A Way to Learn About Yourself

Matthew Hello, everyone. This is the third episode of the More Important Than Physics podcast, the podcast of the David Bohm Society. Today, we will be speaking with a board member about dialogue amongst other things. Howard has been a board member for almost a decade. I couldn’t locate the exact date he joined, but if I had to guess more exactly, I’d probably say eight years ago or so. And I hope you enjoy listening to today’s episode. So Howard, I would like you to start with a brief biography of yourself. You could tell us maybe your full name, what year you were born, where you live, your general life experience before you encountered the work of Bohm and Krishnamurti and how you encountered the work of Bohm and Krishnamurti.

Howard Well, I was born in 1950, a nice easy year to remember how old I am. So I’m 74, going to be 75 this year. The story I usually tell is when I was in college, I was reading Socrates, and I was pretty impressed with this fellow. And he mentioned this thing called “know thyself.” And I thought that was pretty interesting. But at the time, I was pretty busy with pursuing a musical career. I tried to be a rock star. So a number of years later, about 12 years, I had gotten a family and a couple of kids and a house and a car. And I had some leisure times. And this question popped up again that apparently had been lodged into my head of “know thyself.” So I said, well, how do you do that? So I found one book that didn’t really resonate. And it was called The Science of Becoming Oneself. But it didn’t work. Then I found in the back of a jazz guitar book some suggested reading. And part of it was music and part of it seemed to be spiritual-related topics. And there was two there by somebody named J. Krishnamurti. So I went to the bookstore that I thought might have this kind of book. And I went there and they didn’t have the two recommended titles, but they had one called Freedom from the Known. Now, here I have to insert something before I tell you the quote that I read in this book on the fifth paragraph. A few years prior to that, when my daughter was one year old, she was crying. And I said something rather stupid to my wife about, you know, “let her cry.” And about a minute later, it literally felt like some sort of light went off in my head saying, “You’re clueless as a father.” So I rushed out to the bookstore to get some parenting books. And then I started noticing, not only did I not know much about parenting, but I didn’t know much about anything else outside of music. So, then back to the Freedom from the Known book and the fifth paragraph. Krishnamurti said something like, “You’re all waiting for someone to give you the answers. You’re all second-hand people.” That pointed directly to my discovery that I didn’t know much about anything except for what other people had told me. And as I read on in this book, it was just continually pointing out my behavior and the way that I was living. So I had found the right book. And then I began to purchase all of the books that I could get my hands on. And then I turned over one of the books, and there was a little tiny picture of Krishnamurti, and underneath it, it said Ojai. I didn’t know where that was. It turned out it was in the same county where I live. And so I go, “Oh, I can drive there!” So I drove up to Ojai and went to the school. I didn’t see anybody, so I yelled out, “Is Krishnamurti here?” And somebody peeked around a corner and said, “No, he just died two months ago.” But he said, “But we’re going to have some programs in the fall that we can study the teachings.” So I went to the program later in the fall. And I was introduced to dialogue there by the director of the foundation, Mark Lee at the time. There was about 80 of us in this big room. And he said, “We’re going to split up now into small groups of 10, and we’re going to have a dialogue.” And then he said, “And nobody’s going to try to convince anybody of anything.” And I was shocked. Is that possible? I had been in some rather unpleasant business meetings where I was working. And I said, “Can you really not try to convince each other?” So we went into these small groups. And I don’t know whether I should bother telling my first dialogue experience. But I guess I’ll go ahead [laughs].

Matthew Yes, I’d love to hear that. But before you do, I just googled really quickly: Krishnamurti died in 1986. So do you recall, was that the same year you discovered this book by Krishnamurti? Because you mentioned—

Howard No, it was either a year or a year and a half before then. So in ‘85, I was started reading him, and then later I realized, “Oh, I can drive up to where he lives!” But I missed him by two months.

Matthew Yeah, that’s too bad. Yes, please do share your first dialogue experience.

