Understanding Thought: III of III

well we were discussing uh this end of the morning this way of trying to learn something about the this system and we've talked about a thought now the core of the system is really thought though it involves everything and the uh the way it works how uh with all sorts of emotional disturbances such as anger you could first of all use the words find the words which will stir it up so you can then get something to observe to see learn about the relationship between the word the thought and the and all that follows the feeling in the state of the body and so on and and of course in doing that you're suspending the anger i say holding it in front of you rather than it's not that strong that you feel him absolutely must express it nor are you keeping it hidden right you see so therefore you're able to see this process and learn something about it so you're beginning to get acquainted with the system how it really works if you don't have that element of thought in there or language then you don't see the system because the core of it is missing when you see something happening then you say that's the typical attitude the next thought comes along and says there's something happening independent of thought and you get caught in that same fault again so you see the point is you've got to be seeing that it's actually happening the thought is behind this system otherwise the system seems to stand by itself independent of thought like if you take company any company like general motors it's entirely organized by thinking that it exists and has a certain structure and except for that thought it wouldn't exist unless people believed it existed it wouldn't exist you see and they wouldn't they'd have all the factories and everything else but they wouldn't know what they're supposed to be doing or how they're supposed to be related or anything so the thought is at the core of it right and the uh that there's a whole system you know which develops out of that and the uh we want to be able to see the system in operation so we have to have it there in front of us to see it and suspend it and then the other the second point about the use of language is after you see something then you should also put it in words what you have seen right right because you want to inform the thought process of what you have seen right otherwise you know you may see something and the thought process doesn't know about it so it will just go on as before so the thought process doesn't see but it can only get information from a typical way of getting information is from words you see on such an abstract level anyway so uh therefore uh it's essential to say we use words to elicit this thing to make it visible and also we then may use words to state what it what we have seen right but it's not not to do it the other way around to say this is the way it is and then i see it you see that that also can be done and that leads to trouble right illusion so which i'm going to discuss you know as we go along so uh and so that that is a a key point now maybe we could have five minutes of if we wish to discuss all this before going ahead to another point if you wish um i'm gonna take this a little deeper if i may i'm aware now that my conditioning makes me feel the way i feel because of looking outside of me for what i feel and blaming the people that are yelling and i'm looking at it and then lo and behold right next to that feeling i see that i'm a very serviceable person up to now i believe that i service people with all my love because this is what i'm wearing for my mother natalie i really love it now i'm even starting to question that yeah am i doing it because i'm afraid i'm going to displease people and they may end up yelling at me or am i doing it to be light yeah so i think you have to sort of look at all that you know that's those details are things that really you have to look at for yourself you see i think that what i would suggest is that whoever is interested in this should from time to time especially when they're by themselves inquiring to just that sort of question you see you see that see that's what we call the homework and the uh um that's part of it anyway and the uh uh uh so that for whenever you have time and are so inclined then you can ask questions like that and try to find the answer in the same way as before by observation right you see it's no use for somebody else to tell you because you know that that will be very not that superficial answer but i'm looking at this and i'm saying if the chemistry of the body and the mind work together in thought and up to now before my realizing my conditioning they've been working pretty smoothly as far as they were concerned now i'm changing my attitude all of a sudden the brain and the body say hey what's going on here that's not what we're used to and i'm getting a reaction i'm feeling a reaction of their confusion if it is that of the chemistry imbalance and it could be depression or fear and that would give me choices either to escape go back to the way it was call a friend a regular refrigerator take a pill or whatever or stay with what it brings me to give this system if it's depression or fear if i can stay with it without finding an escape is that the adjustment that the body needs chemically and this is the symptoms i'm receiving would they look negative to me to sort of straighten their problem out and then there's something else that takes place that some kind of likeness some kind of a freedom some kind of something else that if i didn't let it stay i would block what was there if my conditioning was to eliminate the terrific fear of confusion that i'm having yes well i think all of that is the sort of thing you have to do you see but you see that i think that that much detail we can't do it here you see in the group we have to in the group we have to get the general notion you know and you know this is not really an encounter group you know one of those therapeutic groups where they might go into that sort of detail you understand there are groups which actually try to work that way yes you have a question i would like to know when you were talking at the beginning are you saying that with words we bring out memory and memory is making objectives by using the word we're objectifying the memory and we can see now we're bringing by using the word not only bringing out the memory but we're producing the actual state which we are trying to explore right such as anger see we find the words which will bring up that previous anger that is still simmering you've forgotten about it perhaps but it's still there on the reflexes and it's ready to spring again into action any time when something happens but instead of waiting for something to happen you because if it happens it'll happen so fast you may not get a look at it you will have if you bring it up by words you'll have time to look at but the main thing you'll have one of the big things you have time to look at is that the words are doing it right if the words were not there you would miss the main point is that means thought is doing this the words represent thought right so when we're thinking we're not using words are if we're thinking we're not using words are we are we still using words but we're just missing the fact that we're using them are we thinking in some kind of another language there may be another language that you know there may be an image language there's an implicit thought which uh i say that it goes without saying if you know if whenever uh anything like this happens i've got to react in this way right that's the thought now instead it just reacts that's still remember the thought spreads out into all the other reflexes so the thought is still going on in another form for example if i wrote it out on paper it would still be the thought but in another form right it can take many many forms it could be put on television set could be carried by radio waves right it can be carried by all the reflexes you see they're all part of that thought there are different forms of that one thought is that clear what i mean you have it's very important to see this that this thought goes out and spreads over the world all over through radio waves and other people pick it up and they get their reflexes so it's all thought now the point is that the words are a way of bringing the thought into evidence right whereas often it works implicitly without your being aware of it see if you respond to somebody you have a reflex that food of that kind disgusts you and you you will just get a sense of disgust but it could have happened by some sort of words it couldn't a very early childhood so therefore but that's still thought even though that expression of disgust is basically thought because that's what controls it that's what makes it happen it's on there on the reflexes i wonder if you see what i mean yes excellent i see so thought spreads all over the place in many many different forms we're just not aware of it yeah but we're