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the movement of thought can become proprioceptive, much as the body does.
a more archaic form of perception, formed over the whole of human evolution, remains latent – and at times active – in the structure of our consciousness. This he refers to as “participatory thought,” a mode of thought in which discrete boundaries are sensed as permeable, objects have an underlying relationship with one another, and the movement of the perceptible world is sensed as participating in some vital essence. Even today, says Bohm, many tribal cultures maintain aspects of participatory thought.
participatory thought is capable of perceiving strata of relationships that are generally inaccessible from a “literal” perspective.
implicate order, in which the phenomena of the manifest world are understood as temporary aspects of the movement of a deeper natural order, in a process of perpetual “enfolding” and “unfolding.”
As the very nature of thought is to select limited abstractions from the world, it can never really approach the “ground of our being” – that which is unlimited. Yet at the same time, human beings have an intrinsic need to understand and relate to the “cosmic dimension” of existence. To address this apparent disjuncture in our experience, Bohm proposes that attention, unlike thought, is potentially unrestricted, and therefore capable of apprehending the subtle nature of the “unlimited.”
While the language of such exploration is necessarily metaphorical and inferential, Bohm nonetheless insisted that sustained inquiry into the nature of consciousness and the “ground of being” is essential if we are to have some prospect of bringing an end to fragmentation in the world. It was his firm belief that this fragmentation is rooted in the incoherence of our thought processes, not in immutable laws of nature. He refused to place limitations on where the inquiry into this incoherence may lead, or to draw sharp distinctions between the individual, collective, and cosmic dimensions of
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when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood.
it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants.
Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together. But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other.
If, however, two people merely want to convey certain ideas or points of view to each other, as if these were items of information, then they must inevitably fail to meet.
if people are to cooperate (i.e., literally to “work together”) they have to be able to create something in common, something that takes shape in their mutual discussions and actions, rather than something that is conveyed from one person who acts as an authority to the others, who act as passive instruments of this authority.
Thus, something new is continually created that is common to the artist and the material on which he is working.
It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.
If one is alert and attentive, he can see for example that whenever certain questions arise, there are fleeting sensations of fear, which push him away from consideration of these questions, and of pleasure, which attract his thoughts and cause them to be occupied with other questions.
So one is able to keep away from whatever it is that he thinks may disturb him. And as a result, he can be subtly defending his own ideas, when he supposes that he is really listening to what other people have to say.
stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the “glue” or “cement” that holds people and societies together.
Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself.
you may agree with some and disagree with others – but the basic point is to win the game.
In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose – if I win, you lose. But a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.
The people who take part are not really open to questioning their fundamental assumptions. They are trading off minor points, like negotiating whether we have more or fewer nuclear weapons.
the whole question of two different systems is not being seriously discussed.
their discussions are not serious,
all sorts of things which are held to be nonnegotiable and not touchable, and people don’t even want to talk about them.
a person identifies himself with them.
tied up with his investment in self-interest.
dialogue has to go into all the pressures that are behind our assumptions. It goes into the process of thought behind the assumptions...
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opinions that you have are the result of past thought:
If the opinion is right, it doesn’t need such a reaction.
It is as if you yourself are under attack when your opinion is challenged. Opinions thus tend to be experienced as “truths,” even though they may only be your own assumptions and your own background.
Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.
fragmentation,
Every division we make is a result of how we think.
In actuality, the whole world is shades me...
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the divisions are in thought. The whole way the family is set up is due to the way we think about it.
the process of thought thinks that it is doing nothing – that it is just telling you the way things are.
When we see a “problem,” whether pollution, carbon dioxide, or whatever, we then say, “We have got to solve that problem.” But we are constantly producing that sort of problem
thought produces results, but thought says it didn’t do it.
Thought produced the nation, and it says that the nation has an extremely high value,
it is necessary to continue to think that the nation has high value. Therefore you’ve got to create a pressure to think that way.
make sure everybody has got the impulse, to go on thinking that way about his nation,
Thought defends its basic assumptions against evidence that they may be wrong.
you say, “I must think about it to solve it.” But what I’m trying to say is that thought is the problem.
a great deal of thought is what we do together.
Language is collective.
In a dialogue, people coming from different backgrounds typically have different basic assumptions and opinions.
against evidence that they are not right,
similar tendency to defend them against somebody who has another opinion.
If we defend opinions in this way, we are not going to be able to have a dialogue. And we are often uncons...
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We just feel that something is so true that we can’t avoid trying to convince this stupid person how wrong he is to disagree with us.
we can’t really organize a good society if we go on that
