Quick tip: if you are eating or drinking anything with diet, lite (light), or low-fat on the package label, then you are eating or drinking too much of it. Switch to the non-diet, full-fat version. If the amount consumed is truly your concern, then eat or drink less of that product. Your body will thank you for the simpler and less processed food you will consume, and your mind will thank you for disposing of the diet / lite / low-fat label.

Anxiety. Anxiety is a projection away from the present moment into the future — near futures, far futures, imagined futures. It’s the mind spinning its wheels in possibilities that have not occurred, and in most cases will not occur. It’s those topics that stoke our worries and fears.

Recently I was spinning my mental wheels, anxious of another conceivable and troubling circumstance. This wasn’t a new topic, but a fear that my thoughts often turn to. It isn’t important what that topic is — it’s one of those persistent, runaway thoughts that we wish we could move on from. As I wondered again how I could move my thoughts away from that anxious topic, a simple analogy occurred to me: thought takes up space.

Thought, it generally seems, is an insubstantial thing, drifting in, moving from one to the next. In common language we don’t have a good way to concretize thought. Perhaps it’s simple, though — it may be that “thought” can be conceived as something that takes up space. After all, we would naturally say that thought takes time. Modern physics relates time to space, saying they are one in the same. This analogy, that thought is spacious, may be useful as a tool to prune unwanted thoughts from our mental landscape. If thoughts take up space, then one way to end unwanted thought is to slowly replace it with something else in that same space.

Imagine then that your mind is a vast garden landscape. The plant life within this garden are your varying thoughts: wanted, unwanted, controlled, uncontrolled, graceful, spontaneous. If we desire new, constructive, desirable thoughts, then they must be cultivated in the garden to replace the old, fearful, undesired thoughts. Just as unwanted weeds must be cultivated out of a garden to make space for new flowers or desired plant life, so must undesired thoughts be cultivated away to make space for the desired thoughts. We must decide what those new thoughts will be, just as we must decide what to plant in the garden.

This gardening is not effortless. It is an activity that requires our intention, attention, and energy. As previously germinated weeds may continue to sprout and show their face in the garden, so may old thoughts continue to sprout. Over time, those old weed-like thoughts will sprout less and less, as the space previously occupied by them is now occupied by stronger, newer thoughts. As the new thoughts extend and deepen their roots, less space will be available for the weeds to grow.

Mindfulness and meditation might be thought of as an intentionally and actively sparse garden. Instead of filling up all available space with new thoughts, we could cultivate an economy of thought as another approach to mental gardening. There is a saying that “nature abhors a vacuum”, and it would seem that in this case it might be initially more difficult to create a sparse garden — that it would be easier to cultivate new thoughts to replace old thoughts, rather than outright removing the old thoughts. Perhaps a sparse garden is something to strive for, though, as it ultimately may lend greater leeway to the overall design of the mental landscape — a skilled mental gardener that may choose to have plant life in a particular area, or nothing at all. A sparse garden with ground readily available for new paradigms, creativity, and seeds of insight to take root.

There’s a common saying: “you are what you eat”. It’s a harmless enough saying, right? Loosely we know it’s just scratching a surface, yet in general we nod our heads and think: “yeah, whatever I put in my body is going to have an effect on me, positive or negative.” Usually this phrase is used negatively, like a shake of the finger at a food stuff believed to be unhealthy.

There’s a deeper thread to “you are what you eat”, though, that isn’t worth loosely accepting. It’s a thread that throws out the “you” and says that the food you consume can fully constitute you — that your external environment fully constitutes you. “You” are merely an outcome of the external world.

Some might think I’m mincing words, but the implications of this simple phrase may exemplify our modern thought. Why didn’t we collectively settle on a phrase that instead puts “you” into the primary position? It’s not far off after all — a phrase that instead honors “you” would be: “you eat what you are”. Think about that:

You aren’t what you eat — you eat what you are.

This simple rearrangement of words completely changes the meaning of the phrase, making you primary and the external world secondary. When you eat what you are, the objective world becomes a symbolic reflection of a subjective you. This is much more responsibility than we’re used to dealing with. We’ve instead decided to put the responsibility on food, television, companies, pollution, bad bosses, and microbes. We’re viewed as products of our parents, society, generation, or genes.

