Understanding Thought: I of III

as well these meetings have been concerned with the really the the question of thought or really and the way what what it's been doing in the world right and just by way of review and we can we all know that the world is in a difficult situation and has been basically for a long time that now we have many crises you know in addition to the latest one in the middle east which has no no clear solution we we have also the ecological crisis which people are which has gone on the back burner i think and uh we have economic crises developing and we have the fact that there's nationalism all over and people don't seem to have all sorts of hatreds and you have religious hatred and inability of people to get together to face the common problems such as the ecological one of the economic when everything is interdependent and yet the more interdependent we get it seems the more we split up into little groups that don't like each other and are inclined to fight each other and kill each other or at least not to cooperate and so uh one begins to wonder whether it will be possible what is going to happen to the human race and technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power either for good or for destruction and yet it seems that it tends to be used more and more there's always this danger of destruction right we know sooner had this rivalry between america and the west and the east are sort of dissolved away and then we have this problem the middle east pops up and doubtless another one will pop up later and so on it's sort of endemic it's not just it's not just uh something that occasionally happens and it's it's in the whole situation now uh i think we're all familiar with that situation and if you think of technology advancing keep you have nuclear bombs which will perhaps soon be available to people like saddam or to somebody else if he goes and you have biological weapons and chemical weapons and what other kinds of weapons they haven't yet invented but surely will and uh and then you have the faster we either we go into a depression which will help save the ecology or we go into a boom which will make us happy but it will ruin the economy i mean the faster we go into prosperity the faster we create all those other problems so it seems whichever way you turn it doesn't work and why not you see what's going is there any way out you see what will can you imagine a hundred years of this or 200 or 500 it won't lead to some gigantic catastrophe either to the ecology or in some other way and uh perhaps war who knows now the uh so it seems that we have to people have been dealing with this piecemeal looking at symptoms right saying we've got to solve this problem or that problem or that problem but uh there's something deeper which is constantly generating these problems which people haven't been considering the way of the analogy that there's a stream and people are pouring pollution upstream and they're trying to remove it downstream but as they remove it they must they may add some more of a different kind so the uh what is the source of all this trouble you see uh now that is really what we've been concerned with in all these dialogues of the past few years and uh and we're coming back to the source is basically in thought i'm saying and those of you who come or heard this once or twice or more before uh the uh which many people would think is crazy you see their thought is the one thing we have to solve our problems right that's part of our tradition and see it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems is the source of our problems and it's uh it's like going to the doctor and he'll make you ill in fact in 20 of the cases apparently we do have that going on but but in the case of thought it's far over 20 and say that the uh so the reason why we don't see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them are the source so the uh but that may seem strange to somebody who's first heard it uh uh because our whole culture prides itself on thought as its highest achievement and it's the achievements of thought i'm not trying to say are negligible they are very great achievements in technology in various other ways and culture but there's another side to it which is leading to our destruction that we have to look at so the uh now what is wrong try to say what is wrong with thought i'd try to give some brief summary and we might start talking about it if you like uh well one of the obvious things wrong wrong with it is fragmentation uh the uh the thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken up you see we can see this going on we see the world is broken up into nations more and more nations russia and no sooner got rid of the communist dictatorship when it's breaking up into a lot of little bits which obviously can't and manage and they're all fighting each other and it's a source of concern that they're doing there's a concern for the whole world right you have new nations nations all over the world uh you know reading recent in an article about during the second world war the nationalism developed in latvia lithuania and estonia they say lithuania for the lithuanians latvia for the latvians i don't know armenia for the armenians and so on and so on uh it's all broken up and yet the world is all one right the more technology develops the more people depend on each other and people try to pretend it's not so right so they say the nation is sovereign it can do what it like you see and yet it can't right the united states can't do what it like because it depends a lot on other countries for supplies of also its oil and it depends on japan for money apparently and so on so uh the uh now uh japan can't do what it like obviously so it seems very hard for people to accept this simple fact seriously um and nations get to fight each other and kill each other they become they say for the nation you must sacrifice everything or for your religious differences you sacrifice everything we split into religions you see we've split into racial groups and saying that's all important or and all sorts of splits into inside each nation there are various splits you know you can see people are divided up and into sections and into all kinds of interests and and it goes on down to the family and inside families and so on people are supposed to be getting together but they can't and see the nation we have the boundary of the nation you say we've established a nation now that's invented by thought right if you go to the edge of the nation there's nothing there particular and unless somebody made a fence right you know so uh it's the same country that the people may often be not very different but it's all important what's one side or the other it's thought that makes it so you see i was informed that most of the nations the middle east were invented either by the british or the french who that their various bureaucrats drew lines and said that's the boundary of this nation that nation that nation and there they were now they all have to fight each other you see so the uh uh now uh well then you have professional groups if you are in science you see every little specialty is fragmented from every other people hardly know what's happening in a somewhat different field and it goes on knowledge is fragmented everything gets broken up you see now what is broken up is something in other words what we are doing is establishing boundaries where really there's a close connection that's what's wrong with fragmentation and at the same time trying to establish unity where there isn't any or not very much right inside the boundary we say we're all one but when you look at all these groups they're not all one at all they're all fighting each other inside as much as they're fighting outside so we have false division and false unification right in other words thought is pretending that there's a sharp division here and really everything is unified inside when it's all not so so this is a fictional way of thinking the question is we say to go on with this fictional way of thinking seems to be very important so important that the actual fact that it's wrong is ignored you see so that it's not that way at all so uh see then it seems strange why why should people do such a strange thing it seems it's really would be it could be thought of as irrational or at the very least a crazy perhaps you know that so much trouble is created out of such small things you know which may prevent our survival even so well now but that's only but then that that's fragmentation is itself a symptom of some more general difficulty with thought or a particular case of it uh because there's a more general difficulty with thought is that thought is very active and participatory it's always doing a great deal but it all is tending to say it hasn't done anything but it's just telling you the way things are right you see thought has created everything you see here and this building around it has affected how all the trees are it has affected the mountains it has affected the plains and the farms and the factories and the science and technology and even at the south pole you have quite a bit of you may have the destruction of the ozone layer which is basically due to thought because people thought that they want to have a refrigerant a nice safe refrigerant and they built this all up by thinking more and more about it and now we have the ozone layer you see it being destroyed so uh the uh uh uh see thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly and we'll discuss further on it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person and yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are not doing anything and that you are inside there deciding what to do with that information but i want to say that you don't decide what to do with the information the information takes over and runs you you see that thought runs you but it also gives the false information that you are running it right that you are the one who controls thought whereas thought is the one who controls each one of us right we don't those until thought