Trust and Compassion

For the past two and a half years I've been asking myself how long we can and should continue having trust in and showing compassion for someone who keeps disappointing us and what can and should be the last straw that justifies our abandoning that person. This question is becoming of great practical relevance to me as I'm officially launching a new practice of life coaching soon.

During these years I've both witnessed and consciously read life stories of both people who didn't abandon those they had decided to trust and people who abandonded them so easily. I'm not going to blame the latter as I'm not fully sure whether I could keep showing compassion for those they decided to abandon if I were in their place.

But at least from now on I don't want to abandon those I've decided to trust, whether privately or professionally, except in one special case as I already know that certain people fail to keep their promises for spiritual sicknesses that have nothing to do with their will power. This special case is when I make sure that my abandonment will touch the very core of their soul and wake them up once and for all - abandonment out of compassion.

Spiral Dynamics and Linguistic Ideologies

Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering research by Clare Graves and elaborated by Don Beck and Chris Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics, is an evolutional model of the human consciousness. Though can be appitlied to the understanding of both individuals and collectives, I find more power of this theory when it's used to measure the evolutionary stages of various collectives, including linguistic ideologies, around the globe. An online article entitled Overview of the Spiral Dynamics Model by Ken Wilber is one of the clearest introductions to this theory in a concise manner.

I've also studied this theory, though purely amateurishly, through the above mentioned book as well as the following series of lectures by Leo Gura, which I relisten to every once in a while:

• Grand Model of Psychological Evolution
• Spiral Dynamics - Stage Blue
• Spiral Dynamics - Stage Orange
• Spiral Dynamics - Stage Green
• Spiral Dynamics - Stage Yellow
• Spiral Dynamics - Stage Turquoise
• Spiral Dynamics - Important Insights and Nuances
• Spiral Dynamics - Areas of Application

It doesn't seem to be by chance that I got acquainted with this theory when I decided to leave academia (I'll officially leave it at the end of this September after two years of preparation for a new career). Then I also decided to stop my active involvement with two linguistic movements that used to occupy me a lot for many years - Yiddishism and Esperantism. Back them I couldn't clearly articulate the discomfort I suddenly started to feel with these two linguistic ideologies, but two years since then, I think I know what aroused and still arouses this feeling inside me.

The case of Yiddishism is quite obvious, at least to me, if not to its blind followers. Judging from its characteristics I've seen first-hand, I would say that it belongs to a fairly low stage in Spiral Dynamics. It's a desperate - and in my opinion, unsuccessful - attempt to replace Judaism with something linguistic and cultural, a kind of a new secular Jewish religion for descendants of speakers of Yiddish. Having started to study Hasidism in a traditional approach and not, G-d forbid, in an academic setting about two years ago, I find Yiddishism far more shallow than before.

The case of Esperantism is more subtle. The very idea of unifying the humankind is noble, but trying to do so through a "neutral" common language seems to me very naive now. It must be ranked higher in the scale of Spiral Dynamics, but not high enough. Its limitation is its obsession with language. I've realized that there is a vast suprarational world that transcends our intellect, thus our language, too. Language is not only a limited tool but also limits us. Actually, we human beings are already unified as divine sparks. All we need to do to see ourselves unified in reality is to raise our level of consciousness, first as individuals, then as a human collective. For this we have to go beyond the limitation of language.

Linguistic (Dis)comfort and Cultural (Dis)comfort in Oral Communication

Until I got divorded from my ex-wife (and decided to get "divorced" from academia, too) about two years ago, I used to use five languages orally - Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Esperanto and Russian - in my private life. Since then I only live in two languages - Hebrew and English.

I guess most of those who continue to live in the same country feel most comfortably in the language and culture they were born into. Even if you immigrate to another country, your most comfortable language and culture must remain your native ones in most cases.

When I immigrated to Israel about 16 years ago, I also considered myself a kind of cultural refugee. I never felt comfortable in Japanese society. My discomfort there intensified after spending five years in Israel - 11 years before my immigration - though in the end I got used to the fact that I might never get used to it. I've never felt comfortable in Japanese, which is a highly context-dependent language, that is, is highly influenced by Japanese culture and its overt and covert rules.

When I immigrated here, I was full of hope. It didn't take me long to start feeling uncomfortable in Israel society. Though this is not a result of my conscious choice, I've come to find myself speaking less and less Hebrew in my private life. I speak more English than Hebrew, at least in meaningful conversations as I feel far more comfortable culturally with English-speaking Jewish immigrants from North America etc. than with Hebrew-speaking native Israelis though my Hebrew is much better than my English.

In other words, cultural comfort seemed far more important for me than linguistic comfort in oral communication. But recently I discovered one context of oral communication in which I can't express myself comfortably except in Hebrew, and not in English or even Japanese. This social context is AA meetings. I started attending several in English on Zoom when I started receiving AA sponsoring a couple of months ago. I've never felt comfortable to express my innermost experiences and emotions in English in public. When attended my first AA meeting in Hebrew this week, I felt so comfortable in Hebrew that I spoke up of my own will even several times.