Understanding Thought: II of III

yes well i discussed the number of points yesterday i mean i understand there's some people here who weren't here last night and uh we discussed as usual that the state of the world which was very depressing and then after that we discussed the notion that thought all these problems which we see have their sources thought that is a their symptoms of something deeper which is the whole process thought not really being intellectual but it's one process connected feeling the body and also really it passes between people and so on it's all one process all over the world and uh it said okay i call that a system you see a whole system where every part was dependent on every other part and there was a a kind of uh systemic flaw their fault which is pervasive so that uh once and we see something wrong with the part of the system we bring another part to bear to try to correct it but it will just add some more of us a very similar trouble and that but we find that these troubles throughout the world have been going on for thousands of years and that's not possible that way to correct them but they may get worse rather than better than that by doing it that way now that was the sort of thing we're discussing and then finally we said when you try to look at what's going on inside you when all this is going on you may get unpleasant feelings you know pain or this or that fear and the instinct as well as the whole culture leads you to move away from it but it was saying it was necessary somehow to stay with it right that was really what we were discussing at the end in spite of the difficulty of doing so that it's really worth doing it because we may learn something that way about how it all goes now the uh i think that was the sort of the things we discussed yesterday now and we thought i thought we'd begin you know people might have a few points they would raise for a little while about yesterday's discussion and then go on i would like to share something that i am questioning of how my brain works during your conversation yesterday uh farmers of nodding in i'm assuming understanding what you were relating to me then i would lose you there would be spaces of not understanding then i said i found myself naughty and when the evening was over there were spaces of confusion when i went home and i tried to sleep i couldn't sleep like my mind wasn't in order for me to sleep i felt it in my body and finally i gave up and i got up and i took a pad and a pencil and i started writing questions about 10 15 questions and then after that it was like a felt butter i took couple deep breaths and i was falling asleep and i said to myself now why did my brain what needed that order even in questioning and could i have done the same thing by doing sit-ups by doing sit-ups with the questioning why did my brain needed that order in question or whatever it came to that i didn't decide to question it just came well somebody what do you i'm still think at it and and i'm going to read over the questions and see if there's more questions than you come out of those questions it's possible you know that the whole discussion leaves questions you know point and the mind wants to brings them up right yeah but uh you know if they were puzzled by something then it won't let you go right but it's understanding part of a dialogue or is understanding conditioning from my perception well you could understand that anytime you see but will my understanding be different from other people that were shaking their heads at that point well i don't know you see i i think that these questions you'll find are not going to lead very far you see that the uh the major point is whether you are looking into what's going on and and perceiving the incoherence and perceiving you know and seeing what it means you see it for yourself right now if you talk it over with somebody else then you can find out whether you can perhaps share this or find out why you don't agree and maybe eventually we'll discuss dialogue later how that's all to take place right it seemed to me that what she's saying might suggest that this is much more of a psychosomatic process than we tend to realize we tend to think of it as a mental mental process where her report seems to say that there's much more involved than that and that maybe uh we have to keep an awareness for that other aspect of it yes well is that would you say that's right that it's a psychosomatic process that disturbed you see that the thoughts that's what we're saying yesterday that's one system of thoughts the body the emotions and also other people are all part of one system and when you disturb when you raise questions intellectually they may affect everything you say or vice versa all of that affects the intellect so you have to see it as one system as the the crucial point because you'll never be able to deal with it if it is one system you deal with all the parts i was trying to fit the concept of addiction into what you were saying i mentioned it to you last night after we finished and when i think of addiction it ranges all the way from you know physical addictions to say drugs and alcohol to various kinds of thought addiction there's positive and there's negative a negative might be racism a positive would be this whole wrath of books on um like norman vincent peale's you know the power of positive thinking there's a whole legion of thousands of books been written in this area is this the incoherence you're speaking about is can it be manipulated in positive ways is it just a manipulation of this thought process yeah collaboration of it yes that's still incoherent if you engage in positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts but the negative thoughts are still there working right therefore that's incoherent right you see that it's not enough to i want to just engage in positive thoughts when you have negative thoughts registered which keep on working and they'll cause trouble somewhere else now i'll just say a few words about addiction now you see one point is to say that when you take a substance like morphine well it's supposed to cover up certain pain receptors the receptors of pain nerves right so you don't feel pain now the body has natural substances similar called endorphins and which do the same perhaps even better and in fact when you're people say that sometimes soldiers in battle are badly wounded feel no pain and only they have a lot of endorphins only later do they feel pain so that has a useful function you see but at the same time it's possible for thoughts reassuring thoughts to or pleasant thoughts to also produce endorphins right and then you could become addicted to those thoughts in a certain sense saying i won't give them up even if they're wrong you know i'll believe them to be true and i can't bear the thought that it's not so because that will remove the endorphins and then that pain will start coming so therefore you can say addiction there's a kind of addiction in the thought process which is possible right in fact it's one of the things that holds this but we'll have to go into that later that the thought process is physical and chemical neurological or physiological as well as intellectual and emotional right so that in fact when you uh when people do various scans of the brain see every time you think the blood distribution shifts all over the place and uh all sorts of changes occur inside they're like the brain waves electrical waves and uh so therefore thought at the very least has a a certain basis in that that neurophysiological process right and it can never be separated from it now that's something we have to keep in mind so the brain that's process is part of the system we're talking about if you put drugs into the into your body you've altered the system if one can mutate the conditioning of thought is there a space where a new thought comes in that's not conditioning then we can have a dialogue well there may be a space we'll discuss that presently you see uh the uh we can have a dialogue you see i'm trying to say we can start our dialogue we'll we're going to discuss that later but we could start the dialogue without considering that question you see and then discover whether there is that space see uh my one point i wanted to emphasize last night was that we don't want to regard this system as an absolutely fixed monolithic thing that was never break into forever but it's actually not all that solid and therefore it has chinks and things and so on and it lets some things through therefore there is an opportunity to do something right you can't control it but opportunities come up what are the effects of the process of the process of the positive thinking to our health because isn't it the kind of schizophrenic duality between the facts and between the illusion of the positive thinking it's a conflict between yeah well there's a conflict between you only see if you if somebody wants to engage in positive thinking it's only because he's already caught up in negative thinking right he wants to overcome it with positive thinking so it will be the best he can hope for is to fill his mind with positive thoughts so the negative thoughts sort of go into obeying right right and don't bother him so much but they got to the benchmen and they stayed there yeah well they're there they're waiting and when when the person somehow feels weak or frightened or something happens and then up they come right you see that he hasn't dealt with those negative thoughts which are registered down there wherever they are and uh therefore at the very least at the very best it's not a real solution at the worst it could bring in various endorphins and so on and make you addicted to false thoughts and and so on so it is not a solution you see no uh the uh that you have to get deeper than that you see if people say cheer up and so on you only say cheer up to somebody who was already depressed right so uh the uh so uh therefore uh if he's depressed for some trivial reason all right but if he's some other reason won't go away then he may cheer up for a while but it'll come back so the uh right just to paraphrase what you're saying you're saying that we have a psychology in which our well-being is based on having affirming images and that that psychology could never stand up as a real base for for well-being because sooner or later we're going to get negative images yeah yeah so as long as we take these images seriously if we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones easily as long as we accept images as realities we're in that trap right because you can't control that image you see you're maybe getting some nice positive images from the people around you and then along comes somebody who gives you a very negative image and then the very channels which enable you to feel good because of the positive image enable you to feel bad because of the negative image right it seems that what you're implying is that in order to be able to really be attentive what is going on with thought we should people would have to do in-depth psychological work with the shadow side of the