My intention in the following representations of the dialogue group is to give the reader a sense of a meeting where the complete context of this complex phenomena of content and process weaves in and out of each participant in a reciprocal manner. This meeting was recorded two years into the group process of meeting once every two weeks. The number of participants represented the average number as the dialogue group moves on to its fifth year.

In retrospect, as I listened again to the audio recording of the meetings, my impression is that this transcription can give only an inkling of the complex set of processes which ensue in a Bohmian dialogue. The complexity of face-to-face interaction has been clearly stated in Fernando Poyatos’s work: "Deeper Levels of Face-to-Face Interaction" in Language and Communication an Interdisciplinary Journal (1985). Also in retrospect I noticed that even the audio tape of the meeting doesn’t represent the texture of a participant’s experience. For example: one senses many people talking out loud, and then and uncanny single "take" ends up being broadcast, even though there seemed to be many other interpretations vying to be dominant in that particular circling . . . The ineffable component of this multidimensional experience is most difficult to convey to a reader who hasn’t participated on a regular basis. Years ago in Ojai, Stanley Danek -- one of the many unsung pioneers who trekked to California to participate in Bohm’s exploration of dialogue -- invited me to attend a Bohmian meeting. Since this group had been meeting for a while, I was expecting profundity, yet it seemed to be wavering in a nonverbal essence throughout the ninety-minute stint. To my untrained sensibilities most of the statements made by the participants were simple and oxymoronic. Only after I had been involved in this form of dialogue for a while, did I come to appreciate the significance of what appeared to be a lack of depth in the participants’ discourse.

I will leave it to the reader to decide what to conclude about what appears below. As I see it, dialogue does not privilege any one view over any other, in the sense volunteered by one of Bohm’s colleagues, Don Factor: all views are privileged. It is this multifarousness -- apologies to the postmodernists -- which follows along the lines of M. Bakhtin’s contention that the most important endeavor in this exploration is to keep the dialogue going against all odds. As humanity approaches bifurcation, this consideration of ongoing dialogue, which is an ancient idea, will -- in my view -- make a difference. If this difference is not in form, it will be in spirit, along the lines of the "road not traveled", as Robert Frost has proposed, and most recently, cultural historian William Irwin Thomson. (See Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in The Evolution of Consciousness [1998].)

Jeff: Yeah, this is supposed to be a program where I design a research project like you do; I to set it up for you, or like Daniel does it. And my adviser was arguing that there should be group Ph.D.’s, and that’s so far out from the thinking right now.

Daniel: We could bring Mark over. You and I and Mark could get a Ph.D. between the three of us. We could.

Ricardo: You get the P, Merick gets the h and you get the D.

Juanita: I’ll take the period.

Mark: I am not quite sure which one I want?

Juanita: Sounds familiar.

Ned: If you’re really smart, Mark, what you should do is you just gamble with these guys and get the other two letters, so you get the whole deal. Make sure you get that two thirds part though.

Jeff: Would Ricardo or Daniel turn that thing on?

Daniel: Yeah, it’s on.

Jeff: I had to do it at our meeting, and it was really funny. We had to tape the minutes of the meeting.

Ned: Is that a 60 minute tape?

Jeff: It’s forty five each side.

Johan: So when the dialogue really gets good it’ll end.

Jeff: Oh one thing, these newsletters. Recent newsletters, everybody.

Johan: I was reading this magazine and I came across something that struck me as relevant to dialogue, and I would like to read it.

Ricardo: Well, let’s hear it.

Johan: It’s part of one answer from an interview with Wynton Marsalis. I don’t know if you know Wynton Marsalis?

Jeff: He’s a jazz musician right?

Johan: Yeah and also he plays exquisitely in classical and jazz, but he’s artistic director of jazz at Wynton center, and in this interview somebody asks him: "As I understood you, the reason a jazz musician needs to master the history of jazz is to discover the music’s essence. What is it?" And he says: "Some of the essential traits of jazz have nothing to do with music, and others are musical traits. Of the things that don’t just have to do with music, first comes the concept of playing. You take a theme, an idea, and you play with it, just like you play with a ball. If you’re teasing somebody or flirting with somebody, you’re playing with ideas, so you have the spirit of play. Next is the desire to play with other people. That means learning to make room. Take the kid who wants to be the star. You have to teach him the rules of sportsmanship, you have to tell him ‘You have to let the other kids play too.’ When I started playing, my concept of jazz was ‘This means I can solo and people will clap for me. When I joined Art Blakey, he was always telling us, ‘Man, you all gotta play more like a group. When your solo’s over, stop playing it. ‘ Third, playing jazz means learning to respect individuality. You don’t have to agree with me. You can have your own way of thinking and that’s good. You and I, we come together and have a conversation. I consider what you’re saying and I come away thinking ‘It could be true,’ or ‘It’s definitely not true.’ Playing jazz means learning how to reconcile differences even when they’re opposites. That’s why it’s such a great thing for kids to learn. Jazz teaches you how to have a dialogue with integrity."

Daniel: Hm. That’s nice.

