Thought as a System by David Bohm (Deep Book Summary)

This is a book summary of Thought as a System by David Bohm (Amazon):

David Bohm’s “Thought as a System” should have the subtitle “The Scientist’s Guide to Spirituality”—it covers all the same things as a “spiritual book” yet never once mentions the word “spirituality.” Check it out if you want to get closer to the truth from a different angle.

The book is a slightly edited transcript from a series of seminars David Bohm gave in 1990 (he passed away in 1992, so this was some of his final thinking). Lucky for us, we can watch/listen all of these seminars (YouTube playlist).

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in quotation marks is from the original author unless otherwise stated.
All content is grouped into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
I’ve added emphasis in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below

The Thought System
Thought is the Source of the Trouble
Flaw/Fault in the Thought System
Habits & Reflexes
Incoherence & Coherence
Necessity & Contingency
Self-Image is Thought
Identity is Thought
Conditioned & Unconditioned
Intelligence beyond Thought
Awareness
Insight
Truth

**The Scientist’s Guide to Spirituality: Thought as a System by David Bohm (Book Summary)**

The Thought System

“We’re not really aware of what is happening in this system which I’ve called ‘thought’. We don’t know how it works. We hardly know it is a system; it’s not part of our culture even to admit that it is a single system.”

What is a system?

“A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes, and so forth, although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure.”
“That’s the whole idea of a system. It’s not necessarily closed, but it has a certain stability of structure. It tends to sustain and maintain its structure, so that when something from the outside comes in it reacts in such a way as to avoid basic change.”
“We have some structure in thought as well—some relatively fixed features. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can’t say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal.”
“Thought gives you vast amounts of connected, logically interrelated information … You begin to see thought organizing itself into a very complex, rich structure.”
“All the information the system has about itself affects what it does.”

One system:

“Thought is not merely the intellectual activity; rather it is one connected process which includes feeling and the body, and so on. Also, it passes between people—it’s all one process all over the world. I suggested that we call that process a ‘system’—a whole system in which every part is dependent on every other part.”
“It is one system; the thoughts, the body, the emotions and also other people, are all part of one system. And when you raise questions intellectually they may affect the non-intellectual parts or vice versa—the other elements affect the intellect. Therefore you have to see it as one system.”
“What I mean by ‘thought’ is the whole thing—it’s all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it’s all one process; somebody else’s thoughts become my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought, your thought, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings.”
“Thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, ‘felts’ and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society—as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.”
“The thought process is a fundamentally collective system. You would not have it in its present form except through a culture and a society.”

Thought and the body:

“Thought is part of the physical processes of the body, a very subtle part.”
“The state of the body is very profoundly tied to thought, affected by thought, and vice versa.”
“This distinction between thought and the physical is one where we should just draw a dotted line. But we have drawn a great big gulf between them in our thought. And therefore we perceive them that way.”
“The thought process is neurophysiological as well as intellectual and emotional … Thus thought has, at the very least, a certain basis in this neurophysiological process; it can never be separated from it.”
“If we think of thoughts as reflexes, it will help us to understand the system better and it will also begin to point to another level. The reflexes are on the level of the neurophysiology and the chemistry. The thought process is also chemistry; but it’s a very much more subtle abstract level—the intellectual part of the thought process does not directly touch the reflexes.”
“I want to emphasize that it is not just psychological. Every reaction is also neurophysiological. That’s why I prefer to call it a reflex. Every reaction of thought is always simultaneously emotional, neurophysiological, chemical and everything else. It is all one system.”

Thought is the Source of the Trouble

“We started out saying the trouble is that the world is in chaos, but I think we end up by saying that thought is in chaos. That’s each one of us. And that is the cause of the world being in chaos. Then the chaos of the world comes back and adds to the chaos of thought.”

