DEEPER THAN DIALOGUE

DEEPER THAN DIALOGUE

Sometimes, when we get out of the car, my two year old son sounds an “Ohhhh!” and points in some direction, with his eyebrows raised.

When we look, there’s nothing to see. He continues pointing, not looking in the direction, but pointing.

“Ohhhh!”, he sounds.

And then he starts to make a sound of some sort.

Maybe it’s a bird call, or a siren, or barking like a dog.

It is then that we realize what he was pointing at. Not something he saw, but something he could hear.

Only then are we able to hear it too. A sound that was there all along, but before his help, imperceptible to everyone over the age of two.

He’s at that fabulous age where his communication is just beginning, where he’s able to use only a handful of words to inform us of things and ask for things with a modicum of specificity, but without enough vocabulary for his mind to be filled with dialogue. The kind of dialogue that makes a noise on the inside which drowns out the outside.

In being with him though, not having him around, but in actually Being With him, you are transported in time back to when there was less noise.

In the same way his pointing lead you to believe there was something to see, the quieting of your mind makes it obvious what you’re feeling that you could not feel before. There is a breeze brushing the hairs on your arms and you hadn’t even noticed there was a breeze. The light is coming through the trees and you hadn’t even noticed the sun came out. With a quieter mind, we don't just hear more, we experience more. All our senses are braided together and with presence we pick up all of it at once.

After speaking in Zurich once, I was present in dialogue with a woman. She was sharing some things and asking questions. I was reflecting back what I saw. She shared that she was amazed at how much I could see. Out of my mouth came words that I hadn’t had time to fact check.

“I can see everything.”

When I said it, she looked at me funny. I immediately understood why. What I’d just said sounded like some egomaniacal fantasy of omniscience. I certainly didn’t rationally believe that, so why had I said it?

In sharing her surprise, as I reflected with her on where that came from it seemed to me those words were not a narrative about myself in comparison with others in the world, but an expression of the state of flow that I was in. I’d just come off stage after an hour of speaking intuitively about Creating and in improvisational dialogue with the audience. Like in Greek Tragedy, where the sole actor dances with the Chorus, the monologue unfolding as an arc of tension between the order of their intent and the chaos of the crowd, I was still as present as that experience had both demanded of me and delivered to me.

And, I believe, it was exactly the experience my two year old son lives in. The experience we all once lived in, all of the time, before the magic of language fattened our left brains and flattened the world.

This is not a call to return, to throw the proverbial baby of maturity out with the bathwaters of modernity. Growth, and life for that matter, is not a circle. It is a spiral. Our coming back is always as something new.

And so it is with Creating.

The Pure Creator is symbolized with the image of a child. For their innocence, their freedom is not a freedom from what is. It is a freedom to create what is.

One must be entirely free, not as a categorical imperative or a narrative held true about them measured and forever, but in a moment of Being.

Until one is Being entirely free, in the now here, there is no possibility for Pure Creation.

And until one is in Pure Creation, what they can envision for themselves and their world is at best a response, if not a reaction, to what is.

To make something from nothing one must Be nothing. Not always and forever. Not more than this person or that. But nothing now and here. Nothing for you. Nothing to you and as you.

To get to nothing, to forget of who you are, to quiet your mind with the constant conversation about what’s right and wrong, immerse yourself in conversations that walk you back. Not backwards, but back.

While language and dialogue may have clouded our minds, it has also left a trail. Front-facing, we can walk ourselves back to a mind that is quiet enough to hear in the distance birds chirping, sirens whining and dogs barking.

Rather than bother yourself with questions about what you might create if you were that quiet and free, instead pursue the silence.

Do not seek to mute your mind. Seek a way of speaking with yourself that hushes you naturally, calmly. Talk to yourself in ways that invite you beyond talking and talking will be a gate you can cross freely over, both ways.

This is what looking to your Being, in all instances, does to you. It cultivates a listening deeper than the dialogue that shapes it.

As you become more adept at hearing, seeing, and feeling being in yourself, you come to hear, see and feel it in others too. And like my two year old son, when people speak, you’ll find yourself saying “Ohhhh” and pointing.

Pointing to something they can’t see, but when once they do, they’ll not only have insight, they too will become more able to feel the breeze on the hairs of their arm.

If you'd like to grow in your ability to hear, see and feel being in yourself and in others, then I recommend you immerse yourself in live Creating Dialogue. We have a number of contexts within which you can experience this; 3-hour trainings, eight-week intensives, and year-long small group journeys.

If you have been reading these articles and feel curious to experience the ideas I share here in a real and embodied way, then I invite you to schedule the first breakthrough in your being with one of our Creating Champions today.

There is no financial investment to experience this. All we ask for is your time and openness to an experience as new, fresh, and rewarding as you find my writing to be.

Go here to schedule it now.

Loving you, JPM