is understood which better yet more than understood proceed they will actually control us under the but create the impression that it is our servant it is just doing what we want it to do now they see that's the difficulty the thought is participating and then saying it's not participating it's taking part it's in everything uh now that it's fragmentation is a particular case of that you see thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying they're there naturally the divisions between nations are regarded as being just there you see but obviously they were invented by people and people that came to accept them and that made them be there the same holds for the divisions between religions every religion was invented by somebody thinking that he had a certain idea about god and that uh that was right and true and eventually other religions weren't right and uh and eventually that you could catch that the other religions were inferior or perhaps even uh heretical or about evil or wrong and you could fight them you know try to suppress them and destroy them and there were vast religious wars and in fact we may still have some more coming so in spite of all the development of the enlightened knowledge and science and technology the in fact science and technology now seems to serve at least equally well those who are perhaps at a more medieval level than it serves those who are regard themselves as more advanced right so uh anybody can use it you see and now the uh without fundamentally altering his own frame of mind which governs why how it's used so uh therefore and saying that thought has this character that it uh is doing something and says it didn't do it now we have to uh really go into that because we could have discussed that a great deal because it's doing what it's doing is very much more subtle than i've said that's only in the beginning now then again another problem with fragmentation is that thought divides from feeling and from the body thought is said to be the mind some sort of abstract or spiritual or immaterial we have that feeling and then you have the body very physical and then you have emotions somewhere in between perhaps and the ideas are all different right now we think of them as different and we experience them as different because we think of them as different so but see thought is not so different from emotion uh if you think something if you think that a certain person has treated you badly you will get angry you see we'll discuss that more later but a very elementary example is that if if somebody uh keeps you waiting for a couple of hours and you can get very angry thinking you know what does it mean treating me like this you know he has no concern consideration for me and you can think of various things he's always doing it and so on by thinking that way you can get very angry and then if he comes and says the train was late it goes so it shows its thought right by changing your thought the anger evaporates so thought at least sustains that feeling and uh the uh you can see the thought of something pleasant will make you feel good you see the thought that you're doing well great will make you feel good inside the adrenaline will be and all the good feelings will come out and the thought that you have done something wrong with the thought that you're guilty may make you feel miserable if somebody says you are guilty which is a thought then you can feel very miserable right so so feelings are tremendously affected by thoughts and obviously thoughts are tremendously affected by feelings because if you're angry you don't think clearly now if you have a feeling of pleasure in something you may find yourself reluctant to give up the idea that gives you pleasure even if it's wrong right you engage in self-deception so the feelings and thoughts affect each other and i gave this example many times but it's a good one there's a good physical reason for that which you can see in the structure of the brain uh see there there's a very thick bundle of nerve there's an intellectual center in the cortex in the pre and the outer layers of the brain and deeper down there's an emotional center and then between them is a very thick bundle of nerves by which they communicate very closely so they must be connected you see now then there was this famous case in the 19th century of an iron pin with an explosion and drove through the man's brain he had been a very level-headed man and so on but he recovered apparently from this it came right out you see then he recovered and he was physically okay but emotionally he was totally unbalanced and intellectually he couldn't maintain any very consistent line of thought so the breaking of the connection of the emotional and the intellectual centers prevented the system from functioning you see what happens is that an intellectual center will normally tell whether an emotion is appropriate or not that's what happened when you were angry and somebody being delaying you two hours and somebody else came and said the train was late you believed him then the the emotion the intellectual center said there's no longer any good reason to be angry and the emotional center duly said okay no reason i give up i give up my anger now so uh the uh and vice versa the emotional center may be sending uh may is pic you know may send um information saying that there is danger there is this or that and the intellectual center picks it up and tries to find out what is the danger it thinks so uh therefore they're intimately and closely related the very wish to think must come from an emotion or from an impulse to think which and and uh so they're they're really almost two sides of the same process right but our language separates them and our thought separates them a fragment you see we introduce in our thought a very sharp division just back between nations where there really isn't such a division as we're introducing a fictional way of thinking about this situation and if our thinking is fictional it's called misleaders i mean now the uh uh that's really uh so we have this question that emotions and intellect are closely connected and i think it's worth repeating but i've said the last two years that in the language we have a distinction thinking and thought right thought thinking is the present sense of the thing and some activity going on which may include some critical sensitivity to what may go wrong and also some new ideas and perception of some kind of insight occasionally but then thought is the past of that so thinking doesn't disappear another idea we have is when we've been thinking something it just goes but it doesn't it goes somehow into the brain and leave something a trace which becomes thought right and a thought now acts automatically so uh therefore if you have been thinking for a while that i have a good reason to be angry it's there and then you remain angry uh so uh that so we have thinking and thought thought is the response from memory from the past right of what has been done and then you have the word feeling which suggests that it's always just active present it's just telling you it's just directly in contact with reality but in fact if we introduced the english word felt say there are feelings and felts right there their feelings which have been recorded and we know that they're there because you may remember pleasure that you had and get a sense of pleasure you remember pain you had it you get a sense of pain a traumatic experience in the past can make you feel very uncomfortable and remembered and and so on so uh nostalgic feelings and so on you know are there from the past and the uh you you know that uh there are a lot of the feelings come up are really from the past they're felt and by failing to make this distinction we often give too much importance to some feelings which actually don't have that much significance if they are recorded if they're just the recording being replayed they don't have as much significance as if they were a response to the present immediate situation now see if you respond according to the way you felt a long time ago or where you got used to feeling saying when i was a child a certain situation made me feel uncomfortable or you know you and then when any similar situation arises now you feel uncomfortable you only get that discomfort but you don't see it doesn't mean anything but it does seem to mean a great deal it affects you right you see so failing see so that false division between thinking and feeling and also the whole state of the body right because according to the way you think you will get adrenaline flowing you know you'll get neurochemicals affected all over the body for example if you see a shadow and you know you have know that there are there are people around who might attack you then you immediately get a feeling of fear and you get adrenaline flowing your muscles tense your heart beats just from the knowledge that there may be assailants in the neighborhood as soon as you look and say it's a shadow it goes the knowledge that it this doesn't happen to be one of those assailants and it goes right so there's a profound connection between the state of the body and the way you think and if people are constantly worried about their under stress about their jobs or something that they may stir up their stomachs too much and get ulcers you know various other things and it's well known so the state of the body is very profoundly tied to uh thought affected by thought and vice versa so uh and that's another kind of fragmentation we have to watch out for right now all of that will tend to introduce quite a bit of confusion or what i call incoherence into our thinking you see or into our action because what happens is that you will not get the results you expect you see that's the first major sign of incoherence you want to do something but it doesn't come out that way right and uh that that's a sign that you have some wrong information somewhere usually i mean if you expect something that you act that way and it doesn't happen is that clear and the right approach would be to say yes that's incoherent let me try to