Home

Direct all comments and EMAIL to Don:

ON DIALOGUE

Chapter 2

The way we start a dialogue group is usually by talking about dialogue - talking it over, discussing why we're doing it, what it means, and so forth. I don't think it is wise to start a group before people have gone into all that, at least somewhat. You can, but then you'll have to trust that the group will continue, and that these questions will come out later. So if you are thinking of meeting in a group, one thing which I suggest is to have a discussion or a seminar about dialogue for a while, and those who are interested can then go on to have the dialogue. And you mustn't worry too much whether you are or are not having dialogue - that's one of the blocks. It may be mixed. So we will discuss dialogue for a while - what is its nature?

I give a meaning to the word "dialogue" that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. "Dialogue" comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means "the word," or in our case we would think of the "meaning of the word." And dia means "through" - it doesn't mean "two." A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a 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.

Contrast this with the word "discussion," which has the same. root as "percussion" and "concussion." It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one - analyzing and breaking up. That obviously has its value, but it is limited, and it will not get us very far beyond our various points of view. 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. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others - but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

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.

Clearly, a lot of what is called "dialogue" is not dialogue in the way that I am using the word. For example, people at the United Nations have been having what are often considered to be dialogues, but these are very limited. They are more like discussions - or perhaps trade-offs or negotiations - than dialogues. 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. But the whole question of two different systems is not being seriously discussed. It's taken for granted that you can't talk about that - that nothing will ever change that. Consequently their discussions are not serious, not deeply serious. A great deal of what we call "discussion" is not deeply serious, in the sense that there are all sorts of things which are held to be non-negotiable and not touchable, and people don't even want to talk about them. That is part of our trouble.

Now, why do we need dialogue? People have difficulty communicating even in small groups. But in a group of thirty or forty or more, many may find it very hard to communicate unless there is a set purpose, or unless somebody is leading it.

Why is that? For one thing, everybody has different assumptions and opinions. They are basic assumptions - not merely superficial assumptions - such as assumptions about the meaning of life; about your own self-interest, your country's interest, or your religious interest; about what you really think is important.

And these assumptions are defended when they are challenged. People frequently can't resist defending them, and they tend to defend them with an emotional charge. We'll discuss that in more detail later, but I'll give an example now. We organized a dialogue in Israel a number of years ago. At one stage the people were discussing politics, and somebody said, just in passing, "Zionism is creating a great difficulty in good relations between Jews and Arabs. It is the principal barrier that's in the way." He said it very quietly. Then suddenly somebody else couldn't contain himself and jumped up. He was full of emotion. His blood pressure was high and his eyes were popping out. He said, ''Without Zionism the country would fall to pieces!"

That fellow had one basic assumption, and the other person had another one. And those two assumptions were really in conflict. Then the question is, ''What can you do?" You see, those are the kinds of assumptions that are causing all the trouble politically, all over the world. And the case I just described is relatively easier than some of the assumptions that we have to handle in politics. The point is that we have all sorts of assumptions, not only about politics or economics or religion, but also about what we think an individual should do, or what life is all about, and so forth.

We could also call these assumptions "opinions." An opinion is an assumption. The word "opinion" is used in several senses. When a doctor has an opinion, that's the best assumption that he can make based on the evidence. He may then say, "Okay, I'm not quite sure, so let's get a second opinion." In that case, if he is a good doctor he does not react to defend his assumption. If the second opinion turns out to be different from his, he doesn't jump up with an emotional charge, such as the fellow did on the question of Zionism, and say, "How can you say such things?" That doctor's opinion would be an example of a rational sort of opinion. But most are not of that nature - mostly they are defended with a strong reaction. In other words, a person identifies himself with them. They are tied up with his investment in self-interest.

The point is that dialogue has to go into all the pressures that are behind our assumptions. It goes into the process of thought behind the assumptions, not just the assumptions themselves.

DIALOGUE AND THOUGHT

It is important to see that the different opinions that you have are the result of past thought: all your experiences, what other people have said, and what not. That is all programmed into your memory. You may then identify with those opinions and react to defend them. But it doesn't make sense to do this. If the opinion is right, it doesn't need such a reaction. And if it is wrong, why should you defend it? If you are identified with it, however, you do defend it. 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. You got them from your teacher, your family, or by reading, or in yet some other way. Then for one reason or another you are identified with them, and you defend them.

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. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise it's going to go wrong.

I'll try to give some examples of the difficulty in thinking, in thought. One of these difficulties is fragmentation, which originates in thought - it is thought which divides everything up. Every division we make is a result of how we think. In actuality, the whole world is shades merging into one. But we select certain things and separate them from others - for convenience, at first. Later we give this separation great importance. We set up separate nations, which is entirely the result of our thinking, and then we begin to give them supreme importance. We also divide religions by thought - separate religions are entirely a result of how we think. And in the family, the divisions are in thought. The whole way the family is set up is due to the way we think about it.

Fragmentation is one of the difficulties of thought, but there is a deeper root, which is that thought is very active, but the process of thought thinks that it is doing nothing - that it is just telling you the way things are. Almost everything around us has been determined by thought - all the buildings, factories, farms, roads, schools, nations, science, technology, religion whatever you care to mention. The whole ecological problem is due to thought, because we have thought that the world is there for us to exploit, that it is infinite, and so no matter what we did, the pollution would all get dissolved away.

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 - not just that particular problem, but that sort of problem - by the way we go on with our thought. If we keep on thinking that the world is there solely for our convenience, then we are going to exploit it in some other way, and we are going to make another problem somewhere. We may clear up the pollution, but may then create some other difficulty, such as economic chaos, if we don't do it right. We might set up genetic engineering, but if ordinary technology can produce such vast difficulties, imagine the kind of thing genetic engineering could get us into - if we go on with the same way of thinking. People will be doing genetic engineering for whatever suits their fancy and the way they think.

The point is: thought produces results, but thought says it didn't do it. And that is a problem. The trouble is that some of those results that thought produces are considered to be very important and valuable. Thought produced the nation, and it says that the nation has an extremely high value, a supreme value, which overrides almost everything else. The same may be said about religion. Therefore, freedom of thought is interfered with, because if the nation has 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. You've got to have an impulse, and make sure everybody has got the impulse, to go on thinking that way about his nation, his religion, his family, or whatever it is that he gives high value. He's got to defend it.

You cannot defend something without first thinking the defense. There are those thoughts which might question the thing you want to defend, and you've got to push them aside. That may readily involve self-deception - you will simply push aside a lot of things you would rather not accept by saying they are wrong, by distorting the issue, and so on. Thought defends its basic assumptions against evidence that they may be wrong.

In order to deal with this, we have got to look at thought, because the problem is originating in thought. Usually when you have a problem, you say, "I must think about it to solve it." But what I'm trying to say is that thought is the problem. What, therefore, are we going to do? We could consider two kinds of thought - individual and collective. Individually I can think of various things, but a great deal of thought is what we do together. In fact, most of it comes from the collective background. Language is collective. Most of our basic assumptions come from our society, including all our assumptions about how society works, about what sort of person we are supposed to be, and about relationships, institutions, and so on. Therefore we need to pay attention to thought both individually and collectively.

In a dialogue, people coming from different backgrounds typically have different basic assumptions and opinions. In almost any group you will probably find a great many different assumptions and opinions of which we are not aware at the moment. It is a matter of culture. In the overall culture there are vast numbers of opinions and assumptions which help make up that culture. And there are also sub-cultures that are somewhat different from one another according to ethnic groups, or to economic situations, or to race, religion, or thousands of other things. People will come to such a gathering from somewhat different cultures or sub-cultures, with different assumptions and opinions. And they may not realize it, but they have some tendency to defend their assumptions and opinions reactively against evidence that they are not right, or simply a 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 unconsciously defending our opinions. We don't usually do it on purpose. At times we may be conscious that we are defending them, but mostly we are not. 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.

Now, that seems the most natural thing in the world - it seems that that's inevitable. Yet if you think of it, we can't really organize a good. society if we go on that basis. That's the way democracy is supposed to work, but it hasn't. If everybody has a different opinion, it will be merely a struggle of opinions. And the one who is the strongest will win. It may not necessarily be the right one; it may be that none of them are right. Therefore, we won't be doing the right thing when we try to get together.

