Intuitive Dialogue Project

Intuitive Dialogue Project – Beyond Dialogue to Communion

Copyright 1995 by Desmond Berghofer, Creative Learning International. Reprinted with permission.

With increasing humility I am learning to trust in life as a guided adventure. During my career years, preoccupation with work and family led me to believe that I had to be the initiator of action if I wanted things to happen. More recently, I have discovered a river of intelligent energy flowing through life in which there is a current that can carry you to where you are meant to go. If you swim in the river unmindful of the current, you will expend a lot of your own energy without finding lasting comfort in the places you go or in the relationships you make. That, it seems to me, is part of the lesson of life.

So I am learning to leave my own intelligence open to the guidance of universal intelligence. As I do this, I find I am led to experiences, which are on purpose. The latest of these personal journeys is what I am writing about here. I have called it “Beyond Dialogue to Communion” because it took me through a series of mind embraces to a deep level of awareness that I could not have anticipated before it began. Here is the story.

It is not really possible to say where experiences like this begin, because everything leads to everything else. However, I will choose to say this one began in 1991 when I wrote a paper on public service renewal for the Canadian Centre for Management Development in Ottawa. Two years later I became aware that the paper was circulating outside the federal public service in the Ontario public service. I began to get phone calls about it from people there.

One of the calls came from Arupa Tesolin, then a manager in the Ontario Ministry of Labour. We exchanged some correspondence, and that seemed to be that Two more years passed, then in December 1995 she called me again. This time she was calling to invite me to participate in a dialogue with herself and three other people. This had no direct connection to her work in government, but rather was a personal initiative, which she felt called to do. Something told me I should agree to participate; so I did. The dialogue was held in Toronto in early February 1996.

The Participants and Purpose

I will introduce you briefly to the other participants. First, there was Arupa, who describes herself in this context as a spiritual emergence facilitator.  Arupa possesses intuitive abilities, which allow her to feel and see in ways guided by the flow of universal intelligence as I mentioned above. Next was Fred Wolf, a quantum physicist by training who withdrew several years ago from research and university teaching to follow his passion to understand the world of spirit through the eyes of a physicist. Since then he has shared his discoveries with the rest of us through a series of popular and ground-breaking books. When I learned that Fred was to be part of this adventure, I was sure it would be mind expanding.

Then there was Wolfgang Amelung, an ecological bio-systems designer, who with Arupa was to be our co-host in Toronto. We would meet for two days in Wolfgang’s workshop and laboratory where he designs ecosystems to transform the quality of indoor spaces where people live and meet. The fifth participant was Ron Allen, a professional musician with amazing gifts in improvisational composition across a wide range of instruments. Over the two days Ron would stir us deeply not only with his musical talent, but also with the sparkling clear integrity of his mind.

What were we to meet and talk about? Arupa never really made that clear. Instead she let the conversation emerge with trust that we would move past discussion, into dialogue, and from there occasionally into what she called “inspiry”. There was a sixth participant to help us do this – the ecosystem of Wolfgang’s workshop, complete with tropical shrubs, “breathing wall”, running water, fish, lizards, turtles, birds and a captivating chameleon, who was later to become a key player and metaphor in our little life drama.

Emergence of Communion

I won’t attempt to summarize what we talked about, because to be truthful, I don’t remember 90 percent of it. It was video taped, so at some point the content will be brought back for us to consider again. However, what I am sure all of us will remember, is the experience we shared of truly opening ourselves to one another, to hear the song of our spirit voices and to feel the energy of the new relationship we were having.

Out of this exchange came an emergence and our answer to the most important question of the age in which we live: Can human beings move on from separation and conflict to cooperation and harmony, and can we in the process reach consistently into the higher levels of potential that we occasionally glimpse in human relations, but which all too often lie locked away behind barriers of separation?

The Experience

What we found was that the answer to that question lies not in words but in felt intent. If we come together with the intent to create the emergence of shared benefit, that is what we will have. Fred taught us the quantum truth that when an observer acts with intent, the observed reality manifests in the direction of the intent. When more of us act with intent towards common good, we will learn how to release it from the universal intelligence in which it is contained.

Wolfgang’s ecosystem helped us to see that nature already embraces the balance that is so sadly missing from our human societies. We get lost in our language and concepts and our relentless pursuit of self-interest. When we set all that aside and truly try to learn from the other persons with whom we are in communion, something moves towards a higher order of being. That is what we found as we reached to moments of “inspiry” that then stayed with us, possibly incorporated somehow in our cellular structure.

The View of a Visioneer

As one who is seeking to release the spirit of visioneering across our world, I was enormously encouraged by the experience of the microcosm I shared for a few days with my new friends. It told me that the solutions to our hardest problems are already in our minds. What we are lacking is the intent to release them because we fear the effect. We fear that much of what we perceive to be our present comfort will be disturbed by the solution, so we hold back from participating fully in the search for “inspiry”.

As I look at the process of negotiation all around me and reported daily from everywhere in the world, I see that the best moments of cooperation and peace occur when people treat each other decently by listening to each other with full heart and mind. As they do that with a shared sense of what is achievable in the future, whether it be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or a new treaty between aboriginal peoples and Canadians, or new understanding about relationships between men and women – as people work on these things with vision and tolerance and compassion, so the emergence comes, and so we move forward.

The brief experience in which I participated has shown me what can be done when personal agendas are suspended to allow a group mind to form. What all of us must learn to do is to make time in our business and social lives for more small group mind embraces. If we can learn how to do that better, we will find that the current running through the river of universal intelligence will support us and carry us further and faster than we had ever dreamed was possible.

On Purpose with Destiny

I close my report on this experience by coming back to the metaphor of the chameleon. You will recall I mentioned this large green lizard of changing colours as another player in our meeting. At one point he had to be fed. His food was a Madagascar hissing beetle, which looks like a large cockroach. In the dramatic moment when the chameleon’s long tongue flashed out and snapped the beetle into its mouth, I saw the moment of destiny waiting for all of us. The bio-systems of nature tell us, if we have the ears to listen, that everything on this planet moves in a great cycle of life and death and rebirth. Our challenge as the custodians of consciousness is to link our intelligence to the universal flow to become co-creators of an upward spiral to higher meaning. That is what this report and our meeting was about.