Authentic Dialogue Part 2: Authenticity and Becoming the Artist of Your Life
by Elinor Dickson
On February 17, 2023, a headline in the New York Post read “America Longing for Authenticity.” On March 14th, Stephanie Ruhle, senior business analyst and host of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, affirmed the way to success. “Authenticity is key. It’s not sustainable to be anybody but yourself. Be excellent and build your relationships.” For a culture increasingly based on manipulation, misinformation, and illusion, in 2023, the need for an antidote was emerging.
Authentic is such a solid word, equally grounding and uplifting. As an adjective we use it to define our most beautiful and treasured things—an authentic Renoir, an authentic diamond, an authentic Ming Dynasty vase. It proclaims something as genuine, original, unduplicated. When we apply it to a person, it has layers of all those meanings. It designates someone who is what they say they are, backed by the consistency of their speech and action over time. We often experience such people as authentic as they resonate with an intrinsic sense of grace and goodness. We all seek to present such a positive image to the world, yet with any degree of self-reflection, we know such a polished mirror has a few cracks in it.
People rarely think of themselves as unique, or as a work of art. In fact, we make a mockery of it. When someone is antagonistic to society, we say “boy, he/she is a work of art.” Or we single out the more ego-driven among us, those who wrap themselves in an aura of being special. Being special is only an authentic state when you are under five years of age. Just being different is not being unique. Real uniqueness, for me, brings up the artistry of Michelangelo. When I first saw the sculpture of David at the Galleria, I was mesmerized by the flow of his lifelike musculature right down to the veins in his hands. My first thought was not, “he must have spent a lot of time at the gym.” The beauty and unassuming power of this sculpture depicts a nobility that comes from disegno, understood in the Renaissance not only as the discipline and skill required to create fine art but as the essence instilled into the work. In his lifetime, Michelangelo’s ability and passion for making the invisible visible, particularly through the human body, was seen as an echo of the divine. His images speak to the beauty and the possibility inherent in human life.
From the beginning of time, we have expressed ourselves through physical alteration and adornment. The modern world is obsessed with appearance, with diet, exercise, creams, dyes, injections, and surgery to look fitter, younger—to project a desired image. All of this can be fine. I confess I only turned grey when Covid made getting to the hairdresser impossible. It is when we base our self-worth on appearance that we miss the whole point.
An authentic human must practice disegno to become the artist of their own life. To recover the essence of who we are requires looking inward to release the fixed, stereotypic ways of thinking and feeling imposed by the world around us. Growing up within a specific culture, family, or peer group shapes our view of the world and, unless examined, becomes an unquestioned way of being. Our beliefs, values, and behavior become less insightful and more habitual—for example, voting liberal or conservative because our parents and grandparents voted that way is a phrase commonly heard. Whether we are raised in a supportive family or immersed in a more traumatic upbringing, our challenge lies in the ability to live our own lives, to feel at home in our own bodies. As the world is rooted in relationship, we are each called to reflect a unique aspect of the whole. It can take a lifetime of reflection and discernment to move away from our childish need to be special and embrace the fullness of our uniqueness. Only then can we open without fear or favor to those around us. Engaging others in authentic dialogue, hearing and exploring their reality without defensiveness is fundamental to building communities, institutions, and economic systems that foster transformation and transparency.
Stemming from his work in theoretical physics, David Bohm came to concern himself with the need for authenticity in human relationships. He is well known for his writing on the explicate and implicate order, the world we see materialized around us and a deeper enfolded source of undivided wholeness. This unseen world is in constant flux, holding all the patterns that give form to our images. Other scientists refer to this hidden source as the quantum plenum or the zero-point-field, while analytic psychologists call it the collective unconscious.
This connection to the unseen world was the foundation of Bohm’s understanding of authenticity. He worked with groups of twenty to forty people, moving them from individual opinions or assumptions to a place of participatory consciousness. Convictions, arguments, and persuasion speak to a win-lose default with no possibility of arriving at a more creative position. In Bohm’s words, “The object of dialogue is not to analyse things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather it is to suspend your opinions and … [then] listen to everybody’s opinions and suspend them. If we can see what all our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content even if we don’t agree entirely.”(1) The suspension of our currently held opinions allows for something new to come into consciousness, a further unfolding of the implicate realm that can bring in its wake new possibilities for the current impasse. Ideally, this is how any group should proceed, and as Bohm pointed out, it is the way democracy is meant to work.
In the decades since his death, Bohm’s work on authentic dialogue continues and has been taken up in new and extended ways within government, business, and educational structures. My interest in Bohm led me to the writings of Peter Senge and C. Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturers at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Joseph Jaworski, Cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative; and Betty Sue Flowers, the Director of the Johnson Presidential Library and a distinguished teacher. Their 2004 book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future is based on a series of conversations between them out of which a model for leadership evolved that they call U Theory. This model invites people to move down one side of the U starting with the need to DOWNLOAD the past patterns that have directed their lives. It recognizes that many people do not really live their own lives but often repeat the stereotypic scripts of their family and/or culture. This first step of becoming aware of ingrained patterns is a big one involving serious self-reflection. The second step, SEEING, encourages people to look with fresh eyes at other possibilities beyond the scripts that have shaped them. These new possibilities lead to a third step, SENSING. Here, deep resonance and imagination within the emerging field allows the participants to embody a new perspective.
In U theory, the first three steps invite the participants to expand their conscious bandwidth to a greater field of possibilities. At the bottom of the U, a two-fold process called PRESENCING, or connecting to Source, occurs. The ego, now able to relinquish its need to control the environment around it can “Let Go,” allowing new ideas and differing perspectives to emerge through an ever-deepening fertilization from the unconscious realms. The participant is now free to “Let Come,” allowing for the infusion of fresh insight and new solutions to emerge from the deeper, archetypal energies within us.
The first upward step called CRYSTALLIZATION is where vision and intention come into play. This greater field of consciousness begins to guide our actions. The second upward step integrates head, heart, and hand and through this embodiment the individual, or group, becomes a vessel allowing a still larger field to emerge. The authors call this PROTOTYPING. The final stage, called PERFORMING, allows our decisions or actions to come from an understanding of the whole.(2)
Over the years, I arrived at the conclusion that if any shift from hierarchical structures to a process-based ecological network is to occur, at least two changes are essential. First, we must reconnect with the greater field of potential creativity within and beyond ourselves. Secondly, the ego, as the organ of consciousness, must become adapted and more flexible to mediate the influx of a greater circumference of consciousness. Emerging from our desire for more authenticity in the world, the introduction of a process that helps bring these changes into our institutional culture is an encouraging development. While using modern language, the authenticity of U Theory resonates within me as it mirrors both the archetypal descent and ascent model at the core of many spiritual traditions and the great evolutionary pattern that science is discovering.
Authentic dialogue, the ability to relate to the other in a creative way, requires that each person must engage in becoming an authentic version of themselves. The river of thought/meaning that Bohm saw flowing between the banks of opinion must include our instinct for life, our feeling, imagination, and both symbolic and critical thinking as the fuel of our evolutionary journey. These are the attributes we must embody to become the artist of our life—to become an authentic presence in the world.
(1) Bohm, David. On Dialogue, PDF, Schouten & Nelissen, p. 7.
(2) Additional references: Otto Scharmer & Katrin Kaufer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. Applying Theory U to Transforming Business, Society, and Self. Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership and Source: The Inner Path o Knowledge Creation.