Bohm
Well, I think there’s a general interest in going on with what we were doing yesterday afternoon, and, as the program suggests, continuing with the small groups. I want to remind people to be sure that somebody takes notes on the proceedings of each of the small groups, so we can discuss them at the larger group in the afternoon.
So at one point, perhaps we could begin if somebody wants to make any further comments on what happened, or, you know…. Yeah?
Audience
I was listening to people in a casual setting since our last meeting last night and yesterday afternoon, and it sounded to me like people had different opposing views as to what kind of thing was taking place here and what was being discussed. And, of course, there’s always a tendency to listen to that and say, “Well, gee, these people aren’t hearing properly.” And of course, I am. And then I looked at that. But I just wanted to say that. That’s what I saw.
Bohm
Yes, it’s quite natural that different people will have different impressions of the whole thing. The whole point eventually, in a dialogue, if we are in communication, then we could come to a common meaning. And that common meaning would be a common mind.
See, in view of what I was saying about meaning as being, a set of different meanings, all different among people, means a set of different minds, right? And if we have one pool of meaning, we have one mind. You see, because the meaning is active, it is not really, you know, sort of abstract and mental. And I’d like to make a comparison. You may have a crowd of people; everybody going in his own direction, coming into conflict and so on. Or you could imagine a ballet dancer all moving from a common pool of meaning. But of course that’s still a limited analogy, because the score of the dance is fixed. You see, if we compare this to an improvised ballet dance, it would be a better analogy. Therefore, the dialogue is an art, you see, as somebody said yesterday. And—yes?
Audience
May I say, I myself am a musician, a classical musician, and may I say that in playing music—analogous to the dance—that although the score and the notes and the fingering (or whatever) may be fixed, the experience of it in the moment is completely new. That’s why it is a recreation, because it isn’t something which is, you know, I can go and play the same piece the next day and it’s completely a new experience, although the notes are fixed.
Bohm
Yes, that’s right, you see. But I want to say that the dialogue, in a sense, has all that, but in addition, the notes are not fixed, you see. The fixed assumptions would be almost like fixing the themes. But you always have room within that theme. The dialogue is exceptionally broad because it does not necessarily fix any theme.
Audience
But there’s a tendency to have something fixed in one’s mind. And it seems that the operation of what I’m hearing through the screen of my background continues. It’s very strong. And the tendency to interpret what’s being heard seems to go on, and it—
Bohm
Yeah, that’s so, of course. You see, we don’t expect this to change in the spur of the moment, you see. When the dialogue is unfolding, it is showing what is happening. Now, see, there’s another point then. Suppose we say I would like to make a distinction here between thinking and thought. Thinking takes time, you’re consciously working it out. Now, in thought, it just happens; it’s a disposition—either to act physically or to talk or to develop further images or something. See, thought is the past participle of to think. And therefore thought is the result of what people have been thinking.
And now, thinking, obviously, is very important in certain areas—you know, solving problems and so on. But I say in the dialogue: thinking is not terribly suitable. You see, it takes time: while you are thinking, the dialogue is going on. And, on the other hand, thought is perfectly all right. You might say thought gets in the way, but if thought comes out as a predisposition, a reaction, then the dialogue is considering that, you see. Therefore, the fact that it’s thought is really not doing any harm. In fact, it’s showing up all these things we’re talking about.
Audience
Could we say that dialogue is a form of brainstorming?
Bohm
Well, I don’t know exactly what that is.
Audience
Everybody putting out ideas, give and take, back and forth, of opinions and understandings and suggestions and so forth.
Bohm
Well, it might include that. I think it goes beyond that, in the sense that people are—eventually they don’t… see, they learn to leave space, you know, for assimilation for other people to come in, and it becomes to a certain extent an art. It’s more integrated than that, you see, when people really are in communication.
Now, the… yes, you see, one thing I could say, one more point to say, is: the dialogue does not aim to solve problems, you see. It may consider problems and discuss them, but it’s not its aim, its function, to solve any problems. You see, the dialogue group is sort of this group which is empty at leisure. If you have problems to solve within a group, you set up another group, like a committee or whatever, to solve the problems or to make decisions. But it’s necessary to have in life somewhere a place where people can meet, where they have no problems to solve. They may always consider their problems, as I said there, but they don’t feel obligated to solve them. There’s no assumption that that is what you have to do, right?
Audience
There’s no particular objective.
Bohm
Yes. But, you see, solving problems is another way of looking at objectives; to say, usually an objective arises very often because you feel you’ve got a problem, right? Now, that has its place, you know. If you’re running an organization or doing something together, you say: here we have certain problems, we must decide what to do with them. But in the context of having been able to talk without any objective, then there will be an understanding which would make it easier to deal with objectives.
Audience
There’s two things. Talking yesterday with someone, we were talking about meaning, and this person said that they felt—pardon? Oh, louder. Talking with someone yesterday, we were talking about meanings and what it meant by meanings, which was how this all began, I think. And this person, I can’t exactly remember what they said, but there was this feeling that they felt that meanings were meaningless because we made them up. I think that’s what they said. But what I said is what I heard being said here, and the basic premise I was operating on, is that meanings were making us up. Not that we were making meaning to them. And this person said, “Oh, well, I wish you’d asked that question to get it clarified.”
Bohm
Yes, we’re suggesting that the general meaning, which is sociocultural in origin, is what makes us up. Each person may pick up different meanings out of the whole collection which is in the society. I said this word, “idiosyncrasy,” private mixture: that each person will gather together a private mixture of meanings which rules his life. It will vary with each person, but it comes from the general collection.
Audience
The meaning [???] is here, and we draw from it and arise out of the meaning.