Johan: And I like the idea of dialogue with integrity. I don’t know what dimension that adds to it, but it’s sort of means maybe sort of sticking with your character at the same time that you are accepting other people’s character.

Ned: One of Mark’s observations last time was insightful, and it was . . . he pointed out that . . . what he seemed to say was that we were saying one thing and doing another . . . which is not integrity. And to a certain extent I recognize this problem. That is, intention is to be . . . to have integrity . . . the intention is there, but what happens is that there’ a huge gap in understanding of conveying that . . . from your own experience to the event that you want to participate in. You jump in there with all this experience, saying I can say something here, I’ve got something to say,’ you jump in there and it’s not appropriate, and you suddenly find yourself treading water very rapidly, and you’re just not connected. There’s no coordination between the two.

Mark: Perhaps, a group of musicians coming from very different backgrounds, who are coming together to do jazz are very different from each other . . .

Johan: Right.

Mark: You know, they gather to do jazz and they all have these preconceptions, you know? But, who knows what jazz is? Perhaps they read the theory . . . how we should do jazz, not how it should be done.

Of course they are musicians and so they have a tendency to do this.

Ned: But there’s definitely a language.

Johan: I was going to make a similar point. I mean, you could almost consider a dialogue as a jazz thing and it’s very important for, you know, one player goes in a certain direction, and does something and it’s accompanied and then when he stops somebody else goes and if it’s disconnected, you know, it’s not jazz. But somehow, it relates, back and forth.

Mark: And we’ve been saying this about dialogue ever since we started, but it’s rare that we actually manage to keep it going.

Ricardo: Part of that for me is the expectation that I have about what I think it should be or what I would think jazz needs to be. And then I expect everyone else to be pursuing jazz in the same way. But they’re not, they’re pursuing jazz in their own way, and so you’re bumping up against a collective understanding, or expectation and an individual expectation.

Mark: Here’s where the dialogue process differs a little and we can poke holes in the metaphor. Because one observation that you could make is that, where dialogue breaks down, this is an important moment for us.. This is the learning part of it . . . This is where we see.

Johan: Well I don’t know that it does break down. It’s like let’s say we’re a one two three four an octet, a ten dectet, we’re an inept player of dialogue, I mean we’re like a group who get together to do jazz and they’re somewhat inept at it. It goes for awhile and then it breaks down.

Ned: Snake oil jazz.

Johan: Yeah . . . and maybe, so I’m rebuilding the analogy, and I’m saying we start our dialogue and it goes for awhile and then something, a monkey wrench goes in there.

Ricardo: And nobody’s willing to pay.

Juanita: That’s right. We don’t have an audience for this or anything.

Mark: OK. I want to push this a little further.

Ned: Ya, I think it’s worth it.

Mark: So what happens when it breaks down is sometimes, because we’re talking about breakdown, that’s a relative, uh . . . I mean it’s as if . . . well, the question is, is it as if a group of jazz musicians came to a point where they weren’t together and the stopped and they said ‘what went wrong?

Johan: Yeah! Right! Yeah right!

Mark: This is not quite the same thing because . . .

Johan: Yeah

Mark: . . . because the discussion of what went wrong is itself part of the dialogue, we’re still playing in a sense. And yet at the same time, people made this comment ‘we’re not doing dialogue we’re talking about it,’ and I think an appropriate comment is ‘well, we’re still doing dialogue while we’re talking about it. But I think there’s both their seed of truth. I think it’s possible to that . . . to see. . .

Johan: It both ways . . .

Mark: . . . both viewpoints as pointing to something important.

Daniel: It’s interesting that on that handout I just gave you that we spoke about on the phone is on complimentarity, where you have the notion of a whole that requires necessary parts that seem to be opposites or be opposed. The metaphor I thought of is . . .the other aspect of dialogue is it’s like a string quartet, where you’re doing a classical mode and each of us are playing our own voice, our own instrument with the emphasis on diction and performance. So we lapse into this business of trying to speak with great Žlan with our own instruments, and then we’re in a sort of classical quartet kind of thing. And then we go into jazz. It’s a different kind of music.

Ned: Improvisation.

Daniel: And I would say is that when we tend to get classical it’s when we get subjective and that’s when dialogue just doesn’t work. We’re each playing to our own ear.

Mark: It becomes repetitive.

Ricardo: Or in the purest sense of jazz for me it could conceivably break down when someone lapses into their own instrument but loses the rest of the group, so that at your . . . Your question was ‘what do they all do, they all, as a group, do they then say ‘what went wrong?’

Well, yeah. What went wrong was that I went off on my instrumentation and no one else followed along and so then we lost the connective.

Ned: I’d like to paraphrase Louie Armstrong, and say that if you have to ask what dialogue is you’ll never know.

Johan: Very good.

Mark: Well, okay, I want to twist that. And say, perhaps if we really want to dialogue we have to not know what it is.

Ned: Interesting spin. Interesting spin.

Juanita: Ya.

Mark : Ya, I literally twisted that

Ned: Are you running a public relations campaign ?

Mark: . . . Well it gets back to, it links to some points that we made before, thinking that we know what dialogue is, thinking that we know what we’re supposed to be doing, prevents anything to even happen.

