Loving Dialogue
This is a translation of a German lecture presented on November 17, 2012at the SGI-Germany Culture Centre, MunichHans-Peter Dürr

Discussion with Gorbachev

Growing up in a war turns you into someone completely different
as opposed to a person who has not lived through such an
experience. You just know; it must not go on like this. That is why I put
all my energy into preventing war. I believe that if you have experienced
war, nobody need try to tell you that war can be justified at times. No,
there is never such a thing as a just war!
I wanted to write a book about what circumstances had led to such an
escalating situation as the Cold War ending without bloodshed. It was
clear to me that some sensible people had to have been involved,
including Gorbachev himself. So I got in touch with him and told him I
was planning to write this book and was interested in finding out how
Gorbachev came to be Gorbachev. After all nobody expected the leaderof the “bad guys” to be the one to end the conflict, right?
Subsequently, I had a long discussion with Gorbachev. After we had
been talking for a while, he said “You know, I’m beginning to think I
myself would like to write a book about nonviolent peace.” Then hesuddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I don’t have to write it!,” and went to his
bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “I don’t need to do it, because,
you see, I invited Daisaku Ikeda to the Kremlin and had a talk with him,
and this is the book that emerged from that talk: A Dialogue between
Ikeda and Gorbachev.”1
Read it, it’s fantastic! Gorbachev and Ikeda are coming from com­pletely different angles, but you can see how they begin to harmonize
while holding this dialogue! This reminded me of my relationship with
Heisenberg. I had such talks with him where we began to discuss things
we did not quite understand. When you trade stories back and forth—
not just rational statements—then your communication turns into com­munion, and you are able to say ‘I learned something from you and you
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loving dialoguelearned something from me, but the result is neither me nor you.’Gorbachev picked up the book and said, “I spent the whole daytalking with Ikeda.” This is excellent; it is not so easy to find common
grounds. Gorbachev’s best friend was Chinghiz Aitmatov, a fantastic
man. [Ikeda also held a dialogue with Aitmatov, a famous Kyrgyz
author. This dialogue was published as a book2]. When I heard of thepeople with whom Daisaku Ikeda had spoken, I exclaimed, “Wait, I
know him! And him as well!” When I visit Japan—and I am there every
year—I’d like to visit Ikeda as well. It’s fantastic taking turns listening
to one another, and not discarding the other because they are of adifferent opinion, but instead asking, “Where are you coming from?”
I wish I could go to Israel and to talk to them and ask, “Please tell me
why we all have to go through this; maybe there is a good reason for it,
but there are also good reasons why this is impossible. We are a billion
people! There must be a way to work things out in a different way!”
You can find something in common with anybody, even with some­one you do not like at all. So why not use that as a starting point? This iswhat I learned from Gorbachev. He told me great stories which I
treasure to this day.

No Reason to Justify War
You might be wondering what I am doing here, giving this lecture. Afterall, I am a nuclear physicist, and this place represents something differ­ent altogether. It seems something must have gone wrong; they musthave invited someone to talk about something that has nothing to dowith his specialty. A nuclear physicist? That sounds scary! You might bethinking, “He’s one of those guys that helped build the atomic bomb!
What does [nuclear physics] have to do with living beings, with what’s
important to us, with living a vibrant life. What do we need these people
for who went off in the opposite direction?” Well, this is not the case;even though I was a student of Edward Teller, I never worked on abomb. But I grew up with people who focused their lives on building
bombs. And that, for sure, must infuriate anyone who cares about life atall, leading them to say, “It just can’t go on like this!”
We urgently need to leave this path. We have to create a future
without waging wars against each other. I find it most distressing that
we have different cultures here on earth—all highly interesting—socie­
ties that have developed hand in hand with religion; yet somehow thesesocieties developed the conception that they contradict each other. And
not only that they contradict one another, but that only one person isloving dialogue