Bohm
Yes, that’s right. And according to the way we draw those meanings, that determines our character, you see. According to the assumptions which we accept. Which—
Audience
The premise on which we are operating here may be or may not be, but—
Bohm
Yeah, that’s the suggestion. For example, if you say, “My country means everything to me,” that’s really a very basic part of your character. If you say, “Money means a tremendous amount to me,” that’s part of your character, right? You know, then you say that person is very much dominated by money, right? If you say, you know, “Culture is very important to me,” or something else is very important, if something, according to what something means to you, meaning includes value and it includes intention, right? Your intention will form according to what it means, how valuable it is. And if you take the whole set of intentions and values and meanings, you see that is an essential factor of your being, right? If it—
Audience
You didn’t create those meanings, those create—
Bohm
Yeah, well, let’s go: in different cultures, things mean different things to people, and we have rather different sorts of people, right? And maybe deep down they’re very similar, but at least their character is different, right? For example, in certain periods we discussed, say, Nazi Germany, where perfectly ordinary people, because of the meanings that were in that culture, they behaved in ways which they themselves would have regarded as outrageous before that happened, right? And therefore the same holds in every country. You know, you have mobs that get together, and people who are perfectly ordinary, and that mob can become quite different, right? Because they take on the meaning of the whole mob, right? Which is very powerful.
So the same holds, you see, the difference between the West and the East. You see, in the West we say—whatever—this present system means a great deal, and in the East another system means a great deal. So more or less very similar people can be on the opposite sides of this divide, and coming into conflict, right? So what makes the sort of the meaning—if you say, “None of these things mean something to me,” or with something much deeper, then you have still another kind of being, right?
Audience
This problem between the West and East—would a good stepping stone be to have dialogue rather than trying to confront their problems?
Bohm
That’s certainly true. I’m saying, you see, if you could ever manage to bring it about. They’ve said they’re having dialogues, but they’re not, right? So if you began and say each one of us has got certain assumptions, right? And now if we could listen to those assumptions in the spirit of the dialogue, holding them without judgment, just seeing what they are, then, in that, a common mind might develop. But you have such pressures and such fears and so on that it’s very much against setting this dialogue up.
You see, I think if you had some people—like they said, there was once an occasion where two people, one from Russia and one from America, went for a walk in the woods, right? I can’t remember the occasion, but so they began to talk more freely, and then something came out of it, but this was squelched as soon as it got into the organizations, right? You see, once you have a hierarchic organization, dialogue becomes very difficult. You see, hierarchy is against dialogue. Is that clear? Hierarchy has become the tradition of the human race ever since our civilization began—let’s say 10,000 years ago—when we went from the hunter-gatherer to the agricultural society and bigger societies where you could no longer have this small group dialoguing. You then had to form administrators and kings and priests. Now, you can’t have a dialogue in that situation, right?
The family itself became hierarchical with the same kind of authority, and therefore there’s no dialogue there, you see. You see, the traditional family was one where the patriarch ruled, right?
Audience
So the question is: why do functional differences between hierarchies—
Bohm
Well, I think this was because people didn’t see any other way to do it, you see. See, suppose you, if you want to speculate about it, you have people who went from the hunter-gatherer society, they began to plant for reasons that are unknown. There’s one idea that people knew about planting things for a long time and didn’t do it. They preferred to live by hunting and gathering. But possibly there was a shortage of food at some time and they had to plant. Then they said, “Well, this is good. We can be sure of our food supply.” They began to plant and spread it, and soon the population went up and they couldn’t turn back, right? So they had to plant more and more.
And then the whole thing got very big, you see. They said, “How can we run this thing?” There’s hundreds, thousands of people involved. We’ve got to form small cities. We’ve got to have people running the thing, storing up grain, organizing it. And you see, the principle of hierarchy then gets set up, right?
Audience
I think that that principle of hierarchy was—I’d like to bring up two points from that. The principle of hierarchy was probably there, in a way, in the hunting society, or gathering society also, in terms of: somebody did the hunting, somebody did this, somebody did that. Now, I think the problem comes from the confusion of, instead of having a function, there’s a certain function that everybody does within a group of people, the whole society itself, everyone performs a certain function. Somebody’s a cook, somebody’s a gardener, somebody serves gasoline, somebody collects garbage. The problem is assigning a status to that function, so that the function becomes a question of, it’s then divided into this person is more, this function is more, this function is less. And in that division, then, there’s conflict. And the meaning of the person becomes—I mean, the meaning is then attached to a person who has status according to a function which is then seen as a possession. You know, I am a king or something. No, I’m a doctor, so this makes me more than other people. And is not simply seen as a function, just doing, not separate from being, but as having a status which has been divisible.
Bohm
Yeah, well, there was some of that in the hunter-gatherer society, but it enormously increased when you went to the larger society. You know, you had some special shaman and medicine man, and you had somebody who had this function or that function, but it wasn’t generally that well fixed. Even the chief, I was informed by some anthropologists, he was not actually running the tribe. His main function was to be a wise old man who would restrain the young braves from going to war, you see.
So the idea was that there was—a number of anthropologists I know say that, in that situation, people had enormously more freedom than they had later, although there were many disadvantages to it. But, in a sense, nobody really cared what you thought or said as long as you weren’t too much of a nuisance, and then they would put you out of the tribe, which was a very serious thing. But perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on this too long, that the—yeah?
Audience
Yes, going back a little bit off of this, you said, you know, if we came together and we suspended our assumptions, and then it seems to me like, you know, I put that in my mind and passed over it. But to actually suspend assumptions, I mean, rather than thinking about it, but to actually do that.
