In the process of achieving Compassionate Communication, we can choose to ask ourselves the four questions listed on what I used as a handout (Non-Violent or Compassionate Communication in handout—December 4, 2011). These questions ask for a good deal of effort and practice both in conception and in action. The entire enterprise of Compassionate Communication offers a rather simple appearance, but it takes a goodly amount of self-reflection and critical reflection on how we see the world and ourselves in the world. This, in turn, leads us to question meaning perspectives previously unexamined which, as we have noted before, takes effort and even courage to do. It can look deceptively simple, but it takes commitment and practice. The results make the entire effort very worthwhile.
Given our human propensity for making form out of the world around us, we may find the question difficult to get to, or even to make much sense out of it: "What am I observing?" That phrase stands in contradiction to our common beliefs: "I see what I see. I saw what I saw. Seeing is believing." We might consider changing those phrases of conviction into something else in light of the question asked here: "I perceive what I have perceived. Believing is seeing." We live quite dependently on our past perceptions for our current perceptions. When we can't fit something into a category we have known before, we can feel quite disoriented. When we think of the child overwhelmed by the number of toy pieces, the disorientation comes from the child never having experienced that level of choice or that level of apparent chaos. Because we don't like the possible chaos of our direct perceptions of things ("What am I observing?), we construct meaning perspectives that put what we experience into some sort of form and order. Those meaning perspectives constitute essential prejudices, prejudices that we need to survive but also prejudices that get in the way of what we see because our perceptions and what we feel because of those perceptions, simply get in the way of our immediate experience and our response to that experience. Immanuel Kant told us that we can never see the "thing-in-itself" due to our perceptional nature. However, when we become and remain aware of that predilection of perception, it allows us better access to what we actually observe.
I lived in New York City a good deal of my life. Certain perceptions of such a life become rather standard. These perceptions formed meaning perspectives of which I remained unaware because those perspectives were rarely challenged. Some years later, I taught in a semi-rural community college which housed students from even more rural communities. When I observed many of these students, I didn't observe them directly. I perceived them as "cowboys." They wore huge hats that made their heads look Stetson shrunken, and these heads sat atop generally or apparently huge bodies. They all wore apparently huge, pointed boots. I had lots of opportunity to see those boots because these cowboys generally stretched their feet in front of them making the bottom of those boots stunningly apparent to me. They sat with arms crossed in front of them, slid down and back in their seats, and sat staring apparently blankly at me all during class sessions. That's what my big city perceptions believed and how my prejudice toward them formed.[137]
I perceived myself as a very liberal if not radical thinker, so I didn't know I held and felt these prejudices, even though I described these cowboys (and cowgirls for that matter) comically if not satirically in conversation and correspondence. All that changed when one of these perceived cowboys came to see me in the office I worked from. He told me he was "kind of shy about these things" shy, which accounted for his class silences, but he liked the class a lot and wanted to show me some things. He handed me a small sheaf of paper which turned out to be his poems. It turned out that a number of those attending the same English class wrote poetry, often what some call "cowboy poetry." The public quality of the poetry held no importance for me in comparison to the honest feelings and perceptions they contained. These young men and women allowed me to see a world of agriculture, ranching, hunting, and rodeo that was entirely closed to me before. They perceived their world as one filled with beauty, challenge, and the love of the life itself.
Along with their perceptions, many demonstrated remarkably agile and open minds. In one research paper, a very cowboy appearing member of this informal group did a research paper on cattle raising. He wanted to prove that some outside people who attacked their traditional and proven practices were not seeing the truth, and he would prove that. He did his research with integrity, and found that traditional and current cattle raising practices did produce overgrazing. Through research, he discovered that if ranchers raised fewer cattle per acre, they would raise larger cattle and would get more poundage with fewer cattle. He called his final draft "Fat Cows Over Skinny Cows." He also appended a note and asked me directly never to tell anyone from his hometown he wrote such a paper. It was a very small place, and those folks "just wouldn't like it." He had a strong sense of perceptions, prejudices, and meaning perspectives without ever hearing the words or ideas themselves. Everyone who lives in a conformist structure will feel these ideas in reality to a greater or lesser degree. Knowing that we live in such a structure, we just want to make choices about what we observe based on the highest level of awareness we can muster. Whatever happens we will, just like the highly trained Fair Witness, make choices about how and what we observe of the "thing-in-itself."