Howard Well, it was basically—so we went into small group, and I’m really fascinated. What is this dialogue? As I reflect back on it, I was literally in this state of not-knowing. I’m going, “What is this? This sounds great.” So I’m listening there, and it seems like some of these other people, they were familiar with dialogue. At a certain point, one of them would say to this other fellow, “Would you stop interrupting? You’re interrupting.” So that would go on and on. And then they mentioned it again, “You’re interrupting!” So the question pops up in my head—actually, this one lady, she said, “You’re interrupting, and we were almost there!” And I’m going, “Wow, where? Where are you getting to?” But in the back of my head, I had heard Krishnamurti say something about “observe yourself in relationship.” And I’m going, “Well, isn’t it really about this relationship with this fellow that’s supposed to be disruptive? What’s happening there that we think this fellow’s a disruption?” Then we went back into the big room, all the groups, and they asked what went on. And pretty much every group said there was somebody disruptive in their group [laughs]. I guess, to skip forward here now, I kept going to these—actually, I’ll tell you my story. So the first year I’m there going, “What is this? This is interesting.” The second year I’m starting to go, “Oh, I’m getting a kind of a feel for this, what dialogue is.” And the third year, I’m going like, “Maybe I can help other people understand what dialogue is” [laughs]. And then, the fourth year, I’m going, “Come on, everybody, get on board! You have to be together, all this!” And then, the fifth year, I was going, “You know, it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing in the group. I can observe myself in relationship. I don’t need somebody else to do something. I can observe what’s going on without expecting anything else to be different.” Probably somewhere in that five years, I found out Bohm was giving seminars at the school.

Matthew Sorry, before we move to that subject, these five years of dialogue events that you attended were all put on by Krishnamurti Foundation America?

Howard Yeah, it was biannual. They’d do one weekend. They’re Friday, Saturday, and Sunday meetings. And there was one in the spring and one in the fall each year.

Matthew Were you attending one or both on average?

Howard Both of them. Yeah. And I also found out early, probably that first weekend, that they had a Thursday night dialogue at the school every week. So I started attending those, too. I would go up there every Thursday evening for the dialogue.

Matthew Where would you go up there from? How far away were you at the time?

Howard I’m trying to remember if I was working—no, I was still working somewhere else. From Simi Valley, which was like an hour-and-five-minute drive to get there. But then later on, I started working about halfway in between and I would just come up after work.

Matthew You mentioned Mark Lee at the first one. Was he consistently at all of these? Was he one of the main organizers? Was he a facilitator?

Howard Well, he was at all of the biannual ones, but he didn’t attend the weekly night ones.

Matthew Right. So before we move on to the Bohm seminar piece, what was your general impression of these? What did you observe at these? Did they show you a promise to dialogue? Did you see dialogue taking place? Did you see any changes in yourself or other people at these KFA¹ dialogue sessions you attended over half a decade?

Howard Yeah, you would notice things and you would have I guess what I would call minor insights. Like, one of these weekly night dialogues there was a couple that was pretty much regulars and they actually had their own Zen center. But this one meeting, they were arguing with each other and the husband got up and stormed out. And it seemed like half of the other participants were on the male side and the other half were on the wife’s side. But somebody asked the wife; they said, “Why did you say that to him?” And her response was, “Well, I knew what he was going to say!” And literally, it was like I’m going, “Wow, I do that, too.” Or, “Everybody does that.” So it was kind of a seeing of a cultural norm. And every once in a while, somebody would say something about what thought’s doing or how it acts. And you look at that and see something that you hadn’t noticed about it. So, yeah, there was a lot of what seemed to be minor insights going on.

Matthew And how much of that dialogue time was spent discussing Krishnamurti’s direct proposals? How much was spent, kind of, people talking about their own observations into thought?

Howard Well, the interesting thing is, I don’t think they ever used any quotes or anything like that. It was looking at his teachings, but it wasn’t continually referring back to Krishnamurti. We were actually looking at something that he had said. Mark Lee was replaced by another fellow—I don’t know if we need to include this—but seemed like the KFA would want someone who was a better fundraiser, who was the director for a while. And then he left, and then Mark Lee came back, and he was more focused on the teachings. There was also a few different facilitators over the years. And I had another dialogue experience a number of years later where the facilitator said, “Well, thought’s a problem.” And I said, “Well, how do you know that?” And then she referred to a Krishnamurti quote. “No,” I said, “How do you know that?” [laughs]. You know, to go into it. But actually this got interrupted by some of my friends that told me I wasn’t listening [laughs]. It was a funny exchange. I said, “How do you know that? Are you privy to inside my head here?” And she said, “No, you leaned forward.” And I go, “Oh, okay.” This was interesting in a sense to me, because later on, there’s this notion of “go slower,” like you need to leave some space. And it’s led to this question that I’ll ask: Well, how long does it take to see something? I mean, if you’re looking at something, does it really take time? And I came across in Krishnamurti’s teaching somewhere, where he pointed out: when you get used to this observation and looking, it begins to move faster and faster and faster. That you initially were so unaccustomed to being aware of the movement of thought and just looking rather than interpreting—but when that becomes more like your natural state, it becomes effortless and moves faster.