not aware of it partly because of our culture which tells us that thought is only intellectual right and efforts no use looking at this other stuff we might become aware of it if it weren't for that so by doing that we can really focus and see our real intention not what we're telling ourselves well we can see what is really happening and that is happening is producing a part of our intention right you see it if there's a valid necessary reason to be angry then or to do let's say to to be impelled to do something then you will get that intention out of the thought right see if you say it's necessary for me to do my job right you find yourself getting the intention to do it you see the intention can flow out of the thought so the intention is still part of the thought you said that you need to um put into words you know like what you've understood and then communicate it to the thought process how does that keep from becoming another system it does go in there is danger that it will happen but see we're going i have to discuss later what you know how this you know that may happen you see what could be done with this uh but it was saying that it is necessary the the thought process will not know what has been seen without some sort of way of translating it into thought right anyway isn't one of the ideas to bring out the assumptions that are already in the thoughts yeah so it won't harm that much if they go back there already well we're bringing out the assumption and we may then form a new reflex and make a habit of it and so on we could go wrong again but the same way we're going into it so that we're you know we're just learning about it now you see we're not trying to actually change it that's the crucial point if we start once think we're trying to change it then we get into all the tangle of questions but we're saying whatever happens is grist for the mill you see if that happens you can learn about that i a lot of times i look at it the other way around that the thoughts come out of the intentions that we may not be aware of but that seems a little strange to me to put the emphasis on the thought well because many of our thoughts or intentions are reflexive they just come out automatically they're coming from reflexes which is basis is thought you see the intention is implicit in the thought you will be impelled to do something if something is necessary if somebody says you you must do it you know it's necessary to do it it's necessary or doing this will give you something you really want right the thought then you will get the intention to do it right see we have this picture that there's somebody inside who's given all this information and then decides to have the intention to do it right i'm trying to say i'm suggesting that is not so generally speaking i'm thinking of cases where the person for some reason has to do something and then we'll generate thoughts that justify that uh well that's the next the next step you see he may have one thought saying i must do this he has another thought saying it would be wrong to do it and he gets a third thought which justifies it anyway right you see the whole thing is one reflex after another you see i think we have to see this system just working working working and somehow intelligence can come in there and get out of this but i'm saying that as long as the system works you don't know what's happening any more than why your legs should jump when you touch that bone so basically you're saying that the system is working by itself reflexively mechanically but it gives the impression that there is amazing yeah the system contains a reflex producing the thought that it is i who i'm doing it you see we'll have to we'll go into that you see that it has a very elaborate system of covering up what's happening so uh this will take some time to go into you see that you see uh and that i think we should go on from america nobody has any urgent question that they uh uh now you see we have a i wanted to say more about thought you see thought is incomplete it doesn't cover if the thought of the table doesn't cover all about the table it picks up a few points about it clearly it has vast numbers of things like the atomic constitution all sorts of structure inside how it's all related to everything you see it's a simplification or an abstraction we say but one way of looking at it to say thought provides a representation of what you're thinking about like the artist makes a picture who rep which represents somebody but it isn't somebody at all it's just sometimes a few little lines are enough to represent that person but clearly a person is far more than that right he has an immense amount in there which is not in the representation and uh the so therefore thought does not provide a complete picture account or information about any the thing it's supposed to be about right when we take for example the thought of the table it has only a few salient features and also it's somewhat ambiguous a lot of different the thought of table includes a lot of possible things that might be tables even little all sorts of strange shapes and sizes or occasionally something would come along you wouldn't expect to be used as a table you see so it's constantly adding different forms and shapes and so on so the word table calls up a representation in your mind probably of an image of some sort of table you your typical table and then there are all sorts of forms it could take so you see this object is this immediately yeah if an object fits one of uh somewhere either those forms are somewhere between those forms they're similar to those forms or in some vague way even then it might call up the notion of table right or the word table and they're all put together and the thing is then that you have that you can see that that's the kind of reflex you see when you look at this there's a reflex in your mind you don't actually utter the word table but there's a potential reflex that's a table right if somebody to ask you immediately say that's a table so the information is there in your mind already already already on tap isn't it so therefore the the thing is recognized by by the fact that it would fit that representation right it would be one of the possible forms of that representation is that clear and any form of that will operate the reflex is that the clear way i'm driving it so and therefore you recognize it or when you think about it you can then think of all the things that are attributed to it and associated to it and so on and connect up to other reflexes and so on see everything you think about is connected to reflexes which will be involved what you can do with it for example this table the representation of the table in your mind is connected to reflexes with what you can do to the table or you can put things on it and so on so that you are already automatically ready to put something on there if necessary right you see so you see how it's all connected up and the um that the intellectual reflexes and the visual reflexes and the emotional and the physical and the chemical and everything are all connected up so that you are ready immediately to take action unless it turns out that it's not a table and it won't do what you expect and then you say it's incoherent and if your mind is working right you say something is wrong i've got to change something right you see so that's the way thought works is that clear it gives you vast amounts of connected information interrelated connected logically related information also with all sorts of ways of open it's sort of open the symbol is not as ambiguous see the word table is the symbol right which whose meaning is ambiguous so that it can add all sorts of other things in it it has a tremendous potential for connecting things up as i see you could say that the earliest thoughts before there was language would probably involve images see if somebody raised that question that the child before the child can use words probably uses vaguely defined images to stand in for the things it's thinking about for example animals will see a part of an object and expect the whole and so will very young children therefore it seems clear that some part of the object can call up the whole or objects that are similar or vaguely similar could call up the whole class and so on so uh that makes a reflex so that that symbol is makes a new reflex which connects all the other reflexes is that clear every one of these objects that the symbol can stand in for has in itself a set of reflexes of what you can do with it right and that symbol connects that all right it's another reflex which connects all those reflexes so you begin to see thought organizing into a very complex rich structure see when it's working right it can do all that i've hardly begun to touch on it because it it goes on to thought to logic to reason you perform very abstract uh symbols for example we talked today about the symbol of necessity and contingency the two words right now they can stand if you ask what are they you can't