| Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:13:29 -0800 (PST) From: "Chinghiz Kayan" <chinghiz.kayan@yahoo.com> Subject: Wisdom, trust, and truth To: "Nelligan Kayan" <nelligankayan@sympatico.ca> Dearest Nelligan: From my sense of what is outside me, you seem to be giving short shrift to the value of having a coaching Dad. From somewhere you seem to have got the idea that no one should have a Dad as their coach. There is enough non-specific wisdom in that notion to accord it some consideration. But wouldn't such a suggestion be proffered in response to some particular precipitating circumstance? In other words, what was the particular description you presented of your circumstances that would have made such a response feel "right" to your interlocutor, perhaps a social worker of some kind? Let me hastily assure you that I ask these questions not to make your life difficult. My intention is actually quite the opposite. The particular intent I have in asking these questions is to encourage you to increase your ability to distinguish generalities from specifics, and to be wary of importing sweeping generalities of seeming, but false, relevance to our specific situation. Such importations can progressively result in our family habitually distrusting each other's suggestions, opinions, and narratives. I think you can imagine how such a family, even if it began with genuine passion and enthusiasm, would devolve step by step into dysfunctionality – until it somehow found a way to introduce, at a time when its members wanted to learn it, the criterion of comparative truth, or rationality, when considering the opinions or suggestions proffered by others. Some time ago, I wrote you an email to explain that trust can never be an absolute. No one is trustworthy in all domains. Even scientific laws are superseded. But we each can be worth listening to if (a) we make more than “normal” efforts, in serious situations, to utter only what we know to be true, which implies refraining from both ego-serving exaggeration and timid modesty and dedicating oneself to being authentic, and (b) we help each other to become increasingly skilled in such efforts. The essay "Navigating the Seas of Judgment: Damned if you do, or damned if you don't?" (a link to which is here) has more on this topic. I love you, Papa |
Upcoming Book: Empathic Authenticity, EA
Excerpt 3: communication among intimates
Excerpt 3: communication among intimates
| Empathic Authenticity An Adventure of Discovery with Chinghiz and His Friends |
| No less a literary master than Mark Twain experienced anxiety concerning the ramifications of telling verbal truth. Here is what he wrote concerning a prayer that he felt should not be published until after his death: "I have told the truth in that... and only dead men can tell the truth in this world." What was the prayer that Twain composed of which he was too afraid to tell the world while he was alive? Here it is: “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him who is the Source of Love, and who is the ever- faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. [After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.” In the following chapters we shall discover, amongst other tested ideas, certain linguistic forms that have unique properties to help our speech and conduct become safely, and in due course prosperously, more authentic. Starting with the telling of one’s own inner truth in a way that others sense as heart-felt and at least a little uniquely valuable because presently relevant, one can progress, perhaps with the help of coaching, from an inner sense that is almost exclusively one’s own to know, to telling what we then sense is true “both out there and in here”. Here, for example, is how Chinghiz recently wrote to his daughter Nelligan to bring up the subject of her seeming reluctance to use him, even in dire circumstances, as a career coach: |
| An excerpt from the introduction (c) 2007-8 by Angus Cunningham angusc@authentixcoaches.com |
| A Second Family Letter from Chinghiz |
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