“People have been dealing with this piecemeal—looking at symptoms, saying that we’ve got to solve this problem or that problem or that problem. But there is something deeper, which people haven’t been considering, that is constantly generating these problems. We can use the analogy of a stream, where people are pouring pollution upstream at the same time they are trying to remove it downstream. But as they remove it they may be adding more pollution of different kind.”
“What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That’s part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems is the source of our problems. It’s like going to the doctor and having him make you ill.”
“The reason we don’t see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them are the source. That may seem strange to somebody who hears it for the first time, because our whole culture prides itself on thought as its highest achievement. I’m not suggesting that the achievements of thought are negligible; there are very great achievements in technology, in culture and in various other ways. But there is another side to it which is leading to our destruction, and we have to look at that.”
“Within the system, the action to get out is part of the trouble.”
“The basic trouble with thought now is that it participates and is not aware of how it is participating.”

Flaw/Fault in the Thought System

“Thought is part of a system which includes all our reflexes, our relations to other people, all that we do, all our society, and everything. But it has a flaw in it.”

“This system has a fault in it—a systemic fault. It’s not a fault here, there or there, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It’s everywhere and nowhere. You may say ‘I see a problem here, so I will bring my thought to bear on this problem’. But ‘my’ thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I’m trying to look at, or a similar fault.”
“There is a kind of systemic flaw which is pervasive. So when we see something wrong with a part of this system, we bring another part to bear to try to correct it; but doing so will just add more, very similar troubles. We went on to say that it’s not possible to solve our problems that way—rather, they may get worse instead of better—and that these troubles throughout the world have been going on for thousands of years.”
“All these problems … are the result of the way we’ve been thinking. But people don’t see that. They say, ‘We’re just thinking. Out there are the problems. The thinking is telling us about those problems—what they are.'”
“It’s the same field—the field of the system of thought. The culture is held together by that system of thought, which has the same flaw, whether it is collective or individual.”
“We are just trying to say there is a mistake in thought, even before we raise the question of ‘me’. Now, that mistake in thought will allow this false notion of the ‘me’ to develop.”

Thought says it isn’t doing anything but telling you the way things are:

“Thought is always doing a great deal, but it tends to say that it hasn’t done anything, that it is just telling you the way things are. But thought affects everything.”
“Thought has the character that it is doing something and saying it isn’t doing it.”
“Thought produces something and says, ‘I didn’t produce it. It’s really there.'”
“When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That’s what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you’re going to do things. Then you don’t notice a result comes back, or you don’t see it as a result of what you’ve done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking.”
“One of the key difficulties has always been that thought does something and then says that what it is doing is not thought. Thought creates a problem and then tries to do something about it while continuing to make the problem, because it doesn’t know what it is doing. It’s all a bunch of reflexes working.”

Thought runs itself without you doing anything:

“This is one unbroken process. In a sense I am not doing anything—it’s going on by itself. But the tacit assumption of thought is that I am doing everything and thought is just telling me the way things are.”
“We are infusing our imagination, our past, our knowledge into what we see—not ‘we’ are doing it, but it’s doing it itself.”
“We have the picture that there is ‘somebody’ inside us who is given all this information and then decides to have the intention to do something based on that. I’m suggesting that is not so.”
“The general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything—that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don’t decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you.”
“Thought gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Until thought is understood—better yet, more than understood, perceived—it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do. That’s the difficulty. Thought is participating and then saying it’s not participating. But it is taking part in everything.”
“Thought claims to be telling you the way things are. That is not to say that they are the way it tells you. To a certain extent it gives valuable information, when it’s working right. But thought says ‘this is the way things are, and you—the thinker—must decide what to do’. And that’s all misinformation according to what we’re saying.”
“Thought is always saying that thought didn’t do it. It says ‘you did it’.”
“The very wish to think must come from an emotion or from an impulse to think.”

