Julio. Well, I think I need to speak a little about phenomenology here. What we say in our programs is that every time that we are able to openly experience a phenomenon without aiming to explain it, it is an enormous learning experience. But we rarely look at phenomena; we are hooked in the assessment or explanation of phenomena. That step is very seldom broken because we confuse the assessment of the experience with the experience itself, or the explanation of the experience with the experience itself. So, when we go to a program and we talk with people, we say, “What is the experience of that?” For example, the woman I spoke of earlier said that the challenge for her was not being listened to. That was her experience. Now, the other man may point to another experience-why didn’t he tell the boss his experience of him? Because he was scared to death to tell him. If we run too quickly to explain it or assess it, we don’t reveal it.
So, when I remember beginning to take a look at all phenom enologists, one of the things was to discover the power of the experience itself. In daily conversation, we do not talk about experience. We try to explain the experience; we assess the experience. In our programs, we challenge the need to assess and explain in every interaction we have.
Bill. Let me ask this philosophically. You talk about phenom enology and the assessment of the experience rather than the experience itself That, in turn, goes back to Whitehead and Russell (Bateson, 1972). So, in some sense, speaking of the language about language, you are doing a wild thing here. You’re bridging these two philosophical traditions. How can you do that? Is that allowed?
Julio. Well, yes, and for one reason. It is because I am ignorant, and by that I mean that I’ve never had formal philosophical training. I studied law and there were philosophical studies around law, but I never studied philosophy formally. But many times, I have discovered by reading a philosopher what we have been doing in our programs. I remember how tremendously powerful it was to discover the second book of Mr. Darwin (1990), for instance, by looking at this issue. You know that Darwin has a second book that deals with emotions?
Bill. Yes, on the expression of emotions. It’s a great book.
Julio. But you know what? In our everyday, common -sense life, it doesn’t exist. So how come we have a great man, Darwin, who wrote two books, yet nobody knows that there’s a second book? Very simple- because it doesn’t fit in our traditional paradigm. Therefore, it doesn’t exist.
That’s another important point in our programs. There’s a conspiracy of silence in every experience that we cannot explain, and therefore it looks like the world is already explained. We are hiding all the experiences that we can’t explain. When we look at experience without explanation, without assessing it, and we just look at the experience, what happens is that we are now allowed to visit experiences that we purposely hide. Regardless of any way of explaining them, the power of revealing the experience is enormous because it allows us to visit the edge. All of us have extraordinary experiences that we never reveal. We are afraid that if people listen, they will think that we are nuts. That’s because experience doesn’t have explanation, but the experience happened.
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