Matthew I find this question fascinating, because, if I had a box, and there’s some object inside, we could look, and everyone could see, “Oh, it’s a red ball.” But why is it that when it comes to looking at thought, it doesn’t seem to have that ease of viewing? You’re foreshadowing some of the difficulties or problems that arise in the dialogue sessions, which I hope we’ll get into a fair bit later on, because I think a lot of people are interested in that and your experience with that. Because, as you’ll hear later in this podcast, starting in, I guess, this is 1986, but going on to today—I can’t even imagine the total number of dialogue sessions you’ve participated in, Howard.

Howard Yep [laughs]. Yeah, I can’t either.

Matthew And I didn’t realize how extensively, before you attended the Bohm seminars, you were attending these events at the KFA. You mentioned the weekly ones too; was that with students present?

Howard It was mostly some of the teachers from the school and then apparently a few that were staff, too. Actually back then, the staff center for the KFA was just right around the corner from the school, so that probably made it easier than when they moved the Krishnamurti Center over to the other side of the city.

Matthew And do you remember the sentiment at those meetings? These schools were a new experiment, a new attempt to support a human being in a very different way that’s done commonly in the common culture. Do you remember the kind of the sentiment, how it was going, the kind of things that were talked about in those weekly dialogues with teachers and staff?

Howard Well, it was always about Krishnamurti’s teaching, and it was quite pleasant. But around that time, there was also a lot of people having their own dialogues at their house and stuff, and then some of the other ones had more disruptive people, as they were called [laughs]. But my memory of them is quite pleasant, but my brain may be filtering out any of the stuff that’s not pleasant [laughs].

Matthew Do you remember the sentiment towards the whole experiment? Did people feel it was going well? Did people feel it was very challenging? Did people feel it wasn’t going well?

Howard For some reason, I don’t feel like that was so much the early times of that. It seems like as the time went on, then people started going, “This is a waste of time.” A lot of my early friends that I met there—one of them was the lady that was in the bookstore, when I went up there, and she became one of my longest-time friends. And a lot of these people just gave up after a few years. They said, “It’s not working. It’s same old stuff. Everybody says the same thing.” But, like I said, probably by that time, I had seen that I really didn’t have to—the dialogue, it didn’t have to go in any particular way for me to be observing what was going on. Because I think that the people that bailed out were saying, “Well, nothing’s happening. Nobody’s changed.” But they would also say, “I don’t get it either.” I think people were really enthused by it initially, but as a few years went on, a lot of people felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.

Matthew Yeah, thank you for that. And again, this sounds like this was roughly 1986 to 1990, 1991-ish.

Howard Yeah.

Matthew So you mentioned the Bohm seminars. How did you hear about them? And do you remember the year of the first one you attended?

Howard Yes. So I missed the—I’m not even sure exactly what happened in 1986; I know he did something. I’m not sure that it was at the school or not, but I didn’t hear about it until—I missed 1987, but a friend from the Krishnamurti biannual events asked me, “Are you going to the Bohm seminar?” And I said, “Is there one?” [laughs]. So I found out about it and then I signed up. And when I got there, they had these booklets, a transcript of the prior year. So I bought the 1987 transcript and was making all my notes in that on the 1988 one. I think I only went to one of the two; they were always November and December. And I think I just went to one of them because I figured that the other one was going to be probably fairly similar. But I felt each year might be a little bit different, which they were, to some extent. So I went from ‘88 through ‘92. And then actually the year after, they did another seminar without David, but Saral, his wife, was there and the four people that were running it, like Lee Nichol and Joe Zorskie and David Moody. And I always forget the fourth one.²

Matthew Yes. We have that written down somewhere. So did you attend the ‘93 one with Bohm absent as well?

Howard Yeah. With Saral Bohm, yeah. And then, yeah, I went to that too.

Matthew So that one from ‘88, what was it like? What was the atmosphere? How many people were there?

Howard Well, it wasn’t 80 people, but it was probably around 50. I found out recently—I think actually Mark Lee told it to me—that the optional dialogue day on a Monday after the weekend, the seminar, Bohm only did it once. And I guess I was lucky enough to go to that. And it seemed like pretty much everyone that was in the seminar from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday went to the dialogue and there was like 46 of us, but maybe there was a few more than that. So there was probably like 50 in the room for most of these seminars.