This problem arises whenever people meet for dialogue, or legislators try to get together, or businessmen try to get together, or whatever. If we had to do a job together, we would likely find that each one of us would have different opinions and assumptions, and thus we would find it hard to do the job. The temperature could go way up. In fact, there are people facing this problem in large corporations. The top executives may all have different opinions, hence they can't get together. So the company doesn't work efficiently, it starts to lose money and goes under.

There are some people who are trying to form groups where top business executives can talk together. If politicians would do that, it would be very good.. Religious people would be the hardest to get together. The assumptions of the different religions are so firmly embedded that I don't know of any case of two religions, or even sub-groups of any given religion, where they ever got together once they had split. The Christian church, for instance, has been talking about trying to get together for ages and it stays about the same all the time. They talk and they appear to get a little bit closer, and then it never happens. They talk about unity and oneness and love, and all that, but the other assumptions are more powerful; they are programmed into us. Some religious people are trying to get together; they are really sincere - they are as serious as they can be - but it seems that they cannot do it.

Scientists also get into the same situation. Each one may hold to a different view of the truth, so they can't get together. Or they may have different self-interests. A scientist who is working for a company that produces pollution may have a certain self-interest in proving that the pollution is not dangerous. And somebody else might have self-interest in proving that it is dangerous. And perhaps then somewhere there is an unbiased scientist who tries to judge it all.

Science is supposed to be dedicated to truth and fact, and religion is supposed to be dedicated to another kind of truth, and to love. But people's self-interest and assumptions take over. Now, we're not trying to judge these people. Something is happening, which is that assumptions or opinions are like computer programs in people's minds. Those programs take over against the best of intentions - they produce their own intentions.

We could say, then, that a group of about twenty to forty people is almost a microcosm of the whole society - like the groups we have just looked at, it has a lot of different opinions and assumptions. It is possible to have a dialogue with one person or with two, three, or four, or you can have the attitude of the dialogue by yourself, as you weigh all the opinions without deciding. But a group that is too small doesn't work very well. If five or six people get together, they can usually adjust to each other so that they don't say the things that upset each other - they get a "cozy adjustment." People can easily be very polite to each other and avoid the issues that may cause trouble. And if there is a confrontation between two or more people in such a small group, it seems very hard to stop it; it gets stuck. In a larger group, we may well start out politely. After a while, though, people can seldom continue to avoid all the issues that would be troublesome. The politeness falls away pretty soon. In a group of less than about twenty it may not, because people get to know each other and know the rough edges that they have to avoid. They can take it all into account; it's not too much. But in a group of forty or fifty it is too much.

So when you raise the number to about twenty, something different begins to happen. And forty people is about as many as you can conveniently arrange in a circle - or you might put two circles concentrically. In that size group, you begin to get what may be called a "microculture." You have enough people coming in from different sub-cultures so that they are a sort of microcosm of the whole culture. And then the question of culture - the collectively shared meaning - begins to come in.

That is crucial, because the collectively shared meaning is very powerful. The collective thought is more powerful than the individual thought. As we said, the individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people. The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts - he makes a contribution. But very few change them very much.

The power of the group goes up much faster than the number of people. I've said elsewhere that it could be compared to a laser. Ordinary light is called "incoherent," which means that it is going in all sorts of directions, and the light waves are not in phase with each other so they don't build up. But a laser produces a very intense beam which is coherent. The light waves build up strength because they are all going in the same direction. This beam can do all sorts of things that ordinary light cannot.

Now, you could say that our ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power. That's the suggestion. If we have a dialogue situation a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to know each other, and so on - then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherent movement of communication. It would be coherent not only at the level we recognize, but at the tacit level, at the level for which we have only a vague feeling. That would be more important.

"Tacit" means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described - like the knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that 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 and all. that, which. are part of it, but there is also a deeper tacit process which IS common. I think the whole human race knew this for. a million years; and then in five thousand years of civilization we have lost it, because our societies got too big to carry it out. But now we have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate. We have to share our consciousness and to be able to think together, in order to do intelligently whatever is necessary. If we begin to confront what's going on in a dialogue group, we sort of have the nucleus of what’s going on in all society. When you are by yourself you miss quite a bit of that; even one-on-one you don't really get it.

ENGAGING IN DIALOGUE

A basic notion for a dialogue would be for people to sit in a circle. Such a. geometric arrangement doesn't favor anybody; it allows for direct communication. In principle, the dialogue should work without any leader and without any agenda. Of course, we are used to leaders and agendas, so if we were to start a meeting without a leader - start talking and have no agenda; no purpose - I think we would find a great deal of anxiety in not knowing what to do. Thus, one of the things would be to work through that anxiety, to face it. In fact, we know by experience that if people do this for an hour or two they do get through it and start to talk more freely.

It may be useful to have a facilitator to get the group going, who keeps a watch on it for a while and sort of explains what's happening from time to time, and that kind of thing. But his function is to work himself out of a job. Now, that may take time. It may be that people must meet regularly and sustain the dialogue. That form might be to meet week after week, or biweekly or whatever, and sustain it a long time - a year or two or more. In that period, all those things we mentioned would come out. And people would begin to learn really to depend less and less on the facilitator - at least that's the idea behind it. Now, the whole of society has been organized to believe that we can't function without leaders. But maybe we can. That's the suggestion. Of course, it's an experiment. We can't guarantee that it is going to happen. But that is what takes place in any new venture - you consider all the evidence, you consider what's the best idea, what to say about it, what your theories about it are, and then you go ahead and try it.

At the beginning of a dialogue we would not expect that personal problems or questions would enter into it. If people sustained the dialogue week after week, or month after month, then maybe they could. Everything can enter, but the people have to get to know each other and trust each other and establish that relationship of sharing. It would be too much to expect to start with that. And in fact, a personal problem may not be all that important anyway; although if someone has one, the group could consider it. There is no reason why they couldn't; however, I don't think we would begin with that, at least not often. The group is not mainly for the sake of personal problems; it's mainly a cultural question. But the personal could come into the group, because personal problems and culture get mixed up.

It is important to understand that a dialogue group is not a therapy group of some kind. We are not trying to cure anybody here, though it may happen as a byproduct. But that's not our purpose. Dr Patrick de Mare, a friend of mine who has gone into this, calls it "socio-therapy," not individual therapy. The group is a microcosm of society, so if the group - or anyone is "cured," it is the beginning of the larger cure. You can look at it that way if you like. That's limited, but still it's a way to look at it. Nor is this a so-called "encounter group," which is aimed at a particular type of therapy where people's emotions, and so forth, can come up. We are not particularly aiming for that, but we are not saying that emotions should never come up, because in certain cases, if people confront each emotionally it will bring out their assumptions. In the dialogue people should talk directly to one another, one to one, across the circle. Then the time would come, if we got to know each other a bit and could trust each other, when you could speak very directly to the whole group, or to anybody in it.

Some time ago there was an anthropologist who lived for a long while with a North American tribe. It was a small group of about this size. The hunter-gatherers have typically lived in groups of twenty to forty. Agricultural group units are much larger. Now, from time to time that tribe met like this in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate. There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more - the older ones - but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.

In the dialogue group we are not going to decide what to do about anything. This is crucial. Otherwise we are not free. We must have an empty space where we are not obliged to do anything, nor to come to any conclusions, nor to say anything or not say anything. It's open and free. It's an empty space. The word "leisure" has that meaning of a kind of empty space. "Occupied" is the opposite of leisure; it's full. So we have here a kind of empty space where anything may come in - and after we finish, we just empty it. We are not trying to accumulate anything. That's one of the points about a dialogue. As Krishnamurti used to say, "The cup has to be empty to hold something."

We see that it is not an arbitrary imposition to state that we have no fixed purpose - no absolute purpose, anyway. We may set up relative purposes for investigation, but we are not wedded to a particular purpose, and are not saying that the whole group must conform to that purpose indefinitely. All of us might want the human race to survive, but even that is not our purpose. Our purpose is really to communicate coherently in truth, if you want to call that a purpose.