find out the wrong information and change it but now the trouble is we find there's a lot of incoherence where people don't do that you see if somebody likes to be flattered you see in some sense he also doesn't want to be taken advantage of right but he finds that the person who flatters him can take advantage of him right it happens again and again and again and he doesn't want that but so he would say well there's an incoherence there because it is not his intention to be taken advantage of but still he has another intention he doesn't think about which is he wants the glow of feeling that would come from flattery right now one implies the other because if he accepts that then he also will accept the truth of what the person says and a lot of other things he can be taken advantage of so he's got incoherent he's got a a conscious intention and another one which which is resist to going against it right that's a very common situation it's the same between with nationalism you see people didn't set up nations in order to suffer the way they've suffered to suffer endless wars and hate and starvation and disease and annihilation and slavery and whatnot that was not their intention when they set up the nation nations to do that but that's what happened and it would inevitably happen now the point is nobody ever looked at the nation and said what's it all about they said at all costs we've got to go on with this nation but we don't want these consequences right and therefore they struggled against the consequences without well they kept on producing the situation see that is the third feature of thought that it doesn't know it's doing something and then it struggles against that it doesn't want to know it's doing it right and it struggles against the result trying to avoid the unpleasant result while keeping on with the way of thinking see that's what i call sustained incoherence you see not there would be simple incoherence which you're always going to have because no thoughts are always incomplete you know we always find our thoughts they're not quite right and we therefore have to say if if we find out what's happening becomes contradictory confused or isn't doing what we expect then we should change our thoughts right and try to make it better but and in simple situations we do right but when it comes to things that matter to us we don't that's rather odd because in the things that matter are the place where we ought to be coherent especially but we feel that only the things that don't matter too much we can afford to be cohering right that's it which is another kind of incoherence because we really nobody has the intention of producing that sort of situation right we see we are producing these situations contrary to our conscious intentions there's another resistance going on which we're not very conscious of so whenever we intend to do something we often have unconsciously a resistance trying to prevent us from doing it it's a big waste of energy obviously in any way it's very destructive it means we can't we will produce problems without end that have no solution you know there's see i suppose we say well the russians finally in america and the west got together finally for various reasons and but meanwhile for various other reasons people have been sending a lot of arms into the middle east right it was not their intention to produce this impossible situation we have now they said well we're sending out the middle east for various reasons and we want to make money some of us we want to we have a certain national policy which calls for doing that there are various reasons right and then it all added up to this situation right if there had been no arms there it would not be so serious so uh also in 73 there was a dis that was plainly brought out that we were very dependent on middle eastern oil which was a very unstable region so for a while people began to use oil more efficiently or energy more efficiently but then gradually they stopped right and then they say look surprise we now depend for half the oil of the world is theirs if that's if that goes we're all finished so the uh uh once again let's see it was not people's intention to produce this situation but rather they may say we don't want this situation but there are a lot of other things we've got to have which will produce this situation exactly so there was an incoherence right we're constantly producing things we don't intend then we say look we've got a problem we don't realize that it was our d print our hidden intentions which have produced and keep on even now very little is being done as far as i can see about using energy more efficiently and thus becoming less dependent on that oil which would remove most of almost the whole problem now the uh so [Music] you must ask why is there this incoherence i mean nobody wants that situation and yet people want things which will inevitably produce it right they think it's thought that makes people say that's necessary see so that so therefore thought has come to this kind of incoherence and i think that's really the kind of introduction uh well maybe we should talk a little about it now and i'd say a little more later about this whole thing if people want to discuss it because that's too depressing to discuss you proposing that you slide from thinking into thought without being aware yeah well it's automatic you see because when we've been thinking it gets recorded somewhere and then that becomes thought i'll discuss later how that thought is an active set of movements right it reflects you see suppose you keep on thinking see the people of that start out with very young children people of that group are no good no good no good and then it becomes thought which just springs up they're no good in fact you'd hardly notice that you're thinking that there's any thought even right there's a bright sense of it in a more detailed sense even now in conversation in this group while you're talking there's a process of thinking and which is as you said alive or more in the present and then there's other stuff happening us which is thought and we don't seem to have the ability to distinguish the two no well we we don't seem to distinguish the two we say we well sometimes we do because sometimes we say i thought that before you know but generally we may miss the distinction and with feeling it's even harder to see that distinction between what we what's the past the past feeling coming up i call it the felt and something which would be an active present feeling right i wonder how much of the fracturing is taught in the newtonian and christian models the christian model of the fracturing and how it is our brain intrinsic and this is actually its behavior its normal natural behavior when i remember in grade schools being taught to fracture classify and disorganize take things apart and my interior was violently against it because i saw this whole knitted skein as a as an uneducated person so i'm wondering whether the brain naturally wants to fracture and analyze or whether it's part of the way we teach ourselves well it is to some extent part of the result of the way we are taught i'm sure the uh i think there's some tendency and thought to constantly build this up you see so it's partly intrinsic i mean it's the nature of the brain not the brain well and the way thought has been developing you see a i think see first of all a certain amount of analysis is necessary for clarity of thought some distinctions have to be made right now we then carry them too far without and we slip over and there's once we carry them too far then we start registering it and that becomes part of our habit right how do we recognize where the edge before slipping over too far well that's a very subtle question and we want to go into that carefully in this whole period i don't think you're going to recognize i see i think it's you'll see that uh something much deeper is involved to see to get free of that isn't much more than just recognizing that difference right but i see what we have to do is to see some sort of notion of where the truck what sort of trouble we're in now in other words we started out saying the trouble is the world is in chaos but i think we end up by saying that thought is in chaos franklin that's each one of us and that that is the origin of the world in chaos then the chaos of the world adds comes back and adds to the chaos of thought did you mean to say that thought has a kind of possessive quality and which it stays gets stuck and then become habitual and then we don't see it yeah well i think everything has that sort of quality that whenever we repeat something it sort of gradually becomes a habit i'll probably discuss that presently but it will be a key point you see and we we get less and less aware of it right you know you just if you brush your teeth every morning you probably hardly notice how you're doing it huh it's a it just goes by itself our thought just does the same thing and so do our feelings right the employment of thought in the psychological sense is that not synonymous with corruption why do you say that is is there not only two states corruption and innocence well i don't know you see a but why you see i'm not saying yes or no i'm trying to say why are you saying this you see in other words uh [Music] are you saying that thought by itself is incapable of innocence or that we simply be in the psychological sense it seems so yeah is it so is the question he said it may seem so i don't know yeah that's the question we're trying to explore right and let's see we'll admit the fact is it seems so it seems as an appearance right now the question is what is what is actually the case and we have to explore that right you see what i mean but this will take some digging into [Music] we can't just take the way things seem and just work on that because that that would be another kind of mistake thought makes just taking the surface and calling it the reality yeah i think it's really interesting what you say i can see how you know if i have the intention to go someplace and i take the wrong road it's no problem i just you