This is http://www.essayz.com/a9006021.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %REPEAT CONTROL EXPERIMENT PERSON JOY ECSTASY LOVE 900602 People who are addicted to the scientists' objective paradigm are prone to believe that something is not real unless it can be repeated and verified under controlled laboratory conditions. When they encounter some new phenomena, they want to repeat it as an experiment under controlled circumstances to check it out. That may be fine when dealing with objective relationships between objects as objects; it leads to tragic behavior when dealing with personal relationships between people as free beings in the process of relating intimately in open and honest dialogue. To the scientist an open and honest intimate relationship may be a new phenomena to be captured for experimental study under controlled conditions. The scientist may regard the participants in personal relationships in much the same manner that atoms in a gas are regarded; interacting without benefit of free internal choice. The assumption may be that all different kinds of interactions are determined by external conditions. The attempt may be made to control the external conditions around previous participants to reproduce the desired interesting phenomena of a remembered intimate relationship. If the phenomena cannot be reproduced, it is regarded as not having been real in any objective sense. When ecstasy is experienced there may be a desire to capture it and control it; to have it available on future recall and call. We may try to recreate that which occasioned joy, pleasure, happiness, and fond memories. In addictive ways we may try to control romantic settings, our personal relationships, and particular persons to recreate what we recall as having been so nice. In such efforts we do not engage in authentic intimacy; and often are running away from authentic intimacy, for authentic intimacy would reveal our addictive dishonesty and manipulative attempts to be in control. Addictive personalities fail to honestly acknowledge the complexity of authentic personal relationships which bring joy, pleasure and happiness. They tell lies through which they pretend that the essence of fulfillment lies in objective realities: possessions which are bought, sold, given, received and controlled; clothing which is put on or taken off; faces which send and receive messages in codes which tantalize, tempt and conceal; cosmetics which enhance appearances but not realities; bodies which can be used and abused in keeping with strong desires and yielding wills. Addictive personalities avoid honest intimacy through the manipulation of objects; both manufactured objects which were never alive, and persons as objects which are no longer truly alive. Attempts to control persons as objects and attempts to control relationships among persons deaden the persons and their relationships. That which is desirable in healthy inter-personal relationships cannot be controlled by the participants in the relationships. That which is desirable in healthy inter-personal relationships is more likely to transform the participants, than the participants are likely to control the desirable relationship. Participants in healthy relationships are less likely to deliberately conceive and achieve the relationships; than the healthy relationships are likely to conceive the participate in newness of life with refreshing perceptions which could not previously have been conceived. Healthy relationships and their participants do not come to be through careful design, planning and systematic manipulations. Healthy relationships come to be through participants giving themselves to the surprising adventures of exploration through open and honest dialogue which leads the participants into relationships which they could not anticipate, and could not desire because the relationships were not known in advance. In healthy relationships people discover who they are, because they do not know in advance who they are or may become. Their nature is conceived, revealed and grows in and through the relationships. They are not fulfilled by controlling their relationships or each other. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================