You could say that generally our culture goes in for large groups of people for two reasons. One is for entertainment and fun. The other is to get a useful job done. Now, I'm going to propose that in a dialogue we are not going to have any agenda, we are not going to try to accomplish any useful thing. As soon as we try to accomplish a useful purpose or goal, we will have an assumption behind it as to what is useful, and that assumption is going to limit us. Different people will think different things are useful. And that's going to cause trouble. We may say, "Do we want to save the world?" or "Do we want to run a school?" or "Do we want to make money?" Whatever it may be. That's also going to be one of the problems in corporate dialogues. Will they ever give up the notion that they are there primarily to make a profit? If they could, this would be a real transformation of mankind. I think that many business executives in certain companies are feeling unhappy and really want to do something - not merely to save the company. Just as we are, they are unhappy about the whole world. It's not that all of them are money-grubbing or exclusively profit-oriented.

When a dialogue group is new, in general people talk around the point for a while. In all human relations nowadays, people generally have a way of not directly facing anything. They talk around things, avoiding the difficulties. This practice will probably continue within a dialogue group. If you keep the group going for a while though, that tendency begins to break down. At a dialogue one evening a fellow spoke up, saying, "Okay, we're all talking about philosophy. Can I read this nice bit of philosophy I brought?" And some people said, "No." So he didn't read it. It seemed a bit of a shock, but it worked out.

It all has to be worked out. People will come to a group with different interests and assumptions. In the beginning they may have negotiation, which is a very preliminary stage of dialogue. In other words, if people have different approaches, they have to negotiate somehow. However, that is not the end of dialogue; it is the beginning. Negotiation involves finding a common way of proceeding. Now, if you only negotiate, you don't get very far - although some questions do have to be negotiated.

A great deal of what nowadays is typically considered to be dialogue tends to focus on negotiation; but as we said, that is a preliminary stage. People are generally not ready to go into the deeper issues when they first have what they consider to be a dialogue. They negotiate, and that's about as far as they get. Negotiation is trading off, adjusting to each other and saying, "Okay, I see your point. I see that that is important to you. Let's find a way that would satisfy both of us. I will give in a little on this, and you give in a little on that. And then we will work something out." Now, that's not really a close relationship, but it begins to make it possible to get going.

So the suggestion is that people could start dialogue groups in various places. The point would not be to identify with the group, but rather, what is important is this whole process. You might say, "This is a wonderful group," but it's actually the process that counts.

I think that when we are able to sustain a dialogue of this sort you will find that there will be a change in the people who are taking part. They themselves would then behave differently, even outside the dialogue. Eventually they would spread it. It's like the Biblical analogy of the seeds - some are dropped in stony ground and some of them fall in the right place and they produce tremendous fruit. The thing is that you cannot tell where or how it can start. The idea here, the communication here, the kind of thought we're having here, is a kind of seed which may help this to come about. But we mustn't be surprised if many of these groups are abortive and don't get going. That doesn't mean it can't happen.

The point is not to establish a fixed dialogue group forever, but rather one that lasts long enough to make a change. If you keep holding it for too long it may become caught up in habits again. But you have to keep it up for a while, or else it won't work. It may be valuable to keep the dialogue going for a year or two, as we said, and it is important to sustain it regularly. If you sustain it, all these problems will arise; it cannot avoid bringing out the deep assumptions of the people who are participating. The frustration will arise, the sense of chaos, the sense that it's not worth it. The emotional charge will come. The fellow with the assumptions about Zionism probably wanted to be very polite. But suddenly somebody said something that outraged him, and he couldn't control himself. It's going to happen that the deep assumptions will come to the surface, if we stick with it. But if you understand that you do nevertheless have to stick with it, then something new will come.

Now, dialogue is not going to be always entertaining, nor is it doing anything visibly useful. So you may tend to drop it as soon as it gets difficult. But I suggest that it is very important to go on with it - to stay with it through the frustration. When you think something is important you will do that. For example, nobody would climb Mount Everest unless for some reason he thought it was important, as that could also be very frustrating and not always entertaining. And the same is true if you have to make money, or do all sorts of things. If you feel that they are necessary, you do them.

I'm saying that it is necessary to share meaning. A society is a link of relationships among people and institutions, so that we can live together. But it only works if we have a culture which implies that we share meaning; i.e., significance, purpose, and value. Otherwise it falls apart. Our society is incoherent, and doesn't do that very well; it hasn't for a long time, if it ever did. The different assumptions that people have are tacitly affecting the whole meaning of what we are doing.

SUSPENDING ASSUMPTIONS

We have been saying that people in any group will bring to it their assumptions, and as the group continues meeting, those assumptions will come up. Then what is called for is to suspend those assumptions, so that you neither carry them out nor suppress them. You don't believe them, nor do you disbelieve them; you don't judge them as good or bad. Normally when you are angry you start to react outwardly, and you may just say something nasty. Now suppose I try to suspend that reaction. Not only will I now not insult that person outwardly, but I will suspend the insult that I make inside of me. Even if I don't insult somebody outwardly, I am insulting him inside. So I will suspend that, too. I hold it back, I reflect it back. You may also think of it as suspended in front of you so that you can look at it - sort of reflected back as if you were in front of a mirror. In this way I can see things that I wouldn't have seen if I had simply carried out that anger, or if I had suppressed it and said, "I'm not angry" or "I shouldn't be angry."

So the whole group now becomes a mirror for each person. The effect you have on the other person is a mirror, and also the effect the other person has on you. Seeing this whole process is very helpful in bringing out what's going on, because you can see that everybody's in the same boat.

What's required then is that we notice the connection between the thoughts going on in the dialogue, the feelings in the body, and the emotions. If you watch, you'll see from the body language, as well as from the verbal language, that everybody's in much the same boat - they're just on opposite sides. The group may even polarize so that two very powerful groups are against each other. But one of the things we're aiming for is that this should come out. We're not trying to suppress it.

Therefore, you simply see what the assumptions and reactions mean - not only your own, but the other people's as well. We are not trying to change anybody's opinion. When this meeting is over, somebody may or may not change his opinion. This is part of what I consider dialogue - for people to realize what is on each other's minds without coming to any conclusions or judgments. Assumptions will come up. And if you hear somebody else who has an assumption that seems outrageous to you, the natural response might be to get angry, or get excited, or to react in some other way. But suppose you suspend that activity. You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.

You have to notice your own reactions of hostility, or whatever, and you can see by the way people are behaving what their reactions are. You may find, as with anger, that it could go so far that the meeting could blow up. If temperatures do rise, then those who are not completely caught up in their particular opinions should come in to defuse the situation a bit so that people could look at it. It mustn't go so far that you can't look at it. The point is to keep it at a level where the opinions come out, but where you can look at them. Then you may have to see that the other person's hostility provokes your own. That's all part of the observation, the suspension. You become more familiar with how thought works.

THE IMPULSE OF NECESSITY

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. And you can notice the similarity of the difficulties within a group to the conflicts and incoherent thoughts within an individual.

I think that as we do this we will find that certain kinds of thoughts play a greater role than other kinds. One of the kinds that is most important is the thought of necessity. What is necessary cannot be otherwise; it's just got to be that way. It is interesting that the word necessary has a Latin root, necesse, meaning "don't yield." It really means "what cannot be turned aside." Ordinarily as we go through life, problems come up and they can be turned aside, or if they can't be turned aside then we turn aside, and that is the way we resolve things. But then there may arise a necessity, as I said, which cannot be turned aside; but we may have our own necessity which also cannot be turned aside. Then we feel frustrated. Each necessity is absolute, and we have a conflict of absolute necessities. Typically, it may come up that your own opinion cannot be turned aside, nor can the other person's, and you feel the other person's opinion working within you, opposing you. So each person is in a state of conflict.

Necessity creates powerful impulses. Once you feel that something is necessary, it creates an impulse to do it or not to do it, whatever it may be. It may be very strong and you feel compelled, propelled. Necessity is one of the most powerful forces - it overrides all the instincts eventually. If people feel something is necessary, they'll even go against the instinct of self-preservation and all sorts of things. In the dialogue, both individually and collectively - this is important - the conflicts come up around this notion of necessity. All the serious arguments, whether in the family or in the dialogue, are about different views of what is absolutely necessary. Unless it takes that form, then you can always negotiate it and decide what has first priority, and adjust it. But if two things are absolutely necessary you cannot use the usual way of negotiation. That is the weak point about negotiation. When two different nations come up and each one says, "I'm sovereign, and what I say has to go: it's absolutely necessary," then there is no answer unless they can change that.

