Gil Friend describes a moment when Michael Mead challenged 200 dharma teachers at Spirit Rock to sit with people they disagree with without violence or walking away. It shifted how Friend thinks about designing conversations that actually bridge divides.
I had some downtime. I was volunteering at Spirit Rock, and there was a conference of Western dharma teachers, so about 200 people who were born in the west but were teaching the dharma around the world. And Michael Mead was a keynote speaker. And it's really hot August night, and we're all crammed in this little meditation hall. And he comes out and he said, what's the greatest challenge facing humanity today? In this long silence, we'll sort of say, well, nuclear war, nuclear winter toxicity, toxic waste, loss of habitat. And it kept building and building, and it got heavier and heavier and heavier, and people were getting very depressed. And Mead said, you know, those are all really important challenges, but they're all secondary. Because the primary challenge confronting humanity is for people, especially men, to sit in the same room with other people, especially other men with whom they disagree and not resort to violence, or to leave the conversation when they don't like what's going on. And that was the moment in my life where I decided I am going to devote myself to learning how to design conversations to bring people together who have differences of opinion, where they can appreciate each other, where they can come to find ways of being that will allow them to move forward together as opposed to in, to tear each other down. So it feels like we've been sort of dancing around that today, and I just want to throw that out there for whatever it's worth. Thank you very much.
