BCIG Book Club: “Thought as a System”
Clinical
Center (Building 10) Medical Board Room (Room 2C116)
THE PROGRAM: BCIG old-timers Jim DeLeo, Carl Leonard, Nada
Vydelingum, Chuck Selden, and David Stiles will review the book according to the
following schedule:
Friday Evening - Jim DeLeo
Saturday Morning - Carl Leonard
Saturday Afternoon - Nada Vydelingum
Sunday Morning - Chuck Selden
Sunday Afternoon - David Stiles
The entire session runs 90 minutes. Each
reviewer will have 10 minutes for a total of 50 minutes (let’s say 60 minutes)
leaving 30 minutes for dialogue about the book. (By the way, David Bohm has
another excellent book entitled “On Dialogue” that offers great suggestions for
having really good dialogues!) At 7:00 p.m., those that want to continue
dialoging may continue right there in the Medical Board Room, or elect to
continue in a nearby restaurant.
BOOK REVIEW: Physicist David Bohm, Ph.D
was interested in the nature of thought. This book is a transcription of a
seminar held in Ojai, California in 1990 and it is highly recommended to all
truth suckers (ah, I mean "seekers"). Two other very important books from Bohm
are “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” and "On Dialogue." Bohm reduces the
source of all the world's problems to thought. He said thinking goes into the
brain and leaves a trace which becomes thought, and thought then acts
automatically. Thus our thinking puts thought into our system which programs
non-reflective actions. Thus if I am English and have been taught to distrust
all French people, the instruction to distrust French people becomes
internalized and I will behave as if this is a logical statement. This concept
is mirrored in the idea of memetics, where ideas are seen as mind-viruses.
One of the obvious things wrong with thought is
that it fragments. Thought breaks things up into bits – things which should not
be broken up. It seems very hard for human beings to accept seriously this
simple fact of the effect of fragmentation. Nations fight each other and people
kill each other. You are told that for the nation you must sacrifice everything.
Bohm saw these kinds of divisions going down into the level of the family. He
pointed out that people are supposed to be getting together, and getting along
but they can’t seem to, even in such basic units as the family. In science, for
instance, every little thing is fragmented from every other one. People hardly
know what is happening in a somewhat different field. Knowledge is fragmented.
Everything gets broken up. Bohm’s vision is one in which we could be moving to a
more holistic view of the world, realizing our common humanity and not
fragmenting the world with false divisions created by thought.
Thought has produced tremendous effects
outwardly. It also produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the
general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things
are and that it is not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding
what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you.
Thought runs you. Bohm says that 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.
Thought even creates a false division between
thinking and feeling. This is another major feature of thought: 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. Thought can generate incoherence and
thought can also generate habits and habitual behavior. Bohm saw thought as a
system, a set of connected things or parts. He said, “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.”
Bohm said that we have this system of thought,
“Now, I say that 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.” Bohm said that our failure to recognize the problem with thought is one
reason why this issue is so difficult to deal with. “I think that 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.” He also pointed to the
importance of insights in changing systems of thought, as Newton did with the
idea of gravity. But he also notes that Newton’s insight only broke the pattern
in a limited domain. Bohm said “all these insights in science were ultimately
assimilated within the general system of thought.” He said the importance of
such changes were that they showed that the pattern of the system is not
something which cannot be changed. Bohm finally notes that, “thought is
constantly trying to grasp things and to bring order to them. And it would try
to grasp itself, because it sees the inferential evidence of itself. And so it
explains itself as coming from a source – a source which is an image, which has
time to act, which has psychological time, and so on. But that requires insight
into this whole thing we’ve been discussing. And that insight would open the
door to freedom, collectively as well as individually – to friendship and
fellowship and love.” |
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5:30 pm- 7:30 pm March 22, 2007
AUTHOR: David Joseph Bohm (born December 20, 1917 in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, died October 27, 1992 in London) was an American-born quantum
physicist, who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical
physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project. (For lots
more on Bohm see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm )
SUITABILITY:
Anyone interested in the subject matter of the book is most welcome to attend
this BCIG Book Club Event.
REGISTRATION:
As with most all BCIG events, registration is not required. Just show up happy.
NIH CONTACT:
Carl Leonard, 301-496-0191,
cleonard@lired.com
REFRESHMENTS:
Please bring refreshments if you wish. There is a cafeteria near our meeting
room. We may go out to dinner with the author in a nearby Bethesda restaurant
after the meeting.
BCIG WEB SITE:
www.nih-bcig.org
Book Club Presentations
Jim DeLeo
INTRODUCTION
 powerpoint
Jim DeLeo
”FRIDAY
EVENING”
 audio
powerpoint
Carl Leonard
”SATURDAY
MORNING”
audio
powerpoint
Nadarajen A. Vydelingum
”SATURDAY
AFTERNOON”
audio
powerpoint
Chuck Selden
”SUNDAY
MORNING”
audio
powerpoint
David Stiles
”SUNDAY
AFTERNOOON”
audio
powerpoint
INSTRUCTIONS FOR LISTENING AND VIEWING
1. Select an audio presentation and click on it.
2. Immediately click on “BCIG links and
resources” (upper left).
3. Click on the Power Point presentation
corresponding to the audio presentation just activated.
4. Press the F5 key to start the Power Point
presentation.
5. Manually advance the Power Point presentation
(press the return key) to keep slides synchronized with audio,
PROBLEMS: Call Jim DeLeo at 301-496-3848 or Carl
Leonard at 301-496-0191.
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