The question is what to do if there is a clash of two absolute necessities. The first thing that happens is that we get this emotional charge and we can build up powerful feelings of anger, hate, frustration, as I described before. As long as that absolute necessity remains, nothing can change it, because in a way each person says that they have a valid reason to stick to what they've got, and they have a valid reason to hate the other person for getting in the way of what is absolutely necessary. "He rather obstinately and stupidly refuses to see this," and so on. One may say that it's regrettable that we have to kill all these people, but it is absolutely necessary, in the interests of the country, the religion, or whatever it may be. So you see the power of that notion.

So in the dialogue we are expecting the notions of absolute necessity to come up, to clash with each other. People avoid that, because they know that there's going to be trouble and they skirt those questions. But if we sustain the dialogue it's going to come up. The question is what happens then.

We discussed previously that something can happen, if people will stay with it, which will change their whole attitude. At a certain moment we may have the insight that each one of us is doing the same thing - sticking to the absolute necessity of his idea - and that nothing can happen if we do that. If so, it may raise the question "Is it absolutely necessary? So much is being destroyed just because we have this notion of it being absolutely necessary." Now if you can question it and say, "Is it absolutely necessary?" then at some point it may loosen up. People may say, "Well, maybe it's not absolutely necessary." Then the whole thing becomes easier, and it becomes possible to let that conflict go and to explore new notions of what is necessary, creatively. The dialogue can then enter a creative new area. I think this is crucial.

What about these notions of necessity which we have to set up or discover? If an artist just puts on his paint in arbitrary places, you would say there wasn't anything to it; if he just follows somebody else's order of necessity, he's mediocre. He's got to create his own order of necessity. Different parts of the form he is making must have an inner necessity or else the thing has not really much of a value. This artistic necessity is creative. The artist has his freedom in this creative act. Therefore, freedom makes possible a creative perception of new orders of necessity. If you can't do that, you're not really free. You may say you're doing whatever you like and that's your impulse, but I think we've seen that your impulses can come from your thoughts. For example, the thought of what is necessary will make an impulse, and people who are in international conflict will say our impulse is to go to war and get rid of these people who are in our way, as if that were freedom. But it isn't. They're being driven by that thought. So doing what you like is seldom freedom, because what you like is determined by what you think and that is often a pattern which is fixed. Therefore we have a creative necessity which we discover - you can discover individually or we can do so collectively in the group - of how to operate in a group in a new way. Any group which has problems really has got to solve them creatively if they're serious problems. It can't just be by trade-offs and negotiations of the old ways.

I think this is one of the key points, then - to realize when you come to an assumption, that there is an assumption of absolute necessity which you're getting into, and that's why everything is sticking.

PROPRIOCEPTION OF THOUGHT

You can see the whole scope of this question of dialogue giving attention to thought may look rather elementary or simple in the beginning, but it actually gets to the root of our problems and opens the way to creative transformation.

We come back to the realization that the thing which has gone wrong with thought is basically, as I said before, that it does things and then says or implies that it didn't do them - that they took place independently, and that they constitute "problems." Whereas what you really have to do is to stop thinking that way so that you stop creating that problem. The "problem" is insoluble as long as you keep on producing it all the time by your thought. Thought has to be in some sense aware of its consequences, and presently thought is not sufficiently aware of its consequences. That ties up with something similar in neurophysiology called proprioception, which really means "self perception." The body can perceive its own movement. When you move the body you know the relation between intention and action. The impulse to move and the movement are seen to be connected. If you don't have that, the body is not viable.

We know of a woman who apparently had a stroke in the middle of the night. She woke up and she was hitting herself. People came in and turned on the light and that's what they found. What happened was that her motor nerves were working, but her sensory nerves were no longer working. So she probably touched herself, but she didn't know that she'd touched herself, and therefore she assumed that somebody else was touching her and interpreted that as an attack. The more she defended, the worse the attack got. The proprioception had broken down. She no longer saw the relation between the intention to move and the result. When the light was turned on, proprioception was established in a new way, by sight.

The question is: can thought be proprioceptive? You have the intention to think, which you're not usually aware of. You think because you have an intention to think. It comes from the idea that it is necessary to think, that there's a problem. If you watch, you'll see an intention to think, an impulse to think. Then comes the thought, and the thought may give rise to a feeling, which might give rise to another intention to think, and so on. You're not aware of that, so the thought appears as if it were coming by itself, and the feeling appears to be coming by itself, and so on. That gives the wrong meaning, as in the case of the woman we talked about just now. You may get a feeling that you don't like from a thought, and then a second later say, "I've got to get rid of that feeling," but your thought is still there working, especially if it's a thought that you take to be absolutely necessary.

In fact, the problems we have been discussing are basically all due to this lack of proprioception. The point of suspension is to help make proprioception possible, to create a mirror so that you can see the results of your thought. You have it inside yourself because your body acts as a mirror and you can see tensions arising in the body. Also other people are a mirror, the group is a mirror. You have to see your intention. You get an impulse to say something and you see it there, the result, at almost the same time.

If everybody is giving attention, then there will arise a new kind of thought between people, or even in the individual, which is proprioceptive, and which doesn't get into the kind of tangle that thought gets into ordinarily, which is not proprioceptive. We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates - because it's not proprioceptive of what it's doing. If your body were that way you would very quickly come to grief and you wouldn't last very long. And it may be said that if our culture were that way, our civilization would not last all that long, either. So this is another way in which dialogue will help collectively to bring about a different kind of consciousness.

COLLECTIVE PARTICIPATION

All of this is part of collective thought - people thinking together. At some stage we would share our opinions without hostility, and we would then be able to think together; whereas when we defend an opinion we can't. An example of people thinking together would be that somebody would get an idea, somebody else would take it up, somebody else would add to it. The thought would flow, rather than there being a lot of different people, each trying to persuade or convince the others.

In the beginning, people won't trust each other. But I think that if they see the importance of the dialogue, they will work with it. And as they start to know each other, they begin to trust each other. It may take time. At first you will just come into the group bringing all the problems of the culture and the society. Any group like this is a microcosm of society - it has all sorts of opinions, people not trusting each other, and so on. So you begin to work from there. People talk at first in a perhaps rather trivial way, and then later less trivially. Initially they talk about superficial issues, because they're afraid of doing more, and then gradually they learn to trust each other.

The object of a dialogue is not to analyze things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the opinions - to listen to everybody's opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means. If we can see what all of our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content, even if we don't agree entirely. It may turn out that the opinions are not really very important - they are all assumptions. And if we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in a different direction. We can just simply share the appreciation of the meanings; and out of this whole thing, truth emerges unannounced - not that we have chosen it.

If each of us in this room is suspending, then we are all doing the same thing. We are all looking at everything together. The content of our consciousness is essentially the same. Accordingly, a different kind of consciousness is possible among us, a participatory consciousness - as indeed consciousness always is, but one that is frankly acknowledged to be participatory and can go that way freely. Everything can move between us. Each person is participating, is partaking of the whole meaning of the group and also taking part in it. We can call that a true dialogue.

Something more important will happen if we can do this, if we can manage it. Everybody will be sharing all the assumptions in the group. If everybody sees the meaning together, of all the assumptions, then the content of consciousness is essentially the same. Whereas if we all have different assumptions and defend them, each person is then going to have a different content, because we won't really take in the other person's assumptions. We'll be fighting them, or pushing them away trying to convince or persuade the other person.

Conviction and persuasion are not called for in a dialogue. The word "convince" means to win, and the word "persuade" is similar. It's based on the same root as are "suave" and “sweet." People sometimes try to persuade by sweet talk or to convince by strong talk. Both come to the same thing, though, and neither of them is relevant. There's no point in being persuaded ,or convinced. That's not really coherent or rational. If something is right, you don't need to be persuaded. If somebody has to persuade you, then there is probably some doubt about it.