imagine what they are right you have no picture what is a necessity or what is contingency but uh you can say but you have a vast number of things which those will connect up with right and anytime you want to bring order into what you're seeing that's one of the things you've got to do is to sort out what's necessary and what's contingent in this particular situation right or another set of very abstract things is the general and the particular the general is the reflex of inclusive and the particular you know as as narrows it down right and you treat this ta you treat things by the general in the particular say that you know this table is something general but it particularly is made of wood it is a certain shape it's right here and so on and so on you see so that also is all worked out you know and and there are vast number of things you know so if you were to try to find out how all this thought process works you could probably spend a lifetime uh and still not get there but uh the uh so i only say this to show that there is a lot to thought that is not that is not the culprit you see that thought is not just pure wickedness but that the uh you have this whole structure which is very subtle and very complex and so on and which we probably know very little about and uh does everything for us and but it has gone you know it has this flaw in it right this this thought is part of a system which includes all our reflexes our relations to other people are all that we do all our society and everything so uh now this thought then it works by a representation right in other words that we by a symbol and by a representation right you see the symbol stands in for the thing a word is a symbol is that you can use images as symbols simplified images right the chinese idiographic language came from originally pictures and they were simplified finally and became very symbols right but then the the the the alphabetic symbol is still more powerful because it has no reserve need have no resemblance whatsoever to what it represents it's far more flexible so therefore that's that was the power of language you see now they you have you have all those symbols and the symbol produces a representation which might be something which sort of stan which sort of it presents it again as it were gives you a sort of a feeling for it right for example you may have seen if you take a represent a human face by a circle with the two dots and a little triangle for the nose and then mouth if the mouth is curved up it represents a smiling happy person if the mouth is curved down it represents somebody who's unhappy and frowning right so you if you look at that you will get feeling in there as a smiling happy person or a frowning person you see you see so that is a kind of representation of the meaning of the thing you see so uh now you have to keep all that in mind you'll see that representations can get more and more detailed become more like artists pictures there may be diagrams they may be blueprints they may be all sorts of things right and that's all thought taking different forms right see every one of those things is thought right so this level below the verbal yeah that's another system of symbols yes pictures perhaps pictures or lines or you know very simplified pictures or blobs or even or something hardly just enough there to stand in right for something and i see and it would seem to me that a child who doesn't yet talk could probably do a lot of quite a bit of thinking through that and you know for example a child has to learn that objects which disappear behind according to piaget psychologists that the object disappears behind something and then reappears he claims that it acts as if it thought that the object had vanished and a new object had appeared at some stage he learns that it's the same object but he he needs a symbol for that he doesn't yet talk right so he must have a sort of a big picture of a blob he doesn't have to have the exact picture of the object that would be a nuisance right so to make such an exact picture in his mind so there's a kind of pre-verbal symbol and then there may be other you know others that we don't know about and you see so that language is on top of all this but then when we start to talk we forget this and these symbols now begin to we don't recognize that they're still part of our thought and they seem to be something else right so this is what you were speaking about earlier in terms of bringing these things up into the verbal and understanding them yes well at least not getting a look at them right you're safe this is where i'm not quite because i'm wondering as you talk about this it seems that it's true yeah there's this whole underlying level of pictures going on excuse me and feelings as well you see little feelings can represent see einstein said that see einstein didn't talk until quite a long until he was fairly old and he said that his a lot of his thought consists of feelings he can't describe which obviously they're standing in right so you might imagine that the little child has sometimes represent things by feelings let's see my question is this seems to elicit a certain level of clarity when you start to bring these up and verbalize them yes they may be missed otherwise but is is it the are we to be selective about this because it seems to be going on all the time what i'm wondering is can we constantly be bringing no we can't no i think we're just learning about you see we're not trying to do anything they say this is crucial we're not trying to achieve an objective you know you know we don't have a program or a goal that we can define but we are learning right see i'm trying to say here's something we didn't know about this process right it may be relevant it may not it may turn out to be helpful in some context you know to the fact that we know it and then we may be able to observe some of it by bringing it up you see i'm bringing it up into words and you might get a connection to some of the other stuff and you get a better feeling for how it's working see because one of the troubles is that this thought process is going on and we don't know how it's working at all and when we don't know how it's working we very quickly regard it as something else a non-thought so we're making a better map sort of yeah what we're doing yeah yes you see one of the key difficulties has always been i said that thought does something and then says it's not thought right and then it tries to that's a problem it tries to do something about it while it keeps the making the problem because it doesn't know what it's doing right it's all a bunch of reflexes working remember thought is the past past participle it's been registered there that registration is through a set of reflexes right so that whenever if this form appears which fits that whole set of uh representations that would stand you know be brought up by the word table if it fits in there then you so you get all the reflexes to the table right right away which makes it very useful but then you could make a mistake and you made the wrong movement and you're incoherent then you've got to say okay it's wrong i've got to go over it like that i'm discussing how thought would properly work and does actually work in many areas in order to show that first of all to show the thought is not all bad but secondly to to understand what has gone wrong we should have some understanding of how it would work when it's right is this the difference between thinking and thought as you described earlier that you have the present in the context of a work uh a workable thought versus when you're thinking you're ready to see that when it doesn't work and you're ready to start changing it right now thought sort of works automatically now thought is always there but the thinking is it means that when the thing isn't working something more is coming in which is ready to look at the situation and change the thought if necessary so it's an element that's outside of thought it's a bit beyond thought let's put it it's a bit it's not purely the past right it's not purely a set of reflexes in the past would it be energized at the moment and the other one passive in the past well the past is active that's the trouble you see the past it's not really the past it's the effect of the past in the present see the the present has left a trace in the past and the other way around the past has left the trace in the present the thinking would be even more energized yeah the thinking will be more energized because the thinking is more in the present right but that present includes what thought the incoherence the thought is actually doing right you know it may include allowing new new reflexes to form new arrangements new ideas you see if the reflexes are all sort of open and flexible and changeable then that'll all work nicely so if i understand you clearly by looking at these primal feelings and thoughts images we have a second opportunity to look at them again more energized with more yeah we see