We have seen the need to evolve a meeting that is a preparation for meeting for worship, a meeting which is similarly open, personal and democratic but which is implicitly educational and uses a wide range of modes of interaction. The touchstone of its success is its ability to generate richer fellowship between participants as they come to know each other and themselves in the deepest things. Learning, in this use of the word, is not head and fact learning, but whole-self learning where feelings and spirit find equal room with thinking and reason.

There is no one way of going about meetings for learning; nor is there one content nor one single aspect of self that they might enrich. As well as intuition there is also information; as well as creative listening and role play and music there is also discussion and guidance. But yet all meetings for learning are about growth in that territory of the self which touches on ultimate meanings, about those things which we feel the deepest, about our shadow as much as about our light, about our being accepted and held in the group and not judged for being found wanting, about new community. Such meetings demand as much discipline as meetings for worship or our business meetings.

Alec Davison, 1982

See also 21.31