Types of Conversation
Last Wednesday I introduced this sequence about conversation. Today, I shall introduce three types of conversation; conversation through dialogue, prayer and science.
- We normally think of conversation as dialogue; covered in-depth in my last post. Remember the success of a conversation through dialogue is where all participants pay close attention.
- Paying attention can be done without other people. Mystics write about the power of awareness, simply being open to and appreciative of what is around us. In the West we call this prayer. Many people think of prayer as something akin to writing a shopping list; a set of demands cast off into the ether, perhaps. It’s better to think in terms of the close attention you need to pay to debugging a computer program or proofreading copy. That quality of attention applied to the world as it is; this is prayer.
- And this quality of attention is essential for the practice of science. Science is observation. The challenge is to see the new thing, not seen by anyone else, the anomaly in the data passed over a thousand times, suddenly becomes clear and important.
What Makes These Conversations?
We live in an atomised world, where the individual is the centre of attention. It is easy to lose sight of progress made through collaboration. Indeed, conversation is the only way anyone can make progress. The response, from a person or anything we encounter, pushes us to think again, to go deeper and find new insights.
These three approaches all do this. Maybe conversation with non-human objects may seem odd but they are there and their intransigence means we have to be challenged by them.
I’ll write about prayer and science in the next two posts, so that we can see how they work as conversation.
Are there other ways in which we converse? How do we converse online?