If each of us lives in a different river of experience, & that river flows & changes, how can we communicate?

Question

"All rivers lead to the sea. That's our common ground." It is for those that do travel and reach the sea through much study and self-reflection.

I'd really appreciate more than blurbs which are more often than incomplete thoughts forcing others to speculate what you meant. This is the philosophy category, is it not?

Answer 1

The age old question.  We have a conduit of understanding called universals which connects us one to the other.  It's not known how this works exactly.

Answer 2

That is almost exactly Wittgenstein's conclusion. He argues that all problems of philosophy come down to elaborate language games and confused communication between different 'forms of life'.

Check out his "Philosophical Investigations" - it's a brilliant read!

Answer 3

By the things the join us together.

Answer 4

All rivers lead to the sea. That's our common ground.

Answer 5

...with a smile...a wink or a nod...

Answer 6

8 Through the quantum field. We seem to impress informatioon on it. Information is independent of time and space. Distance phenomena ,such as what happens betyween identical twins, are independent of time-space. In Advanced Asian philosophy this is refered to as the ninth level of consciousness.  

Answer 7

by liquifying our exsperiences to take the fork of the flow so that not only our exsperiences take the plung but our knowledge floats forever

Answer 8

....i find that my experiential recantations are less important than listening to the present day dogmatic life-events of others

....and lending an empathetic arm of trust

...my river flows freely, no ships in my harbor.....

...and i have learned many new things throughout my life

.....among many books, as well as, having lived in 4 foreign countries of dramtically different cultural moors, i have come to know myself, very well, and in that have learned that knowing others requires a true strength of will and backbone.....

.....an unwavering spirit is sure required, modest, yet open to the concepts of another human, who in as so many words as 'Mitchner might elect to utilize' , will surely lend new reason to some seemingly complex behavior found within the inhabitants of an otherwise educationally limited society, totally inhibited in their free thoughts through years of governmental censorship and behavioral control

.....this same spirit may also be utilized, however, in out homeland, upon the streets of America, where we find many citizens unwilling to live under a roof, without any desire to have a door shut behind them at night for security....those who are in-fact, willing to scrape their next 100 meals from some outcast surplus found upon the service walls within America's back alleys, or greenbelts among the metropolitan smorgasbords we know and love

Answer 9

If, as you say, "common experience" is somewhat of a myth, then it is not so much about what we communicate to each other; rather, it is more about what the river can communicate to us:

The Surging Waters Spoke Only The Gospel

The river “rivered” while people “behaved.” The river “swelled” while people “behaved dramatically.”  Being human meant, on some level, being dramatic.

The more passionately we get carried away with “wanting,” or “not wanting,” the more drama increases. At some critical level, drama sends things askew as it disrupts harmony-- just like when a river floods. However, rivers don’t worry about the consequences of a flood, not so with people. Extreme drama creates extreme disharmony. At some point, we are confronted by two alternatives: “Do we pursue drama, or non-drama? Is it equanimity we desire or high emotion?”

“To let it be, to be calm, to just be”-- each person must accommodate these behaviors for himself/herself. Progress will be made through self-illumination. Less dramatic behavior (by degrees) will be the result. You can study the process of non-drama, take advice from others who have practiced it, even imitate non-dramatic behavior, but, ultimately, benefits result only from practicing it honestly.

We are already practicing drama and non-drama. Our knowledge lies in the awareness of the two. Our freedom lies in choosing between the two. Drama is not a bad thing; it is the only thing. It is “how” we live that matters. We are continually integrating this “how” back into our experience and proceeding from there. Some of us are not ready to choose a life of non-drama. All I can say is that it seems that positive results will follow, both for the individual and society. And so spoke the river to me, the same river(s) that return to the sea again and again.