The Nature of Things – Dr David Bohm
David Bohm discusses his perspective on theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, including the contradictions between relativity and quantum theory.
He explains his theory of the implicate and explicate order to describe the wholeness and interconnectedness of matter. Bohm relates this to consciousness, self-deception in thought, and Krishnamurti’s teachings on awareness to transform individual and collective conditioning.
KEY POINTS
- Relativity and quantum theory have in common the undivided wholeness.
- The view of relativity which Einstein was pursuing was that there’s only a general field, particles are concentrated regions of a field which spread out through the universe and merge with others. So the particle is an abstraction according to Einstein. There’s only a whole field, which is undivided.
- Quantum mechanics says energy exists in the form of indivisible quanta, and the entire movement of the universe is made up of unbreakable, indivisible links which include the observer and the observed, it includes us as well as the atoms we’re looking at.
- If you take waves passing through a pond, they pass right through each other as if there weren’t any. But if you put a rock in there, you see the rock scatters the waves. So the waves would show up that rock. They wouldn’t show each other up, right? Now, when we think of empty space as carrying matter and waves, and insofar as this movement passes through without deflection, we would say that that’s what we mean by emptiness. You see, it doesn’t necessarily mean that space is empty, but merely matter and waves of light and various things pass through it.
- All these things which seem to exist independently are merely manifestations of something much deeper. It’s like the iceberg, as they say; the top of the iceberg—only far more so.
- […] Thought itself, consciousness, is caught in a certain irrationality, a certain disorder, confusion. Thought is conditioned, you see? We ordinarily think that our thought is free, that we can just be free to think what is true, right? But we’re not that free because everything that happens is recorded in the brain—actually materially, we could almost think of a tape recording. And this record is replayed as a set of instructions to a computer program) that makes us act in certain ways; to think, feel, and act in certain ways. So we may think that a certain thing is true just because it’s on the program, and we act accordingly to that program.
- Most thought is self-deception. In fact, the dominant thought is almost always self-deception, however rational you may be in applying your techniques. The end is always determined by self-deceptive thought.
- The program is recorded in the brain cells.
- […] What we can do is to observe this program reflected in two ways. We make a mirror. Both in our relationships with others, which will show us our programs, and then also watching the feelings which those programs are producing in ourselves—like fear, anger, all the sensations all over the body. Seeing the connection between thought and that state of sensation and feeling and bodily action
- The source of this global force is exactly the same as the source of what happens in the individual—that is, the collective programs. That, if they aren’t changed, nothing can be done. You see, people have tried by every means imaginable—by religion, by science, by politics—to change this, and nothing has happened, right? It has gone on much the same over thousands of years. Now, somehow that is not going to change fundamentally unless you get at the root of it. Society is basically identical with the individual at this deep root. The society is nothing but the totality of individuals who are caught in it; who are, in turn, reinforcing each other. So we first of all have to understand what the problem is. Because we may be just following a false hope by hoping that we’re going to straighten it out in some other way. It may produce a momentary improvement, but it cannot really get rid of it.
Photo by Marta Cuesta of Pixabay
