YeKengalé

In my previous blog, A Futile conversation, my aim was to provoke interest as well as reflection on how and why we do the conversation thing, whether publicly or privately. I think its a remarkable sign of the times that political and religious conversations are marked by a spirit of pride as opposed to one of meekness. Religion and politics broadly define human being and doing respectively. When both our thoughts and our actions have their foundations in contempt and contention, it is a sign of controlled combustion out-spiralling into explosive inferno. Fire that should serve to fuel growth bursts its boundaries to consume whatever body facilitated it. Without meekness, new knowledge is nearly impossible but certainly undesirable. No one seeks to expand, everyone seeks to impose. All that talk with no backing wisdom can only invoke chaos.

We talk to convince rather than confess what we think we know. We listen to pounce rather than learn. Learning requires surrender. This we blindly require from all but ourselves. When every man is one man against the world, heroism become idiocy and the world is reduced to the last man standing, should he not succumb to his wounds.

Our hope in conversation should be to discover new avenues of insight, new paths of action through deep listening and contemplative exchange. The minds we seek to change should be our own, not necessarily our convictions but our ‘convection’ – the way we radiate energy, the way we allow our ‘heat’ to be transferred. Humans are beings of community, but when the common unit of communities becomes each a law unto its own self, what you get are tons of hot-headed ego bubbles, each about to burst into oblivion as the community super novas whatever coherence it once had to ash. These are the times we live in.

May our desire be to get Caught Up and changed. (Click for context, the ‘not’ is deliberately omitted.)