This article is about creating and committing to what is possible with he-she-it-they in your life. I will take your thinking through a journey that will have you come to a place where the landscape is one that you have never seen before, and you will be left with knowing that if you stuck with “the way things are” and “the truth” as you see it, you will mark your self as a stupid human.

So here we go….we are going to start at an ordinary place….

When I say “a cup” what do you hear? It holds liquid, it maybe glass, maybe plastic… etc. But there is something else about the cup that never comes up. Imagine I have a cup on the table with coffee in it. I reach and pick it up and the bottom just pops off and all the coffee just rushes out. In that moment I go through something. If I was talking with someone, I stop, If I was working, I stop. I have to deal with the situation. Philosophers call this a form of breakdown. The cup just stopped behaving like a cup. So one of our fundamental ways of listening to what a cup is that it works as a cup but… this is not in our consciousness as we engage with the cup. In a sense you are listening to the cup without listening. This is true about everything; you don’t worry about the ground being there when you take a step and you don’t think about your car not starting when you get in it (may be you do), you don’t worry about air not being there when you inhale, you get the point. We walk around with a form of knowing that is unconscious. This is necessary by design or we could not function in the world.

Lets make it a little more complicated though. It is one thing to have an unconscious listening for a cup and it is totally a different thing to have an unconscious listening for your wife or your mother or your father, or your school or your government or your job, for the boss, for the Muslims, for the French… etc. You know that you have such unconscious listening, always operating in the background. These live inside of you in such a way that they dictate how you behave towards these when you deal with them in your life. So you have a listening that you are smarter than your wife, well guess what, your conversations and actions are tainted. Lets say you have a listening for your child that he is lazy, well then that causes the way you relate to that child. These listenings create what is possible between you and he-she-it-they. They limit and define the world of activities and conversations and anything beyond how it is now, is not possible, not even imaginable.

How do these listenings get created? Do you do it? Does he-she-it-they do it? How is it that you come to an unconscious listening of your wife, husband, father, your body, even who you are? Well they get created the same way your listening gets created for the cup. You have experiences as a fundamental part of being human and you pick it all and make it all up about he-she-it-they as you “grow up.”

Now, notice something; when it is about the physical world your listening makes things work. You put coffee in a cup, drive your car, get on an elevator and you count on these listenings so that you can function. However notice something else; with human beings and human structures, today you can have one listening and tomorrow a completely different one. When your listening changes you say he-she-it-they changed. You see, we think in the following manner: First we look for evidence that there is a change over there with he-she-it-they, then we create a new listening, and we even play the – lets wait and see game- . Finally when we collect enough evidence that they really changed, then we change our listening for he-she-it-they. In this scenario he-she-it-they are responsible from the change, we just watch, wishing and hoping they change.

We are never responsible for creating our own listening it is always up to something other than us that creates the listenings for the he-she-it-they. We listen to friends, experts, news. We give our freedom to create a listening for the he-she-it-they away, we do it every day we don’t even think about it. You might be about to meet someone for the first time and your friend says “you know you got to be careful with this guy, he gets upset very fast.” You meet the guy and you are listening for evidence that he will get mad any moment. You talk a particular way, act a particular way. Possibilities of what can be are dead.

Giving our power away to something else other than our selves in creating a listening for he-she-it-they has far more reaching impact when the listening is created by those who we know as experts or authority. So experts say that “…..,” you are done, your listening is set, you have given your power away. Here is one very powerful example in creating a listening.

In April 1968 Jane Elliott walked in to her class room with an intention to teach a lesson. The excerpts below are taken from Smithsonian.com.

On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott’s third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk. “They shot that King yesterday. Why’d they shoot that King?” All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” she asked the children, who were white. “It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”

She knew that the children weren’t going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. “Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical,” Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes—and the smarter the person. “Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes,” Elliott said. “Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it.” She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers’ lounge. She described to her colleagues what she’d done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them……

Back in the classroom, Elliott’s experiment had taken on a life of its own. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication tables started making mistakes. She slumped. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. “You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we’re better than you are,” one of the brownies said. The blue-eyed girl apologized.

On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn’t want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

The rest of this article is here

Creating a listening can change the course of the world. We need to take our power back. We need to get responsible for our listenings for he-she-it-they. “What can be,” because we say – can be – should never be upto something outside of us. Anyway of being is possible for any human. and any relationship; but one must get responsible for the listening one has for he-she-it-they, and then create a listening into which the he-she-it-they can live into. One must first create the listening then wait for the evidence. Try this, you will see how, what is possible, can become reality, you will see things being possible that you did not even imagine with other humans, and you will find the power you have to create what is possible between you and the rest of the humans. Now you are the one who is responsible for how he-she-they are. Enjoy.

Thank you for reading.