If we could all share a common meaning, we would be participating together. We would be partaking of the common meaning - just as people partake of food together. We would be taking part and communicating and creating a common meaning. That would be participation, which means both "to partake of" and "to take part in." It would mean that in this participation a common mind would arise, which nonetheless would not exclude the individual. The individual might hold a separate opinion, but that opinion would then be absorbed into the group, too.

Thus, everybody is quite free. It's not like a mob where the collective mind takes over - not at all. It is something between the individual and the collective. It can move between them. It's a harmony of the individual and the collective, in which the whole constantly moves toward coherence. So there is both a collective mind and an individual mind, and like a stream, the flow moves between them. The opinions, therefore, don't matter so much. Eventually we may be somewhere between all these opinions, and we start to move beyond them in another direction - a tangential direction - into something new and creative.

A NEW CULTURE

A society is a link of relationships that are set by people in order to work and live together: rules, laws, institutions, and various things. It is done by thinking and agreeing that we are going to have them, and then we do it. And behind that is a culture, which is shared meaning. Even to say that we want to set up a government, people must agree to a common meaning of what kind of government they want, what's good government, what's right, and so on. Different cultures will produce different functions of government. And if some people don't agree, then we have political struggle. When it goes further, it breaks down into civil war.

I am saying society is based on shared meanings, which constitute the culture. If we don't share coherent meaning, we do not make much of a society. And at present, 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. There is a certain amount of significance, but it is very limited. The culture in general is incoherent. And we will thus bring with us into the group - or microcosm or microculture - a corresponding incoherence.

If all the meanings can come in together, however, we may be able to work toward coherence. As a result of this process, we may naturally and easily drop a lot of our meanings. But we don't have to begin by accepting or rejecting them. The important thing is that we will never come to truth unless the overall meaning is coherent. All the meanings of the past and the present are together. We first have to apprehend them, and just let them be; and this will bring about a certain order.

If we can work this through, we will then have a coherent meaning in the group, and hence the beginning of a new kind of culture - a culture of a kind which, as far as I can tell, has never really existed. If it ever did, it must have been very long ago - maybe in some groups in the primitive Stone Age conditions. I am saying that a genuine culture could arise in which opinions and assumptions are not defended incoherently. And that kind of culture is necessary for the society to work, and ultimately for the society to survive.

Such a group might be the germ or the microcosm of the larger culture, which would then spread in many ways - not only by creating new groups, but also by people communicating the notion of what it means.

Also, one can see that it is possible that this spirit of the dialogue can work even in smaller groups, or one-on-one, or within the individual. If the individual can hold all of the meanings together in his own mind, he has the attitude of the dialogue. He could carry that out and perhaps communicate it, both verbally and non-verbally, to other people. In principle, this could spread. Many people are interested in dialogue now. We find it growing. The time seems to be ripe for this notion, and it could perhaps spread in many different areas.

I think that something like this is necessary for society to function properly and for society to survive. Otherwise it will all fall apart. This shared meaning is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has some very poor-quality cement. If you make a building with very low-quality cement, it cracks and falls apart. We really need the right cement, the right glue. And that is shared meaning.

DIFFICULTIES IN DIALOGUE

We have talked about the positive side of dialogue. However, this attempt at dialogue can be very frustrating. I say this not only theoretically, but also from experience. We've mentioned some of the difficulties: it's frustrating to have all these opinions; there may be anxiety. Besides that, you will find other problems in trying to have a dialogue in a group of any size. Some people want to assert themselves; that's their way of going about things. They talk easily and they become dominant. They may have an image of themselves as dominant, and they get a certain amount of security out of it, a lift out of it. Other people, however, do not have such great self-esteem in this area; they tend to hold back, especially when they see somebody who is dominant. They are afraid that they'll make fools of themselves, or something of the kind.

There are various roles that people adopt. Some people adopt the dominant role, some adopt the role of the weak, powerless person who can be dominated. They sort of work together, with each other. Those "roles," which are really based on assumptions and opinions, will also interfere with the operation of dialogue. So a person has built some assumptions about himself, whether it's one way or the other. Also, since his childhood people have told him that that's what he is, that he is this way or that way. He has had bad experiences or good experiences, and it all built up. These are some of the problems which will arise when we try to have a dialogue.

A further difficulty is you find that very often there is an impulse or pressure, a compulsion almost, to get in there quickly and get your point of view across, particularly if you are one of the "talkers." Even if you're not, you have that pressure, but you're holding back because you're frightened. Therefore, there is no time for people to absorb what has been said, or to ponder it. People feel under pressure to get in, and people feel left out. The whole communication breaks down for this very elementary reason. This is nothing deep at all, but still we have got to address it. Very often when you don't give space in a group, everybody jumps in right away with whatever he has in his mind. But at the same time, you shouldn't be mulling it over in your mind - picking on one point and turning it over - while the conversation goes on to something else. If you stop to think about one point, by the time you have thought about it the group has moved on, and what you were going to say is now irrelevant. As you were thinking, "What does all that mean and what shall I say about it?" it became too late, because the topic has changed. So there is sort of a subtle situation in between, where you are not jumping in too fast, nor holding back too much. There may be silent periods, and so on.

So while we don't have "rules" for the dialogue, we may learn certain principles as we go along which help us - such as that we must give space for each person to talk. We don't put this as a rule; rather we say that we can see the sense of it, and we are learning to do it. So we see the necessity or value of certain procedures that help.

Also, if someone wants the group to accomplish his idea or purpose, it would probably start a conflict. The dialogue is aimed for those people who can commonly agree that this is the way to go about it. If people don't agree that this is the way to go about it, then there is no reason to be in it. Frequently you find that as the dialogue goes on and the group continues, some people leave and others come in. There are those who feel, "Well, this is not for me."

Now, how are you going to deal with the frustrations within the group? As we said before, things may make you angry or frustrated or may frighten you. Your assumptions may be revealed and challenged, and you may find the opinions of others to be outrageous. Also, people may be frightened and anxious if there is no leader and no topic and nothing "to do." So you have to get through all of that.

These are the problems that are going to arise - that have arisen in all the groups that I've seen. And you can expect that, they are almost inevitable, and may ask, "Then what is the point in going on with all of this?" So we must explore that.

THE VISION OF DIALOGUE

Let me give what I call a "vision of dialogue." You don't have to accept it, but it may be a way to look at it. Let's suppose we stick with this, and we face the emotional charge - all this irritation" all this frustration - which actually can develop into hate if very powerful assumptions are there. We could say that hate is a neurophysiological, chemical disturbance of a very powerful kind, which is now endemic in the world. Wherever you look, you see people hating each other. So suppose you stick with this. You may get an insight, a shared insight, that we're all in the same position - everybody has an assumption, everybody is sticking to his assumption, everybody is disturbed neurochemically. The fundamental level in people is the same; the superficial differences are not so important.

It's possible to see that there's a kind of "level of contact" in the group. The thought process is an extension of the body process, and all the body language is showing it, and so on. People are really in rather close contact - hate is an extremely close bond. I remember somebody saying that when people are in really close contact, talking about something which is very important to them, their whole bodies are involved - their hearts, their adrenalin, all the neurochemicals, everything. They are in far closer contact with each other than with some parts of their own bodies, such as their toes. So, in some sense there is established in that contact "one body." And also, if we can all listen to each other's opinions, and suspend them without judging them, and your opinion is on the same basis as anyone else's, then we all have "one mind" because we have the same content - all the opinions, all the assumptions. At that moment the difference is secondary. Then you have in some sense one body, one mind. It does not overwhelm the individual. There is no conflict in the fact that the individual does not agree. It's not all that important whether you agree or not. There is no pressure to agree or disagree.

The point is that we would establish, on another level, a kind of bond, which is called impersonal fellowship. You don't have to know each other. In England, for example, the football crowds prefer not to have seats in their football stands, but just to stand bunched against each other. In those crowds very few people know each other, but they still feel something - that contact which is missing in their ordinary personal relations. And in war many people feel that there's a kind of comradeship which they miss in peacetime. It's the same sort of thing - that close connection, that fellowship, that mutual participation. I think people find this lacking in our society, which glorifies the separate individual. The communists were trying to establish something else, but they completely failed in a very miserable way. Now a lot of them have adopted the same values as we have. But people are not entirely happy with that. They feel isolated. Even those who "succeed" feel isolated, feel there's another side they are missing.