Bohm
Yeah. Now, you see, if we’re, say, talking in the dialogue when people feel free with each other and trust each other, so whatever they say comes out, it’s not premeditated, right? You see? Therefore, the assumption can come out, right? You see, one difficulty is: by yourself it’s hard sometimes to know you’ve got the assumption. You can look into it and find out. But another way is: in the dialogue, whatever you say is revealing your assumption.
Audience
So you become a mirror for each other.
Bohm
Yeah. If you don’t, if you’re not premeditating it—that is to say, covering it up, right?
Audience
This morning I was thinking about something that came up yesterday that… we were talking about assumptions, and we say how do we know that what we see about our assumptions, or we see as we call the truth or whatever, isn’t self-deception. I think that was mentioned several times. And I was thinking about self-deception, and I thought: well, the fear of self-deception creates this lack of action. If a person is always in this state of willing to say, this is always an assumption, then one doesn’t worry about self-deception because they’ll act. And if it turns out to be false, they’ll keep moving. And in the action, you can only find out what’s true or false. But I think that sometimes our brain is saying: well, I don’t want to make any mistakes. I definitely don’t want to fall into self-deception. But the only way to find out is to act. But if you’re acting from the premise that this is all an assumption, you can’t get caught in it. That was something that I thought.
Bohm
Yeah. Well, that’s very similar to what I was saying. That, simply, people will talk without premeditation. Worrying about whether it’s self-deception or not is a form of premeditation. But if you talk and just—say you’re simply talking—then the meaning will become clear to the group, to you, to other people, as the exchange goes on.
Audience
It seems there needs to be another element in there, because we all have a lot of experience of just talking. And the talk comes so quickly that I don’t know if there’s any room to see an assumption.
Bohm
Yeah, so saying in the dialogue we’re going to be talking, but with a certain art of dialogue so that I’m not jumping in too fast. People will be learning that, giving time for the thing to be assimilated, to sink in, and for other people to come in. You see, this very fast reaction is one of the things that comes from what it means to you. You see that it becomes, for some reason, it’s important to answer very fast. Now, what could it be?
Audience
What could be the reason we answer?
Bohm
Yeah. What’s the assumption?
Audience
That there’s an answer that needs to be said?
Bohm
No, but there’s a kind of urge to get in there, right?
Audience
That I know—
Bohm
But why—
Audience
[???] I’m being attacked.
Bohm
That’s one possibility, yeah.
Audience
Sometimes it’s good to, from your question, to get your response out quick enough before someone else comes in and takes your thinking away, or you lose your thought that might be going on [???] do that—
Bohm
Yeah, but then if we are all moving more slowly, then that ceases to be a serious problem.
Audience
If you speak immediately and quickly, you can pretend that it’s coming from some deeper thing that’s the truth. Whereas if you pause and premeditate and consider it and manufacture something to say, then you don’t have the same pretense that it comes from something deeper and more accurate.
Bohm
Yes. Well, see, what I was saying is that this slowing down is not of the nature of premeditation, but it’s a kind of silence, right? Do you understand what I mean?
Audience
Well, right now I have the urge to talk, but I don’t know what to say.
Audience
[???]
Audience
I would like to ask, as a scientist, you said that meaning, if it’s in the abstract sense and there’s no dynamic or action involved, as a scientist there are meanings that are somewhat abstract—like pi or e, or whatever. How does it lead somebody like yourself into a deeper, more fundamental aspect of meaning that would relate to the Germany question that you mentioned, and the the eminent problems that thought has brought upon, that we have brought upon ourselves by abstracting thought to try to solve our problems? And yet there is great meaning in pi, in and of itself.
Bohm
Yes, well, there is an area of thought which can be abstracted, you know, relatively independent, which is in science and other areas. It’s not entirely abstract, because you’re getting information from the world and also it produces emotional effects. You see, if somebody is very interested in what he’s doing or he may also be defensive about his work in science, And the thing is not entirely abstract, but it is relatively so. And so you have a sphere of meaning. Let’s say in pure mathematics, as an extreme example, you have a sphere of meaning which works in a very abstract level. It has a certain contact with the rest of reality, but it’s rather loose. So there’s a natural structure of thought, of logic, and so on—which, I don’t know, we haven’t had time to discuss the concept.
Now, the other point I want to make is that we’ve been discussing the notion of a generative process underlying thought, or underlying society, right? An unfolding into the more concrete details, right? Now, see, the words “generate” and “general” have the same root. We use the word “genus.” You see, people who have the common origin are thought to be related in the family or whatever. See, the notion that the fundamental relation may be in the generative process is a common one, right, in our history. Now, we could apply that not only to biology, but also to thought, or to society, or, more broadly still, to matter as a whole.
Now, you see, the word “general” has usually meant something abstract, you see. The general subsumes, as they say, the particulars. The general is an abstraction which subsumes the particulars, but the particulars are regarded as the concrete reality. The general is an abstraction of what is common from all those particulars. That’s one way of looking at it.
Audience
Doesn’t abstraction involve space? In the sense that in the act of abstraction there is a creation of which you’re abstracting from a concrete particular. And there is a creation of space. Now, the correspondence may not be correct, but there is a creation of space. If it’s not correct, it’s a fiction that is created—
Bohm
Why do you say it’s creating space?
Audience
Because it’s abstracting from a concrete reality, [???] particular.
Bohm
Yeah. Well, you see, abstract means literally to take out. So you take out some feature from the various concrete particulars and form the general, if they have that in common. Now, that, we say, has been taken out. It’s abstract. Now, the first feeling about it is that that’s very insubstantial and mental. It’s something in the mind. It may guide your action, but it’s something in the mind, whereas the concrete particulars are there being really real.
