Beyond the Between in Dialogue
Will pure dialogue ever be able to overcome our separation?
Under certain conditions, pure dialogue could overcome our separation, making social constructs and categories like autism and even self disappear, at least momentarily. This is what I’ve believed for nearly 17 years. Maybe I was wrong.
In the archive, you’ll find my articles on definitions of autism and selfhood in modern contexts. So, the first thing to clarify now is what “separation” means and there are at least three different points to consider:
Functional separateness
You and I are obviously distinct organisms with different histories, perceptions, bodies, needs and limits. Dialogue does not dissolve this, nor should it. Boundaries, asymmetry, and opacity remain real.
Psychological alienation
The felt experience of being cut off, unseen, defended against, objectified, or trapped inside private consciousness. Dialogue can soften this - sometimes dramatically, which is really powerful for a lot of people.
Metaphysical non-separation
The deeper claim found in traditions like Buddhism, Sufism, Advaita, or certain phenomenological currents: that the self is not ultimately discrete and independent in the way modern consciousness imagines. Dialogue may gesture toward this but in modern societies where we apply dialogue to a certain field or context, it’s unlikely.
See the account of Rumi and Shams in 13th century Anatolia below, which addresses most of the above and the dangers of ascribing absolutes to this question.
What I’ve always found compelling, at least enough to invest so much time and energy into it, is that genuine dialogue destabilises the modern fantasy of the isolated self without requiring mystical belief. When two people remain present long enough, suspending performance, certainty, strategic positioning, identity maintenance — something weird and beautiful happens. The interaction ceases to feel like “two sealed interiors exchanging information.” Meaning begins arising between rather than from either participant individually. I’m fortunate to have experienced this several times, mostly in 1:1 coaching sessions. I find “coaching” is a strange but convenient word, and the strangeness between people and our meanings is what this Substack is all about.
Martin Buber (d.1965) was pointing toward a kind of union in his “I–Thou” relation - neither fusion or sameness, but a momentary collapse of objectification. As a counter-illustration, “I-it” would be like when we talk at someone rather than with them as another person. Many people monologue at each other. Social structures are designed to maintain (and influenced by) polarity. Buber said the “I” emerges differently depending on whether one encounters the world or people as “It” or “Thou.” So the relation itself is primary. I think that’s both incredible and ordinary. We all know love.
Similarly, David Bohm (d.1992) treated dialogue as a field process where thought itself becomes visible collectively. In Bohm Dialogue (and this is where you’ll see my application to autism), fragmentation is not merely personal pathology, but built into thought structures and social conditioning. The dialogue group begins to perceive the machinery of separation as it operates in real time - and perhaps paradoxically, engage in it.
Dialogue can also become another refined performance of separateness and one may perceive subtle egoic tendencies such as “I am the conscious facilitator.” “We are the awakened group”; “This is deep” and other subtle status hierarchies around attunement, vulnerability, insight.
Have you seen our new Autism Dialogue Approach Foundations course on Udemy?
