The Ending of Time by Bohm & Krishnamurti (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of The Ending of Time: Where Philosophy and Physics Meet by J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm (Amazon):

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the authors (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
All content is organized into my own themes (not the authors’ chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

Intro to the Book
Suffering / Society
Conditioning / Centre
Time / Becoming
Thought / Belief
Attention / Insight
Love / Truth

**Physics meets Philosophy: The Ending of Time by David Bohm & Jiddu Krishnamurti (Book Summary)**

Intro to The Ending of Time

“The starting point for our discussions was the question ‘What is the future of humanity?’ This question is by now of vital concern to everyone, because modern science and technology are clearly seen to have opened up immense possibilities of destruction. It soon became clear as we talked together that the ultimate origin of this situation is in the generally confused mentality of mankind.” (Bohm)

“These dialogues constitute a serious enquiry into this problem, and as they proceeded, many of the basic points of Krishnamurti’s teachings emerged. Thus, the question of the future of humanity seems, at first sight, to imply that a solution must involve time in a fundamental way. Yet, as Krishnamurti points out, psychological time, or ‘becoming,’ is the very source of the destructive current that is putting the future of humanity at risk. To question time in this way, however, is to question the adequacy of knowledge and thought, as a means of dealing with this problem. But if knowledge and thought are not adequate, what is it that is actually required? This led in turn to the question of whether mind is limited by the brain of mankind, with all the knowledge that it has accumulated over the ages. This knowledge, which now conditions us deeply, has produced what is, in effect, an irrational and self-destructive programme in which the brain seems to be helplessly caught up.” (Bohm)
“If mind is limited by such a state of the brain, then the future of humanity must be very grim indeed. Krishnamurti does not, however, regard these limitations as inevitable. Rather, he emphasizes that mind is essentially free of the distorting bias that is inherent in the conditioning of the brain, and that, through insight arising in proper undirected attention without a centre, it can change the cells of the brain and remove the destructive conditioning. If this is so, then it is crucially important that there be this kind of attention and that we give to this question the same intensity of energy that we generally give to other activities of life that are really of vital interest to us.” (Bohm)

Suffering / Society

JK: “Each one of us thinks that we are separate individuals psychically. And what we have done in the world is a colossal mess.” … DB: “Well, if we think we are separate when we are not separate, then it will clearly be a colossal mess … If we are trying to separate what is inseparable, the result will be chaos.”

Suffering & Problems:

“The whole point is we have suffered from the beginning of time, and we haven’t solved it. We haven’t ended suffering … Can suffering end? That is the problem … That is really a very serious and deep question. Whether it is possible to end suffering, which is the ending of ‘me‘.” (Krishnamurti)

“I am trying to find out the origin of all this misery, confusion, conflict, struggle—what is the beginning of it? That’s why I asked at the beginning: Has mankind taken a wrong turn? Is the origin ‘I’ and ‘not I’? … Why has mankind created this ‘I,’ which must, inevitably, cause conflict? ‘I’ and ‘you,’ and ‘I’ better than ‘you,’ and so on and so on … I am inclined to observe that the origin is the ego, the ‘me,’ the ‘I.'” (Krishnamurti)
“Any factor of division, which is the very nature of the self, must inevitably cause suffering … The ending of suffering comes about when the self, which is built up through time, is no longer there.” (Krishnamurti)
“All the problems that humanity has now psychologically, as well as in other ways, are the result of thought. And we are pursuing the same pattern of thought, and thought will never solve any of these problems.” (Krishnamurti)
“Personally, I refuse to have problems … I mean by a problem something that has to be resolved, something you worry about; something you are questioning and endlessly concerned with. Also doubts and uncertainties, and having to take some kind of action which you will regret at the end.” (Krishnamurti)
“Can we have peace on this earth? The activities of thought never bring it about.” (Krishnamurti)

Society & Technology:

JK: “In technology, communication, travel, medicine, surgery, we have advanced tremendously. There is no question about it. But what have we psychologically achieved?” … DB: “And the psychological question is more important than any of the others, because if the psychological question is not cleared up, the rest is dangerous.” … JK: “Yes. If we are psychologically limited, then whatever we do will be limited, and the technology will then be used by our limited . . .” … DB: “Yes, the master is this limited psyche…and in fact technology then becomes a dangerous instrument. So that is one point, that the psyche is at the core of it all, and if the psyche is not in order, then the rest is useless.”

