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Brent: Can you speak more about the role that loss plays in situations of radical openness?
Anton: The concept of loss or losing is important because it speaks to the ways that opening oneself up and allowing oneself to be moved is not just a benign thing to do; it involves relaxing one's grasp of what one thinks one already knows, including about oneself, and taking the risk of losing one's previous understandings. The reason that such losing is risky is that we use our acquired understandings to secure our personal sense of continuity of being. That is, we protect ourselves from destabilizing surprises by approaching new situations on the basis of what we already know, what we have already learned. In this way, we minimize the crises that might be expected if we encounter something (or someone) new and unexpected, since the new and the unexpected always carry with them the threat of disrupting and destabilizing our ways of getting through time and surviving as we were before. I believe that discontinuity of experience—of thoughts, feelings, self-states—represents, ultimately, an existential threat for every person. And so I proceed with a way of describing dialogue that intends to highlight, rather than obscure, the real risks involved in pursuing a stance of radical openness.
Betty: Brent's question about loss and radical openness's proposal “of losing the understandings to which we have been attached” causes me to ask if radical openness requires us to adopt a skeptical stance toward our own assumptions, especially about another person. Is this also what we might aim to lose? For me, “assumption” has associations with implicit and explicit bias, and to epistemology (i.e., all that we think we know). Is this what we might aim to lose?
Anton: Yes, Betty, I think you have understood what I am trying to get at here. But maybe, rather than a sense of skepticism turned toward oneself, I would prefer to think of it as a sense of personal mystery or maybe also personal