personality or the hungry dogs in the basement are killed it's psychology called guilt that is always buried underneath and we're seeing it in other people well we have to be let anything come up which is going to come up you see and the point is that i'll come to that that we have a mechanism for preventing it from coming up the brain is already conditioned to keep it down we have to try and understand that process [Music] and that's culturally reinforced yes it's always being reinforced and so let's say that things which are relevant would come up in consciousness but there's a whole mechanism to keep them down right even some areas that are very good for example some people don't accept anything nice being said to them because they don't see themselves well they always see good outside and other people and it's also being repressed in the basement yeah well it's all the same whether you say you're wonderful or guilty you know it's just one image instead of another you see the fundamental process is not different whether you say i'm the greatest and the best or you say i'm the worst i'm guilty of everything right it's the same process and the difference is rather secondary although because even if you say you're the best i mean somebody's going to come along to question that and so on and people often for all sorts of complicated reasons in their past they find it easier to accept guilt right questioning the process of either it's getting underneath that whole process and seeing that any image that we have is not based on reality so it's not a question of whether i should believe in the negative or it's it's understanding the whole thing that's right it's one system the positive and the negative they say this system the positive and the negative are two sides of the system right so anything positive is inevitably negative implicitly negative right and vice versa that the see let's try to look at that that there was once an article i saw about the pain pleasure centers in the brain say in the middle of the brain somewhere there are this pleasure pain centers you know and animals that they have access to them and by touching a pleasure center it showed a picture of a cat very pleased was touched by either electrically or chemically and then by touching a little stronger the cat looked very frightened and by touching it a little stronger still it looked enraged but somewhat pleased at the same time it wasn't rage was pleasure you see and the so uh the the point is that uh that and what they said was that every time you stir up pleasure then all the pain centers around also come in to partially comp compensate it's a very complex feeling and every time you stir up pain the pleasure centers come in so there's always a mixture of it too now suppose now that you stub your toe and you feel pain but meanwhile the pleasure centers are set to work to overcome that and when that pain goes away then you'll feel pleasure and it's left over is that clear because the pain has died away the pain centers are quiet for the moment and then the pleasure centers take a little longer because they were stirred up a little later right so you get one turns into the other now fear and security sends the sense of fear in the sense of security will turn into each other and but then that gets more complex because you also introduce words about it and saying this is pleasure that is pain and we have introduced the way of saying it it's either pleasurable or painful say if it's not pleasurable then it's implied that it may be painful or if you if if you're losing the pleasure you've had it before then it's implied that there's a loss there's pain and on the other hand the ending if you think the pain is over then you're pleased by it see so there's always one always indirectly implies the opposite right [Music] so therefore you can't separate the two neither at the level of chemistry nor at the level of the intellect or anywhere else and the uh and therefore the thing is just to say that's the way it is you see that the attempt to have pleasure always must fail because the pleasure the pleasure centers will get worn out and the pain centers having been stimulated to balance them will now start to come in strongly so the uh uh that is there is no way to get pleasure constantly and if you if you were to try to do it i think you would discover it became painful you see so the uh it's always a transitory phenomenon uh now uh the uh uh and we'll discuss all that later that for the animal the pleasure pain reaction is really generally appropriate but you can already see that for thought it's not because if you can get pleasure or pain from thought then the right that that thought which should be true and correct that's the criterion for is no longer working right the criterion is does it give pleasure or pain right therefore that thought becomes destructive so if if if thought can be determined by pleasure or pain that is already in the beginning of a lot of trouble right and so we we get conditioned to that see now we'll come back to all that a bit later but uh and are there any more points i said apparently one more and then perhaps we'll go and try to go on the um engulfing feeling seems to be the best that we can do without transforming into another state of being so we seem to prefer to be in that and spend our lives multiple ways yeah well anything that would give endorphins would be the equivalent to taking morphine or be even better and would therefore feel good for the time being right but you can't maintain the endorphins forever and it's bound to change you see so i think there are other chemicals which can cause anxiety for example and there are still others that cause something else in something and you know they all go on to the receptors in a way you can't control so uh therefore that that process is not going to really work you'll find out if you look at it it's not coherent right we attempt to control the endorphins i think we find that out i find that out but then that other state beyond doesn't seem to arrive yeah well i suppose yeah but you see the other state is projected by the system you see suppose we begin by saying that if we start that way we have already gone into the system because that pleasure which the other state projects is the same pleasure as the endorphins right you say that therefore we have to say that the only right way to do it would be to say we want to see what is what is correct what is true you know what is coherent you seeking know well well no but i'm saying that even if you get pleasure from it fine except it may get distorted you see but i'm saying the key question is are we going to that this process is not coherent none of it has any meaning whether you have pleasure or pain or fear or whatever right is that if the when the process has sustained incoherence then it all has no meaning you see somebody could get great pleasure by deluding himself in the extreme case being i'm god or i'm napoleon right and if he deludes himself sufficiently perhaps he could keep out all evidence to the contrary and therefore he could get pleasure when he would probably get bored with it after a while [Music] you see you can't maintain it forever so i think that the attempt to live by pleasure is not for endorphins is not able to work now that's the first thing to notice uh it's not coherent then what do we do you see i think we have to understand this process better that's what it means that we are caught up in a process in a in a system that isn't making sense would you say that being um aware of the right word but being aware of the system has already um bypassed that chemistry it's not getting hooked up into the chemistry of the endorphins well it to some extent but probably you would find it as you would get hooked up anyway later because something will happen that sort of comes in with uh too fast or too powerfully well yeah i didn't mean forever yeah i just met at the moment as you are watching this process unfolding so to speak that the the the need to stay with the endorphins or the or the fear of the pain all that maybe you may have sort of worked on out the back door you may have begun to move in another level let's put it that way man but that's a possibility we say we should say maybe there's another level that's awakening you know which is not controlled that way by the system here it seems we start this inquiry of the notion that i am inquiring and i being my endorphins and all of that and that right there might be a tremendous assumption what yes well we have to say we have all that and i am all that stuff in the system but at the same time maybe i have potential for more right that's all you can say and i say we're exploring do we have the potential for more than that not yeah assuming it seemed to come to me and maybe it's not useful at this point is that the inquiry what inquires might have nothing to do with endorphins oh yeah that sounds that's why that may be the potential beyond the system if it's true inquiry then perhaps it's beyond the system i mean but don't assume it because then it will be part of the system and every assumption goes into the system yeah so uh the uh well uh i think uh you know i would like to make another step you know that the uh let's see there's another way we can look at this and the uh which is to look at thought to say a thought is a set of reflexes which gives some insight right now what is a reflex it's a reflex means to to bend back you see turn backward same as reflecting uh the um you have a knee jerk reflex if you hit your bone here at an evil jerk you see it what happens is the nerves carrying the signal up somewhere they meet a crossover preps in the spine and go out as an outgoing signal to make your knee jerk right now that one of the most elementary reflexes now uh the we have a lot of reflexes and these can be conditioned you see uh for example pavlov had this that the dog a dog has a reflex seeing food that salivates right so reflex always has that form a certain thing happens and as a result something else happens you know just so right automatically no then he rang a bell many times and after a while the dog would salivate without seeing food but just hearing the bell right so you can say perhaps the bell reminds them of the food and then they salivate or perhaps eventually it went through it skipped that stage and the bell just made it a saliva so that the reflex was conditioned right by the bell right in other words it was subject to another condition and the uh now that is the basic form of conditioning to repeat something quite often and it leaves somehow a mark in this system and the nerves and then a reflex has been altered huh so uh the you can see conditioning of reflexes all the time in fact a great deal of our learning consists in establishing conditioned reflexes i mean for routine learning say for example to learn to drive a car you're trying to condition your reflexes so that they will be appropriate right so when you learn to write the same way you don't want to have to think all the time of how you're going to write and walk or you know do various