know next time i take i find out what the right road is i change the information and i take a different road but if both personally and collectively often i have the intention to do something and it doesn't it doesn't work out and yet i don't know what's wrong and that you know i won't i can't seem to change the information or whatever and what i'm very interested in especially is how there's a sense of me separate from the information and from the intention and i feel like i'm this objective being that can change it and yet i can't seem to or the world can't seem to so the sense of of me separate from the information um i think that's something interesting to explore yes well we will try to get into that during this whole period you see that's another subtle question but we have that feeling as you say that what seems to be and we don't necessarily accept what seems to be see if we accept what seems to be as what is then we can't inquire i mean if what seems to be were perfectly coherent then i'd say all right why question it but since it's highly incoherent i would say a good reason to question it that would be common sense in most in ordinary areas of life now the so it seems that all that's happening that we all want to do things and we can't do what we want something else seems to happen that stops it's now that so see some of the people who are running corporations are getting interest in this question because they have the same problem then actually i know some people are working in this area and they find that when their boards get together they can't seem to get the result they can't agree and they can't get the results they intend either that's one of the reasons that they are thinking a bit and the uh so uh uh once again uh you know but there's a fellow who has written a book peter senghi the fifth discipline he has he has analyzed some of these i don't say he's got to the bottom of it that's interesting has made some sort of analysis which shows that very often it's because they're not following the effect of their thoughts you see that when they think something and something is done then it spreads out to other companies and then it comes back a bit later as if it were something else right independent is that clear so they treat it as an independent problem and they keep on and thereby making it worse because they keep on doing the same thing so their way of thinking is creating a problem it takes some time for the problem to get back to them and they by that time they've lost track of it and they say here's a problem they think some more and produce more of that problem [Music] or else change the problem but into another one that's worse or whatever so uh the point is that they are not following and they say that they are not aware of the effects of their thought right that the fact thought is active participating now you see there is this feeling that when you are thinking something it does nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it that's the way come the way people are talking right but the way you think determines the way you're going to do it and then then you don't notice a result comes back right 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 is that clear so therefore your problem you see all these problems that i described are the result of the way we've been thinking that whole series of them which are so depressing but people don't see that they say we we're just thinking out there the problems and the thinking is telling us about those problems what they are so if i see a situation which seems so very obvious that that a whole group of people are acting very incoherently and then i think i see it very clearly that they're being incoherent and then i start to act to correct that i mean i'm not noticing that my own thinking and my own may be incoherent and the action then will be no because you're not thinking you may be caught in the same thing you see in fact you see that because actually how will you correct it you see it if unless you ch unless the thinking changes it won't be corrected nothing you do can change their thinking except communication to them that they're incoherent about communication which they will accept and understand is that clear otherwise you are you are trying to meet thought with force really it's kind of violence you see if you say out there are some people behaving incoherently and i will try to make them behave coherently then you're using force right but they keep on thinking the same old way if you're more powerful than they are they will do what you want for a while until you get to be a little weak and they'll take care of you then quality of thought if i can bring it back again [Music] it seems to me it looks appears and we like to explore it thought comes in from the outside comes to the awareness takes over takes possession and maybe collectively take possession and go to war and we don't see it because thought is possessive like magic it seems to take over yes it takes over and why does it take over you see the point is see there are two levels of this point one is to describe the what happens as far as we can see outwardly and secondly to see the the the source of it right because unless we see the source of it it will never change so how do we explore the source yeah well that's what that's what this whole series this weekend is about right you see but i think it's important to see what the question is the first thing is to see there is a question that needs to be explored right back then can thought be aware of itself well that's a subtle question you see i think we'd have to uh uh perhaps would be best to leave that goal for a while on the surface it appears it wouldn't be aware of itself if it's just memory but some kind of we need some kind of awareness of what thought is doing let's put it that way that seems clear but which we don't have generally speaking appropriate pro pros what's that word you use previous times proprioception self perception of thought you see and we'll come to that you know as we go along that there may be a way to get into this but i mean i think you know we should look at another the thing you know in sort of a general way at this and for this evening it would take us rather longer than this evening would make available to go into that now it's not by any means it doesn't look entirely impossible with something we could approach this question somehow but but it is a very difficult question you see there are two reasons why it's difficult which i would put one of them is that there's a fault in the process of thought but what i mean by thought is all the whole thing thought about the body the whole society sharing thoughts it's all one process it's essential for me not to break that up because that's all one process and somebody else's thoughts become my thoughts you see and vice versa so therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought your thoughts my feelings these feelings those feelings for some purposes all right but not for this purpose we're in now now the uh uh so uh now i i would say that that this thought makes what is now often called a modern language a system a system means it's all put together but it really the way they're using the word commonly now it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent uh for their not only for their mutual action but for their meaning and their existence you see you could say if you organize a corporation that is a system you see you have this department that department that department they don't have any meaning separately right they all only can function together now uh the uh uh in some sense the body is a system uh maybe a society is a system in some sense now all the and and so on uh now i want to say that thought is a system thought that system is not only includes faults feelings it includes the state of the body it includes the whole of society as it's thought as passing back and forth and a whole process by which thought evolved from ancient times or even before right a system is constantly engaged in a process of development change evolutionist structure changes and so on now there are certain features of the system become relatively fixed we call that the structure you can see that in an organization there's a certain structure and that sometimes begins to break up because it doesn't work and people could change it right now so we've got some structure and thought as well i don't know if you can see some of it but which are some relatively fixed features and but it's been constantly evolving you see so we can't say that this structure began never you know you can't say when it began but with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal i think it was probably very simple the thought before a civilization and now it has become very complex and ramified and has meant much more incoherence than before so uh the uh so you have this system right and now i say that this system has a fault and a systemic fault it's not a fault here there there but there's a fault that is all through the system can you picture that uh it's everywhere and nowhere you say so therefore you may say i see a problem here but i bring my thought to bear on the problem but my thought is part of the system it has the same fault as the fault i'm trying to look at very similar fault so we have the systemic fault and you see you can see that that's what's been going on in all these problems of the world that the fragmentation of nations has produced problems and and dealing we say here's a fault something is going wrong but in dealing with it we use the same kind of fragmentary thought that produced the problem just a somewhat different version of it so therefore it's not going to help and make make things worse so for example you were saying you know you see all these things going wrong and then you say but what shall i do i try to think about it but my thought by now is pervaded with this systemic fault yes so what what does that call for is it like the whole system has been polluted well that's one way of looking at it yes something has happened in