But then I want to suggest turning this upside down. To say: in the generative process, the general is the most concrete. The general, the deepest feature of the generative process must hold for all, and then it gradually unfolds to the particulars, you see. Like the tree growing from the root into the branches.
Audience
Could you say what you mean by the generative process—
Bohm
Well, let’s take life. It may have a generative process, you see, thinking of how it starts. First of all, the most immediate thing, the plant starts from a seed. Now, the seed contains very little material or energy. The plant is actually made by the environment, not by the seed, right? It’s made by the soil, the wind, the water, and the energy of the sun, right? The seed provides a pattern or information, according to modern molecular biology—which we can make a metaphor: it informs the environment to make a plant, right? Previously, the environment was not informed, so it only made more inanimate matter all over again, right? So therefore, we say the plant is generated, you see, in this process. And then it will produce more seeds and it will decay and it will fall back into the soil and so on. So that whole thing I call the generative process. Now, you can see a society works very much in that way, too. You see that any organization starts from somebody who has the idea of it—as it were, the seed of it—and this is communicated to the other people around, and they all start to make the society.
Now, you see, what the idea means is that that is a generative idea. You see, suppose you take General Motors—well, here we have “general” in there, too! See, where is General Motors? You see, it’s in the idea of General Motors, right? If the notion of General Motors did not exist, we would have all the buildings and all the machinery, but nobody would know what they were supposed to be doing, and the thing would collapse, right? You see? So the whole thing is generated from an idea, right? Very much as the plant grew, you see, society provided the environment and the energy which produced this organization. But the idea could have originated in one person, right? Or in a few.
Audience
Are you saying it’s the ordering process? It takes the random, it orders all this random into a tree or into a car?
Bohm
Yeah, or into an organization.
Audience
We think we’re taking this disorder and ordering it, but you’re saying that the order is ordering it.
Bohm
Yes, the order in the idea. You see, an idea, its root of the word is the same root as the Latin videre, “to see.” You see, an idea is a way of seeing. It becomes fixed later and may become rigid and so on. But the original idea was a sort of a perception of what was possible.
Audience
Actually, the general could be the real and the original could be—the idea could be abstract, but then [???] —
Bohm
But it’s concrete too. That’s right. You see, the idea in its actual operation is concrete. You see, the generative order is acting concretely to make the plant, the generative process, to make the organization, to make the society. See, if society had no generative order, it will degenerate. See, that’s what happens to older societies. Their generative order begins to fall apart and break up. So we could say misinformation getting into the generative order and making it break up, you see. So the older a society gets, the more misinformation it accumulates—much as, if we go back to the human body, according to modern molecular biology, the key information is in the DNA. Now, that may or may not be entirely true, but we could accept it for the sake of argument and say the DNA contains information, but that information does nothing. It’s the cell that carries out the meaning of the information. And, in fact, the cell doesn’t exist by itself. It never existed. It’s the environment that has made the cell. So in some way there’s a generative order set up in the whole environment to make cells or to make an organism.
Audience
We say that the general proceeds to the individual rather than the individual?
Bohm
That’s another way of looking at it, yes. You see, saying in the generative process, the general proceeds to unfold to the more details.
Audience
But we always concentrate on the individual thinking. It directs us towards the general. General is just an average or something.
Bohm
Yeah.
Audience
It’s not an average. It’s a thing that—
Bohm
Well, the general as process is concrete. You see, the general as an idea is very abstract, right?
Audience
It appears to be.
Bohm
Yeah, as pure thought.
Audience
An idea.
Bohm
Yeah. Well, I mean, the thought of the general is an abstraction, right? But we say that this abstraction—in some cases, the general, if you put together a lot of qualities which are not very significant, the general, you see, is very abstract. But if you find something which is connected with the generative process, then this abstract idea points to the concrete generative process. You see what I mean?
Audience
But this is concrete in the particular that is generated.
Bohm
Yes. But the generative process, in some way, the generative process is perhaps more concrete. But the particular is an abstraction from that point of view. You see, the particular branch is an abstraction from the tree. The branch is really not a particular existing by itself, right?
Audience
So I guess a properly conducted dialogue could be considered a generative process.
Bohm
Yes.
Audience
And what is the nourishment that it derives its source from? Like the seed derives its nourishment from the environment, that it generates from the environment.
Bohm
Well, it’s the meaning, you see. It’s the meaning of the dialogue, which its significance—you know, its value—from which comes the intention to dialogue
Audience
So it’s the energy? You’re asking about energy, or what?
Bohm
Well, you see, the energy is there, you know, all the time, right? The energy of all the human beings. But it is going in all sorts of directions according to the various orders, or the various processes, meanings which have taken hold, right? Now, if the dialogue is seen to be a very significant thing, you know, where it will have high value, it will liberate energy, and it will become your firm intention. Right? Is that clear, what I mean? See, instead of saying, “I have chosen to dialogue,” you see, which turns it around, you’re saying, “There’s me first here, who’s the source of everything, and then I choose this or this or this.” Now, I’m saying I, in my wisdom, have chosen to dialogue or not to dialogue, right?
Audience
Well, I don’t know if I can explain it a little differently, but when there’s an intention which is generating here, and it becomes high generation, the energy is very high level, it’s not possible, it seems to me, to really see the extension. And the extension is vital to it, because this generating energy becomes a motion that misuses symbols, like it doesn’t have a structure for religion. You know, if it does, it has its own. So there is structure to almost everything we’re trying to talk about. But if it’s emotion we’re talking about, which most people talk about, they really don’t get together on the structure that’s similar.
