Dalai Lama once visited a Christian monastery in Barcelona, Spain. There he met a monk who had lived as a hermit for a few years, meditating on the subject of love. Sitting together eye to eye with him, Dalai Lama was overcome by joy by being in his presence. There was no doubt of there being a sense of community without words. They understood each other's honest aspirations in spiritual things. This happened despite the fact that they were of different religious beliefs and that they could barely communicate with the help of the spoken word. Apparently, they had another attitude: to understand compassion and love is to understand the essence of man. We can learn from everything we encounter in life if we live in the present and get in contact with the power, the joy, and the compassion that are within us.

The word "communication" is derived from the Latin communis, meaning both "common" and "message." In the sense of "common," communication is an interaction between people. The spoken word is just a small part of what happens; gestures and facial expressions are responsible for most of the communicative exchange. This is a complicated system of intentional and unintentional signals. But what really speaks to the individual are the actions of fellow human beings. Ideal communication between people is characterized by openness and lack of a hidden motive. Also important is the willingness to listen without prejudice and trust in the good intentions of others. Faith in the other frees us from a fear of being used. We dare reevaluate our opinions without risking being laughed at.

In the other sense of communication, "message," mass media has an increasingly stronger position. Most often, however, this kind of communication is biased and one way. This is how mass media exercises control over our cultural and social values.

To picture body and soul, observer and object, and active and passive as opposites is to give a somewhat misleading description of a world where everything is mutually dependent. This kind of thinking is not a reflection of nature. We do not love the babbling brook because of its similarities to human speech. The stars on a velvety black sky do not make us gasp for breath because of their constellations. It is not due to symmetry or an association with pictures that we enjoy the patterns of glistening water, the veins of a leaf, or a spider's web against the sunlight. We do not need these things to survive, but we feel a joy in our hearts and an inexplicable wonder of and reverence in these experiences. Seen this way, nature's perplexing multiplicity becomes a dance without any other meaning than the patterns that appear, patterns improvised in the interactions of being. Sights and sounds emerge and disappear. You are transported from a world dominated by the time of the clock to a world where real time rules. A place where life flows by its own in an uninterrupted stream, and where active and passive, inner and outer are the same.

Anna Blomfeldt 1998