Facets of a Diamond - Blog

It was the beginning of a seminar I was conducting in London. I looked at the audience. To nearly all of them I was a stranger as they were to me. I could feel their tension and uncertainty as they sat there clutching their pads and pencils, ready to write down every word I said. How was I to get them to feel less threatened, and free to put aside the writing materials, to listen with their whole brains, and hearts?

As I always do, I asked them to introduce themselves. After we had gone through about a dozen introductions, the tension was less—but still there.

Then one woman stated her name and said that she played a little piano, meaning, of course, that she played her piano just a little. I found myself taking her statement the other way, very concretely. “Oh? How small is it?” I asked. Some of the audience laughed, some of the pads and pencils were put down.

After we had gone through another row of introductions, a man announced that he was a piano teacher. I found myself replying, “What do pianos need to be taught?” And everyone laughed. The tension, both theirs and mine, was gone.

Both of these remarks were what I call out of phase. If a schizophrenic had made them I would have said they were examples of his disordered thought processes. But here the same remarks were taken as humor, and they had a therapeutic effect. Those particular jokes were acts of creativity, attempts on the part of my unconscious to reduce the specific state of uneasiness in myself and in the audience, and as such they were successful.

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Extract from the book 
 The Meridians and Beyond: The Diamond Reports, Vol. 2