ERIE vision: Exploring Entheogenic Potentials's video: ERIE presents: You Can t Make This Stuff Up or: Who Speaks Part 3

ERIE presents: You Can't Make This Stuff Up, or: Who Speaks? A Dialogue with Gary Weber & Richard Doyle (Part 3). Saturday, October 24, 2015. San Francisco Speech is usually assumed to start with a clearly defined preverbal message, which provides a benchmark for self-monitoring and a robust sense of agency for one’s utterances. However, an alternative hypothesis states that speakers often have no detailed preview of what they are about to say, and that they instead use auditory feedback to infer the meaning of their words. ~ “Speakers’ Acceptance of Real-Time Speech Exchange Indicates That We Use Auditory Feedback to Specify the Meaning of What We Say” ( Lind et. Al, 2015) Dialogue is essential to all spiritual and philosophical traditions. The Katha Upanishad, The Bhagavad Gita and Plato's Dialogues exemplify the fundamentally interactive and even agonistic discovery of truth that links otherwise diverse traditions. Consider contemporary Tibetan Buddhists engaged in debate and Jesus's counter arguments to the scribes and the Pharisees. While­ common sense suggests that in a dialogue, at least two individuals participate in an exchange of ideas, this of course begs the question of the origin of the ideas and whether or not they have meaning until they are heard. Insights, novelty and seemingly tangential ideas emerge. It may be instructive to note that “dialogue” derives etymologically from the Greek for “speaking through”, pointing to a logos that flows through rather than being initiated by the participants. The experience of spontaneous dialogue as recorded in Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought points to a space beyond the individual bodies and minds of the interlocutors, whose practice becomes not the initiation of speech or thoughts, but a silencing of the internal dialogue of self referential thought such that the flow of logos can emerge. From whom? This spontaneous dialogue will likely begin with a discussion of the contemporary neuroscience that strongly suggests that human beings are not the conscious initiators of speech and discussion, but are instead the medium by which ideas come into discourse. We have no idea what will be said, or who will say it, but the words will themselves emerge from and empty into a stillness beyond speech.