the whole system which makes the thought wrong in the whole the whole process not straight in the whole system right any part of it there may be bits of it which are okay but you know it doesn't stay right when you extend it it's a bit like i used to say like the thing of saying the egg which was rotten only in parts you see there might be some parts which haven't been rotten but they'll spread right you see so the uh let's say we can get some relatively clear thought in science right it's not entirely clear because scientists are worried about their prestige and status and so on sometimes they won't consider ideas that won't go along with that or with their prejudices or whatever but uh nevertheless science was aimed at not having that right it was aimed at saying seeing this fact whether you like it or not and looking at theories you know objectively and calmly and you know without bias and so on so and then to some extent it was achieved better than in some other areas of life right so therefore some results flow out of science and technology which are quite impressive the great power was released and then but now we discover that in the use of science whenever the time comes to use science we just forget the scientific method right we just say well no that was nice for the scientists to use the scientific method to make all that from now on we say well the use of this thing will be determined by needs of our country i might need to make money or i need to defeat that religion or you know whatever right or just my need to show what a great powerful person i am right so therefore we now say so we say relatively unpolluted thought has been used to develop certain things and then and then we always trust to the most polluted thought to decide what to do with it well that's part of the incoherence i'm just repeating it but uh are you saying that as we get into this pollution we cannot see our true intentions that we we don't know what are we don't see that our intentions are incoherent and perhaps that they're arising out of the pollution i think um as an individual you know we strive to resolve these things in ourselves that what are our intentions and as individuals what causes us to act or take what we do and at the same time i see that part of the problems you describe the global problems are a different kind of problem that individuals haven't faced you know for example individuals want to survive and want to reproduce that's no longer possible in the sense that it was before because a lot of our problems are we have too many people so there's both uh working on this as an individual and somehow collectively realizing that we can't do the basic things individuals used to need to do that something has to be changed yeah so that's quite true but you see we can't seem to do it you see that the uh people trying to get together to deal with these things don't seem to be able to get very far in order to take the pollution or the ecological the climate you know exchange of climate very little has been done on it we said a lot of good words have been produced by various governments but when it comes to putting a lot of money behind it it hasn't gone very far you see the therefore there's very good intentions or counteracted by another set of intentions or a whole bunch of sets of intentions such as we've got to allow we can't interfere with this so we can't interfere with that we've got to allow this and that and that then it adds up to nothing so the uh therefore it's the same incoherence that of course our the intentions we profess are blocked by another set that we not only don't profess but may not know fully we've got you may not want to know right it seems to me that we have to like become aware of certain assumptions which we've completely taken for granted and aren't even aware that we have and that seems like we kind of have to go backwards and you know just question what our what our assumptions are that we're taking for granted in the way we in the system and how we operate all the time because there's something that we're not even noticing which is limiting our ability to make our intentions happen both individually and collectively well you see we're faced with this thing that i think we're not really aware of what's happening in this system which i've called thought right we don't know how it works we don't we hardly know it's a system see it's not part of our culture to admit that it's just a single system even could you explain that system again you said we're going to discuss this thought but you're also including the emotional yeah and what else were you in the state of the body and also the whole society the culture the way we pass information between us and emotions and everything now when you see the state of the body are you also including the organ supply or anything yes the organs are affected by it okay so when you say the organs are affected by it in a sense you're making a distinction are you saying everything somehow i'm hearing that you're saying the whole this whole thing is a system a closed system well i wouldn't say it's entirely closed system isn't necessarily closed it you know it can be open to various influences or things coming in and out that's the whole idea of the system but uh you see that 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 outside comes in it reacts in such a way as to avoid the change of basic change right right but i i i'm hoping you're going to say that there is a possibility of of opening up the structure or seeing it or being oh yeah yeah yeah there is there is yes i'm not saying the system is everything there is i'm saying the system pervades our whole activity do you get the distinction it's like something pervading our activity but doesn't mean that it's all there is but it actually has become so pervasive it may be almost told that we are able to see much of the time so what is not in the system can we say what is not part of the system well yes uh well we could say for the beginning that perhaps there is some kind of perception or intelligence which is which is deeper which is able to see this incoherence you see for example if we say that see the system itself could not very well see its incoherence very far because it would distort it now i'm suggesting there is a capacity that this the system could be regarded as some sort of uh well as we've said to a certain extent it is necessary because we need this whole system of thought and so on for all sorts of purposes now it has produced has developed a fault the there is i say an intelligence a perception which goes beyond memory we can't see a factor click currency and incoherence just simply by way of it you know that that's the first step there's a lot beyond this system the system is actually only a very tiny part of reality but uh the but it looms very large and it would be very unless you actually see the thing i'm talking about what i say will be incorporated into the system as an image which will not really convey you see what i mean is that clear what the problem is you see that the system sort of tends to incorporate everything anything repeated several times becomes a perception and then repeated several times becomes part of the system so somebody may have had an insight and then it becomes part of the system you excluded memory uh intuition from the system didn't you well it doesn't mean it depends on what you mean by it i think the system is able to have a kind of intuition that in the sense that it may imitate uh uh it may give them a memory of intuition which sort of feels a bit like intuition the intuition would not be from the system with it right now that we're truly so yes but i'm saying there's perception inside there's intelligence there's various things you can call it which will we'll try to bring it all out as we go along which may not be part of the system but let's put it now that i don't think it's that way and that we're keeping it as a possibility and we all may see some evidence that that system is not every and not everything aren't there times that an action is considered right right by the individual and of course that action taking place is a result of what you might call non-self-serving thought and yet not trying to impose it on someone but where there's a strong elements of say compassion and love in that particular thought now in that sense isn't the uh the fragmentation of thought is not really necessarily a part of that activity is uh particularly if the point of non-being not being imposed particularly there's that sense of compassion and love in that action uh is that is well if there were such compassion and love then i would say it's not part of the system clearly but of course a lot of what is felt to be compassion and love is is actually part of the system because you know once again such experiences you know become part of repeated become produce experiences that are felt to be the same you see so see it's this deceptive feature that we have to watch out for but it's just in the question of what is not part of the system where the worst confusion takes place right because see if you would confuse part of the system that is not part of the system then you're you're lost so you have to be very careful about that right you say that there's no use just saying love will take care of everything you see people have said that for ages and it hasn't done it right the christian religion was based on the idea that god is love and they said we have one god who is pure love and so on and so on christ and nevertheless they fought each other not only fought other religions but they fought each other very violently over very violent religious wars lasting centuries and so on with the terrible things now and i'm sure that these people didn't intend to get into that you see but because of the way they were thinking about their religion they couldn't help it they had another intention the theological question took over for example from love or the question of the religion being connected with the monarch of power or this effect you see so it doesn't stop it to just say we're all