17. THE INNER STATE

[T]HE FACILITATOR WHO HAS DONE THE INTERIOR WORK WILL “SET THE FIELD” FOR THE PARTICIPANTS AND HELP THEM LEARN THE WAY INTO THAT DEEPER TERRITORY THROUGH DISCIPLINED PERSONAL PRACTICE. IT IS ONLY THEN THAT PARTICIPANTS WILL BEGIN TO ACT AS A “SINGLE INTELLIGENCE” AND RELEASE THE “PHENOMENAL CAPACITIES” ENFOLDED IN THE GROUP.

Earlier that morning at breakfast, Lee had told me that he had worked closely with Bohm from the early 1980s until Bohm’s death in 1992. Lee wrote the forewords for a number of Bohm’s books, including a book on the nature of thought and the self that was created from the transcription of a seminar Bohm held at Ojai – Thought as a System. (Lee had taught at Ojai with the noted Indian teacher, J. Krishnamurti, and was deeply involved in the dialogue groups that took place there. When I met Bohm in 1980, he spoke highly of Krishnamurti and suggested that Krishnamurti could help us create the Leadership Forum curriculum.)

I told Lee about my meeting with Bohm and that Bohm had shared with me an explicit mental model of the way he believed the world works and the way he believed human beings learn and think. To Bohm, it was clear that humans have an innate capacity for collective intelligence. They can learn and think together, and this collaborative thought can lead to coordinated action. We are all connected and operate within living fields of thought and perceptions. The world is not fixed, but is in constant flux; accordingly, the future is not fixed and so can be shaped. Humans possess significant tacit knowledge – we know more than we can say. The question to be resolved: How do we remove the blocks and tap into that knowledge in order to create the kind of future we all want?

By 1983, Bohm was devoting much of his time to exploring this issue of collective thinking and communication. Over the next eight years or so, a significant amount of progress would be made toward understanding this entire process, which Bohm simply called “Dialogue.”

Beginning in 1985, Bohm put forward a series of propositions regarding a new vision for contemporary dialogue. This model of Dialogue received considerable attention throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Hundreds of formal and informal groups sprang up to practice it. Bohm’s Dialogue model was also widely embraced by various organizational development and management communities, including Peter Senge’s Organizational Learning Center at MIT. It deeply informed Peter’s “fourth discipline,” team learning. Team learning, Peter wrote, is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations, and team learning starts with Dialogue – the capacity of the members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine “thinking together.”

By the time I arrived in Boston in 1994 to work with Peter and his colleagues, there was a significant amount of excitement about Bohm’s process of Dialogue. In 1989, Bohm had visited MIT and shared with Peter and his colleagues his view that true Dialogue could bring about a radical transformation of group consciousness and that under the right circumstances, “group mind” can develop and then access knowledge otherwise unavailable. Bohm felt the effect of such Dialogue could extend beyond the boundaries of the group, including subtle but significant effects within the organization itself.

That morning, after he had laid out this general background for those of us unfamiliar with it, Lee spoke of Bohm’s intense hope for the transformative power of Dialogue on the collective mind. However, in his later years, Bohm felt that the impact of Dialogue seemed to have been erratic, even meager. In part, Lee felt, this lack of sustainability may have arisen from the commercialization of Dialogue whereby the training of facilitators was deficient, arising from an incomplete understanding of Dialogue itself as proposed by Bohm. Lee said that he wanted to focus on this one point – the way that Dialogue had been marginalized. In this way, he hoped to take a small step toward restoring certain essential features to their rightful place in Bohm’s model.

Lee said that after Bohm had held seminars and meetings so that people could experience Dialogue, he had collected his thoughts in a small, self-published booklet, On Dialogue. It was intended primarily for distribution to those on the mailing lists of the Bohm seminars and sold, surprisingly, twenty thousand copies very quickly. This was a shorthand version of Dialogue – a pithy but incomplete extraction of the essential features of Dialogue intended for an audience already familiar with the deeper elements of the process, namely those who had attended the seminars with Bohm or read the detailed transcripts of the meetings. This incomplete version has been amplified in recent years through the publishers of several mass-market “how to” books. Taken together, the original incomplete booklet and the secondary materials have defined the field of Dialogue for an entire generation of practitioners.

