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305 pages, with illustrations; including glossary, bibliographic references, name and subject indices
£15 (UK) $30 (USA)
DuVersity Publications

"Back home again and finally finished reading The Supreme Art, which I found to be a supreme account of the state of mankind and the hopes of our attaining normality in the cosmic realm of life. While it combines science, religion, psychology and philosophy, as well of course simply talking and listening, I was struck most forcefully by the feeling that this is the best prescription I have read of a way to further Gurdjieff's work. Other readers, naturally, will find Gurdjieff references incidental but I think you have directed many of his ideas to new, inner realms." Bob Hunter

"Anthony Blake is a thinker's thinker. I go to him, not to get answers, but to find a better quality of question. And this is what Blake does: he holds the question." Robert Fripp

"What gets me in your book are rather single sentences, statements, hints. Like Bante’s saying “All are right, nobody is wrong”. I have already some time ago given up the idea of a saviour, but to go as far as to say only action (thinking, talking, doing, dreaming) of all and all on the same level of authority and importance can make us progress and survive… Only now I start to explore this idea and see that it is true. . . What I find is that your book is immensely practical, lots of things one can do, try out immediately and in every day life. (There are of course also many ideas, sentences I do not understand or cannot subscribe to. Which is already an immediate opportunity to practice the spirit of dialogue !)" Knud Kusche

The Supreme Art of Dialogue attempts to integrate diverse perspectives on the dialogue process, including the spiritual and the scientific and is itself a kind of dialogue incorporating many points of view. At its core is a reconciliation between numerical or formal and verbal or qualitative ways of thinking. It has four main sources. Each contrasts with each of the others in contrasting ways, and engages with the others reciprocally.

Structural Communication [Bennett] method of dealing with both content and structure of meaning independently; two-channel, two-way communication based on writing. Structure is explicit and related to systematics. Developed for educational purposes in the 1960s; further developed eventually into LogoVisual Technology
Dialogue [de Mare and Bohm] free-floating conversation not directed to the future but to the present moment; with diffuse structure allowing for emergence, based on speaking. Structure is implicit. De Mare's median group is a special case of the maximum number of participants compatible with the possibility of equality between them. Dialogue requires the suspension of everyday habits and assumptions of discourse. Facilitation of dialogue varies according to theoretical perspective, purpose and context, from virtually nonexistent to very managed.
N-logue [Blake] structured conversation based on the number of participants N; usually articulated and observable for small numbers up to 4; can be written or spoken. They require even more stringent suspensions of habit than dialogue in general. Structure is explicit. N-logues are treated as particles of meaning making of various sizes and qualities called logons. Instead of 'adding' their separate minds together, the N persons take on roles of an N-mind. They can be practised as an art in their own right or discerned and cultivated as they arise spontaneously in dialogue. Dialogue is composed of N-logues. N-logue is conscious. Derives from systematics.
ILM [Matchett] based on listening to complex sounds, especially music, that are more highly structured than speech in form, allowing content to arise of itself; centred in individuals though conducted in a group, where all listen to the same source but do not talk with each other. Structure is implicit. ILM is taken to symbolise and invoke access to the information field that underlies the very possibility of communication. Whatever an ILM experience means is just what the individual wants it to mean.
From the Glossary

The dialogue process is of supreme importance in human life yet only now is it beginning to be acknowledged. The late Patrick de Mare always insisted that dialogue was mind and that mind was that between brains rather than in brains. The key figures in the discourse of The Supreme Art include: John Bennett, mathematician and mystic and student of Gurdjieff; David Bohm, physicist; Patrick de Mare, pioneer of the median group concept; Gordon Lawrence, pioneer of the Social Dreaming Matrix, and Edward Matchett, an explorer of how genius might be developed.

Chapter One – Dialogue
       Origins
       The Form of Dialogue
       The Energies of Dialogue
       Dialogue and Culture
       To Know Together
       Meaning Logic
       Roles in the Structure of Meaning
       The Significance of Neutralisation
       Meditation and Dialogue
       The Will of Dialogue
       The Mathematical Feel of Dialogue
       N-Logue

Chapter Two – Encounters with Meaning
       The Importance of Meaning
       Structure and Meaning
       Meaning and Words
       Media
       Removing the Veils
       Structure
       The Structure of Experience and the Experience of Structure

Chapter Three – Structural Diversity
       Structural Communication
       Dialogue
       Principles of Structure
       Higher Intelligence
       Music and Love
       Webs of Meaning

Chapter Four – Trust in the Process
       Dialogue Phenomena
       Interface between Finite and Transfinite
       The Space of Meaning
       Dialogue and Consciousness
       The Space, Time and Will of Mutuality
       On Religion
       Trust in the Process
       Three Kinds of Mind
       The Categories of John Bennett
       Progression
       Twelve Categories

Interlude – Technics of Dialogue
       The Measure of Dialogue
       Why Increase Diversity?
       The Sayable

Chapter Five – The Game of Dialogue
       Fabric and Circles of Meaning
       Structures of Meaning Making
       Meaning Games
       Matrix
       A Theatrical View of Dialogue
       A Scientific View of Dialogue
       Logons
       Greater Meaning
       The Experiential Barrier
       The Barrier of Creativity
       The Genius of Dialogue

Chapter Six – Immediate Liberation of Meaning – ILM
       Universal Field of Meaning
       Awakening Intelligence
       The Sound of Music
       Impulse Power
       Naturalist’s Trance
       In the Realm of the Senses
       Vast Computation

Chapter Seven – Large Group Meetings and Beyond
       Beginnings
       Mental Space
       Agora
       Making of a Shared Present Moment
       Ideals of Facilitation
       Conscious Society
       Global Dialogue
       Levels and Scales of Meaning
       Historical Roles of Groups

The Supreme Art of Dialogue is about making meaning together, a complex work of mutual adjustment and creativity. It explores structures of meaning-making that are keys to unlocking the possibilities of our capacity for seeing the world and ourselves in new ways, enabling a new kind of mind.

"Living in the era of information and knowledge, people are chained to facts. In a series of stimulating chapters this book invites us to enquire into the making of meaning. Public life is reduced to ideology which provides the leaders of society with a ready-made, taken-for-granted perception of society that the citizen has to accept as absolute truth. This book offers an antidote to slipshod thinking, also showing how dialogue like dreaming, can be creative by organizing thinking into new holistic patterns, leading us to the infinite." Dr Gordon Lawrence, author of Social Dreaming @ Work

"This book is a valuable attempt to explore the possibilities of dialogue from a multi-disciplinary perspective and 'stretches the envelope' to include concepts from physics and mysticism as well as from the more orthodox material of Group Analysis. Blake's advocacy of structure in meaning-making challenges many current assumptions and he introduces some new theoretical approaches that offer much food for thought." Anthony Judge, developer of the Encyclopaedia of World Problems and Human Potential (Union of International Associations) and instigator of the Union of Imaginable Associations

A result of this . . . book is to make one aware in everyday talking, listening or reading, when automatically rejecting, resisting or ridiculing another person or group's opinion, that in fact one is not even knowledgeable (let alone conscious) enough to judge. This is reinforced by the dialogue principle of allowing all propositions to stand with an equal degree of value while the process gathers force. . . One must sit up and take notice of the progression of categories as applied to dialogue, from its all-inclusiveness incentive of bearing contradictions, dynamism of mutual meaning, and the other attributes to the final claim "Dialogue is the meaning of the universe" Bob Hunter author of forthcoming book The Attention Paradox