On Dialogue and Identity

On Dialogue and Identity

Recently, I was involved in a twenty-five square zoom dialogue. Perhaps it was a Squarcle? We were all hoping to delve into how identity shapes a process of Dialogue. 

I realised that we own many identities that we collect over time.  We use them to impersonate our true selves; our self, our other self and our all self. It helps to tell me apart from the story of my deep desire to be unique. It is the custom of many tribes to ask me about my family and my heritage and my history so they can place me in context to their culture. 

Are my identities a changing dynamic? Do I wear my mask for only short periods of time, or for many years? If I do not wear my heart on my sleeve does anyone else even notice the number of masks that I have hanging up on my ego-based shelves? The penny drops… the light goes on… ‘No ego’ is not the same as a ‘separate ego’. Buddhists belong to a greater community than their own consciousness, or so it seems. 

One member of the group is an architect and he is required to flow with the changing circumstances of the environment. It calls into question his integrity as a designer. If the designer likes you, the building is designed in one way; if the designer does not like you, it is designed in another way. Is it even possible to be personal without an ego?

Humans are satisfied by pain or by pleasure. We each of us have to stay true to this pendulum as we navigate our short lives here on earth. What if I stay true to myself and other people still do not like me? What of me ought to be expressed? What of me ought to be suppressed?

My nights are filled with enough nightmares and negative idling’s as it is. How many of us have a notion of how other people define us? How many of us dependent on that definition? What if the definitions are not the way that I really am? What if I am in a male body yet I identify as a female? What if I am in a young body and I identify as an elder?

I have too many resentments to process over generations that I was not even born into take account of. What if I don’t look Jewish and people offer me something that is forbidden? What if I AM: Holy Misunderstood? What if I am wholly misunderstood?

I was raised within the context of a deep cultural wound, a collective injury. When a thought travels from my mind to my tongue, who are my best companions for that journey? What if I have no companions and there is only me? How would I know my own perception when I am the perceiver too?

How do I listen to feedback when I am the voice talking and the ears listening? How do I really listen to my long-term friends and acquaintances? Do I still see them as they met me for the first time? Do I ignore who they are now, because I would have to change my mind about who they really are? Am I capable of changing my mind about them?

Their perspectives are different from the part that they perceive about me and if I was able to see myself as others see me, perhaps I would not recognise myself either?

If I ask, I know that I will not get an honest answer. Honesty only arises in the listening. If I pay attention to the clues, I will get to understand not how people see me, rather how they understand me. Such reflection is a mixed bag of exploration and stuckness.

Jewishness, or Buddistness or Catholicness requires a deep sense of vulnerability that is buried so deep that it has become unconscious to my daily identity. It’s as deep as my sexual desires or as immutable as my skin colour or my DNA. 

Humans are killed by inhumans simply for their sexual orientation, for their race or their Covid19 status. During the pandemic, many descended into their primal states. Many lived their lives through their reptilian lens, and they were triggered by 5G and conspiracy theories and fake news and so on and so on…

Some of them put their knee on another man’s neck and killed him. Even if we did not place our own personal knee, if we have come from a moneyed class, we know deep down that we did that many times; we were paid to do it; it was our corporate identity. We all suffocated others from our sense of power. This begs the terrifying question, is that complex within me? Is it social? Is it aggression? 

What practices can we attempt together that minimise the senseless violence; only the violence is actually triggered by senses; it is an oxymoron – does this mean Oxytocin as experienced by a moron?

In Dialogue, I park my reptilian instincts, but do I really? Aren’t I my own worst enemy? Nobody else owns my threat response. Nobody else floods my brain with cortisol and adrenalin, I do that myself. We each of us have our own corona – our crowns…and each of us respond to a biological threat from our own mental prison. How does that mental prison function?

If I have a timid streak, where does my animal instinct really go? How do I integrate the intellectually gifted with the intellectually bereft? Is Dialogue enough? As a group, we reflect on the reflections and we meet the evolving questions which appear organic and elusive. 