Thought is limited and incomplete but claims to know everything:

“Thought cannot be the whole because it is just a representation, an abstraction.”
“Thought does not provide complete information or a complete picture or account of the thing it is supposed to be about.”
“Thought is inherently going to be incomplete. It can at best provide an abstract representation, it will not contain the thing itself. The thing itself is not only more than could be contained in the representation; but additionally, thought is not always right. The thing itself is always in some way different from what we think it is. It is never exactly what we think.”
“Thought is always trying to claim that it knows everything. It has that tendency in it, and we have to see why. This is a very dangerous tendency, which leads to self-deception. It doesn’t leave open the unknown. It doesn’t leave open that the thought is only a representation. And you must leave room in your thought for something more and something different. Healthy thought requires that it intrinsically be built so that it always has room for that.”
“One of the ways thought goes wrong is that it claims, implicitly at least, to be able to know everything—that it could get rid of uncertainty and get rid of the unknown. There is this drive in thought to say that it will eventually get hold of everything.”
“Representations can be correct up to a point. Appearances can be correct up to a point, or they may be illusory. That distinction is very important. The fact that the brain constructs appearances is not the whole story; but that some of them are correct up to a point is crucial.”
“Knowledge is limited, because knowledge is only a representation. Knowledge may be adequate, but it is not the thing itself, whatever that may be. It is not ‘that which is’.”
“Knowledge is limited. And the proper application of this system of knowledge requires that knowledge know that it is limited.”

Thought affects perception and what you see:

“Thought affects perceptions. You see or feel something produced by thought, but then the next thought comes along and says ‘I’m only telling you the way it is’. Thought makes that claim, while it is actually affecting the way things are. That mistake is crucial.”
“This is the point I want to make: thought is affecting what you see. The representation enters into the perception. Sometimes you know something is a representation—such as when you draw a diagram or have a photograph. But in many subtle ways the representation enters directly into the perception, and you may miss the fact that it is coming from thought.”
“Thought takes sense perception, among other things, as the source of its information; and it says that sense perception is unaffected by thought—that it is just telling you something. And thought will then proceed from there. But it may turn out that the perception has already been affected by thought, and that thought is thus taking something it has done as being a fact independent of thought.”
“Thought presents itself as separate from perception, as just telling you the way things are. Thought has this picture of how it works—that you see certain things and then thought merely tells you more about them; that it draws inferences, it does nothing and has no effect. Therefore that’s the way you see thought. But thought is actually doing more than that. It is affecting how you perceive everything.”
“It’s crucial to see this: the representation affects the perception. That is crucial. And it is a tremendous source of illusion if we once lose track of the fact that this is happening.”
“It is all thought, and all those movements are all one system. The system even enters perception, and it affects perception.”

Habits & Reflexes

“We don’t usually think that thought is like the knee-jerk reflex. We think we are controlling thought and producing thought. That way of thinking is part of our whole background. But I’m suggesting that it’s not generally so—that a vast part of our thought just comes out from the reflex system. You only find out what the thought is after it comes out. Now, this really overturns a great deal of the way we look at the mind or the personality or our entire cultural background.”

Habits:

“I think that whenever we repeat something it gradually becomes a habit and we get less and less aware of it … It just goes by itself. Our thought does the same thing, and so do our feelings.”
“A lot of what is felt to be compassion and love is actually part of the system, because once again such experiences, when repeated, become a habit.”

Reflexes:

“The whole thing is one reflex after another. I think we have to see this system just working, working, working. Now, perhaps somehow intelligence can come in and get us out of this. But I’m saying that as long as the system works, you don’t know what is happening any more than you know why your leg should jump when the knee bone is hit.”
“Thought is a set of reflexes.”
“Thought goes out and spreads all over the world. Other people pick it up and they make it part of their reflexes. But it’s all thought.”
“Each person is affected by the other people’s thoughts, so that the reflexes of one person become the reflexes of the other.”
“Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It’s just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a ‘structure’ as they get more rigid.”
“One reflex gives rise to another and another. Behind these are all sorts of different reflexes ready to operate, and some of those may even bring back or recreate the reflex you think you’ve eliminated.”
“We’ve said that when we have a thought it registers in the memory. It registers in the form of a reflex. Memories often take that form—you see something and it reminds you of something or it makes you do something or it makes you see something in a certain way. Those are a kind of reflex.”
“This whole system works by a set of reflexes—that thought is a very subtle set of reflexes which is potentially unlimited; you can add more and more and you can modify your reflexes.”
“Even the whole logical process, once it’s committed to memory, becomes a set of reflexes. You think logically by a set of reflexes. There may be a perception of reason beyond the reflexes, but anything perceived becomes sooner or later a set of reflexes. And that’s what I want to call ‘thought’—which includes the emotion, the bodily state, the physical reaction and everything else.”
“The intellectual reflexes and the visual reflexes and the emotional and the physical and the chemical and everything are all connected up, so that you are ready immediately to take action.”
“All these reflexes are interconnected in one system, and the suggestion is that they are not in fact all that different. The intellectual part of thought is more subtle, but actually all the reflexes are basically similar in structure. Hence, we should think of thought as a part of the bodily movement, at least explore that possibility, because our culture has led us to believe that thought and bodily movement are really two totally different spheres which are not basically connected. But maybe they are not different. The evidence is that thought is intimately connected with the whole system.”
“How are we going to change the reflexes? That’s the question. Understanding is important, but it will not be enough.”

