Bohm Dialogue

The Berlin Wisdom Model identifies two practices that help people activate their wisdom6. The first practice is internal dialogue, as we advocated for in Part Two, in terms of helping your different selves get to know each other better and to learn to dance together. The second practice is external dialogue. In Part Five we will spend less time on

The physicist David Bohm (one of the main contributors to the theory of dialogue) points out that the Western word “measure” and the Sanskrit “maya” appear to derive from the same origins. Yet, in the West, the concept of measure has come to mean “comparison to some fixed external unit,” while maya means “illusion.”

Who should you speak with? Dialoguing with a variety of people, in a host of far-out ways, makes for a paradigm-smashing experience:

A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.

The main point, however, is not to strive for some abstract ideal of coherence. It is rather for all the participants to work together to become sensitive to all the possible forms of incoherence. Incoherence may be indicated by contradictions and confusion but more basically it is seen by the fact that our thinking is producing consequences that w