“We have cultivated a mind that can solve almost any technological problem. But apparently human problems have never been solved. Human beings are drowned by their problems: the problems of communication, knowledge, of relationships, the problems of heaven and hell. The whole of human existence has become a vast, complex problem. And apparently throughout history it has been like this. In spite of his knowledge, in spite of his centuries of evolution, man has never been free of problems.” (Krishnamurti)
“The emphasis on the psyche, on giving importance to the self, is creating great damage in the world because it is separative, and therefore it is constantly in conflict, not only within itself but with society, with the family … with nature, with the whole universe.” (Krishnamurti)
“We will, if human beings are all tremendously orderly in that inward sense, perhaps create a new society.” (Krishnamurti)
“I think that even if ten or fifteen people were undivided, they would exert a force that has never been seen in our history.” (Bohm)

Conditioning / Centre

DB: “The key point is that finding the source, the root that generates the whole, is the only way.” JK: “Yes, that’s right.” DB: “Because if we try to deal with a particular problem, it’s still always coming from the source.” JK: “The source is the ‘me.'”

Cultural Conditioning:

“How do you convince me that I am caught in an illusion? You can’t, unless I see it myself. I cannot see it because my illusion is so strong. That illusion has been nurtured, cultivated by religion, by the family, and so on. It is so deeply rooted that I refuse to let it go. That is what is taking place with a large number of people … Can that conditioning be dissipated? That’s the whole question.” (Krishnamurti)

“Thought has created an image through experience, through education, through conditioning, and made this image separate from me. But this image is actually ‘me,’ although we have separated the image and the me, which is irrational.” (Krishnamurti)
“The constant assertion of the self is the movement, is the conditioning, an illusion.” (Krishnamurti)
“Accumulated knowledge conditions … As long as the brain is conditioned, it is not free.” (Krishnamurti)
“The world is me: I am the world. But we have divided it up into the British earth and the French earth and all the rest of it!” (Krishnamurti)
“Conscious meditation, conscious activity to control thought, to free oneself from conditioning, is not freedom … When you use the word ‘meditation’, it is generally understood that there is always a meditator meditating. Meditation is really an unconscious process, not a conscious process.” (Krishnamurti)

Centre (I/Me/Ego):

“Look at the problem differently, the problem being why do I always live in this centre of ‘me, me, me’? … The centre is the cause of all the mischief, all the neurotic conclusions, all the illusions, all the endeavour, all the effort, all the misery—everything is from that core.” (Krishnamurti)

“The very structure and nature of the psyche is the movement of thought … Thought is the movement of experience, knowledge, and memory … intention, aspirations, beliefs, dogmas, rituals … fears, pleasures, sorrow … The whole content of that consciousness is the ‘me’ … The ‘me’ is my name, form, and all the experiences, remembrances, and so on that I have had. The whole structure of the ‘me’ is put together by thought.” (Krishnamurti)
“The ‘me’ is a divisive entity because it is separative; it is concerned with itself … The mind which is functioning with the ‘me’ is always the same mind.” (Krishnamurti)
“The knowledge which is the ‘me’ is so tremendously strong as an idea.” (Krishnamurti)
“Knowledge creates the ‘me,’ and the ‘me’ is experienced as an entity which seems not to be knowledge but some real being.” (Bohm)
“Anything that is limited must inevitably create conflict. If I say I am an individual, that is limited … I question altogether whether we are individuals … There is no individuality.” (Krishnamurti)

Time / Becoming

DB: “Becoming a monk is the same as becoming anything else.” JK: “Becoming a monk is like becoming a businessman!”