The question moves around our system as if it has nothing to strive for; it is relaxed in its slowness. We each grapple with dozens of feelings even in small groups. There are myriads of thoughts. We each access the deep core of our own queries in our own state of flow, yet the emotions simply pop back up even though we try to repress them. At least on zoom you won’t get a clip around the ear for being stupid!

Some of us want to go deeper; some of us want to surface as they don’t have the oxygen required for a deep dive. They will get the bends. Where do these intentions come from anyway? Our consciousness; our unconsciousness? 

It is a challenge to see twenty-four pairs of eyes stare back at me. It is a relief to breakout into smaller groups. How much more intimate is the smaller group? It depends on what I want then to see of me. I can be just as intimate with a million people if I let them see into me; In to me see…

We all have different assumptions about what Dialogue is and is not. For some it is individual, for some it is group, for some it is both. For some it is about economy, for some it is about ecology. Perhaps my screen size determines the size of my lens? If only I could stretch my mind as easily as I stretch my screen…

Do I have the capacity to reveal myself to the others? Do I own the capacity to reveal it to myself? Who am I as a human? Who are we as a group of humans? In speaking about my wounds, I let my emotions fly. I feel them and I let them go. I touch the core of my non- identity. I can only teach what I already am. I can only learn what I am not. 

For three people, they hear the instructions with different lenses, and they spend their time in the breakout arguing about the rules that none of them know about. The process is the content and the content is the process. 

A new person arrives halfway through. They were in cyber limbo. The facilitator forgot to add them to a group and now they parachute into our already deep Dialogue. 

Oh hello!! Are we a WE yet? Can I just show up, or do I have to identify myself? With the same message we all have different misunderstandings. Some misunderstand the process. Some misunderstand the question. Some misunderstand both. We think under the tyranny of time and perhaps when we split off, God holds the space…

When I open my mouth, my heart comes out. In Dialogue, I am often too quick to slow it down again. Slowing my heart deepens my relating, it brings me calm, it brings its own calm. 

There is a quality to exploring without questions. It is a place inside of me. There is no answer if there is no question. What if the question comes from the wrong place in me? What if it comes from my head rather than my heart? What if my virtuosity in Dialogue is not as I think it is? 

The surface level of my speaking drops deeper. I choose not to hide. I am not getting wrapped up in so many questions. I drop my filters. I go beyond discussion. I can handle the attention. I don’t mind if I offend the forty-eight eyes in front of me. 

How do I handle my own truth until something new emerges? I begin with myself. I seek what I am hiding. I say it to the group. It begins with me. I look at myself to see the hider. When I see inside of myself in this moment, the false person and the true person both look back at me. Which one of them will now hide?

Which one of them has the right to be in this group? Which observer observes? Which one is the same? Which one is different? Why would my own identity be a hindrance to myself. Perhaps if I do not trust my culture, I cannot go into a deeper dialogue. What if my Irishness is located in England? What if my whiteness is located in Africa? What if my stupidity is located in intelligentsia? What if I have to cast my pearls before swine?

Is my political correctness truthful? How brutal can diplomacy be when it needs to oil a friction? How does respect become a mouthguard? I speak from my own ground, from within myself. I don’t mind stepping on other people’s toes. I am here, right now, in this moment and I own its imperfection and perfection. 

I avoid my vulnerability in this room. I propriocept my own thoughts and I disclose what is hidden within me. I go to the deepest region, but what is revealed is not hidden within me; it is hidden within my tribe. Identity is a dance made for more than one person. It is a group sport.

Perhaps humans are one tribe. Inhumans certainly are! The other tribes take their crooked steps and they dance their dance. In it, we all become revealed and we do not mind who holds the space in the breakouts. We become generic. We become collective. 

We recognise that we have our own identity on this zoom call. We are porous enough to seep through our selves.  We are corpus enough to contain ourselves. We own our own temporary identity and we stretch it’s form and structure just enough to be husband and wife, father and mother, son and daughter, perpetrator and victim all over again. 

