Here are some passages from "Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue" by David Bohm. The late David Bohm was Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

I think it’s important to see these passages because the view expressed is not that of a philosopher or a psychologist or a theologian, but a physicist. He has an interesting approach and some fascinating phraseology. I have inserted the non-quoted and parenthetical material to bridge gaps and keep this introduction from getting too long.

Bohm: "Throughout history there has been a succession of world views; that is, general notions of cosmic order, and the nature of reality as a whole. Each of these views has expressed the essential spirit of its time, and each of them in its turn, has had profound effects on the individual, and on society as a whole, not only physically, but also psychologically and ethically. These effects were multiple in nature, but among them, one of the most significant is notions of universal order."

"The first of these is the ancient Greek notion of the Earth at the center of the universe, and the seven concentric spheres in the heavens in an order of increasing perfection of their natures. Together with the Earth, they comprised a totality that was regarded as an integral organism, with activities they regarded as meaningful. … Man was thought to be of central importance in this whole system, and this implied that his proper behavior was to be regarded as correspondingly necessary for the over-all harmony of the universe."

"In contrast, in the modern view the Earth is a mere grain of dust in an immense universe of material bodies — stars, galaxies and so on — and these, in turn, are also constituted of atoms, molecules, and structures built out of them, as if they were parts of a universal machine. This machine, evidently, does not constitute a whole with meaning." In this view man’s actions are seen as largely insignificant. "Man tends to feel much more at home" with the first point of view.

PHYSICS

"Now, it’s in physics that the mechanistic world view obtained its most complete development. From physics, mechanism has spread into other sciences and into almost all fields of human endeavor (and it has become) a more or less dominant world view that affects us all."

"Of course there is no way to prove this assumption (that things can be totally explained in a mechanistic way). So to suppose that this assumption holds without limit is basically an article of faith, which permeates the motivation of most of modern science and gives energy to the scientific enterprise. This is a modern counterpart of earlier faith in religious belief based on more organismic types of view (the Greek view), which also in their time gave energy to vast social enterprises. That is, we have not lost the age of faith; we have really changed from one faith to another. And faith is, according to Teilhard de Chardin, just the holding of the intelligence to a certain world view."

Physicists of the time (of Newtonian physics) "commonly had an unshakeable confidence in correctness of this whole thing." But relativity and quantum physics "overturned the whole conceptual structure. Now this clearly illustrates the danger of complacency about our world views, and makes it evident how necessary it is to constantly have a provisional, inquiring attitude toward them. That is, in some sense, we have to have enough faith in our world view to work from it, but not that much faith that we think it’s the final answer."

BOHM II

More passages from "Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue" by David Bohm. The late David Bohm was Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Bohm sees "far-reaching and pervasive fragmentation" arising out of the mechanistic world view. "We have a way of thinking that produces irrelevant breaks and fragments, rather than seeing the proper parts in relation to the whole."

"Being guided by this view (the inappropriate fragmentation that ensues from the mechanistic approach), man then acts in such a way as to try and break himself and world up so that all seems to correspond to his way of thinking.

"Fragmentation is therefore an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to the general tendency to break things up in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive."

"When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first — his own person, his own group — he can’t seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. … Similarly, he will think body and mind are independent actualities, thought and feeling, and so on, and he begins to think to divide these up, each to be treated separately. … To sum up, fragmentary thinking is giving rise to a reality that is constantly breaking up into disorderly, disharmonious and destructive partial activities."

"The main point then is that your world view — it’s really a self-world-view because it includes yourself — has a tremendous effect on you."

"The forms that we have in our world view are charged with tremendous energy, and presumably when that world view is challenged, say by a scientific world view or a religious world view, a tremendous explosion may take place and people fight over it to the death. Nevertheless it may be necessary to challenge these world views if they are wrong. There is a risk of doing so, but there is also perhaps a greater risk in not doing so, because if we go in with a fixed, rigid world view it will lead us to the edge of the abyss."

Questioner: "My impression is that to a great extent what you are talking about is a pervasive confusion — that we mix up the fragments and think they are wholes, then behave as if they were wholes."

Bohm: "Yes, well, that’s because we are thinking that the parts in our thought each corresponds to a sub-whole; but more deeply, because we are taking this thought as an exact representation of reality, we are imposing it on reality where in general it won’t hold. So in attempting to impose this thought on reality rigidly, we start to break reality up."

"I am attempting to say that the whole divides into parts, and they are natural. … The attempt to impose a line of thought too hard will tend to lead to arbitrary division."

In the application of a world view, "We are affecting our whole way of approaching the world and ourselves. And this has a profound effect on the way science is done, and the way society is organized, and the way people are related."

BOHM III

More passages from "Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue" by David Bohm. The late David Bohm was Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Bohm: "I would like to make a distinction between thinking and thought."

