The Limits of Thought by Bohm & Krishnamurti (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of The Limits of Thought: Discussions between J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm (Amazon):

The Limits of Thought Book Bohm & Krishnamurti

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
Thought / Conditioning
Me / Centre
Reality / Truth
Seeing / Perceiving

**Science meets Spirituality: The Limits of Thought by David Bohm & Jiddu Krishnamurti (Book Summary)**

Intro to The Limits of Thought

“My first acquaintance with Krishnamurti’s work was in 1959 when I read his book The First and Last Freedom. What particularly aroused my interest was his deep insight into the question of the observer and the observed. This question had long been close to the centre of my own work as a theoretical physicist who was primarily interested in the meaning of the quantum theory.” (Bohm)

“We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti’s major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or, to put it differently, it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening when we are engaged in the activity of thinking … Ordinarily, we tend to be aware mainly of the content of this thought rather than of how it actually takes place.” (Bohm)
“We may be aware of the actual structure and function of the process of thought, and not merely of its content. How can such an awareness come about? Krishnamurti proposes that this requires what he calls meditation … To meditate would be ‘to ponder, to reflect, while giving close attention to what is actually going on as one does so’. This is perhaps what Krishnamurti means by the beginning of meditation. That is to say, one gives close attention to all that is happening in conjunction with the actual activity of thought, which is the underlying source of the general disorder. One does this without choice, without criticism, without acceptance or rejection of what is going on. And all of this takes place along with reflections on the meaning of what one is learning about the activity of thought … Krishnamurti has observed that the very act of meditation will, in itself, bring order to the activity of thought without the intervention of will, choice, decision, or any other action of the ‘thinker’. As such order comes, the noise and chaos which are the usual background of our consciousness die out, and the mind becomes generally silent. (Thought arises only when needed for some genuinely valid purpose, and then stops, until needed again.)” (Bohm)
“He begins from a fact: this fact about the nature of our thought processes. This fact is established through close attention, involving careful listening to the process of consciousness, and observing it assiduously. In this, one is constantly learning, and out of this learning comes insight into the overall or general nature of the process of thought. This insight is then tested. First, one sees whether it holds together in a rational order. And then one sees whether it leads to order and coherence, on what flows out of it in life as a whole.” (Bohm)

Thought / Conditioning

“Why has mankind given such tremendous importance to thought?” (Krishnamurti)

Thought:

“Thought without truth is a divisive process … Thought intrinsically divides itself from truth, but that is false because thought is only reflecting … It may be the whole trouble, that thought tries to reflect truth in itself, and calls that an independent reality … I think the danger is that there is the mind which does not realize that this is thought.” (Bohm)

“Thought is time, measure, and all the rest of it … The things that consciousness contains are put together by thought. All the content of that consciousness is the product of thought; consciousness is thought.” (Krishnamurti)
“The weakness of thought is that thought inevitably separates itself from what it thinks about. It creates an imaginary other, which it calls the object—which is still really thought.” (Bohm)
“Thought changes its nature. That’s the point we have to get hold of, that thought does not have a fixed nature.” (Bohm)
“Thought itself is a distorting factor if truth is not operating … Thought without that quality of seeing is a distorting factor … Whatever thought does, it cannot produce a permanent radical transformation.” (Krishnamurti)

Conditioning:

“I know how to operate in reality, because I’ve been trained, conditioned, all that … The habit, the conditioning, has been to say thought is the primary thing in life. Thought never realized it was limited.” (Krishnamurti)

