After several years of stabbings in the dark I tried: ‘What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?’ It worked. They kept going, and I kept out of it.

Difference is all there is. There is no such thing as same. That’s the curious thing. All this clubbiness, all this we/they super-construction in our rituals and rites, all this being-an-exclusive-member-of drive we learn as we grow up – none of it is real. Inside every group there is so much difference we would drown trying to slosh through it all. So we pretend. Here is your medallion. Now you are one of us. We are all the same. Thank goodness.

We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.

So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?

And then, who knows?

To love?

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.

Each person had five minutes.

There was fervour this time; people’s emotional connection to their views was deeply personal. And at a few points I sensed they were holding on for dear life to the promise not to interrupt. In those moments the promise seemed to be the only thing between them and disintegration of the person’s turn and the whole group’s integrity. For me these moments are reassuring, not alarming. The promise is rugged and soon reinstates the ingredients of attention and interest.

And because the promise in that way holds back the touchpaper of adrenaline and cortisol, the grounding of serotonin and oxytocin gradually increase, and those near-death moments subside. The speaker keeps thinking, and the others start again to understand, and even to learn.

From there people can risk factoring in to their view a few bits of the other’s view, knowing somewhere without words that their own identity is safe and sometimes even that their own identity can branch out a bit, consider this or that additional perspective, develop a new does-this-fit nuance. The fear of losing who we are at our core no longer calls the shots. Our freed minds do.