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right and the others are not. And herein arises a justification to wage
wars, so that only the—so to speak—“right ones” may survive. This issomething that will particularly bother someone who may not work withweapons but did work with people who developed weapons. This is why
I feel it is my duty to do something that has nothing to do with myregular work.
But there is more to the story: The desire to make known the fact thatthe same physics that produced the atomic bomb are totally different
from what we learn in school. Physics is completely different! The
revolution in physics actually occurred one hundred years ago. Why do
we not know this fact? Well, in my personal development, I spent a lotof time thinking about what holds the world together at its innermost
core. This is also a philosophical question, so I decided to become aphysicist. Especially having experienced war firsthand, I was inclined tosay, “I don’t trust people, they are lying to me. I want a job where I cansee for myself what is right and what is wrong.” This is what guided mein the beginning. Well, things turned out a little bit different.
Through my connection to Werner Heisenberg I suddenly learned thatphysics arose from and led to the fact that matter does not exist at all.
People invested fifty years of research into the quest to find the smallest
particle of matter from which the whole universe is built, and all of asudden they found out that this basic component does not even exist!
Poor guys, fifty years searching for something that does not even exist...
But it was not all bad as it led to the discovery that the foundation ofphysics was actually a completely different one.

We Experience More than We UnderstandRegarding the title of today’s lecture, “Loving Dialogue,” I would like tosay: It does have to do with love, in the sense of finding out what therelationship between science, culture and religion is. Are they reallyseparate? We draw a line between matters of the body, the soul and themind. We do not really know how they are connected. Anyway, it turns
out that this revolution that came about in physics one hundred years
ago gives us the answer that these three things are not separate at all, but
only are skewed by our perception that they appear to be three separate
things.
This is why I am interested in different religions. This is why, forinstance, every year I travel to Kazakhstan, where people say, “What can
we do in our country of nine million, with four different languages andsix different religions. How can we move people to cooperate with each

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other to come together—without anyone having to give in?” It is
actually possible. All we need to do is not expect people to all become
the same in order for things to work out. It is precisely the differences
between us that make things work. And so, since I do not much care forthe words “soul” or “mind” I say what actually connects us is what wemight call “love”—we cannot really express in words what it actually is.
I will go into this deeper later on.
Now I want to talk about how we understood physics until now, what
the world looks like as perceived according to our school books. Here is
an important statement you will all understand: “We living beings
experience more than we understand.” Everyone says: “Well, ofcourse!” Well, why of course? To say I experience more than I can under­
stand means: “I’m not good enough yet. I need more universities tellingme how to explain everything—then I will understand.” This is theperception we have: what we experience beyond our knowledge isnothing more than something yet unknown that we need to figure out.
But it turns out this is not the case. Thus you do not have to be de­pressed, if you are experiencing something you cannot explain. It’s
wonderful! Because if you do, there is something in your mind that you
cannot understand. And this is a new world that is important for ourdevelopment.
We experience more than we understand. There is something morethat exists in between. And I can tell you that the language we use,
contrary to e.g. Chinese or Japanese, is difficult. We use concepts todescribe what we can grasp with our minds—but what about all that isin between? It is not even mentioned! OK, it is mentioned in the verbs,
as you can see. Suppose a seventeen-year-old comes up to me and says,“Could you tell me what love is?” I say, “No, I can’t.” “But everyone istalking about it, and I’m still young, and I want to know what it is.”I reply, “No, I can’t explain it to you, because love is something thathas a relational structure, not a descriptive one.” “But I have to live inthis world somehow.” “True, this is your life, but you won’t be asking
this question in the future.” A year later I meet the young man again. He
comes up to me and says, “Last week, I fell in love.” And I reply,“Wonderful! So tell me what that means when you say, ‘I fell in love.’”“I can’t say.”This is an example of the fact that something very valuable to us
exists in the background. The fact that I cannot explain it does not makeme feel unhappy—on the contrary, it shows me that doors have opened
up for me, making my life that much more vibrant. I would go so far as
to say that things like this—of the sort that we can experience but

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cannot explain—are what is called faith. A child will say, “Yes, I believe
it,” not “I can explain it.” In our culture we say we have the ability tounderstand everything. And then we try to step into a circle ofknowledge, where we try to somehow explain what we see so that we
can understand it. And when we have a grip on it we can touch it, so to
speak, so that ultimately we can change it, making us capable of doing
something with it.

