What to Do When You Really Disagree with Someone
What to Do When You Really Disagree with Someone
Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle'sStillness Speaks
We are living today in an extremely polarized world. Extreme viewpoints that divide us exist in politics, religion, social norms, food choices, medical choices, how to bring children up, how to make a relationship workjust about any area of life you can name.
An article in The Washington Post today, Thursday November 17, by Ted Koppel, who was Managing Editor of ABC's Nightline for fifteen years and now serves as a contributing analyst for BBC World New America, talks about how opinionated talk has replaced the largely hard facts of the days when people like Walter Cronkite, once called the most trusted man in America, drew the family together for the evening news.
Today, we are so polarized on so many issues that we can't even begin to hear facts when they are presented to us.
Our biases are so strong, truth cannot penetrate. This is why we can look at the same information and come to 180-degree opposite conclusions.
What is needed today, but is so lacking in our discussions, is the ability to listen to and hear each other.
Says Eckhart Tolle in his second book,Stillness Speaks:
The deepknowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention. Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exists in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.
Our world is in a perilous situation in terms of its polarized political positions, religious dogma, economic disparity, ecological exploitation, and other key areas of life. We as individuals can solve none of these issues.
What we can do is, in our own life, among those with whom our life intersects, bring consciousness to every situation, every conversation, every exchange.
To do this, we don't talk about consciousnesswe don't try to persuade anyone of how unconscious they are.
What we do is bring our full attention to each and every person or situation. We model consciousness instead of preaching it.
When someone is expressing a viewpoint, a quite remarkable thing happens when we are silently, peacefully, completely calmly present and attentive.
If they are sharing a truth, we find ourselves becoming open to this truth instead of resting. Not at all defensive, we allow our understanding to expand.
If what the person is saying doesn't resonate with us at all, in the presence of our complete attention the individual is invited to feel the emptiness of where they are coming from.
This last statement is something you have to simply experience for yourself to realize how powerful it is.
As long as we are pushing against someone, disagreeing, debating, arguing, their unconscious thought is in full swing. But once allow stillness into the situation, so that they have nothing to push against, no one to "prove" something to, and they begin to experience how empty what they are saying actually is.
No, they may not change their opinion the first time this happens. But they catch just a glimpse of what it is to be aware.
All we are asked to do in any situation is simply to bepresent with our full attention. Our job is then done.
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