The Heart of Dialogue Is a Simple but Profound Capacity to Listen

A publication of the INTERCOMMUNITY PEACE & JUSTICE CENTER NO. 110 / SPRING 2016 The heart of dialogue is a simple but profound This means listening not only to oth- Emerson once joked that ninety-five ers but also to ourselves and our own percent of what goes on in our minds capacity to listen. reactions. Recently a manager in a pro- is none of our business! We often pay gram I was leading told me, “You know, great attention to what goes on in us, By William Isaacs I have always prepared myself to speak. when what is actually required is a But I have never prepared myself to lis- kind of disciplined self-forgetting. istening requires we not only hear ten.” This is, I have found, a common This does not have to be difficult. It is the words, but also embrace, ac- condition. For listening, a subject we of- within the reach of each of us. cept, and gradually let go of our ten take for granted, is actually very hard To do this you do not have to retreat Lown inner clamoring. As we explore it, to do, and we are rarely prepared for it. to a monastery or to be converted to we discover that listening is an expansive To listen is to develop an inner si- some new belief. You do, though, have activity. It gives us a way to perceive more lence. This is not a fa- to do some deliberate work to cultivate directly the ways we participate in the miliar habit for settings inside yourself and with oth- world around us. most of us. ers-where it is possible to listen. with other rhythms. But seeing and listening are very different. The substance of seeing is light. Light moves at a far more rapid pace than sound: 186,000 miles per second as opposed to 1,100 feet per second. To listen, in other words, you must slow down and operate at the speed of sound rather than at the speed of light. The eye seems to perceive at a super- ficial level, at the level of reflected light.1 While the eye sees at the surface, the ear tends to penetrate below the surface. To listen well, we must attend both to the words and the silence between the words. LISTENING AND THE PRINCIPLE Voicing Listening OF PARTICIPATION Speaking the truth of Our capacity to listen puts us in con- Without resistance or one’s own authority, what tact with the wider dimensions of the imposition. one really is and thinks. world in which we live. It lets us connect to it. Listening can open in us a door, Asks: What needs to be said? Asks: How does this feel? a greater sense of participation in the world. I see listening, properly under- stood and developed, as an immediate Respecting Suspending gateway that can connect us with the much-touted but much-misunderstood Awareness of the integrity Suspension of notion that we live in a “participative of another’s position and assumptions, judgement, universe,” one of the four key principles the impossibility of fully and certainty. that underlie the approach to dialogue understanding it. proposed in [Dialogue and the Art of Asks: How does this fit? Asks: How does this work? Thinking Together]. The principle of participation builds upon the realization —William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Currency, page 419 that individuals are active participants in the living world, a part of nature as In other words, you must create a space We listen in a way that tells us about the well as observers of it. At the heart of in which listening can occur. dimensionality of our world. Hearing is the matter here is the idea that human The ways we have learned to listen, to auditory, of course, relating to sound. beings participate intimately in their impose or apply meaning to the world, The word auditory and oral have the worlds and are not separate from them. are very much a function of our mental same roots as the word audience and The principle of participation that models, of what we hold in our minds auditorium. Their most ancient root lies behind the practice of listening is as truths. But the physical functioning means “to place perception.” When we well demonstrated by a hologram. A of our ears, and how they differ from listen, we place our perceptions. hologram is a three-dimensional im- other senses, can shed light on how we Our culture, though, is dominated age created by the interference pattern can learn to “make sense” in new ways. by sight. We see thousands of images of two interacting laser beams. All the flashed across our minds in an hour information contained on the plate is THE SENSE OF HEARING of television or the Internet. The re- enfolded into every part of the plate. The sense of hearing is ever present. sult of this external bombardment of Our hearing puts us on the map. It bal- visual impressions is that we tend now Language Is Holographic ances us. Our sense of balance is inti- to think in these ways. In the Western Our language is also holographic. mately tied to our hearing; both come world we have begun to be habituated Each word contains not only the wider from the same source within our bodies. to this quick pace, and are impatient context of paragraph and sentence but 2 NO. 110 / SPRING 2016 the deeper context of our lives. When ceive those around you. BMW was used and you first interact with someone, their To listen is to realize that much of our much older than he initial words carry the entire hologram reaction to others comes from memory; it had realized, and of their consciousness to you. is stored reaction, not fresh response at all. that the young Every part of ourselves is enfolded in Listening from my predispositions in this men were very every part of our conversations whether way is listening from the “net” of thought gentle, very bright, we realize it or not. But we cannot always that I cast on a particular situation.2 and capable. tell the extent of our participation. There is not enough information to produce a Stick to the Facts The Ladder of clear and coherent understanding. We We need to learn to listen with a great Inference lack a focusing process-a way of contain- deal more humility. This typically means We need to distinguish between the ing the enormity in a small space. Dia- literally coming down to earth and con- inferences we make about experience logue is the focusing mechanism for the necting what we think with the experienc- and the experience itself. Why is this im- hologram of conversation. Through it es that lead us to think it. While this portant? One of the ways we sustain the we can expand our awareness to in- may seem obvious and easy, culture of thinking alone is that we form clude ever-greater wholeness. in practice people continu- conclusions and then do not test them, Dialogue is a process that can ally jump to conclusions, treating our initial inferences as facts. We allow us to become aware speak abstractly, and fail wall ourselves off, in other words, from of our participation in a to notice they are doing so. the roots of our own thinking. And when much wider whole. Like A new discipline of listen- we are invested in an opinion, we tend to the telescope, it focuses the ing to what is said can make seek evidence that we are right and avoid available light more completely a real change. This is not always so evidence that we are wrong. Errors of this so that we can see more. sort can have devastating consequences. LEARNING TO LISTEN Listening can Follow the Disturbance Learning to listen begins with recog- Slowing down our thinking and lis- nizing how you are listening now. Gen- open in us a door, tening in this way is not so easy, in part erally, we are not all that conscious of because the landscape is not neutral. how we listen. You can begin to listen a greater sense of Some of the memories we have are pain- by listening first to yourself and to your participation in ful. They move very swiftly and grab us own reactions. Ask yourself, What do I by the scruff of the neck. By the time we feel here? or How does this feel? Try to the world. realize their influence, we are caught. identify what you feel more carefully Often when we listen to others we may and directly. Beginning with the percep- discover that we are listening from dis- tion of your own feelings connects you easy to do. We are often unaware of the turbance; in other words, we are listen- to your heart and to the heart of your ex- extent to which we assume what we see ing from an emotional memory rather perience. To learn to be present, we must is what is there. A colleague of mine tells than from the present moment. learn to notice what we are feeling now. the story of a man who went one day to pick up his high-school-age daughter and Listen Without Resistance Be Aware of Thought another girl. As he drove up to the place [This] relates directly to the chal- As you begin to listen, you can also he was to meet her, he saw her leaning lenge of listening beyond the net of our begin to notice what you are thinking.

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