***On Communication

Listening seems sometimes as if it is a rare happening among human beings. We can’t really listen to another person speaking if we’re preoccupied, or if we’re trying to decide what we’re going to say when the other stops talking, or if we’re debating about whether what is being spoken is true or relevant or agreeable. Listening, in other words, is being accessible and open to what is being said.

Listening gives life to what is being spoken. You might even say it is with the listener that both the speaker and what is spoken exist and come alive.

Speaking, meanwhile, can be something more than talking, more than the exchange of symbols or information, more than saying what you really think. In speaking we can share ourselves, we can evoke experience in others. Speaking is where our ideas become clear and possible. It is where others are expanded by our participation with them. It allows for the futures we create. Speaking lives in poetry, in the appreciation of another, in idle conversations that pass the time, in great theories and books that give rise to wonder and thought.
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Speaking allows for "who" and "how" we "are" in the world. It is what gives voice to all that is possible in being human.

True communication is creation. It has the power to shape, determine, and alter the course and quality of our lives. It moves people. It generates experience in others. It not only delivers information to others, it actually transforms their ability to hear. True communication transforms both the speaker and listener.

The Landmark Forum suggests that what it is to be human has its own domain and that domain is one of language—of communication, of conversation. Through communication —the realm of language, of conversation—each of us has complete access to ourselves, to others, to the very essence and possibility of what it means to be human.

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