Differences between Realness (Wirklichkeit) andReality (Realität)
So, in order to describe the state of knowledge, we introduced the term
“reality” (Realität). The title of this topic would be “The experience of‘realness’” (Wirklichkeit). In German, we have the word Wirklichkeit(realness) and it is in fact different from the word reality (Realität).You
can see it as follows: A realness is something that I experience, butcannot explain. That means that I, the subject, look at the object, butthere is something in between that I do not want to take apart; this we
can call “a-duality”: one cannot exist outside of it. Thus, subject andobject are somehow connected; however this exceeds interaction; rather,
it is an experience that in no way separates one from the other. However,from the perspective of a natural scientist, the scientist has to first of alllearn to distance himself from that which he is observing, to separate
himself from it. This gives him the ability to talk about what actually is,
and not about how he feels about it, and so on.
Our culture is quite famous for having this capacity. The problem is,when I separate the object from the subject, the resulting description isstill not quite right. One object is separated from another object: as if
there was a heap of things separated from one another, yet somehow
they build the world. This is the structure that characterizes the oldphysics. The separate object is a thing, and that thing expresses reality.
That is where the term came from. But realness is something else
entirely. Realness is something at work and continually changing. Thisis a completely different way of looking at things.
Our Western way of viewing things is that phenomena can be under­stood, then treated, then manipulated. This leads to power structures.
First I isolate something, and then I say I understand it, and then this ismine and not yours because it is separate. This is an important point.
This is something that has always moved me on my trips to the Far East.
There it is clearly about realness.

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Everything is Basically Alive
The old physics, which you learned in school, cannot understand what isalive, only what is dead. And that is why it claims that life is just a very
complicated lifeless thing that just looks like it is alive. However, it isjust the opposite! Everything is basically alive. When I mix living matter
it starts looking like it is not alive anymore. This table here for instance,is alive, but you will disagree; this is because everything is mixed up
together. That is the old physics that we learned; everything is separate,
but somehow connected by interactions that we do not quite understandyet. We have to realize that when we speak of reality (Realität), we killthat which is alive, and then we need not be surprised if what is alive is
not even part of our physics. The old physics says: In the beginning
there was matter and substance, the building elements. They explain
how it is all connected. In old physics there are laws one can deduce,that can be applied and used to predict what will happen.
The non-living—and this is a very important point—in comparison to
the living is another story entirely. Non-living matter has the property ofobeying the second law of thermodynamics, which means that in the
future the probable will occur with greater probability. Fantastic, thisnew discovery that the probable will occur with greater probability. It is
actually not as trivial as it sounds. You experience it every morning at
your desk: completely orderly in the morning, by noon it’s a mess, andin the evening it’s chaos! It always goes from order to disorder, and it is
no help imagining when you go to sleep everything will reversed! No, itnever goes the other way. So that means that we can, from the oldphysics point of view—without referring to the new physics—establishthat nothing living will ever come out of non-living matter. How can it
be then that two and a half billion years ago we were this chemical soup,and now there is life all around?! How did we manage to do that? The
amount of order increased rather than decreased! Was there a guiding
hand somewhere? Where could it have come from? That is something
we cannot explain. When you straighten up your desk, you need not
only energy but you have to figure out where everything belongs to beable to make any order out of it.

Without Taking Things Apart—New World View and Religion
Now I will make a big leap to the beginning of the 20th century, when it
was discovered that the old physics was no longer valid. No matter how
hard one tried to deny this fact, it could not be ignored. We realized weloving dialogue147

