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" "On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious – that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not – not in the way I’m using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, “Perhaps I’d better not talk to you, because you’ve got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.” Freud’s answer was, “This cancer may be fatal, but it’s not serious.” And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way – that it may well be fatal, but it’s not serious.
David Joseph Bohm (20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992) was an American-British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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In other words, the creative person does not strictly know what he or she is looking for. The whole activity, therefore, is not regarded as a problem that must be solved but simply as play itself. Within this play it is not taken for granted that new things must always be different or that they can never in any significant way be related to what came before. Indeed, it could be suggested that the more different things are, the greater may be the importance in seeing how they are similar, and likewise, the more similar things are, the greater may be the value in perceiving their difference. Science, according to this argument, is properly a continuous ongoing activity. Through creative play and fresh perception there is a constant movement of similarities and differences, with each new theory differing in some subtle but significant fashion from what came before. To sustain this creative activity of the mind,
To see the universal nature of gravitational attraction, Newton had to become free of the habitual compartmentalization of earthly and celestial matter, a form of fragmentation that was implicit within the tacit infrastructure of the “normal” science of his day. To break away from the habitual and commonly accepted modes of thought, which had been taken for granted for generations, required intense courage, energy, and passion. Newton had these in abundance, and at the height of his powers, he was always asking fundamental questions. The crucial factor in Newton’s vision, and indeed in the creation of all new ideas, is this ability to break out of old patterns of thought. Indeed, once this has been done, new perceptions and novel ideas appear to arise naturally.
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