Quick Takes

Meetings of Opposites

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Quick Takes

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The past – not dead; not even past – is present in our lives as a force-field governing our interactions.  The past is the track we are impelled by our common culture to follow.  Can we get outside our pasts, the experiences and recognized patterns which drive our suspicions and our grievances?

  Building a railroad is a different enterprise than riding the already-laid tracks.  We are desperate to be laying the track. Our job after Charlottesville, after January 6, and before November — our philosophical and political and moral job – is to lay the track on which opposites may travel toward meeting.

Laying track, we can be about re-inventing America

The common ground of Meeting is not in the middle;  it is a different space altogether.  On the same  streets, either we fight as Opposites, Us-Against-Them – or we create this other way of being together:  Meeting. 

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Common ground is a matter of living together, not of agreement in opinions. Civility is not the cause of common ground, but the effect.

An idea is more real to us than a material object seen by the eye.  (Plato)

The optical illusion that we’re living in today: Us-Against-Them

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

Meetings of Opposites produces the actual experience of common ground among people whose opinions or positions are irreconcilable.

          Four components:

• Investigate the nature of visual perception to reveal the mechanism which produces optical illusions.
• Examine current discourse among us – the statues controversy in Charlottesville or any charged issue – to show the same mechanism at work.
• Introduce a philosophical framework for distinguishing perception from being-together.
• Participate in a series of exercises adapted from Outward Bound, to experience a way of being together different from the way perception allows and enforces.

Recognition of perception’s hegemony, along with the personal exercises, produces affective depolarization: A FRESHENED WORLD TO LIVE INTO.

With up to eight pairs of Opposites, each session of 2 ½ hours includes all four components.  I bring the workshop series anywhere in North America without charge.

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Henry McHenry Jr. Charlottesville, Virginia

mchyjr@gmail.com