The process of ‘Connection’ occurs when one person, with a sense of purpose unknown to the other, inaugurates unbroken focus on the world of the other. This brings clarity to bear and to arise. This clarity enhances the other’s self-understanding and this in turn enhances the self–understanding of the one who inaugurated the exchange. This enhanced clarity, based on the other but available to both, may produce even more clarity for either involved in unknown quantities.
It works like this:
- • I set aside the trappings of my self (I ‘estrange’ myself from my ‘normal’ constrained self).
- • I start a conversation with another who is a stranger.
- • I focus entirely on that other.
- • I have some knowledge of the things that form the background to our conversation.
- • I genuinely want to hear what the other says, and I help the other form and develop this with as much clarity as possible.
- • I focus increasingly on the special, sometimes seemingly insignificant or often obscured qualities of that person’s world.
- • What the other says becomes increasingly clear.
- • The other’s clarity is revealed in some small or greater way.
- • I am affected by this and may feel clearer.
- • I pass this sense of clarity back to the other, and the other understands some sense of this revealed and shared clarity.
- • The experience is felt increasingly as a unifying, important, and memorable one—an enhanced level of reality the conduit for which is love.
