Dialogue Permeates the Cosmos and Humanity

1. Dialogue at the Foundation of All Dialogue is not just the latest fad about which many people and organizations, even countries, are enthusiastic for now, only to drop it in a few years or sooner, in favor of the next fad. No, is the very structure of the cosmos and its highest manifestation, humanity. Etymologically, the word dialogue comes from the two Greek terms, dia, which means variously across, between, together, and logos, which means primarily thought, as in logic, and only then the sharing of our thought in word. Thus, literally means thinking/talking together. In recent decades, however, has increasingly been used to mean want to talk with you who think differently from me so I can learn, which is a radical shift in how we have approached--and far too often still approach today--the Other. After many decades of being deeply involved in many different dialogues, formal and informal, and research into and reflecting about, (starting in 1957!), I have come to realize that it is something much, much deeper, much more constitutive of both our humanity and even the very structure of the whole cosmos. Let me start with the latter. Think of in the broadest possible terms, as the mutually beneficial interaction of differing parts. On the macro level, we start with the cosmos's Big Bang 13,800,000,000 years ago (what the cosmos was like before it banged, why it banged, why it followed the incredible rules that it did, why the cosmos existed, why anything existed--these and many intriguing, and most probably unanswerable, questions we have to leave for another time). This incredible expanding cosmos, of which we humans are an infinitesimal part, is fundamentally a between matter and energy. Think of Albert Einstein's elegant formula, e=[mc.sup.2], equals mass times the speed of light. Were either matter or energy to swallow the other completely, we would not have the universe we have, swarming with billions of stars and galaxies. But we do, because matter and energy are in a fundamental with each other. On the micro level we find fundamentally the same dialogic situation: Every atom is composed of positive and negative elements, the positive nucleus and the negative electrons; only the dialogue between the two produces the more than 100 chemical elements that exist in the entire universe. Were one to swallow the other, the result would be some sort of black hole. But, we have the universe we all experience precisely because there is the constant between positive and negative energy on the sub-atomic level. When we move up the ladder of being to self-conscious matter, homo sapiens, we find another profound dialogue, this time between body and spirit. A human being is not just matter, a slab of dead meat. It is also not even just living meat, as in a dog, bird, or fish. Rather, a human is fundamentally a between body and spirit. Were we humans just living bodies, we would be no different from my pet cat, but were we only spirits, we would be angels, not humans. If our spirit, for example, does break off the dialogue, if it does leave our body, our body indeed is then just a slab of dead meat, not a human being. Let us look further at homo sapiens. Besides the fundamental body-spirit dialogue, we humans are also profoundly a of man and woman. Even on just the bare physical level, if there were no dialogue between man and woman, there would be no more homo sapiens. But, the male-female is vastly more profound in the shaping of homo sapiens; one does not have to be a Freudian to recognize that the erotic permeates every aspect of our humanness, whether we are conscious of it or not--indeed, perhaps especially when we are not aware of it. Moreover, now in the twenty-first century we humans are just beginning to become aware of this profound constitutive female-male dialogue, which for so long has been askew, and hence far too often constrictive rather than constructive in its misapprehension and oppression of women. …