Exploring the Potentials of Creative Dialogue ICIS Forum, Spring 1994 John Briggs Western Connecticut State University The great holistic theorist David Bohm used to say that we know a great deal about individual enlightenment but very little about the achievement of collective enlightenment--i.e., group insight and social creativity--and that our fate as a species may soon depend on whether we can acquire and act on that knowledge we don't yet have. All over the world groups of people have begun probing for that knowledge through experiment with a process of social enlightenment sometimes called "human togetherness"(Janus Roze's lovely phrase) or "dialogue." ICIS began its experiment along these lines many years before the current movement. What makes ICIS and the current movement different from the venerable traditional versions of the salon is the intention to explore the transformation of consciousness itself, and an urgency about the need to do so. Bohm defined dialogue as the activity taking place in a semi-large group (20-40 individuals--the size of the hunter-gatherer societies Bohm saw as a model for cooperative human interaction). Dialogue, Bohm said, is "not an exchange and it's not a discussion. Discussion means batting it back and forth like a ping-pong game. That has some value, but in dialogue we try to go deeper." The idea, Bohm argued, is "to create a situation where we can suspend our opinions and judgments in order to be able to listen to each other." This suspension, as it turns out, may be less a willful act on the part of the group's individual members, than an effect of dialoguing itself. In other words, whether they like it or not, the group interaction can result in everybody's opinions getting suspended. Bohm's holistic theories (there were several), which evolved out of his work with Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti, provide a basis for conceptualizing how a creative transformation might take place through group interaction. Bohm argued that all matter is consciousness and that the matter-consciousness continuum is holographic: each "part" embodies the whole. This was related to Krishnamurti's idea that "you are the world." Collective consciousness, consciousness as a whole, Bohm reasoned, is primary; our individual consciousnesses is an epiphenomenon, derived from and dependent on that whole. We are wrinkles in the fabric of the indivisible collective, the way a vortex is a wrinkle in the fabric of a whole flowing stream. For Bohm, a change in individual consciousness translates directly to a change in the whole, just as a change in a whole translates directly to all its associated individuals.* Taking this idea a step further, we might suggest that the dynamics of this translation are nonlinear, or catastrophic, and might be modeled on the insights of Chaos Theory. According to Chaos Theory, since everything in a dynamical system (the weather, for example, or some collective consciousness) is connected through feedback to everything else, a small effect somewhere in the system can become dramatically magnified by the action of the whole, thus concatenating into a proportionally huge change--a change that may even radically transform the entire system. In fact, in consciousness we have seen this happen frequently: a single idea wrought by one individual or a small group can sweep across some field of collective mind and change it broadly. The great religions have swept through consciousness in this way, as have great evils, like fascism. In both cases, even individual minds not directly transformed by the new ideology have been affected (usually for the worst) by its movement and force. With dialogue, however, we are not relying on an idea or ideology for transformation but "something deeper." Not something imposed by force, by the promise of reward or the threat of punishment, not something spread by indoctrination or by the conditioning of consciousness (consciousness is already too much a creature of its conditioning); rather dialogue inclines toward insights emerging spontaneously and creatively from a collective collaboration. Such a group creativity produces no artifact, no fixed work of art, but generates instead a creative shape of human relationship itself--out of which may come works or artifacts. Could the very activity of dialogue--a kind of exercising of the organs of collective creativity--have a transforming effect on social consciousness, enough to help us evolve a new relationship with each other and the world we live in? Obviously no one knows the answer to that at this point, but the experiment seems worth trying. I have tried it myself in a couple of circumstances and have found dialogue to be a process with intriguing potentials. First, back in the mid-1980s my old friend David Shainberg, his wife Catherine and I initiated a dialogue group of 20 or so individuals who set out to plumb the creative potential and mysteries of the collective consciousness about which we know so little. We met once a month at David and Catherine's apartment in New York City. Let me quote a passage from an article I wrote several years ago describing those sessions. The passage illustrates the point that in dialogue the suspension of opinion (which I believe--that's my opinion--is a precondition for creative insight) is less a willful act of individual dialoguers than an effect of the group interaction.   We found our Sunday afternoon discussions in New York a frustrating mix of aimless chat and deep communion. We talked a lot about whether, though there were no formal agendas or leaders for our meetings, there might be hidden ones. We found that the large size of the group and the stubborn individuality of its members made it impossible to stick to any subject very long, and we yearned to set some specified purposes or rules. But we never set them. We taped the meetings, and volunteers reviewed the tapes and wrote up summaries, which frequently revealed that the apparent meandering of our conversations disguised an elegant underlying order and an often stunning logic. Sometimes what took place was quite eerie. We would actually seem to feel the presence of the group mind, separate from our individual minds, having its own will or intention and speaking in our various voices. I would oftentimes feel myself pitted against the group, unable to persuade the other members to see my point of view. However, when I would listen to the tapes I would realize that my point of view had been subtly adopted by everyone. Other