Are you ready to take responsibility for your world, or will you continue to let your world take responsibility for you? It’s a change in thinking, and it starts with recognizing the roots of simple daily phrases and thoughts that we take for granted.

Action heros take action, but what kind of action do they take? What makes their action different from the day-to-day action we typically take?

The key feature of a hero’s action is that it is deliberate. Their action has a specific reason for being — whether that be due to response, passion, or drive. It is clear and purposeful. Even the outcome of their action, while not without risk, seems to be couched in a kind of built in safety net. The main character cannot possibly die in this episode, after all, and whatever hard times they may encounter will only be temporary, as their deliberate action in each will carry them to the final scene. Mistakes will occur along the way, but rather than groveling in their past action, they continue to take action in the “now” almost effortlessly.

What is the nature of our typical day-to-day action? Is it deliberate like the action hero, or is it meandering and often judged by ourself or others? “Did I make the right move?” “What if I did X instead of Y?” “Will I have time to make it?” “I’m may regret this, but..” “Hindsight is 20/20″. “What will they think?” “I should have ordered the steak.”

Our action by comparison seems muddied in generalized fear and suspicion, at times even turned towards our own previous actions. It lacks the concise and definitive treatment that action heroes portray. Clearly action heroes in typical story form are a simple metaphor. But perhaps we can bring a small piece of their wisdom into our daily life to help us be more empowered in life’s actions, small and large. It’s the small actions in particular that are the easiest target for exercising more deliberate action (the large ones tend to encourage deliberate action almost automatically from our inner hero). We do not have to strive for constant deliberate action, but we can strive to write it into more episodes of our life, and triumphantly move from scene to scene.

Magic pills are those modern concoctions, those man-made potions that provide “effects” to the body. Down our mouth, into our stomach, assimilated into the blood stream, out to the various organs — the body becomes a stage for a magic show beginning the moment we first decide to take the pill.

The Usual Suspect

The usual suspect for magic pills are the pharmaceutical productions. The magic show put on by Tylenol is reduced pain. The magic show put on by Prozac is emotional change. The magician is the man in a white lab coat and his stage the detailed studies, side effects, colorful diagrams, FDA approval, and billion dollar backing.

These pharmaceutical magic shows are not difficult to identify, though their easy identification does not make them easy to turn away from. The allure of these magical pills comes with the stated benefits.

Their hand-in-hand “negative side effects” are actually a benefit to the audience of the magic show. The side effects in all pharmaceutical productions ideally remind the audience that they should look away from time-to-time — that the show is not quite as safe as it seems. As wonderful as the benefits of the magic production may seem, someone just might get stabbed in the sword box.

The Unusual Suspect

A newer, more subtle type of magic pill comes under the banners of “natural”, “naturopathic”, “herbal”, and so on. The subtly of this magic show makes it more difficult to identify. Naturopathic magic pill productions are no less easy to turn away from, and their allure is similar — a laundry list of benefits.

The stage for the naturopathic magic show is set with herbs, minerals, vitamins, exotic ingredients from all corners of the globe, unusual body parts from the animal kingdom, no side-effects, “these statements not evaluated by the FDA”, combining to what is ultimately the anti-thesis of pharmaceuticals.

The lack of side effects, generally lower cost, and easier access (no prescription or white lab coat necessary), makes these shows that much more difficult to turn away from than the pharmaceutical variety.

Mentally, the advantage to naturopathic shows is of course built into the word itself — nature. It’s easier to conceive that we are putting something “of nature” into our bodies, than purely “of man” as in the pharmaceuticals.

Black Box Magic

Magic pills are like the popular magic trick where a person is placed in side of a box. The magician proceeds to stick swords into the box. From the outside of course it appears that the swords should be stabbing the person clean through. On the inside of the box, we don’t actually know what’s going, except that we’re fairly certain they will be unharmed despite outward appearances. That’s the magic of course, and the person exits the box unharmed.

We agree to get inside the magician’s sword box every time we take a magic pill. There is a duality with the magic pill, though — we become both audience and participant in the magic act. The inner workings of the trick, complicated into minute pill form, are hidden from us.