Bohm
Well, yeah, I think that will come. You see, I’m trying to say emotion is a part of the process of meaning. Emotion is an expression of meaning, and in turn, it’s the source of meaning, further meaning, right? You see, if you have a feeling of energy, it may do to be high value. You see, if something means something very bad to you, you will have a negative emotion toward it, right? That’s part. You see, as we say, the hormones carry the message to the body of the meaning of your thought. And the RNA, according to the theory, carries the message of the meaning of the DNA to the sites where proteins are made. So the emotions are part of the message, you see.
Audience
But doesn’t that—when the emotion gets too high, the concentration is totally on that, and it doesn’t cut off that emotion by anything that goes by. It doesn’t see a friend that’s there. In other words, it’s just totally encased in a cocoon.
Bohm
Yes, we have to discuss this. That’s a complex question. The emotions and the rest of the whole process are in this generative process. See, one of the problems of our traditional culture is that emotions and other features of our life are taken separately—such as thought, and so on. Now, this is to fragment things that are really one. Now, I think if we want to discuss that, we could say if you watch—this would go to the question of being aware as an individual, of how your mind is going. You see, we have emphasized so far the socio-cultural question. We haven’t paid much attention so far to the individual question, but they really are bound together. And if there is time, we really have to consider both together. Now, the—yeah?
Audience
I wonder now, this serious question came to me a few minutes ago in this dialogue. Let us say three people are engaged in dialogue. Then all these three people have realized the limitations of thought, ideas, conceptions. Then don’t they experience, or don’t these three people come to a silence, rather than dialogue?
Bohm
Well, they may, yes. You see, the difficulty is that one has to realize the limitation of thought in a full sense of all the process by which meaning produces a disposition to act, to talk, to have emotions, you know, what we were discussing, you see, and also to conceal. You see, this whole thing is very much bigger than—you see, one may abstractly realize all that you said, and still the underlying process is not altered.
Audience
But the silence itself, if the silence is real silence, it will reveal that process.
Bohm
It may, but, you see, I think that if your assumptions are unconscious and are concealed, it may not. You see, the experience suggests that in a very large number of cases, people, after having gone through the silence, will react in much the same way, with anger, when something happens, you see. Therefore, we must say that it did not reveal the whole process. You see, that dialogue will help to reveal more of it. When you’re by yourself, you can easily fool yourself—although not necessarily so. You see, if you are very sensitive and aware, then, by yourself, you can see this. On the other hand, in relationship it comes out much more clearly, if we can manage not to get into confrontation and explosions and anger and hate and all that.
Audience
Yes, that is a different realm you are talking about, different from what I suggested, what I wanted to bring up. More or less I would repeat what I said. Let us say three people go on dialogue. Then all these three people have realized the dialogue is based on words, thoughts, concepts, ideas. And these three people have realized that these thoughts, ideas, words clearly do not do much. They are limited realms of communication. That is where my question arises: Then what happens? Does silence prevail among these three?
Bohm
Well, I think you have to find out. You see, it may prevail. I think we can’t say what will prevail. They may talk or they may not, you see. No reason why, if they have something to say, they shouldn’t continue to talk. I think that seeing all that would mean the ending of conflict, you see.
Audience
Yes, that is very true. [???] conflict there.
Bohm
Yes.
Audience
Silence is not the result of conflict, but cessation of conflict.
Bohm
Yes, but I think the cessation of conflict may take place while people are talking. You see, talking is part of the silence. Silence does not exclude talking, but talking may exclude silence if it’s in the wrong spirit. Talking is as much part of reality as anything else.
Audience
Silence doesn’t exclude conflict, either.
Bohm
If it were a false silence, it would allow conflict. But say if it were the kind he’s talking about.
Audience
Well, talking certainly allows us to appreciate the variety of life and the differences among us, and to, in other words, celebrate the great differences that there are. There doesn’t have to be conflict in order to appreciate the variety of things. Out of this great variety, creation feeds on that also, doesn’t it?
Bohm
Yeah. Well, you see, the problem is this: that talking is normal to people. It’s part of our whole structure, and society could not exist without it, nor could we live without it. We couldn’t function. Now, the difficulty is that, in talking, communication breaks down. Conflict arises, commonly. And we’re saying: in dialogue we are exploring that.
Now, I think that when we are able to talk freely, you know, the conflict will reduce, right? It will go away. We’ll find the sources of conflict. We’ll become aware of them. You see, that’s one approach. Now, it’s important that we be able to do this together.
Audience
You use the words “when we talk freely.”
Bohm
Yeah.
Audience
It seems to signify something which is readily apparent—
Bohm
Yes, well, what I mean is that, in general, people don’t talk freely. It’s part of the culture of our society that none of us feels free just to go somewhere and talk whatever is on your mind. Now, a great deal of experience suggests that it would be very unwise to do that. Because of the nature of our society, right? If you, for example, were living with people, and you got to know each other and trust each other, then you might imagine a situation where you could say whatever was on your mind, right?
Audience
Well, it’s still not apparent to me that talking freely, that tends to mean you say what’s ever in your mind, right?
Bohm
Yeah.
Audience
Okay. And then the other person says what’s ever in their mind.
Bohm
Yes.
Audience
And I respond to that when I have conflict.
Bohm
Yes. Now, what we haven’t done—that’s true, you see. What we haven’t done is to work through that conflict. See, this dialogue is not going to come about without some conflict, you see, because of our whole background. We haven’t discussed that, but all of us are going to be in the first stages of this dialogue rather polite to each other.
Audience
But you pointed that out, I think, and maybe for me that’s one of the most essential aspect of that type of dialogue—is that what you called impersonal friendship. And I think in everybody’s life that is probably the only occasion where that type of dialogue occurs, is between friends. Because the whole nature of friendship is such, by definition, that there is no fear, that there is no reservation, but, you know, that there is an openness. An open flow back and forth without premeditation, without anxiety and reservation and so on. And to bring that about, of course, one has to really break through all these barriers that are established through culture, and through all the, well, custom of sorts, you know, like a particular form of politeness.
