Dialogue Wisdom

We often feature excellent articles we've collected about conversations that matter. We welcome readers to forward powerful articles to us. Send your submission to: [email protected] .

We have often described the Conversation Café method as a combination of traditional indigenous council and Bohmian (from David Bohm) dialogue - simplified for use among everyday people in everyday places. David Bohm was one of the world's greatest quantum mechanical physicists and philosophers and was deeply influenced by both J. Krishnamurti and Einstein. Below is an excerpt from his essay on dialogue.

DIALOGUE - A PROPOSAL
Copyright 1991. c. David Bohm. Donald Factor and Peter Garrett

Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing dance or play together with little difficulty but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariable to lead to dispute, division and often to violence. In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought.

In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity to participate in a process that displays communication successes and failures. It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues.

Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.