Perhaps the magician, or the man in the white lab coat, surrounded by the instruments of the trade, could be comfortable with the purpose of the trick. He could say it is doing x-y-z, with possible side effects in some black boxes of a-b-c. The instruments and studies would back him up.

But, we’re not the scientist or magician here. Instead we’re audience and participant rolled into one. The magician tells us we won’t get stabbed, and that perhaps there’s even a percent chance we’ll come out of it feeling “better”. And so we step in.

Why Not Magic?

So what’s the big deal? Should we proceed willingly into the illusion of healing through the magic pill? What’s wrong with being audience and participant on a stage that we ultimately believe will heal us?

The problem with magic pills and health is that they are one facet of a larger process where we literally give up the innate healing ability of our body to external factors — where we incorrectly say that our body is not capable of healing itself, but that it must be healed by external factors.

In a true magic show we give up our sensory perceptions to the magician for the purposes of momentary entertainment. The slight of hand, and the carefully crafted mechanics of the trick, are accepted for our entertainment purposes. We recognize this wholeheartedly as a temporary effect, and then we go about our lives.

But what if we left the theatre and the magic show continued on? What if we continued to put our perceptions and experience in the hands of external factors as we did in the theatre? We would live in a world where our perception and experience was guided and misguided by the whims of daily magicians who we pass by, each magician with his latest trick ready for show. You might say that some addiction follows this general trend of continuous magic — the giving up of experience to an external factor, the addictive substance itself. Authority is given to the addictive substance to control the experience of life, and a psychological dependency is created in which the substance is required to “feel better”.

The body requires basic nutrients. It requires clear emotions, feelings, and thoughts. It does not require magic. Giving up on the body in this way has far reaching side effects to other areas of health and life. It takes the power and art of healing off of the body and self, where it truly is, and places that power onto an external magical factor.

Magic When You See It

Nearly anything we consume whether in pill form or otherwise, is something that we might assign a “magical” status, without even realizing we are doing so — or realizing the long term consequences of that assignment.

In both our usual suspect, the pharmaceutical, and our unusual suspect, the naturopathic concoction, it’s not the actual ingredients that ultimately become a problem. Instead it is the complicated nature of the ingredients that allows us to become the one who is ultimately assigning the “magic” to the magic pill, just as every good audience does.

Whether with the scientifically constructed chemical in the pharmaceutical, or the 10 to 100 perfectly chosen ingredients in a naturopathic brew, it is the unknown-ness of the concoction that lends itself to a magical designation. The scientific chemical is inherently unknown, and the effects of 10-100 ingredients of a naturopathic are psychologically unknowable. Our thoughts can’t comprehend the myriad operations that go into the operation of our bodies, the beating of our own heart, much less the effects of magic pills on the whole system.

So how do we recognize when we are caught up in the magic, and how we do lessen it? Some things to look for:

1. When we assign, likely with the help of a magician, the outcome of the pill we take. This is my “feel good” medicine. These are my “happy pills”. This will help me “sleep at night”. We have taken the power of healing away from the body, and assigned that power to something we do to, or put into, the body.
2. When one company or product line has the “answer” for our ailment, and therefore is the sole magician or “best” magician in our mind. This is often the case with pharmaceuticals, but is also common with naturopathic medicine. Therefore, watch for any single product or company’s product that you think you absolutely need to “feel better”.
3. When the number of ingredients on the box is long. The “magic” seems to increase with the number of ingredients. This is especially common of naturopathic productions — although we can probably understand each ingredient individually, the combined effect of all ingredients is naturally magical. Try to keep individual ingredients in a single consumable as simple and “knowable” as possible.
4. Try to cut back on your magical pill usage. If you find that you have many magic pills — try to get that number down. Accept your body’s innate healing abilities as innately internal, not external.
5. Use food as much as possible. Food is typically quite comprehensible to mind and body, and has a far less likelyhood of becoming magical.

Magical Food

If every external consumable is potentially something that can be assigned a magical status, what about food? Food certainly applies here, though for the purposes of this article we’re talking about effects that we typically assign to things that go beyond routine nourishment or our taste buds.

