13. JOURNEY TO PARI

THE REALITY WHICH IS MOST IMMEDIATE TO US CANNOT BE STATED.
– David Bohm

The letter was from F. David Peat, a noted physicist and author with whom I had corresponded over the years. David was a friend and colleague of David Bohm for more than twenty years. Together they wrote Science, Order and Creativity. David was writing to invite me to a conference on “The Legacy of David Bohm” to be held at the Pari Center in the medieval hilltop village of Pari, Italy, south of Siena, in June of 2008. The meeting would take place as a roundtable of about fifteen people to encourage open discussion, he said, and would begin with a short technical session for the physicists and mathematicians. It would then open out to a discussion of the implications of Bohm’s work for society as a whole. The list of attendees included many of Bohm’s longtime collaborators and early students, many of whom had written papers and books on Bohm’s approach to physics.

I couldn’t accept quickly enough. I had first met Bohm on a Monday morning in the summer of 1980. The Friday before, I had left the law firm I had helped establish twenty years earlier in order to follow a dream I had held for over six years – to found a new leadership forum in America. The American Leadership Forum was designed to introduce a developmental path to rising leaders who were committed to becoming servant leaders. After reading a lead article in the Sunday Times about his new book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, I followed my immediate impulse and went to the telephone. After several calls, I found Bohm’s home number, and before I knew it, he was at the other end of the line.

I poured my heart out to him, telling him what I was all about and that I must see him. Almost without hesitation, he agreed to spend the next afternoon with me. I spent over four hours with him, tape-recording our conversation. What he told me provided the foundational elements of the curriculum for the Forum and turned out to be one of the most important days of my life. What I learned that day altered my worldview forever, creating the opening for all that occurred afterward.

After our meeting, I moved to Houston to found the Forum. A couple of months later, I received a handwritten letter from Bohm saying how much he had enjoyed our conversation and how much he hoped we could meet again soon to continue the dialogue. I responded the following day, but allowed the press of founding and running the Forum to get in the way of returning to meet with him. I called him after arriving back in London, but by that time he was too ill to meet with me and passed away a year later.

I count this as one of the greatest mistakes of my life – I’ve regretted it ever since. I acknowledged it in Synchronicity – and wrote about the “Trap of Over-activity” as one of the patterns in my life that blocked my full development. I solemnly swore to myself that I would never, ever do that again – that I would do my best to “de-clutter” my life, making room for opportunities and blessings that show up at the most “inopportune” times.

When I read the invitation from David Peat, I saw this as a sort of reprieve – an opportunity to correct, in some measure, the terrible mistake I had made earlier. That day, when I accepted David’s invitation, I had that feeling of excitement and anticipation that accompanies breakthrough moments – and in fact, came away from the meeting in Pari with two key gifts. The first was a much deeper insight into what Bohm had told me about the nature of the universe; and the second was an introduction to one of the world’s most respected living scientists, the – dean emeritus of Princeton’s School of Engineering.

Both led me to formulate principles that helped complete my understanding of what I had been struggling to comprehend for so many years. By the time I had left Baja for the second time, I had developed the concept of the source of discovery, creation, renewal, and transformation, but I had not yet been able to explain that concept. Without that step, my understanding was incomplete.

I left for Pari a week early to go to a hotel in the little village of Colle Val d’Elsa, lying between Florence and Pari, in order to review all I had read about Bohm since I had first met him. In rereading all the books, papers, and essays, I was reminded of how respected Bohm was among his peers. He was acknowledged as a brilliant physicist, explorer of consciousness, and one of the most original thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, a man who had made influential contributions to physics, philosophy, consciousness, psychology, language, and education. Einstein had such a high regard for Bohm and his work that he made Bohm his close collaborator and friend.

Bohm came to believe that the traditional interpretation of quantum mechanics, with its issues associated with uncertainty, was incomplete. In a bold step that turned quantum mechanics on its head, he introduced the “implicate order,” which created a storm of controversy, yet may well have opened the door to a much deeper theory of the nature of reality and existence.

The day before the conference, I drove south from Colle Val d’Elsa to Pari. A map of the year 1250 shows the village much as it is today, surrounded by a heavily wooded area and, closer to the village itself, by olive groves and vineyards. I learned later that the woods are filled with wild boar, deer, and pheasants, and that the families of Pari grow their fruits and vegetables according to traditional farming methods on the surrounding land. Only two hundred people live in the little medieval village, which has a small hotel, a grocer, a general store, a post office, a hairdresser, and one restaurant, which serves traditional Tuscan cooking.