Time:

“Is it really possible for time to end—time being the past, the whole idea of time—to have no tomorrow at all? Of course there is tomorrow; you have to go to a talk in the morning, and I have to, and so on. But the feeling, the actual reality of having no tomorrow—I think that is the healthiest way of living.” (Krishnamurti)

“Thought is time.” (Krishnamurti)
“Knowledge of the ‘me’—the psychological knowledge—is time … As long as there is psychological accumulation as knowledge, as the ‘me,’ and so on, there is time. It is based on time.” (Krishnamurti)
“Time has built the ego, the ‘me,’ the image of me sustained by society, by parents, by education, which has built it through millions of years. All that is the result of time. And from there I act.” (Krishnamurti)
“If psychological time doesn’t exist, then there is no conflict, there is no ‘me,’ no ‘I,’ which is the origin of conflict … If there is no ego, there is no problem, there is no conflict, there is no time—time in the sense of becoming or not becoming, being or not being.” (Krishnamurti)

Becoming:

“The evolution of consciousness is a fallacy … There is no psychological evolution, or evolution of the psyche.” (Krishnamurti)

“Partly I am concerned in becoming because there is a reward at the end of it; also I am avoiding pain or punishment. And in that cycle I am caught. That is probably one of the reasons why the mind keeps on trying to become something. And the other, perhaps, is deep-rooted anxiety or fear that if I don’t become, be something, I am lost. I am uncertain and insecure, so the mind has accepted these illusions and says I cannot end that.” (Krishnamurti)
“Any form of becoming is an illusion, and becoming implies time, time for the psyche to change … The illusion is ‘I am becoming‘ … There is no illumination by becoming.” (Krishnamurti)
“Psychologically, becoming has been the curse of all this … Psychological becoming breeds inattention … That is the root of it. To end becoming … Becoming is the worst—that is time, that is the real root of this conflict … The constant endeavour to become something psychologically is a factor of time.” (Krishnamurti)
“If man feels something is out of order psychologically, he then brings in the notion of time and the thought of becoming, and that creates endless problems.” (Bohm)
“Self-improvement is something so utterly ugly.” (Krishnamurti)

Thought / Belief

“I think the wrong turn was taken when thought became all important … Thought has created the wars, the misery, the confusion. And thought has become prominent in human relationship … Our mind isn’t healthy! The mind is so diseased, so corrupt, so confused that even though you point out all the dangers of this, it refuses to see them.” (Krishnamurti)

Thought:

“I think that thought became the equivalent of truth. People took thought to give truth, to give what is always true. There is the notion that we have knowledge—which may hold in certain cases for some time—but men generalize, because knowledge is always generalizing. When they got to the notion that it would always be so, this gave the thought of what is true. This gave thought supreme importance.” (Bohm)

“Thinking is the movement of memory, which is experience, knowledge, stored in the brain.” (Krishnamurti)
“Thought cannot solve anything, psychologically … Thought cannot bring about a change in itself.” (Krishnamurti)
“The unknown, the limitless, cannot be captured by thought … As thought is limited, our consciousness, which has been put together by thought, is limited … Knowledge, which is born of experience, is limited … Whatever action is born of limited thought must inevitably breed conflict … Thought in its very nature is divisive, fragmentary, and therefore I am a fragment.” (Krishnamurti)
“Thought will create a sense of fragments. You could see, for example, that once we decide to set up a nation, we will think we are separate from other nations, and all sorts of consequences follow, which make the whole thing seem independently real. We have a separate language, a separate flag, and we set up a boundary. And after a while we see so much evidence of separation that we forget how it started and say it was there always, and that we are merely proceeding from what was there always.” (Bohm)
“You could say that our civilization is collapsing because of too much knowledge … It is part of the order of the universe that this particular mechanism (thought) can go wrong. If a machine breaks down, it is not disorder in the universe; it is merely part of the universal order.” (Bohm)

Belief & Desire:

“I want to clear up all the illusions that I hold, not some. I have got rid of my illusion about nationalism; I have got rid of illusion about belief, about Christ, about this, about that. At the end of it, I realize my mind is illusion.” (Krishnamurti)

“Observe that you have belief, you cling to the belief, belief gives you a sense of security, and so on. And that belief is an illusion; it has no reality.” (Krishnamurti)
“Delusion exists as long as there is desire and thought. That is simple. And desire and thought are part of the ‘I,’ which is time.” (Krishnamurti)
“Desire is the beginning of illusion.” (Krishnamurti)

Attention / Insight

“Is it possible to have a total insight, which is the ending of the ‘me,’ because the ‘me’ is time? Me, my ego, my resistance, my hurts, all that. Can that ‘me’ end? It is only when that ends that there is total insight.” (Krishnamurti)

Attention:

