Experiments in Collective Consciousness
What we learned from doing Bohmian Dialogue at a festival
In July 2021, some friends and I held some Bohmian Dialogues at Buddahfield festival under the name The Collective Consciousness Experiment. This post is about what we learned and will take forward into the next experiment.
If you’re not familiar with this process, you can read about what Bohmian Dialogue is, and how it shaped my intentional community. This post will be most relevant to you if you’ve experienced a Bohmian Dialogue and are thinking of holding one yourself.
Experiential learning
Many people have felt a sense of ‘not getting it’ leading them to feel disparaged. Our aim is to facilitate experiential learning, which requires minimal input and dealing with that feeling of not knowing is part of the journey. We have outlined some new principles below which will help with this.
And perhaps you could start with some guiding questions: How can we create connection in this group? What does collective consciousness feel like? Refrain from intellectualising, stay in your body. Are you feeling connected to others here? Why? Why not? Would you like to share why or why not? One way to frame Bohmian Dialogue is a meta-conversation about what’s happening between us here and now.
Proposed new principles
We’ve found that the principles (which weren’t written by Bohm) are not actually all that helpful; some are obtuse and pseudo-spiritual. So we’ve tried to distil our own principles. We feel these principles are not only relevant when in a Bohmian Dialogue, the ethos of each could be tried when communicating at any time, especially when things start to get tense.
So here are the principles:
- Breath — Allow one breath after each person speaks. This is an opportunity to connect to ourselves and become aware of what’s happening between us. The ‘between us’ part is super key. If we don’t slow down, take a breathe, and allow some silence, it becomes a normal conversation with people slipping into status quo, habitual ways of relating to each other. Breathing allows more space for considering the questions mentioned above and the ones in the section.
2. Stay in the present moment (or a few seconds into the past) — Stay here and now. What’s coming up for you in the present? What’s it like to be here in this space with these people? What thoughts are arising in you? What does it feel like to be in your body right now? Observe these things and if it feels like sharing might bring you into deeper connection with those around you please do.
We want to keep things in the present and in the relational, rather than abstract, lofty ideas. In a Bohmian, we want to focus on how we feel in ourselves within this group space, and feelings that arise from the interactions that happen between us or anything else we notice. It can be about anything as long as it’s rooted in the present. This is first and foremost an experience, rather than a philosophical exploration.
3. Follow genuine curiousity — Ask questions that you actively want to know the answer to and be curious about those around you, for example, who needs to speak, or how does that person feel about that interaction that just happened? Who hasn’t spoken? What are they feeling and thinking? Maybe they’re nervous or bored? Why not ask them?
Try to sense the individual and collective energies. Try to notice who needs to speak with something ‘burning’ to be said and prompt them to share. This practice is about lightly encouraging everyone to make the implicit explicit.
4. Radical honesty & vulnerability — This is about sharing what’s really going on within us. When I pretend to myself and those around me, I’m not in connection with them. I’m pretending to feel something I’m not and that’s dishonest. Share anything you’re feeling even if you feel bored, share what’s true for you. It’s OK to say “I’m not feeling engaged”. Saying something like that immediately brings people back into connection because there’s honesty and vulnerability present.
Undoubtedly, there will be so many assumptions, judgements, and stories arising in us about each other. Name them. And as mentioned below, it is us bringing the process who need to demonstrate this.
It can be hard to share when you don’t really know what’s going on. But the beauty is that you can share that! Say “I’m confused about what’s going here/in inside of me”. And then people can ask me questions to help you figure it out.
It can also be difficult to be radically honest when we’re afraid of hurting someone else’s feelings. A nice trick is to clearly label a judgement as just that: “I have a story that …”. This creates distance between you and the judgement, i.e., “I don’t believe my judgments, they’re just stories”. This is rooted in the Buddhist practice of detaching from your thoughts, not seeing them as central to your ego, but a momentary experience.
If you want to share a story/judgement with someone, we recommend asking “Can I share a story I have about you with you? Are you willing to hear it right now?” This way we can get consent before sharing judgements of others. This practice can help air the things that are blocking the connection.
This is one way we can try to create a safer space. We encourage people to use their judgement in terms of what to share with extra sensitivity around identities that suffer from oppression.
What else did we learn?
Meditation
The session starts with a meditation to help people connect to what’s going on for them. I recently did an insight dialogue retreat in which we regularly paused to feel into our bodies, which ties in with the principle above about breathing.
This is useful because I often feel unable to access my emotions and their causes when I’m in a group space, especially one where I’m talking or actively participating. A meditation that guides people through connecting to themselves and then focusing on others in the room, opening eyes and still feeling into one’s own body as we look around the room and see others doing the same. Feel free to make up your own meditation that helps people stay present with themselves while getting curious about the inner workings of those around us. If you come up with something, I’d love to hear it!
The setting
Obviously, the setting for the process plays a major role. Sound and heat disrupting our process and contributed to the feeling of disconnect and distance because we sometimes couldn’t hear each other. So try to minimise distractions by holding it in a quiet, chill space.
We ran four sessions and found that the first one, although there was 18 people present, worked quite well. Others with a similar number did not work well due to the large number of people and the previously mentioned conditions. Sitting close together seems to be key, although we were restricted by Covid regulations.
So you wanna bring the Bohmian?
So you wanna bring Bohmian to your community or friends? There’s some things to note about ‘facilitating’ a Bohmian dialogue. Ultimately, we learned that this isn’t a facilitated space in the traditional sense. Although we’re bringing the process, we’re not facilitators and we need to let go of fixing things.
It’s equally facilitated by all of us taking part. Make people aware that if this space isn’t working for them, they should speak up, it’s s shared responsibility. This links to the principle about being curious about others: if you think something isn’t working for someone share that as a story that you’re having about them.
It’s hard not to feel like you need to guide the process, but the point is to fully live as yourself in the process with the experience you bring from having done Bohmian’s for a while, i.e., embodying and modelling the experience. This could look like amplifying the meta-conversation by naming what’s happening and sharing how it makes me feel. When people share stories, voice that you feel disconnected if that’s what you feel. Ask meta-conversation questions. You could potentially interrupt people to bring them back to the present moment, but I’m not feeling so clear on how I’d do that without hurting someone.
Julyan Davey suggested a technique used in Possibility Management to prevent people from giving the facilitator (or the person they perceive to be the facilitator) power, that is, treating the space holder as an authority figure, for example, if someone is only talking to and looking at the space holder. To deal with this, you can simply name it. When you perceive someone giving you power to you, you point it out, and request that they not give their power away.
“You have to die first” is what someone recently told me about trying to normalise vulnerability.
We hope you found the experience illuminated some of the implicit aspects of all that happens between us. Here’s to those of you brave enough to take part!
Thanks to Matilde, Sjoerd de Koning, and Julyan Davey for bringing the Bohmian with me.
