Stages of a conversation

September 9, 2007

Stages of a conversation

I’ve been digging through my house in the process of cleaning, and I found this piece of paper that I’ve been keeping around for a number of years from a Landmark Education class. It’s probably some kind of violation of copyright for me to put it here, but if i put it here, then losing the paper doesn’t matter. At Landmark, everything is a conversation. If you go to enough classes, they eventually tell you this, and start to distinguish the various kinds of conversations. I can’t remember it all in detail, but basically: Representational - words, writing, where something represents or symbolizes another thing. Immediate - a scream, yell, cry, not “language” as we would normally think of it, but still an expression. Perhaps “emotional center” would apply here? Structural - Movement center, as the 4th way folks might call it. Some of this is self-explanatory, but some of it requires jargon to be explained. Like Gurdjieff, Landmark has particular definitions for words that you and i use all the time. For instance, Enrollment is “creating a possibility in another’s listening such that they see the possibility for themselves and step into it committedly.” (Yes, I rattled that off from memory.) For anyone reading this, if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to try to explain this to the best of my memory.

STAGES OF A CONVERSATION