"Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their experience of reality.... To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time. ... To add someone else's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable." -MG Taylor Axiom, 1981

Physicist David Bohm has described the principle of enfoldment in his book, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue. The one-sentence summary states that the entire universe is enfolded into each of its components and that the visible universe is the movement or process of enfolding and unfolding--the reflexive transit between principle and expression. We are literally the enfolding and unfolding of our experience.

Communicating our experience of something is necessarily attenuated. Feelings, textures, colors, sounds, the pattern of sensations dancing across time and out of time, are all incompressible--they can't be shared by the spoken word. Someone can only report to you about their experience. Since you can't truly understand the experience from their vantage point, the only wise course of action is to accept it at face value and move forward together or move further apart from that acceptance.

The big danger about arguing over someone else's experience rises if one of the parties actually wins the argument, at which point, some critical understanding and vantage point on the universe--and the resulting learning--is denied and lost. (full article on the axioms)

So how do people from two different cultures begin a conversation and create a language and a doing that supports the reality of both vantage points?

“If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.

Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself.
Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”
-David Bohm

Last evening I watched a PBS special on the Power of Play and was fascinated for an hour with the way animals (including humans) use play...