Juanita: Yeah.

Mark: And it also leads perhaps to conflict of different point of views about what we should be doing. But I think that it’s a very hard thing not to know.

Ned: It’s a very hard thing to talk about dialogue and to talk about thinking about dialogue . . . thinking about thinking . . . I mean, these are terrible ways of using language because we don’t have the vocabulary.

Johan: It’s always seemed to me that I’ve always been puzzled by everybody’s certainty about what dialogue was because to me it’s always been a big mystery.

Mark: Perhaps you can’t do any better than ‘mystery.’

[Laughter]

Ricardo: Definitely what my problem is is clarity!

Juanita: I think that really addresses an issue that we . . . that there a need to know, a need to be grounded in knowing, and that the letting go of needing to know is sort of stepping into chaos or something. So it’s not comfortable. But I really believe that’s where we. . . I think, as a result of last time or some sort of thoughts had been circulating after the last couple of months . . . it’s like I really believe that I need to let go. I need to be a new learner every time I come. I need to learn in a new way. And that my thinking that I know, after two years of doing it, then I get this sense that I am somehow an expert and that comes in my way. And I think that we all -- perceive that we all come in some kind of knowing of what it is, now we know how to do it . . . it’s letting go of that that’s important.

Ned: A lot of my frustration comes from attaching myself to -- whether it be a time a dialogue takes on its debate side or its argument, or its explanations of things. Dialogue takes on all this and metamorphoses. It develops this formless thing that takes on many different forms, but I tend to attach myself to one specific aspect of the dialogue. I get locked into that particular thing, and many times its just conversational, and its not really getting into the idea of inquiry, which is forcing a dissection of what we’re doing here -- why we’re here. We’re not here to chitchat and make small talk; we’re here to really, insightfully generate, by our intention, a focus on being here as a whole, as a community.

Mark: So it’s more than form.

Johan: Yes. And it’s not a performance like a jazz thing.

Ned: An ensemble.

Johan: In other words, in jazz you put out your performance --

Ned: It’s an ensemble.

Johan: Yeah. So, you’re saying the dialogue is more -- wow, I -- Well, it’s more forcing things to go wrong deliberately and inquiring into what went wrong.

Ned: There isn’t any wrong. You see. That’s the point.

Johan: Well, where does the inquiry come in.

Daniel: Well, it’s -- John --

Johan: It’s not wrong. Ya.

Daniel: If it’s an epistemology -- I mean, if it’s a learning process -- We’re supposed to be -- the conceit we have is that we’re on the cutting edge of a way in which we’re trying to keep track and take responsibility for the things we say, and lift ourselves up out of clichŽ, slightly, and become more aware of whether we’re making sense or not. And pressing this enormous conceit is: we’re saying that we’re learning; we’re learning through performing, we’re learning from each other. So, when dialogue fails it’s because learning, which is always a promise, starts to fail for us, and we know one of us is not performing or the wind has gone out of that particular sail.

Johan: Ah.

Faye: In a barely audible voice what was it you were saying . . . you keep pushing your boundaries. You keep pushing into the unknown constantly, expanding in that sense.

Ned: The unknown is a huge abstraction. We really need to be a little more concessive about where we want to go with this particular effort.

Faye: Why do we have to go?

Ned: It seems to me that . . . just for clarification, the idea of the metaphor of a jazz group -- there is a structure to jazz. In order to play together they have to follow a certain form of chords and structure and tune, in order to develop a framework in which to improvise. So, what we’re doing in dialogue all the time is changing this framework around and manipulating each other by our participation.

Ricardo: It seems to me that beyond learning to play a piece together, jazz offers the opportunity to be inspired in some new way, to contribute your portion of the ensemble in a better way than you’ve done before, as opposed to a kind of a concert situation where what you are is part of a collective is better than what you would be individually, but it’s still limited to the quality of the whole. The jazz possibility of the analogy as I’m taking it to my concept of dialogue is that you each bring what you have to offer, but hopefully that’s inspired in some bigger way by the collective. Or, what you’re hearing around you might inspire you then to be something more than you have been before.

Daniel: When Faye said that it’s pushing some boundaries, I thought of My Dinner With Andre and how that film -- that film was taking on a sensibility in the world and making -- creating comedy out of it, but very instructional -- well, yeah, it’s -- I felt My Dinner With Andre was humorous. Perhaps I had some kind of conceit in the way in which I watched the film, and I watched it three time s and the last two times on television so it was a small screen and maybe that distance made me see the comedic aspects to it. But, what I’m saying is that there in these films that we have seen come out of the international community of intellectuals and film writers and so on who are supposed to be on the avant-garde edge -- because that’s way the avant-garde is defined as an aesthetic -- they’ve pushed this element of going out to the point which you just ] -- you’re pushing beyond and beyond and beyond yourself until you step on your tie and fall on your face. And I thought of that comedic aspect to that, and then there was this other film that had been done by a Swedish woman that had to do with physicists, that was an immense amount of conversation -- Mindwalk -- We’re doing a kind of performance like that aesthetically. We’re doing our own little mindwalk in our own little Dinners With Andre here.