What was missing, Lee said, was identified by Bohm in a conversation they had in 1992, shortly before Bohm’s death: “People are not doing enough work on their own, apart from the Dialogue groups.” Bohm and Lee concluded that facilitators and participants needed to do deep personal work on their own and then bring the fruits of that work back into the circle – and to do this work on a consistent basis. The “work on their own” would be contemplative practice – any form of meditation, mindfulness, or awareness training. Lee pointed out that when the mind is silent, transcending the ego (as it is during deep meditation), something beyond thought comes into operation – a conscious awareness that is primary. “It is an awareness decoupled from our view of our self or our view of the world. It is a genuinely new order of insight – a momentary loss of self in which we are nonetheless intensely aware.” The point Bohm was making is that if the personal work is done, “the body is the individual gateway to a remarkable wealth of unexpected information.”

Lee later told me a story about Krishnamurti that illustrates an aspect of what is meant by “work.” He said, “At the very end of his life, Krishnamurti was involved in designing a study center in rural England, adjacent to the secondary school he had established there. The very heart of the building complex (both metaphorically and literally) was a meditation room. Krishnamurti died before the center was completed, but he gave some very precise instructions about how to use the room. ‘Don’t go to the meditation room to become quiet,’ he said. ‘Take quietness into the room when you go there.’

“This is really quite a profound view. It more or less upends all our views about getting something. It creates a very particular kind of non-presumptuous responsibility toward the world.

“Extended to group work, the implications are equally profound. Rather than going to the next Bohmian dialogue (or whatever the case may be) with an eye toward personal growth, or what I can get from it, I could go – having inwardly prepared myself – in a deep state of dynamic silence and ‘give’ that to the group work, right from the beginning. This of course does not preclude outward participation, but rather underlies it. I take total responsibility for the whole endeavor – inwardly, silently – and enter the group work with that sense of total responsibility. If multiple people in the group work understand this and actually do it, it will transform the group, and the work.

“I think this is what Bohm was alluding to when he said that people were not doing enough work on their own.”

I found Lee’s remarks highly instructive and remarkably relevant to the conclusions I had reached after my meeting in New York with Tex. There were two reasons for this:

First, I was grateful to have the “inside story” about the pamphlet On Dialogue. I must have read that little booklet ten times over the years since I had first seen it after arriving in Boston. Particularly, in the later years, I began wondering about the absence of a piece on the development of the “inner state” of both the facilitator and the participants as a necessary condition to Dialogue. Now I knew – and I felt a great sadness about the missing piece in view of the significant work that had been done on Bohmian Dialogue over the years. I was personally aware of a number of large-scale change efforts in Europe and America that had featured Bohmian Dialogue at the center of the process. None had reached their full potential because the need for these personal disciplines was not made specific.

Second, there were interesting parallels between this story and my growing realization that the U-process was being misunderstood and underutilized. The essence – the “little doorway at the bottom of the U” – had not been made explicit enough. The hard work of building capacity in the facilitators and the senior leaders of organizations has rarely been done. Just as in Bohmian Dialogue, the facilitator who has done the interior work will “set the field” for the participants and help them learn the way into that deeper territory through disciplined personal practice. It is only then that participants will begin to act as a “single intelligence” and release the “phenomenal capacities” enfolded in the group.

In his later years, Lee said, Bohm was fond of stating the maxim, “A change of meaning is a change of being.” A number of participants at Pari mentioned this during the three days there. Lee and the others understood this to connote Bohm’s view of a generative or creative order lying at the heart of the universe – a participatory universe. In such a universe, communion and fellowship are natural features of the topography, and intrinsic human warmth is common currency, part of the shared meaning of nature and society. Bohm felt the mind/body continuum (“You have to think with your whole body,” he said to me) is concretely related to the deepest orders of the universe. If this is so, Lee said, then a change of meaning and purpose may open us to these orders, glimpsing a larger, perhaps very different universe.

Lee closed his remarks that day by saying that such deep reflections lie at the very heart of Bohmian Dialogue – not as a fad or theory, but as the deepest prompting of our humanity. And if this depth of Dialogue reemerges, it can contribute to a new and radical creativity, a collective intelligence that can beneficially affect the trajectory of our current civilization.