The same criteria for identifying magic pills may be used to identify magic foods. Typically you’ll find these in the form of food concentrates and exotic products, such as fruits from other continents that have their own marketed laundry list of benefits. Of course there are also the typical psychological hang-ups that some of us have with food, for example, treating a bad day with ice cream.

Some of these are healthy, and some are not. Only you can know for sure. Keep a watch for how much authority and importance you’re assigning a given food as you eat it, if you’re unsure. You’ll know if you keep watch of your internal dialog as you consume it: “This has x ingredient in it, and x provides me y, and therefore I’ll be z because of it, I read an article about x ingredient, etc.”

The Author and Magic Pills

How is this author doing with magic pills in the real world? It’s tough — to be sure, we are bombarded constantly by advertisements of pharmaceuticals, and there are many alluring naturopathic pills out these days. Food concentrates and exotic fruits reign. I too have the ubiquitous cabinet of bottles.

As a basic rule, I try to weed out the vitamins with a laundry list of ingredients, and that I therefore cannot get from more than one company. For example, it’s the difference between taking simply “Vitamin C” and taking the magic form “Super-Charged Complex Immune Booster Vitamin C Concoction”. Simple “Vitamin C” is easier to understand, and less susceptible to magical connotations. Another helpful aspect of staying with the simple form is that it is more easily recognizable as existing in other forms of readily available food. I know I can eat an orange to get “Vitamin C”, but I cannot easily eat a combination of things to get to “Super-Charged Complex…”

Another basic rule is that if I’m interested in trying a new concentrate or concoction, I see what other concoction I could get rid of.

In short, concoctions are still a part of my life, however my attitude towards them strives to be different. Rather than viewing them as a necessity to health, I try to view them as a true supplement that my body can do or not do with as it pleases. This is a drastic change in normal attitudes that I am slowly working into to my personal perspective, and have already seen the positive results of.

Final Thoughts

Recognizing the magic show in pills and consumables is but one facet of the health balancing act. This a change of attitude, and will take patience as we watch our thoughts and emotions surrounding a consumable. This facet is about being more aware of our own mentality when we are giving an undeserved amount of authority and power to a specific consumable — when that view of the consumable starts to exceed the power and authority we attribute to our body and self in the health balancing act. Remind yourself when taking a pill that the body will do or not do with it as it pleases — this pill may or may not help the body. The body, therefore, is given the ultimate authority over the consumable.

Update: January 8th, 2008

After writing this article in May, 2007, I continued to look at my own magic pill use. While at the time of the original article I had already eliminated many of the magic pills associated with remedies and illness precaution, I was still taking about 5 vitamins / supplements per day. As with the remedies, over the years I’ve revolved the various supplements taken in a day. At that time I was taking a multi-vitamin, potassium / magnesium, fish oil, vitamin C, vitamin B, and vitamin D. For the past 6 months I’ve only been taking a multi-vitamin in the morning — no other vitamins / supplements. I consider the remaining multi-vitamin a simple nutrient catch-all for the varieties of food I’ll eat in the day.

So, except for the morning multi-vitamin, I’m living free of all other capsulized or concocted vitamins, supplements, remedies, and precautionary measures. When I’m around others who aren’t feeling well, I no longer load up on vitamin C as a prevention measure. When I travel, I don’t take airborne or some other brew as a shield against the world. It’s truly liberating to be free of mindsets that try to second guess the body’s innate abilities and processes. Magic pill recognition and elimination are one aspect of that total changed mindset. In many ways the mindset is a return to the innocence and outlook of childhood years. As children the world is a less fearful place. Germs and arbitrary consequences to the environment don’t exist yet. The world is not dangerous, but imminently consumable and breathable. Where our parents and society look to see germs and other areas that require arbitrary measures of protection, our child eyes see a field of exploration and play.

You’ve seen this one right? This image has been emailed, printed out, passed around, and snickered at for at least a few years now. I’m not sure who the original artist is. Whether you’ve seen it before or not, take a good look at it now. Ignore the gender. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. After the initial chuckle, there’s something more to this. It resonates with us. Given its staying power and recurrence, it resonates with many of us.

