My post yesterday uncovered a new path of exploration for me.
Sure, virtually any philosopher you pick will have expressed the fact that we humans have a need to feel connected and that biologically and psychologically, we depend on feedback. To that extent, there is nothing new in my recent realizations. But they are new and fresh to me.
Not entirely new, I suppose, but entirely fresh. Rather like the flesh beneath a freshly peeled segment of orange. The orange itself is not new to the eyes but the bit of flesh it now reveals is very fresh indeed and I'm salivating with eager anticipation of its sparkling, zesty juice on my tongue - guaranteed to generate an explosion of pleasure on my taste, I mean thought, buds :)
Forgive me, I don't mean to get all metaphorical. I'm just relating the observations that my mind is making.
And, yes, it intrigues me, this need of ours to feel connected and to receive feedback. Let me put it this way. If I didn't believe that someone would be reading my posts and might respond to them, I'm pretty certain I wouldn't write them.
Nope. I mean, I might pen my thoughts in a journal, whether electronic or paper, which is something I have been doing. But blogging is a public affair, and for many of us bloggers, it's a public affair of private proportions. Or might that equally be a private affair of public proportions?
Regardless, why do we have this need to feel connected? Why are we looking for feedback?
As always, my best answers are the ones that are true for me. So let me try and rummage through this rain forest of my mind and see what I find.
Wow! Here is some of it:
I want to feel connected because THAT'S WHAT I REALLY AM and this sense of a separate 'me' feels neither real nor good. Whoa...!
In other words, I want to remain in touch with a truth that seems to have become obscured by a dominant belief in separation! But, I suppose you may ask (as I am now doing), why we need external forms of connection when true connection is ultimately felt in the mind and heart.
Yep, that is a great and very valid question. My answer is that we are physical beings and our physicality predisposes us to physical/external forms of connectivity.
It's like eating food. The physical body requires some food to keep it going. Not a lot, but enough. We'd die without it, eventually.
Likewise, I would think, with being connected. The physical/external forms of connection help remind us of our fundamental connectedness - something that our false sense of separation obscures us from.
Without it, we might feel completely and falsely separated and that would not be a true and full reflection of who and how we truly are. We'd die, psychologically and spiritually, without it just as we'd die physically without food.
And feedback?
I think that feedback gives us information about our relationship with others and with ourselves. Whether we're being drawn closer to them or pulled further apart. Whether we're feeling more or less alive. Whether we're experiencing more or less joy.
We don't need to be in agreement with other people's ideas in order to feel close or closer to them. But we do need to know that we are not disconnected or distanced from them because of our differing ideas and beliefs.
I seek feedback as my way of testing out some of my ideas and beliefs. What you say in response to them gives me new lenses to view them with and this could result in my re-examining and refining them or explaining them further or abandoning them altogether.
It also helps me recognize and respect you as a unique expression of the single connectedness that you and I are. And that you have as much freedom and right to your thoughts and beliefs as I do to mine. AND that the more I am accepting of your unique expression, the freer I can feel! Oh yeah!
I seek feedback also because I think, in some way, it tells me that someone cares and that I matter, in however minuscule an amount that might be.
So, what do you think?
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