had come to the limits of our knowledge and that we could not keep
doing things the old way. For a long time, the big question was how tomanage using the old terminology and language of physics, but it could
not be done. A new world view emerged, telling us that things werecompletely different than we had understood them to be—much more
open—and suddenly it seemed that the new language that was required
shared many similarities with what we call religion—not the establishedreligions, but that which is actually behind them all, because you do notmake religion understandable in the moment you explain it: There must
be something essential which is beyond our understanding.
How do we deal with this fact? One has to simply leave it open, andthat also means that not every question that we ask has an answer. There
are questions that cannot be answered because they are not wellformulated. For example, what color is a circle? Blue? Red? Green? No.
Colorless? No! Color has no meaning for the circle! But wait! What if I
tear a piece of paper, take my pen, and look! The circle is blue! But thecolor comes from the pen. And the fact that you can see the circle’s
thickness is due to the little ball on the ball point of the pen; it’s as thickas the little ball and has nothing to do with the circle. Well then, howshould I talk about this circle? Close your eyes and try to think the coloraway. That works. And now, think the thickness away. Nothing! That’s
because you are looking for the circle outside rather than within yourself.
If one has had such an experience it is very important to realize thatthe many religions that we have today—if we go look back 4,000 years—are actually rather similar. Only the language used to talk about themdiffers. We listen to the language and say, “That’s something different!”
Yes, it is a different language, but that is like comparing French andEnglish with German and saying that it is not the same. So, if we goback and ask ourselves how all these religions arose we will find outthat in the moment you begin to write it down you say, “Yes, what I’ve
written down is understandable, and so it must be true.” No! It is just my
way of approaching that which is essentially not graspable. This does
not indicate stupidity on our part, only that which is not graspable is toblame and still I can say, I’ve fallen in love, and the other person can
nod and say, I understand what you mean.
Today we find ourselves in the situation that we use modern physics,
but we act as though it was still the old physics. That is quite
schizophrenic. We are dealing with the bombs that modern language
needs and say we want to shape the future. We are just hanging on—webeing the western world because when I look to the East, I see that they

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do not make things so simple. For them it is not so important thateverything you do is put in writing. Their language expresses
relationships. So, if we go by the old description, we start with theelementary building blocks and analyze them. The laws that govern
them are all part of the old physics and so we put them all together. And
some kind of result will be sure to come out of it, but it will not be
unambiguous. To illustrate, let me show you this picture of a young girl.
However, it is not just a young girl. If you take a closer look you canalso see an old woman. It depends not on the physical laws of thestructure, but on how I put the pieces together. So for some reason I
choose to interpret the picture one way or the other. I still see the young
girl in this picture, even though people tell me it is time I start seeing theold woman, I’m 83 after all, but it is hard, because I really think thatyouth is pretty interesting!

What does it mean if you use this other—let’s call it—dimension. Itmeans you have a different perspective: you do not take things apart, butinstead observe them as you would observe a painting and say, “Isn’t
that pretty.” And if I say it is pretty and someone asks me why—well assoon as I start questioning why it is pretty I start taking it apart again.
And soon enough I will have forgotten why it is pretty, because I
practically just tore it to pieces. We need to get into the habit of looking
at the big picture, and not saying that the big picture is only valuable if I
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they do not really exist. The world is not a reality but a realness that iscontinually changing. We can never reach the point of understanding it;
we can only use its changing nature as a navigation point.

What Exists is not Matter
The new physics says realness (Wirklichkeit) is not really a reality but apotentiality. Realness is the possibility of realizations—realnesses—
because there is far more than one answer. And the funny thing is, if you
get to the bottom of this world that we experience then you will see thatwhat was there in the beginning is not matter—matter does not evenexist! All that exists is what is in between, not what I can hold onto.
That is quite amazing, that all that exists is what is in between, but not
the things you can hold onto: visible points of invisible intersecting
relationships. However my wife says that my day depends on all thesethings I can hold onto, and she is right. Even if you say matter does notexist, roughly speaking, a whole heap of the intangible put together cancreate something tangible; that which we call matter. And this is theworld we orient ourselves in.
If I ask: “What exists?” there is no answer. All I can ask is: “Whathappens?” Everything is alive, so to speak. Instead of an atom—
something that is only matter and does not have any other properties?wehave something that is always changing. I call it a “Wirks.” People ask,
“What’s a Wirks?” I reply, “If you do not understand, then you’ve
understood it!” And if they say, “Tell me more,” then I reply “It has to
be enough, because you have this possibility in the background and it isimportant for you and your development! This implies a completely
different structure that bears the possibility of developing into a different
direction, where the strict natural laws of cause and effect don’t apply.”
This is just a clue as to how physicists came to the conclusion that
nothing tangible exists, only what is in between. Why is the idea of theatom as the smallest particle not true? They looked at the atom and said
it looks like a ball and it looks like a system of nucleus and electrons
orbiting around; kind of like the sun and the planets. But this just did notwork. Electrons are not real, protons are not real, all these terms you
have heard—people just use them because they want to understand. And
this has consequences. I will not elaborate on this much more, I just to
wanted to explain how we got on this track that forced us to see things
that are not tangible.

