Bringing Deep Democracy to Life:An Awareness Paradigm for Deepening Political Dialogue,Personal Relationships,and Community Interactions

摘要

Democracy in its traditional form is exercised in part through voting, major-ity rule, laws protecting minority viewpoints and the freedom to listen to all voices.However, democracy is rarely something that we consciously manifest in daily life-whetherduring political debates, community meetings, personal relationships, or in our internallives. In this article I describe a few communication methods that make it possible to bringan even deeper form of democracy to life in our moment-to-moment interactions. Leaders,group and community facilitators, and anyone who wants to become a participant facilitator'can use this new form of democracy, based on basic awareness principles and methods.The framework I describe is derived from process-oriented psychology, its group processapplication, called worldwork and its philosophy of deep democracy. I show that withoutawareness of our moment-to-moment overt and subtle, dreamlike signals democracy is adream that has not quite happened. With greater awareness, political debate as well ascommunity and personal dialogue can transform into more co-creative and deeply demo-cratic interactions. I also speak about a new kind of leader who can be ordinary and onesided as well as bring awareness and openness to the various people and levels of anyinteraction. To make my point, I use examples from large group work, the recent presiden-tial race in the United States, as well as personal interactions.