Bohm's journey to dialogue: A look at its roots

Abstract

Bohm's world was holistic, as holistic as the unanalyzable interconnections of the quantum or his unified vision of matter and mind. Holism extended, he believed, into human psychology and society itself. He dreamed of developing a group mind and spent his last years organizing dialogue circles in its pursuit. (David Peat, 1997, p. 4) Many groups today are exploring dialogue through the inspiration of the work of the late David Bohm, a quantum physicist and philosopher. This paper examines David Bohm's worldview out of which his vision of dialogue unfolded in the mid-1980s. Dialogue represents an important culminating aspect of Bohm's lifework: a far-reaching inquiry into the nature of reality and the ramifications it suggests for human society. Because few thinkers in our day have grappled so thoroughly with making connections between the physical sciences and the problems facing our world today, it seems apropos to examine the journey Bohm took on his way to developing his proposal of dialogue. My interest in Dialogue began in 1991 after first reading Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline and attending one of David Bohm's seminars on Dialogue in Ojai. The draw for me was intuitive. It seemed that Dialogue might be one remedy for some of the self-defeating ways of interacting that are unconsciously fostered in our society. In the West, we learn from an early age in school and in our families how to defend our position on things. We learn that being right is more important than listening to others. When we grow up, we take these ways of defending our need to be right into our most intimate relationships with others and then wonder why things do not go the way we like. We rarely examine the ways in which we communicate. We rarely consider that the interpersonal problems we encounter may lie with the process rather than with the content. One of the important values of Bohm's proposal of dialogue is that it brings into conscious relief the process by which we share meaning with others. And this rests on the values, skills, and worldview that underpin it. What are these assumptions about the nature of reality that Bohm came to from his work in quantum physics that led him to dialogue? Do they make sense in our world today? Should we take his proposal of dialogue seriously? After first learning about dialogue, I started practicing it in a community group I started in Temecula, California. Later, with my business partner, Glenna Gerard, I began to train others in how to use dialogue in organizational contexts. After a decade of exploring dialogue and co-authoring a book with Glenna, entitled Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation, I began to wonder more deeply about the roots of Bohm's proposal of dialogue. How did a quantum physicist come to the conclusion that something like dialogue was imperative in our world today? Why was I, a practicing organizational consultant, coming to the same conclusion as a physicist? The interconnectedness of life, holism, and the constant flowing nature of reality were fundamental for Bohm. In the context of these beliefs, Dialogue is a conscious act of man, representing the élan vital, the force, and the spirit that holds the entire universe together. I will attempt to trace the development of Bohm's thinking from his vision of quantum reality to dialogue.1 I will do so mainly by drawing upon his biography by David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm. Other sources that have been important to me in my personal work with dialogue have been Bohm's own writings: Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Science, Order, and Creativity (co-written by Bohm and Peat), On Dialogue, and Changing Consciousness (a dialogue by Bohm and Mark Edwards). Also helpful have been interviews with Bohm by Renee Weber in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages, as well as a collection of writings in Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm, edited by B.J. Hiley and F. David Peat. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.