Incoherence & Coherence

“Thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it. And it struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call sustained incoherence. There is also simple incoherence, which we can’t avoid having because thoughts are always incomplete.”

Incoherence:

“The basic sign of incoherence is that you’re getting some result which you don’t intend and don’t want. And the other signs are contradiction, conflict, stress, confusion.”
“The principal thing to notice is that your incoherent actions are reflexes. You are not doing them on purpose. You don’t know that you are doing them. It’s the same as the way your knee jerks when you hit it, whether you like it or not. Similarly, when something touches those reflex conditionings, you just jerk. It produces the result which you don’t want.”
“The question is: are those reflexes coherent? According to the theory of evolution, incoherent systems don’t last very long. This is called ‘natural selection’. In thought, however, we seem to be able to keep up these incoherent systems of reflexes, at least quite a while. Sometimes the people who have them might not live very long, but in our society we have arranged conditions where we can go on with a lot of incoherence without actually leading to a selection process. The point is that reflexes can become incoherent and get stuck because of all these mechanisms.”
“According to the dictionary ‘violence’ means ‘the undue use of force’. And that’s a kind of incoherence. If you’re using force where force is not called for, that’s incoherent. For example, if a problem arises in thought and you use force to try to solve it, that is uncalled for. Therefore, the attempt to deal with social problems by force is incoherent, because the problems all arise in thought. And violence will never solve the problem in thought.”
“When we discover incoherence, our attitude can be either to move toward coherence or to defend the incoherence.”
“Our creative technology challenges us. We have to be coherent. At least we have to move towards coherence, or else all sorts of disasters may occur.”

Coherence:

“Coherence is sensed as harmony, order, beauty, goodness, truth, and all that everybody wants.”
“The universe as a whole is coherent, and anything incoherent we do is just part of the coherence of the universe when we look at it that way, even though if we do something crazy we will get a result we don’t want.”
“It is precisely because the universe is coherent that an incoherent species doesn’t survive.”
“No thought is fully coherent. The nature of thought is such that it is partial.”
“The criterion for coherent thought is that it is true and correct.”
“We want to see what is—what is correct, what is true, what is coherent.”

Necessity & Contingency

“We have to get straight on what is necessity and what is contingency. And in each situation this is what you’re doing all the time. You’re trying to assess the necessity and contingency.”

Necessity:

“The word ‘necessary’ means ‘it cannot be otherwise’, and the Latin root means ‘don’t yield’.”
“The whole idea of reality is bound together with the concept of necessity.”
“The sense of necessity gives the greatest force and power there is in human affairs.”
“The instinct of self-preservation is generally regarded as a very powerful set of reflexes built in by a set of genes, but the notion of absolute necessity will override that every time. You may say ‘my instinct is to preserve life’. But if the country says ‘it’s absolutely necessary to risk it’, then you have to risk it. Most people will feel that way. Or if you say ‘God demands it’, then the demands of God may override all the instincts. Or whatever it is. Your ambition may override the instincts, if it’s absolutely necessary to achieve your ambition. There’s a tremendous force in this. This notion of necessity is not merely intellectual. It involves everything.”