I am saying that this is a reason for dialogue. We really do need to have it. This reason should be strong enough to get us through all the frustration we talked about. People generally seem ready to accept frustration with anything that they regard as important. Doing your job or making money, for example, is often frustrating; it produces anxiety. Yet people will say, "That is important! We have to stick with it." They feel that way about all sorts of things. I'm saying that if we regard dialogue as important, as necessary, we will say about it as well, "We will stick to it." But if we don't think it is necessary, we might say, "Okay, what's the point? This is too much trouble. Let's give it up. It's not producing anything." You see, you have to explore anything new for a while. In science, or anywhere, you usually have to go through a period where you are not getting anywhere while you are exploring. It can, nevertheless, be very discouraging.

If we can all suspend carrying out our impulses, suspend our assumptions, and look at them all, then we are all in the same state of consciousness. And therefore we have established the thing that many people say they want - a common consciousness. It may not be very pleasant, but we have got it. People tend to think of common consciousness as "shared bliss." That may come; but if it does, I'm saying that the road to it is through this. We have to share the consciousness that we actually have. We can't just impose another one. But if people can share the frustration and share their different contradictory assumptions and share their mutual anger and stay with it - if everybody is angry together, and looking at it together - then you have a common consciousness.

If people could stay with power, violence, hate, or whatever it is, all the way to the end, then it would sort of collapse because ultimately they would see that we are all the same. And consequently they would have participation and fellowship. People who have gone through that can become good friends. The whole thing goes differently. They become more open and trusting to each other. They have already gone through the thing that they are afraid of, so the intelligence can then work.

There's a story I would like to relate in this connection. I knew a man in London who had been a child psychiatrist. He told me that somebody once brought to him a girl about seven years old who was very disturbed. She refused to talk to anybody. They brought her hoping that he would help to get her talking. So he tried for about an hour and got nowhere. Finally, getting exasperated, he said, "Why don't you talk to me?" She answered, "Because I hate you." He thought that he had to bring time into this somewhere to defuse it. So he said, "How long will you hate me?" She said, "I'll hate you forever." He was then a bit worried, so he brought time in again. He asked, "How long will you hate me forever?" Then she burst out laughing and the whole thing was broken. The energy which had been there was now available. The absurdity of the thing was shown to her - that the thing was incoherent. She was saying that she" was going to hate him forever, and she could see that that wouldn't really be so; and if that's not so, then the idea that she has got to go on with the hatred is not necessary either.

When you have anger, it has a reason, or a cause. You say that you are angry because of this, this, or that. It builds up to rage and hate, at which point it no longer has a particular reason anymore - it just sustains itself. That energy of hate is sort of locked up, and then it's looking for an occasion to discharge. The same holds with panic. You are usually aware of a reason for your fear, but by the time you get to panic it goes on by itself. However, the sort of energy that goes around at that level may also in a vague way be the kind of energy we are talking about for creativity - namely, an energy without a reason.

But there is a great deal of violence in the opinions that we are defending. They are not merely opinions, they are not merely assumptions; they are assumptions with which we are identified - which we are therefore defending, because it is as if we are defending ourselves. The natural self-defense impulse, which we got in the jungle, has been transferred from the jungle animals to these opinions. In other words, we say that there are some dangerous opinions out there - just as there might be dangerous tigers. And there are some very precious animals inside us that have to be defended. So an impulse that made sense physically in the jungle has been transferred to our opinions in our modern life. And in a dialogue, we get to be aware of that in a collective way.

As long as we have this defensive attitude - blocking and holding assumptions, sticking to them and saying, "I've got to be right," and that sort of thing - then intelligence is very limited, because intelligence requires that you don't defend an assumption. There is no reason to hold to an assumption if there is evidence that it is not right. The proper structure of an assumption or of an opinion is that it is open to evidence that it may not be right.

That does not mean that we are going to impose the opinions of the group. In this way the collective can often be troublesome. The group may act like a conscience, inducing powerful guilt feelings in its members, because we are all so built that we tend to regard what everybody agrees on as true. Everybody may or may not have a different opinion - it is not that important. It isn't necessary that everybody be convinced to have the same view. This sharing of mind, of consciousness, is more important than the content of the opinions. And you may see that these opinions are limited anyway. You may find that the answer is not in the opinions at all, but somewhere else. Truth does not emerge from opinions; it must emerge from something else perhaps from a more free movement of the tacit mind. So we have to get meanings coherent if we are going to perceive truth, or to take part in truth. That is why I say the dialogue is so important. If our meanings are incoherent, how are we going to participate in truth?

I think this new approach could open the way to changing the whole world situation - ecologically, and in other ways. For instance, the ecological movement, the "green movement," is now in danger of fragmenting and splitting, because many of those groups have different opinions about how to deal with the problems. So they can wind up fighting each other as much as they fight for the ecology. Consequently, it seems particularly urgent that the green movement get into dialogue.

People concerned with the ecology are clearly aware of some of our planetary problems, but I think that many of them may not be as, aware of their assumptions and tacit thought processes. I think it is important to call attention to this explicitly in a clear way, so that it becomes clear what the basic problem is. These kinds of activities go together. Cleaning up the rivers and planting trees and saving the whales should go together with dialogue, and with seeing the general problem of thought. They all belong together, because any one of those activities by itself is not enough. If we all just talk about thought and think about thought for a long while, the whole planet may be destroyed in the meantime. But I think that dialogue will work in this tacit level of mental process, where the most significant things take place.

There are situations where people have differing assumptions and opinions, where one faction is interested and the other isn't. Still, somehow, we have got to have a dialogue. Even if one faction won't participate, we who are willing can participate in a dialogue between our thought and their thought. We can at least dialogue among ourselves as far as we can, or you may by yourself. That is the attitude of dialogue. And the further this attitude could spread, the more I think it would help to bring order. If we really could do something creative, it might still affect other people on a tacit level. It would really communicate at the tacit level, both with words and beyond words. But if we keep on repeating the same old story, then it won't happen.

This notion of dialogue and common consciousness suggests that there is some way out of our collective difficulties. And we have to begin at the grass roots, as it were, not to begin at the top of the heap with the United Nations or with the President. I know that there are people in the US State Department who are familiar with this idea of dialogue, which shows how these ideas do percolate and may even reach the highest levels. This indicates that things can communicate very fast in this modern world - though that may look very insignificant at first. In three to five steps it might reach all sorts of levels. Just as the destructive things communicate, so this idea of dialogue could communicate, too.

As we ourselves stay with the frustrations of dialogue, the meaning of what we are doing may be much more than will appear at first sight. In fact, we could say that instead of being part of the problem, we become part of the solution. In other words, our very movement has the quality of the solution; it is part of it. However small it is, it has the quality of the solution and not the quality of the problem. However big the larger movement is, it has the quality of the problem, not of the solution. Accordingly, the major point is to start something which has the quality of the solution. As I have said, we don't know how fast or slowly it would spread. We don't know how fast a movement in the mind - in the thought process and beyond the thought process, this sharing together - will spread.

People sometimes say, "All we really need is love." Of course, that's true - if there were universal love, all would go well. But we don't appear to have it. So we have to find a way that works. Even though there may be frustration and anger and rage and hate and fear, we have to find something which can take all that in.

To illustrate the point, here is a story about the two leading physicists of this century, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein remembered that when he first met Bohr, he felt close to him. He wrote of a feeling of love for him. They talked physics in a very animated way, and so on. But they finally came upon a point where they had two different assumptions, or opinions, about what was the way to truth. Bohr's judgments were based on his view of quantum theory, and Einstein's on his view of relativity. They talked it over again and again in a very patient way, with all goodwill. It went on for years, and neither of them yielded. Each one just repeated what he had been saying before. So finally they found that they weren't getting anywhere, and they gradually drifted apart. They didn't see each other for a long time after that.