things so certain reflexes are established and conditioned now the um uh the uh you know the wreath now i'm going to say that a thought we've already said that having a thought deregisters in memory and i think it it registers in the form of a reflex you see memories often take that form that namely you see something and it reminds you of something right that is a kind of reflexes or it makes you do something or it makes you see something in a certain way you see or somebody says something and you feel a certain feeling see the the conditioned reflexes can affect the feelings it could affect your adrenaline saying a certain thing makes you frighten it could affect your thoughts saying this thought leads to that one and that leads to that you get a chain of thought right so you could say thoughts elementary thoughts may take the form of a series of reflexes and see for example if somebody asks your name you have an immediate answer right it's a reflexer now a more difficult question see there's a way the mind has searches in the memory for an answer it's there's a searching reflexes set up which then finds an answer which may sort of seem to fit or something and it comes out and you can see whether it does spit or not and uh the um so i'm proposing now that therefore this whole system works by a set of reflexes and these reflexes are potential thought is a very subtle set of reflexes potentially unlimited right we can add more and more you can modify your reflexes you see suppose if you say uh all people of this kind are so you know all you might say uh like the logicians say all swans are white but then you modify by saying oh i've seen some swans may not be white and so on another one and they even the whole logical process once it's committed to memory becomes a set of reflexes right you think logically by a set of reflexes so there may be a perception of reason beyond the reflexes but anything perceived becomes sooner or later a set of reflexes and that's what we call i want to call thought which includes the emotion the bodily state and the physical reaction and everything else so i say that there's it's useful to look at this as a system of reflexes because a reflex just works right we've seen it work with the knee-jerk now we don't usually think that thought is like the knee-jerk reflex we think that we have we are controlling thought and producing thought right see that's part of our whole background is that clear now i'm suggesting that is not generally so women you know the vast part of our thought just comes out like that right you only find out what it is after it comes out uh so uh now that that really overturns a great deal of the way we look at the mind right and the personality our whole cultural background in most cultures so [Applause] it's worth pondering that then that thought that this whole system works as a system of reflexes and the question is can you become aware of the reflex character of it that it is a reflex i think it's fair to characterize it in that kind of singular reflexes as distinct from um an emerging constellation well that's what i meant a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified added changed and we could say that as long as it's free to change then intelligence there must be some kind of intelligence which would be able to see whether it's coherent or not something a bit beyond the reflex but the uh but then when it gets conditioned too strongly then it may resist that perception it may not allow it see so is that clear what i mean that now uh the thing is then that uh these reflexes serve us if they're not too rigid because then if they don't work if they're incoherent we can drop them or they may drop themselves but on the other hand when the reflex gets very strong and rigid it won't be dropped now i think there's a neurophysiological chemical reason for that that see every thought involves some change in the chemistry of the system right a strong thought with a lot of emotion and so on involves a bigger change or a constant repetition and builds up the change or both together make a very powerful effect and now see people have said that there are synapses the nerves don't quite touch there are synapses which connect them and experience and perception and so on and thought establishes sign up connections and they the more you repeat that pattern you may assume i suppose that they're getting stronger you see more and more and after a while they get very strong right very hard to shake so you could say that something happens in the chemistry and the physics or the neurophysiological process so that this is not purely an intellectual problem or an emotional problem or even a physical problem i got surprised huh all of a sudden i was aware that it had a lot of attention yeah more than i wanted yeah so the the reflexes uh get conditioned very strongly you see and they're very hard to change you see that and they uh they interfere say a reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern further in other words produce a defensive reflex now not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so so well built up but also there's a defensive reflex which defends this against evidence that might weaken it see so it all happens one reflex after another after another it's just a vast structural system of reflexes they go they form a structure as they get more rigid [Music] just the learning of evolution though isn't this also how our bodies have evolved it may it may be but now the question is are those reflexes coherent right i mean according to the theory of evolution incoherent systems don't last very long you see it's called natural selection [Music] but we seem to in thought we seem to be able to keep up with quite a while with these incoherent systems of reflexes you see see it's not that the people sometimes the people who have them all live and they make but in our society we have arranged conditions where we can go on with a lot of incoherence without actually leading to a selection process so [Music] therefore the point is now that reflexes can become incoherent and get stuck right by all these mechanisms if you had to use another word for incoherence what would it be inconsistent well that you know [Music] conflicting you see these are all uh enco what is incoherent may show up as contradiction as inconsistency of this conflict right as stress and right inappropriate inappropriate yes but if it's sustained you know what i mean is that there is sustained incoherence right that you have it just keeps on going in spite of the fact that there's evidence that would show it's incoherent right now we could say that intelligent response would be seeing incoherence to stop it suspend it and look begin to look for the reason for the incoherence and change it but i say there's a defense of incoherence a typical case is that if it gets attached to the endorphins an incoherent train of thought attached to the endorphins will defend itself right because it will feel very uncomfortable when that's questioned you start to remove the endorphins between incoherence and cancer well cancer is an incoherent growth it's incoherent with the whole system the body and it grows by on its own you see so for some reason it's not accepting whatever system the body has to keep the thing in order the cancer is not accepting it it defends it itself against it and in fact even mobilizes the body to support it you see is i read somewhere that certain kinds of cancers can sort of send out chemicals to the body which cause the body to grow blood vessels to feed the cancer which is a highly incoherent process from the point of view of the body without you any form of disease these ease would be the same thing yeah kind of incoherence yeah it would say it's incoherence with the whole organism or whatever can we say that stress would be a crystallization of this system well stress would be a lot of conflict resulting from this incoherence which begins to you can see it affects the chemistry not only in the brain but all over the body and the and producing further changes which keep on accumulating uh can we use the word reaction with reflections or is this implicit only logical the reaction is psychology well but i think that it is it's i want to emphasize that it's not just psychological i think every reaction is also neurophysiological that that's why i prefer to call it a reflex that no matter how every reaction of thought is always simultaneously the emotional neurophysiological and chemical and everything else that it's all one system everything and in some cases it may not be important but another there's always a slight effect at the very least and in many cases when there's a powerful conditioning then the effect is very great i mean when you just have a thought this is on the table it's a rather minor effect but some physical effect is going on just to say that could we say that anything we do or think that is out of harmony with the whole with the incoherence yes well then it depends on what we mean by the whole obviously uh but uh incoherence arises they say the sign of incoherence it's hard to give a positive definition but the sign of incoherence and the basic sign is you're getting something which you don't intend right and don't want and the other signs are contradiction conflict stress you know all those things confusion yeah and also our action to force getting out of the competition what and also would be the the action that is forced to apply to get out of the future yeah well we may have an inappropriate action like i said within that system the action to get out is part of the trouble right [Applause] when he said uh the whole first of all we couldn't know what the whole meant yeah that it would almost seem like incoherence could only be take place in less than the hole well some part is not coherent with the rest yeah we've established limits and we say for example our craziness as human beings might be part of the greater coherence of eliminating the species because it's so dire yeah if you take a great enough hole then it's coherent that is right i mean the universe as a whole is coherent and anything incoherent we do is just part of the coherence of the universe when you look at it that way right because if we do something crazy we will get a result we don't want so we might at our level of coherence attempt to come to or in our level of incoherence out of that we might try to become coherent and that might be part of the incoherence i see it you could say in the universe as a whole is there's no reason to say there's incoherence right but if if we in our particular structure are not coherent let's take the case of a species that is not coherent either in itself or with its environment it doesn't survive that's part of the coherence of the universe it's just because the universe is coherent that an incoherent species doesn't survive it may also be part of our coherence that we're questioning our coherence too though right yeah it could be the universal coherence that is stepping in and saying wait a minute this isn't working yeah it could be that's part of it