Why? Maybe it resonates with a part of us that knows there just might be a grain of truth to it. Who is that man on the far right? Has he really evolved? Is extreme technology really the ideal “path” for humanity?

Perhaps more importantly, who is the man in the middle? The man standing perfectly erect. This might be man connected with both his creativity as a human to create technology (his spear), and yet still grounded to the spirit of his physical being. Confident in both. Looking ahead not to his future, but perceiving his present moment in a type of clarity that we have forgotten. The man in the middle whose reality exists in balance with the map of the natural world, instead of at odds with the virtual map of mind and technology — the man on the right ultimately at odds with himself.

Whether portrayed in a movie, book, or play, the character of an action hero (man or woman) is unmistakably fascinating.

I first noticed this after watching two different action heroes fairly close together. The first was Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the second was Jack’s character in Lost. As I watched them on-screen, I also watched myself have reactions about the characters. What was drawing me into these characters? What was the source of my excitement, adrenaline, and appreciation around their every move? And then it occurred to me — action. Simply, these characters take action. In the very best scenes, you can imagine the dilemma of a hero as he/she cycles through all of the possible actions that they could take and chooses one course in seconds. Action heros dramatize big decisions that are quickly and gracefully propelled into existence. They are truly acting in the moment.

What about life’s smaller decisions — decisions not dealing with life and death? Don’t they deserve more mulling, pondering, projecting, and second guessing? What I have no doubt about is that the character of an action hero would rise to the challenge of life’s smaller challenges with equal grace. What drink to order at Starbucks today, no problem. Taking care of the weeds in the backyard, done. Small decisions are not without dilemma or deserving of consideration, but what an action hero has, again, is that crucial piece: action. For whatever type of circumstance, an action hero is confident that his current set of knowledge is “good enough” to act on at the time.

But, we can’t do everything at once can we? If we were always acting on things, wouldn’t we eventually get tired? Sometimes taking action means taking non-action. Instead of flipping channels because you’re procrastinating a chore, sit on the couch because you’ve taken action and made the decision to sit on the couch. Even the decision to relax can be taking action, as long as it is a decision of action. After all, at the end of the action drama, even the hero can be seen at the beach in relaxation, or grinning back at the love interest.

Try this: throughout your day, small ideas, chores, cravings, impulses, etc, will constantly pop into your head. Watch for them. These are the could of’s, should of’s, and maybe’s that sit outside your normal path of the day. Instead of letting them go, take action on a few more of them than you would normally. You know you’re not really going to do that load of laundry that just popped into your head today… but what if you did? You’ve always wanted to take a book to that park you pass by every day… what if you did? If there’s something that you can’t take action on right now because it requires more information, or you want to relinquish it to your subconscious, then do so explicitly — take action not to act on that thing which you cannot act on right now, for whatever reason. Your mind will be free of it until which time you are ready for it.

All thought, big and small, can be propelled into action. The action hero is appealing because of the grace and consistency to which they’ve mastered the art of action. That is their wisdom — a deep trust of their own being to make decisions, to take action in the current moment, or to let the current decision completely go, making room for the new creative action that will follow.

You’ve heard the phrase "the human condition".  "Thought as a System" might be considered a diagnosis of that "condition", a look at the root of that condition — thought.

The course of this book is one of discovery for the reader.  At the end of this discovery you have a new set of concepts without quite having a structure for how you arrived at them.  There is no formal chapter structure or well planned outline.  Instead this book presents a conversation between the late David Bohm and 50 others that took place over several days in 1990.  David Bohm gets the ball rolling, and then feedback from the audience shapes the actual conversation that became the book’s contents.  By the end you’ll see that there was probably a reason for this format as it is complimentary to the concepts presented.  Bohm himself was a theoretical physicist.  His life was all about exploring the nature of reality, in all its facets, and thought-as-a-system is just one of those facets.  The ideas in this book and the book itself are only one of Bohm’s many contributions to our world of thought.