Then one year, both of them were at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, but they still didn't meet each other. A mathematician named Herman Weyl said, "It would be nice if they got together. It's a pity that they don't." So he arranged a party to which Einstein and Bohr and their respective students were invited. Einstein and his associates stayed at one end of the room, and Bohr and his associates stayed at the other end. They couldn't get together because they had nothing to talk about. They couldn't share any meaning, because each one felt his meaning was true. How can you share if you are sure you have truth and the other fellow is sure he has truth, and the truths don't agree? How can you share?

Therefore, you have to watch out for the notion of truth. Dialogue may not be concerned directly with truth - it may arrive at truth, but it is concerned with meaning. If the meaning is incoherent you will never arrive at truth. You may think, "My meaning is coherent and somebody else's isn't," but then we'll never have meaning shared. You will have the "truth" for yourself or for your own group, whatever consolation that is. But we will continue to have conflict.

If it is necessary to share meaning and share truth, then we have to do something different. Bohr and Einstein probably should have had a dialogue. I'm not saying that they could have had one, but in a dialogue they might have listened properly to each other's opinion. And perhaps they both would have suspended their opinions, and moved out beyond relativity and beyond quantum theory into something new. They might have done that in principle, but I don't think that this notion of dialogue had occurred to scientists then.

Science is predicated on the concept that science is arriving at truth - at a unique truth. The idea of dialogue is thereby in some way foreign to the current structure of science, as it is with religion. In a way, science has become the religion of the modem age. It plays the role which religion used to play of giving us truth; hence different scientists cannot come together any more than different religions can, once they have different notions of truth. As one scientist, Max Planck, said, "New ideas don't win, really. What happens is that the old scientists die and new ones come along with new ideas." But clearly that's not the right way to do it. This is not to say that science couldn't work another way. If scientists could engage in a dialogue, that would be a radical revolution in science - in the very nature of science. Actually, scientists are in principle committed to the concepts involved in dialogue. They say, "We must listen. We shouldn't exclude anything."

However, they find that they can't do that. This is not only because scientists share what everybody else shares - assumptions and opinions - but also because the very notion which has been defining science today is that we are going to get truth. Few scientists question the assumption that thought is capable of coming to know "everything." But that may not be a valid assumption, because thought is abstraction, which inherently implies limitation. The whole is too much. There is no way by which thought can get hold of the whole, because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines. And the past from which thought draws contains only a ·certain limited amount. The present is not contained in thought; thus, an analysis cannot actually cover the moment of analysis.

There are also the relativists, who say that we are never going to get at an absolute truth. But they are caught in a paradox of their own. They are assuming that relativism is the absolute truth. So it is clear that people who believe that they are arriving at any kind of absolute truth can't make a dialogue, not even among themselves. Even different relativists don't agree.

So we can see that there is no "road" to truth. What we are trying to say is that in this dialogue we share all the roads and we finally see that none of them matters. We see the meaning of all the roads, and therefore we come to the "no road." Underneath, all the roads are the same because of the very fact that they are "roads" - they are rigid.

We've said that in a dialogue there will be frustrations, but you might become better friends if you can get through all that. Not that we demand affection. We don't demand friendship; we don't demand anything, though friendship may come. If you see other people's thought, it becomes your own thought, and you treat it as your own thought. And when an emotional charge comes up, you share all the emotional charges, too, if they affect you; you hold them together with all the thoughts. Often, when there is an emotional charge somebody can come in to defuse the issue a bit so that it doesn't run away - as the child psychiatrist defused it with his asking, "How long will you hate me forever?" Or some other sort of humor may defuse the issue, or something else some appropriate remark which you can't foresee.

Sometimes you may find that you are about to raise a question, but someone else brings it up. In such a case, that thought is probably latent in the group as a whole, implicit. And one person may say it, or somebody else may say it. Then another person may pick it up and carry it along. If the group is really working, that would be thinking together - common participation in thinking - as if it were all one process. That one thought is being formed together. Then, if somebody comes up With another assumption, we all listen to that, we share that meaning. Now that would be the "vision of dialogue."

SENSITIVITY IN DIALOGUE

What we have been discussing has not been common in human society, although it is really what is necessary if the society is to cohere. If people would do this in government or in business or internationally, our society would work differently. But then, that requires sensitivity - a certain way of knowing how to come in and how not to come in, of watching all the subtle cues and the senses and your response to them - what's happening inside of you, what's happening in the group. People may show what is happening to them in the stance of their body - by their "body language" - as well as by what they say.

They are not trying to do this purposefully, but you will find that it develops. That's part of the communication. It will be non-verbal as well as verbal. You're not trying to do it at all. You may not even be aware that it is happening.

Sensitivity is being able to sense that something is happening, to sense the way you respond, the way other people respond, to sense the subtle differences and similarities. To sense all this is the foundation of perception. The senses provide you with information, but you have to be sensitive to it or you won't see it. If you know a person very well, you may pass him on the street and say, "I saw him." If you are asked what the person was wearing, however, you may not know, because you didn't really look. You were not sensitive to all that, because you saw that person through the screen of thought. And that was not sensitivity.

So sensitivity involves the senses, and also something beyond. The senses are sensitive to certain things to which they respond, but that's not enough. The senses will tell you what is happening, and then the consciousness must build a form, or create some sense of what it means, which holds it together. Therefore, meaning is part of it. You are sensitive to the meaning, or to the lack of meaning. It's perception of meaning, if you want to put it that way. In other words, it is a more subtle perception. The meaning is what holds it together. As I said, it is the "cement." Meaning is not static - it is flowing. And if we have the meaning being shared, then it is flowing among us; it holds the group together. Then everybody is sensitive to all the nuances going around, not merely to what is happening in his own mind. From that forms a meaning which is shared. And in that way we can talk together coherently and think together. Whereas generally people hold to their assumptions, so they are not thinking together. Each one is on his own.

What blocks sensitivity is the defense of your assumptions and opinions. But if you are defending your opinions, you don't judge yourself and say, "I shouldn't be defending." Rather, the fact is that you are defending, and you then need to be sensitive to that - to all the feelings in that, all the subtle nuances. We are not aiming for the type of group that condemns and judges, and so forth - we can all realize that that would get in the way. So this group is not going to judge or condemn. It is simply going to look at all the opinions and assumptions and let them surface. And I think that there could then be a change.

Krishnamurti said that "to be" is to be related. But relationship can be very painful. He said that you have to think/feel out all your mental processes and work them through, and then that will open the way to something else. And I think that is what can happen in the dialogue group. Certain painful things can happen for some people; you have to work it all out.

We once had a dialogue in Sweden, in which the group seemed to divide itself into two factions. There were a lot of "New Age" people, and from the beginning they began to talk about the virtues of love and the fact that the place was full of love all around, that it was all love everywhere. Part of the group remained silent for a while, but in the next hour they started to talk. They intimated that the love talk was all sentimental nonsense and didn't mean anything. Then one fellow got so excited that he couldn't stand it, and he walked out. He eventually came back, and they finally got together again. Polarization had taken place, which is a typical difficulty that can arise. Someone noticed the polarization happening and said with a bit of good humor, "There are two groups here - the love group and the hate group." That broke the tension a little, and the two sides could then begin to talk. They didn't necessarily convince each other, but each was able to see the meaning of the other side's position, and the two polarized groups were able to talk to each other.

Now, that was a more important point than whether they convinced each other. They might find that they both have to give up their positions so that something else can come about. It was not important whether one favored love or one favored hate or another favored being suspicious and careful and somewhat cynical, or whatever. Really, underneath they were similar, because they both had rigid positions. Loosening that position, then, was the key change.

On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious.

But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not - not in the way I'm using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, "Perhaps I'd better not talk to you, because you've got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this." Freud's answer was, "This cancer may be fatal, but it's not serious." And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way - that it may well be fatal, but it's not serious.

LIMITED DIALOGUE

Sometimes people feel a sense of dialogue within their families. But a family is generally a hierarchy, organized on the principle of authority which is contrary to dialogue. The family is a very authoritative structure, based on obligation, and that sort of thing. It has its value, but it is a structure within which it might be difficult to get dialogue going. It would be good if you could - perhaps that could happen in some families. In general it is difficult, though, because there is no place in the dialogue for the principle of authority and hierarchy. We want to be free of hierarchy and authority as we move. You must have some authority to "run" things; that's why we say that if you have a "purpose," then you are bound to bring in some authority somewhere. But in dialogue, insofar as we have no purpose and no agenda and we don't have to do anything, we don't really need to have an authority or a hierarchy. Rather, we need a place where there is no authority, no hierarchy, where there is no special purpose - sort of an empty place, where we can let anything be talked about.