too so the question is you know then which is going to uh prevail you see this questioning or the old conditioning habits of right is each new human being pretty much predestined to have this incoherence could we say well i think it's built into the nature of thought that this is a possibility and by now we have built up a society and a culture which implants it in everybody even if it were not there but also that possibility was there the minute you had creatures who could think is that much right that it wouldn't go coherently you see because thought thought is reflex right now i've outlined you that the possibility of conditioning the reflex by repetition by powerful emotions in other ways by defensive methods and then it could get stuck and then there would come a time when that reflex was no longer appropriate it wouldn't be able to change you see therefore that would produce incoherence if something changes in the reflex doesn't you've got incoherence what was your called death in relation to life well you see uh from the point of view of the species that death is part of this whole process you see that that you could say that species have evolved in such a way they last a certain time you see that the uh perhaps you know that a certain kind of species would be better able to survive if the it didn't last too long you know other kinds could last longer i don't you know it all ends in death [Music] but still well you don't it depends what you mean by all eventually in terms of time yeah but you see all i see the universe doesn't end in death it may this present universe may itself change but perhaps there's something beyond that right so it's a question any particular thing will end in death i think he's changing right yes uh i mean the question of death is a very long and subtle one i might get to it later but i mean just for the moment every you know no matter what if you look at any material structure it's always changing and it cannot last forever right so but we have a certain attitude to death which we have to ask whether it's coherent or not you can't ask whether that is coherent it's a limited attitude yeah yeah it's no point asking whether death is coherent or not a death just as a fact right but the um our attitude may not be coherent maybe that's why it disturbs us so much what is the criteria for coherence uh test work there's no unique criterion but you have to be sensitive to incoherence but the test spring coherence is you're getting results you don't want you know we have two things which are opposing each other that's right yeah that's right you can see that as contradiction and then conflict as confusion and coherence is sensitive harmony order beauty you know goodness whatever no why it's no flaw but it sensed us what is good right true harmonious orderly beautiful all that everybody wants right now is the incoherence in the dna and we are born with that well and not not this particular incoherence and thought that the possibility that of our thinking is somehow in the dna and the possibility is implicit in there that that could go wrong right given a set of circumstances which will condition it to go wrong now somehow in the history of the human race that has happened we don't know whether it was inevitable but it certainly we can see that it looks likely considering the nature of our brain that this sort of thing could happen like that's fine that is god and probably exactly that well it's also the society you see you can't tell where the incoherence is in the system as a whole which not only produced hitler you know not only his genes but also he grew up in the austrian society at the time which had some very nasty features and very incoherent features you see for example hitler was beaten merciful mercilessly by his father and he ran away when he when when he was young and he was beaten when he came back then again it was thought many people say that hitler would thought he had a jewish grandfather or something and this disturbed him because he hated the jews so much and all of this must have muddled him up very badly you see and so you can say there are all sorts of factors which added in maybe if they hadn't been there he would have been different who knows right yeah but that particular genetic structure born into that particular crazy society produced hitler's so and perhaps somewhere else it would have produced something else maybe he would have been a great genius in some other situation because he had some kind of ability anyway you say you need the form of violence that we perceive any kind of violence or disturbance violence is incoherence in a way it's because that what we mean by violence violence means the undue use of force you see in the dictionary and that's a kind of incoherence if you're using force where force is not called for that's incoherent see for example if the problem arises in thought and you use force that is uncalled for therefore the attempt by violence to deal with social problems is incoherent because they all arise in thought and violence will never solve a problem in thought you think our cosmology is coherent probably not you see not not no thought is fully coherent the point is we are going the nature of thought is such that it's partial i'm going to discuss that later right but it can when we discover it in coherence our attitude can be to move toward coherence or to defend the incoherence right now the the kind of incoherence i'm talking about is the defense of the first kind of incoherence right so that if you find some incoherence suppose you get used to a certain reassurances of security and they give you endorphins and then if somebody evidence comes up that you're not so secure you may reject it that's the kind of incoherence i'm talking about that it won't look at the end at the evidence which is evidence of incoherence right you see what i mean that there's a defense against evidence of incoherence and that is the kind i'm talking about because you will never get rid of all incoherence and thought right do you see what i mean is because it interrupts a cosmology or a belief system that we've all been imprinted with yeah but that's been connected to the endorphins no that but that alone wouldn't do it it's much more complex it has been connected to the endorphins and when we question that we start removing a lot of endorphins from all the brain cells and suddenly the brain cells are jangling terribly saying quick do something to stop this and the thing to do is to reject that well you can you can look at it but i'm saying that it's part of it but i'm saying it's not the whole of it you cannot separate one part of the system from the other you see if we if we had brains working properly we could look at inheritance in cosmology and say yes how interesting a good chance to find a new cosmology right but on the other hand if if we get a lot of comfort out of our cosmology the brain cells will suddenly jangle and erupt and they won't give you a chance to look at it [Music] you said once that enemy is an integral part of the human brain what envy how can we then we discover this i think that in the fireplace talking broken lecture about that since if this is an integral part of the brain then we are stuck no well we can the potential for producing envy is an integral part of the brain right but not it is not necessary that it be actualized you say all the time right that if we can begin to see the process which is making envy then then the envy can come to an end you have to recognize first that you have endless yeah well that's necessary yes yes yeah and then to begin to look into envy is the same sort of thing it's a comparison with somebody and saying he's got something that i need make her want and then it makes you feel uncomfortable perhaps that perhaps it removes just for the sake of argument it removes a lot of endorphins from a lot of cells and then you get a very great discomfort and say the way to get it back is to you know to uh do better than that you see that you feel more comfortable i wonder then what what about people who seem to uh glory and delight in misery that and is that producing some kind of endorphins well they're probably getting some kind of pleasure out of it you see uh i mean it's a very twisted kind of thought that gives pleasure from the misery i mean like you know there are all sorts of ways to do that i'm saying you know that i'll show towards avoiding worse yeah maybe avoiding something worse yeah you're differentiating and now between feeling bad and feeling good you're saying they're not the same that one's twisted well no i'm saying that you can't feel good for twisted reasons or feel bad you see is there a difference though well if the reasons are twisted there's no difference right but if if you feel good genuinely then that's the next thing you know you may feel bad because you're not well you know and so on you see our uh but uh uh i think that see that the question of making good or bad feeling the key to your thought process is as part of the incoherence that the the question is about what about the question of coherence and truth doesn't that take precedence now with this coherence we're not saying coherence is good and incoherence is bad we're just saying that is what they are according to their own yeah things and that's all yeah but it said we're saying there's a second order in coherence which avoids facing the first order right now which avoids facing evidence of incoherence and we're saying well as a matter of fact that will produce all sorts of consequences which we could say are destructive now if you don't mind destructive consequences okay go ahead right the only reason i bring this up is we might get the notion in our thinking that incoherence is bad and it shouldn't be whereas it's only saying that it's a conflict one side opposing the other and apparently it wants to resolve itself but no good or bad we're not in a position to say good or bad well morals have no place at this stage you say i mean we're just trying to get a clear perception of it and saying but you will discover that in fact you don't want to be constantly getting results that you don't want you see in the at some stage you will discover that incoherence is producing all sorts of things you don't want and perhaps you would like to get rid of it right we say at least get rid of that second order triangle a good clue to look at this incoherence that is covering up would be to see any form of violence like any time a person is defending himself or or feeling uh wanting to change something because it's frustrating or that would be a clue that there's any coherence right there yeah that's right there are all sorts of clues you have to become sensitive to those clues and the thing to notice is that your incoherent actions are reflexes you're not doing them on purpose you don't know that you're doing them the same your knee jerks whether you like it or not right when it's when you hit it so similarly when something touches that conditioning of those reflex conditioning it just jerks it does it produces the result which you don't want so