Hilary: I wish.

{Laughter}

Ricardo: We’re mostly stepping on our ties.

Jeff: That was the conversation between the physicist Liv Ullmann, the politician Jerry Brown -- sort of -- and the poet, whoever. Is that right?

Juanita: Yeah.

Mark: One aspect of what we’re doing here, occasionally, this doesn’t distinguish it from a Salon.

Daniel: It’s a good point.

Mark: What I have been observing, I have an opinion of what we are doing here in terms of what insight can this give us into the nature of thought, and it seems that it’s basically been mostly a series of associations. Somebody says something and brings up an association in someone else’s’ mind, and so in a sense we’re gong on what the last person said, but it’s all very external, very impersonal. Which is fine because, in principle, because, for me, what I would say -- I wouldn’t say the real dialogue . . .

{Laughter. Comments.} Go ahead say it! There you go! We know you mean it! {Etc.}

Mark: . . . the real -- the inquiry -- the novelty, potentially, is that the place where I can discover something about myself is in the observation -- while I’m watching this -- I’m asking myself, "what is going on? what’s the point of this?" And it’s possible for us to all be doing that, but none of us could ever bring this point up. The reason I bring it up is because I’m not confident that we’re all doing this, but I have the suspicion that this series of associative things is no more than that. We’re all getting stuck in this everyday habit of --

Daniel: Ignoring the uncanny.

Mark: -- of not really watching what we’re doing, not really paying attention, not really asking the question, not really inquiring, but just . . . chatting. I bring this up -- I brought this up before --

Johan: Well, I --

Mark: Because I’m not convinced -- I want you to convince me that we’re all really looking.

Johan: You’re concept there is very tricky because it’s sort of double-edged: if you do nothing but inquire it’s sterile, because what are you inquiring about? And so you have to have the association, maybe people’s emotions getting aroused, before you have something to inquire into. So it’s a double-edged thing. It’s almost as if you have to relax from the inquiry and let it flow until some passions start coming out and then maybe it’s self-inquiry or I inquire into what you meant when you said that last thing. But, it seems to me that the inquiry without the passion, without me slipping into my natural mode of language which exposes, let’s say, thought, in the Bohmian sense, then there’s something to inquire -- In other words, when I slip and say something like Ned called attention about using the word "wrong" and said "well there’s no right and wrong" -- well, there’ something to inquire into: "Why did I say that?" or as soon as he says it I admit "Oh yeah. I didn’t mean that. But why did I say that. But why did I say it. Is this --

Ned: "Why" is only one aspect of the inquiry.

Johan: Yeah.

Ned: the inquiry, there’s many -- anything, any subject can be dissected into many various and sundry ways, taking sections, looking inside of it, looking at the outside of it, looking at the skin of it, looking at -- you know -- all these aspects of it, and it’s our responsibility as an ensemble to pick up another facet to look at.

Johan: But actually, I mean, you could inquire in many ways, but I would think that the whole point of Bohmian dialogue is to inquire in a way that you get a real "Ah-ha!" out of it, you get an insight either into what somebody else is doing or what oneself is doing. In other words, I suddenly get an "Ah-ha!" and understand something about myself -- in other words, just sort of an abstract kind of inquiry -- I mean, what’s the point?

Ned: That’s a good question.

Daniel: Well I think the point that I interjected when Mark was talking this business about the uncanny -- and let us remember that when you associate this word with Freud, and we also associate it with Romantic poets -- whether it’s been forty years since any of us read Freud or Romantic poets, who cares? Freud said "The mind is not master in its own house." In other words, there’ s things going on. John, that’s what -- what you were saying struck me in the simplest way, but I think you were saying something beyond that. For me you were saying that business of when you get to some kind of sublimity or when you see yourself looking into your own abyss, into the void, and you get this uncanny kind of felling where the hair wants to stand up on the back of your neck. That is also supposed to be something that dialogue would deliver us to. And I think that what Mark is saying is that when we start avoiding that and are just skating on the pond, we don’t look down through the ice at all those things down below.

Mark: I think what I’m worried about -- maybe that’s not the right expression -- is that the verbal process and the way this verbal process runs, it seems to hide a lot of -- When I’m listening, you know, when I’m listening to, not just what words are saying, but also looking at what’s the process of thought behind this -- when I’m doing something which is essentially non verbal -- and if I’m trying to -- I can’t talk abut it at the same time. okay, and when I talk about it this is -- right now I’m not engaged in the same kind of observation as I was when I was listening Daniel. There’s something else going on . . .

Ned: Don’t you feel, Mark, that during the process of analyzing -- as soon as you look at what you’re internal dialogue is doing, when you’re looking at it, you’re looking at it . . . it stops.

{Laughter} Johan: Uh, yeah.

Mark: But that’s the point. What happens when the internal dialogue stops, and you’re just listening to it.

Ned: Well, it seems to me that that’s a crucial element in this whole dilemma of the internal wheels and the external wheels, and how these things are intermeshing. You know, we have this ego structure that we are focusing in on as the internal part, like there is an inside me and then there’s, outside of my skin, there’s all you guys, you know. When essentially, there’s -- the ultimate game to me is that we share consciousness, that we get into this mode where we have no bodies, no interior, no exterior, we just have thought, and it’s all out on the table, and the exploration is out here also.

