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Contemplative Dialogue has effectively assisted both groups and individual leaders in engaging the 'Collective Mind' or 'Spirit' of their organizations. It has also been effectively used in working with informal groups and creating a deep experience of community where division or separation may have been the felt starting point. The Centre for Contemplative Dialogue is committed to evoking the awareness described by Thomas Merton speaking in Calcutta in 1968:
The
deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion.
It is
wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity.
We are
already one. But we imagine that we are not.
What we have to recover is our
original unity.
What we have to be is what we are.
Insofar as the process of Contemplative Dialogue works with what is most essential about the human person, it requires no explicit language of spirituality or particular belief system to be effective. It makes no effort to "change" or "fix" participants. Rather it assists them in touching what is most central and trustworthy in their human experience, and speaking of it with deep integrity.
From
this common ground, groups and individuals both find new awareness and freedom
to create the lives and organizations to which they aspire. Businesses, civic
groups, boards, and faith-based communities all have the capacity to practice
this satisfying and effective way to work together.
