Art of Understanding

I really wonder how we human beings understand one another so well. I don’t know if there is any other creature on earth, who understand and communicate with one another as well as the humans. We depend largely on language to communicate, but language is not all. There are people who are able to communicate with others through non-verbal signs and gestures. The speech-impaired do communicate themselves, though their communication is very different from what most of the people would do.

But behind this seemingly simple process of understanding one another, there is a whole lot of things happening in and out of us. In order to understand a person, the receiver should be in a proper frame of mind, to receive the code which comes encoded in the form of a gesture or language, and it is the duty of the receiver to decode the message, and respond appropriately to show the receiver that the message has been properly received. Levi Strauss has extensively studied the way we communicate with one another… but that is all theory.

Why do we often experience a break in communication? Why do we face misunderstanding even with familiar people? In a communicative process, any disturbing factor is technically called a noise; this noise is not merely auditory, consisting of audio signals, but it has several layers, one important layer being the psychological. This simply means that in order to achieve a good level of communication, the speaker’s heart should be in sync (short for synchronization) with that of the receiver’s heart. When there is a mismatch, then the communication is bound to fail.

Thus it is within our power to direct the way communication takes place with me and within me; it is not too difficult to create artificial noise around me so that I do not hear the other person, and then can go to any extent to find excuses. No communication is hundred percent faultless. The perfect communication that can ever be possible is beyond the reach of human beings. Even an attempt to communicate to my own inner self is inadequate, and leaves a lot of gap, that I find it hard to reach a perfect equilibrium with one’s own self.

But how does God communicate to human beings, and what are the noises that we can identify? Even when God communicates himself/herself through the best medium possible, yet human mind may plant an artificial barrier between them and the message… No wonder, our communication with God, or the reverse, God’s communication with humanity is never a finished task, but a process that will go on till the end of time. Maybe at the end of time, we may sigh and say, Ah, now we understand what God was communicating to us!