consciously you're trying to get a but the reflex just jerks and gives you b and you say i don't want b you don't know where it's coming from so you fight be well to keep on with the reflex that produces it you see that where the problem is are we talking about the possibility of an interval in either in the interval for example if the physician is about to hit my knee i could stop him i don't know if there's any value in what i'm about to say and as you're about to as you as you say hypothetically attacked me negatively i could hold it in the veins is that a valid well you could try that you said i think we're i'm suggesting that we're engaging in learning about this we don't know yet what to do with it you see we have to be interested in learning for its own sake you see because if we have any other sake it's going to enter the conditioning right you see you see that saying that you will find nevertheless that you do want to learn for the sake of making things better but then you have to say well that is also part of what another reflex do you see [Music] see how these one reflex brings up after another they say i i've understood now and i've learned that to learn in order to do things in order to make things better maybe a trapper in this area i've learned that but then i still do it right because the reflexes still work right so then i have to say i've got to learn about those reflexes that are diverting the inspire see the point is what's characteristic of this is as you understand this it doesn't work right this is not right away anyway that you seem to understand the point and it doesn't work now but if you'll see what i said you will see that it's inevitable that it won't work because we first understand it on a certain abstract level we haven't touched those reflexes right therefore you could say i understand that my knee jerks whenever you touch it but of course it doesn't change right you see how are we going to change the reflexes you see that's the question see that the understanding is important you see but uh it won't will not be enough you'll see now anybody who has been in this game for a while only notice that all these things which are understood don't work right well maybe they walk in the first stage because we stopped by the understanding and then after this rational understanding maybe something deeper happens it may but very generally people find that it doesn't work you see that we have to go deep there's something more is needed i'm saying that we have somehow somebody may get an understanding so deep that it does touch the reflexes we'll come to that possibility later right then it will change but usually the understanding is a verbal or intellectual understanding or an image it doesn't mean that it has no value but it means it's still too abstract may need some homework and the understanding to go deeply that's it yes some homework which will make it touch the reflexes you see in school we're unfortunately often taught that when you have understood this thing until uh abstractly then you've understood it but you all know even there when i sort of kind of i mean it kind of comes to put in practice you can't right so the uh the the thing is that uh we have to notice then we try this and it doesn't work then the first response might be well it doesn't work i give up but you see it and anything where you're serious you don't do that right but if you're serious about it you say well okay it didn't work why not you see well just even using the analogy of the knee jerk i heard a doctor refer to someone where the knee jerk reaction was a slow term and it's a medical term i don't remember but uh not all knee jerks are as fast so the speed would be involved well some are faster some are slower you see but any reaction which has in the thought which has very powerful emotions or has been repeatedly great many times will probably work very fast you see i wonder if part of our difficulty is that we're imbued with a notion that we can understand where the understandings that's being referred to might have nothing to do with anything i know about see i might be going after this understanding i think that it's something i can grasp whereas actual other understanding might be something operating in an entirely different level and one would never say that one understood yeah well there's some confusion about understanding let's put it that way and the uh we have to get into that further you see what does it mean and uh but i think that the fact is that see people make see things that they're doing wrong and but then when they're not paying attention they find themselves doing it anyway you see and the then i think the reason for that is simple that you have you're dealing with this the system consists of a set of reflexes that's exactly what reflexes do you see for example you if you brush your teeth in the morning you follow a routine and you may very often start doing things of a similar nature when the occasion when when it's not the right occasion and you find it isn't working you're saying what i mean it if you get up and start the reflex and the thing that belongs there is not there right then you say here's an incoherence and then you stop you see so all those reflexes are see i think we have to pay attention that if we think of these as reflexes we are going to understand this thing and another it will help us to understand it better and also begins to point to another level the reflexes are on the level of the neurophysiology and the chemistry the thought process is also chemistry but it's a very more so much more subtle abstract level and it doesn't directly touch the reflexes the intellectual part of the thought process does not directly touch the reflexes you can't think your knee not jerking yeah now we are still on the surface with intellectual but but that homework that means attention is needed then the attention is really at a potential to take us deeper yes we have to get a ton of attention that will take us deeper but see see i think that we what we do need however is to draw this intellectual map you see the intellect has to be clear because we already in any case have a large number of intellectual maps that are not clear about this thought process the whole culture has given us a lot of maps for example it said that thought and feeling so when the chemistry are all different right that's a map which is wrong misleading so there are a lot of maps of that kind that are wrong now what we have to do is to see get somewhat free of them and to give it more coherent map so but that alone i'm trying to just add that that alone is not going to do it yes it should be stopping soon yes right up there isn't part of the problem the fact that the initial reflex doesn't work oh it's really nice the it's the carrying on of the reflexes yes but that's the whole nature of reflexes to carry on you see it was conditioned for some reason yeah but that's the nature of reflexes to get condition when you repeat them that will be inevitably produce a carry-on effect supposing you intellectually understood this process but still that initial reflex was so enticing that you you still yes that's the problem saying that you can intellectually understand it but it still carries on the enticement is part of the reflex it's the chemist chemical part of the reflex i mean the reflex produces endorphins for example which will be or some other chemical which will produce a sense of enticing so it's a matter of perspective and to see deeper than i think it's a bit more than that you see let's uh try to go into that as we go along i think we need to make have a break now we try to make it 10 minutes uh say a few more uh extend this whole idea a little further they uh are saying that it's important to to have a we inevitably have a kind of thought about thought an intellectual map of the thought process which is sort of endemic it's all spread in our culture right we pick it up here and there uh you know like saying you know like saying think positively you see for example that's part one a kind of intellectual idea about thought as to how to deal with depression and so on and uh the uh there are all sorts of ideas circulating around so i think we're trying to present some sort of map of thought which will make me more coherent and and this because if we are being guided by incoherent ideas which are already part of our reflex system therefore we will go wrong and we can't just choose not to do it because it's part of the reflex system you see so uh the uh the first step is at least to look at some other ideas which may be more coherent and we'll have to ask how we're gonna really have them really work but on the reflexes which is will come later now the uh because eventually we must begin to there must be some way to alter those affect those reflexes right otherwise we're stuck now uh the uh i wanted to add that one of the basic if we combine this notion of reflex one of the thoughts which has the most powerful effect is the thought of necessity you see it is much more than a thought the the word necessary means it cannot be otherwise but it also the latin root necessity means don't yield it suggests the emotional physical stance of resisting holding right and then that's the other side of the system that when you say it can't be otherwise you see the other then you say i've got it it's got to be this way so i've got a hole and it also means it cannot be turned aside you see some very powerful force you can't turn aside and you say i've got to turn aside you see we establish an order of necessity saying this turns aside for that and this for that right we're saying so this is crucial to our whole ordering of thought see the notion of necessity and it's opposite which is contingency which means what can be otherwise right now if something can be otherwise it's worth trying to change it if it can't be otherwise i know your strength to change it right so this will have a tremendous effect if you think something is impossible it means that it can't it can't be done it's the same it's necessarily and that's necessary and therefore you can't do it you will not try you see so the assumption that something is impossible may well trap you into into making it impossible right on the other hand you may assume something is possible which is not unjust battery your head on a stone wall you see and i also do supper you see so we have to get straight on what is necessity and what is contingency and in each situation this is what you are doing all the time we're trying to assess the necessity and contingency like we say that this will not turn aside from my hand right i don't expect it to i don't expect my hand to go through right if it went through i'd be very surprised you know we discussed this last time that joe was telling about there was a a an exhibition of lasers very good lasers with an image of a ship very realistic and two people came in who evidently didn't know anything about it and when the woman came over and decided to take hold of the ship and her hand went through so she didn't understand it there was a look of horror in her face