Bohm
Yeah.
Audience
So that way you use friendship, you say the friendship maybe—we’ve agreed that we don’t discuss certain things and we keep it in certain areas, and—
[Audio cut]
Bohm
—I want to define the meaning carefully, the way I want to use the word. You see, we can always change meanings according to whatever we need. And the one meaning of friendship is just what you said: that we avoid things that disturb each other. But another meaning is that we don’t necessarily do that. That we don’t jump in, but, at a certain stage, if something is important which is unpleasant, we still can say it to each other without an explosion, right?
Audience
Which would imply a capability for friendship—
Bohm
Yeah.
Audience
—which I may not have.
Bohm
Well, you may have it—everybody has it, but it may be blocked, right?
Audience
Aren’t you saying that in this process of dialoguing there may be an explosion, and you have to work through that?
Bohm
Yes. Yes, but then it will be easier in the large group, because when there’s an explosion between two people, they confront each other, like I was saying yesterday, and their very efforts to stop this often make it worse, right? Now, when there are other people who are not quite that involved, they can come in in different ways and sort of keep things diffused to the point where we can confront this, confront someone, where we can face this without blowing up, right?
Audience
Well, that can happen. Sometimes it happens. That actually the nature of groups is to divide.
Bohm
That’s true.
Audience
And it often gets that you actually get not just the two people, but the two people with the other groups behind them, and you get an actual polarization of the group.
Bohm
That’s one of the dangers. You see, I’m saying every situation has advantages and difficulties. Now, the individual has certain advantages and certain difficulties, but in the group you can polarize. And this is what’s happened in the world between East and West, and other polarization, religions. But then, being conscious or aware of all that, we can say: we’ve got to see that we don’t polarize. And I’m saying there is a way by which that can happen.
Audience
Now, it’s okay to say here that it seems to me that this division and this conflict occurs when, in a sense, I’ve lost my body. In other words, I’m so engrossed in what I’m thinking and where I’m going with my thinking that that takes precedence over everything, and that thought is all. And so for this other thing to occur, it seems to me, I have to have some notion that it’s important to regard the whole situation rather than just what I’m thinking about.
Bohm
Yes, that’s true. That’s what we’ll be learning. You see, as we start, we begin with the the culture which is around us, right? Which includes all that those problems. Now, then we can be learning that this is what we need. You see? That getting carried away by your emotions is not really called for, right? I mean, getting carried away by your thoughts, right? But rather, that’s one of the functions as the group slows down and it doesn’t build up to such a high temperature, then that carrying away will not happen so strongly.
Audience
So it’s possible for a discussion to turn into a dialogue.
Bohm
Yes. See, there’s no sharp division. But, you know, one of the ideas is that it’s either this or that. But that’s an assumption.
Audience
Is there a difference between communication and dialogue?
Bohm
Well, dialogue is a kind of communication. But, you see, we have all kinds, you know, some of which are very restricted. I mean, for example, East and West are communicating with threats.
Audience
But the word “communicate” means—
Bohm
Make it common.
Audience
In union with.
Bohm
Yeah. Well, to make it common in some way. You could say politics is an attempt to communicate, right? Basically. Politics is people’s attempt to communicate and come to a common policy. And there’s a fellow called von Clausewitz who said: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, when communication breaks down, you try to communicate to the enemy that you are stronger than he is by demonstrating that; that he’s got to do what you want, right? You see, politics has broken, right? The attempt to discuss. Politics should really be dialogue. It seldom is, but if—you see, policy should be determined by people who are in dialogue, but instead it becomes confrontation and eventually war. Now, even war is a kind of communication.
Audience
Part of the conflict is the spatial separation. Even if you took this group and divided it in half, and people talked in two different rooms, it’d probably be just a mild form of polarization. And when you have the East and the West, the fact that people are separated interferes with any type of dialogue.
Bohm
Well, it’s one of the problems of the size and so on. But, you see, I think that this group is just a little big for getting started. Some group between twenty and forty would be more convenient. See, in fact, the smaller groups are really almost about the right size for starting at that.
Audience
I think it was Friday night you said something about, or alluded to, something about dialogue and communication may be the same thing. I was thinking that if two or more people are talking, and with a comparatively clear perception of what is, then it is the same thing. It’s like there’s little need for usual kind of explanation for a lot of things. It’s like it is more of a kind of an indicating than a lot of explanation.
Bohm
Yeah, it will be more implicit, you see. That’s what I was saying about these hunter-gathers, according to the anthropologists, that they would talk about all sorts of things that seemed to have nothing to do with anything, but they were sort of, it was implicit. Much more was implicit in it, right?
Audience
Well, when they were talking, and in a dialogue, what, in a sense, determines whether something is true? Because in a society where everyone’s homogeneous, you would assume that you’re all—like in a fundamentalist religion or something—you all agree that this is what’s true. And you get a little bit more diversity of backgrounds, and then you get more of a conflict of meanings and of ideas. But when you have a dialogue, where is the ring of truth? How do you recognize something which is false and something which is true?
Bohm
Well, that’s a very difficult, subtle question. You see, we were discussing yesterday that truth is not just in the content or in the correctness of the thought, but truth is in the straightness of the whole process. And the untruth is the non-straightness, which is deceptiveness or self-deception. You see, if you’re worried about thinking about self-deception, that’s the sort of question you’re in. You see, to say, is the process straight? Is it aiming to conceal what’s really there? Or is it aiming at some object which is not what it’s saying it’s doing?