based on love because nevertheless it still can be absorbed into the system right it can be an invention of the system it can be an invention of the system talking about love yes well and also yes well if you like to call an invention or see i i'll try to develop that a little later how to look at that right now as anybody out there did you have something well it's just that uh if my whole life all that i've ever known lies within the system then any notion of there being anything outside of that is only a notion of the system and i can't have any idea what that would mean yeah well yes we don't know what it means but we we have to entertain the idea see i think we have to be careful not to paint ourselves into a corner there you see that to say everything is in the system no way out of it i'm not saying that it's just that i might get the notion that i could visualize yeah something which was outside and that would be that would still be inside you see right and see that's why i say that becomes the most dangerous source of confusion because then you say that's outside that's all right so in that way thought produces something that says to be outside and it doesn't notice that that's one of the basic mistakes thought produces that and says i didn't produce it it's really there so when you're saying that in a way we should see the well no let me put a different loop so you're saying that we should see the difference between what is the system and what is not the system instead of using thought to establish a boundary there which probably would lead to a fragmentation if we could if we could see it but you see i don't know how we're going to say it is the question you say sensitivity i'm yeah i guess i'm just wondering i mean there have been a lot of times when people have have had insights into particular systems or you know become aware of something and made a major change like there was you know pre-science and then there was science or there's a lot of examples like that where people did have a change a radical change in a more limited sphere i'm wondering if looking at how they did it in that area would be useful or relevant to you know getting to the root of this whole system well you have something in mind well yeah like like that i guess like how they went from how did human beings manage to go from never having science to having science for example oh yeah yeah well that's an interesting point and that um you know how how was it possible for scientific knowledge to develop which was quite contrary to the previous culture and and see that's an interesting uh that required what i would like to call insight now the uh uh i can give you several examples you see uh and and and greek times in action and also in the up through the middle ages people believed it see the ancient greek idea was that the earth was at the center of the universe and there were seven crystal spheres of increasing perfection that heaven was that the seventh one was the perfect one and saying that celestial bodies should being perfect should move in perfect figures the only perfect figure is a circle so therefore they said they ought to be moving in circles right see so they they uh and then when they found they weren't they said well it's not actually a circle but we can make it up out of circles on top of circles called epicycles and uh save the appearances as they said and they but the basic idea was this order of increasing perfection and also the idea that each thing is striving to reach its right place it was a highly organic view of the universe right everything had its place and so on and the uh now uh but when people found that it wasn't working too well they tended to move to save it rather than to question it seriously right now uh well gradually evidence accumulated especially after the end of the middle ages that there wasn't a great difference of heavenly and earthly matter you see uh well for example uh [Music] the uh uh the the moon for example had a lot of irregular features on it it wasn't very perfect and other planets had satellites not only the earth and so on you see the you didn't see a lot of evidence that heavenly matter and earthly matter were all that different right but still there was the idea heavenly matter is basically different it's heavenly it's perfect it belongs up there it stays up there where it belongs and therefore nobody everybody was satisfied you see now but there was a gradually but there was enough evidence by the time of newton or even before to question that seriously but many people may have done so but not there's a sort of an unconscious level where it still works right saying why does the moon stay up in the sky it's only natural it's celestial matter it stays up where it belongs right you see nobody worries about why it isn't falling right so uh and the that explanation may have made sense in ancient times but there was enough evidence to question it but there's a whole habit in the mind not to question it let's take it for granted then you see the now the story is that whether it's true and i don't know that newton was watching the apple fall and he must have had the insight that see the question where it may have been in the mind why isn't the moon falling and he suddenly had the answer the moon is falling right that's the force of universal gravitation right that everything is falling toward everything and then he had to explain why it doesn't reach the ground which he was able to do later by some calculation showing it was also going outward because it was far away it was moving away in a fast orbit that kept it off the ground while it was still falling so he uh he had an insight he must have had an insight at that moment you see which broke that old mold of thought right saying why people would as if anybody ever asked why the moon isn't falling he would quickly he wouldn't even bother with the question because it was so natural that it belongs where it stays where it belongs but then um by breaking that thought and then from there on uh the key point of the insight was to break the old mode of thought right from there on it was not so difficult to go to the new one because you could say if the moon is falling then there is universal gravitation everything is falling and you can then go on from there [Music] so there are other cases of that kind you see but uh and this led to the more modern view but now this more modern view is just as rigidly fixed as the ancient view was you see it would take some sort of something to break that too right now the uh another to say that that is the absolute truth final no no more questions need to be asked and so on you see that the uh uh so uh uh there is an insight which is possible and we'll come back to this again which can break that old mode of thought we have to really look at that you know think about an area first think about it and see what we can see it and and that opens the way to something else now of course it only broke in some limited domain right it didn't break into the vast area that we've been talking about all these insights in science were ultimately assimilated within the system when you say we have to think about it isn't that the system doing the thing it may be or may not be i'm trying to say see i think we shouldn't have prejudged the issue i'm saying it may be possible in the flash for suddenly some real thinking to take place it must happen occasionally or else where would we be i mean we would never have got anywhere at all right if we use the kind of thought we use in nationalism to deal with practical problems all the time we would have been dead long ago it would be correct to say that the that newton's insight was um seeing the um seeing that the natural state of everything is not motionlessness but well that was even before that you see that there was already another insight which was that the natural state of thing is to be in motion you see that i didn't give the full story of it i sort of focused on one point of gravitation maybe how of what you were saying was very interesting in the fact that he was able to question the wrong question that he wasn't supposed to ask it was kind of a forbidden question to question what was religious this would not be thought to ask and then breaking the pattern of thinking well see that it often happens that when you ask what you call a wrong question is a question which already assumes the thing that ought to be questioned you see it's called begging the question now the uh he was at see i don't know whether he was asking people were generally asking the wrong questions because they were not aware of the importance of the question of why the moon isn't falling right so they might have asked if why is the moon going from here to there why is that this planet going in this particular set of epicycles and so on so that would have been the wrong wrong question because it would have assumed all these epicycles which are not really rather than in the actual situation so uh therefore you're led because you don't question that whole structure you're led to ask a lot of other questions that have no particular great meaning and they get you in deeper now see your questions contain assumptions that's the point right therefore when you question the question you're questioning some a deeper assumption right but that's done non-verbally do you see what i mean to question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act which you can't describe unless it happens it breaks all the pattern yeah somehow it breaks the pattern we want to go into that a lot let's see uh in other words that this pattern is not just something that you know we're stuck with it's inevitable absolutely inevitable there are signs that it could break right what do you mean when you say that it's non-verbal well i don't know you see if i say i have a question which may contain assumptions it should be questioned i could question them verbally but you see what would lead me to question my question eventually i can put in words but i'm saying the first step the first flash of insight is not verbal do you see what i mean