We get a feel for how to encounter ourselves as we explore our collective vulnerability. We are Yin Yang and this is both time and place. We are sensitive and anonymous, digital and real. But it seems that we know what we are doing and we hold our own collective conversation because we all know the price of fragmentation. 

We know our identities well enough not to wear them when we don’t need them. We show up in this set and setting right now. We show up in this cyber world and some of us may never meet ever or in a dozen lifetimes. 

We feel the discomfort of white people speaking about the vulnerability of black people who are not here. In our future self, our strategic self, we will remember this time and we will know to keep our traps shut. When we run into the people who do not like us, all we have to do is to stay in the soup of inhumanity. 

I discover myself. I get out of my own head and not a mushroom in sight. A nice white lady treats a Chinese lady like a child. Too much gin. Not enough gin if you ask me. The gin should have been shared amongst them both. The veil is too thick. And too thin. At the same time. 

Guess what. It is not a level playing field. There is no loyalty. Some of us never belonged where we were born. The Chinese woman is accused of sending the virus to America. Why does she have to put up with this crap? Since the 1800’s Chinese have been hated in America. She is asked if she is undocumented. Her passport says she is from Orange County. 

I am myself. I have my own preservation to think about. Is it the way that I look to others? Do I look Irish? I stop the debate in my head. I drop into my genuine emotion. White people don’t want to be white, they want to be some independent form of themselves. Republican, democrat, liberal, green , scientist, economist, doctor, nurse, whore, priest; the list is endless.

The yellow woman says she does not belong to china. She belongs to herself. She belongs to her own wounds. Her scars have the DNA coding of her healing. She always looks like she is from a different place. If she allows her scars to heal, she will come out stronger. Her vulnerability will flow like a river and it will be the Tao. 

Meanwhile, I am banished from my patriarchy when I understand fragmentation. My position of power is to know my own power in the context of the shadow of others powerlessness.

My filters and frames are my imbalance of power. I incubate my privilege and I come home to my racial privilege. I feel a false sense of what is so in the world. I feel my own dishonesty. I hide from my own experience. I am a clone. I am misguided. I hide my whiteness and my power. I am expected to choose from my powerlessness so that my identity will make me irrelevant. 

Diversity brings new perspectives. My day to day life experience serves me with the attention of my own identity, only when it is raised. Otherwise, I have no identity. I re-open my own wound. My vulnerability is a plus sign and my life is a series of minus signs that I can attract to. 

I live my vulnerability like some kind of character structure and each identity passes itself forward for destruction like a moving roman column in the face of a fierce enemy. The front row body is killed so the row behind body walks over the dead corpse to fill the void. How else is an empire formed?

I like my vulnerability. It creates a space that I can enter alone. It makes me aware. It allows me to create connection and not to be afraid. Nobody can hurt me only me. I am unfuckwithable. Let Covid19 come and find me. I claim my personal reconciliation to my own power. The wound is collective. Covid19 is collective. Xenophobia is collective. 

There is a good reason not to like other races. They kill you when you are not looking. Our teacher David Bohm asked if there was a way back to the naturalness of the world. South Africa had to ban alcohol to reduce domestic violence. Why did they not do that years ago if this is the real cause of it?

Vulnerability leads some into prison. This is where power and transparency are equal bedfellows. The course of the dialogue points to its potential, but never seems to reach it. It is as if potential does not want to be found today. We are not honest enough, not subtle enough, not silent enough. 

I don’t mind being hurt. I mind being open. I mind being present. I mind being available. Nothing hinders my identity. When I see me, so do you. I am your cultural conditioning. If thought can create reality, can it create imagination too?

I present my human beingness. My identity is divisive. It shows the false power structures that thrive on national identity, on racial uniqueness on social character. Some are better and some are worse. My thoughts create structures before I get out of bed in the morning.

