Parallel Conversations (an excerpt)
They were just finishing off their bar lunch and Donald was back at the bar
getting a second round in for him and Rocky, the others having politely
declined a top up. Rocky had gone off down the corridor looking for the
gents and had inadvertently entered the Ladies before realizing his mistake.
Anyway, he was just coming out of the loo and was looking around for the bar
when a guy passed him on the corridor.
'Lost your way?' the man enquired as he turned off toward the gents.
Usually such subtle communications would pass Rocky by before their deeper
meaning dawned on him, but not this time: he was right on the ball that day.
'Yes, actually, I have,' he told the man as he headed back into the bar.
It had been the Sufi Idries Shah who'd alerted Rocky to what he'd termed
'parallel conversations'. Apparently, there'd been a meeting and two guys
took to the stage and started to converse about anything and everything that
popped into their heads. Afterwards, the members of the audience were asked
about their experiences of this experiment and they found that strangely
enough, each one of them had found a different meaning to the conversations
behind or beyond the surface meaning.
Rocky had come across this before, but he hadn't had a tag to pin on it. For
example, someone had been talking about their weekend and had said something
about there being no point in mending fences whilst the wind was up and
about deciding to spend their time tidying up the attic, and there had
seemed to be a deeper psychological element to that surface conversation.
Rocky found this happening more and more. Sometimes he'd catch the drift
immediately, but other times it would only be a short while or some time
afterwards that he'd realize what had been said.
And he'd also noticed how many people would use stock phrases, proverbs and
clichés when they were talking. They could carry out all manner of
conversations using these prefabricated building blocks ... ... ....
The ebook is currently available in pdf format for free download in the
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