Hilary: What has really bothered me is there seem to be two currents going. One is, so long as somebody’s talking we’re doing dialogue, and I guess I question that; and I know this is going to pre K, but Jeff the first time I came you gave me this handout and I reduplicated it --

Jeff: What is it?

Juanita: And . . . well, ah --

{talking}

Hilary: And to me, I have been reflecting on it, and this speaks so much, and I have had this forever -- But to me this holds the kernel of where we’re trying to go or of what we’re not doing, and that is, {"}Dialogue starts from a willingness to be tentative about what you know{"} and I think, ah -- well, maybe I should just read it: "The focus of dialogue is what we experience, and not our ideas, precepts, belief systems" and all that crap; and all the intellectualizations and all that crap. That’s not what it says -- you know. "You can participate verbally or silently sharing. Dialogue is letting the issue unfold in affection and mutual respect." And I experience that as really missing in this group . . . that we let an issue unfold; and you can only let it unfold if there is affection and mutual respect, because when you trigger something and you don’t feel that there’s a climate of affection and mutual respect, you tell Freud "shut up." And you know, A Dinner With Andre could not have happened if there had not been that. I saw it eight times, the whole time through. "When a reaction arises, neither suppress it nor defend it, but suspend it in the mind and in the group, keeping it constantly available." Ah, you know, we never get close to that. Ah, dialogue is a way of being, the Zen of being, and seeing the Zen of seeing in an unfolding relationship. If we really would move towards that, we would have a chance, if not to be just surface comments.

Juanita: I’m really, I’m anxious to explore this notion that we have that this is not a respectable dialogue. I guess it offends me, so I kind of get a nudge about it, and I need to hear more about what that is for you.

Oh! If I -- well, it says here, um: "Dialogue is letting an issue unfold in affection and mutual support." Um --

What I heard you saying is that you didn’t think we did that, that you didn’t think there was respect, or you didn’t think -- you said something like we certainly don’t fit this --

Hilary: I don’t feel that this climate of affection that encourages -- ah, as to say, ah, "hey yeah, uh, something just grows up that made it stand up on the back of my hair" because the next person may very well not even hear what you said, and go off about something else. You know, that’s a psychological barrier. When you are not heard. Or saying "I disagree," and I think there’s no place for "I disagree." It’s more like looking at it, the Zen of looking at it, and then looking at it together and letting it unfold.

Mark: Well, I wonder if your perception is that you personally are doing this, and that you perceive others as not really doing this.

Hilary: I -- I -- I -- I ah have not experi -- maybe -- There have been a few times that I have experienced this to be happening.

Mark: But I’m wondering -- it seems to me that this could happen, that one person could be following your suggestion, and it really doesn’t matter what other people are doing. In other words, I can follow your suggestion no matter what other people are doing.

Hilary: I -- oh. That had not occurred to me. I thought that everyone has to follow it, because, how can I open up about something if I’m not sure that somebody isn’t going to hit me over the head.

Ricardo: I really think that that’s -- I really think that’s where I have a problem, is that I believe that there then is an expectation that everybody be in the same spot.

Hilary: No.

Ricardo: And that is an impracticality. And that you are responsible for conducting yourself in that way as best you can, but when you start to expect everybody else to be doing it in exactly the same way, you create this terribly grand scheme of "how we will be," rather than the way we are.

Hilary: You made an assumption, that I did not say, that people do it in the same way. What I’m putting forth is if a person does it, it’s up to the rest of the group to let them do it in their way. Ah --

Ricardo: But then --

Hilary: And there ‘s no -- the whole point is that we move with that person to hear that, and in that hearing, um, dialogue occurs because we move. And that there’s -- You’re absolutely right, it totally cannot be that we all follow the same -- but the whole point is that we move with each other to the inch of whatever’s being talked about.

Mark: Okay, so then we still -- The one thing which -- Okay, ah -- what I think Juanita was struck by, I was struck by the same thing as well, is this -- this -- this -- notion that that -- well, the group -- that this mutual respect and affection is not there for you. Now, for me it’s there. I want to say that, to me, I find this group, to me at least -- you know, I do not feel that I am inhibited about bring up things here because I don’t feel affection and mutual respect in the group. So, it’s interesting that you, you say you do feel a lack of mutual respect

Hilary: To be honest, I sometimes um -- I feel battles go out {knocking, and I’m talking about the kind of battles that can sometimes go out.

Juanita: So why is that disrespectful I mean, what’s the problem . . . where is that --

Hilary: I just don’t see that enlightenment.

Mark: Okay, um, well . . .

Ned: One of the difficult things about talking about the past is that --

Hilary: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Ned: Is that we talk about it in terms of bringing it forward into the present and yet there’s still speculation. So, even though the dialogue is not ideal at all times, I think the idea of having a hope that it will be at the next go around -- that aspiration, that point of movement is all important. That we continue that movement.

