Crucially, they have arrived having promised to stop interrupting. They have agreed 1) to start giving attention, 2) to stay interested in where each other’s thinking will go next and 3) to ‘share the stage’ equally.
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Finally, I returned to those two simple things: be present and don’t speak. I promised. And I kept the promise.
During that time we discovered that inside this promise not to speak, this
simple three-faceted agreement to stop interrupting (to start giving attention, to stay interested and to ‘share the stage’), there is a lot going on. Inside this promise there appears to be a kind of ‘coding’ for removing blocks in thinking. It appears that the mind, when not interfered with, asks itself a range of catalytic, almost ‘innate’ questions when it gets stuck, breaking through blocks for itself, so it can be on its way again. All of that seems to happen when the promise of no interruption is in place and the mind is soaring.
Things work in context, not in the spotlight.
I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.
We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.