Dialogue doesn’t mean talking for one’s own benefit. You might be negotiating in a room but carrying out only a monologue based on your own preconceptions. The other party may also listen to your voice and interpret it with their own preconditions or preconceptions. In this view, we are not actually able to listen to each other. To listen to the other’s voice, we have to free ourselves from our own prejudices, we have to give our entire attention to the speaker, the other, and with that attention and attentiveness, we must try to understand what the other speaker really means. This is a very effective method, which is the basis of establishing a genuine and harmonious relationship within humanity and between groups. It is also a way of understanding the relationships between nature and the environment, physical resources and everything else. By adopting this approach of attentiveness and understanding as the basis of relationships built on the knowledge of the interrelatedness of all things, we might be able to make this world a bit better and more comfortable for sentient beings living in this world.

We have also lost the sensitivity to listen to our own inner voice. The loss of this sensitivity is largely due to the conditioning of modernity that makes us think about ourselves as something independent and artificial. We have distanced ourselves from our own nature, and when we distance ourselves from our own nature we also distance ourselves from nature surrounding us outside. This distance creates fear and conflict. My old friend Jiddu Krishnamurti used to talk a great deal about fear and why fear arises. Fear always arises in the mind because of our misconception of the nature of the self. In the Buddhist tradition, we call it the grasping of self, and then we talk about the antidote of selflessness. Selflessness does not mean the self does not exist. Selflessness means we do not exist as an independent “self” to be clinging to and grasping after. We grasp after this misconceived autonomous self and erroneously believe that it has complete independent and inherent existence without interrelatedness.

When one is uprooted from their own nature, then fear automatically results. That fear leads to not being sensitive to our inner voice. So in order to relate to others, we should understand our true nature of ourselves. And for that, we have to understand who we are. If you see who you are, then you will be able to relate yourself to the other-not to your projection of the other, but to the real nature of the other. Only then can an intimate relationship be established for the benefit of humanity and produce a meaningful dialogue between religions and other worldviews.

-- 5th Samdhong Rinpoche, Lobsang Tenzin