You're right! Your own personal subjective experience is the highest form of truth!

Yes, this is sometimes called teachers disease. What are very intelligent people, after 20-30 years of teaching and preparing lessons, lectures etc., as teachers fall into a kind of lopsidedness. It is like the fact we can develop bad breath and not know it; it doesn't rise to the level of our being aware of it. Let us say that John has a mild case of this; still it is not easily balanced out. People can be born with a predisposition to teach. Then the many, many, many of the twigs of behavior and attitude around this inherent disposition get bent in such a way that the tree is inclined in an unbalanced way. Any predisposition is related to what Gurdjieff called 'chief feature'. It is like the basic or central motivator of our life that activates all the other motivations. The closer the disposition is to 'chief feature' the more difficult it is to recognize in our self. If we can learn to recognize it, it becomes our friend. If we can't, it blinds us to some aspect of self, it is a blind spot for us. One jazz man asked how to improvise said "What you think to play; don't play that." Abraham Maslow's statement that "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as a nail" can be seen to refer to this kind of blind spot. When John gets involved in a discussion, we can see his intensity goes up to the point of using more force than necessary at certain times in his contributions. We all suffer from our own unique version of this blindness to some degree; it is a kind of unconscious attitude that creeps in, often other people can see or feel it but we don't. When we see something in another that bothers us, it is always a good opportunity to open to and allow the felt-sense of this "bother' in our body as a sensation. With whole body awareness or simple presence and our being receptive to the the felt-sense of what arises, we can say 'may this sensation' anchor and further feed the presence of my presence into the present. In this way we allow our own chief feature to be recognized and we begin to see how it can help us be more present and not caught up in the mind only. We learn to welcome both the sense of 'bother' (aversion) and the 'impulse to grasp at' (attraction) that we don't ordinarily like to take the time to feel at the bodily felt sense level. The pithy teaching is: Open to and allow the felt-sense of the 'groundlessness' of the present situation and notice the tendency of the mind to retreat to the 'safe' territory of conceptualization. "Groundlessness" is unique to each person and can have different levels of intensity. It is a felt-sense of lack. It is mainly a feeling state we are not taking time to allow it to be acknowledged. Subconsciously we sense of lack and we react to it before we acknowledge it and allow it to be felt. It we did take time for this we would not have to impose it on the conversation. Here, like learning to play jazz, we learn to be creative. We don't necessarily have to go with the words and attitude (very often colored by compulsion) that are our usual way of in this sort of situation. John points to this affliction of chief feature quite plainly in different words when he speaks about the "Solomon effect" from 1:11:50 to 1:12:30. In short we become identified with the features of our own personality. Some of these features (aka 'states of mind') only partially know they are loved and so when they take center stage in us, we to some extent try "to push the river". We are caught up in the compulsion to some extent rather than pausing to sense and feel the condition of the body-mind in the present situation. This pause and allowing the felt sense of the breath gives the space for a shift to occur in us; this allows us to relax into the tension rather than letting the tension drive us. Here an aspect of the energy of the compulsion (which in fact doesn't know in the moment it is loved) is allowed to untwist itself and in the long run, we will find we are more completely our self rather being at the mercy of our blind spots.