Now, I think that—people have used the word “the ring of truth.” It suggests that we get that feeling of the truth or straightness of the process from some level other than verbal analysis. Otherwise the feeling of truth, you know, some people have said it smells right or, you know, they’re using metaphors, right? It rings true. That can be deceptive, too. But there’s no guarantee in this. As I said, even if you want to make money, there is no guarantee that you will make it. And this is even less guaranteeable. But there is a possibility for that feeling of truth or falseness. That is, it may ring false, you see. Then you have to look at it, and begin to examine it, and see if you get a feeling of its falseness.
Audience
Would you say correctness is a process or just truth?
Bohm
Well, the correctness is a feature of truth, but the process may be true, but it maybe momentarily have an incorrect statement in it, but then it’s moving toward being corrected. But a statement may be correct, but part of an untrue process.
Audience
Is it possible for good to come out of falsity? [???] to come out of truth.
Bohm
No, in the long run, I don’t think any good will come of falseness. In the long run, good could only come out of truth. And truth could only come out of what is good or truly good.
Audience
[???] absolute?
Bohm
Well, as far as I can see, yes. You see, I’m proposing that. I mean, that statement could always be questioned. But I’m saying that’s what I see at the moment.
Audience
I have a question that’s very difficult for me to articulate. Maybe I could get some help. We are all personal or self-conscious people who are coming to hear that dialogue is important. And we may hear, as an idea, because we haven’t experienced it, that that’s more important than the individual. And then this individual is sitting here, listening to this, and even excited by the idea. And yet, the “me” has, for the many years I’ve been alive, it’s so strong that the idea, when it actually gets down to trying to be quiet and listen, doesn’t want to, because there hasn’t been a display that dialogue is more important than “me”—even though the idea is absolutely clear.
So then I’m noticing right here, you know, I’m trying to listen, and then I hear my wanting to say this question, which is the me. It may sound like a question that’s interesting or not, doesn’t matter. But it’s not coming from listening, because as things were going on, I was not quietly listening. I have reactions, and I’m coming up with all these things that seem like it’s going on with the conversation, but it’s not. Okay? So do you get the dilemma I’m speaking of? Did I…?
Audience
You did real good, Nadia.
Audience
Thanks.
Bohm
Yes, well, does anybody want to chime in on that? I think—
Audience
It may be coming from the dialogue. I mean, what I hear you saying is that it’s not coming.
Audience
No, I feel it’s coming for me, because I was thinking about—you know, you talk about thought—I was thinking about I couldn’t get it in my mind, but I had this feeling, and I wanted to get it out, and I couldn’t hear what was going on, and I watched that, and then it would go back to wanting to say this, because it’s important to “me.” So this “me” is now dominating, and I’m not being quiet.
Audience
Why do you feel there’s something wrong with it?
Audience
Yeah, right. Exactly.
Audience
Well, because the I is so strong that our society has invested in the individual. And that even though we hear the importance, we hear that as an idea, I don’t know how many times one has actually experienced how unimportant this “me” is.
Audience
Isn’t it important to let that disposition come out? And that, as dispositions come out, that becomes the foundation for dialogue. And that we can all hold those dispositions without conflict.
Audience
And I think she’s just demonstrated that.
Audience
She did.
Audience
So if you didn’t have the idea that there was something wrong with the “I”—
Audience
I’m not saying wrong. It’s interfering.
Audience
Well, whatever you have—I’m feeling that there’s some kind of conflict between what’s happening, which you say is an idea, and another idea, and you feel that one idea should be subservient. I don’t understand. If you didn’t have all these ideas, you wouldn’t have all these conflicts. And then we could sit here and see what’s happening.
Audience
See, I’m not listening to your question right now, because I have an answer already in mind.
Audience
Fine. But then we’re not talking to each other.
Audience
So that’s exactly where dialogue doesn’t happen. I’m watching the fact that, as you’re saying it, I heard something and I want to respond to that. And so then that can’t be...
Audience
But, see, you didn’t respond to it. You put something in the middle that says: “I should be listening to his question.” That’s what I’m saying. See, if you’d have just said, “Oh no, that’s all a bunch of baloney,” we’d be dialoguing.
Audience
Right. I’m trying to be subtle.
Audience
But you didn’t do that. You put something—well, don’t be subtle.
Audience
No, I’m trying to see.
Audience
Is that true?
Audience
Is what true?
Audience
The spontaneous response “Well, that’s just a bunch of baloney,” is that dialoguing?
Audience
Well, it would be much closer to dialoguing than her having a dialogue with herself saying, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way.” At least we’d be communicating that. You start concealing. Well, no, that’s what I’m saying.
Audience
She’s put it—she’s made it public for us all to look at. So she has brought it out for us.
Audience
Right, and I asked her why she had that, why I felt that she was saying there was this separation, and she says, I’m not listening to what you say because I’m always thinking about your answer. And then I’m thinking about my thought about the answer, and I’m saying, well, why didn’t she just think about the answer?
Audience
I think that you are reacting because she’s not listening to what you’re saying.
Audience
No, I’m reacting because she’s not letting what she’s thinking out.
Audience
But we all do this.
Audience
Well, fine, I’m reacting. If I didn’t react, I wouldn’t be here.
Audience
I think at this point, the problem is trying to have a dialogue in a group.
Audience
My feeling is she may not have been finished.
Audience
Oh, that’s…
Audience
I think it is a problem of fragmentation. If you see a division between dialogue and “I,” there is this conflict and fragmentation and back and forth difficulty. But if you see as a whole, there is no room for that kind of conflict to arise. Are you following?