Matthew And how would it start?

Howard Well, with Bohm opening up with an introduction and he sometimes mentioned, “We probably went over some of this last year, but I’m going to still open it up.” So he would just open it up and talk for a while and then periodically would invite questions. And especially after we’d take a break and then come back in, he would ask again, if any questions came up for anybody. But most of it, he was talking most of the time.

Matthew I imagine you read some Bohm’s work before attending the dialogue? You mentioned you had the previous transcript of the talk before. Had you read any of his other works?

Howard I imagine so. I haven’t actually looked at that, but I must have probably bought—I know I had early books, like Unfolding Meaning, Wholeness and the Implicate Order… But I’m not sure, the dates on that, when I actually did that. And of course, The Ending of Time was available. And given that I pretty much bought every Krishnamurti book I could find, I imagine I picked up that one.

Matthew Yeah, that’s fair. And do you remember, was there a difference hearing Bohm live as opposed to reading his past material?

Howard Well, he—what I noticed about him was how mild-mannered and kind and quiet he was, but then, of course, everything he was saying, the way he answered questions and stuff was, it just—mind-boggling how sharp his mind was. I actually only talked to him one time when we went up to the snack table [laughs] and said hi to each other or something like that. But I didn’t spend any time with him one-on-one.

Matthew Right. And how long would a session go on for?

Howard Well, it was—I’m trying to remember it if we started at nine or something… Like hour and a half, and they’d take a short break and then go on for another hour or so, and then there’d be a lunch break, and then same kind of thing in the afternoon, like for an hour, hour and a half, and then break, and then another hour, hour and a half.

Matthew One of the things Bohm would talk about is the importance of people really examining the things he was pointing to, a necessity and looking at these things of people getting together and actually addressing the root cause of these problems of humanity, we sometimes call them. Was there that element in these meetings, were people enthusiastic about taking these proposals and doing something with them, with getting together? Or did it more—people would find the seminar very interesting, but it just disband for another year?

Howard Yeah, I don’t—probably some of that creeped into the other, Krishnamurti dialogues, let’s say, but I never came across any of them that were like the groups from the seminars getting together. Although, there were a couple of—actually, one of the groups that was formed in a different part of town, down in Santa Monica, down in east of or west of LA… There was apparently a number of different groups that were formed out of people that met at the seminars, and yeah, one of the groups that I was attending in Santa Monica was formed out of people that had gone to the Bohm seminar. But the dialogues were still more about Krishnamurti’s work and not so much studying what Bohm had said.

Matthew Right. And you had that half a decade of experience with dialogue from the Krishnamurti Foundation and your own direct experience with it. Did attending these Ojai seminars change your view of dialogue, change your approach to it, change your lived experience of it?

Howard Well, I was still pretty enthused on this, so I actually started a couple of groups up and down in LA and I still kept attending the weekly dialogues I think all the way up into the nineties. Then I’d stopped going up to Ojai as much and I had created a couple of groups down in the LA area.

Matthew Those groups in LA, if you had to guess, what year would you say you started those?

Howard Probably the mid-nineties, I’d say.

Matthew Mid-nineties. Gotcha. And the last Bohm seminar without Bohm was ‘93. And you mentioned that one of these and one alone, there was an attempt at an actual dialogue session. You happened to be present for that. Could you describe your experience with that particular dialogue session?

Howard Yeah. The way that I recall it is, the first thing was—I guess, a little background: By this time, I know I had read Bohm’s views on dialogue, and one of the things that he said is, you need to have this large group of 40 people. So for a while I was trying to start a large group, and this is where I began to see how difficult it would be to get more than, say—once you get over 10 people, it starts to get more… chaotic, let’s say. And the idea of having 40 people in a dialogue was—I gave up that idea fairly quick when I realized that that kind of group would require a lot of serious people committed to doing this continually for quite a time, and with new people coming on in all the time, that’s literally impossible. So anyways, back to the optional day of dialogue. So pretty much, like I said, there was like 46 of us in this room, and initially, somebody would say something and pretty much everybody would look over to Bohm and see what he was going to say [laughs]. But pretty quickly people, I think, noticed he wasn’t going to play into that. He stayed out of being a facilitator or a controller. But the reason why I think the dialogue was able to work for somewhat is because this whole group had just spent Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday listening to Bohm and asking questions and looking. So when they got to Monday, it seems like everybody was somewhat in this listening mode, but after a while it did get into some polarization. What I remember about it, there was so much energy in the room, with all these people, I literally had the felt sense, I could feel that this was the microcosm of the macrocosm, which revealed to me one of the reasons that Bohm wanted to have large groups, because you literally can feel that, that this movement that’s happening in the room is what’s happening in the whole world. I think the reason why you could feel it was because of having all this energy in the room. So that’s my recollection of that group. I don’t remember the topic that we had, but he didn’t present a topic; it was just putting people in a room, and at some point somebody brings something up, and then they move into it.