people also reported having this experience. I compare it to the way an author feels about a story he is writing when it takes on a life of its own, frustrating his plans and intentions while at the same time being shaped by those intentions. Another phenomenon I noticed in the strange communal currents that ran through our Sunday afternoons was that conflicts that arose among group members mirrored conflicts taking place within my own mind--as if the group's dialogue were a psychodrama of my interior monologue. One example of this was that many of us became quite angry at one fellow who badgered us with his skepticism about the dialogue project and was always threatening to leave the group. In fact, though we vigorously opposed him, his position reflected shadows of skepticism that existed within each of us. At least, that was my impression. Other people had other impressions, and one of the irritating aspects of "dialoguing" was our inability to agree on any theory about what was going on. Yet, that seemed fitting, because we began to appreciate our different points of view not as sources of conflict but as sources of dialogue itself--a basis for social creativity. Of course, not everybody in the group agreed with that point of view, either.   I now believe skepticism may be essential for the enterprise, or at least an inevitable byproduct of it. I can't speak for others in the group, but I know enough about David and Catherine to say that all three of us were consistently skeptical about what we were doing at the same time that we were committed to it. David--who had been a close friend of both Krishnamurti and Bohm--was a psychiatrist who had transformed himself into a painter, a creator with a fascination for exploring the labyrinths of consciousness, an admirer of Wallace Steven's poetry, a man who liked metaphysical jokes and irony used as a magnifying glass. Catherine, poet and therapist working with imagery and symbols, often questioned us closely and provocatively about whether we were daring enough in our experiment. Skepticism and irony are one way to suspend opinion and open a doorway for insight. Skepticism and irony about dialoguing even as you are doing it may also be in part a recognition that something quite mysterious and unknown is going on when we open up to each other without any boundaries. We don't have very clear words or concepts for what happens in a group mind and this suggests that the "knowledge" we need to have about social consciousness may be a dramatically different type of knowledge than we are used to. Perhaps the kind of "implicit knowledge" that appears in the wake of an ironic statement is closer to the form of knowledge that may be uncovered as we explore the dialogue phenomenon. Irony and skepticism also seem a useful check on the tendency for social groups to demand conformity from their members or to become delusive about how wonderfully or dismally everybody is getting along. After a couple of years in the group, immersed in these strange open discussions, I felt something changed in my relationship to the collected other. This is difficult to describe. I had always felt awkward in public situations, self-conscious, guarded, inadequate to the demands (even when there were none). Learning to stand up in front of a class was agony and so I had developed what others described as a "laid back" style of teaching which was partly my personality and partly my large sense that my peculiar angle on things was not quite relevant or valuable to other people. So I was socially quite self-conscious. I can't say that my personality changed as the result of the dialoguing but my social consciousness (whatever that is exactly) maybe did. The change seemed impersonal, if that makes any sense.It spurred me to a rather unusual move. I started to become involved in the civic affairs of our small Massachusetts hill town. Like many rural towns it was fighting for its life against the threats of development, economic recession and factionalism of groups within the town (the newcomers vs. the natives, people who wanted to improve the business climate vs. people who wanted to keep it a country village; town boards and departments unused to working together and used to guarding their turf). Initially I stayed in the background, writing up articles about town government activity for our local monthly "Country Caller," disseminating information only. Then I was asked by the Chairman of the Finance Board if I wanted to run for Selectman, one of the three positions having fallen open that year. I talked over the idea with David and told the group I wanted to try out the dialogue in a "real" setting. The group had often discussed our anxiety that it was one thing to discover collective creativity in the rarefied atmosphere of a New York apartment, quite another to discover it in a real world where participants would have neither the time nor interest in such theorizing and experimentation. Nevertheless, I had decided that a seat on the Granville Board of Selectmen was as good a place as any to see if dialogue could work where it really counted, in the everyday world of community. I had no concrete idea of what doing this experiment meant I wish I could go into detail here about the five years I spent on the Board. It was a thoroughly absorbing and often moving experience. But I would like to share some insights which I discovered that I had learned in the dialogue in New York. I say discovered because I was not aware that I had learned these things until I found myself in the small town pressure cooker having to make decisions and get things done in a group setting. The town decisions involved everything from removing a destructive department head to the municipal purchase of an expensive piece of property so that developers wouldn't overrun it; from setting up a recycling program to funding the police department in a budget crisis. Under the selectmen form of government (a rather wonderful invention, actually, one especially suited to dialogue), the fewest number of people involved in these decisions was three; the largest number included several hundred at a town meeting. As a matter of fact, every decision always involved many people supplying information and points of view at various levels along the way until the decision emerged. The first thing I had learned from the dialogue was that if you can endure letting an interchange rage long enough, a form will emerge. In the real setting of the town as opposed to the ivory tower setting of our New