them right there and we are able to look at them with something a little beyond we suppose beyond the conditioning right it's not entirely conditioned how we look right you see so therefore we say it's it's more alive and so on so and we say we want we're saying we're doing this because it's very important to come into real contact with this system which really rules our lives i mean in addition it's very necessary and i've explained how all the good things it can do and how it works when it works properly and so on can so deceive us that it's thinking but it's not really oh yes it can it can deceive us about anything and anything and everything you see there's no limit to its power of deception because you could say every trick we know thought knows in the next moment you see if we see a trick then thought has it there in the next moment in the reflexes so thought is us you see so in other words thought is not different from us right so we are the deceivers and we are the deception yes i say so say thought can you do all that deception now but i i've discussed how thought works when it is not deceiving you see now then uh and we say it gets into this uh trouble which comes for many reasons it's hard to analyze it one reason is that ultimately the chemistry is too rigid all these little these connections are too rigid or you could say there's the thought of absolute necessity which provides a hold on the whole thing but they all work together right why that was absolutely well you see there could be a view of absolute necessity which was just a perception saying at this moment it's uh as far as we're falling on my head i got to move yeah you've got to move you're saying that's it now but then you say it's absolutely necessary for me to do various things to achieve my ambition and that may be the past you see it may be the this whole system saying that so uh well that's really um you see so we have this situation then right that we have the thought provides representations which we can produce outside or inside and communicate and produce as symbols that we can communicate and also that hold everything together and connect everything mass media the mass media carry them all you see they disseminate them and they act like seeds that's a good word disseminate you see that it scatters them they're all become seeds of further reflexes right so the people who receive them it becomes they become new reflexes they take root and become new reflexes right so uh the uh it's all a system you're seeing working now uh the uh and you you can see that thought is inherently going to be incomplete you see it can at best provide a representation an abstract representation it will not contain the thing itself right the thing itself is not only more than it could be contained in it but it has thought is not always right it has parts in it which are wrong when extended it's also the thing itself is always in some way different from what we think it is right it is never exactly what we think and uh some of our thought is a mistake and you see uh and when extended you see for example people believe that newton's laws would hold forever because they held for several hundred years and yet uh you know a new einstein quantum theory and relativity came in and overturned them and um you know that during the late 19th century lord kelvin one of the leading theoretical businesses said it's no use to young people to go into theoretical physics it's finished matter of the next refinements in the next decimal points and you see uh the thing didn't it didn't work out that way and now many people are talking some physicists have a theory of everything they don't have it but they say we're going to have it we hope and the uh we expect it but you see it's the same thought is always trying to claim that it knows everything right it has some tendency in it we have to see why you see this is a very dangerous tendency which leads to self-deception right it doesn't leave open that the unknown you see it doesn't leave open the thought is only a representation and it must leave room in your thought for something more and something different see healthy thought requires that it intrinsically be built so that it has room always for something more and something different saying whatever the representation is it could be something more on something different or to put it differently it would say that at most you could say as far as i know that is the way it is but that leaves room for something more and something different now that would be healthy thought proper thought or orderly thought would have to have that form and structure and now a great deal of our thought doesn't have that right see for example religious thought doesn't often doesn't have it a lot of our political thought doesn't have it you know even a lot of our scientific thought as i've just explained doesn't have it and and so on you see so uh therefore that's a crucial point that one of the ways thought goes wrong is it claims implicitly at least to be able to know everything or to that could get rid of uncertainty and get rid of the unknown that it really there's always this drive to say we will eventually get hold of it all right in thought that has been i don't know always but there has been and uh that seems as civilization develops that drive seems to even get stronger it gives a sense of security doesn't you see considering the thought is reflex a lot of thought is aimed at increasing our security right and in a very in a legitimate way it provides for greater security i mean we get food you know we store up food and do various things so it begins then to gradually extend and say i not only need that kind of security i need other kinds i need emotional security i need relational security i need to know it and be sure of everything you see uh and once it has security it provides for the endorphins to coat the pain arms and you feel well and as soon as that's questioned the endorphins are removed the nerves get all excited and there's a drive to think the thoughts that will give you security saying that i know it all right this is so uh that's that's part of the reflex system let's see so therefore can we stay with the fact that thought does not know at all right but thought there's always uncertainty or at least as far as we can see there's always uncertainty there's always the unknown right that our representations are adequate up to a point for example we could say this table you know if you take a circular table it looks like an ellipse from various angle directions but we know that those are all different appearances of a single circular form so we represent the table as a circle we say that's what it is a solid circle but then a scientist came along and said well that's mostly empty space it's atoms moving around inside and it's really quite different it's only very roughly a circle only it's rather like a cloud might look like a circle but it's no circle you think so uh then so we could say the essence is now the atoms and we say the appearance is now the circles according to the scientists only in appearance but then they came along later and said these atoms originally the word atom meant it couldn't be cut and yet they said now it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons and the the uh and mostly empty space and therefore the atom is only an appearance and these other particles are the essence and then then came quarks and then came other things to see so you could wonder if they're ever going to finish this or whether it's not just that it's always a representation which may be adequate or not it may be a correct representation up to a point right if it's correct it will guide us coherently to the extent that it is correct at some stage since it's incomplete representation it must cease to guide us coherently and then we need to change our thought so we do not expect to find some eternal truth about the the about the nature of matter right the nature of matter as far as we could see could be infinite and unlimited right qualitatively as well as quantitatively that in other words we don't there's no reason there's no valid reason why we should think of matter as limited see people have been thinking the 19th century it was limited in this way and then now is the 20 the 21st or the 22nd they may think entirely differently and they'll look for a new their final theory but which looks very different than it might go on and on but you see we don't it's important that there is no such there's no justification for that it's not the right way to think you see to think that way is going to is going to mix up the thought process so what you're saying that's verified is that knowing can never be absolute yeah i've i've i've focused on matter where we have the most solid knowledge right with science and that cannot be observable but then if we go into society and into the psyche and so on it seems that's far less definite than the the scientific knowledge of matter right so uh the uh therefore we're