"The Lecture"

Dr David Bohm was a respected physicist and was also interested in the nature of thought.  This book is a transcription of a seminar held in Ojai, California in 1990.

This review concerns only one issue that he discussed, the issue of thought, but it is the one that is central to his ideas. 

In fact this is less a review than an attempt to highlight some of the concepts that Bohm identified.  This reviewer is of the opinion that this is an important book and should be read by everyone who is searching for truth in this world.  For some this may form an important part of their “homework”.  

Bohm’s key work in this field is “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, which will be the subject of a later review in PS Magazine.

Bohm outlined the various problems that he saw as being present in the world and asked “What is the source of all this trouble?” 

His answer was that – “I’m saying that the source [of the various problems] is basically in thought.”

Bohm noted the distinction between “thinking” and “thought” – thinking implies the present tense, and thought is the past participle. 

Thinking goes into the brain and leaves a trace which becomes thought, and thought then acts automatically. 

Thus our thinking puts thought into our system which programs non-reflective actions.

Thus if I am English and have been taught to distrust all French people, the instruction to distrust French people becomes internalized and I will behave as if this is a logical statement.  This concept is mirrored in the idea of memetics, where ideas are seen as mind-viruses.

This is a core concept and you may see it as an important protection against the false conceptions that plague our view of the world.   

In Bohm’s analysis thought is at the root of all these problems.

Fragmentation

“One of the obvious things wrong with thought is fragmentation.  Thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken up.” 

“It seems very hard for human beings to accept seriously this simple fact of the effect of fragmentation. Nations fight each other and people kill each other. You are told that for the nation you must sacrifice everything.”

• Bohm saw the divisions going down into the family – he said that, “People are supposed to be getting together, but they can’t seem to.”
• “In science, for instance, every little thing is fragmented from every other one.  People hardly know what is happening in a somewhat different field.  And it goes on.  Knowledge is fragmented.  Everything gets broken up.”

In Bohm’s vision we should be moving to a more holistic view of the world, realizing our common humanity, not fragmenting our view of the world with false divisions.

“Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly.  And as we’ll discuss further in, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person.  Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that s not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information.  The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you.”

“Until thought is understood – better yet, more than understood, perceived – it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do.”

Thoughts and feelings affect each other...” there is a false division between thinking and feeling.”

“This is another major feature of thought: thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing.  It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it.”

Thought can generate incoherence and thought can also generate habits and habitual behaviour.  Bohm saw thought as a system, a set of connected things or parts.

He said, “thought is a system.  That system not only includes thoughts, ‘felts’ and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.”

Bohm said that we have this system of thought, “Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a systemic fault.  It’s not a fault here, there or there, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system.”

He added that, “Something has happened in the entire system which makes the thought wrong – the whole process in the system is not straight.”

Bohm said that our failure to recognize the problem is one reason why this issue is so difficult to deal with; “I think that we’re not really aware of what is happening in this system which I’ve called ‘thought’.  We don’t know how it works.  We hardly know it is a system; it’s not part of our culture even to admit that it is a single system.”

He also pointed to the importance of insights in changing systems of thought, as Newton did with the idea of gravity.  But he also notes that Newton’s insight only broke the pattern in a limited domain. “all these insights in science were ultimately assimilated within the general system of thought.”

He said the importance of such changes were that they showed that the pattern of the system is not something which cannot be changed.

Bohm finally notes that, “thought is constantly trying to grasp things and to bring order to them.  And it would try to grasp itself, because it sees the inferential evidence of itself.  And so it explains itself as coming from a source – a source which is an image, which has time to act, which has psychological time, and so on. 

But that requires insight into this whole thing we’ve been discussing.  And that insight would open the door to freedom, collectively as well as individually – to friendship and fellowship and love.” In my opinion, a worth while read!

PS-Magazine.com and MerlianNews.com
a trans-Atlantic holistic internet resource

About PS Magazine l Terms