"Whatever you have been thinking enters your experience. So therefore, when we experience things, we experience them filtered through thought. … One of the difficulties is that the thoughts contain all sorts of presuppositions, which limit us and hold us in rigid grooves. What we have to do is to discover these presuppositions and get rid of them — get free of them."

"An idea is a way of seeing."

"The way I see thinking is that thinking may arise first of all from sense perception. … Thinking will arise (even before we have the ability to use language: Piaget) first of all from perception, but clearly it’s affected at each stage by past thought. Whatever you have thought is going to affect your next thought, so in thinking, present perception and past thought are fused."

"An idea must be vulnerable — you have to be ready to drop it."

THE MOON ANALOGY

"The mind establishes two compartments. It has a presupposition. You say the answer’s natural, that the moon belongs in the sky because it’s a celestial object, and celestial objects don’t fall."

"Now Newton was supposed to have been sitting under the apple tree, and he saw the apple falling, and you could guess that what he asked himself was that if the apple is falling, why isn’t the moon falling? So that was a new question. … And the answer was the moon IS falling … and then he had only to ask why doesn’t it reach the ground?"

"You see, the new idea was already in the question. So you can ask, where does the facility to be aware of questions come from, and perhaps that's the nature of awareness."

In regards "why isn’t the moon falling?" … "Nobody asked that question. There was a lack of force to break through the compartments (of thought). Now from some deeper source came the attention needed to see that that was a question, and I think that force had to break through the barriers of our conditioning — something new."

THOUGHT

"Normally most of what we do is the result of thought, which is almost like a program of a computer. We need that, because we need all sorts of thought. When you learn to drive a car it’s basically through thinking about it that your action really becomes thought, so that you don’t have to continue to think about it. It acts rapidly. So you must have thought running a large part of your life, and the hope is that it will be correct thought. If it’s not correct thought, then you have to be ready to pay attention and see when it’s not correct. The trouble is that this thought tends to run in grooves in which it gets stuck … it takes something to break through that. Now in an extreme case we would call that power genius — you see, a passion."

"We used to have when I was a child the question: What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? The point is there is an object that doesn’t yield, and eventually is has to yield to a force which however may not be a force of great power in the ordinary sense, but a force which has great subtlety and depth."

Questioner: "The force sort of digs our the object from underneath."

Bohm: "It sort of dissolves it from underneath, yes."

Questioner: "And makes the idea that it’s a solid and spatial object irrelevant."

Bohm: "Yes. It brings out the irrelevance of that idea. You see, every idea is limited. Now we don’t accept that usually, at least for certain ideas. For example, as we discussed last night, the idea of nationalism is not accepted as limited because it takes precedence over everything else, as you can see in songs like ‘Duetschland, Deutschland, uber Alles,’ which means absolutely unlimited, right? Now that idea was the power which drove us to the First and Second World Wars. It was part of the power, anyway; similar ideas prevailed. … Therefore if you take an idea which is absolutely necessary it will generate behind it the force of absolute necessity — the false force of absolute necessity. I think it’s wrong for absolute necessity to come from an idea. Every idea must be vulnerable. … Now is there an absolute necessity? Perhaps there is. We have to inquire. But that absolute necessity cannot take the form of any particular idea."

"When the brain suddenly expanded for some unknown reason, it was able to think — to produce thought — but it did not have the capacity to see that thought made a program, and that its subsequent actions were determined largely by that program. It did not see the program. … Thought is enfolded almost like a kind of program. The brain was never set up to be aware of its programs. … I am trying to say that we don’t see thought because it’s a program."

Questioner: "Now we’ve got to challenge that. We’ve got to come in and change that into something else. We’ve got to make some sort of creative act to break out of this groove. Now where does that creative act come from? How do we nurture it?"

Bohm: "I want to suggest that at the deeper, subtler level, thinking is not conditioned by thought. It is a deeper, enfolded activity and has energy and passion."

Questioner: "And which is not motivated by the grooves of thought."

Bohm: "Yes, the grooves of thought are rather on the surface, you see. … Somehow we can’t actually get to reality because we are stuck behind a screen of thoughts."

Questioner: "And it (thinking) filters through them?"

Bohm: "It doesn’t only filter through them, it’s got to dissolve them. The reason we’re not conscious of this is that these grooves produce such tremendous effects. If you go to a place like Reno, Nevada, or Las Vegas, and we turn on all these electric lights, then you don’t see the stars, and you say that all these electric lights are the main thing, and there is no universe. (laughter) That’s the way people obviously feel at that place, right? (laughter) And they blot out the universe. So when you turn off the lights then the universe comes through. At first it seems very faint, but that faint thing may represent something immense, whereas the very powerful bright thing may represent nothing much."