Thought

So what is "thought" in this material?  Thought is notably past tense, and the sum of what you’ve already "thought".  To that end thought is a part of you, but not you.  Just as you might consider your hand a part of you, but not you.  An aspect of the human condition might be that we confuse thought with our total self, instead of considering thought a part of our total self.  This would be like confusing our hand for our total being, in other words.  It would be like giving our hand so much authority and importance that we forget it is "just a hand" — a valuable part of us, but a part nonetheless.

System

The other side of the title is the "system", which considers thought on a much more expansive playing field than we normally do.

A system is an assemblage of related elements comprising a whole, such that each element may be seen to be a part of that whole in some sense. — Wikipedia

If thought is a system, then what are the elements of that system?  The elements, simply, are "everything".  Absolutely everything "entering" thought is/becomes an element in thought’s total system.  When you look at a something with your eyes, the images are an element entering your total thought system.  Even [new] thoughts occurring in the present moment are themselves new input into the thought system. 

Thought in the World

Now let’s tie thought to the system and set it out into the world.  We divide our reality in two parts — a personal reality (ourself), and a world reality (outside ourself).  We artificially treat these as two different systems.  We think of the world reality as fundamentally separate from our personal reality — a world of people and things that can be considered on a level ultimately separate from ourself.  When thought is treated as a system, however, elements of the world reality are instead a fundamental, interconnected, and ultimately indistinguishable part of our personal reality.

For example, if someone is speeding down the highway in their car, the image of that speeding car + human is going to enter the systems of every observer along the way.  While the same world reality of the speeding car may meet the personal reality of every observer, as an actual element in each personal thought system, the speeding car is going to be represented quite differently:

• "That man is a lunatic.  He’s putting everyone in danger."
• "Wow, I hope nothing is wrong.  I remember when I had to go that fast because my dog was injured and had to get her to the vet."
• "I’m great, I follow the rules.  He’s going to get his just reward soon for breaking them."
• "Crap, that reminds me, I should probably speed up a little.  I’m late for work."

There is no uniform world reality of a speeding car + human.  There are only the personal systems of thought that reflex around the world reality of the speeding car based on the history of each system. So which is one is the true representation of the world reality? — simultaneously / paradoxically all of them and none of them.  To each his own system of thought.  This is a little reminiscent of the adage, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there is no one around to hear it?"

Closed Systems

Now our personal thought system, like our hand, is absolutely essential to being human and getting around in the world.  It’s wonderful and amazing in its own right.  However, as is discussed in the course of this book, there is a problem.  The problem is that we confuse our thought system with reality.   

Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. – David Bohm

Thought creates divisions within itself, about the world, and reports back to us that they are true and natural facts about reality.  It makes final conclusions about reality that at the time are taken for the complete and total picture.  You might say here that thought-as-a-system is the concept where thought-is-reality.  "He is a lunatic" is the man driving to the down the road.  "She hates me and will fire me" is the angry boss.  "Atoms are the smallest unit of matter" is the now old fashioned scientific view of matter.  "War is the only way to get this change made" is the oil producing nation given artificial power by the nations that need its black resource.

As a reflexive system, thought responds to pain and pleasure — the thought system tends away from pain and towards pleasure.  How the system defines pain and pleasure is represented differently to each individual.  To be clear, I use pain and pleasure loosely here.  You might replace "pleasure" with "feel good / comfortable / initial thought", and you might replace pain with "feel bad / uncomfortable / have to think more about it".  To the person angry with the speeding driver, based on whatever past experience makes up their thought system in that moment, it is most pleasurable for their system to go to that condemning thought first.  Left alone, the thought system will remain with that initial assessment about reality.

As it tends towards pleasure (its own relative definitions of pleasure), you might consider that thought also tends towards homeostasis or sameness.  If the definitions of pleasure and pain at any given moment in a person’s life are built up on the definitions of past thought, then it is pleasurable to maintain a thought system in its current state.  In other words, it’s more painful to "think" outside of the existing system. Left to its own tendencies, you might say that thought closes itself off from new input. 

Open Systems

One of the greatest things about this work is that Bohm does not allow for reductionism in the thought system, as he so easily could have with this material.  He could have said "thought is a system, that’s all thought is, that ultimately explains all human behavior and conditions, and therefore that’s all ‘we’ are."  In fact, it would have been very difficult for me to take this book seriously had it gone down this road.  Having some prior exposure to Bohm’s other ideas about "reality", however, gave me ample promise that he would not take the lazy way out in reductionism. 