“Thought has become conditioned over the ages, partly by heredity, and partly through tradition, culture and environment. It has been conditioned to self-deception, to falsify, to distort … In one sense this conditioning constitutes a subtle kind of brain damage. Conditioning gives great importance to thought, to the self and to the centre.” (Bohm)
“Any tradition, good or bad, makes people accept a certain structure of reality, very subtly, without their realizing they are doing it, by imitation, or by example, or by words, just by statements. So very steadily the child builds up an approach in which the brain attributes things which are in the tradition to a reality which is independent of tradition. And it gives it tremendous importance. I think it’s in every culture. Tradition has real effects of all sorts, which may even be valuable in some ways. But at the same time it conditions the brain to a certain view of reality, which is fixed. In our culture we get a conditioning as to what is sensed to be real and necessary and right, what you have to make of your life, what sort of person you should be, what is really the right thing to do and so on. All this is picked up from tiny little indications. They don’t seem to be thought, but seem to be the perception of reality. The brain treats thought as some reality independent of thought, and it becomes fragmented. A person may look at that reality and say, ‘That’s reality, I’ve got to keep my feet on the ground.’ But this ground has been created by tradition, by thought; it is no ground, it has nothing under it at all. It is sustained and nourished by this damaged brain, which is unable to get out of that circle.” (Bohm)
“Children are brought into a tradition; when they follow it, everybody says, ‘That’s right, you are good’, and so on. Tradition goes back to that feeling of belonging to the family and to the community, of being approved of because you are not only doing what they say, what you’re supposed to do, but believing what you are supposed to believe, and believing in what is real. This tradition includes the belief that we have a correct consensus as to what is real, a belief that we don’t create our reality.” (Bohm)
“There is a depth which is not touched by the traditional brain, by the damaged brain, by the brain which is conditioned, a depth, a dimension, which is not touched by thought.” (Krishnamurti)

Me / Centre

“When the thought process operates in me, as ‘me’ and ‘not me’, when there is that sense of duality, is there love, is there compassion?” (Krishnamurti)

“The ‘me’ is the image which thought has created … Thought has created the ‘me’, and the ‘me’ has apparently become independent of thought, and the ‘me’, being still part of thought, is the psychological structure … I am false, because what thought has created psychologically is false.” (Krishnamurti)
“The centre is thought … When thought has invented the centre, then it may attribute various qualities to that centre, such as thinking and feeling … Thought attributes to the centre the quality of being a perceiver, as well as a thinker and an actor.” (Bohm)
“Thought created the ‘me’ as a permanent entity … Thought created the centre as a permanency, and that centre forms a unit to pull everything together … As long as there is a centre there must be suffering.” (Krishnamurti)
“It (thought) has attributed to itself a centre which is separate from itself, whereas in fact it has created the centre and it is the centre … It attributes to that centre the property of being alive and real, and so on. And that is a fragmentation … In order to maintain the fiction that the centre is separate from thought, everything else has to be made to fit that.” (Bohm)
“If somebody attributes to the centre the quality of being a certain nation, then you must distinguish another nation as not belonging to this centre. So it fragments mankind in order to hold the centre together. Therefore the entire world is fragmented indefinitely, shattered into fragments.” (Bohm)

Reality / Truth

“It’s a wrong question for me to ask what place truth has in reality … Truth may have a relationship to reality, but reality has no relationship to truth.” (Krishnamurti)

Reality:

“Reality is merely a field, it is not that which is, or an independent substance … The basic thing that goes wrong is when reality is given the significance of that which is.” (Bohm)

“Reality is the thing which is thought about … Reality being all the things thought has put together, all the activity of thought thinking about or reflecting upon something, distorted or rational … Reality is a process of thought, of thinking about something that is real or reflected upon, or distorted, such as illusion … Reality is a projection of thought, of what we think about, reflect upon. And anything that thought creates, makes, is a reality either as a distortion or as an actuality.” (Krishnamurti)
“The mind is nothing and reality is no thing ultimately. There is nothingness and in nothingness there is a sort of form which is reality—but a form which is nothing … Nothingness is the same as freedom, because so long as a thing is a thing, it is not free … The man who is not free cannot change his reality.” (Bohm)
“As long as I live in the field of reality, which has its own energy, that energy will not free me.” (Krishnamurti)
“In dying to reality—it sounds absurd—only then is there nothingness. ‘Dying to reality’ means dying to all the things thought has created. It means dying to all the things of measurement, of movement, of time.” (Krishnamurti)

