David Bohm Quotes

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

The essential activity of science consists of thought, which arises in creative perception and is expressed through play. This gives rise to a process in which thought unfolds into provisional knowledge which then moves outward into action and returns as fresh perception and knowledge. This process leads to a continuous adaptation of knowledge which undergoes constant growth, transformation, and extension. Knowledge is therefore not something rigid and fixed that accumulates indefinitely in a steady way but is a continual process of change. Its growth is closer to that of an organism than a data bank.

However, as indicated earlier, truth and falsity have actually, like relevance and irrelevance, to be seen from moment to moment, in an act of perception in a very high order.

Man's general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.

The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.

The thing that mostly gets in the way of dialogue,” he says, “is holding to assumptions and opinions, and defending them.” This instinct to judge and defend, embedded in the selfdefense mechanisms of our biological heritage, is the source of incoherence.

What prevents theoretical insights from going beyond existing limitations and changing to meet new facts is just the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality (which implies, of course, that they need never change).

...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.

The division between mind and matter, or the observer and the observed, has produced very serious consequences in attempting to see that the world is a whole, because even if you are thinking of wholeness, you are thinking of an observer who is looking at this wholeness, and this creates a division. This starts to break up the whole, because you identify with one part of it, and then there is another part you are not identified with, and therefore the whole is broken up in two. And then it breaks up further, because there are many observers, and each observer is an external object for all the others. The many parts obtained in this way are related, and you have to break things up even more in order to understand their relationships. So the implicate order can be important as a way of seeing how this particular problem might be dealt with.

Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.

If I am right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source, it follows that if we don't do anything about thought, we won't get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way.

As Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana says, “when one human being tells another human what is ‘real,’ what they are actually doing is making a demand for obedience. They are asserting that they have a privileged view of reality.

In the dialogue people should talk directly to one another, one to one, across the circle. Then the time would come, if we got to know each other a bit and could trust each other, when you could speak very directly to the whole group, or to anybody in it.

Throughout his career as a theoretical physicist, Bohm made note of the fact that, in spite of claims to pursue “truth,” scientific endeavor was often infected with personal ambition, a rigid defense of theory, and the weight of tradition – all at the expense of creative participation toward the common goals of science. Based in part on such observations, he frequently remarked that the general lot of mankind was caught in a similar web of contradictory intentions and actions.