Rule 6: Misunderstanding and silence

Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.

Humans are living in their own world of concepts and presume that others share their world which is rarely true or even possible. So communication is prone to misunderstandings. Especially when we are caught in our feelings we tend to use projections and think that others do not like us or do not understand us. We know from the way our mirror neurones work that we can only be empathic when we are relaxed.

As soon as we are tensed up and agitated, we are in the fight-flight mode. This is when we tend to misunderstand the words we hear or to hear words which have not been said or give the words we heard totally different meanings. So words are taken as an insult or attack, and we feel them as physical wounds although they are just words. We are deeply hurt and yet righteous about being so hurt that we think it is appropriate to take revenge at the next opportunity.

This is how the problems in the world are created, in the small and in the big world. And this is how they are kept alive and how they are deepened and programmed into our souls.

When we realize that our communications are highly at risk to failure and imprecision, we are well advised never to take words at face value. And we also should not take our interpretations at face value but as that what they are: assumptions about a possible meaning of what has been said.

Many if not all of the conflicts we get caught in result from such misunderstandings. So we should take good care so that we do not to start important talks when we are in stress. For when we are in high agitation, we speed up our talking, forget to listen and end up in screaming and simplified accusations. Bonds of love are torn down and communicative devastation is left.

Wittgenstein stated that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." He defined “world” as “what the case is”, and that are the facts, everything which can be stated in an objective way and can be pictured in a clear way by means of language. The internal world or the communicative “world inbetween”, where we cannot find such clear and distinct descriptions. In these areas, there is a confusion of tongues which has to be cleared up until the language is freed from its distortions. After that, the problems of philosophy and metaphysics and probably as well the communicative problems in everyday life will be seen as pseudo problems and will disappear.

We can look for another way. As soon as we find our inner peace and silence, we are able to connect deeper with others. Words and their meanings become secondary. Instead, silence is the real answer to any question. Here we know from Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com