Truth:

“What is the action of truth within thought? That’s really the question. In general you can see it’s to straighten out the way of working, to remove all the distortions … Truth does not depend on thought, but thought may depend on truth. Thought may be acted on by truth.” (Bohm)

“I want to find out if it is possible to live entirely in truth. If we start from there, perhaps we can go into it. That is, one is functioning only with what is, one is not bringing into operation his memories, his personal reactions and all that, but lets the fact act … What I am trying to get at is whether a human being can live only in the present—in the sense that we are talking of the present. That is, to live with what is all the time, and not with what should be or what will be or what has been … I want to find out how to live in a sane way, which means to have no contradiction, to live always with what is … What is, is beautiful.” (Krishnamurti)
“Truth is action … Truth is intelligence … Truth is love, compassion and everything else … When I separate you, in that separation love cannot exist.” (Krishnamurti)
“Only a mind that sees the whole sees truth, and to see the whole, thought has to come to an end … Truth is not to be achieved, or gained, or perceived through education, through culture, through the medium of thought … One has to have a great sense of humility to see truth.” (Krishnamurti)
“The truth goes beyond the individual, actual fact because it sees the total. It sees what is universal and necessary, the totality of the nature of thought.” (Bohm)
“Truth is indivisible … The truth is whole and indivisible. The lack of compassion can only arise from the division … If man feels divided from other people or nature, then he will not have compassion. So if there is no division, compassion is inevitable.” (Bohm)

Reality + Truth:

“If a man wants to live in truth, this is his first question: what is action in relation to truth? I know action in relation to reality, which is based on memory, on environment, on circumstances, on adaptation, or which is an action to do something in the future.” (Krishnamurti)

“Reality is a thing. Truth is not a thing, therefore it is nothing … Truth is nothingness—not a thing. The action of nothingness, which is intelligence in the field of reality—that intelligence being free and all the rest of it—operates in reality without distortion.” (Krishnamurti)
“Having operated in the field of reality all one’s life and seen the distortions in that field, the seeing of that distortion is truth … When I have freed myself from distortion, then truth is the seeing and the doing and the operation of that intelligence in the field of reality … Truth acting in the field of reality is intelligence.” (Krishnamurti)
“We have to be careful because the language continually tends to put in separation. We tend to think things are real and have some substance; that is, that they exist in themselves. We tend to think that what is is reality and that truth would only be correct knowledge about reality. But what we are proposing here is to turn it around to say that truth is what is, and reality as a whole is nothing but appearances. Reality is a kind of appearance that may be a correct appearance or that may be incorrect, may be an illusion. There is a tremendous habit to say that reality is what is.” (Bohm)
“Truth can act in reality, but reality cannot act in truth … Reality is a function within the operation of truth … Reality is a necessary field for truth to operate in. The difficulty is when thought starts, and tries to reflect on truth, and divides itself from truth. Therefore it produces the notion of reality and of the truth about that reality … To explain it a little: when I start from the thought of reality, as that which is, then I think this thing is a substance which is just by itself, and here is another one, and they are separated by space. But if I look at it another way and I say, ‘There is truth’, the space acts, and reality is merely a function, it is not a set of independent substances. That’s what I’m driving at—each one by itself, separate from all the others, is not that which is.” (Bohm)
“We are seeking a substance, something, that stands under the appearances. We seek it in reality. It has been the age-long habit to look for some solid, permanent reality that underlies all the changes and explains them so that we understand. But it may be that the whole of reality is no substance. Perhaps it does not have an independent existence, is a field, and what stands under this reality is truth … The word ‘nothing’ means no thing. So nothingness is ‘no thingness’, which is not reality. Reality is to be something. So if we say nothingness, it doesn’t mean unreal—neither real nor unreal—but it is entirely out of that field. Ultimately reality is nothing, no thing. But now we’re saying that there has to be a kind of space, of emptiness, of nothingness, in which the thing can be seen. Because seeing is truth, which is no thing, nothingness.” (Bohm)