saying knowledge is limited right knowledge may be adequate knowledge provides a representation it is not the thing itself whatever that may be it is not that which is right we could just call it a view to many different views yeah it's an appearance or a view or we could but it's a it's not a it's also a representation in the sense you can bring it up again and again from it's a reflex which gives rise to a view right right you have to keep it open and not put it in a conclusion that close it yes look that's right you see that but then you have to admit that there is that there's no that we're not going to get the whole of it that there there's always the unknown is always open there you see that and uh uh the uh and it must be that the unknown is you know far beyond the known right immensely beyond the noun for example uh in physics you know they now well we'll discuss that later i think you see it would it probably would come more appropriately later the uh uh so uh knowledge is limited that's the point and uh and the proper application of this system of knowledge requires that knowledge know that it is limited are you describing two ways of thinking one that limits and solidifies and may practical a certain way and another way that is always open right the way that's open is the most practical you see because the way that's open includes relative solidification to any degree that may work right we say this table is relatively solid i admit it you see but i don't say it's absolutely solid you see you could find an atomic structure in there it's mostly empty space if you light a fire it turns into gas you see so the explanation is the atoms just simply are sort of held together by forces and when the temperature goes up they uh sort of just come apart right they go into space you see so therefore you'd have to say that this table is not absolutely solid right the idea that the table is solid is a representation and i gave the example that it looks solid you expect it to be solid your reflexes are separate to be solid if this were a very good laser image you would be ready to put a glass on it it would go through right you see so and then you would say that you know that's the wrong representation so what is it that allows us to see our conclusions in different areas of life where we're no longer learning where we've come to an opinion yeah well opinions may be all right there are assumptions we may make assumptions but as long as we can we know their assumption but what allows us to see those opinions and those conclusions that we have yeah well i think the question is the other way around why don't we see them you see why do we think that there are truths well if we try to program it to learn about every aspect of ourselves that too it seems to be just part of the system yeah yeah we can't really program it but i'm saying that there may be an unconditioned capacity of potential in in us to look at this right and see what it is that's i'm suggesting we we leave that open i think it's essential for a healthy thought to leave that open because if you don't then you'll imply that it's all conditioned and therefore there's no way out we can never know because we only think we know because the constant change there are no absolutes we never know absolutely we always can know relatively right but it's a fairly good notion that this is a table that will support i know that right but i can't say the ultimate absolute about it you know what it will be like after this changes in time and so on you see that's relative knowledge right relative to certain conditions and circumstances but the notion that we know the whole thing or that we have absolute knowledge you know will not work also as you're saying things change and the knowledge is limited to the past and we extend our knowledge from the past toward the future we pray we project it and very often that works so we can take it we take it saying as a provisional assumption that it's going to work what we know is going to work but we have to the key thing is it's open if it doesn't work then we're ready to see it isn't working and change it i don't know if this is to a point at this part but when i look at that table there's a certain knowing of it as a table but together with that there's a feeling of it at the table yeah you can feel it you expect it to be solid and so on no but within me together with the representation yeah comes a feeling of realness yeah reality right and that feeling it seems to me is what makes that solid in other words maybe we're going to do this later but it's that feeling aspect of the table yeah that locks the door yeah but you see the reflex of the representation is a set of reflexes all tied together and it includes the feeling and the visual appearance and all that right so the the word table ties all that together right it stands in for all of that okay so now you get a sense that this is going to be solid you see which may be mistaken it may be right now see you get the fact that the mind starts to attribute various qualities to the table according to you know partly the way things have gone in the past and and partly by what is observed now so for example we've gone into this many times if you have a television set you see a telephone and it rings there's a ringing noise then your mind attributes it to the telephone in the television image it seems to be coming from there right that's how you see it and yet uh if nobody answers the phone in the image you again can say that it may be coming from the next room and then you will see it differently right so the the sense of it's being here inside the television set or in the next room comes from the way the thought is working see so thought the set of reflexes can attribute and create that feeling that it is there as in the form that's attributed right you see that that's all part of the process and uh yeah it makes some sense to make some difference between knowledge in the past sense and knowing that knowing requires being open and seeing what's happening now right right but as you said about einstein for example that he was knowing things with his body yeah different ways so it isn't just a series of images coming by in some program sequence it can be a an extension of being present which is a form of knowing not just a series of ideas floating by an observer yeah well i think you see you could say that as you get a feeling contact with the table right so einstein got a feeling contact with the scientific ideas which he was working with which was part of his thought provided a different kind of barometer a richer sort of barometer yeah but the thought related to death well that yes we could but perhaps we should discuss it later but uh the uh um see it's very hard to get any real contact with that because you have nothing too connected with right so therefore it's very hard to get it straight you see perhaps we'll try to bring it up later uh-huh so anyway that you have all this representation and which includes all of that including the feeling contact and the visual uh sense and the sound and the word and everything else so uh all the different meanings and then you know what you see there's a nice example say suppose you see a rainbow now it seems to be an object out there so colored arcs right that's the way you experience it right but according to his physics what there's no rainbow out there in fact if you tried to assume it was an object and walked toward it would not be found when you got there right so in fact physics says that the ground of the rainbow is really there's a bunch of raindrops falling and there's light reflecting off and it reaches your eye in a certain way everybody it reaches everybody's eye in a rather similar way so everybody agrees there's a rainbow but it doesn't mean there's a rainbow right you see there what actually is there at least closer to what is actually there is falling rain and light refracting a process this is true for the table well the difference is that if you walk toward the table and you will touch it coherently if you walk toward the rainbow you will not so the rainbow is not a coherent object right it's an image having no um oh it's like the laser image of the ship you see it doesn't have the whole being that the ship has so the rainbow does not have being as a bull it has being has been following a process of pulling rain and light refracting so the romantic aspect is is dissolved what they're romantic aspect of poetic about their anger well physicist physics dissolves that yes but you see uh uh but the the the point is that that that example is very interesting because it shows the way the thing works you see that the represent the rainbow is a representation it's not produced it would probably be produced in people even before words but you don't have to have words to have representations you see so as we've just gone into so the rainbow is a representation which however it does not cohere with what it it's supposed to represent you see there seems to