I maintain that the particular sub-culture of Rhodesian culture in which I was brought up was not a mind-body dualistic culture. I believe my peers and I were rather more Africanised than would enable them to easily conform to this standardised Western mode of perceiving and reacting to things. In my own case, mind-body dualism has been like a foreign language of the emotions, that sometimes makes sense (but only in a peculiar kind of way) and most of the time doesn't.
The difficulties of relating to those who have an entirely different emotional outlook than one's own can be seen in some ways as akin to a game of "battleships". The approach to understanding the cultural other may not be warlike in all respects. Rather, what is required is good will, persistence and ongoing determination, to break through certain barriers of social conditioning, in order to see the other's perspectives. Even then, one may catch a glimpse of such perspectives maybe just a bit. Incredulity of the type that inwardly proclaims, "Well aren't you white in skin colour, and therefore don't you surely know exactly how we think!!" is the least helpful attitude to work with, when good communication is the desired outcome.
Rather, the game of battleships must continue with patience and rigour: "Did I manage to understand you, or did I perhaps entirely miss the point?"
In the actual game of battleships, one tries to target the location of the other party's ships or submarines, by trying random co-ordinates at first, and then honing one's guesses based on whether one has made a "strike" or missed. Despite the metaphor of battling, it is in fact a game of the mind. Nothing is achieved by getting het up or distressed. Rather, cool persistence wins the day.
When one's emotional orientation towards the world is very different from those around you, the onus is on you (not them) to communicate effectively, by directing one's missives not into thin air (although such randomness in direction will be necessary in the first instances of the game). Rather, one must make one's estimations based on previous experience as well as seeking to develop various modes of predictive logic. In this, the content of the other's thoughts are not so useful, for this content is precisely what can be misleading if one over-identifies with it, because one thinks one recognises in it common mental states. First lesson in battleship warfare is that the very structure of your mind and his mind are not the same, no matter how similar are the surface tropes of meaning. That sense of seeming to hold something in common is only the heart's desire to hold things in common, speaking forth. It's wishful thinking and the source of a delusion.
It is the deeper structures of the other's mind that one must aim to know if one is truly to understand him. Attention to surface content only betrays this more complex ambition.
Why does he respond to acknowledgement of having changed as if this implied personal weakness? What makes him view verbalised self-awareness as a sign of being abject? How does it come about that he fears strong emotional states, and moreover sees them only ever as coming from outside of him, from others "out there" and never from within, from his own being? What makes him believe in the possibility of implicit knowledge of the other, when he has barely engaged in any detailed conversation with them, and only has cursory information to go on? Why does he persist in believing that a quintessential moral stance is best expressed by not sticking out his own neck (either on behalf of himself, or on behalf of others)? What makes him view the person of the other gender as being extremely alien from him, and from his own consciousness, to the point that he finds it difficult even to relate casually, in a relaxed manner? Above all, why does he attribute states of mind that correspond to 'guilt' and 'sin' to the other party, when there isn't any of that in the subjective state of mind of the other?
My answers to date point to a state of being where the mind and the body do not work in cooperative accordance, but are extremely divided. The structure of the mind of the other seems to have revealed itself, and perhaps this implies that my battleships game has now been won.
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