Conversation Among David Bohm, Peter Garrett, Henrik Tschudi, Don Factor and Sven Björk
Individual Creativity and a Higher Form of Intelligence in Dialogue
DAVID BOHM: People gradually learn to give space to each other, so this requires sensitivity because they realize the dialogue is more than to have their own point of view expressed to keep the dialogue going.
HENRIK TSCHUDI: We seem to cling to our own separate personality, part of the fragmentation that you’ve been talking about many times, getting into a dialogue and if this flows in the right way it should create a higher, a different form of intelligence, you’ve said that, too. How would you manage, how would you vision to have this increased or this different form of intelligence come out at the same time preserving the individual creativity?
DAVID BOHM: Yes, see, in this dialogue there is no view, no assumptions are being imposed if it is working right. There is complete freedom. A collective mind does not mean that it’s like a dictatorship or a mob, right? But each one is free. What it means is that if somebody has a different view the whole group will listen to that view and assimilate it along with the others, so the individual is free to make a creative contribution to the group and the group will listen. But also, there’s a kind of creativity of the group as a whole because people can, see, we can do what I call thinking together. Usually we think separately and we argue about it or we try to convince each other, persuade each other, or I may absorb a bit of your thought to improve my own. But when you’re thinking by yourself, you go from one idea to another to another. If you’re really serious you’re not doing that, right? If we are thinking together, then whatever one person’s thought would be taken up the other, then it would not belong to anybody, so it would be an extension of the process of individual thought into the group. I think that would create the possibility of a higher kind of intelligence than the individual is capable of. So, certain things can be done that way which the individual cannot do, but also the individual makes his own creative contribution, too.
HENRIK TSCHUDI: And the result is this higher kind of intelligence, is this what is what you have exemplified by this hunter-gatherer way of doing things, that something ought to be done sitting down and the result of this higher form intelligence would an action which seem to flow out of it, it that correct?
DAVID BOHM: Yes, which would adapt to the situation. You see, the main point is the different spirit with which everything is done, so that we are all not against each other but so we’re all working together and thinking together. So therefore, when they’re hunting, they don’t have to make a plan beforehand, but in each moment they will understand each other and make the appropriate communication and action together. On the other hand, you see, if people are competitive and each one is thinking, “Am I going to do better than the other?…that animal’s mine,” and so on, it wouldn’t work.