How can I have looked deeply at myself and still be coming up with this as a supposedly meaningful response to another human being? Is there not such a thing as the abuse of dialogue?
Like butting in? Ask the other chap first if he feels abused; I hope he doesn’t. Then your point may have some bite to it.
So I am my memories; that’s what I am composed of. There may be a part of me that believes it is free from these restrictions and can act without the influence of memory. But that too is another belief, another memory.
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I understood it was intended to be a dialogue. Perhaps the rest of us here are just FakeViews and conspiring to StealTheDialogue?
Then why do you feel abused? What is your gripe with it? I said there may be a perception of the truth wholly without a perceiver. I am not saying, ‘Storm the Capitol!’
You are the advocate here for dialogue as a ‘we together’, so show, don’t tell. Show everyone here what together means.
Are we communicating as two friends? Just you and I, never mind all the rest. This is not something I can show you or you can show me. When we are thus together we are showing the world the meaning of friendship; there is no argument about it. But we can do this only if it our sole intention to be friends, which means the desire for perfect order in our relationship. Otherwise we’ll forever be going off at tangents because we have different desires.
I guess you’re familiar with the work of David Bohm “on Dialogue”,
cited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue
A dialogue has no predefined purpose, no agenda, other than that of inquiring into the movement of thought, and exploring the process of “thinking together” collectively. This activity can allow group participants to examine their preconceptions and prejudices, as well as to explore the more general movement of thought. Bohm’s intention regarding the suggested minimum number of participants was to replicate a social/cultural dynamic (rather than a family dynamic). This form of dialogue seeks to enable an awareness of why communicating in the verbal sphere is so much more difficult and conflict-ridden than in all other areas of human activity.
Dialogue should not be confused with discussion or debate, both of which, says Bohm, suggest working towards a goal or reaching a decision, rather than simply exploring and learning. Meeting without an agenda or fixed objective is done to create a “free space” for something new to happen.
David Bohm said:
"Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise it’s going to go wrong. (Bohm, “On Dialogue”, p. 10.)
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**Who would be having it? If we’re thinking about “we are together,” is that relationship? Or is that still a you and me, in the imagination?
**Hello Dominic - I just noticed that I didn’t see this response from you. Sorry about that.
Given what we might call ‘good luck’, I lived close enough to the KFA in Ojai to attend dialogues on a regular basis. And later on I moved to Ojai and began facilitating dialogues at the KFA, until covid shut things down. So, yes, I’m very familiar with what commonly occurs in dialogue. But those “difficulties” are also revealing the nature of human conditioning. It’s all “on full display” for anyone open to observing it.
If we’re focusing on whether “some other can’t cope,” it’s not observation, it’s analyzing. The discovery of ‘what is actually true’ needs to be primary over everything we think we know. There needs to be a clear seeing that “I don’t know,” and an absence of any interference of belief with regard to open observation. Insight can occur by oneself, or in a dialogue. But dialogue brings out patterns that aren’t likely to occur outside of relationship.
I’m just describing the way all of this appears to be. I’m not suggesting these words have any special significance. I’m basically suggesting that ‘observing what is choicelessly’ doesn’t depend on what anyone else is doing, whether anyone is “coping” or not. It’s about how open each person is to choiceless observation. And dialogue can be very revealing, regarding who we are. Whether transformation occurs or not depends on how serious and sensitive we are. If we’re translating everything according to memory, “trying to figure it out,” that’s analyzing, not observation.
That’s “how it appears” from over here.
Yes. But why do we take part in it? Can we make it clear why this particular activity is so important?
Psychologically, it is still a you and me, therefore a division.
The need for self-knowledge and the humility and open-mindedness that characterize it. Your posts are characterized by presumed knowledge, declarations, pronouncements, assertions, and defensiveness, not to mention deflection.
In post 20 you said that “any insight may be an illusion”, and since you admit that you’d never had insight, you should be able to provide examples of “insights” that turned out to be illusions.
Examples illustrate what you’re trying to say, but every request for examples you rebuff, and this haughtiness is reminiscent of Krishnamurti’s frustration with his audience. You seem to believe you have profound understanding that you can’t communicate; that you’re undergoing the same thing K went through.
A dialogue can reveal the movement of thought, psychological time, which is individual, personal and out of sync with each other. In other words, each one of us have our own world inwardly in which we function. You and me may have same belief or idea but each one of us still have our own ownership.
The creating of individual inner realities does not help human society to function coherently. Rather it is creating havoc and conflict, because inner worlds unvisible for the others collide when humans meet.This is happening in discussion forums, families, companies, politics. Words are spoken, which trigger reactions one has not intended, words are loaded with individual meaning which represent in some cases everything a person stands for.
In the interest of living together in a sane way I think it 's important to be aware of the mechanism of thought.
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Welcome to the community.
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You mean “partial insight”. Total insight is the end of the perceiver.
It seems we have been down this path many times before. Perhaps what you see in me is something you also feel about yourself, but not as vividly, not as sharply. I think this is a common element in all human relationships: that what we see as faults in others are really the outward manifestations of our own characteristics.
No, total insight also has a perceiver. That is what I am talking about: total insight is limited to the perceiver. It is the perceiver who calls it total because that is precisely what he desires to find. So I am rejecting all insight, both the partial and the total. If you want to consider an example, you have to bring such an example to the table; I have nothing to bring. I am not interested in insights. They are conclusions formed from perception, as though the perception itself was merely a stepping stone.
Take violence. It is a fact that one is violent. Why does there need to be an insight into this fact? The fact is there; you are living with it every day. The insight into violence is just an attempt to override the fact, to end the violence; it is a way of not facing the fact, of turning it into something esoteric and mystical.
Agreed. So how shall we go about it? Is there a right or a wrong approach?