Matthew But you mentioned this very simple notion of people getting together and observing together, looking together, rather than relying on the response of memory, the response of thought and knowledge. Now, it seems to me it would be a very radical thing if people got together and were able to just look together. And to some extent, that seems to be part of Bohm and Krishnamurti’s general project. In the common culture, a certain activity is going on, but in a microcosm, if some of us could get together and really act more from perception, observation, rather than from knowledge, thought, memory, that in of itself would be a very different set of activity going on. I believe to some extent you could argue this was attempted in both the Krishnamurti schools, the dialogue groups, the study centers. I’m going to tie this into dialogue more generally. Some people feel, even some people who are part of the original organizers of Bohm Ojai seminars—I’m pretty sure I heard one of them say they feel it’s been a failed experiment. Others say quite the opposite, that we’ve just scratched the surface; we’ve barely begun this experiment. And this problem of communication arises whenever human beings get together. So this is an incredibly viable path to go down because we have to face the problem of communication. And have you heard of a better vision to face the problems of communication? So what’s your general take on this whole thing? Does dialogue have a deep promise to support human culture going in a coherent and good direction? Does it have a promise to help us explore the root cause of humanity’s problems, the origins of human conflict? Is it a failed experiment? What’s your take on it?

Howard Well, I always go with my own personal direct experience, which is, it’s radically changed my life. And there have been—actually, I would say there was that one major insight into what I would describe as a direct seeing of the limited nature of thought. And that happened in a dialogue group. And so my own direct experience is that this shift in consciousness can occur with an insight into the nature of thought. And again, that happened in dialogue. So regardless of how challenging it seems to be for people to do what you were just pointing to, to come in and to be really open to observing and listening, as challenging as that generally seems to be for the general populace, there is that possibility. It seems like, again, because of how ingrained the conditioning is, there has to be an incredible seriousness. And even one of the thoughts that comes up for me is, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. Essentially, it seems like it has to be the central thing in your life to really get at the root of this. Otherwise, it seems like it’s not up to the task of breaking through this condition patterns.

Matthew Unfortunately, that is the appearance to me as well. And I say unfortunately, because I wish it was a bit of an easier thing; I wish it was just something that anyone could just take, pick up. And you never want to be elitist or exclusionary. But at the same time, there are certain activities that take a degree of seriousness in order for them to work. Anyone could say, “I like quantum physics,” but to become a quantum physicist is not—you know, years of schooling, effort, sustained interests, reading… And I’m not trying to say this is equivalent, but I’m just using that as an example. I feel like this is something where if you’re just toying with it, you’re just playing with it, you’re just flirting with it, probably not much will result from it. It’s not going to do harm to you. You might feel a bit more peaceful. You might have some nice ideas to repeat to others, but it can stay at the intellectual level quite easily. And that is one complaint, I will say from my own direct experience, that often this seems like an intellectual affair with no significant change in behavior of the participants sometimes. I know other people have run dialogue groups and some describe them going well, others describe a lot of difficulties. Can you talk about the variation of what you’ve seen, what you think is a fair expectation of the process?