Contingency:

“‘Contingency’ means ‘what can be otherwise’. If something can be otherwise, it’s meaningful to try to change it. If it cannot be otherwise, then there’s no use trying.”
“Something that is necessary is a very powerful force which you can’t turn aside. Yet you may say ‘I have to turn it aside’. Thus we establish an order of necessity, saying ‘this turns aside for that, and this for that’. This notion of necessity is crucial to our whole ordering of thought; as is its opposite, which is contingency.”
“The point is that the notion of necessity and contingency is always operating. Everybody is using it all the time without even thinking about doing so; it becomes part of our reflexes.”

Self-Image is Thought

“Now, it’s around the self-image that the problem is most difficult. We’ve got a kind of self-image that is almost like a television programme going on inside; its going on in the nerves, and so forth. And this image has several parts. One part seems to be ‘somebody’ inside at whom you are looking. Another part seems to be ‘somebody’ who is looking. We have different words for these.”

I (subject):

“The system contains a reflex which produces the thought that it is ‘I’ who am doing everything. It has a very elaborate system of covering up what is happening.”
“The word ‘I’ stands for the subject, the one who sees, who acts, who does, who determines everything, who has will.”
“‘I’ is the active agent. I will, I determine, I see, I choose, I think.”
“The word ‘I’ by itself means almost the same as God. It’s the ultimate source of everything.”

Me (object):

“Also there is ‘me’ to whom it’s all done.”
“‘Me’ is the object, everything happens to me.”

Self:

“Then, the ‘self’ is what unites those two. ‘I’ and ‘me’ are two sides of myself. So there are me, myself and I. That’s a concept of the self.”
“The phrase ‘I am’ by itself represents the pure subject, the pure source, the one, the source of everything; and that ‘me’ represents the object. But we identify or equate ‘I am’ with ‘me’, saying ‘I am this, I am that, I am what I am, I am all the things attributed to me’. However, there comes a problem in equating ‘I am’ with ‘me’, because ‘me’ is always limited … Whereas ‘I am’, without adding anything more, does not have any implicit limitation.”
“The essential point is that the ‘me’ is always limited, but we feel that ‘me’ is the same as ‘I am’, as ‘I’. Now, this creates a conflict.”
“It’s very hard to keep the thought of ‘I’ and ‘me’ orderly—to make sense of it, to make it coherent. People don’t know how to resolve this contradiction between ‘I am’ and ‘me’.”
“The basic meaning of the word ‘self’, according to the dictionary, is the ‘quintessence’—the essence of the essence … The idea is that the thing ‘itself’ means the very essence of it. Thus what you mean by the ‘self’ is your very essence. You say ‘I’ and ‘me’, and ‘myself’—’self’ being the essence from which the ‘I’ and ‘me’ have their ground. But that use of language will give rise to representations, which we are liable to mistake for actuality. Whatever the self is, its essence is unknown but constantly revealing itself.”
“There is actually nothing but a process of thought which creates the image of ‘I’ and ‘me’. They are both the same ground really—namely, thought. They are all one.”

Observer & Observed:

“The system also contains the whole system of time, as well as the system of the self and the observer and the observed.”
“In our personal consciousness there is the impression that there is an observer and an observed, there is a thinker who produces thoughts separate from himself. And once thought has formed the image of the self as ‘me’ and ‘I’, then there is the view that it is ‘I’ who creates thought. In other words, thought has explained its origin through the image by attributing itself to that image.”
“We have a representation of the self as capable of being the observer and the observed. Just as we say ‘I can look at my body, so we say ‘I’ can look inside.”
“The process in which I look at my body has a certain meaning; but the process in which there is an observer who steps back to look at the hurt inside has no meaning because it’s just two images. It might as well be going on in a television screen.”
“If we had an insight right away into all this—that the observer is the observed, as Krishnamurti so often said—then it would all evaporate.”

Identity is Thought

“The question is: do we need an identity? Clearly in some limited sense we do need to know who we are—we have identity cards, we have memories and needs and certain relationships, and all the rest. We keep that all straight. But is that identity the supremely important thing that it seems to be?”

