The wrong message.
People read something and form an image in the mind. This image has been constructed with all the language and societal skills accumulated over the ages. The impression of what was read in the words, and in the mind, are all kinds of emotional and memory associations. All of this is what is thought to be a message to us, telling us something. We think about what this message means to us, and process it according to our own way of thinking. The words and ideas are accumulated and with skill there is an interplay of the words between people. The message telling us something, is what the mind is looking to use conversationally, socially, and in many other ways, like advertising, politics, etc.
We might think there is a right way to do all this, or question messaging, and the messenger. There is no real understanding of listening freely. That doesn’t mean I have to be a slave to conversation. It is seeing the awareness of the listener, the observer, the thinker. While receiving or giving messages can be pleasing, or disturbing, it is nothing more than messaging. Working with the content of the messages is the I, self, or ego. Thinking the messenger is who I need to find more about personally, or to debase, is the other thing we get up to. The mind is accustomed to being told what to do, and then accepting or rebelling, making this a method of interaction. It is not looking seriously, directly, at the thinker for oneself.
It’s the compliance-defiance loop. Like any pair of opposites, each incites the other. You comply with the words of an authority figure, a guru, you assume they are right and follow their every suggestion, instruction. Then, at some point, for whatever reason, you grow weary of this and begin to rebel: defiance. Perhaps rebellion eventually gives way to nonattachment, perhaps it circles back to compliance and the loop begins again.
Both compliance and defiance are grounded in authority-dependency. Is there another way?
What do we mean by authority. It comes from the word author. The words we use, I, me, my, you, is ownership, and let us think it is our own personal thinking. I think am personally connecting with what I see, what I feel, and being creative with words. But the word was originally formed from an image of the external, and is communal. The mind is working with a concept of authorship. It is repeating the externalisation, and in the thinking, making authorship a separation between authors, something to assert with authority, petty or sophisticated. It is not hard to see authority is close at hand, and is the source of my behaviour, my beliefs, my preferences, etc. .