Hilary: I concur with that. And that means that then when it doesn’t happen that we [have to] speak to it.

Johan: Well. If you know it’s not happening. . . .

Juanita: Then what, {Johan If you know it’s not happening, then what?

Johan: Well I mean . . . I suppose if you know it’s not happening then you can get into this spirit of inquiry, but -- I don’t know. Maybe, maybe I lack some kind of sensitivity or something. I don’t know what I was quite saying.

Mark: Well, I’m feeling something interesting here, and it has nothing to do with what is said -- I know it’s a sort of emotional aftermath of one or another of what has been going on here, and I’m wondering -- do you think -- some of it has its place . . . and then go on to speak about something else, it seems like.

Johan: Well, really, I -- when I said that I think I was really trying to do something nonverbal maybe.

Daniel: If I were to say what I just felt and experienced in the last ten minutes it would be that I suddenly look through Hilary’s contribution in reading these suggestions. I realized that Hone, Jeff laid this stuff on us two years ago. And all of the sudden it’s kind of like a score box, and you go down through and say what has worked and what hasn’t. And the implication is that if one of these things hasn’t worked, if we have been aggressive or psychologically beating up on each other, which means, why, we can let things go, ignore each other, refuse to call each other on things for the sake of unity at all costs -- In other words, some of the things I was thinking is "how have I been weaker or shy or just have lacked nerve, or what things haven’t I said over the last two years that later on I thought ‘gee, I really should have said something’?" And perhaps Hilary’s introduction of this has thrown us back a sense we’ve had of where we’ve been and what we’ve struggled with. Maybe that’s why suddenly, Johan, you just sort of faded on yourself.

Johan: Yeah, I don’t know. There was a point to what I said, but I don’t know what it was.

Hilary: Yeah. But I think I said -- I used the word permanent

Johan: Well, oh, yeah.

Mark: Something just occurred to me about this business about at least what I feel is meant about the issues she defines. And it is this point of affection and mutual respect. The problem which I’ve been struggling with at various times is that -- at times, you know, I have seen a pattern going on and the effect of my bringing that to a person’s attention has been to cause an emotional upset. And I’m wondering whether that may have the effect of making the atmosphere around here not to be an atmosphere of respect. If I upset someone does it mean then that for that person there is not this atmosphere of affection and mutual respect, which is necessary to bring -- is this the problem, if that’s the case?

Hilary: Yeah. I think if it is done in the spirit of the Zen of ‘let us look at that’ then it would not accrue a negative feeling. If it is done and you’re being judged and uh -- telling the children to behave -- or controlling or pointing out or accusing you know or dominatory. You know, it depends on that spirit, I think.

Ricardo: And you -- And how does that spirit feel to you generally? Does it feel negative?

Hilary: I think that it’s better if we stay in the now and not go back to the past.

Ricardo: Well, the reason I want to return to the past in that context is that I feel like the elephant in the room here is some sense that this is maybe different for you than it is for me or for some of the rest of us. And I thought Mark’s comment just now was trying to get at how he might contribute to your feeling that way, and what he’s doing in what he believes to be a constructive way for dialogue. So we’re still trying to get at that issue.

Hilary: Anything Mark does is contributing.

{Laughter}

Mark: That’s interesting -- Mark has -- well, what is it --

Daniel: That’s the feeling I have is that your comment about your contribution was a hundred and eighty degrees -- was absolutely right but it was just completely turned, because I have said to you over the phone more than once you showed more guts more balls last night or last week, and you said this and this and this and it had to be said. I think you are in my mind Mark as one of the more consistent contributors to trying to get people to be accountable --

Ricardo: Yeah, and I would attribute that to Hilary as well

Daniel: Yes! And Hilary as well! Yes!

Mark: Well, thanks. No, the reason -- you understand the paradox here -- the possible conflict that such a contribution such a risky contribution in a sense -- if it upsets somebody and that person takes that in a certain way, then it could be negatively reinforcing to them.

Ricardo: But it’s still the responsibility of the group to present that if it’s put out in a way that it isn’t constructive, that it isn’t well-meaning, then the rest of the group is supposed to be accountable for that too. "Hey, that didn’t quite make it here."

Mark: Right, so then the question is, how could it possibly be that we don’t have this atmosphere of affection and mutual respect --

Ricardo: I agree.

Mark: Because if we don’t it means that we

Juanita: I think in order to have respect you need to be able to be hurt, be able to hurt each other. And I think that is what enables respect. That affection creates no conflicts or no conflict means "good," and I believe that I personally as a conflict avoider, need to learn how to be able to put something out that could potentially hurt someone in a climate that is respectful; there still is respect; or that I could be hurt by someone like in some sense I was just offended by your comment, but I wasn’t offended by you. And somehow there’s this two sides of the same coin to this issue of affection and respect. We need to be able to allow opportunities for hurt or conflict.

Hilary: I find it fascinating that I really didn’t even have that one in mind --

[Laughter]

Mark: Oh, you want to move.

Ricardo: You want to move on to the critical one.

Juanita: But what you really wanted to say!

