What is a Dyad?

The word 'Dyad' comes from the Greek (duad) and Latin (dyas, dyadis) roots - meaning two units treated as one. In this respect they are a partner based communication tool that help people gain insight, which comes about due to two people coming together with the shared intention of arriving at an understanding.

They are best understood as a solution to the problem of how we know Truth and are a distilled form of Socrates greatest gift to mankind - the dialectic, who’s sole purpose according to Plato is apprehension of the ultimate good. It rescues the unconscious process of whole-making from the tempestuous depths of the individual psyche. Previously a one man endeavour, the epistemic division of labour of coming to know between two parties as one dyad, brings greater consciousness, clarity and increases the viability of direct contact with one’s ultimate source manifoldly, for each contemplating partner. 

It solves the problem that an individual has in trying to know truth whilst simultaneously avoid untruth, two incompatible processes that compete within the individual. Instead, the work is divided between two parties, one partner who actively pursues truth and another who refrains from judgment. The tension between the two polarities within the one ‘dyad’ birthing forth an intelligent thread - logos, that which gathers together and makes whole, made possible through the zeroing in on the truth of one’s object of contemplation and the reciprocal opening towards truth by the two partners.

In practice, one is the listening partner, the other the contemplative, communicating partner. In the case of the 3 Day Enlightenment Intensive retreat, the listener gives the instruction at the beginning of each 5 minute cycle for example - “Tell me who you are”, which the contemplating partner tries to answer. They do this by allowing the instruction to land, getting a sense of themselves and intending to directly experience that, remaining open to what occurs in their body, mind & emotions, including the symbolic and the ‘felt sense’. They then communicate to their partner whatever has arisen through their contemplation without adding anything or leaving anything out.

The listener, simply offers their presence by watching, listening & trying to understand without nodding, commenting or evaluating in anyway. It allows the contemplator space & time to work things out for themselves and to be listened to without judgment, a rare opportunity in life. After 5 minutes, the bell sounds and they swap roles.

The continual interaction with the truth of one’s object of contemplation and the continual presenting of what arises in the contemplation to another, demands radical honesty and with nowhere to go but into the depths of one’s own experience, heroic self-sacrifice.

Unlike some forms of meditation & prayer, this form of dialectic explicitly orients us towards life, closing the gap between self, life or other. In committing to ‘not twoness’, we are giving up the infinite amount of choice available to us as a passive observer, we ‘get off the fence’ so that we may enter into the mystery of co-participation.

In committing whole-heartedly to this classical form of dialectic, the process of becoming enlightened to self, life or other, is greatly accelerated. Our promethean fire, the consciousness within us that longs to unite with it’s ultimate source, who’s inability to do so is the cause of spiritual disease & the ensuing meaning crisis, is returned.

By grace, the nous - our ability to intuitively apprehend, recognises the logos, intelligibility itself, through our object of contemplation. Rather than being a big high or experience it is a change in the way that we participate with all experience. At this moment we enter into communion with our object of knowledge and are co-enlightened to it, with it, as it. The mutual recognition & reconciliation of father & son is a triumphant homecoming and a crossing of a threshold where we become divinized and divinity becomes humanised, and is a new beginning that has far reaching effects & profound implications for how we live our lives.