The ‘official’ Kinfonet dialogs are being terminated at the end of the month and will be removed from the main website. I have asked John to move his dialog group to the member meetups section of Kinfonet. You will have to contact John there in future if you wish to join his facilitated group.
If I do start up a Kinfonet group again it will be more of a study group/book club type with the intention of collectively garnering a comprehensive, academic, non-cherry-picked understanding of what K is actually proposing - with perhaps a designated after talk session for sharing personal perspectives.
This reminds me of the time I ended up at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and we spent 3 days reading a very short 2 page text where the scholarly monk had to carefully explain what each phrase (and quite a few words) meant (the text was already translated into English). Great times (in a slow going way)! I stiil remember learning about the concept of “storehouse consciousness” - though its still a bit of a fuzzy concept for me.
Its a totally different experience from the notion of “insight dialogue” or “Bohm dialogue” which seems more about experimenting with communication itself. The main question being whether we are able to interact without being bound by any authority, free from dogma - free from what we know. Can I listen or speak without fear of, or desire for accumulation?
Just speculating here, but I imagine that a K study group, because of the problem of authority, or of someone interpreting on K’s behalf, the text itself (or the video) would be the focus and we would just experiment with listening to that?
Though in this case there would be only students and no professor doing the close reading. Some students may have studied more and others less, but we all would use each other to check our individual understanding against another’s. With the hope of the disparate understandings dovetailing into a common one. In theory of course. Under no illusion that such a thing could ever occur in practice given who (or is it what) we are.
I understand your critical reflection and observation of dialogue. Large group dialogues often feel vague and scattered and dominated by individuals. As I reflect on it now, I wonder if the dialogue space paves the way for such dominance or do individuals bring it to the space themselves?
Good call on study sessions.
Whichever way, studying K’s work is a joy and I love to implement self-inquiry at the same time.
In the future, if you decide to initiate this idea further, I would be glad to participate.