Copied Thursday, 24 September 1998

The following page has been copied by Terrell Neuage onto the server at the University of South Australia and onto Angelfire.com for use as a reference in my Ph.D. The reason being that I need to have my referenced source at the end of my work, approximately early 2001.

Ken Parejko has granted permission for this copy. (Thanks)

The original site for Comments on Bohm Dialogue

Comments on Bohm Dialogue

By Ken Parejko

Though I am really new to this, my own interpretation of what Bohm was about when he urged dialogue as an anodyne for our ills is this:

That most of our thoughts are not our own, but inherited from the "collective conscious," or "wego" as he was said to call it. We use these collective thoughts, which we think are our own, as tools to help us in our everyday emotional, spiritual, and mundane lives. But because the society which promulgated them is "incoherent" (meaning, I think, irrational in the large sense of being out of balance, out of "ratio; meaning also that intention and action are out of step with one another), they often do us more harm than good.
That thought, emotion, and body are all one. Thought gives rise to emotion, and vice-versa. This can become a closed, incoherent system, which is unable to see its way out of a predicament; e.g. the predicament of wild nationalism, or the environmental crises we are in, or one of the emotional dramas we all go through in our lives. People who commit suicide or act out their rages onto friends or strangers are demonstrating this incoherence. But in the confusion and stumbling about we all do to some degree in our lives, we also demonstrate that incoherence.
That we cannot just on our own solve these problems, but rather we need "dialogue" with others. As fairly closed systems, we need opening up, something our defenses do not urge upon us.
That we cannot just on our own solve these problems, but rather we need "dialogue" with others. As fairly closed systems, we need opening up, something our defenses do not urge upon us.
This dialogue is an informal exchange of thoughts with the goal of becoming aware of our own fundamental assumptions about reality, and life. By running dead up against our assumptions, which derive in part from our collective conscious, part from our own life experiences, we can see how they limit our ability to improve ourselves and our society.
Dialogue is practice; through this practice, we become more and more subtly aware of the processes which give rise to our thoughts. By intercepting these thoughts before they become engraved in our (and the collective) consciousness, we can bring about a rational accordance of intention and action.
Thus, in dialogue, transformation is possible. Only through the transformation of individuals is larger societal transformation possible.
(p. 94, "On Dialogue") "Getting to the root of all this belongs to all of mankind: we have something which can, potentially, produce a revolution."

Ken Parejko, 1997-12-24
Email: parejkok@UWSTOUT.EDU