Hilary: Is number one that that dialogue starts from a willingness to be tentative, you know. But I really wasn’t talking about hurting individually. I think it is up to the -- that is exactly the nature of dialogue -- it triggers and then we stay with it and walk with it ‘til we find where the dead end is.

Juanita: Which is what we’ve been doing with this issue. We’ve been walking with this issue, the one that you didn’t think you put out, but you did.

Hilary: I mean, I put it out, and that wasn’t the central issue I was just interested that people talk on that.

Mark: I wonder how tentative you’re being about that. The zealots intention is perhaps a little less tentative than the point of it. I mean, the way you put that. That’s what we’ve been doing. I mean . . .

Juanita: Yeah -- so, do this. Ask me again because I want to try to.

Mark: I’m not sure whether I’m making a serious point here, but perhaps there’s a serious point behind it somewhere.

Juanita: OK

Mark: Which, perhaps is behind what real point of Hilary’s objection to this other point of view, is that the -- if we’re really tentative about what we know, if the whole dialogue -- if everything is a question rather than --

Johan: An answer.

Mark: Rather than a statement about "oh, this is the way it is" then should that not reflect itself into an entirely different language. So that perhaps we should be speaking in a more questioning tone. The fact that we tend to put out what as if these things are -- perhaps that really does show something that is missing.

Hilary: And what if -- I think these all say the same thing. "When a reaction arises neither suppress nor defend it but suspend it in your mind and in the group, suspended in the groups mind, but keep it constantly available to look at it."

Ricardo: I’d like to try to present that notion. Earlier Johan raised this analogy of jazz, and we all went off in what was a kind of a conversational way. And then Mark it seemed to me got to a point with that where he wanted to use what was going on there in an inquiring way. And I’m wondering now if we are able to kind of return in a way that that tenant just suggests. That maybe that is in fact a dialogue -- it is maybe not what you wanted in the same inquiry way that you just suggested to the group. That you took that to some questioning place of greater merit or meaning for you than -- The reason I say that is I was very intrigued by the integration of our thinking about the jazz topic with the analogy, and I liked the flow there of what that was. And again what I’m trying to suggest is for me the disruption then was exactly what you just suggested, where you had a tendency to want to take this someplace different than where it was or more or --

Mark: Interesting that you’re perceiving this as a disruption.

Ricardo: No, I’m not perceiving it as a disruption, so much as a question -- my question is an answer to the question you just proposed -- is maybe what we’re all trying to do all the time is to remain in that more tentative state. And then are you in that tentative state if you’re taking it --

Faye: This is assuming that a tentative state is the thing. I would think it’s only one state of many.

Ricardo: Well, yeah it is -- It’s just the one that’s written here that we’re sort of addressing about being an ingredient here in how we would choose to be, and I think that --

Faye: Doesn’t that change with the moment?

Ricardo: I think it changes constantly, but I think what we experience happening is that it changes with the individual as opposed to the collective, as opposed to the group.

Faye: But that’s what makes the collective is the individuals.

Juanita: Is that a statement or a question or --

Faye: -- each one that makes the collective. I think the insistence on everything being a specific or the same or whatever is where the -- where error is creeping in.

Johan: Well, who is making the suggestion that everything be the same?

Faye: That’s what I’m picking up. That we all have to stay tentative and this and this kind of thing, and that’s a point and it’s a very good one --

Johan: Well, it’s the willingness to be tentative which is about what you -- there’s a paradox, it needs -- all of this, it’s all very slippery and it’s full of paradoxes.

Faye: One thing being willing to be tentative but you can’t continue to hover. There comes a point when you have to land.

Johan: Exactly, know what you’re saying. In other words, you -- and it’s a matter of being subtle with language, because I will admit that over the years I’ve done a lot of reading in stuff about Zen Buddhism, and one thing that you become sensitive to is that often, when there’s a statement made, it really means exactly the opposite of what is stated, or it means something that’s off in left field, that has nothing to do with the words, and a little bit of that spirit in dialogue, I think it might be helpful. In other words, maybe when I say something I mean the exact opposite of what I’m saying. Or you know, sometimes, not all of the time, but just some of the time.

Ned: Is it up to the perceivers to interpret when this is apropos.

Johan: Yes.

Ned: This is interesting because it’s not -- I don’t feel any responsibility for your reactions to what I say.

Johan: Exactly, right yeah -- there’s no -- I guess I’m pointing out -- you can react any way you please, I’m just pointing out that maybe if you take me seriously all the time, you’re being very inappropriate in your reactions.

Ned: Well, certainly humor has a major role to play in the whole dialogue setting, especially for the defensive reactions that can occur.

Hilary: I would just say I didn’t experience that as humor. I experienced that a paradigm of communication -- that if you comprehend the paradigm, then it was just plain communicating. It wasn’t humor

Mark: I feel like I have done things in that way in the past. I don’t do them anymore because I don’t feel like they have had a communicative effect in this context so there’s a question whether it’s appropriate -- it’s certainly appropriate to communicate in that way when you’re with someone who is --

Johan: Well, what I’m suggesting --

Mark: in a group like this --

Johan: Well, it’s not deliberate. I mean the point is it sounds like you made a decision to say something paradoxical or

Mark: No, no, it’s not that. It was just the frame of mind I was in at the time.

