML
- Being able to do FIML means that you have developed a skill or trait that did not exist in you before. The ability to do FIML is a functional “state of mind” that emerges from other states of mind–from consciousness, awareness, self-reflection, self-criticism, communication, language use, emotion, etc.
- Doing FIML will change the way you communicate, especially with your FIML partner. It will change the way you view language and its uses.
- Since FIML depends on real data agreed upon by both partners and since FIML can convincingly change how we perceive ourselves and our partners, it can give us new perspectives on psychology and/or any activity that depends on language/communication.
- The use of a linguistic/semiotic vocabulary in FIML allows us to classify a great deal of human cognition, psychology, and behavior as lying on a spectrum of public—private semiotics.
- This perspective allows us to broadly define many human behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as mistakes. For example, a private semiotic may be a “neurosis” and can be defined simply as a “mistaken interpretation” or an “ongoing mistaken interpretation.” Similarly, any public semiotic that can be shown to be wrong can be clearly identified as a mistake or an “ongoing public neurosis.”
- What is “normal” in FIML is, thus, that which is not mistaken. Partners have great leeway to decide much of this for themselves.
- Very often, the least mistaken view is one of doubt or traditional skepticism, the view that we may not be able to be certain about whatever is in question.
- FIML practice accepts the basic scientific view that a scientific theory must be testable or falsifiable, based on experiments that can be repeated, based on verifiable evidence, internally consistent, consistent with what is external to itself, useful or practical, open to change, and parsimonious in its explanations.
- New scientific theories should also say something new and interesting, something that explains data in a new way or that provides a new way of understanding old data.
- FIML differs from a good deal of science in that it relies heavily on the experiences of two (or more) partners. FIML is a kind of subjective science that also relies on the objectivity of a truthful partner.
- For the most part, partners alone decide what is true for them, though they cannot honestly do this without reference to other fields of science and thought.
- FIML resembles Buddhist practice, art, or the work of early scientists in that the existential/ experiential data acquired by individuals is of great importance to those individuals and is central to what they are doing.
- FIML can be scientifically falsified if many people do it and fail to gain any benefit from it.
- Done properly, at a minimum, FIML practice should clear up most communication mistakes/ problems between partners. FIML also provides the means for partners to continue clearing up new mistakes as they appear.
- By clearing up mistakes in communication between partners, FIML practice alleviates a great deal of emotional suffering.
- By clearing up mistakes in communication between partners, FIML practice will also relieve partners of other mistaken ideas and feelings, thus relieving a good deal of more generalized emotional suffering.
Uncertainty in human social interactions
All human interactions entail some uncertainty and most entail a lot.
To deal with uncertainty, humans use heuristics (“rules of thumb”) that generally are based on what they perceive to be normal or required in the situation at hand. These heuristics come from experience, from role models, from organizational structures, beliefs and so on.
A recent study—Uncertainty about social interactions leads to the evolution of social heuristics—explores:
…an evolutionary simulation model, showing that even intermediate uncertainty leads to the evolution of simple cooperation strategies that disregard information about the social interaction (‘social heuristics’).
This study uses simulations to tease out how social heuristics and social cooperation evolve in very simple game scenarios.
If social games have rules, we can change how much uncertainty they contain and how best to cooperate within them.
This is essentially what FIML practice does. FIML greatly reduces interpersonal uncertainty between partners while increasing cooperation by having a few fairly simple rules.
When uncertainty is lowered and cooperation increased between partners, psychological well-being and understanding is proportionally enhanced. This happens because social interaction and communication are basic to human psychology.
The study linked above employs simulations to show a sort mathematically forced evolutionary outcome arising from initial settings. I believe FIML is similar in this respect, though the FIML game involves complex humans rather than simple sims.
I often wonder why no one has discovered the rules of FIML before. So many great thinkers, but not one found these key rules for optimal communication and psychological understanding. I believe there are two basics reasons for this: 1) FIML requires developing dynamic metacognition during real-time real-life communication events and this takes practice; and 2) most great thinkers that we know about today and hence could learn from also had great status, and this prevented them from noticing the deep flaws in interpersonal communication that FIML corrects.
American Buddhist Net 