It worked. Nick said that the biggest change was immediate: there was less fear in the room. The promise of no interruption does exactly that: it defuses the fear. In its place, gradually, is safety. And from safety grows better thinking and clearer conveying of thought and feeling. And from that grows understanding, and from that the threat of polarization shrinks.
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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.
This puzzled me. But then I thought about this: on screen the promise of no interruption is broken, yes. But not by the listener. It is broken by the platform. And it is the listener’s promise, not the platform’s, that ignites the thinker’s mind. It is the thinker’s trust in that human promise that allows them to claim their own intelligence and fly. And although this means that one of the three aspects of the component of place – the room – is deeply compromised, the most important aspect – the listener – holds steady and perhaps does ‘double duty’ to make up significantly for the interruptive room.
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.
All four systems cause interruption. But polarization is also directly caused by it. And so to stop it, we have simply (although, of course, not easily) to eliminate the cause: we agree not to interrupt. If we can do that, we will not polarize. We will disagree. Even deeply. We may fight. Even fiercely. But we will not disconnect. And if we don’t disconnect, we will keep thinking.
Discipline produces freedom, nearly always. And this act of attention does exactly that. It restores respect where derision had moved in and begun to rot the premises. It liberates.