Johan: Yeah, well, I mean, what’s wrong with it. I mean, you were being genuine then --

Mark: Perhaps, but nevertheless as a matter of fact as a matter of observation, I have chosen to back away from that as a consequence of the effects which it had on the group. out of a sense of responsibility for --

Ricardo: Affect and respect.

Hilary: You can’t go -- I’m sorry, Johan, I just told Ned I wouldn’t correct you and I did. I’m sorry.

Ned: That’s fine.

Hilary: I’m sorry. You’re depriving the group if you sit on yourself from your whole being. And in a way the last comment here -- "dialogue is being together and seeing together in an unfolding relationship" -- speaks to the fact that one of the results of doing dialogue is that I come to move into the Zen paradigm if I wasn’t used to it by deeply listening, and being present to you. So by your cutting that out you deprive me of part of you and the world -- you know, we’re all in the world.

Ned: Ignorance is bliss though, Hilary. I mean, you wouldn’t know the difference.

Juanita: I’m kind of curious about where you guys are --

Jeff: Well, Thomas Grey never said that ignorance is bliss. He said that ‘where ignorance is bliss foolingry and folly will persist’.

Juanita: Where ignorance is bliss, what?

Jeff: He said "where ignorance is bliss foolingly and folly will persist Thomas Gray, you know --

Right.

He knows who it is.

Jeff: So that clichŽ is a classic distortion of a kind.

Jeff: Well, it just seems that we all can enter in at different points. If we play it back to where we were playing jazz, I could have entered in, you could have entered in -- So I think that we all play different roles, sometimes where you know we hold back. Sometimes we could in an internal manner respond differently to each perspective. Like I was listening to Mark, he said the word "all" when he began his statement, which is one of those unwielding, non-negotiable assumptions that we’re supposed to be paying attention to.

Ned: I believe he’s been put on the rack.

Jeff: Oh, no. I wasn’t talking about Mark, I’m just saying that I could have entered in at different points earlier on in the tape but there’s a whole group here.

Daniel: I think also what’s present to our group always and through each of us are the problems of our times, in the sense that one of the things that’s happening with learning now is that there is a reaction to the notion that self-image in the American educational system is supposed to be an A plus ultra. Johan was saying we’ve got to bring back what used to be called the jack with the stick -- I mean, in the nicest way -- that part of each of us that reaches out and gives us a little punishment so that you know you’re coming up against a real flesh and blood person. If the American educational system was being criticized as giving people a sort of fools paradise of Southern California, that self-image is great and you get "well, your opinion is just as good as my opinion" pretty soon the entire society is saying there’s not a cutting edge to things: we’re in value relativity and all this. The reason I mention these things -- it’s sounding like just I’ve been reading too many newspapers, or something -- is because I think these cultural issues are present to us as we go through our own therapy, so to speak. What I’m saying is one of the functions of dialogue is for each of us to define ourselves in terms of the problems of our age -- how we’ve joyfully gotten by them or how we’ve been stuck with them. So I’m just sort of changing the subject, in a way, to say that there’s other things present to us aside from ourselves; there are -- culture is hovering over ourselves.

Faye: Are we having Atavistic tendencies?.

Juanita: What?

Faye: Atavistic tendencies Uh-uh. Atavism is essentially coming from the distant past, settling on the order of cellular memory ethnic backgrounds even though you weren’t brought up in that culture, it’s built into your DNA and everything.

Ned: How do you spell that?

Daniel: It is spelt atavistic. It’s full of the primitive and gets, does it not, with Jung into these figures --

Johan: Yeah, the collective unconscious.

Daniel: Archetypes. Yeah, archetypes, like the Christ is an atomistic --

Juanita: Oh, Okay. I’m with you now.

Faye: So it’s also culture plus atomism. Plus.

Juanita: Plus ?

Faye: Plus your own experience.

Johan: And we’re sort of trapped in our culture, but -- which is a good point -- but --

Daniel: Oh Faye’s point is that we’re trapped in a transactional role that we see ourselves as the man on the white horse or the lady waiting to be rescued or whatever it is, and I’m not deliberately making fun of this because the atavistic figures are more serious than this kind of pop culture way I’m speaking of.

Hilary: I must be missing something here -- What I’m wondering is isn’t every moment in history influenced by my culture and my collective unconscious and so it’s almost like a cop out or something -- You know, that is the point of life -- is to see the self in the now, in the culture now -- we’ll be moved in our presence of the past. And that is what we’re here for.

Johan: We’re well wait -- Yeah, in a sense we’re here to shed the conventions of our culture.

Hilary: Right -- that is the subject.

Daniel: But we’re in this transcendental thing where the reason we’re put on earth is to rise above all this stuff, right. And that’s a terrible conceit, to where you get above the now.

{Laughter}

Faye: Well essentially to go through it is all that matters.

Juanita: To go through it and pardon me?

Faye: To go beyond it. To go through it and go beyond it.

Juanita: Huh . . . that’s a really interesting assumption I think.

Contextual Essay ... by Nick Consoletti