Imagining Imagination

Imagining Imagination

with Richard Burg, Beth Macy and Lee Nichol

Saturday July 9, 2022
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

In 1978, as David Bohm was bringing forth his vision of the implicate order, he pointed out that, rather than being a new model, “I regard the implicate order as a new form of imagination.” There are many potential lines of inquiry bound up in this statement. Among those that we will take up are: What did Bohm mean by “a new form of imagination”? How might this differ from a model? We tend to think that descriptions and models are either literal or metaphorical – but are there aspects of imagination that are neither of these? Could a renewed and revitalized imagination itself the key to this inquiry?

To illustrate how these questions regarding imagination can have practical applications, the second portion of this session will consider a two-year experiment into Bohm’s notion of “holoflux.” At the core of this process is an approach to embodiment called rheosoma, the flowing body – itself an experiment in “Bohmian” imagination.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

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The Panel

Richard Burg – In 2003 I retired from consulting, my fourth career (IT, potter, Continuing Medical Education research). Simple Idea worked with corporate leaders to integrate human values and productivity in a constantly changing environment – engaging with teams and individuals to build relationships within the organization that nurture the humanity in everyone, even as they work together to achieve audacious goals.

In 1990 a friend sent me a transcript of a talk given by David Bohm at MIT. In my organization development practice – focused on changing corporate cultures – group work was a built-in aspect of the process. Bohm’s dialogue experiment was thus enticing, and I discovered a Bohmian dialogue group in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I attended weekly for the next eight years. Stemming from that group, Lee Nichol and I designed a nine-hour, multi-day introduction to Bohm’s experiment at the first National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation in Washington DC. I have since engaged in dialogue in many different contexts – most recently, like many, in online dialogues, before and during the covid pandemic.

Early on in my dialogue work, I received permission to transcribe the little pamphlet, Dialogue: A Proposal (D. Bohm, D. Factor, and P. Garrett) and post it online via colleagues at MIT. It is still available, in multiple “versions,” some with several addenda/commentaries.

Richard is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing)

Beth Macy, PhD, organizational consultant, Bohmian dialogue practitioner

The common thread weaving through Beth’s career has been change, having been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues:  organizations from small to large, private to public, non-profit to profit, health care to oil and gas, local to global. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is completing a book on the ideas and individuals who influenced Bohm’s methodology of dialogue.

Beth is a contributor the the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing)

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movment/Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. Lee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.