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hearing so much that made deep sense and knowing that I would remember little. The fine grains of David’s perceptions could not be held by the coarse weave of my mind.
In one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, a senior vice president has hosted “agenda-less” dialogue meetings monthly for
“Shared meaning is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has very poor quality cement … The society at large has a very incoherent set of meanings. In fact, this set of ‘shared meanings’ is so incoherent that it is hard to say that they have any real meaning at all.”
analogy mean in the social world? In his talk, Bohm often returns to the challenge in dialogue of simply allowing multiple points of view to be.
“The thing that mostly gets in the way of dialogue,” he says, “is holding to assumptions and opinions, and defending them.” This instinct to judge and defend, embedded in the selfdefense mechanisms of our biological heritage, is the source of incoherence.
Put differently, the core problem, Bohm realized, is that we do not know how to live together in a changing world.
We only know how to live based on truths from the past, which today inevitably results in one group attempting to impose their truths on another.
Bohm realized that defending core beliefs and the resulting incoherence was endemic in the modern world. He tells a poignant story about Einstein and Bohr, two men who shared a warm friendship early in their lives but who could not speak with one another in their later years, “because they had nothing to talk about. They couldn’t share any meaning, because each one felt his meaning was true.” If such entrenchment can afflict two such brilliant minds, who among us is immune?
quest for “unique truth” carries the potential to divide rather than connect people. As Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana says, “when one human being tells another human what is ‘real,’ what they are actually doing is making a demand for obedience. They are asserting that they have a privileged view of reality.”
This is why the modern world is full of increasingly stunning technological advances and an increasing inability to live together.
“A different kind of consciousness is possible among us, a participatory consciousness.”