My cognitive divisions are the root of my conflict. I can feel the sadness. When I hear the consequences of my reality, their filters seem more important than my identity. Whether you are Black or Chinese or White; my beingness is beyond all these. 

My thoughts create conflict because they can. I have a right to be me. Certain others claim the right to be them. Somewhere, over the rainbow, all our rights can participate fully. People are different. Really? Aren’t they always the fucking same? What have we been talking about for two hours?

Our richness and our honesty is also our degradation. We are no better than those without any identity at all. We are no better than those who cannot Dialogue. We just have fancy language and political correctness and a better vocabulary for hatred. 

When we release our tacit infrastructure, we are the organism of who we will become. How do savages dance? The same as civilized people. None of us experiences what the other goes through every day. Bullshit. We are the other. 

We ignore the horsepower of mind in the room and we focus on the horseshit that we have to suspend the unsuspendable. We reveal ourselves. We now know what we are doing with it. We are showing how we don’t drop assumptions and that there is a very low possibility to transcend ourselves. 

If we walked into another dimension of understanding, we would not be fully engaged. We would be too busy asking clever and incisive questions or typing what we already said into the chat-box as if it was doubly important. 

We are another dimension of the disturbed mind. We are blocked from digging down. We are not really here. There is nothing to be done about it. We are overwhelmed. We cannot make sense of it. Our ideal is irrelevant. The jury is out if this was even a Dialogue!

Our heads settle down and we write in our journals. We process. We are the fruit of our own thoughts. We don’t know how high the stakes are until they are worthless. 

Online slows us down. We are put into our boxes. Reputations are confined to heads and shoulders far away. We ought to sit in on a circle in a poor black neighborhood and see what Dialogue really is all about. Now that’s where everything is at stake. 

The stakes are low online. All I have to do is go on mute. Or switch my video off so they don’t see I am on facebook. The power of the container is both over and under. The safety of the container is both internal and external. The strategic identity of the group has an intimacy which overtakes our fear. 

We are slower. We are more reflective. We witness the reflection. We reflect the witnesses. We love the space. We have to; the space loves us. We are virtually lost and found. Extra time allows us to go deeper, yet it gives us a strange self-confidence. We are offered a magic wand to fix one problem in the world. 

What is it to be truthful in a world where we have to show so many identities? Are we grateful? Do we acknowledge the quality of our thinking? Do we see the many different perspectives which makes up the whole, the hale and the holy?

It’s one thing not to be engaged with my head, but when I am disengaged with my body, I am dead, a lifeless thing. My wellbeing needs Dialogue. Those that profit from identity are at the root of conflict the world over. It is at the heart of all inhuman struggle. 

I stay in the dance for the sake of the dance and not of the dancer. I swing on my moods. I commune with my reactions. I move with my feelings. The moment in me now is urgency. We are killing each other on the TV and there is no enemy but within. Can I kill myself by putting my knee on my own throat?

On the surface there are so many dancers, but there is only one dance. It has its own expression. Nobody knows who the choreographer is. We can’t stop dancing. We cannot step away from the dance. It is hard to find acceptance within the ballroom of ourselves and claim the root of the movement of thought.

We are a million years into our social conditioning and we may not like what we see. Yet, we have to live it together and see it by being it. We are the dance beyond the dance. We are all here to do it. Our choice is collective. We hearts feel together. We are the only motivator. 

We are the new inhumanity. Our new group assumptions tells us that this group is safe. I just turn up. I have no choice. I have to be myself. I need to feel whole at the end of the session, even if the cracks show up. I need to re-scabbard my double-edged sword and finish the race in which I am the only competitor. 

How can we talk about cruelty when I do not feel cruel now? Integrity and vulnerability are only concepts to those who are out of integrity and invulnerable. We search for the container to hold the questions. We can’t find it. It’s not an it, it’s a him. We killed him didn’t we? We kill them all. 

We receive the blessing of a Druid in a language that we do not understand. Thank God we are all Atheists.