The Gathering
What is a dialogue? Is it just a conversation? Or something more? Can you hear someone without exploring their thoughts as they are showing up for them? Can you put aside your own ideas, opinions, concerns, judgments? Can you understand what they mean just by the words they use alone? Are you certain when you are listening to them speak that you know what they mean by the words they use? Is there a way of listening and a way of responding that enables you to get them, their thoughts, the meaning underneath their thoughts? Is there a way of taking the whole person in as they speak: their gestures, body language, thoughts, feelings, emotions, their words, the meaning of them? If you can do this, is that a conversation, perhaps a dialogue?
The word dialogue is interesting. It can be traced to an Ancient Greek term, “dialogos.” It can be translated as “the word that moves.” But is there more? The prefix “dia-” means “through” or “across,” “to move through.” Movement is at its heart. The suffix “logos” is a rich term. Often designated to simply be defined as “word,” but as you dive into it, logos seems to be much more than just words. “Reason” is one, perhaps it is “to move through reason.” “Law” is another, implying ordering of things or principles. But, you can keep going further into its origins.
Logos, traced to its earliest known root, is “leg-.” This means gathering, arranging, choosing, discerning. One of the earliest known uses of the term comes from Heraclitus. To him, it was a universal principle of order and knowledge. It was gathering together links, relationships between the reasoning, ordering function of man and the intelligible, i.e., understandable structuring of reality, the world. It was universal and changing, flowing like the river you can’t step in twice. It was fire, giving light for the relationships to be seen, it was consuming, separating, moving. It was a bow that moves by turning into itself to propel itself forward. The Stoics thought we were to align ourselves with the logos, this universal flowing and gathering. This was, to them, to partake in the divine ordering of things. To them, it was our highest purpose, to align our reasoning, our portion of the logos, to the universal logos of reality, the logos spoken of by Heraclitus.
Similarly, the ancient Taoists and Ch’an masters spoke of the Tao. They spoke of it as a path, a way, a continuous, flowing movement of the Cosmos. They called the principle by which things gather together into forms (structures), “inner-pattern.” To them, the point of their practice, and life, is to align your whole movement, your whole consciousness to the movement of the inner-pattern. This was to follow the Way (the Tao).
So perhaps dialogos is the act of us gathering together with reality as it is moving right here-and-now, revealing its comprehensible order, its inner-pattern, as we meet it with what we are, right then and there. Perhaps dialogue is this full participation of the whole being moving with the ordering of reality as it presents itself in its elusive, mysterious movement. Perhaps it is to participate in reality’s dynamic unfolding. The implications of this are far-reaching and profound and will be the subject of further explorations here in the future.
Yet dialogue, can also take a specific form, involving people using words to communicate, which is our focus here. Perhaps speech, for us humans, is one of the most potent ways of engaging in dialogos, this participation in the ordering of reality. And when we come together, we have the opportunity to not just have a conversation, but instead we can enter into dialogue. In a dialogue, we move with each other and reality, expressing and participating in its movement through words, thoughts, feelings, ideas, meanings, and gestures at the meeting point of the present moment. Here, in the present, open and attuned, we are able to disclose ourselves and these relationships to one another as they gather in our perceptions in the conversation before us, forming us into a moment of common union with each other, with reality.
When we take this definition of dialogue seriously, it means that dialogue includes something more than just two people talking. If dialogue is this gathering together, reality itself is also a participant. However, reality does not use words. So a dialogue then must include more than just speech. It must include more than just listening to the words of the other people in the dialogue. Must the listener be listening to themself? Must each participant also be listening to what the world is offering to the gathering? Perhaps this stance is essential to listening? Maybe hearing is a better word—hearing as more than listening, but attuning to what is gathering—a fully involved participation. If so, must I be attuned to the gathering of myself, must I also be attuning to reality, to its gathering, and must I also listen to you, my dear speaker, and attune to how you are gathering together and presenting in the present moment with your words, meaning, and affect? And all of this, all at once? Wow! If this is hurting your brain to think about—it is hurting mine—maybe this is a clue.
Just exploring the full, rich potential of what dialogue involves seems to short-circuit my brain. There are so many things going on that must be taken into consideration at one time! So maybe that clue we’re looking at is telling us that we need more than our thoughts to comprehend the full gathering of me, you, and reality at the same time—more than words and thoughts are required for dialogue to take place. Maybe, perhaps, our mind, its concepts, its thoughts, can, and often do, get in the way of such a dialogue, in this sense of the type of dialogue we are discovering and if we are trying to use those alone, we might miss the whole point.
Dialogue, it seems, is a different type of experience than what passes today for a conversation in which one person, filled with beliefs and ideas, stands at a distance from another person, filled with beliefs and ideas, as they fling their words, beliefs, and ideas against the opposing wall, hoping for one to stick, which usually just ends up in everyone watching greasy bits slide down the wall into a mess on the floor. There is a lack of participation—maybe listening, but certainly not hearing. And this seems to be our default mode with each other.
On the other hand, it seems a dialogue focused on bringing to bear as much as possible with focused, yet wide attending to yourself, the other, and reality, where this “gathering” can occur, requires mutual involvement. Here, all participants are engaged together in the kitchen of the present moment. Gathered here in this kitchen, we are looking together, finding what ingredients are available here-and-now in the cupboards, then finding a recipe that will combine the best of what’s available to us, and then we start washing, chopping, slicing, boiling, separating, combining, emulsifying, heating them with fire. Once our combined discovery and participation culminates in a dish, we then sit down at a table, facing one another and partake in the bounty, creativity, and the mutual efforts expended between the participants and the world as they have come together to nourish our bodies and make us what we are.
What would happen if we didn’t just utter our words or profess our beliefs to one another without a care or thought about how they will find us or reality at this moment in time, but instead we patiently look, listen, and wait for what wants to come out in the present moment? What if as they come out we hold them up, take them in, share in the discovery of what they mean to you, what they mean to me? What if we pass the ideas back-and-forth, take a bite, notice how they taste, notice how they land in each of us and how they feel inside our bodies as they work their way through, and share in our differing experiences of them, just for the sake of seeing them as they are, for the sake of seeing what they might offer? Perhaps we will find our thoughts are nothing like we thought they were when they were tucked away in the cabinet, or might we even find they are, more precious, more beautiful, more delicious than we could have imagined, when we see how they look out here in the light of reality, through the eyes of another when they are laid out on the table before us?
In philosophical counseling at Useful Frames, we seek to enter into a dialogue, and participate in its full, unfolding with counselor, client, and reality in the present moment. Our experience is that when such dialogues occur they are enriching and transformative experiences for all involved and allow us to see the reality of ourselves and the world a little more clearly. Could you benefit from seeing yourself with more clarity?
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