well those perceptions were in the absence of thought and then thought became a product yeah that was affected by the perceptions right it took a new turn because of those perceptions if that insight isn't thought that then what is it oh i don't know you see it but we would really have to go into that carefully you see i say how would we answer that you say when you say i can ask a question i see if if we're answering it by thought then the thought can't answer it right they say so but on the other hand thought could still say something about it which might help help us toward the question right and i said we're not trying to say thought is always a culprit or always bad it can also sometimes in many cases be right not only technically but in other areas and but uh the uh we need it but you see i think that that kind of thought that would come in a thing like this you see there's a sudden feeling waking up a bit right [Music] on the inside is there an unlimited pool of insight that any one of us could be in touch with if there's a pause in thought well maybe you see i mean see how would i answer it again you see this is a matter of learning to question the question that is there an assumption there that i could tell you yes or no if i can't tell you then what are we going to do with the question he said don't answer it right away you see that mate newton took a long time before he even got to the question and he was quite bright can a conception take place that help us to see that how impatient we are meaning how how thought is uh likes to have too fast explaining answers well we can look at that too we want the answer right away and we want to make that help us to start being a little bit more careful to slow down but why do we want the answer right let me get away with another question is that right i don't know if that means we're not interested in the question if our real interest is to get on with another question then we're not going to do this one very well there is like the computer which speaks once right away to have information set conclusions informations and assumptions right away maybe it is the nature of the machinery the machinery nature of salt well that may be but then we have to ask you know why do we allow ourselves to be subjugated by this machinery could it be that it gives us security to get the answer very quickly and uh we feel oriented and it gives us sensational security well that may all be but you see you could have said the same about newton that if he had the he may have wanted the answer right away this question may have been disturbing you know to just to raise fundamental questions even in science can be very disturbing and somebody could feel i'd like to have the answer right away and get out of this unpleasant state of disturbance and he would never get anywhere it's generally an uncomfortable it's uncomfortable not to uh to know something yeah but then newton must have been in some state of not knowing other scientists i don't really pick on newton who must have been in some state of not knowing for some period or some state of even confusion and very unpleasant you know incoherence and some possibly unpleasant feelings right or maybe he had an intuition but that came but i think he worked on it quite a while i mean he must have gone through a long periods when it needn't have been always pleasant so to some extent we have to sustain the incoherence sustaining the way that not to get rid of it immediately you say it's a mistake to try to get rid of the incoherence before you actually get rid of it if you see what i mean i mean it only creates the system creates the appearance or the seaming of getting rid of it you know so you see if you're we we seem the system seems to want to relieve the pressure without actually getting to the root of thing well that's again the same problem in the same plot another way the same fault that we've been talking about that we don't stay with that's a pervasive fault in the system it 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 thing about the unpleasant feeling and the confusion that might be a learning thing that comes later because i've seen a child attempting to do some sort of puzzle say and without any sense of confusion or pain just interest again and again and again attempting until maybe finally they succeeded and so i wonder uh i'm thinking about does learning to come out of confusion well or does learning come out of a willingness to face something that doesn't have any immediate answer but it isn't necessarily unpleasant it's just sort of an advance that may well be but we have to consider the state of the system which has evolved with our civilization over thousands and thousands of years which is that we have a lot of bad experience connected with not having the answers and one way or another and therefore there's a reaction immediately you want the answer right away and there's a feeling of it's the memory of all the unpleasant experiences of not having the answer right those felt bob up many many child many children are are pushed to have the right solute have a solution yeah well they're rewarded with the right solution and that they face on a certain amount of unpleasantness if they don't have it and the educational system does that the whole economic system does that i see everything has grown the political system it has all grown up to do that right now that's by now part of the system so we have to say here we are in the system and what are we going to do with it so if we face them if there is unpleasantness it would be very fine to say we shouldn't have it that would be that would be very good but since we have it we have to say what are we going to do with it what will be our response can we get sensitive to that here yeah well let's see if we can it seems that it's not just a an intellectual thing even listening to our voices here you know mine and moving around there's a it is sona's tone and the way that we talk to each other which is a little kid picks that up and that's i know i know right well can we see can we face it is there any unpleasantness here facing the uncertainty or the unknown you see if there is you see it you'll notice there's a tremendous movement away from that's the system set up to move away from that right from awareness of that now you can see that if we by inference by just thinking about it clearly we can see that if we keep on doing that that makes no sense and the result must be real disaster right you see yet we find so we could say my intention is not to do it but you'll still have to still find yourself doing it so you have a sort of resistance coming from something else from the system for whatever we'll call it for the moment one part of the fault in the system that we do not understand what is the role of incoherence in the in learning and in the system that we either try to get it get it you know get out of it immediately or else we sustain it indefinitely because we don't seem to find the middle golden mean of the middleweight with incoherence in a way letting it unfold itself sufficiently for us to understand what's going on sometimes we do it i think we understand perfectly well how that works because everybody does it in areas where they're not too important to him we would need sensitivity to see with the meaning yeah but again the system is not sensitive you see it destroys it you see that the system interferes with it right now but then you're saying we do not actually see the incoherence of not you know responding to incoherence in the mind do we see it or don't we see it's a bit puzzling isn't it you see sometimes it seems we see it you see it in an elementary technical sense when you see incoherence and it's not worrying you're frightening you you actually do all that you said don't people do use incoherence they begin to look at it and do exactly what you said and you know saying you know if there's not too worried about it that's exactly what people do but uh when people find it something important to them then they can't seem to do it right something that um in what you're saying here we have to um it's like re-educate our system and to to there's not abuse of art words but to understand that when we're in this uh safe confusion or anxiety of not having an answer that there may be a possibility it would seem like we have to actually articulate that for the system before i might even attempt to experience that i don't quite get how are you doing well we have been educated to have an answer okay all my life you know as soon as a teacher asks a question or whatever if i have the answer i'm you know a good kid and then i hear for the first time whether it's here or so many years ago that actually if i don't have the answer i'm a good kid okay so so i am i'm enlarging the system i'm actually broadening it to include something new that i never even conceived would be a possibility it was just such a a small thing that i had learned that was so deep yeah well i'm just wondering in a way aren't we here doing two things in a sense we're actually um hearing that it's okay you know that it might be actually interesting to be confused see if i'm anxious it's going to be hard for me not to want to find an answer to something so i'm going to see this movement and not have that have any space and if i hear well maybe anxiety is okay that in itself may actually reduce the anxiety in some cases i think but i mean but when you're really anxious i'm not sure it would work you see you see that if you've got some situation that produced you know involving you your interest very deeply which was in danger you know that was real see if somebody well nowadays people may be anxious about losing their jobs for example and they could become very anxious about that now they could think well being anxious is all right but i'm not sure what helped them very much at that level you see i'm not i'm sorry i what i'm just suggesting is that if we um if we learn if we hear within this that not having the answer is is a is not only okay but it actually may have some some other implications then to find myself