Exploring Ourselves with Jackie McInley,
December 7, 2024

Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
December 7, 2024
Present: 13

Once again we welcomed a new participant to our dialogue. It made sense to shed light on our intentions, since the deep art of dialogue inquiry is a process of discovery and essentially a work in progress for us all. The group highlighted one major aspect as the crux of dialogue: listening.

At the heart of the word itself is a sense of to obey – an obligation to listen – as a test or goal to be achieved especially in traditional education. We went into how the collective meaning we attribute to a word can deeply condition our listening; this process of sense-making strongly guides us and can stay undetected in the process. Do words speak and listen for us and do they hold a set of individual and collective expectations? If language is using me what is that “me” being used? Does this sense of me create an added impression of separation in listening to another? Does conditioned listening, the group inquired, imply an already concluded view of what it hears? Does it construct a version of what is being listened to – and by extension a version of the world around – according to its own content? Does this conditioned sense-making lie at the root of our problem?

Is there another kind of listening that doesn’t come to a conclusion as its process? Is there a listening with no past?

Jackie McInley