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The Future is Open, so we can be Creative
I think this is a good thing, because as long as we are bound to strictlaws of nature, it is like being in a prison. If I say I am creative theanswer will be, “No, you just think you are. You have to do it: it was
already decided at the time of the Big Bang that 17 billion years later
you would be giving this lecture here. Everything is included, all yourstammering, you don’t even have to apologize for any of it.”
What matters is not matter, the single particle, but how it is allconnected. You think you are sitting on that chair and are independent
from the rest of the world. But no—we are in fact something that is not
localized! We are all connected; there is no separation in this world.
Everything is connected, but not all ties are equally strong. This is whatmakes it possible to coexist in this world, without an intellectual
understanding of each other. All we need is sensibility for each other.
First of all; what makes the difference is the way things areconnected. Based on this realization the second point is that there isactually only one creation which is interconnected and inseparable. The
separations are built in at the bottom and grow in different ways. Thismeans that how it grows is not the way our logic would have it and thatwhen I study something it has to be one way or another. It is a different
kind of logic. There is endless variability, and that is the reason why wecan all be creative if we act accordingly. And that brings me to the third
point: the consequences are that the future is open, there are no laws. If
this is our starting point, it is infinitely open, but not randomly open. I
don’t want to elaborate, but it means that each of us can, in principle, becreative. And being creative does not mean that everyone in the world
goes off to a different direction, but that I have other dimensions, so thisworld is comprised of more and more dimensions, not only three
dimensions or six dimensions but an infinite number of dimensions.
Every creative aspect leads to the growth of even more creative space,so I do not step on someone else’s feet in the process of being creative,
but in fact open up a new configuration.
That is why I do not believe in the Big Bang theory that you hear
about in classical physics. It is not even interesting! They say, 17 billion
years ago there was this Big Bang and then it all started and just went
downhill from there and in the end it is all over. No, it is not like that. If
there was a Big Bang, then it was something altogether different. It
bangs and bangs and bangs and keeps on banging, and that is each andevery one of us! We all take part in the creation of the future. Is that not
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something to change our direction?

Cooperation is the Foundation on which the Cosmos is
Constructed
Why is what I have been telling you important to us? Does this reallymatter to the world, which is ten to the nth times bigger than what wewere looking at in our experiments? Do we need some means of magnifi­
cation, something to billow it out? The answer is: no. I brought this
instrument along to demonstrate something. This is a pendulum, you
can easily calculate its movements; it’s something you learn to do inschool. See how it wobbles back and forth, now you see it’s getting tired
because of friction, it’s losing energy, the amplitude is decreasing and it
slows to a stop. This is very predictable, just like old physics. Well, thisis not very interesting.
But can we really calculate it all? The answer is: no, we cannot.
When it [the pendulum] is in this position all the way up here, then you
cannot predict what direction it will swing over to. If you swing thependulum as hard as you can it stands still up there and then it falls
down, to one side or the other. Not even a physics professor can predict
which side it will fall over to. I always use an old trick and say, I am aphysics professor, so I know which side it will swing to; and then I standon one side of it and predict it will fall down toward me. And it does!
The only reason it does is that I also exert a force of gravity on thependulum. Wherever I am standing, I am not alone in this world. If I am
standing on this side, I will pull it this way, and if I am standing on theother side, I will pull it the other way. That means that this position here
is an instable equilibrium. But this point of instability also means it is
the point of highest sensitivity.
You often hear about how a butterfly’s wings can cause a typhoon.
Everybody says that cannot be true. In this case too, a point of
instability makes it possible for such a small cause to have such a large
effect. The point is that there is a situation in the background, apotentiality, no longer a reality, but rather a multitude of connections, aworld of interconnections. At the point at which water changes from it’sgaseous to its liquid state, if there is a minor disturbance, then—whoosh—the pendulum falls in one direction. So, instability means sensitivity.
If the pendulum could talk it would say, “What a great feeling this is—nobody knows what I am going to do, except me.” But it cannot talk,because it drops down, and that means that it dies and it has no morestrength to tell anyone. It would be nice if this had a little bit of variety