and she said to her companion let's get out of here the point is that we count on the notion of necessity saying this will stand up this will be stable this will cannot be turned aside and so on we count on the earth being something that cannot won't turn aside and when it shakes it they're very disturbing and psychologically as well as physically and the uh so uh the the point is that this notion of necessity and contingency is it's always operating everybody's using it all the time you know without it becomes part of our reflexes and this is important you see that uh the now you see once something is necessary if we say it's not see if we think it's necessary [Music] this also is connected with the idea of reality because things which are real sort of won't be turned aside they'll sort of resist their pushing and so on various ways of testing for reality they're stable they resist they have a kind of internal necessity that holds you see and the the whole idea of reality and necessity are bound together you see that uh the uh uh because if your hand goes through this it's a sign it's not real right and the uh uh now and the word the notion of reality is very important too clearly in our whole psychic makeup that you know the difference between real or unreal or illusory is very crucial and the uh so now the notion of necessity creates a very powerful reflex right it's got to be that way see if we not only add any motion to the reflex we not only add repetition to the reflex but if we add the notion of necessity it becomes very powerful uh especially we can say if we say it's always necessary you see something may be necessary some of the time but then it may give way and they have to turn aside at another time but if we say it's always necessary it means it's absolutely necessary it cannot turn aside for example if we say the nation is sovereign that becomes absolute necessity and there's no way of turning that aside now if two nations assert their sovereignty in the same place what can they do you see there's no way to turn aside man and therefore they've got to fight now or two religions in the same way you see god is absolute necessity and god has got to be this way and not that way and there's no way to turn aside right so there are similar questions all through life that wherever people are finding it hard to get along you will discover they have different assumptions as to what is necessary or absolutely necessary right if you look at it that's what they're fighting about um that that if one one feels this is necessary and the other that and they cannot turn aside and negotiation is an attempt to make people turn aside for each other to adjust and adapt which admits some of the contingency of what they thought was necessary so therefore this question of dialogue which we're going to get into is involved very much in what you assume to be necessary the assumptions of what is necessary are what prevent dialogue and they create a set of reflexes to defend and with absolute force so and they give power to the reflex you see the instinct of self-preservation is generally regarded as a very powerful a set of reflexes but built in by from the genes right but the notion of absolute necessity will override that every time you see if you say my instinct is to preserve my life but if you say the country says it's absolutely necessary to risk it then you've got to risk it see most people will feel that way or if you say you know god demands it then the demands of god will override all the instincts right so the uh or else whatever it is you know your ambition may override instincts right if it's absolutely necessary to achieve your ambition so uh the uh therefore there's a tremendous force in this this notion of necessity is not merely intellectual it involves everything right it involves the chemistry and it means all the adrenaline you need will be released when to defend it right you know whatever is not whatever is needed will be the will be made available right so and this may have very valuable side if you're ever going to accomplish anything you need that right you see if you don't think something is very necessary you won't have much energy to do it and the you know you could say nobody ever accomplished anything difficult without really going through difficulties without feeling that it was necessary and therefore if you feel that going into thought is necessary perhaps it will continue against difficulty on the other hand you may feel that some crazy incoherent thing is absolutely necessary and do the same you see uh so uh it's important however to begin to pay attention to these notions of necessity what is assumed to be necessary and absolutely so and how it moves you you see it's beginning to notice that you get that feeling of urge you see you get you're impelled you have an impulse to act right impel means being pushed right from within you're being compelled which is a bit stronger sometimes compulsive urge or propelled or perhaps even repelled but it's all the same process right it's abso it's necessity at work giving a push so you'll feel an impulse and you say well that's me having an impulse but you can see there's a system there's a thought beneath it your your intentions may arise in that impulse you see so i think you see people have shown that when sometimes when you have an intention they've made electrical scans of lexical measurements and seeing there's some electrical process in the brain that precedes your conscious intention right it's built up so electrochemical process so it's coming from the whole thing the whole system you see so now you see it's important to see this all connected because uh when you break it up this is not a place where it's correct to break the to to separate them you see in some cases it's correct to separate like saying this table is separate from the chair right because one can move independently of the other but when things are tightly connected then we shouldn't separate them in our minds and the idea is that we may distinguish certain things you know for the sake of convenience the word distinguished means to mark a part a distinction is merely a mark which is for convenient doesn't mean the thing is broken like it's like a dotted line whereas if we represent a divide it's a solid line so between thinking and feeling and chemistry and so on we should draw dotted lines in our minds not solid lines it would be good to draw only dotted lines between countries too uh the uh so uh because really that it's a distinction and not really a a division of two different things which are independent now uh so uh we have to then be able to think of this clearly uh even though as i said that won't won't really change the reflexes but if we don't think of it clearly then i think all our attempts to get into this will go wrong now uh and clear thinking implies that we are in some way awakened a little bit so perhaps there's something beyond the reflex which is at work right in other words something unconditioned right is there the unconditioned is the question really if everything is conditioned then there's no way out but what suggests itself whenever when something the very fact that we're able to see new things sometimes would suggest that there is the unconditioned maybe the deeper material structure the brain is unconditioned or maybe beyond who knows we'll discuss that later but it doesn't matter at this stage where it is as long as it could act you see so if there is the unconditioned which could be the movement of intelligence then there is some possibility of getting into this now so they're saying that perhaps unbeknownst to us the unconditioned may have operated a little you see we're not trying to say that the conditioning is absolutely solid and frozen all forever [Music] so that's the point now so at least to be coherent we have if we're going to do this sort of thing at all we're doing we have to suppose that there may be the unconditioned you see if we don't suppose that it may be then we are totally incoherent in our very attempt to do it right exactly if we say there may not be the unconditional it cannot be then it would be foolish to for us to try to do anything with the conditioning of course when we made that statement we would have assumed a tremendous position of knowing yeah but if we once assume it then we're stuck you see now if we assume that there is the unconditioned we're going to be stuck again right because we will produce a sort of an image of the unconditioned in the system of conditioning and and i don't mistake it for that right so suppose we say there may be the unconditioned uh now we leave room for that right see we have to leave room in our thought for possibilities wouldn't we have to even say more in the sense that thought could never say there is not there is only the condition i mean that we've gone way past our bounds when we make that statement yeah it's incoherent for thought to make that statement well we'll come to the thought doesn't know that much you see that it's clearly evident that it doesn't know that much but you know we can even go into it more later so see if thought merely sticks to what it knows it has no way of saying there is no unconditional nor can it safely say there is there is the unconditioned so that means what that we don't know but we may say we suspect there is the unconditioned we have seen evidence that there may be is the evidence of the unconditioned sometimes seen in creativity yes that's what we want some evidence we could say the fact of creativity suggests that there is the unconditional without proving it right because some of the people in artificial intelligence would say that was merely a much deeper form of conditioning that you didn't see right but even that would be better than the conditioning we have now one well he might you know get along with a few years with that one whereas with this one we might just expand our limitations well we might still get into incoherence you see see what incoherence with creativity has become more dangerous than without it you see without having created all these modern scientific things that would be much safer from we could go on with our incoherence at the stone age level we would be quite safe with our incoherence you know we wouldn't have the means of doing very much so we could probably survive indefinitely and in fact the evidence is the stone age people may well be more coherent than we are anyway so that their attitude to nature is more coherent and so on so but uh even if they were as incoherent as we are they could probably survive because they cannot do that much damage right uh now but then with our tech with our creative technology we are putting that challenges us you see say either we've got we've got to be coherent or else at least we've got to move toward coherence or else all sorts of disasters may occur i look at my conditioning even intellectually and say hey i don't feel good when somebody yells at me and take a responsibility even intellectually to look at it and without having expectations of the end result what it would be like if i