The role of society/culture:

“All this thought—this whole system—is even more social and cultural than it is individual.”
“The individuality that we have—or that we think we have—is to a large extent the product of our culture, which creates the particular image of the individual.”
“Thought is a system belonging to the whole culture and society, evolving over history, and it creates the image of an individual who is supposed to be the source of thought. It gives the sense of an individual who is perceived and experienced, and so on. This would be conducive to the next step, which is for thought to claim that it only tells you the way things are and then the individual inside decides what to do with the information—he chooses. This is the picture which emerged gradually: thought tells you the way things are and then ‘you’ choose how to act from that information.”
“The system gives you the identity. Without the system you would have no identity. The whole system of thought spread over the world is what gives you your identity, your place in the world and so forth. If there were no system, how could you sustain that identity? The identity could only exist socially and culturally. Although we may try to identify ourselves with God, or something like that, there again it’s the culture which gave you the thought allowing you to do that.”
“Our individual self-images mostly come from the culture. The word ‘idiosyncrasy’ has the Greek root meaning ‘private mixture’. There is a big mixture of images floating around in the culture from which everybody picks his own mixture. Each individual selects images for one reason or another. He doesn’t do it consciously. He picks up some of the images and repels some of the others; he finds others revolting, and so on.”
“We have the image that ‘I do the thinking’, ‘I am the thinker’. But in fact the culture has produced most of the thought. It sort of passes through me, I add a bit to it, I do this or that to it. The kind of thought we use, which is communicated, originates basically in the whole society and the culture. We have the sense of separation because our culture tells us that each individual is separate, and therefore we perceive it that way.”
“The word ‘individual’ literally means ‘undivided’. But we’ve seen that the individual which society puts together is highly divided and in conflict.”

Identity:

“You get a sense of identity built up out of thought.”
“We don’t need the notion of an identity, of an all-important identity on to which we are going to hold, because that gets in the way of the need to change our reflexes. Once we identify with something, our reflexes are that way—it’s very important, ‘necessary’. And we will want to preserve that identity even though it may involve ideas that are false.”
“The identity has a certain limited significance. It’s not that we are going to dispose of it, but it has no fundamental deep eternal significance. There is eternal flow and movement that is creative. But this creativity can get caught up in a certain process.”
“There’s nothing more ephemeral than thoughts; and yet thoughts can hold themselves by saying, ‘I must remain this way forever, with absolute necessity’. The point is to have the notion of a creative being, rather than of an identified being.”

Conditioned & Unconditioned

“Thought works by conditioning. It has to get conditioned. You need conditioning to learn a language, to learn how to write, or to do all sorts of things. When the conditioning gets too rigid, though, it won’t change when it should. But there may be areas where it is not that rigid and it could change, and then you can get something new—a new set of reflexes.”

Conditioned:

“That’s the nature of reflexes—to get conditioned when you repeat them.”
“You can see the conditioning of reflexes all the time. In fact, a great deal of our routine learning consists in establishing conditioned reflexes.”
“This is not purely an intellectual problem or an emotional problem or even a physical problem. Rather, the reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change.”
“The conditioning contains a reflex which informs you that the conditioning is very important.”
“When you say that you choose this alternative, it’s not clear what it means—who chooses, or what chooses, or how it gets chosen. Even if that were free, it would seem that it’s not a very significant kind of freedom. It does seem that it is not free, however, because if your choice is conditioned then you are not free.”
“As long as we are in this system, there is very little freedom. You can say ‘I do what I want’, but what you want is the result of the system. We are wanting things which are incoherent and creating misery. And we’re not free to give that up.”
“We are not free at all, as long as we are stuck with all this stuff.”

Unconditioned:

“The question is really: is there the unconditioned? If everything is conditioned, then there’s no way out. But the very fact that we are sometimes able to see new things would suggest that there is the unconditioned. Maybe the deeper material structure of the brain is unconditioned, or maybe beyond.”
“If we once assume that there cannot be the unconditioned, then we’re stuck. On the other hand, if we assume that there is the unconditioned, again we are going to be stuck—we will produce an image of the unconditioned in the system of conditioning, and mistake the image for the unconditioned.”
“If there is the unconditioned, which could be the movement of intelligence, then there is some possibility of getting into this.”
“What we are doing now is, I hope, creating some kind of window. In other words, perhaps the unconditioned energy is awakening, or something, and therefore it can begin to look at this conditioning.”
“Clear thinking implies that we are in some way awakened a little bit. Perhaps there is something beyond the reflex which is at work—in other words, something unconditioned.”
“If the brain really is not conditioned deeply and all these combinations are free to move around, then it can respond in an infinity of ways and move in relation to truth.”