Bohm uses two words to consistently describe his open, non-reductionary, system — insight and creativity.  If you imagine that day-to-day thinking is like the cogs of your past thought system turning over past thoughts, then insight and creativity would lie definitively outside that mechanism.  Whereas the 5 senses could be considered one form of input into your existing thought system, insight and creativity be considered another form of input.

It’s important to not diverge into territory where we try to figure out the ultimate source or definition of this insight and creativity.  The book does not, and so we won’t here.  What’s decidedly clear is that insight and creativity lie "outside" the thought system.  If we’re listening for them, then they’re capable of affecting great change to the system, much more change than the system left to its own devices.

Another input into our system might be deeply hearing the thought systems of others, and that leads us into the final concept.

Dialogue

The final concept that Bohm delivers is "dialogue".  Dialogue is a way to share our thought systems with others, ideally as new input into their system, with no specific goal in mind.  It’s not:  "Let’s sit down for 1 hour and discuss how we’re going to get XYZ goal, or $ABC success".  Instead it is simply: "Let’s talk.  Let’s dialogue."  Maybe it’s slightly more specific: "Let’s talk about XYZ and see what happens."  It is non-directed communication, exposing thought systems to each other in a respectful, accepting way.

Dialogue is group oriented.  The example given in the book is a romantic image of two Native American tribes in some kind of dispute — not a dispute escalated to war, but a dispute nonetheless.  To resolve their dispute, the tribes would sit around a fire and dialogue.  Picture 50 Native Americans circled and cross-legged around a roaring fire.  Each person in the circle may take a turn speaking, or perhaps it is more free form.  The goal of the discussion is non-directed and unspecified.  Each person in the tribe is simply sharing their view of the world at that moment — their thought system.  At the end of these discussions, the two groups walk away knowing how to resolve their dispute — perhaps not specifically yet, but they have opened themselves to the thought systems of the other group’s individuals.  It is this non-directed sharing of world views in a valuing and respectful way that constitutes successful and beneficial dialogue.

Final Thoughts

If I were to write this overview again, it would turn about these concepts in a completely different way.  I took liberty in not just reporting concepts verbatim, but also participating in the global dialogue about what my thought system thinks of all this.  This overview is ultimately just the tip of a larger set of concepts that are best appreciated by taking Bohm’s journey — the journey he and his dialogue participants took during the creation of this inspiring material.  Read it, use it as input into your own thought system, and then let it out into the world.

A celebration of creativity framed as a new year’s resolution?  Encouragement for our internal procrastinator?  I found this gem in an unlikely place — a 2006 resolution list on zefrank.com.

I promise not to keep ideas in my head, unfulfilled and full of promise - not to let these vague outlines of future actions give me false confidence and security in the abstract.  Instead I will execute them quickly and faithfully so that I am again on the brink of the unknown, hoping that these ideas were not the last that would ever come to me from God knows where.

Well put, Zefrank.

You are your DNA – that’s the modern portrayal. Doctors would like to change a few bits of your DNA before you are born and remove a tendency to a certain disease. Sociology explores the day when we’re fully reduced to DNA – when it might be used as the ultimate form of discrimination. Analyze a person’s DNA, for example, and instantly know if they have the traits that make them desirable for a certain job. The human is reduced to a collection of data points that can be analyzed and manipulated.

But what if DNA is only a starting point? Like the psychology of our childhood is a starting point for the adult mind, what if DNA is only a starting point for the biology of our flesh? The emerging field of “epigenetics” explores exactly that possibility:

“At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a ‘memory’. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.” — The Ghost in Your Genes

“… even the things they saw …” The implications of this are profound, and the referenced article stops just short of taking the next logical step: even the things we think and believe may affect our genetics.

In the face of science, this puts the world back on our shoulders — exactly where it should be. We are not passive recipients of our environment, heredity, or childhood psychology. We are active creators and designers of our existence, right down to our DNA. It’s refreshing to see that science is catching back up.