A turning symbol turns your attention to the whole time you are now living.
‘The answer is always there, but people need the question to bring it out’ (Cleary 1995, 164). We are always at the turning point; but more important, we are at a turning point now.
What difference does a belief make in practice? We can ask this question, but we can’t escape the fact that any answer can only be another belief, another judgment of prior judgments, another current course adjustment.
A turning word speaks from experience, carries it forward, and changes its actual context.
A situation changes itself in response to the words, and this change is their meaning. The situation absorbs the words that are spoken in it. The situation gives birth to the words that change it. Situation and words cross, so that each becomes part of the meaning of the other. As word after word comes, the situation reads ( ….. ) the words in its own way.
— Gendlin, in Levin (1997), 8