Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue or “Dialogue in the Spirit of David Bohm”) is a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone’s point of view fully, equally and nonjudgmentally. This can lead to new and deeper understanding. (en.wikipedia.org)

Prerequisite Concepts

Knowledge Is Active

As I said, knowledge is not just an accumulation of information waiting passively. It is an active and often dominant process that controls the general operation of the mind, without our being conscious of it. And it takes a high level of mental energy to be aware of this activity. Otherwise, it takes over, which is what it has done.

Knowledge Must Yield Yet It Does Not

It’s clear that any form of knowledge has to be able to yield to fresh perception or, rational behavior is impossible. Knowledge with absolute necessity cannot yield so it distorts, rationalizes, and pushes aside undesired facts so that nothing disturbs the general framework. This means that we are caught in self-deception.

Thought Runs You

Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly. And, as we’ll discuss further on, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything—that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don’t decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Until thought is understood—better yet, more than understood, perceived—it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do. That’s the difficulty. Thought is participating and then saying it’s not participating. But it is taking part in everything. Fragmentation is a particular case of that. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.

We have the picture that there is ‘somebody’ inside us who is given all this information and then decides to have the intetnion to do something based on that. I’m suggesting, however, that that is not so.

But in fact you can get evidence that thoughts and feelings move as a processes on their own; they are not being run by “me.” They are not being produced by the “me”, and they are not being experienced by the “me”.

Thought Produces Chaos

We started out saying that the trouble is that the world is in chaos, but I think we und up by saying that thought is in chaos. That’s each one of us. And that is the cause of the world being in chaos. The chaos of the world comes back and adds to the chaos of thought.

Thought Creates the Thinker

Thought creates the thinker; it is the thinking process that brings the thinker into being. Thought comes first, and later the thinker; it is not the other way round. If we do not see this to be a fact, we shall be led into all kinds of confusion.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

We Don’t See the Fact Because of Thought’s Movements of Which We Are Mostly Unaware of

That is the fact: that we don’t see the fact. There is a higher order of fact – which is that we are not seeing the direct fact. As I said, that is the fact from which we must start.

There is No Necessity to Belief

No belief. No, don’t control anything. Observe that you have belief, you cling to the belief, belief gives you a sense of security and so on. And that belief is an illusion, it has no reality.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thought is A Set Reflexes That Move On Their Own

I’m proposing that this whole system works by a set of reflexes – that thought is a very subtle set of reflexes which is potentially unlimited; you can add more and more and you can modify your reflexes. A reflex just operates, as we’ve seen in the case of the knee-jerk. However, we don’t usually think that thought is liek the knee-jerk reflex. We think we are controlling thought and producing thought. That way of thinking is part of our whole background. But I’m suggesting that it’s not generally so – that a vast part of our thought just comes out from the reflex system. You can only find out what the thought is after it comes out.

Thought is One Giant System That Organizes Society

All our systems of organizing society are an extension of thought. There’s hardly anything in the world that we see or experience that is not an organization of thought. So it’s all part of the system. There’s one system. It doesn’t stop inside a human being. It goes from one person to another, all through society, all through history, all over the world. The ecological problem is the result of the way we have been thinking about the world, that it’s something we can exploit indefinitely and we’re still thinking that way.

We Must Give Sustained Attention to the Process of Thought

We’ve been discussing dialogue and thought, and the importance of giving attention to the whole process – not merely to the content of all the different opinions and views – and to how we hold it all together. Also we’re all watching the process of how it affects us, our feelings and states of the body, and how other people are affected. This is really something of crucial importance, to be listening and watching, observing, to give attention to the actual process of thought and the order in which it happens, and to watch for its incoherence, where it’s not working properly and so on. We are not trying to change anything, but just being aware of it.

Thought is Primarily Tacit

“Tacit” means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described—like the tacit knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. Thinking is actually a subtle tacit process. We do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

The tacit process is common. It is shared. The sharing is not merely the explicit communication and the body language. There is also a deeper tacit process which is common. The whole human race knew this for a million years, but now we have lost it, because our societies got too big. We have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate, to share our consciousness. We must be able to think together, in order to do intelligently whatever is necessary.

We Need a Coherent World-View That Reflects Wholeness

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

Insight Brings Order to Thought

I propose that the essence of insight is this mental energy which perceives these subtle and powerful forces of knowledge, the emotional, social, intellectual, and still others that are beyond description, which make us very reluctant to give up fixed beliefs. When this energy is present we could say that the mind is free of certain blocks that are inherent in knowledge. I want to emphasize that the general action of insight is in dissolving blocks and barriers, which allows the ordinary faculties of the mind, such as reason, to give rise to new ideas and approaches.

The Mind Must Be Freed from the Dominance of Thought

Now the question is: can the mind be free of this egocentric activity? Right? That is really the question, not whether it is so or not. Which means can the mind stand alone, uninfluenced? Alone, being alone does not mean isolation. Sir, look: when one rejects completely all the absurdities of nationality, the absurdities of propaganda, of religious propaganda, rejects conclusions of any kind, actually, not theoretically, completely put aside, has understood very deeply the question of pleasure and fear, and division – the `me’ and `not me’ – is there any form of the self at all?

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Science Will Not Save Us as Long as Thought Dominates

On the other hand, it has become evident that because of the general incoherence of society and the individual that I just described the further progress of science along its current lines cannot resolve these crises and may indeed tend to aggravate them. Thus for example it seems clear that science cannot make it possible for us to act together with the coherence and general good will needed to provide everyone with an adequate physical and social basis for life and at the same time to avoid destroying the planet through ecological disasters, climate changes, and so on. Nor can it help us deal with the forces of nationalism and religious divisions so these will no longer prevent us from getting together to meet all these problems which are evidently of a world-wide nature.

History

North American Indian Tribes

One of the first notions I ever had of Dialogue was many years ago when I read of about an anthropologist who visited a North American Indian tribe, probably hunter-gatherers, of about 20 to 40 people. He saw that they frequently gathered together in a circle, and they talked and talked. Nobody seemed to be in authority, and they didn’t have any particular agenda or any particular purpose. They made no decisions – they just talked. But at the end they separated and seemed to know what to do. They had established a relationship with each other so that they could then deal with their practical problems and really communicate, and not get into the state we are often in where we are fighting over the problems and not communicating.

So, that is really the sort of thing I have in mind for Dialogue. It may prove very hard for us to do this, because for thousands of years our tradition has been otherwise. So when we get together we have a purpose; we have authority and hierarchy with some people having more value than others and their word counting more; and also we want to achieve something and we don’t want to waste our time. So I am suggesting something that seems quite different. You may ask, if we have such pressing problems, why should we waste our time just talking. But I say that our problems originate because we can’t engage in this activity of just talking, and therefore when we try to deal with our serious problems we find that we are not meeting.

(bohmdialogue.org)