Intelligence beyond Thought

“The system pervades our whole activity. It’s like something pervading our activity; but that doesn’t mean that it’s all there is. Do you get the distinction? The system has become so pervasive, however, that it may be almost all that we are able to see much of the time.”

“It’s worth pondering that this whole system, which we are calling ‘thought’, works as a system of reflexes. The question is: can you become aware of the reflex character of thought—that it is a reflex, that it is a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified, added to, changed? And we could say that as long as the reflexes are free to change then there must be some kind of intelligence or perception, something a bit beyond the reflex, which would be able to see whether it’s coherent or not. But when it gets conditioned too strongly it may resist that perception; it may not allow it.”
“I think we have begun to see enough of it to see that there might be a way out—not to say there is, but there might be. Now, this requires that we see thought as one whole, with the entire chemical-physical system, and all that.”
“There’s a lot beyond this system. The system is actually only a very tiny part of reality; but it looms very large.”
“Perhaps there is some kind of perception or intelligence which is deeper, which is able to see this incoherence.”
“There may be another level that is awakening, which is not controlled by the system.”
“If it’s true inquiry, then perhaps it is beyond the system. But don’t assume it, because then it will be part of the system. Every assumption goes into the system.”
“Unless you actually see the thing I’m talking about, what I say will be incorporated into the system as an image. Is it clear what the problem is? This system tends to incorporate everything. Anything repeated several times becomes part of the system.”

Awareness

“Don’t try to do anything. We’re just learning—aware, attentive, learning.”

“We examine it not in the spirit of trying to get rid of this or that reflex in particular, but rather in the spirit of learning more about the whole system, so maybe we learn something which can then be extended.”
“The point is that you have to see this, to be actually seeing that this is happening—that thought is behind this system. Otherwise the system seems to stand by itself, independent of thought.”
“We want to be able to see our system of reflexes in operation; and I’m suggesting that we have to have it there in front of us to see it, but suspend our reactions.”
“If we say that thought is a reflex like any other muscular reflex—just a lot more subtle and more complex and changeable—then we ought to be able to be proprioceptive with thought. Thought should be able to perceive its own movement, be aware of its own movement. In the process of thought there should be awareness of that movement, of the intention to think and of the result which that thinking produces. By being more attentive, we can be aware of how thought produces a result outside ourselves. And then maybe we could also be attentive to the results it produces within ourselves. Perhaps we could even be immediately aware of how it affects perception.”
“The important point is actually to see for yourself the proprioception of thought, to see it in action.”
“I’m suggesting that there is available on awareness, a stream of consciousness, which is more fundamental, which I imaged as being in the depth of the ocean. But awareness, too, may be confused with the operation of the system, because the system can make a representation of awareness and then take the representation to be that fundamental consciousness itself.”

Putting it into words:

“After you see something about how the system is working, you should also put that into words, because you want to inform the thought process of what you have seen. In other words, you may see something; but if the thought process doesn’t know about it, it will just go on as before. The thought process itself doesn’t ‘see’. It can only get information. Its typical way of getting information—on such an abstract level anyway—is from words. Therefore, I’m saying that it is essential to use words to elicit this thing, to make it visible to thought; and also we may then use words to state what we have seen.”
“The point is that the words are a way of bringing the thought into evidence, whereas often it works implicitly without your being aware of it.”
“It’s all one act. The creative act simultaneously alters some of the reflexes and also produces the expression, in words or some other means, which will enable thought to take it up and move in a different way from there on.”
“When an insight is put into words, what is it that puts it into words? Is it thought or is it the insight? I want to suggest that the insight itself will be an insight into the words which express it properly.”

