Quotes from David Bohm

if there is listening through a "listener," then we are not listening.

both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.

Q: Are you saying that thought has a kind of possessive quality which stays, gets stuck, and then becomes habitual? And we don't see this? Bohm: I think that whenever we repeat something it gradually becomes a habit, and we get less and less aware of it. If you brush your teeth every morning, you probably hardly notice how you're doing it. It just goes by itself. Our thought does the same thing, and so do our feelings. That's a key point.

It is especially important to consider this question today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.

it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped. So, in certain ways, the creation of special subjects of study and the division of labour was an important step forward.

What is called for is not an integration of thought, or a kind of imposed unity, for any such imposed point of view would itself be merely another fragment. Rather, all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which it is clear and adequate.

Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

the subtle but crucial role of our general forms of thinking in sustaining fragmentation and in defeating our deepest urges toward wholeness or integrity.

One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.

science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view

violence doesn't stop merely by saying, 'we'll act based on love', because that can become just an idea that gets absorbed into the system.

Although our modern way of thinking has, of course, changed a great deal relative to the ancient one, the two have had one key feature in common: i.e. they are both generally 'blinkered' by the notion that theories give true knowledge about 'reality as it is'. Thus, both are led to confuse the forms and shapes induced in our perceptions by theoretical insight with a reality independent of our thought and our way of looking.

perhaps because we have at present no coherent world view, there is a widespread tendency to ignore the psychological and social importance of such questions almost altogether.

When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature.

The point is that we have all sorts of assumptions, not only about politics or economics or religion, but also about what we think an individual should do, or what life is all about, and so forth.

If intelligence is to be understood as an unconditioned act of perception, its ground cannot be in structures such as cells, molecules, elementary particles, etc. Ultimately, anything that is determined by the laws of such structures must be in the field of what can be known, i.e. stored up in memory, and thus will have to have the mechanical nature of anything that can be assimilated in the basically mechanical character of the process of thought.

At any particular stage in the development of science, our concepts concerning the causal relationships will then be true only relative to a certain approximation and to certain conditions.

Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that's the point. Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption. But that's done non-verbally. Do you see what I mean? To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can't describe.

older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains.

If one considers this question carefully, one can see that in a certain sense the East was right to see the immeasurable as the primary reality. For, as has already been indicated, measure is an insight created by man. A reality that is beyond man and prior to him cannot depend on such insight.

One may speculate that perhaps in ancient times, the men who were wise enough to see that the immeasurable is the primary reality were also wise enough to see that measure is insight into a secondary and dependent but nonetheless necessary aspect of reality.

what we have to do with regard to the great wisdom from the whole of the past, both in the East and in the West, is to assimilate it and go on to new and original perception relevant to our present condition of life.

One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures.

Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement...It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony of fitting between mind and matter.