be a correspondence though because if you look at the table through a very powerful microscope and yeah in a sense get closer and closer to the table just like you get closer and closer to the rainbow well you never get closer to the rainbow you see it it will move it's weird there might be some use in pushing that though because the table is so real to me in my feeling but actually even if i go up and knock on it or put a cup on it finally all that i have is some sort of sensations and the tableness of it is only in the stepping back and holding something in my mind yeah the tableness is built from your mind you see right out of a whole set of reflexes all tied together right now the same is true of everything but see so you could say that from that point of view science has said things come into the nervous system and but in the brain they are built somehow into this sense of the reality of the world right and now the point is does this reality cohere in our experience right if the reality that is so formed does not cohere then we have to change it right but if you say that it's a kind of representation of reality but uh that the brain is forming a representation which is able to guide you properly you see but that sense of the reality of objects and things is constructed it's clear that uh the uh [Music] psychologists like piaget claim that very young children may not have the notion of the reality of a permanent object or they may feel that it sort of come just vanishes and something else comes up and that or us the unity of all the objects you see for example he cites the case of some child of a couple of years old who thought that the father who appeared at the dinner table was different from the father in the office there were two people he later learned there one you see so that's part of the thing you see the one in the minute you see it's another abstract concept that you have to get straight right and informing the representations you see your representation puts certain things as one certain things as many certain things as necessary contingent general particularly said it all organizes it right and the meaning is very different according to how it's put you see so that child was seeing two fathers uh and then he learned there was only one and that uh uh therefore he saw one right so uh and that that was more perhaps he discovered the incoherence in seeing two you see so therefore we have to say that representations can be correct up to a point you see appearances can be correct up to a point or not or they may be illusory that distinction is very important the fact that the brain constructs appearances is not the whole story but the fact that certain some of them are correct is crucial that they're correct up to a point yeah so yeah would you say then that the world that we see is just the description no the description is writing it down literally it means you know the way we put it in words the word the world we see is far more than those words but it is it is organized through a representation into which those words have had a big effect right see for example see the way we talk about things the way we think about things affects how we see them whether we see two or one is a crucial point for example if you have printed words which are a bit too far away to be seen if somebody tells you what the words are you actually see them right there are many examples of that kind you see how the word affects what you see so another thought right so this is the point i want to make that thought is affecting what you see in other words the representation enters into the perception sometimes you know it's a representation like when you draw a diagram right you'll have a picture but then the representation enters directly into the perception and you may miss the fact that it is coming from thought like the representation of an enemy it goes into the perception of that person as the enemy you know as stupid or as whatever right the idiot i see the kaleidoscope from the magnifying glass what's that well i mean that thought is a mediation system to be aware of things that are not now or not present yes but it's projected into what is now unpresent and that projection may be a good guide you see it may be an accurate approximate way approximately not right otherwise it's important to actually project it in to serve as to be useful in what you're doing because another way to be present to what's not now and not present well maybe but you see this is it's important to have this that to see this table as a table not to say this is just a representation you see when you're going to act toward it you have to sort of act toward it as something that is present right so but a lot of it is projected into what is present but you act toward that too right the only point being that if it's not coherent you change it you see so therefore it's crucial to have this that the perception does affect that the representation affects the perception that's crucial but it's also a source of illusion if we once lose track of the fact that that is happening doesn't anything have multiple representations well many things have yes there's anything that doesn't well i shouldn't think so you say you could represent things in many many ways yeah thought is unlimited representation oh yeah yeah rather than the representation yielding some deeper sense of significance which would have more utility than the lock on the particular yeah well we get locked on a particular one because it may include reflexes that give rise to good chemical states of the endorphins or something or other reasons are the the lack of absolute necessity or you see there are various factors which can lock this thing so that you can't work to let it change in the way that's called for when you see incoherent when there's incoherence and you see that that's the way that illusion and mistakes arise you see and so on and mistakes that you don't correct did you say thought is unlimited is limited in what it can grasp each thought is limited but there's no limit to how far you could extend thoughts saying that now we can grasp this tomorrow we could grasp more we could go on indefinitely but does not grasp the whole right it's quite crucial that we jumped with representation then why it's quite crucial that we checked those representations you see what's missing is we have to be able to see that thought is actually participating in perception you see one of the assumptions thought has become comes to make is that certain kinds of thought don't participate they only tell you the way things are perhaps they represent the way things are right so but and the other now the point is that thought actually participates not only in the fact that we made the world according to thought our social world and so on but also because it participates in the world that we see right either correctly or incorrectly and now not but thought does not seem to know that it is doing this therefore that's a crucial mistake you see is that clear that that mistake can be very dangerous well my it's my experience of my representation is my experience of reality yes yeah the experience of reality includes the projection of representations into what you see right it's not entirely that because you have to take into account if it doesn't if your mind is working right the represent the whole thing is incoherent then it loses its hold and you begin to change is that clear so it's vital that we see the whole thing even beyond the personal yeah you can look at the media for example they can make and go to war and without it are full of representations which are presented as uh you know as perceptions right in fact now they have even docudramas you see they're doing it directly you see they they put something in the form of a documentary which is only a drama you see you give an example of a case where representation affects experience and we can see that easily well they're great you see uh there are a lot of examples in the sense that if you represent somebody as nasty and unpleasant you see very often cartoonists represent certain people as nasty and unpleasant but say the nazis would represent the jews in a certain way in their cartoons and then soon people were seeing them that way right but i mean more like from our everyday experience where we could see how it works i mean is there anything in our sort of tangible experience where we actually see how they work you see this is what we're trying to get to you know this this is a very subtle question to actually see this thing happening is something the human race doesn't do usually i i thought it would be easier if we could if there would be even a single example maybe there is not there are a lot of examples of how representation affects perception i gave you the example there are hundreds of examples of that time where if you have the letter indistinct and you state what it is you see it that way yeah when there are ambiguous figures then you say it's this way you see it that