Pontos / Dots

By Carlos A. Inada
From São Paulo
Via Dangerous Minds

Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), by Czech artist and film-maker Jan Švankmajer, is split into 3 sections: “Exhaustive Discussion” (“where Arcimboldo-like heads reduce each other into bland copies”); “Passionate Discourse” (in which “a clay couple merge and dissolve in love-making, only to eventually disown and destroy each other”); and “Factual Conversation” (in which “two heads fail to communicate”).

In times like ours, when “dialogue”, “deep listening” are popular in areas like social innovation, leadership, and even Buddhism, one would expect that our practices were much distant from those trends. However, sometimes it’s as if “dialogue” has actually become an object like any other, subject to “exhaustive discussions”, or “passionate discourses”, or “factual conversations”. We keep using and repeating a vocabulary of “dialogue” and “listening”, but we actually end with more of the same, new fundamentalist “metaphors of colonization”.

What are your thoughts on this? What’s your vocabulary for dealing with dialogue? What are your practices? Is a true positive change possible?

Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) (1982), by Jan Švankmajer.

Photo: © Nina Maria Mudita

Dharma/Arte Magazine has published this week “Feminine principle and Theory U”, by Arawana Hayashi, and we’ve highlighted here 3 moments of the U Process: sensing, presencing, realizing ― which also represent the interaction between the feminine and the masculine principles.

Arawana warns:

Feminine principle has nothing whatsoever to do with gender or gender politics. Although women’s wisdom is a very worthwhile topic, it is not really the focus here. The essence of feminine principle is space—vast, vast space. […] And it invites each of us to discover how we can manifest more spaciousness and openness in our daily living and our work with others.

Dharma/Arte Magazine has published another text on the feminine principle, by Alice Haspray, a former student of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and also of Chögyam Trungpa: “Glimpses of space: the gift of feminine principle”. In this text, Alice Haspray introduces a provocative question to our deep-rooted dualistic tendencies, which are manifest in all our activities, including our approach to spirituality and to the feminine and masculine principles, to space and activity. Alice Haspray writes:

When we say we need space, where do we find it? Right in the midst of all that energy is space itself. When there is too much energy, space is right there. When there is too much space, energy is right there. It isn’t anywhere else. Where else could it be? When we feel claustrophobic, how do we find space to breathe?

With this question, Alice Haspray highlights the dance between the feminine and the masculine principles as an essential part of a realistic reminder: we are right here, right now. Where else could we be? And presents a quotation of Chögyam Trungpa, as an invitation to our reflection and discussion:

When we feel more imprisoned, helpless, chaotic, and terrible—that is the space actually. Whether you like to believe that or not, it’s a fact. The more we feel claustrophobia, the more we feel that we are completely cluttered with stuff, that we are caught in the middle of a traffic jam completely. Those kinds of little, or even big, things are all around us. We are being surrounded by that situation and we cannot get out of it at all. When we try to get out of such a situation, we have to produce or manufacture more stuff in order to get out of it. And that stuff in itself starts to get in the way all the time. All that is actually space, the E principle.

This leaves all of us with a question: “What is the masculine energy that we carry? What is the feminine energy we carry? How do they dance together?”

DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE

FEMININE AND MASCULINE: HOW DO THEY DANCE TOGETHER?

Arquivo/Archive

RSS

Membros / Members

Informativo / Newsletter