Howard I had recently had a—I have a lot of Zoom dialogues that I do. And one of the last ones was just—people were bringing in Advaita things and Course in Miracles things and just… It was an awful dialogue. But I didn’t want to reject people or anything like that. I think this is something that we all could benefit from, learning about ourselves. And I do this whenever I’m at a dialogue and I see anyone that—I ask people often, “Have you ever experienced dialogue?” If they haven’t, I will often read a quote or two from Krishnamurti. And I’ll just read this one quote that I used last night. So he said, “To take such a journey we must travel light; we cannot be burdened with opinions, prejudices, and conclusions—all that old furniture we have collected for the last two thousand years and more. Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.”³ So I use quotes like that to try to invite people, not as a rule, but to look and see, “Okay.” I mean, this is the invitation of the dialogues I’m doing: Okay, you read a lot of stuff, but let’s get at the root. Let’s see for ourselves. Let’s observe what’s actually going on in us. And you can’t do that if your mind’s caught up in knowing. If you’re—see, what I think generally happens in most people’s consciousnesses is they think they’re listening and looking, but they’re literally translating what they’re hearing to see if it matches up with their background or what they think is true or false. It’s being filtered through the belief and opinion structure. “No, that’s right.” “No, no, I don’t know, that’s wrong.” Because we literally think that this content that we have is truth. So there isn’t this just listening in a way that you really want to see what the other person’s words are pointing to. You want not to just latch on to a verbal description. That’s what words are literally for, is to point to something. And in general, like when you mentioned the red ball, we could see the red ball. We’re talking about human consciousness. So if there’s an observation of this movement of thought and consciousness, it’s pretty much doing the same kind of thing in every brain. So we should be able to observe what thought’s doing in what we call our brain. And I suggest it’ll reveal the processing and the thought forms that are in pretty much every brain.

Matthew And that sounds like a very reasonable proposal. And it seems like Bohm’s vision of dialogue, Krishnamurti’s vision of dialogue, these have both been around for a significant period of time. And it really feels to me like this experiment hasn’t been attempted sufficiently. I feel like—I think I used the words “scratching the surface.” I still feel like we’re there. These are very new. If you look at human history, we just got these, and a handful of people have tried them, and we’ve seen some fail and some produce very interesting effects. And then I imagine, if there was actually like a physical center, a place where people were deadly serious about this, they might even be able to take it to a different level. Now, Howard, I realize it’s 2025. So next year will be 2026. That would be 40 years of doing dialogue for you, starting in ‘86. I did the math right.

Howard Yeah [laughs].

Matthew And I know you have dialogue groups now, a variety of them. Some you operate on your own, some other people, some I believe are associated with the Krishnamurti Foundation America. Is that correct?

Howard That’s correct. Yeah. Right.

Matthew So, four decades of doing dialogue. I imagine you wouldn’t have continued with it if you didn’t see a kind of value in doing so. Is there any particular advice or guidance you would give to someone wanting to get into dialogue, but they may or may not have people in their area that share that interest?

Howard It would be beneficial if you have some friends that are interested in doing this with you. I’ve tried to help people start dialogues. I almost helped a couple people in the Phoenix area get one going, but enough people didn’t keep showing up. But at the KFA, people will come in and I always ask, “Where are you coming from?” So, when I find somebody in an area, I try to get them to get together and start their own group. But it’s like—I agree perfectly with Bohm saying that you need to have either the first couple of sessions looking at the nature of dialogue together, or even there’s the other more controversial one of have someone that’s actually familiar with it be there. Or, I guess Bohm said, to have a seminar with someone who actually understands the process to some significant degree, which you would still probably use Bohm’s pointers if you’re going to do a Bohm dialogue. I have a few different lists that I’ve made with regard to Bohm’s pointers about dialogue. But there’s in the Krishnamurti circle, there’s always a resistance to this notion of somebody might know more than somebody else [laughs]. And that’s a good skepticism in the sense of when you really go into this, it isn’t really about knowledge; it’s about seeing and observation, observing how life actually does what it does versus the story that we store about that seeing. I think over time we’ve forgotten that when you learn through observation and listening and your senses essentially, then thought makes a narrative about whatever was learned. And then we give extreme importance to that narrative about something which wasn’t the actual seeing or learning. As far as starting a group or doing—I guess one other thing I want to say is, I have yet to find any better way for people to learn about themselves and observe the nature of the conditioning that we have outside a dialogue, because even if somebody has a bigger platform like Jim Carrey, and he starts talking about wholeness, it’s still just at the level of intellectual. It has to be seen directly, and again, to me, that’s always the challenge: the seeing versus interpreting it, evaluating what you’re seeing. But the option is there for any human brain that’s not damaged, just observe.