don't have this conditioning and just let it be my main would be that i don't feel good when somebody yells at me let me take the responsibility why do i feel this way and then just let it go yeah whatever comes yeah but what happens then you say uh suppose you say i don't feel good when somebody yells at me right then you ask why not right why don't i feel good yeah and i said what what's the answer i have to look within me to see if there's any connection of memory brain sales groups whatever that it's not really that particular person that's yelling but any person that's here yeah so it goes back to me again because i'm dealing with different people and i'm the main yeah well you have a general assumption there don't you that emily you are the sort of person who should not be ill then it's absolutely necessary that nobody should yell at you i mean that seems to be the assumption right see i think it's worth fishing around to try to put the assumption in words right because it's important to get it into words because you miss it otherwise you see the whole brain is set up to hide the assumption anyway that's my understanding my understanding would be that they have a right to yell but not on you no it doesn't matter it's how my why am i reacting to this but before that now let's say before you got that far right the first thing you found was that you were disturbed by somebody yelling at you right and i say why because you didn't make me feel good yeah yes but why is that because all the feelings come from are bound up with the thoughts we just said it's all one system right so maybe there's a thought that's behind her the thought is that i'm not a good girl but why is that you see if somebody else doesn't prove you're not good i'm believing that because of my conditioning thoughts well wait let's go back then you see and saying that then you have another thought further back but you got maybe from your parents right saying that whenever they thought you were no good they yelled at you so therefore you have a an assumption in there that whenever anybody yells at me it means i'm no good and therefore whenever whenever i'm no good i feel uncomfortable another one right that's another reflex so those two work together as a reflex is that clear whenever anybody yells at me it means i'm no good and whenever i'm no good it means i can't feel good right now those two thoughts are working in the chemistry and i don't like it what it does to me well i don't like that chemical effect that's very disturbing right that makes sense right that chemical effect is disturbing i mean we can't criticize that [Music] now i look the person that felt that the little person that was defenselessly open without depends on their perception that somebody yelled at them they decided that i'm not going to go now i'm an adult and i have some responsibility to look at that and see that am i going to hold on to that perception or am i really able to let go what's the answer no and this is to look at it and i'm asking the way the programming was done through the years of me having their perception can that jump the groove then it'll jump the groove and where there's a space and i that programming is cancelled well that that's what we're exploring you see that cannot be done but i see what's implied is that there's got to be a an electrochemical change in the brain right you see it's not enough we have a certain set of thoughts which have begun to point to the problem and now something that we've had that same problem as before that that alone is not enough to change the reflex not intellectual part but the chemical part that i know i i'm realizing now that i feel uncomfortable yeah but but it doesn't change if somebody yelled at you you might still feel uncomfortable but my experience has been that by by realizing it i'm letting the yelling come through and i'm i'm feeling it in my body i'm not resisting it yeah okay then and by notice this thing it it desensitizes the old misfiring of the synapses or whatever and it sort of reverses the process of what originally brought it through it may you see yeah let's say you can explore you see that if you can stay with that it may well do something like that [Music] and if that happens and i see myself that ah now i don't get upset with people yelling at me i understand not only intellectually physically the change has taken place now do i move to another conditioning well you may see it's a question you see that there are vast number of reflexes and we've only looked at that one right you see we have to sort of get further because one reflex gives rise to another and another in the back is all sorts of reflexes ready to operate some different ones right and some of those may even bring back this original reflex you see that you have may have further assumptions which say that whenever i am too disturbed i can do nothing about it you see that's a common assumption that i've just got to let it take hold of me some people have that assumption right that if the disturbance is extremely powerful then i've got to let it take hold right see that's necessity right so that assumption could also come in later when say suppose you say okay somebody yelled at me and i if they in certain cases i can already begin to see the chemistry and all that i don't respond so much and suddenly somebody who is very important to me really yells and it happens again with beyond a certain intensity and it sort of takes over again right you see that may happen i don't say it well but hasn't she when she has had that experience yeah yelling not activating the chemistry yeah and so together with that if she has a proper description of yeah what has taken place hasn't she been pointed in a new direction even though someone else yelling may cause her but she has been shifted yes there's a shift in direction yes yes it's a step in the direction but still there may be more you see the person who has had that experience is never the same no even though they still react that a new they have a new opening wouldn't you say yes but that opening can be lost if you don't keep it up right you see it requires to stay and work the rigidity of the assumption of the conditioning will be loosening a little bit but and the person can feel more comfortable but i don't think that means that much is happening well there's a certain move has happened but we have to go very much further very much to say because sometimes you can have a full ourselves and say oh that's a transformation oh no it's not a transformation we have at the moment in this environment specifically the tendency very quickly to getting another assumption i'll i change there's something happened in me and i'm transformed no well that would be a con justified conclusion you see the the uh uh without any evidence backing it up i mean that's the kind of thought that goes wrong that we jump to a conclusion which gives pleasure or something but uh the uh i would say just look at it as saying it's a step which from which you could learn something provided the correct description yeah you have to put it correctly in words because if the trouble is in the verbal sphere anyway that which has gone into all the chemistry and all that and in addition all the other stuff is being carefully hidden by the reflexes so that if you don't get into words it's not likely you're going to see it because you see the the problem is not just the feelings or the reflexes and so on it's the relation between all that and the words you see namely the words were the thoughts which are underlying the words which you put in words were that whenever anybody yells at me it means i'm bad now that is an assumption of necessity right always it's something always so you see that's why it's so powerful do you see what i mean that you you often don't see the power of the assumption of necessity that so you don't if you don't put it in words this merely happens but if you put it in words you can see clearly whenever anybody yells at me it means i'm bad you'll have to put it in word and say that's the way i think not to say i'm just thinking about it do you understand and then you'll get a feeling of that right and say that's the way where i really think now but notice that is an assumption of necessity that whenever anybody yells at me it's absolutely necessary to feel that i'm bad hmm it seems like you can reflect on it in this way and then you're changing the focus from you know they shouldn't yell at me to what's going on in the mind that's making it so terrible or you know it's creating the reaction by looking at your hidden assumptions but i'm just wondering is there some key to get behind the whole system of of reflexes rather than just like examining each one and saying you know what's the assumption behind well you know we have to explore that you see uh from what you learn by existing we examine it not in the spirit of trying to get rid of this reflex in particular but rather in the spirit of learning more about the whole system right so that maybe we learned something which could then be extended yeah see it it seemed to me that the description that needed to accompany the app was not simply the specific that i don't want people to yell at me and that that bothers me but rather that up to that point i believed that someone out there saying something to me caused a disturbance in me and now i see that in response to words i generate a disturbance in me yeah but i i don't but i generated it i didn't even do it i have a set of reflexes that did it which came because i had concluded from a number of cases that it was absolutely necessary to feel bad whenever somebody yelled and that was the right thing to do and so on you know that it was inevitable you see that that was the thought so that whenever somebody yelled the reflex just worked yes just like the nature never mind what you say how you say it is important isn't it but i mean the yelling conveys a message right but haven't i in seeing that in some sense i've shifted from thinking that the problem was external oh yeah yeah to well you begin to look at the real source of the problem which is the your own reflex you see saying that i i also had another reflex before is what you're pointing out that whenever this happened i added another reflex saying that this all has originated outside you're seeing that that's the that's the that's where the blame lies right the cause so therefore you see how when the reflexes all work together that see in order to prevent you from seeing the real cause of the thing that reflex system has developed an explanation of the why you feel bad which is that somebody outside has done something to you right it's a rationalization seemed to indicate that the problem was always within this thought not outside so it's just a projection if your reflexes hadn't worked nothing would have happened you see if somebody had well yelling works in every language but you see if somebody says something bad to you in a language you don't understand nothing happens right the tone of the voice sometimes may convey well yes i say yelling will work in any language