Practice Note 2 – How do I tell others about apithology?

This Practice Note (like all Practice Notes) comes from people asking the same question when they come to the same place in their apithology practice.

This topic concerns a practical problem of how to share what is outside a person’s experience, with them experientially. An added complication is when that experience is outside of known experience, generally. Of even greater concern is how does one do that intimately, remotely (i.e. through digital media).

Some guidance is now available: Practice Note 2 – How do I tell others about apithology?

Once we have an initial appreciation for apithology we will want to tell others about its benefits. The absence of any hesitancy to act on this desire is probably where the following maxim comes from:

“To speak on apithology publicly without hesitation, is possibly to not understand its practices, ethics, or questions.”

Why is this? Well, apithology is an interesting discipline. While simple in its forms, it is designed to answer questions not asked, and so it asks of us a mind of inquiry, not practiced.

To hear about apithology requires a certain intrigue of unknowing. There is also a readiness for receptivity. In its distinctiveness, there is also desire to know its difference. Being something unfamiliar though, our greater desire is to collapse its frame of inquiry, into something already understood which is self-affirming.

Offering a familiar explanation or simplification counters the discipline’s benefit prior to us even commencing its discovery. Promoting self in the name of apithology, is also not really a benefit to its practice or its community. It is actually the impact on others of these good intentions, that is the nuance in motivations, that seeks our attentiveness.

We have found over time that, when a person who grasps only the idea of apithology without its practice, tells 100 people (likely to use it) enthusiastically about apithology, not one of those 100 people later become a practitioner (for very clear reasons in apithology theory).

An unembodied understanding simply has no weight or presence in communicating an unfamiliar explanation. Without the embodiment of orientation, those hearing of a new-ness for the first time, will assimilate and accommodate the new knowledge without any recognition of substantive difference.

This is because knowing ‘of’ something, is not the same as knowing from it, being with it, and doing as it – in embodied coherency. In speaking ‘about’, we do not speak ‘from’, and apithology is always practiced from a place that is clearly different in its inquiry. In our early speaking, we may deny others, in their later recognising.

For this reason, usually the way someone finds out about apithology is when they notice something different in a person’s approach, that exhibits a different quality of ethos and the holding of an enactive presence. When we ask them why this is, we may receive the answer (in humility):

“Oh – I have an apithology practice.”

What practitioners do when asked next:

“Apithology?  What’s that?”

– is outlined (briefly) in Practice Note 2.

 

© willvarey (2016)