David Bohm Quotes

#1. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

David Bohm

#2. We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.

David Bohm

#3. Can we learn to become more learning-oriented individually and collectively, rather than 'I know' oriented?

David Bohm

#4. Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter ... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven , just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.

David Bohm

#5. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, its far over 20%.

David Bohm

#6. Universe consists of frozen light.

David Bohm

#7. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something-a trace-which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

David Bohm

#8.
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?

David Bohm

#9. Ultimately, the entire universe ... has to be understood as a single undivided whole ...

David Bohm

#10. A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department ... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

David Bohm

#11. From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character ...

David Bohm

#12. We can't simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes-taking the surface and calling it the reality.

David Bohm

#13. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.

David Bohm

#14. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that system began.

David Bohm

#15. We havent really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.

David Bohm

#16. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

David Bohm

#17. Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought 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.

David Bohm

#18. 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.

David Bohm

#19. And thought 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.

David Bohm

#20. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.

David Bohm

#21. The system [of thought] doesn't stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It's conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the thing that's making the unpleasant feeling.

David Bohm

#22. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it.

David Bohm

#23. During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.

David Bohm

#24. Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.

David Bohm

#25. A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.

David Bohm

#26. Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all.

David Bohm

#27. Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.

David Bohm

#28. The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

David Bohm

#29. One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.

David Bohm

#30. If we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones. As long as we accept images as realities we are in that trap, because you can't control the images.

David Bohm

#31. Thus, in a dialogue each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it can be said that collectively they are making something in common

David Bohm

#32. The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion) ...

David Bohm

#33. To change your reality you have to change your inner thoughts.

David Bohm

#34. Both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.

David Bohm

#35. We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.

David Bohm

#36. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info 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.

David Bohm

#37. Anybody can use science and technology without fundamentally altering his own frame of mind which governs how they are used.

David Bohm

#38. So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

David Bohm

#39. In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.

David Bohm

#40. the subtle but crucial role of our general forms of thinking in sustaining fragmentation and in defeating our deepest urges toward wholeness or integrity.

David Bohm

#41. Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other's presence.

David Bohm

#42. This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society.

David Bohm

#43. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.

David Bohm

#44. Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

David Bohm

#45. At any particular stage in the development of science, our concepts concerning the causal relationships will then be true only relative to a certain approximation and to certain conditions.

David Bohm

#46. In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.

David Bohm

#47. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.

David Bohm

#48. Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.

David Bohm

#49. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change.

David Bohm

#50. Thought creates our world, and then says 'I didn't do it

David Bohm

#51. The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

David Bohm

#52. Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

David Bohm

#53. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.

David Bohm