We all talk. We talk all the time, if not to each other to ourselves. Out of our great loneliness, human beings have created from their ancient animal grunts of fear, warning, nesting and mating calls, location cries, maternal warnings, the lyrical and complex music of language. We cry out, in our sad separation, for closeness, for union. No matter how tightly humans cling to one another physically, closeness eludes us.

Talk Is Not the Same as Communication
And no matter how much we talk, talk is not always communication, communion, nor does it form a human community. We are still thinking alone, not together, according to M.I.T. founder of the Dialogue Project William Isaacs. As he says in his book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, a chat becomes, not true communication, but only the craft of looking for evidence that we are right and others wrong.

Our brains chatter all the time; most of it comes out of our mouths. But the question remains, do we really communicate? Or, I say one thing, you hear another through the screens of our own ideas, or our parents' and teachers' ideas, or something we read in a book, or our need for the security of our own positions. In short, we hear not directly but through the screen of memory. Mostly, we have a battle of opinions, with nobody listening or hearing at all, or only hearing what we want to hear, which is not listening but editing. Or we intellectualize, and, as physicist and foremost inquirer into the nature of human thought David Bohm says in the book On Dialogue, we avoid direct exchange of heart to heart and mind to mind encounter, and we exchange theories and speculations instead. The question is: are we interested in having a battle of old opinions, or are we interested in the discovery of the truth about how we can really solve, put an end to our common human problem which is that each one of us suffers? Because the truth is, that we have, as a species and individually, been psychologically suffering for millions of years.

Never let anyone tell you we learn from suffering, that we learn from pain. We learn nothing from pain except that it hurts. What we learn from is by understanding pain, by understanding why we suffer. And we learn how to understand ourselves best through relationship, how we think, feel, listen, and act and react with another.

The Right Question
Often a whole argument between people can be resolved by asking the question: why do we hold the opinions we hold? What fears, what deprivations, what anger and anguish, what loneliness, what needs for affection, sex, attention, validation, terrors of failure, longings for companionship and belonging, for a place in a group, a family, to God and to the universe, lie behind the opinions we hold? You and I, our parents and teachers, people who bully, people who follow and obey authority-why do we thrash around like this, hurting ourselves and one another? Is it because we don't know how to ask one another the right questions, how to have a true dialogue instead of using words like walls or bullets?

I spent my entire adolescence alternating between sullen depression and screaming my soul out to my family and the world. The family was force-marched to the dinner table promptly at six-thirty every evening for food and the conflicts in my head beautifully served. The stated purpose of coming together was family conversation; the result, every evening without fail, was the boiling in oil, as the potatoes had been, of my sister's and my own budding adolescence. Our growing up and away from our lock-step family life and what we teenagers might reflect on our parents terrified them, driving my father into silent horror, my mother into violent scenes.

The result was that my sister remained a frightened good girl who slit her wrists one evening in our bathroom. I was the bad girl: I fought back. I became a negative blueprint of everyone. I could not communicate the depths of my depression, my desperate need for a soulmate. I did not understand the difference between falling in love, a panic attack, getting high on life, just getting high to escape my confusion and pain. They all felt the same, and there seemed to be nobody to ask why I felt the feelings I felt or how to handle them.

I spent a lot of time talking to people who weren't even there: in my shower, in my bedroom, even in a crowd of people, the shouting in my brain never stopped, venting my opinions and my judgments and my yearnings. There are people to this day who do not know I have a relationship with them. Now it amuses me. In my teens, it did not.

There was no one to talk to, in a world of some six billion souls, because I did not know how to talk to another human being.

Isolation
It is this feeling of isolation that makes most of us frightened, or angry, or both, and we fight off these terrible emotions not only by stuffing ourselves into acceptable straightjackets or self-destructive, rebellious, negative blueprints of everyone, but with fists and weapons. And we use words, endless streams, rivers, oceans of words, explanations, philosophies. We throw handfuls of words at one another and at the stars, and wait for answers.

This book is about the endless human struggle to overcome loneliness with words. Humans are the species who invented speech-it's among our distinctions from other animals on this planet. But speech, words, in all the thousands of languages and dialects we've invented, all this talk is not the same thing as communication. And it is only communication that gives us the connection that ends separation. Too many of us just build walls of words and then try to climb over them and call this communication as we stretch over the top to hold hands.

