Conversation

We all have conversations with ourselves going on in our heads. Some of these help us to deal with daily choices. Some don't help, because we tend to repeat the same patterns of thought and feeling, and they become part of a closed loop which leaves us going around in circles.

RPO offers the opportunity for two people to talk together using the internet, a written conversation which explores what one of them finds to be a bother, issue or problem, and the other seeks to help clarify, explore and reflect on.

We use the word conversation because we want to avoid the model of an expert prescribing solutions to a client.

We respect the capacity of those who use this service to reflect on their issues, and hope to help that process by engaging in a particular kind of conversation with them.

The pause between each sequence of the RPO conversation provides a space for reflection and choice, which can introduce positive changes. In reflecting on a problem, one gains a different view of it, and this new perspective allows a changed approach. So the conversation itself moves with its changes and finds new ground to explore.

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Knowledge

'the instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best, and almost nothing we are told remains the same when retold.'

Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker, November 13th, 2006

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Alibi

What's your alibi? I was somewhere else. Alibi = elsewhere. That we are elsewhere implies that there is a home where we belong, that we live in exile; to be elsewhere is a permanent human condition on earth. Elsewhere might be time, or might be that we are in the moving present, losing forever the moment just passed, and therefore we cannot be sure what it is 'to be', because the direct experience is not of being, but of losing our existence in the irretrievable 'has been'.

Paraphrased from an extraordinary philosophical work, 'Metaphysical Horror' by Professor Leslek Kolakowski of the University of Chicago, who also writes:

'the very act of knowing , the very fact that our mind communes with the world which it is not and that it can assimilate this world or make of it a self-conscious event, this most common fact, if we look at it without prejudice, is the strangest thing one can imagine.'

So from these quick dips into this work, we see that the very attempt to converse may lead us to slip away into the immediate past, or lead us to attempt to know something about another person and to explore how that person experiences this world we both are trying to know something about.

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Introductions

Ron and Ken, psychotherapists, have been meeting and discussing regularly for several years. Initially we wondered about the mind, consciousness and thinking in relation to computing, the internet and cyberspace. The internet, and especially Web 2.o, is developing into 'an ecosystem for communicating, connecting, collaborating and creatively expressing ideas and information in revolutionary new ways.' Duane Nickull of Adobe.

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