York dialogue, I found that a leader of sorts was needed (it was often not me) as an antenna to sense when the interchange was flagging and encourage the participants to see what form was implied by what they'd said. If you had faith--as I had begun to--that the form would be there, it didn't take a whole lot to encourage people to recognize it. It was, after all, a form they had created themselves and they generally enjoyed seeing it. Usually this meant that despite our initial disagreements, when we finally came to a decision it appeared "inevitable" to everyone, a decision that seemed cast by the circumstances. On the Board of Selectman I can't think of any issue where we had a split vote, and that wasn't because we agreed on every issue. It was because, I believe, we all stayed in the discussion long enough to discover what was the inevitable thing to do. I was indeed fortunate that the selectmen I worked with were naturally of this disposition, dialoguers by New England heritage and their own individual proclivity. If I had gotten nothing else from the dialogue group but the sense that patience in social interchange leads to new forms, that alone would have been invaluable. But there were other, related lessons: 1) Cautions about polarity. The dialogue had taught me that discussion tends to either agreement which masks disagreement or to polarity. Once a discussion has polarized it becomes very difficult for anything creative to happen. If only one person can stay out of the current of a developing polarity, that can change the whole flow of the interchange. Again, my fellow selectmen were quite naturally good at this, and I learned a great deal from them about it. 2) Need for multiple points of view. As I indicated however, tension in a discussion is by no means negative. One trick for keeping polarity at bay is to have enough points of view represented in the interchange--more than two or three--so that the multiplicity of perspectives forces everybody to see the subtlety of the issue at hand. Once there is some agreement on the fact of subtlety, the group moves to a new perspective on the whole matter. Really creative things come out of this. Keeping multiple points of view alive is unfortunately not as easy as it should be. Sometimes you need to discourage the tendency for people to take sides and blur their own distinctions. You can help them avoid this by simply restating the nuance that they have contributed to the discussion. This also makes everybody realize that they are contributing valuable things when they contribute nuance. 3) Credit for success. Be shy about taking credit for the good things that happen in the group, for the successes, because in fact they are never your successes; they are the successes of the group. Most leaders give this idea lip service by thanking their underlings. But that only feeds a problem (as I see it). A problem with groups involves power and winning. These tend to be toxic to collective creativity. They cut the group off from the whole and divide it against itself. That's not to say that you won't often be dealing with people's power motives and egos, but avoid falling into the assumption that such people (including yourself) came up with the solution that is now owned by the winners. Remember, the people who advocated precisely the wrong solution were invaluable contributors to the dialogue. No artist ever failed to make mistakes and nearly all great creators have realized that mistakes, failure and wrong ideas are necessary conditions for any successful creation. Mistakes lead to new directions. Without them the mind stalls. Great creators often cherish and somehow embody in the final work the very mistakes that led to the discovery. In the same way, we should cherish the wrong idea and help the possessor of that idea to see the part (s)he has played in coming to the collective solution. 4) Take the idea of a group "leader" with a very large dose of salt. The dialogue taught me that in an active group everyone is a leader at some point in the discussion. In the town, if the issue was fire engines, the leader was the fire chief or sometimes a line fireman; if it was financing the new fire engine, the leader could be a member of the Finance Board; if the issue was how to put it all together, that might call on the selectmen to lead. In the course of a five minute consultation, the leadership could shift a dozen times. What was important was not the leader but the collaboration that could lead to some creatively inevitable result. The results didn't always work out but then we went back for some more dialogue. 5) Maintain your sense of humor. Irony helps here. Irony is especially important in real life dialogue. When I retired from the board, the town officials and some of the citizens gave me a rather elaborate party. This was embarrassing. But then I realized that it wasn't a party for me at all. We were all honoring the creativity that had taken place among us through our work (dialogue) together. The party was full of skits and sendups of the trials we had endured and solutions generated. For me the best testimony to the dialogue came after I left office. The dialogue went on in the town. The boards and departments continued right along talking to each other and working together, working things out. I felt I had played my part in the municipal psyche by adding the creativity of that New York dialogue group to the creativity of the many people who volunteered their time for the town. In short, in this small way I saw that a dialogue begun in one place can spread to another without in the least turning itself into an ideology or an imposition. To me this is as remarkable as if I had witnessed the birth of an entirely new species of thought.   Note: In the last year we have lost two great experimenters in dialogue. David Shainberg died on December 5, 1993, and David Bohm died October 27, 1992. This past summer David and Catherine Shainberg hosted a memorial dialogue for Bohm at their house on Cape Cod. This next summer I expect we will hold a dialogue for the second David at the home where his many ideas about dialogue were formed. I know that both Davids will be present in mysterious and multifaceted ways. I write the above in memory of their fervent honesty and optimistic fatalism about the destiny of our species--for their belief in the possibility of our learning to negotiate the awesome (and sometimes humorous) cosmic paradox that we are all both separate individuals and an indivisible part of each other.