Matthew And how would you respond to the sentiment that came out later on, where—I think it was Lee Nichol’s article where he said, Bohm felt people weren’t doing enough work outside of dialogue.⁴ It’s also my contention with the vision of dialogue, which obviously I’m—it’s an experiment that interests me deeply, but also there’s something—it’s like school. It’s like in school, you go to this place and you’re supposed to learn there, but then you step outside school and you’re in life. And it’s a bit of an artificial construct. In the same way, I feel like you could say with dialogue, there’s some element of that: you’re getting together intentionally for a period of time, but you’re spending a minority of your time in this dialogue group. So obviously there’s great importance to what you do outside of the dialogue group. So how would you respond to that question of, will dialogue work if people aren’t engaging in a serious activity outside of the dialogue group? What do people have to do outside of the dialogue group? Should there even be a difference between the fundamental activity inside and outside of dialogue?

Howard Well, I would definitely say it’s helpful to do it, to be aware of what’s going on with thought in relationship, essentially all the time. But what was coming up for me—so I work at the KFA three days a week, and they sometimes have resident scholars there, young people that come to just study the teachings. And sometimes they just study on their own. And they don’t bother coming to—we have Wednesday night dialogues and Saturday dialogues and they often don’t come to them. And when I talk to them about this, I suggest this is where—I mean, you need to do both. You need to be observing yourself outside of dialogue… Like he said, you need to do the homework. If you’re serious about this, you’ll do it. But if you’re not serious, it would just be like a hobby or part-time. But in the dialogue is where—one of the things that came up from Bohm was that we all have assumptions that are stored in the brain as absolutely true, unquestionable. They’re just—so we have those ideas that they never come up to be questioned because they’re assumed to be unquestionable. And in a dialogue—so if you’re just by yourself and you’re not in a dialogue, you’re not likely to ever question that. But if you’re together with other people, someone will often say something that directly conflicts with one of those assumed ideas. And so it brings it up into awareness. And after I looked at that—I had also tried, with another friend, to start a dialogue with a Green Party group, a political party. And that one there, one of the fellows said, “Capitalism is the best system there is.” It’s just to try to give you—it’s not the best one—but somebody else in the group took issue with that, just like Bohm’s examples of the Zionism stuff at those early dialogues that he had; someone would say something critical about Zionism, but the person that really feels Zionism is the central thing for them, they don’t question it. They’re not going to question it outside of a dialogue group where somebody else might question it. So I think both are essential. I agree with Bohm that—but if you’re not really doing it as a lifestyle, then you’re not real serious about it.

Matthew I like those examples. It seems, in the current culture, the ability for people who disagree with each other to listen to each other and communicate with each other civilly, at least in my four-plus decades on the planet, seems to have degenerated. I don’t know if that’s your view as well or not, but it concerns me that people with different views are unable to communicate with each other, because we’ve seen historically when people don’t communicate, then it just gets worse and worse and usually leads to violence or something else drastic.

Howard Yeah. And actually, Bohm and K, one of their last conversations was The Future of Humanity. And they’re talking about, we’re headed towards catastrophe unless we have a change in consciousness. So I had this notion that, maybe with dialogue, I could play some small part in preventing a collapse, because basically this notion was—I was also looking at human nature and seeing that pretty much humans will avoid changing until some sort of painful thing happens that forces them to look at what’s going on. Otherwise if they’re feeling okay, they just don’t bother looking at this. So I noticed that dialogue was a way to observe what’s going on now instead of waiting until things get so awful that it forces you to look at it. But as of recently, I was looking around and I’ve come to the conclusion that a collapse is coming whether we like it or not. So I downgraded my expectations to “perhaps I can play a small part in helping people learn to cooperate.” If you can see the falseness of this self-center and see that, no, we are literally all in this together, then we can cooperate instead of shooting each other whenever the resources get short. But to go over to Bohm’s example of the indigenous group the anthropologist was observing… You know, this group comes together and just talks and talks and talks until everybody apparently understands what’s going on and what everybody else is doing, and then they disband and go back to their everyday life. And a friend asked me about that, what’s the difference between the Bohm dialogues or K dialogues that we do and that. And to me, we’re so conflicted, like I think you pointed out before, we’re so, attached—I don’t really think that’s the best word because it implies that there’s an I that’s attached—but we’re giving so much significance to these beliefs and opinions that we have that we find it difficult to come together and actually listen to each other. So I like Bohm’s example of what dialogue could be, but it seems to me, until we see the nature of this divisive self-centeredness, what Bohm called a self-worldview, and see that it really isn’t something important—it’s actually rather poisonous and divisive—we won’t be able to, in general, come together and have that kind of listening and talking to each other. I would suggest that the tribe or the group that he was observing, they saw themselves as together, not as adversaries, but we grow up in this culture that’s all about competition rather than cooperation, so we see each other as adversaries. I’m sure your experience reflects the same thing. It’s hard to get any kind of group together and actually have people listen to each other.