way you see when the figure is unambiguous then you can't easily see it right but in an ambiguous situation it becomes clear that the way you're thinking is affecting the way you see now you're suggesting that we may think that that's an anomaly an exception but you are suggesting no that's the general case yeah i'm saying that that's the way perception works we should yes let's try to have a break very soon but uh sum it up here that it's how perception works that it is highly affected by thought right and by representation and by imagination and so on and in fact you'll see that that's quite inevitable now uh but we do not seem to see this happening see i could say that there are people who say that in very early times people had a more participatory kind of thought they would think that they were participating in some of the things they saw like saying they participated in the totem of the tribal in nature and the whole nature and the eskimos apparently had a belief that they could that there was a there were many many seals but they were all manifestations of the one seal the spirit of the seal we could say that is the one seal was manifesting so they could pray to the spirit of the seal to manifest so they could have something to eat right now if you thought all seals were individuals that prayer would be ridiculous because you're asking this seal to come up and just be eaten you see this individual seal but to the spirit of the seal well of course i'll just manifest and i'm still here and they say i think they looked at the buffalo that way and so on so the uh therefore they felt they were participating in that and in some way they were more keenly aware of the participation of their thought but in another way they were perhaps overdoing it in the sense they were supposing the the reality of some of the things which were being projected by the thought right in a way that may not have been right entirely and then we to we developed instead a more objective kind of thought which said we we want to have a thought about something where we don't participate where we just think about it and know just what it is right [Music] exactly and that made possible science and things like that technology and now but that went too far because we began to apply that objective thought universally and said it applies inside outside to everything and then we say there's no participation whatsoever by thought right now that's wrong because clearly that i've pointed out a great deal of participation and how it creates the world and now we're seeing also it clearly participates in perception and that is the crucial form of participation so you see thought participates in everything but our ideal of objective thought is absolute non-participation and just simply telling you the way things are and doing nothing whatsoever right now in some areas that's a good approximation but we have supposed that to be the universal situation our thought hasn't is that so we could say now that here is one of the questions that thought where thought is going wrong this could be said to be part very close to the fundamental flaw in the process same way that thought is doing this thing and doesn't realize it's doing it is that clear what the question is this might sound so once it's divided that can't be the whole but yes but but also thought can't be the whole because it's just a representation an abstraction right and thought may divide in the sense of distinguish no marking apart or it may divide in the sense of separating and tacitly thought has made a separation rather than a mark right see we ought to just make a dotted line between thought and perception right but thought has made a solid line and says thought as one side perception is on the other and that line has this physiological component and so the line is experienced is real yes the separation is experienced as real the division because whatever thought rep that's the representation of thought that becomes the perception of the situation right you're saying that thought by setting boundaries is creating the separation all the time it's creating the sense of separation and then the action flowing from that creates breaks things up right is that clear that we'll have to discuss this some more but see that this is really getting close to the crucial difficulty with thought that it does not keep track of what it's doing right but that has been the difficulty all along so the representation of thought now thought is making a representation and presented as a perception yes but that's a deception no it's not necessarily one because it may be necessary for practical purposes to see this table as a table if you're approaching and driving a car you're having time to go through all those thoughts you must directly move toward the what you see which includes a lot of thought right right the meaning of what you see is included in how you see it right is that clear so it is a necessary feature of the whole system and yet if thought knew it was doing this then it would be all right the deception consists in the fact that thought doesn't know it's doing it it seems that i'm doing it but sorry doing it yeah thought is doing or it doesn't even know what's happening you see it says that's perception i'm thought right i'm just telling you the way things are i see what way things are and i just tell you what separation between me and what's happening yeah that's right separation which is false because the way i think is affecting what i see so that perception that perception the thought that the me is one and there is no separation well i don't think we've got to the me yet but we're just trying to say there's a mistake in thought even before we raise the question of me right now that mistaken thought will allow this false notion of the me to develop yes i think we should break 15 minutes at most right very exactly and so we were talking about the thought affecting perception you know not knowing it does so this and this may make a crucial mistake because we may take the thought the way thought enters perception as a fact and we think more on the basis of that so-called fact we can get into a trap like we may say you know people of that kind of no good i can see they're no good right and so on and so on and the uh so the that requires some attention that this uh see this question of thought entering perception now it will not only do so outwardly but also inwardly and we'll have to see the serious consequences of that when we try to imagine perceiving ourselves and distinguishing you know disentangling that from our thoughts about ourselves so uh okay now is that uh maybe you want to ask one or two more questions and i'm a little confused about something but i i have a feeling it's certainly not what i've heard you talked earlier the last session about how deceptive thought can be very deceptive then you also talked to the end of the last session about uh how unaware thought can be somehow rather on one hand i get the feeling of a very coy and conniving though i say you're proud i'm a little confused i wouldn't say thought as in a way thought it was very cunning but it's not really very rare what it's doing and the same cunning also is what solves practical problems but the uh if we think of it as a set of reflexes which has a tremendous adaptability and they can find all sorts of ways of making you feel better for example it feels around it it's you know it probes it it finds ways which may look extremely ingenious when but in fact it doesn't mean that it has been really a vicious spirit they're trying to do wrong you know do you win or something there is a kind of peaceful thinking it supports the weakness of the memory the forgetfulness of certain details is what actually happens but i meant that's part of the deception may include the fact that thought makes you forget you see thought is able to make you insensitive to you see it can all the reflexes which might make you sleepy or not inattentive or forgetful or thought can take command of them and operate them right it can change see for example i suppose one viewers you can be a bit on serotonin they make you too too much a chemical called serotonin could make you somewhat too a bit dopey i suppose so thought might find a way to liberate serotonin right by certain thoughts could find a way you know thought can sort of probe around it's one system all of it that's the crucial point that it's all thought is all one and all those movements are all one system but the system even enters perception and the uh affects perception so uh uh that thought could make you feel sleepy thought could make you feel very excited or you know thought could make the mind dart so it won't stay with the point right saying quick something else is important you know uh you know it can do all sorts of tricks to try to keep your mind off a point that might that thought supposes might be disturbing in the end you think it's just doing it for to help you without it's not really doing it any for any