"Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their experience of reality.... To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time. ... To add someone else's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable." -MG Taylor Axiom, 1981

Physicist David Bohm has described the principle of enfoldment in his book, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue. The one-sentence summary states that the entire universe is enfolded into each of its components and that the visible universe is the movement or process of enfolding and unfolding--the reflexive transit between principle and expression. We are literally the enfolding and unfolding of our experience.

Communicating our experience of something is necessarily attenuated. Feelings, textures, colors, sounds, the pattern of sensations dancing across time and out of time, are all incompressible--they can't be shared by the spoken word. Someone can only report to you about their experience. Since you can't truly understand the experience from their vantage point, the only wise course of action is to accept it at face value and move forward together or move further apart from that acceptance.

The big danger about arguing over someone else's experience rises if one of the parties actually wins the argument, at which point, some critical understanding and vantage point on the universe--and the resulting learning--is denied and lost. (full article on the axioms)

So how do people from two different cultures begin a conversation and create a language and a doing that supports the reality of both vantage points?

In her recent post, A world without answers, Gail expounds on one of the effects of increasing rates of change and growth in complexity: Answers aren't what they used to be. So how then, as we venture into panarchy, can we utilize the incredible expertise time has accumulated, if not for answers?

An effective process through which to put "expertise" is a syntopical reading. Most often (in my experience), this is done in groups, with each person having different books or source material, and taking an hour or 90 minutes to scan and note. However, it can also be an enlightening way of thinking and engaging with ideas as an individual.

Create a dialogue with and among the authors. Don't limit them to analysis and critique - let them imagine and galumph with each other's thoughts. Use syntopical reading as a means of getting familiar with someone's ideas and the all important context and situations they rest upon... and then carrying them forward. Engage both imaginative, play-of-mind thinking as well as analytical and critical thinking.

Don't set your sights on answers. Rather, seek out clues, and explore the relationships that connect them.

I'm using syntopical reading and conversing in this way in a current exploration of paradigm shifts and other kinds of phase transitions. Gail and I recently crafted a paper touching on paradigm shifts in general but more particularly, exploring current history for compelling signs that a significant shift is unfolding, and may be on the verging on a global upcreation to borrow a term from Kevin Kelly.