Insight

“The first step, the first flash of insight, is non-verbal.”

“Thought is part of a material process. It goes on in the brain, the nervous system, and really the whole body and everything; it’s all one system. Thought can be conveyed by material processes such as radio waves, television, writing—all kinds of ways. In talking, sound goes out and conveys thought. Within the body thought is conveyed by nervous signals; there is a code of some sort, which we don’t know too well. We’re saying that thought is a material process; it has reflexes that just go on by themselves. And if you have an insight or perception that this is true, then that will actually affect you. An insight or a perception of truth may deeply affect the material process, which includes all the reflexes. But if we merely have an intellectual or inferential knowledge of what is going on, then it doesn’t touch this process deeply.”
“Somebody may get an understanding so deep that it does touch the reflexes, and then the thought process will change. But usually the understanding is a verbal understanding or an intellectual understanding or an image. That doesn’t mean that it has no value, but it means that it is still too abstract.”
“The insight is probably from immense depths of subtlety—perhaps even beyond the organism for all we know. Wherever it comes from, the important point is that it works directly at the physical chemical level of the organism, along with everything else. So it really affects you through and through.”
“For insight together we need dialogue. Individually a person can have insight; but we need it together, because now the civilization has reached a stage where it cannot proceed in the other way.”
“In a moment of insight in the group we may see that we share this material process, and that this material process we share is more significant than all the particular thoughts where we differ.”
“Insight would open the door to freedom, collectively as well as individually—to friendship and fellowship and love.”
“Freedom is the perception and creation of a new order of necessity.”
“You are deeply involved in this creative act. You don’t control the creative act. It’s coming from the same source as insight.”

Truth

“If you don’t want to call it ‘insight’, you could call it ‘perception of truth.'”

“An idea may be correct or incorrect or somewhere in between; but truth is something deeper. We should reserve the word ‘truth’ for something much deeper.”
“The root of the word ‘true’ in English means ‘straight’, ‘honest’ and ‘faithful’—like ‘a true line’. And in Latin, the word verus is a root word which means ‘that which is’. So you could say that a rough idea of the meaning of the word ‘truth’ would be ‘straight, honest and faithful to that which is’. But there will be no truth unless the mind is straight, honest and faithful; unless it doesn’t engage in self-deception; unless the chemistry allows it. For truth to arise there must be a certain situation in the brain.”
“You have to be awake, alert for truth. In other words, it requires what we may call a certain ‘state of mind’; really, a state of the material system as well. What generally happens when the whole system is too jangled is that it is filled with all sorts of chemical effects of this incoherent thought, which interfere with perception and put you to sleep, and so forth. You could say the brain is filled with what I call ‘electrochemical smog’. And when that is present we don’t have truth.”
“Our civilization has filled the air with smog, and the lungs are not in a condition to breath properly. Similarly, it’s filled the brain with electrochemical smog, and it’s not in a condition to respond to truth.”
“Truth is something more vital. It has to be that sort of movement which doesn’t deceive itself. And then it has to fit, cohere with ‘that which is’. Truth is a perception, and is simultaneously an action. The action of truth would clear up the electrochemical smog. It clears up the smog, as it were, so that you see more clearly. And also the system isn’t being poisoned, and whatnot. So that’s part of truth. Truth is not merely information about ‘what is’. But rather truth is a key factor in ‘what is.'”
“The source of truth must be like the source of insight—beyond what thought can grasp. And truth comes and touches the physical chemical state of the brain, as well as producing the words which communicate it to thought.”
“The perception of truth, which may be in a flash of insight, actually changes the system to make it more coherent. And at the same time, it produces the words, or whatever, which communicate a new foundation for thought.”
“Truth is not just floating out there abstractly, but truth actually is. That is to say, truth is a factor in actuality. Truth meets ‘that which is’; it touches ‘that which is’ in a coherent way when it touches what’s going on in the brain, and clears up some of it. And then from there on, that perception of truth gives rise to thought which can also act in a more coherent way.”
“Truth is not a reflex. It is a creative perception. We need the reflex, but not to be dominated by the reflex.”

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