even no matter what you say but but somebody can say something to it very quietly which also means the same thing and you will feel back but if you don't understand what he says nothing happens it's kind of that's the little story of the boat that's coming to crash the other boat the guy in this boat are yelling to the other boat then they crash and he realizes nobody in the other boat and he laughs well anyway so the point is then that you have to watch you see it's crucial say i have a valid reason which makes it necessary for me to feel bad or to get angry or to be frightened or various other things right or to be you know pleased or whatever right you see that these things will affect the chemistry and the notion of necessity puts all the power behind it you see now you don't notice how often it's there implicitly rather than explicitly so it's very important to get it there explicitly so that you really see it's there right see because the whole system is set up to prove to prevent you from seeing this you see that let's try to put it like this that see freud used to talk about repression of unpleasant memories and just traumatic memories right and say how could this be he would ask if it's a puzzling question you must remember something to be able to repress it it seems it seems to be a paradox but it's not a paradox because you see our memory always has a vast content a lot of it comes up which is irrelevant and we have a lot of reflexes set up to sort of try to select what's relevant even in normal memory healthy now that same reflex can be set up to repress this uh to push us push down this unpleasant material it simply responds to that material automatically like the knee jerk and it gets it down you see you see you don't need to do anything in particular so the whole system is set up to do that sort of thing right so that it's really very hard to just look in there and see anything so but you see if you get a hint or a clue and and then you can put it in words and then you can begin to see at least what the thought is and you watch what the words do to your chemistry something happens to thought when you express it it makes it solid it makes it real you relate to it where in my mind if the can take over and i lose yeah it was me yeah but if i bring it out it becomes more real than i can look at it yeah it's it's implicit when you don't put it in words and it can do all sorts of things and but now make it explicit and then you can at least see the thought is doing it so you're getting some perception right you see by bringing it out you can see that that this is what's happening whereas if you don't make it explicit you can't see that thought is involved at all and therefore you say this is an emotional problem or some other problem or it's a somebody out there has done it you know various explanations isn't it just as important though to uh as you're putting into words be aware or connected to the response in the body directly that's what it is that's what i mean to watch not only that's right too much not only the words but how they are you see when you say the words that are really the true words expressing the way you really think your body is going to respond you see see if you say this i've been hurt by that person i'm very angry you know right and then if you find out in words i'm angry because because he did this and this and this and anybody who does this and this this to me it's absolutely necessary for me it's only right and necessary for me to get angry or hurt or whatever right and watch you will see that if you have found the right words the body responds that will be a nice demonstration of how the system works you mean a word like i've been hurt the words which express the real thought behind your heart you say suppose you say i don't know i trusted that person he was my friend and i counted on him not and then he said those terrible things about me it's a it's it's a completely unjustified i mean it's it's true it's traitorous behavior it's uh you know that was stupid or something and that started yeah that's right and this yeah this was really something which was not justified not right you know worse you know it was he betrayed me he attacked me you know he had no reason to do this you know you know you think of all those words and you will see the effect on the body if you have found the right words the body will be affected if you found the words which express the way you're really thinking so at first we have an intellectual anger and then as we express it the body picks up and then we find out we're emotionally angry the next thing you know our voice is getting louder and then you find your physically angry namely your tents all over the body and now if you stay with it you will finally get the impression this is nothing but a physical process that's crucial because you'll see this means this something which i'm anticipating for the next time that thought is part of the physical processes of the body a very subtle part it seems to me like i can reflect on you know some disturbing emotion that i've had and discover this underlying assumption of necessity but then often even though i can say rationally well it isn't really necessary there's still a strong feeling or it is necessary you don't want to let go of it that's the reflex you see the it's in the chemistry you see it it's not only in the intellect right now what i'm suggesting it won't cure it it's a matter this is being done to learn and not to change anything right this is crucial because if you're trying to change anything will be it won't work yeah so so you you find the words which do this and see how those feelings are affected and how the body is affected you see just simply to learn is that clear it may make it go away okay fine but it's not the purpose to make it go away we're just trying to get some perception into it yeah see and in fact if it goes away too easily it's wrong because you won't have a chance to learn how it works right the purpose is learning yeah and not changing not changing you see that something may change when you learn but that's a byproduct but can our conditioning prevent us from learning because our condition preconditioning is don't be angry it's not nice don't cry it's not acceptable and when we started filling up with this emotion our condition he said say hey stop well i'm not supposed to feel that yeah but that's the same thing the conditioning is what we've been talking about the conditioning is what makes us angry and the conditioning tries to say you know you shouldn't be angry it's all the same you see in other words you may find that i've got then you've got to put that in words saying i i i believe it's absolutely necessary for me not to be angry and begin to look at that you see so there are also more words you see so the point is that this this is a system and it sort of spreads out and out and out and uh the uh therefore you don't expect to get it all right away by this process by this procedure we don't really ever expect to get anything in the sense that any trying to move in there and take hold of anything to be part of the system yeah and you're suggesting something which lies outside of it yeah i'm saying we don't care don't try to do anything but we're just learning and we're attentive learning right we are in the system when it's sort of trans like a hypnotic trance the system is that's exactly what hypnosis is you see if you think it over the hypnosis is the use of the word to operate the system right you see the word you accept the word of the hypnotist as to what is necessary and that happened and that's all there is to it i have one question to go into a little bit are we are we out of time well just one more question okay um it seems as if when we are aware of the system as a whole a physiological process the psychological process the whole thing as we touch on that the description seems to be accurate that comes out of that awareness but when the intellect says i need to find the right word to describe process my experience has been that it doesn't work as well well i'm not suggesting you do that at this stage i'm saying find the word that makes the process go with full strength they say it's like saying i've got a piece of machinery i want to make it go slowly so i can look at it not to spin with tremendous speed i can't see it or not to just stand still and i don't see how it works right well the button is the word right you understand the buttons yeah so is it having just a very accurate description no no a true description of the way you are thinking you see usually we don't uh put in words the way we really think right we don't tell ourselves we don't want to admit to ourselves the real nature of our thoughts you see if you are hurt you usually say he heard me right or i'm hurt i'm not hurt right you know you'll say all sorts of things right right and therefore those words will just lead the whole thing astray right because they will not be correctly the thoughts which are really working they will just muddle it up so suppose we say i don't know exactly the words but i'm going to experiment try to find them the words which express the thoughts that are really working which are now implicit only i want to make them explicit so i say maybe when i use those words i feel worse now therefore my instinct is not to use them right but i say no this is necessary really necessary truly necessary to get into this right to dig until we find the words yes you see so i say it's truly necessary i've seen why it's necessary so i say that the fact that it hurts a little bit doesn't matter even if you had a toothache you see it would go to the dentist it would hurt a bit but you say it's necessary for him to drill a bit right so otherwise your tooth will decay so the uh therefore you say okay i'm going to dig a bit it may hurt a bit but it doesn't matter right i want to find out what's going on of what you mean by finding the words well i try to give some suppose you're angry and say i'm angry he kept me waiting two hours you know what did he mean by keeping me waiting so long he he takes me for granted he doesn't consider my value at all no he does whatever he he probably had something better to do and he ignored me you know he i he he kept me waiting here and my time is valuable he just doesn't consider me properly you know there are all sorts of you may find other reasons you see i mean depending on what it is you find the reasons with the words which express the real reason right which seems to make it necessary to be angry not to justify it make it right and necessary saying it's really anybody would be angry in this case you know anybody who treated this way would be angry it's absolutely necessary and universal i'm really bright and so on and so on you

Channel: David Bohm Society

Views: 1,003

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: David Bohm, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Crisis, Culture, Metacognition, Psychology, Conflict, Global Conflict

Id: YTjpP73L9wY

Length: 111min 49sec (6709 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021