As we said, you can also have a dialogue in a more limited way - perhaps with a purpose or a goal in mind. It would be best to accept the principle of letting it be open, because when you limit it, you are accepting assumptions on the basis of which you limit it - assumptions that may actually be getting in the way of free communication. So you are not looking at those assumptions.

However, if people are not ready to be completely open in their communication, they should do what they can. I know some university professors who are interested in applying the principles of dialogue to corporate problems. One of them recently had a meeting with the executive officers of a corporation that makes office furniture. They wanted to have this sort of meeting, because they knew that they were not functioning efficiently and that they couldn't agree. The higher officers had all sorts of assumptions that blocked everything. So they asked him to come in. He started a dialogue which they found very interesting, and now they want to have a whole series of them.

Naturally, that sort of dialogue will be limited - the people involved do have a definite purpose, which is limiting - but even so, it has considerable value. The principle is at least to get people to come to know each other's assumptions, so they can listen to their assumptions and know what they are. Very often people get into problems where they don't really know what the other person's assumption is, and they react according to what they think it is. That person then gets very puzzled and wonders: what is he doing? He reacts, and it all gets very muddled. So it is valuable if they can at least get to realize each other's assumptions.

The professor told me about two interesting cases. One involved a company which had trouble with people in the higher executive branches who were not very happy and were not getting on with each other. The company's usual way of solving it was to offer them a higher salary, sort of a sweetener, and a lot of mediocre people were given the very highest possible positions. It went on and on, and pretty soon there were so many people with high salaries that the company couldn't afford it; they were failing. They said, "What can we do? Well, we've got to have somebody who's tough, who will tell these people, 'You have to accept another position.'" The negotiator that they used explained the new policies by saying, "The company just can't afford it." But he was avoiding the issue. He was not straightforwardly saying, "This whole approach is wrong." Now, if the company is to work efficiently, there must be a mutual agreement that they are not going to give a person a higher position just to alleviate a psychological problem between people. That's not a right way to proceed. Everybody should understand that that is not the right way of working, otherwise the company won't succeed. Therefore, a dialogue was needed so that they could really begin talking with each other in order to come to see clearly the salient points: "That's the way we are thinking, that's where the problems are coming from, and that's the way we have to go." So within the framework of assuming that the company· has to survive, there was a limited kind of dialogue - not the kind we ultimately want to have here, but still it was good in some way.

Now, I am suggesting that the human race has got to do that. We could say that the human race is failing for the same sort of reason that the company was failing.

The second case involved the negotiating group itself, the university people whose specialty it is to go into companies and help solve these problems. They were organizing a meeting among themselves with the same purpose - just so they could talk. They had a series of meetings where it happened that two of their people could never quite meet on any issue. One of them constantly had the assumption that the right thing to do was to bring out the trouble - to confront somebody with it. And the other person had the opposite assumption, which was that you shouldn't do that. He wanted other people to draw him out. He felt that he couldn't say something unless other people created the space for him to talk, and drew him out. The first fellow wouldn't do that, he did the opposite. So they couldn't meet. The whole thing went on for a long time in confusion, with the one person waiting to be drawn out, and the other person not understanding that this was the case. Finally they got to talking, and each one actually brought up childhood experiences which were behind his assumptions and then it opened up.

The fellow who was working as facilitator during this time did very little. In fact, several of the people appealed to the facilitator and said, "Why don't you talk?" The facilitator may come in from time to time and comment on what is going on or what it all means. In a more general group he should eventually be able to be just a participant. Probably in the company group this wouldn't work, though; he couldn't become just a participant - such a group has too limited an objective.

This second example might be an illustration of when the personal may have to come into the general, because in certain cases there are blocks due to particular assumptions that the person got hold of in childhood, or in some other way. And in this example, they were finally able to uncover those assumptions. They weren't trying to heal each other, or to do therapy; nevertheless, it had a therapeutic effect. But that's a secondary thing.

Some people feel that that type of corporate dialogue is only furthering a corrupt system. However, there is a germ of something different. I think that if you go into society, you will find that almost everything is involved in this corrupt game. So it doesn't accomplish anything to dismiss it all. The executives have got to make the company work; and in fact, if all these companies would work more efficiently we would all be a lot better off. It's partly because they are in such a mess that we are in trouble, that society is inefficient, that the whole thing is falling apart. If the government and the companies could all work efficiently, we wouldn't be so wasteful, even though that by itself wouldn't solve all the problems.

For the society to be working right, all those things have got to work efficiently and coherently. If we look at what is going on in the world today, in this or in any country, we can say that it is not working coherently. Most companies are not really working coherently. And slowly the thing is sinking. I think that if you can get this notion across in whatever situation - the germ of the notion of dialogue - if you can get people to look at it, it's a step. You could say that heads of state are not likely to have the kind of dialogue that we are talking about. But if they will have any kind at all, if they'll begin to accept this principle, it's a step. It may make a change; for instance, the kind of waste of energy which is going on in the production of armaments could be cut down. If we could stop the tremendous amount that's being spent on armaments - let's say a trillion dollars a year - that could be used for ecological regeneration and all sorts of constructive things. And possibly some of that might happen. Those political figures who are more aware of the ecological problem might, for instance, make the President more aware of it, if they would really talk. Not that we can expect the politicians to solve the problems we face. But I'm saying that if there's a slight movement toward something more open, the rate of destruction will slow down. If we go on at this rate, we may have very little time to do anything.

We can't do anything at the level of presidents or prime ministers. They have their own opinions. But the various ideas filter, as we've said. Somehow the notion of something a little bit like dialogue has filtered to that level, and it may have an effect; that's all I am saying. I think that in the US government there are some people who are more this way, and some people who are more the other way. We don't know how it is going to come out, but there is a certain movement toward something more open. I don't say that it is going to solve the whole thing; I am saying that if it slows down the destruction, that's important, because unless the destruction is slowed down to give time for something new to emerge, it will be too late.

There may be no pat political answer to the world's problems. However, the important point is not the answer - just as in a dialogue, the important point is not the particular opinions but rather the softening up, the opening up of the mind, and looking at all the opinions. If there is some sort of spread of that attitude, I think it can slow down the destruction.

So we've said that it is crucial to be able to share our judgments, to share our assumptions, to listen to each other's assumptions. In the case of Einstein and Bohr it didn't lead to violence that they did not; but in general, if somebody doesn't listen to your basic assumptions you feel it as an act of violence, and then you are inclined to be violent yourself. Therefore, this is crucial both individually and collectively. Dialogue is the collective way of opening up judgments and assumptions.

BEYOND DIALOGUE

We should keep in mind, nonetheless, that the dialogue - and in fact, all that we've been talking about - is not only directed at solving the ills of society, although we do have to solve those ills. We would be much better off if we didn't have them. If we survive and we want to have a worthwhile life, we have to deal with those problems. But ultimately that's not the entire story. That's only the beginning. I'm suggesting that there is the possibility for a transformation of the nature of consciousness, both individually and collectively, and that whether this can be solved culturally and socially depends on dialogue. That's what we're exploring.

And it's very important that it happens together, because if one individual changes it will have very little general effect. But if it happens collectively, it means a lot more. If some of us come to the "truth," so-called, while a lot of people are left out, it's not going to solve the problem. We would have another conflict - just as there is conflict between different parts of the Christian faith or the Muhammadan faith or various others, even though they all believe in the same God, the same prophet or the same savior.

Love will go away if we can't communicate and share meaning. The love between Einstein and Bohr gradually evaporated because they could not communicate. However, if we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing. That would be the way. The question is really: do you see the necessity of this process? That's the key question. If you see that it is absolutely necessary, then you have to do something.

And perhaps in dialogue, when we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group that could solve social problems. Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in the relation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called "communion." It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word, koinonia, the root of which means "to participate" - the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole.

Back to Top
Home

Direct all comments and EMAIL to Don: