## Metadata - Author: [[William Isaacs]] - Full Title: Dialogue - Category: #books ## Highlights - Many people seek breakthroughs in productivity and performance by developing measures and metrics, carrots and sticks. Dialogue achieves this by deepening the glue that links people together. - Too many of us have lost touch with the fire of conversation. When we talk together, it is rarely with depth. For the most part, we see our conversations as either opportunities to trade information or arenas in which to win points. Difficulties that might otherwise be resolved or even dissolved persist. And often we find we simply do not have the wherewithal to genuinely consider new possibilities, new options - What is needed to bring about dialogue? Coherent new actions and behavior, fluid structures and an ability to predict problematic ones, and a wholesome atmosphere and understanding of the space out of which our conversations arise - The implicate order is the idea that underlying the physical universe is a sea of energy that “unfolds” into the visible, explicate world that we see around us. In this picture, reality unfolds from this invisible sea and then folds back up again. Bohm began to speculate that these ideas might serve as a metaphor for understanding other levels of experience, including thought and consciousness itself - Bohm differentiated between these processes by calling the fresh responses we have “thinking” and the habitual reactions of memory “thoughts.” “Thought” is not only the past of thinking, it is the product of thinking. The problem, however, is that thoughts re-present themselves in consciousness as if they were “real” and active now - As my colleague Peter Garrett has suggested, feelings work in the same way; “feelings” form in the present moment, “felts” are memories of feelings from the past. When we hear patriotic marching music, many of us experience “felts” of patriotism - True thinking moves more slowly, more gently than this. Usually we do not imagine we have time for it. Thinking has a freshness to it, like a flow of water softly moving through the mind, and requires space. The fruit of thinking is sometimes a seemingly simple, quiet idea that stands out among a crowd of passing thoughts. It arrives unannounced. Truth, a mentor of mine once said, is like a deer that comes to stand at the edge of the woods to drink. If you make too much noise, it runs away. How quiet are you - When we undertake any task, like run a meeting, negotiate an agreement, discipline a child—even meditate—we operate from a set of taken-for-granted rules or ideas of how to be effective. Understanding these tacit rules is what I mean by theory. The word theory comes from the same roots as the word theater, which means simply “to see.” A theory is a way of seeing - To open yourself to begin to understand the theory behind dialogue is to open yourself up to the forces that make human endeavors effective or not - Our hearing puts us on the map. It balances us. Our sense of balance is intimately tied to our hearing; both come from the same source within our bodies. We listen in a way that tells us about the dimensionality of our world. Hearing is auditory, of course, relating to sound. The word auditory and oral have the same roots as the word audience and auditorium. Their most ancient root means “to place perception.” When we listen, we place our perceptions. - Berendt points out that there are few “acoustical illusions”—something sounding like something that in fact it is not—while there are many optical illusions. The ears do not lie. The sense of hearing gives us a remarkable connection with the invisible, underlying order of things - Today, what we call “real” are the things we can quantify and measure objectively—views stemming directly from Descartes and the canon of modern science that grew from it—“specific location.” This idea is simply that if you cannot find a precise measurement and location for something, it does not really exist - Every part of ourselves is enfolded in every part of our conversations whether we realize it or not. But we cannot always tell the extent of our participation. There is not enough information to produce a clear and coherent understanding. We lack a focusing process—a way of containing the enormity in a small space. Dialogue is the focusing mechanism for the hologram of conversation. Through it we can expand our awareness to include ever-greater wholeness. Dialogue is a process that can allow us to become aware of our participation in a much wider whole. Like the telescope, it focuses the available light more completely so that we can see - The word intelligence is quite revealing on this score. It comes from two Latin roots, inter and legere, which mean “to gather between.” Intelligence, then, is the active, fresh capacity to think, to gather between already existing categories. In other words, we can learn to listen either from the net we already have, or to the spaces between. - One of the ways we sustain the culture of thinking alone is that we form conclusions and then do not test them, treating our initial inferences as facts. We wall ourselves off, in other words, from the roots of our own thinking - Peter Garrett, who developed the process of dialogue in England with David Bohm, provides a vivid illustration of how to look for coherence in dialogue. In the dialogues he conducts in maximum security prisons in England, he works with some of the most serious offenders—serial murderers, serial rapists, felons of all sorts. I once asked him what the most important thing he had learned from his work. He said simply, “Inquiry and violence cannot coexist - The core questions to help us learn to respect involve asking ourselves, How does what I am seeing and hearing here fit in some larger whole? How does this belong? What must be sustained here that others are missing? What is happening right now? - I have worked for some years now with a variety of practices that explore the physical dimensions of learning. Most of these derive from the martial arts. Almost all of them take seriously the notion that effectiveness means becoming centered—not fixed and rigid but fluid, like a branch in a tree. Rooted, but flexible. Centering is the practice of finding the center of gravity, a point of balance, of quietness in yourself - Says Garrett: “The impulse behind intentions is pure, even though the intention may be distorted and the impact not what was intended. Inquiring deeply enough to reach the original impulse will always reveal wholesomeness. This provides the confidence to enter the loudest confrontation and the darkest territory without fear that it will get forever worse.” - Note: This just just like NVC. Wholesomeness is a great way to define needs. - Aikido is a martial art that seems particularly well suited to dialogue because it invites practitioners to become aware of and blend with the energies of one’s “assailants,” whether they are hostile individuals or challenging circumstances. One acts from this place of centeredness, constantly inquiring into circumstances, constantly alert to sustaining one’s center. This is something that all practitioners continuously do - The art of thinking together invites us to a different level of thought, to notice that for us to perceive something, it must somehow be in us, or it literally would not connect to anything in us. Even something that we feel is an enemy is connected to an image or perception in us of that enemy. - We may be tempted to say that a given behavior is all “theirs”—I do not have anything like that in me! Maybe so. But the courage to accept it as not only “out there,” but also “in here,” enables us to engage in the world in a very different way. If you can perceive it, it is also in you, you are bringing it forth whether you realize it or not. To maintain that it is separate from you is to fall prey to a pathology of thought: that there is a world independent of how you think about it and participate in it - One of the most challenging things a group can learn in a dialogue is to hold the tension that arises and not react to it. Typically, when faced with this kind of cross-current in the conversational ecology, people begin to “vote” on which person or perspective they feel is “right.” This relieves the tension for them, but, ironically, intensifies it for the rest of the group, since this reduces the space in which a new understanding can emerge - I have a friend who used to run a two-acre organic farm. He said he always grew enough for the insects and the people! Managing the tensions within ourselves is a bit like this. We make room for all the perspectives and voices without trying to get rid of any of it - One of the group competencies of dialogue is the capacity to sustain respect for all the perspectives that arise, long enough to inquire into them. - The loss of respect manifests in a simple way: My assessment that what you are doing should not be happening. The source of the trouble lies in my frame: My belief causes me immediately to look for a way to change you, to help you to see the error of your ways. It causes me to avoid looking at my own behavior and how I might be contributing. People on the receiving end of this attitude experience violence—the imposition of a point of view - Note: NVC! - we tend very quickly to identify what we say with who we are. We feel that when someone attacks our idea, they are attacking us. So to give up our idea is almost like committing a kind of suicide. But non-negotiable positions are like rocks in the stream of dialogue: They dam it up. One of the central processes for enabling us to enter into dialogue is the practice of suspension, the art of loosening our grip and gaining perspective - David Bohm once told the story of how he, while attending a dialogue in Sweden, found himself forming a criticism in his mind about another person in the room. He wanted to interrupt this criticism, but to do so in a way that could let him see its nature and structure. He did not want to just let it go on unchecked, nor did he wish to suppress it. As he watched his own reactions, he said he felt like a bolt of lightning was moving in his body: Containing and reflecting on the energy of criticism brought up great intensity in him. To suspend criticism is to observe its motion, to take back into yourself the force you might otherwise put off onto others around you. If you neither suppress this energy, disavowing it (what, me critical?), nor express it (those idiots deserve what they get), you are left with having to hold it in yourself and explore its meaning and dimensions. This can be quite uncomfortable, which may be why it is rarely done. But it can lead to enormous insight, for instance, about the pervasive habits of judgment we can impose on others. The very act of inquiring into one’s reactions in this way produces a change