David Bohm, On Dialogue http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Chaos-Complexity/dialogue.pdf

Scientists also get into the same situation. Each one may hold to a different view of the truth, so they can’t get together. Or they may have different self-interests. A scientist who is working for a company that produces pollution may have a certain self-interest in proving that the pollution is not dangerous. and somebody else might have self-interest in proving that it is dangerous. And perhaps then somewhere there is an unbiased scientist who tries to judge it all.

Science is supposed to be dedicated to truth and fact, and religion is supposed to be dedicated to another kind of truth and to love.

But people’s self-interest and assumptions take over. Now, we’re not trying to judge these people.

Something is happening, which is that assumptions or opinions are like computer programs in people’s minds. And those programs take over against the best of intentions. They produce their own intentions…

There are various roles that people adopt.

…a group that is too small doesn’t work very well…

So when you raise the number to about twenty, something different begins to happen. And forty people is about as many as you can conveniently arrange in a circle — or you might put two circles concentrically. In that size group, you begin to get what may be called a ‘microculture’. You have enough people coming in from different subcultures so that they are a sort of microcosm of the whole culture. And then the question of culture — the collectively shared meaning — begins to come in. That is crucial, because the collectively shared meaning is very powerful

The power of the group goes up much faster than the number of people.

That’s the suggestion. If we have a dialogue situation — a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to know each other, and so on — then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherent movement of communication. It would be coherent not only at the level we recognise, but at the tacit level, at the level for which we have only a vague feeling. That would be more important.

It may be useful to have a facilitator to get the group going, who keeps a watch an it for a while and sort of explains what’s happening from time to time, and that kind of thing. But his function is to work himself out of a job.

It all has to be worked out. People will come to a group with different interests and assumptions. In the beginning they may have negotiation, which is a very preliminary stage of dialogue. In other words, if people have different approaches, they have to negotiate somehow. However, that is not the end of dialogue; it is the beginning.

Negotiation involves finding a common way of proceeding. Now, if you only negotiate, you don’t get very far — although some questions do have to be negotiated.

Then what is called for is to suspend those assumptions, so that you neither carry them out nor suppress them. You don’t believe them, nor do you disbelieve them; you don’t judge them as good or bad. You simply see what they mean — not only your own, but the other people’s as well. We are not trying to change anybody’s opinion. When this meeting is over, somebody may or may not change his opinion.

This is part of what I consider dialogue — for people to realise what is on each other’s minds without coming to any conclusions or judgements. In a dialogue we have to sort of weigh the question a little, ponder it a little, feel it out.

In the beginning, people won’t trust each other. But I think that if they see the importance of the dialogue, they will work with it. And as they start to know each other, they begin to trust each other

The object of a dialogue is not to analyse things, or to win an argument, of to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the opinions — to listen to everybody’s opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means.

It may turn out that the opinions are not really very important — they are all assumptions And if we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in a different direction.

If everybody sees the meaning together of all the assumptions, then the content of consciousness is essentially the same.

Conviction and persuasion are not called for in a dialogue. The word ‘convince’ means to win, and the word ‘persuade’ is similar. It’s based on the same root as are ‘suave’ and ‘sweet’. People sometimes try to persuade by sweet talk of to convince by strong talk. Both come to the same thing, though, and neither of them is relevant. There’s not really coherent or rational.

The collective dimension of the human being, where we have a considerable number of people, has a qualitatively new feature: it has great power — potentially, or even actually. And in dialogue we discuss how to bring that to some sort of coherence and order. The question is really: do you see the necessity of this process? That’s the key question. If you see that it is absolutely necessary, then you have to do something.