in a situation where i would normally be anxious because i don't have the answer there may be a willingness to to to drop trying to have the answer um yeah that might help but i think that it wouldn't be enough to solve it you see uh uh i don't know you see uh yeah i think what it could help relax it a bit and uh you see uh even there i would like to say one more point that it's not really that you have heard that this is all right but you must have seen that it's all right you see in other words it would be still part of the system if you really took my word that it's all right you see what i mean that but actually having heard it you saw that it was it made sense right yeah i think that yes i hear what you're saying you have to have a display is what you're saying but you have to see that it makes sense you see that it's coherent in other words that but that this would be the coherent way to function or operate to allow anxiety to be there if you're anxious you've got to say that's it i'm anxious that's part of the whole situation right but then you have to notice that the mind is conditioned or the system is conditioned to move away from that anyway and that's also part of what you have to be aware so i'm saying by saying all this we have begun to move and by seeing it and seeing that it makes sense it's coherent then a certain move has begun loosening up the system does that make sense yes yeah i think that's just what i was saying so it shows that this system is not a monolithic rock wall you see now that it it's it's actually really very not solid at all you see but it looks extremely solid you're asking whether we can learn to become more learning oriented individually and collectively rather than i know oriented well that's part of it and the other part is to say that when we're looking into the impulses and feelings and anxieties which push us away from that because instead of saying that's terrible i'm anxious i must quickly find some thought that relieves the anxiety saying that anxiety is perfectly normal in this it's to be expected in this situation it's an opportunity to learn it's an opportunity to learn yes now that's a reversal of most of our culture now so don't accept it therefore it can say but say if you see that it makes sense and it's coherent it doesn't prove it's right but say at least it suggests it's a good approach right before what you shun suddenly becomes valuable because he said it's an opportunity yeah i say krishna used to use words like that saying that envy or sorrow is a jewel so you would say how can they say such things they're terrible things you say but the the point is that if you look at it differently you can see that this is just what you've got to learn what's going on there you see what it means in other words that all these things are now the fact that you have all this going on which you don't really want is a sign that is incoherence [Music] are we saying that we call to us what we need to learn what are we saying in a way that we call to us what we need to learn i don't quite get it no well i don't know how else to put it what was the words well do we attract how do we need to learn well i think rather we acknowledge that things that seem the things that we ought to get rid of are actually the clue to what we need to learn you see that our whole culture and our whole instinct has told us these are things we've got to get rid of as quick as we can but now i've suggested reasons why maybe they are the things we they're the the the source the clue for learning by from there we can begin to learn and since we don't look at them that's why we never do learn right that's one reason anyway i said at least that alone would explain there are probably a lot of other reasons but the uh so so that's a point then that it's part of the system see our whole culture is part of the system to say that that's what we should do in addition there's some instinctive tendency in that direction anyway you know to get rid of whatever is painful which makes sense in certain areas say such as a toothache or something to do you know deal with the tooth you save it to stop the pain but even there it could be wrong if your only intention was to get rid of the pain you might just use use various drugs to relieve the pain until the tooth rots right you see see the pain is an indicator of something wrong it should be looked at in that way something which is not coherent right is going on that's interesting because psychological pain is an indication of something wrong but usually we try to think what the wrongness is whereas the wrongness is the actual incoherent the disturbance which is the signal of the incoherence maybe that makes sense yeah yeah yes the the point is this it's very hard to get this straight but we'll have to finish up in a short time now the the pain is in some way a sign that a result of a certain kind of incoherence maybe biological pain also very often is because you have in the tooth some process a bacterial process going on attacking the cells which is not coherent with their operation and pain is a warning of that right now the uh so pain i think in general could be looked at that way that pain and there are people who cannot feel pain and they really hurt themselves all the time you know their pain nerves are damaged so uh and in fact epilepsy seems to be that that the pain those nerves it's an attack on the nerves which prevents you from realizing and from feeling pain so that these people destroy their muscles by using too much force it's going to observe it watch it carefully that the destruction of epilepsy comes from people using too much force and everything they do not i mean leprosy i'm sorry leprosy uh select leprosy's people the pain nerves are somewhat damaged by the disease right they cannot tell how much force they are using and they have observed they're using fantastic amounts of force which destroy the whole system so therefore you can see that pain has a necessary function and the instinctive wish to get rid of the pain which works in the animal level is not working here with thought and that instinct is not good enough you see you've got to something much more deep and subtle is needed thing could also be thought well that can be painful right the thought of what an idiotic thing you've done or you see what a fool you've made of yourself could be very painful right although in some other cases it could be more like perception something not so much coming from yes but but even so that pain is something to be perceived even if it comes from thought there is a perception needed obviously to learn the pain doesn't come from thought i'm just playing with it the pain is something i generate in me in response to the thought well but it's part of the generalized thought in the sense i'm using the word right of the whole bodily response but see if i didn't understand that i would try to solve the problem of the pain which i am generating through my thinking whereas i am in a sense deliberately painting myself in response to unbeknownst to myself yeah you're hurting yourself is a simple way to put it that are you saying that's really uh you know so once once the thought is there doesn't it once that image is there isn't the response often immediately i mean it's not that we're doing it to ourselves so much is that the thought itself seems to bring physical pain doesn't it yeah that's part of this generalized pro i'm trying to say thought is never this thought it's also the bodily state the feeling they see those nerves just whatever is going on in the intellectual part just connects with everything else right it flows out so fast that you can't keep it in one place so that a thought of a certain kind will produce either pleasure or pain you said that it doesn't erase the memory of it isn't it an immediate thing though with that i mean it's directly wired into the the nervous system well i don't know how fast it is you see it could take a second or two before you feel the pain right you may it takes a second or two for the impulse to get down to the solar plexus where you might feel the pain you see and you're saying you know my heart is broken or something like well this is interesting and because i think the question that was brought up that maybe it isn't the thought then but we are doing something if there is a if there's elapsed time there that's what i'm wondering about it but we're not doing anything so we'll discuss that it's all i'm trying to get across a different picture which is it's one process unbroken right and we're not doing anything okay that's what i'm asking yeah it's going on by itself but the thought is saying you're we're doing it right right no that's no the thought is that it is being done to me that you said something and therefore i am hurt am i actually physically hurt yeah well all right that's double the thought is that the thinking is being done by me and the pain is being done by you right whereas the pain is being done by me well by the same thought that does it all in the first place this is because the emotion mediates the process that is so fast but the emotion is very fast that's true yeah the thing is always mediated by emotions yeah but it might take a second or two before it you know the emotional center is hit very quickly but then there's another center down in the solar plexus that takes longer but anyway i think we should not continue this uh you know i'm sure that people are very seem very interested but uh the uh it's quarter to ten which is a bit later than we usually go and we start remember tomorrow morning at 10 the place is open 9 30 right and if during the night you go over this and think or feel some of it maybe we could discuss it tomorrow right so if we could start tomorrow by discussing whatever you may learn you

Channel: David Bohm Society

Views: 2,558

Rating: 4.9679999 out of 5

Keywords: David Bohm, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosophy, Cognition, Metacognition, Thought, Knowledge, Science

Id: rsDrbY56wus

Length: 99min 44sec (5984 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021