“I feel that attention is the real solution to all this—a mind which is really attentive, which has understood the nature of inattention and moves away from it!” (Krishnamurti)

“In attention, thought has no place.” (Krishnamurti)
“Where there is attention, there is no problem. Where there is inattention, every difficulty arises.” (Krishnamurti)
“When I make an effort to attend, it is not attention. Attention can come into being only when the self is not … When there is attention, there is no centre from which ‘I’ attend.” (Krishnamurti)

Insight & Intelligence:

“Is there an activity which is not touched by thought? We are saying there is and that that activity is the highest form of intelligence … The mind, although deeply conditioned, can free itself through insight. That is the real clue to this.” (Krishnamurti)

“Insight being out of time, not the result of remembrance, not an intuition, nor desire, nor hope. It is nothing to do with any time and thought … Insight is not a movement from knowledge, thought, remembrance, but the cessation of all that, to look at the problem with pure observation, without any pressure, without any motive, to observe the whole movement of measurement.” (Krishnamurti)
“There can be perception/intelligence only when it is not tinged by thought. When there is no interference from the movement of thought, there is perception/intelligence, which is direct insight into a problem or into human complexities … When there is insight, there is no division … When there is that insight, intelligence wipes away suffering.” (Krishnamurti)
“Insight into this whole movement, which is not ‘my’ insight, brings about transformation in the brain … To put it very simply, when the self is not, there is beauty, silence, space. Then that intelligence, which is born of compassion, operates through the brain.” (Krishnamurti)
“You can’t produce this flash (insight) at will.” (Bohm)
“The key point seems to be that without insight, nothing can change.” (Bohm)
“The self is a centre creating darkness or clouds in the mind, and insight penetrates that. It could dispel the clouds so that there would be clarity and the problem would vanish.” (Bohm)
“I can only dispel the darkness through insight, and I cannot have that insight by any effort of will, so I am left with nothing. So what is my problem? My problem is to perceive the darkness, to perceive the thought that is creating darkness, and to see that the self is the source of this darkness. Why can’t I see that? … The material process is working in darkness, in time, in knowledge, in ignorance, and so on. When insight takes place, there is the dispelling of that darkness … And thought, which is the material process, no longer works in darkness. Therefore that light has altered—no, it has ended—ignorance … Insight can only come about when there is a flash, a sudden light, which abolishes not only darkness but the creator of darkness … Insight is the elimination of the darkness which is the very centre of the self, the darkness that self creates. Insight dispels that very centre.” (Krishnamurti)

Love / Truth

DB: “Do you want to say that there is one consciousness of mankind?” JK: “It is all one.” DB: “That is important, because whether it is many or one is a crucial question … It could be many, which are then communicating and building up the larger unit. Or are you saying that from the very beginning it is all one?” JK: “From the very beginning it is all one.” DB: “And the sense of separateness is an illusion?” JK: “That is what I am saying, over and over again. That seems so logical, sane. The other is insanity.”

Love:

“Good and evil; love and hate; light and darkness—when one is, the other can’t be.” (Bohm)

“Love has no relationship to hate … Where love is, hate is not.” (Krishnamurti)
“If I see clearly that love is independent of hate, hate cannot possibly act on love. Love may act on hate, but where hate is, the other cannot be.” (Krishnamurti)
“Love is without cause, and hate has a cause. The two cannot coexist.” (Krishnamurti)

Truth:

“One could say mankind is in a sense dreaming, asleep … The person who hasn’t seen is almost living in a world of dreams, psychologically, and therefore the world of dreams is not related to the world of being awake … If somebody sees something, then his responsibility is to help wake the others up. To get out of the illusion.” (Bohm)

“An illusion cannot be related to that which is true, because the content of the illusion has no relation to what is true.” (Bohm)
“There is no relationship between me and truth … You cannot find truth through the false.” (Krishnamurti)
“Knowledge has only crippled me from seeing truth. I stick to that. It hasn’t cleared me of my illusions. Knowledge may be illusion itself.” (Krishnamurti)
“The observer is the observed … The experiencer, the thinker, is the thought. There is no thinker separate from thought … Actuality is when there is no division between the thinker and the thought … When there is that actuality, you have really eliminated conflict altogether. Conflict exists when I am separate from my quality.” (Krishnamurti)

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