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to it, so let us introduce some variety here to make things more lively. I
have a single pendulum here and I have inserted two needles which I
can barely take out again; this has now become a tri-pendulum [apendulum on a pendulum on a pendulum]. When I set this tri-pendulum
in motion, this unstable situation occurs more than once: again andagain it scans the subsurface, so to speak. If you let your computer
calculate what happens next, it will calculate wildly and then stop andtell you, “Error, this does not exist.”
And it does not, because this point is not calculable. Suddenly, theworld becomes open—isn’t that great? Every time I do this I get adifferent result. Then I say, “This is not enough.” From the beginning,
through the experience, until death, is just a matter of minutes. Pretty
short—I’d like to live a bit longer? How can I do that? I have to fixate (itin) an unstable situation. I cannot manage this with just one pendulum, I
would need many. It is like standing on one leg: if I lift one leg and theother leg does the same I would tip over, which is not a good strategy
for survival. But can we do anything about this? For instance, when you[one leg] begin to tip over, then you move forward, and when you [theother leg] begin to tip, you go forward, and now … you’re walking!
Each time I fall, the other leg does not do the same thing, but rather theexact opposite. That implies you should not do just as I do and theneverything will be fine; no, to the contrary, it would be a doubly wrong!
With more of this instability joined together with others that are
different, one can create new situations which in the end are so precious
and—after two and a half billion years—have led us to this result. So,
instead of the opposing force becoming an enemy, we say, “Thank God
you are here, because you pick me up when I cannot go on any more.”This interplay of diversity, a cooperative interaction eventually leads tothe existence of very complex things that we can recognize in the visible
manifestations of life. But the point is: even though we can explain it inthis way, the question remains: how do we get to the point ofcooperating? With people, it does not happen so easily. If they are
different they say, “Ha ha ha, if I do that, then you will stumble, andthen it will be my turn.”
Then what could be a reason for them to cooperate? It has to do withthe fact that from the very beginning they are not coexisting independent­
ly. Rather, it can be likened to an organism in which the different living
parts cannot say, “I’m going to make the other parts stumble,” because it
would get them in trouble. That means that the precondition is thatcooperation is not a superimposed behavior, but rather the foundation,
the way the entire cosmos is constructed—it’s made that way.

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The Universe Demands that We live a Vibrant LifeIf we are creative, then we are co-workers, not separated from others.
Here we need dialogue as well. I need to speak with the other in order todo something for them in an atmosphere which is symbiotic. When two
come together they can join forces in a win-win situation, and not like ina game of Monopoly. Monopoly could never lead to the fact that wehave 500 million different species out there without having to have a big
meeting every year about how to arrange things with one another.
Everything is connected with each other, and that is why we haveprogressive development which is ever more vibrant. If we think about
what sustainability actually means, the ability to sustain, it is not
sufficient if we fail to include vibrant life itself.
If I do not mean the living, but instead cultivate the ability to stay thesame, it is really easy; all I have to do is just lie down and die, and then I
am done, I have nothing more to do. There is no young person who says,“Oh, that is just what I want to do. I want to just lie down and then I’ll
have fulfilled my mission!” No, because life is living and vibrant! You
have to maintain the liveliness, which means you can do things in thesame way or do something different. And that is why we have auniverse, a cosmos, which is growing and growing, and not evenhappening in three dimensional space.
And this is perhaps a good point at which to end my lecture.
Notes
Michail Gorbatschow/Daisaku Ikeda, Unsere Wege treffen sich am Horizont(München: Btb,1998); Mikhail Gorbachev/Daisaku Ikeda, Moral Lessons of theTwentieth Century: Gorbachev and Ikeda on Buddhism and Communism (London and
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005)
2
Tschingis Aitmatow/Daisaku Ikeda, Begegnung am Fudschijama. Ein Dialog(Zürich: Unionsverlag, 1999); Chingiz Aitmatov/Daisaku Ikeda, Ode to the Grand
Spirit, A Dialogue (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009)1