One of the most important conversations going on in the Western world today - a new vision of science, spirit and the nature of reality. It will affect how you think and how you live.

In the twentieth century, Western science made an astonishing “discovery” - that inside an atom, there were no longer any “things” – only process and interrelationship. Physicists such as David Bohm began to see the Universe not as a collection of separate particles, but as an unbroken whole – that everything is enfolded into everything.

A similar understanding existed all along in Native American thought and language. In a Native worldview, the entire cosmos is seen as a living dynamic flux of process and interrelationship. Blackfoot elder Leroy Little Bear, former Director of Native Studies at Harvard, noticed that Bohm was interested in a deep dialogue process similar to Native American talking circles. Believing there was a possibility for a respect/respect exchange of worldviews, he approached Bohm and initiated a meeting of the minds between quantum physicists, Native American elders and linguists. The historic first dialogue, held five hundred years after Columbus, marked a coming full circle of leading-edge Western science and indigenous wisdom. For the first time, Native elders were on equal footing with the high priests of Western knowledge, the quantum physicists, and the interpreters of that interchange, the linguists. Their dialogue proved a fruitful meeting ground for the realms of Energy, Meaning and Spirit.

The Fetzer Institute sponsored the historic first dialogue and 3 subsequent dialogues. The dialogues were then sponsored by MIT, and then in 1999, SEED, in partnership with linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford, sponsored the first of its annual Language of Spirit conferences. For the first time, the previously private dialogues were opened to the public. The Albuquerque tradition, known as the Southern dialogues, has evolved over the years to include many different disciplines in Western science and many Native traditions.

This year, in the eigth annual Language of Spirit dialogue, our theme is “whole thinking = coherent society; fragmented thinking = fragmented society.” Previous dialogues have uncovered common threads between leading edge science and indigenous science, and how the advances in quantum physics, living systems, ecology, biology, systems theory and complexity theory informed our view of leadership

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