Matthew Yes. And like you said, if the participants aren’t serious—well, it’s funny. Sometimes people stay around because it’s just a pleasant “hey, we get to talk.” It’s like the same reason someone might go to a philosophy meetup group and just, “I want to share my knowledge. I want to talk.” So sometimes you get a group that doesn’t really get uncomfortable. It doesn’t really challenge each other’s assumptions and beliefs and stays on a more pleasant level. And it’s a pleasant way to pass the time, but it remains very intellectual, and not much is happening. Other times you get a lot of conflict and disagreement and confusion. “Are we doing dialogue? What’s dialogue? Is this dialogue? Is this allowed in dialogue? What’s thought?” And it doesn’t seem to move beyond there easily. And then people get bored just being stuck in that place. Then sometimes you have that flow where, like you said, people are just actually observing and perceiving rather than relying on their memories. And that’s such a beautiful quality.

Howard Yeah.

Matthew You can recognize it and feel it when it’s present. And I’ve seen it enough times that I don’t know how far dialogue can go or how supportive it can be, but to me, it seems like an unavoidable proposal. If you get human beings together, they’re going to have to communicate. In the present state, there’s a lot of difficulties that arise in communication. And you really have to observe these difficulties as they arrive to understand them. You can’t just reflect and think about them, but you have to have that. Like you said, very early on, you have to see and understand the problem for yourself directly through perception. But when people actually do this, it does seem to be a different quality. I think, for example, when we have our board meetings, even though we’re not attempting dialogue, it’s a very different kind of communication where we can absolutely challenge each other to our face, and there’s no animosity. There’s this desire to learn and see and perceive what actually is the case. But I don’t know how far that can go, because it feels like, again, it’s hard to get serious people together, especially in a local area, sustain that for a significant period of time. But I know we’re not going to stop going down this path. It’s a direction that we continue to want to seriously explore and document and hopefully even get some participation from the scientific community to help us rigorously look at what’s going on in the dialogue group. Something I imagine you’re going to continue for as long as you’re able to.

Howard [Laughs.] I do have thoughts that come up of like, “Do I really want to keep doing this?” But it just keeps going [laughs]. It doesn’t—essentially, I don’t see anything that’s more important. But I was going to mention, as far as the seriousness goes… I have the sense—this is just a proposal I’m making—that to really be serious, I think you have to see to some degree more than just your own personal life; you have to see what’s happening around you. Because if you learn that we’re headed for difficulties, but you’re doing okay, then it sometimes isn’t enough to get you to look at something. But if you had kids, say, you become, “Well, what’s the world gonna be like for my kids?” Or if you care about what’s happening in Gaza or something like that—it seems like you have to have some degree also of concern for what’s going on around you and not just your own personal desires. I also feel, again, that the seriousness is unlikely if you’re not somewhat attentive to what humanity’s doing.

Matthew I feel like, perhaps, in the past, it was more natural to have that sense of, we’re a caretaker of the Earth, that we’re responsible for the Earth and the people on it, and this modern world has created very different individualistic ways of thinking.

Howard I want to add, I think that this is one of the reasons why Krishnamurti and probably Bohm were emphasizing this contact with nature. That’s where you can get in touch with what’s called the sacred and feeling the necessity to preserve this. That’s one of the problems of how we’ve all moved into cities and isolated ourselves from nature and cut ourselves off from life in some sense.

Matthew Yeah. That’s a whole another subject that actually—I want to have a podcast on just that particular subject. I think it would be quite interesting. And I think there’d be a lot of different people who would have meritful things to say in that area, obviously, including Bohm and Krishnamurti. And interestingly, from my more recent conversations with Lee Nichol, this is also a direction he’s very much exploring, this question of, can we have thought perception or thought sense if we don’t have strong body perception or body sense? And obviously, people who lived in nature previously had a much stronger connection and relationship to it. Probably a very natural and inevitable one. Well, I’m very grateful for your time today, Howard, and sharing your experience, and I’m sure we’ll talk again in a future podcast on similar or maybe different subjects. But I very much appreciated speaking with you today. And thank you to our audience for listening. This podcast can be found on all major platforms, including Apple and Spotify. And again, we do hope to release episodes more frequently. It’s just—we have a lot of work and few people. Have a good day, everyone.