J. Krishnamurti, the great 20th century philosopher and teacher who founded schools in California, England, and India, reminded us always that the word is not the thing itself: his great example is that a menu doesn't feed you when you are hungry. Words are only symbols-they have very little meaning in themselves except to act like pressures on us: try using the word 'lazy' or 'love' or 'Communist' or 'Republican' or 'nerd' or 'smart' or 'cool' on someone and watch their faces, blood pressure, body postures change. In one of his sixty years' of talks and teaching, holding dialogues with physicists, psychologists, and prime ministers, teachers and students and factory workers, Krishnamurti said:

"It is especially difficult to understand the intricacies and the complexities of human relationship, is it not? Even when one is very familiar with a person, it is often ...almost impossible to find out what his feelings and thoughts are. This becomes comparatively easy when there is affection, love between two people, for then there is immediate communion at the same time and on the same level; but that communion is denied when we are merely discussing or listening on the verbal level...Communion ceases to exist when there is fear or prejudice because then the defense mechanism is at work...What we have to establish between us is not some imaginative, mystic communion, but a communion that is possible only when both of us are intent on discovering the truth which will solve our problems."

In this book, we'll use words not as positions but as pointers, wayside lights, toward dialogue. Dialogue is thinking and talking together, instead of conversation which is thinking alone and taking turns to speak.

Since our brains are neuronally constructed so that we must talk to ourselves, since we really do want to talk to each other, and since we are wired to question the universe, let us for God's sake and the sake of one another, learn how.

Words Begin with Thought
Words begin with thought, which is based on memory, and expressed in images and words. Again, memory, thought, mental images, and words only describe real things. They are not reality, they are not real things themselves.

Remember what Krishnamurti said, that thoughts and words are like a menu that describes food. But a menu is not food, and it won't fill your belly. And also, a lot of our thought as expressed by talk has been programmed into us by our biology, by our culture, by family and school education, by personal interpretations of our experience from every past moment of our lives. And a lot of all this programming and our own interpretations of experience (especially those that happened to us as young children) may be faulty. Also, we don't take time to get to know ourselves and other people-we mostly simply make them up or see them and fill in the blanks according to our own needs or prejudices. It is extraordinary what thought invents and then believes to be true. A boy seen across a club dance floor becomes a love god for a lonely girl; a boy who has lost his mother wants his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to have a baby so there's a mother in his life again. Religions and nations become pseudo-parents in our imaginations, and when they fail to rescue us as thought/belief hoped they would, we get angry and upset and frightened, and find other escapes or havens from our need for security. We find escapes like sex, or drugs, or bullying other people, or sports, or shopping, or food-all of which can turn into our own private religions-and all based on thought's misinterpretations of facts.

Thought, therefore, is not only the stuff of the past-which may or may not be applicable to the present facts of the moment-but was not even a truthful record in the first place. The brain records what we hear from other people, and everything that happens to us: what it records may be incorrect. This is how prejudices, opinions, and beliefs are formed about people, nations, groups, even life itself, that have nothing to do with the facts.

The message here is: be watchful of thought, of what you think, of the talk inside your head or from others that comes from thought only instead of observation. Because it is really extraordinary what thought invents and then believes to be true.

Contemplate Two Human Thought Beliefs

1. My life is lonely.
In a universe filled with atoms just like mine, and, on my own planet, 6 billion and a few odd other humans pretty much like me, the actual fact is, it's not possible to be lonely. Clearly, thought has invented the feeling of loneliness, and then decided to believe it is true. Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. You can be by yourself for a while and still feel connected to everyone and everything. Think of those small explosions of affection or joy you feel sometimes in a quiet moment.

2. If I attach myself to something, a person, a place, a group, an idea, I won't feel lonely anymore.
You can see for yourself that in attachment, there is also right away the fear of loss, greed for more, jealousy, dependency, and the anger that depending on someone brings in its wake. And in all these emotions there is the very loneliness and isolation you got attached in the first place to avoid.

