Turtles and Balloons
From Elfi
The following is what Angel told a group of Elfpath members on August 26th 2010. It isn't so much a transcript as a paraphrasing.
Contents |
Communication
When you talk to someone, many things have to happen almost simultaneously. You think of the idea you want to convey, dig in your head for the corresponding words, move your vocal chords, tongue and lips to produce the words, the other person has to hear it, successfully change sound waves into words, see if he knows similar words, and connect those words with ideas.
It's a fairly complicated process where many things can go wrong. When things go wrong, barring things like speech impediments or deafness, it's usually at the stage that connects ideas to words.
Turtles
The easiest way to explain this is, as usual, with a metaphor.
Ideas are like turtles - they move slowly, they don't say much on their own. Everyone has their own turtle pen in their head with all their turtles in it. Each turtle represents a separate idea or a concept, with its own set of energies attached.
Turtles can move, though slowly, as your ideas take on new meanings. New turtles can be born, and occasionally a turtle dies. It happens.
So what happens if you've got a really cool turtle and you want to show it to someone else, discuss it with them, see if they've got the same turtle in their head? Turtles all look the same, and other people won't be able to take a look at your cool turtle and tell what ideas, feelings and energies it's got under its shell. So we devise a system that lets us compare turtles in a rather simple way - we tie balloons to them with words on them.
Balloons
This makes communicating a lot easier. Instead of desperately waving a turtle at someone, you can show them the balloon and they simply see if they've got a turtle with the same balloon on it. This is much handier, and makes communication much easier. It works perfectly, if there are only a few turtles and a few balloons. However, as your vocabulary expands and you acquire more experiences, you get more and more balloons and turtles.
- You can have turtles without balloons, these are simply ideas or a feeling you have no name for, like Scanning before it had a name.
- You can have turtles with more than one balloon, like if the concept "anger" has the words "rage, irritation, guilt, anger, hulk out, muck relating to drunk dad" attached to it).
- You can have a balloon with multiple strings leading to different turtles like if the concepts "yum" and "guilt" are both attached to the "triple chocolate cake" balloon,
or simply the word "thingie", attached to hundreds of different "undefined" turtles that represent concepts with no real name.
- You can have a balloon with no turtle, like the balloon "floccinaucinihilipilification", which does not have a turtle attached for people who do not know what the word means.
Misunderstandings
You can probably see this getting complicated when more and more turtles appear. As they move, the lines get tangled up and stuck in knots. Then, when someone shows you their balloon for "love", the chance you'll be able to follow the right string down to the same turtle becomes rather small. You won't be able to be sure if you and the other person are talking about the same turtle. You're probably following the wrong line out of the tangle and end up at a different turtle. Someone shows you their balloon for "love", you find your balloon with that word on it, follow the string, get lost in the tangle and up at the turtle that's actually attached to "dad" or "control" or "pain".
So, things go wrong. Not only are you talking about Control when you're saying Love, the other person is saying Love as well and is actually talking about Dependency.
But you're still both saying Love, you can't see the turtles, you think you're talking about the same thing.
Moving Turtles
Once a turtle is in one spot, it doesn't mean it's stuck there for good. Once a balloon is attached to a turtle, it doesn't mean it can't move to another turtle.
Take that word from before, floccinaucinihilipilification. Right now, unless you've googled it, it'll be a balloon without a turtle. But maybe a turtle has been born, a small one, that doesn't know where it's supposed to be. You kind of need a turtle to talk about something at length. Now if I tell you that floccinaucinihilipilification is something most people do quite a lot, almost daily, your turtle might start shuffling into the direction of some other turtles that include things you do almost daily, like the turtles for Work or Shower.
If I tell you that, in addition to doing it almost daily, it's something you do to other people or things, it gains a better sense of where it is.
If I tell you that floccinaucinihilipilification means 'the act of assessing someone or something as worthless', your turtle has found a place. Right between your memories and muck related to thinking someone is worthless. Not only that, it's gained another balloon. Now, it's got 'floccinaucinihilipilification' and 'the act of assessing someone or something as worthless'.
How to Tell
To put this another way, each turtle is an idea, more importantly a set of energies you associate with that idea.
The balloon is just the word you use to refer to that set of energies.
When turtles move, these energies are changing. It's hard for two people's turtles to be in exactly the same place, because the energy you associate with an idea depends on your personal experiences, muck, teachers, and so on.
This means that, because turtles are energy, you can Scan them.
You can simply see if your turtle and the other turtle Scan the same, or Scan “Is Bob using the same turtle as me? Y/N”. Or if you’re doing a Scan for someone else, say “is doing this useful to me?” you can make sure you’re Scanning for the right turtle. Otherwise you might be Scanning for “does this activity have some sort of payoff that’s practical for them” while they mean “does this activity bring me closer to my Core/Star”.