Seeing / Perceiving

“If I can perceive reality clearly—all the illusions and the actual, the reasonableness and the unreasonableness of reality—if I see that clearly, then can there be a perception of what is, which we say is truth? That very perception is an action in which there is no operation of thought.” (Krishnamurti)

Seeing:

“If in one’s mind there is no space but it is crowded with problems, with images, with remembrances, with knowledge, such a mind is not free and therefore cannot see, and not seeing, cannot act.” (Krishnamurti)

“I am beginning to understand the field of reality and truth, which is the seeing of what is. The seeing of what is, that intelligence, can operate in this area of reality … The seeing what is, is action. That action operates through intelligence … Seeing, acting, is intelligence … The seeing is the acting; that action is whole, and therefore it is intelligence. Any action that is whole must be intelligence … Seeing is the whole. When you see the whole, that is the truth.” (Krishnamurti)
“For a man who lives in reality and observes the rational and the irrational in that field, the seeing of the irrational is the truth because he sees the whole of the irrationality of that field. And because he sees it—the seeing is the doing—that is the truth. So he lives in truth in the field of reality.” (Krishnamurti)
“Seeing is the ending of thought … The seeing is the doing, which means seeing the whole. It must be, otherwise it’s not seeing. And if the mind sees the whole, then the distortion can never come back … The seeing of distortion is the ending of distortion … If I’m not free of my distortion, though I see it, I haven’t seen it … There is no seeing without freedom. Freedom is the essence of seeing—freedom from prejudice and so on. A mind that is free does see.” (Krishnamurti)
“Seeing has no space … When people say ‘I see’, there is a division … Seeing is acting. In that there is no space as division. Therefore that space is the freedom of nothingness … I listen and it is revealed, and there is no action. I just watch. I live in that revelation … I have seen this thing. And it will operate. I am not going to take action. It will do something, I don’t have to do anything … When you see without the observer, when you see that the observer and the observed is one, that is truth.” (Krishnamurti)
“Seeing, doing, compassion—it’s all one. Not ‘seeing, then doing, then compassion’. Seeing and the doing is the whole. And then there is that seeing as the whole. In that there is compassion.” (Krishnamurti)
“That is the truth, to see the whole of the reality without distortion … When there is seeing, then this whole movement of contradiction no longer continues.” (Bohm)
“The observer is one reality observing the other reality. But truth is indivisible.” (Bohm)
“The lack of freedom is the lack of seeing … The lack of freedom is the reality, is the instrument of reality.” (Bohm)

Perception:

“Perceiving is the acting in the present … Perception is action, seeing is action … There is total perception—in that there is no thought … One of the qualities of total perception is compassion.” (Krishnamurti)

“When the mind is empty, when the mind is nothing, not a thing, in that there is perception … Perception is not a movement of thought … Thought has no place when there is total perception … When there is total perception, thought doesn’t enter into the psychological process … Where there is total perception, a change in thought takes place … Thought functions in grooves, thought lives in habits, in memories, and a total perception does affect the whole structure … You perceive that all belief is irrational, there is a perception of this total structure of belief, and then belief has no place in your thought, in your brain. If I perceive the total nature of belief, then it’s over.” (Krishnamurti)
“Perception sees the nature of thought, and because it perceives the nature of thought, it perceives all the fragments … Total perception means seeing all the things that thought has put together, and it made itself a separate centre … Total perception means to see thought attributing to itself certain qualities, thought creating the centre and giving to that centre certain attributes, and all the things arising from the psychological centre … When you perceive something totally, the centre is non-existent … That centre becomes totally unnecessary when there is complete perception … Total perception can only exist when the centre is not; then consciousness must be totally different … There is only perception, not the perceiver … There is no observer and the observed, there is only perception … Perception can only take place when there is no ‘me.'” (Krishnamurti)
“The new perception should cause the growth of a new society, a new man.” (Bohm)