22 jul THOUGHT AS A SYSTEM
We usually think of our thoughts as separate from reality—just reporting on it, not shaping it. But David Bohm says thought is deeply involved in creating our experience.
Thought isn’t just “thinking.” It includes:
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Memories (past experiences shaping the present)
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Emotions (fear, joy, anger—all tied to thoughts)
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Reflexes (automatic reactions, like anger when insulted)
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Even objects (cars, phones—all products of thought)
The Problem:
Thought doesn’t realize it’s creating reality. It acts like a separate observer, leading to conflicts—personal (arguments) and global (wars over resources).
The Solution?
Just like our body knows where our hand is without looking (proprioception), we need to sense thought in action—not control it, but see how it shapes reactions.
Key Insight:
When we observe thought without judgment, its grip loosens. Groups can help by discussing openly, revealing hidden biases. This could lead to a new kind of collective intelligence.
Bohm’s Goal:
Not absolute truth, but a better “map” of how thought works—to reduce conflict and suffering.
In Thought as a System, David Bohm takes as his subject the role of thought and knowledge at every level of human affairs, from our private reflections on personal identity to our collective efforts to fashion a tolerable civilization.
In Bohm’s view, we have inherited a belief that mind (or thought) is of an inherently different and higher order than matter. This belief has nurtured a faith in what we call objectivity —the capacity to observe and report neutrally on some object or event, without having any effect on what we are looking at, or without being affected by it. Historically, this perspective has given us a scientific and cultural world view in which isolated, fragmentary parts mechanically interact with one another. Bohm points out that this fragmentary view corresponds to ‘reality’ in significant respects, but suggests that we have overextended our faith in the objectivist perspective. Once we make the critical (and false) assumption that thought and knowledge are not participating in our sense of reality, but only reporting on it, we are committed to a view that does not take into account the complex, unbroken processes that underlie the world as we experience it.
He explores the manner in which thought actively participates in forming our perceptions, our sense of meaning and our daily actions. He suggests that collective thought and knowledge have become so automated that we are in large part controlled by them, with a subsequent loss of authenticity, freedom and order. In conversations with fifty seminar participants in Ojai, California, David Bohm offers a radical perspective on an underlying source of human conflict, and inquires into the possibility of individual and collective transformation.
The late David Bohm was Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. He was the author of many articles and books including Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order and The Undivided Universe (with Basil Hiley).
David Bohm died in 1992.
Q: It seems that we see appearances differently and we see ourselves as separate because our awareness is incoherent. But once we go into this it becomes coherent and extremely powerful.
Bohm: It is very powerful because it’s all working together instead of being in different directions. It doesn’t cancel out but it works together. I sometimes give the example of a laser. Ordinary light waves are called ‘incoherent’; they go in all directions and are not in phase with each other, so they don’t build up. But the light coming from a laser is coherent, because the waves all beam in the same direction and build up great strength. Similarly, if even a few people were to think together in a coherent way it would have tremendous power in the culture and in the society.
Now, one of the questions that’s involved in all this is time. All thought involves time, in a way which we don’t see. We tend to think that everything exists in time, that time is an independent reality. People represent time by space. In a diagram they draw a line and call it ’time’, and say that here is a point in time, which is now, then another point, then another point. Clearly, thought is then representing time through space.
But we seem also to experience time psychologically. Leibniz, the philosopher, has said that space is the order of coexistence. All that co-exists is in a certain order which we call ‘space’. And time is the order of successive existence- the order of succession. The real basis of time is succession- things succeeding each other in a certain order. Time is a concept which is set up by thought to represent succession.
All sorts of concepts of time are possible. In the early days people didn’t think much about time. They may have had a vague notion of past and future the vague notion of tomorrow being any time, and the past not remembered very well. There were no printed records. The past was mostly mythological; and the future was probably equally mythological, if they thought of it at all. They could possibly have thought of seasons and things like that. The seasons are the succession of process. Your body goes through a succession of rhythms. And that succession is the basis of the whole thing that is a thing that’s actual.
Thought deals with that, puts it in order by means of the concept of time. We may draw a line and call that ’time’, but as I have said earlier, that’s really representing time by space. You say the clock tells time, but it doesn’t. What you actually see is the position of the hands of the clock, not the time. It means time; it’s been set up in such a way that it should measure time. But we never actually see, perceive, or experience ’time’-it’s inferred.
Nevertheless, we seem somehow to experience time in our own psychological existence. But if you thought that time was a basic reality then you would have a paradox. The past is gone it doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t exist either -it’s not yet. And the present, if it were thought of as the point dividing past and future, also could not exist, because it would be dividing what doesn’t exist from what doesn’t exist. That’s the paradox of this view. However, it is no paradox if you just say that time is a representation. A representation can be all kinds of things.
Science has developed all sorts of notions of time. There is Newton’s idea of absolute time a certain moment that’s the same for the whole universe, and then another moment succeeding it, and then another one. Einstein challenged that, and said time is relative to speed, and so on.
You can change the ideas of time and of space, but they are all representations. Each one may have a domain where it’s correct; and beyond that it may not be right, may not work coherently. But in our culture we have a tacit assumption that everything exists in time.
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