The Good News
Happily, the brain has two main capacities. Not only has it the capacity for thought, but the capacity for direct observation. Thought is necessary to remember language, your name, how to do brain surgery or change a tire, to retain all kinds of technological and practical information. But it has no place in psychological relationship; what is needed psychologically is direct observation, attention, awareness, insight in each moment. If your thoughts only remember how you and your friend felt yesterday, you'll be missing what is happening between you right now today.

Watch What Happens with Words
We are all a bundle of unmet needs. And our talking to each other doesn't often help because we generally imply someone is to blame for whatever is happening, oneself or others or fate or luck. Again, we are not discussing the passing on of information but personal talk, the problems of life. And instead of seeing why we have unmet needs and fulfilling those ourselves, we yell at each other silently or out loud for failing us.

Most of us have an 'I deserve' attitude. For myself, it's because I cannot bear to think of myself as just like everybody else, and subject to the same rules at home, school, at work, or anywhere else. I am just a little or a lot smarter, better, more deserving than most. Of course, what most of us, including myself, actually deserve is a slap for all the unkindnesses we commit in life, but who wants to talk about that. If nothing else, I insist I am at least different from other people, and deserve better than I'm getting. Humans are, of course, as alike as snowflakes or ants, any differences being purely superficial. And we all deserve what we get (excluding planetary cataclysms) for behaving the way we do which is mostly greedy.

But our attitudes and the images we create about ourselves do make us greedy, prejudiced, and judgmental, and there is no affection or understanding in this. And then we wonder why we feel deprived, left out, or bored, boredom being simply a state of not giving to or participating in what is going on. And sometimes we end by depriving, criticizing, and judging ourselves most harshly of all.

In all this judging, we don't just look at ourselves and others so we can understand, and share together talk of what we find out. We think maybe the truth about ourselves, or someone we depend on, might be frightening. We think one thing and say another. Or we find people whose words agree with our thoughts, at least for the moment. Then we join sides, and make mental and verbal war on someone else. But even in this activity each of us remains isolated, and lonely, not sure that today's best friends will be tomorrow's.

There's no peace and security in any of this.

Words Can Be a Trap
And words can be a trick played by one brain against another, since you may say one thing, and I hear another, or you may mean one thing by a particular word, I may mean another. I say "I love you." But I also say "I love jelly beans." What meaning are you to take from my saying "I love you?" I say "I love you," but if you do something I don't like, I'm mean to you, or I leave you. So what does that word 'love' mean? Do we really go into it together?

Then there is the word said quickly, reactively spoken, something meanly said in anger that can take days, weeks, even a lifetime to get over both by the person who spoke and the one who heard. You can't always choose what thought-words pop into your brain. Unless your ability to restrain your mouth is excellent, you can't always choose what thoughts or feelings in the form of words come out of your mouth. What the art of dialogue can teach you is how to make amends, because it is based on self-knowledge. And making yourself open and vulnerable to another through affectionate renegotiation warms everybody's hearts.

The Electronic Verbal Trap
We may be very clever electronically, with email, instant messaging, online chat rooms, Internet dating, and cell phones, but you can't hold someone's hand or look into another pair of eyes through the ether. There is no actual contact. And these methods of chatter are as likely to miscommunicate as easily as face-to-face talk if we don't know how to have true dialogue with another.

The Black Hole
Loneliness, the endless pouring out of words without truly communicating, feels like living in a deep, black hole, a dark prison of your self, caught in your own thoughts and your own pain, and the feeling that this is life and it could go on for another fifty or sixty years, the difference being that the daily grind of school turns into the daily grind of work, the original family into your own copy.

It can feel like death every day when life turns into deadly routine.

Communication Changes Loneliness into Life
But when we learn to communicate truly, then everything comes to life. Routine can turn into actual contact, an exciting, ever new, ever vital relationship, with oneself, other people, with school, work, learning, with nature, the universe. And life becomes truly alive. Relationship is the end of loneliness. It is life itself.

Before we can talk with each other, though, before we can really communicate with another, it is necessary to learn to talk with ourselves. Not talk to yourself-anybody can walk around muttering-but have a real get-to-know-myself dialogue. It really does turn out, as Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mother Teresa, Krishnamurti, and other great scriptural, scientific, and philosophical minds have said: all true relationship to each other, to the world, to the universe, is based on self-knowledge.