On Dialogue

by David Bohm

on as true. Everybody may or may not have a different opinion—it is not that important. It isn't necessary that everybody be convinced to have the same view. This sharing of mind, of consciousness, is more important than the content of the opinions. And you may see that these opinions are limited anyway. You may find that the answer is not in the opinions at all, but somewhere else. Truth does not emerge from opinions; it must emerge from something else—perhaps from a more free movement of the tacit mind. So we have to get meanings coherent

I think this new approach could open the way to changing the whole world situation

dialogue. Even if one faction won't participate, we who are willing can participate in a dialogue between our thought and their thought. We can at least dialogue among ourselves as far as we can, or you may by yourself. That is the attitude

true. How can you share if you are sure you have truth and the other fellow is sure he has truth, and the truths don't agree? How can you share?

get people to look at it, it's a step. You could say that heads of state are not likely to have the kind of dialogue that we are talking about. But if they will have any kind at all, if they'll begin to accept this principle, it's a step. It may make a change;

The real crisis is not in these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; it's really in the thought which is making it—all the time. Each person can do something about that thought, because he's in it. But one of the troubles we get into is to say, "It's they who are thinking all that, and I am thinking right." I say

that's a mistake. I say thought pervades us. It's similar to a virus—somehow this is a disease of thought, of knowledge, of information, spreading all over the world. The more computers, radio, and television we have, the faster it spreads. So the kind of thought that's going on all around us begins to take over in every one of us, without our even noticing it. It's spreading like a virus and each one of us is nourishing that virus. Do we have a kind of immune system that stops

participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—a trace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically. So thought is the response from memory—from the past, from what has been done. Thus we have thinking and thought.

that thought is able to provide a representation of what we experience. "Representation" is a very appropriate word here, because it just says "re-present"—to present again. Thus, we may say that perception presents something, and that thought re-presents it in abstraction.

that this representation is not only present in thought or in imagination, but it fuses with the actual perception or experience. In other words, the representation fuses with the "presentation," so that what is "presented" (as perception) is already in large part a re-presentation. So it "presents again." You then get what we might call a "net presentation," which is the result of the senses, of thought, and possibly some insight. It all comes together in one net presentation. The way you experience

reason. Therefore, we don't approach such people as intrinsically dangerous, but as people who are the victims of mis-representation.

ie my representation of young black men. that i recognize this as a representation helps me id it as a misrep

treat nationalism as a problem. The absurdity of such a procedure becomes evident if one puts forth the question of how one can be ready to annihilate children of another nationality and yet love children of one's own nationality. Such a question has no answer, and indeed the attempt to find an answer can only lead to further confusion. What is needed is that people be ready to give

serious and sustained attention to a paradoxical pattern that has come to dominate their thinking and feeling.

the outward work go hand in hand. But it has to be kept in mind that through centuries of habit and conditioning, our prevailing tendency is now to suppose that "basically we ourselves are all right" and that our difficulties generally have outward causes, which can be treated as problems. And even when we do see that we are not in order inwardly, our habit is to suppose that we can point fairly definitely to what is wrong or lacking in ourselves, as if this were something different from or independent of the activity of thinking in which we formulate the "problem" of correcting what is in error.