Bohm
Yes, I understand. Well, yes, I think there are several interesting points in this whole discussion. You see, that’s one, and I’ll come to it. See, the other is that you could see the emotional temperature beginning to rise, which is really the beginning of the process, you see. That, you see, if we don’t go through that—not that we seek it on purpose—but if we don’t go through that, then we will not be able to be friends, right?
Audience
Right.
Audience
[???] was speaking [???] I had a sense that you were exposing yourself, in a way. And my feeling throughout what you were saying was that it was right (to use a word), and something was being revealed. And we all do that, I think, with what you were talking about. You know? And…
Audience
See, my question is: Where do we make that step beyond that? We all have this “I” that wants to jump in, and in spite of the knowledge that dialogue is important, we now have value to a degree. But the value of “me” is stronger. It has come first for 41 years, and it’s going to take a lot of work to see that the value of this group is more important than—I mean, to experience that.
Bohm
That may be a set of assumptions. You see, one point was just remarked, you know, the separation—
Audience
[???]
Bohm
What? Yeah, no, that’s a fact. The—see, in the dialogue, I think we are neither in the individual nor in the group, but we’re moving between them, you see? Now, I would like to say, perhaps, you could say a human being has three dimensions: the individual dimension of his own life, the dimension of socio-cultural, and what we could call (for want of a better word) the cosmic dimension, which religion has concerned itself, with philosophy, and to some extent science, and possibly other things. And we haven’t mentioned the cosmic dimension here. We’re primarily concerned so far with the socio-cultural, because that has been the one dimension which has been highly neglected, I think, in our culture, and the whole of culture. But, you see, the individual and the socio-cultural are not necessarily in conflict. Socio-cultural doesn’t mean suppressing the individual. They may flow into each other so that we may focus on the individual or on the group. It moves back and forth.
But I think what you’re referring to is another problem. That, how the individual, or how the self, has become so dominant. Which is part of a vast culture and history. And that I don’t know if we can discuss. You know, if we want to we could discuss it later. But that has to do a lot with the way our thought goes. But I think, just for the moment, since we can’t go into that at this moment, it would not be right to set up this opposition between the individual and the group; saying group is more important or less important. But really, there should be a situation where the human being can develop or unfold in all the different dimensions. And we’re (for the moment) considering, say, the individual and the socio-cultural dimension. The other one we may not have time to really get into very far. All of them are very difficult questions and require a lot of discussion.
Audience
[???]
Bohm
Yeah, we might later do it. I think this time—yes, we’ll try it. Perhaps we could try to get into that. But I think that we need all three of those dimensions, you see. And experience of humanity suggests that all three are needed, right? Because that has been present far into the past, right?
Audience
[???] three dimensions [???]
Bohm
There’s the individual—you know, the person—and then there’s the socio-cultural dimension, and the cosmic. See, perhaps early man was in direct contact with nature very often, and he had that sense of cosmic dimension in his daily life. When that went away, the people had to develop religion and philosophy, and to some extent science to try to bring that back in another way.
Audience
One thing I heard was we all respond from “I” and come out of these responses from I, ego, or something like that. I think that may not be quite true. That maybe an experience of an individual, but that may not be true as far as this group is concerned.
Bohm
Yes, and why is it not true?
Audience
I think there may be people who see the dialogue itself as “I,” rather than a division between dialogue and so-called “I.”
Bohm
Yes. That may be. You see, perhaps I should make one more point, but I think we had agreed that we were going to have a break. So I’ll just make one point. You see, this word “I” requires a tremendous investigation. But one point is, you know: it has a tremendous meaning, and a tremendous power. It has all sorts of meanings, you see.
One question is: what does it mean? You see? Now, if you say “I,”—see, usually a person feels that he ends at his skin. He’s somewhere inside the skin. But if you take a blind man who is tapping with his stick and holding it tightly, he has the feeling that he ends at the end of the stick, which is loosely connected to the room. He’s learning about the room from the end of the stick, which is him. If he holds the stick loosely, he ends at his fingertips. Anybody may think, “I’m going to move my arm,” so he thinks I’m somewhere in here, moving my arm, which is something else. Or, on the other hand, you can go outward and say, “I am identified with my country. I end at the boundaries of my country.” Or you can say, “I am the whole cosmos.” Right? These are different ways of experiencing. Or, coming inward, you could (removing more and more) finally say, “I’m a tiny little point right in the very middle.” Or else, eventually (if the point goes) you could say, “I’m nothing.”
So therefore, this meaning of the word “I” is very variable according to the circumstance. And therefore, I could not necessarily exclude the group. If we say “I”—whatever it means—it means the act of, you know, that active movement of the mind which determines meaning and so on. And therefore that could be the group right for a certain moment. Then individual could be in another moment or, you know, as we separate and so on, you see. So this word “I”—this notion that “I” has a fixed meaning is not true, you see. That “I” can mean a tremendous number of things, and at a certain moment we may say that the source of mind, of meaning, and so on, is the whole group.
Now, when you say, “I,” personally, that’s exactly what you mean. That the source of meaning is in here, right? That, namely, the source of intent, of meaning, of significance, of intention, of value, is somewhere in here. You see, the “I,” what is meant by that is that, I think. You see? That it’s the subject.
Audience
And saying that there is a conflict between the I and the group is the conflict.
Bohm
Yeah, it creates the—
Audience
The dwelling on the conflict is the conflict.
Bohm
Yes, that’s right. It’s a—
Audience
The work on the conflict is furthering the conflict.
Bohm
Yeah. If you do it that way, it’s a self-fulfilling assumption that there is this division. Now, it may be that it has been there. We have already held that assumption. But then, holding it more firmly will make it worse.