The concluding panel of Part One of the Beyond Bohm event will examine work in progress in various areas related to Bohm’s thought.
The session will start with the panelists describing which developments of Bohm’s thought they consider most important for their work, for their life and for philosophy in general.
David Bohm’s writing on creativity was not directed exclusively at art works, instead it sought to outline a more foundational capacity in any one of us – or in any human discipline – for new orders of perception and understanding. First and foremost, he explained, we need to awaken the necessary ‘creative mind state’ which is supressed by the unrecognized “boss reality” of Western thought, language and the associated entrapment of the self-image. Bohm’s is a dynamic model of creativity open to entanglements of mind, body, language, conceptual abstraction, non-human matter and infinity, the nature of which is to be continually unfolding, to be generative. His expanded notion of what constitutes an ‘artform’ is radical and speaks to contemporary, speculative approaches towards ever opening up an animate world of which we are a participant.
For those who have surveyed David Bohm’s version of dialogue and the larger theoretical context from which it emerged, a trove of concepts and definitions will be familiar: participatory thought, literal thought, thought of type “A” and type “B”, representations, collective representations.
Reaching back through recorded history, into the multivalent worlds of oral tradition, Indigenous people have long indicated knowledge of how the world comes into being, and how humans can live in accord with this perpetual ”coming into being.” This knowledge is expressed through origin stories, ceremonial activity, ritual enactment and renewal, paradoxical language play, and trickster humor – it permeates all aspects of daily life in traditional cultures.
Human consciousness is a shared space. As individuals, we are born into an inherited socio-cultural matrix from which almost all of what we think and do derives. As Bohm points out, thought is a material process which pervades and dominates us.
We need to realise that we are participants. We must make a basic shift: from literal thought to participatory thought, a process in which we partake of consciousness. This can then become a kind of “food” which, in our times, we so desperately need.
Dip with Beth Macy into her research archives of the lineage of Bohm’s dialogue. Pursue with her core aspects of each lineage member’s own early lifetime wounding as well as later cultural and professional alienation, and the impact of these dynamics on lineage members’ resulting contributions to Bohm’s ideas of “participation” in dialogue. And then, explore the meaning as it flows through the whole of the lineage and those to whom dialogue’s participative spiral of meaning unfolds, transforms and re-enfolds.
It may be “auspicious coincidence” – or otherwise – but the first five of the sessions in Beyond Bohm 2 are in one way or another related to participatory consciousness. This overlap occurred without any intention on the part of the individuals who put together each of the sessions. It is likely then, that this topic will figure into our final summary session, though any of the topics addressed in the preceding weeks may come to the fore – especially in the extended discussion and Q &A with those attending this final segment of Beyond Bohm. And in the spirit of dialogue, something completely new may emerge, unforeseen by any plan or agenda.
At the very least, our brains help to shape our consciousness. Can an examination of the way in which they do so help us to reconcile different visons of ourselves and of our world? There is nothing reductionist about asking such a question: rather, McGilchrist shall suggest, it helps us to transcend the limitations of reductionism itself. Importantly it may, for the first time, give philosophy a basis for judging certain views on the world as worthier of acceptance than others.
Indigenous peoples alive today are rooted in a consciousness of Earth that once provided the guiding mode of consciousness for humans but which at this point in time most of the rest of humanity has lost. The mainstream mode of consciousness is the “anthropocentric” or human-centered mode—a consciousness of objects, causality, competition and hierarchy that focuses on the individual self and on the conflict for survival of the individual. By contrast, the holomorphic or Earth-Mind consciousness is a holistic awareness; it’s an awareness of living in dynamic balance with other beings as “relatives,” including mountains, trees, rivers, wind. It’s an awareness of the deeply metaphoric nature of our relationship to reality and of our obligation to engage in “reciprocity” with all beings, animate or inanimate.
In this two-hour webinar, divided into two forty-minute presentation sessions followed by twenty minutes for questions and debate, Coleman will lead a discussion about the perception and interpretation of signs and symbols at it relates to music notation. The discourse will encircle Coleman’s Music: It IS Rocket Science and the many disciplines that inform the study and contemplation and performance of music. We will explore the history of music notation and contemplate the notion of music as language. Coleman will demonstrate at the piano the diverse performance outcomes that arise from the often confusing, different published editions of a single work. Webinar attendees will be encouraged to actively engage in discussion, and they will be provided with links to materials that can be perused in advance of the scheduled session.