For over 35 years, Enid Vien has been a student of Humanity. Her searches have taken her through many philosophical, religious, and metaphysical pathways to the melding of method and magic that so characterizes her work today. She likes to call herself a pragmatic philosopher.

The following chapter from her book, The Healing Spirit is © 2007 by Enid Vien. For reprint rights, please contact Enid Vien

Communication is a great deal more than just words and their meanings (semantics). Not to dismiss semantics as a vital necessity for clear verbal as well as written communication. To clarify my position on this, let me say it is first necessary to fully define communication itself and discuss its composition, before one can worry about its content.

Communication is the relay of information, a message from one entity to another. One could argue that computer terminals do just that. However, until a live person reads the message, no actual communication has occurred. The data has merely been relayed from point A to point B. Data can be conveyed without words. A gesture, a sigh, a wagging tail, an attitude; all convey information from one living entity to another.

Our bodies relay data to us all the time, in the form of: hunger, exhaustion, repletion, comfort, warmth, aches, cold, discomfort, and pain. When we receive the communications, we decide whether we need to act or not in order to take care of the body. If we override an important signal, more communication will be forthcoming, until the body’s needs are met. This tells us that the body has a certain sentience of its own, quite apart from our intellects and awareness. As there is life force in plant forms, they also sent out messages which you can receive if you are receptive. As has been previously noted, some house plants enjoy music and being talked to.

Less obvious is the communication from inanimate objects, for they are generally considered lacking in life force. Yet they also send out messages. Consider a painting, even a rock or a cloud, certainly a book. All convey data. There is dynamis in them or they would not exist at all. However they do not fulfill all the needs of a true communication unless someone has encoded a message within them. Like the computer, they do not create the communication, they can only relay it. Once in awhile, a sentient entity takes up residence in an object, causing much superstitious dream when someone receives an actual communication from a tombstone, or a stuffed moose head. I recall a restaurant in Los Angeles that displayed a stag with magnificent antlers on the wall above their fireplace. I doubt if they realized how uncomfortable many of their clientele felt. That the stag was inhabited was remarked upon by many, and I confess I shamelessly eavesdropped on other diners after I began to count up how many comments were made about this phenomena. The most frequent remark was: “The eyes are following me around.” Next in frequency was, “I could swear that thing is alive.”

For a complete communication we must have an originator and a recipient who are both sentient and capable of understanding the message. There has to be space between them through which the message travels. Absence of space makes communication either unnecessary or impossible. At the high end of the scale, complete understanding renders communication redundant, and at the low end it is too close to be seen, like the proverbial missing sunglasses that are eventually found on top of one’s head.

There must be the will to communicate, the communication must be direct at the intended receiver, who must in turn have the willingness to receive, and finally there must be a message that can be understood and the recipient must be able to understand it without adding to, or subtracting from the message, or altering it in any way. (The receiver must receive an exact copy or duplicate of the message.)

This is one complete communication. Travelling one way. To reply, or acknowledge the communication the positions reverse, with the recipient now becoming the originator. This is then two-way communication.

This gives us the ingredients for communication.

When any one of these ingredients is missing or messed up, the communication will not be complete and problems can, and usually do, follow. There are many ways a communication can fail to arrive, arrived mangled, or be misunderstood.