One of the most powerful thoughts people have is the thought of necessity. It is much more than a thought. The word 'necessary' means 'it cannot be o… - David Bohm

i like to go into the roots of words, because they often show early insights, a fresh perception of meaning. the word 'economy' has a greek root, meaning 'household management'. we can say that there are so many households in the world and they all behave independently. in fact they are all interdependent. the earth is one household really, but we are not treating it that way. so the first step in economics is to say, the earth is one household, it is all one.

One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver 'feeds back' into the input, the receiver operates on its own, to produce mainly irrelevant and meaningless noise, but when it is sensitive to the signal on the radio wave, its own order of inner movement of electric currents (transformed into sound waves) is parallel to the order in the signal and thus the receiver serves to bring a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure. 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 the 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. (This notion is discussed further in chapter 7.) It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony or fitting between mind and matter.

We were saying that thought is not merely the intellectual activity; rather it is one connected process which includes feeling and the body, and so on. Also, it passes between people — it's all one process all over the world. I suggested that we call that process a 'system' — a whole system in which every part is dependent on every other part. I also suggested that there is a kind of systemic flaw which is pervasive. So when we see something wrong with a part of this system, we bring another part to bear to try to correct it; but doing so will just add more, very similar troubles. We went on to say that it's not possible to solve our problems that way — rather, they may get worse instead of better — and that these troubles throughout the world have been going on for thousands of years. Also, we said that when you try to look at what's going on inside you when all this is happening you may get unpleasant feelings such as pain or fear; and that instinct, as well as the whole culture, leads you to move away from looking at it. But it is necessary to stay with it somehow, in spite of the difficulty of doing so. That was what we were discussing at the end — that it is really worth doing because in this way we may learn something about how it all goes. Now, I thought that people might have a few points to raise about what we've been talking about before we go on.