I checked into the small hotel and walked up to the meeting room at the top of the village. The original building at the summit had once been a castle. The views from there were magnificent. I could see the forest, olive groves, and vineyards for miles. And it was serene – so quiet. I could sense the energy field there as I walked into the empty meeting room. It was set up with a long conference table, flip charts, and a huge blackboard on a stand. Windows on two sides filled the room with light, and out one of them, I saw a little park.

I had learned that David Peat had created the Pari Center for New Learning with his wife, Maureen Doolan, and the support of the village associates, Sette Colli (Seven Hills), and the Comune di Civitella Paganico. The Center is dedicated to education, learning, and research and encourages an interdisciplinary approach linking science, the arts, ethics, and spirituality. Its philosophy and approach is that of “gentle action.” Above all, David Peat had told me, the Center is dedicated to the “spirit of place” – what Ikujiro Nonaka called “ba.” As I made my way down the steep steps to the village center, where we were to have dinner, I felt deep gratitude for the opportunity to meet with Bohm’s colleagues and students in such simple, serene, and beautiful surroundings.

Dinner was planned for seven o’clock at the village association’s meeting room – a long, narrow room with a table that ran the entire length of the room. As I approached the door, I could see that the meal was already being served by Maureen and Eleanor (David and Maureen’s daughter) with the help of others, some of whom appeared to be local women.

Just outside the door, I met a young man who introduced himself as Tahir Gozel. I recognized his name because he was listed on the invitation as the person who had supported the entire affair, including all of our travel, food, and accommodation expenses. Tahir was a highly successful businessman and philanthropist from Baku, Azerbaijan, a member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), and, as he told me later, a long-time student of Bohm’s, having first learned of him by reading my Synchronicity book years before. Tahir was accompanied by two young friends from Turkey who were members of SoL Turkey and who had agreed to prepare a report of the proceedings.

Tahir introduced me to David, Maureen, and Eleanor, and David, in turn, introduced me to all the others. It was a bit overwhelming at first because I was meeting so many people at once whom I had read about and for whom I held deep admiration and respect. The sheer number was a lot to take in – it reminded me a little of the way I had felt on the first day as a fraternity “pledge” at the University of Texas, meeting all the members at once.

There was Basil Hiley, Bohm’s long-time collaborator. I knew Hiley’s name instantly because it had been mentioned throughout all the books I had read about Bohm. As I learned during the course of the meeting, Hiley had been utterly devoted to Bohm and all Bohm stood for, having been his student at Birkbeck in the 1960s. I learned from many of those present that Bohm was equally devoted to Basil. For the next few days, I stuck pretty close to Basil and David, who were both tolerant of my incessant questions and had the capacity to translate complicated conversations among the physicists into clear and concise accounts for me.

I met Yakir Aharanov, a pioneer in quantum theory and a distinguished Israeli professor of physics at Chapman University, who was an early student of Bohm. Aharanov and Bohm discovered what came to be known as the Aharanov-Bohm Effect, or AB Effect, making explicit the essential, global nature of quantum theory. The work of Aharanov and Bohm was considered by many physicists to be of Nobel Prize quality, and over the years, rumors circulated that they were short-listed for the prize but never won it because of ambiguity over who exactly had discovered the effect.

That night I also met Henri Bortoft, a former student of Bohm and an apprentice to Bohm in the 1960s, who has focused much of his life’s work on Goethe’s approach to science. I had known of his comprehensive book on the philosophy of Goethe’s science, so I was delighted to meet him. Otto had interviewed Bortoft as part of our research leading to the U-process. In fact, we had used Bortoft’s insights on observing, suspending, and redirecting our attention in the opening pages of our book Presence. Bortoft called the focus on an understanding of the generative process underlying reality, “encountering the authentic whole.”

Then there was Lee Nichol, who had worked with Bohm closely on the phenomenon of dialogue and the potential of the collective intelligence inherent in highly aligned groups to beneficially affect the trajectory of an organization – or, if the dialogue involves sufficient numbers, the trajectory of our current civilization. That, of course, was at the very heart of Bohm’s injunction to me in London, so it was natural that I spent a good bit of time with Lee at meals and in between sessions.

I also met Mark Edwards of London, one of the most widely published editorial photographers in the world and founder of a photo agency specializing in environmental issues, the third world, and nature. He is the coauthor, with Bohm, of Changing Consciousness, which focuses on thought and its manifestation in terms of society and the planet.

In addition to the many remarkable physicists and mathematicians present, I also discovered that an old friend of mine was present, Andrew Stone, Lord Stone of Blackheath, a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom and former chief executive officer of Marks & Spencer, who was in the process of establishing a department of Religion and Science at the University of Cairo. I had met Andrew years earlier in London and knew of his reputation as a servant leader in his organization. True to his character, as I sat down next to Tahir for dinner, it was Andrew who arrived from the kitchen with my dinner plate, placing it in front of me and asking if there was anything else I needed.