other reason but it's doing that the system yes it's doing what it's supposed to do to try to help but it's very it's extremely confused about what it's doing so it does harm right right it doesn't seem that thought has the whole system's well-being uh as its aim or goal it seems that it's uh much more a particular pleasure or sensation yeah but that's the way thought conceives the the key feature of the whole system saying getting that pleasure or pain you see originally thought was set up to try to protect you and help you and after a while it runs on its own and it's just running i don't think you should think it's trying to do anything it's just anymore that your knee jerk is trying to do anything i'm not quite clear about that because that just to put a moral judgment to say it's wrong i think that's different but we can see that in many cases at least thought is trying to uh achieve a certain objective yes which it has pleasure satisfaction whatever that is well i don't know that that's where you interpret it but it may not be doing that you see let's try to think that suppose that suddenly the endorphins have been removed from the pain nerves and the brain is objecting very strongly and thought merely reacts or it responds you know with reflexes aimed at uh doing whatever will release that right will reduce that right which is what it does all the time anyway so it's more of a mechanical view than we would like to expect yeah i fancy these reflexes are relatively mechanical and say though the system as a whole so though the brain as a whole is not mechanical it can get caught into a system of reflexes that looks like a machine it doesn't do it security the brain demands security yes that's right but you see when faced with some sort of disturbance the brain gets agitated and thought process comes in with reflexes to try to diminish the agitation so there's nothing special about it it just goes on you see now as if it were a machine though it is not a machine after the fact we call it these things we say that it is trying to do something or that it's mechanical but that's only a description after the fact and in fact it's not merely what is going on yeah in effect its behavior can be represented as mechanical but only up to a point right there i don't hold yours first i would like to know you could clarify for me or what will you understand by psychic energy and thought and the connection between both of them well it's hard at this point to do that i mean see thought will will liberate through the reflexes all sorts of energies right so thought is in command as it were of a whole range of energies which in turn affect thought now as a certain level these energies are not the most subtle energies you know of the unconditioned but there are a great range of energies there could you it's uh isn't isn't thought primarily dominated by conditioning for the say 95 99 but we do have a small percentage there where we have the opportunity to uh see things differently and then the new conditioning comes out out of that when there is a change yes is that approximately right that's right yes that the thought has if you think that the thought works by conditioning and it has to get conditioned you see you need conditioning right to learn a language to learn how to write or to do all sorts of things and then when it gets too rigid it won't change when it should change but there may be some areas where it's not that rigid it could change and then there it can make new uh you can get something new a new set of reflexes but there's a window of opportunity occasionally in which uh yeah we see something that's the reason we occasionally get an insight to change that's right yeah this window may arise in all sorts of fortuitous ways or perhaps not fortuitous but see what we're doing now is i hope creating some kind of window right in other words it's perhaps the uh the unconditioned energy is awakening or something and therefore it can begin to look at this conditioning you see for whatever it's worth i believe i had read somewhere that thought is it frames still frames uh something like 10 to 15 frames per second for whatever it's worth is that does that have any validity i don't know uh i mean that may be somebody's theory i don't know much about it see it could be in her pr you know it doesn't sound quite right can we say that thought is a peacemaker between the brain demand and the senses demand and it gives to both it's trying to but in fact it stirs it up you say because it's not doing it intelligently it thinks it's doing it yeah that's right and you had a question back then yeah when there's the agitation of the disappearance of the engulfing adaptation of the brain to to get that state back what what are the other possibilities i didn't get that well you say that when you don't have a feeling of well-being or the endorphins unfair anymore the brain becomes agitated and searches for that thought thought begins to try to solve that you see now so what are the other options aside from thought solving it well you see if thought didn't do anything it might be there was another solution would come the agitation might just disappear you see it may be that you know stay with the fact that there are no endorphins for a little while and soon it'll come to a new equilibrium right you see there may be no real problem at all except the thought says quick i must do something that's condition yeah so it's different from the center so why don't we go to system yeah yeah yeah we're going to go into that tomorrow yeah right well now i went from a few points then um you see so we have this let me say a few more points and that they have this question that thought of affects perception right and this this will be very crucial for the thought and the thinker tomorrow uh because the question arises you know how are we going to uh or the observer in the observed or whatever how are we going if thought affects what we perceive how we're going to separate the two and and so on now uh the uh now but there is one point i would like to bring up now which is related to that which is would it be possible for thought see i'm going to say thought is a movement you see every reflex is a movement really see is that clear it moves from one thing to another it may move the body or the chemistry or just simply the image or something so when a happens then b follows it's a movement now uh so all these reflexes are interconnected in one system and the suggestion is that they're not really all that different one thought is more subtle the intellectual part but they're really basically similar in structure so therefore uh we should think of thought as a part of the bodily movement at least explore that possibility and because our culture has led us to believe that thought and bodily movement are really two totally different spheres and not connected you know basically and uh maybe they are not you see now uh the their evidence is that they are not that thought is intimately connected with the whole system and the uh now we have with the body a very interesting situation called proprioception means self-perception you see if you move your any part of your body you know that you have moved it it resulted from your intention you know that immediately without time without an observer you know without having to think right that if you don't know if you can't tell that then in a very bad way you see uh the uh there are people who have lost it and they don't know i can't move you've seen it but uh the uh because you must be able to distinguish between a movement that you have created and one that occurred independently now the uh i've often cited this case of a woman who woke up in the middle of the night and when the light was turned on you know she was found to be hitting herself when she stopped but what happened was she had a stroke which damaged her sensory nerves which would tell her what she was doing but not the motor nerves or she could still do it so she may have touched herself but since she wasn't being informed that that was her therefore it was assumed right away it was something else an attack right and the more she defended the verse the attack got right so and then when the light was turned on the proprioception was reestablished she could then see with her eye what she was doing so the uh now uh there is also the case which was published of a woman who somehow lost proprioception overnight and she couldn't move her body and she had to be watching every movement and learned very skillfully to watch and somehow to get along and that never changed apparently but everyone knows what happened some damage somewhere but the uh uh so uh now this quality of proprioception you see it is there for the body right and one of the things is to see the relation between the intention to move and the movement right to see immediately that relation to be aware of it man and you see this intention to move we're usually not very aware of it but we can be you see if somebody wants to make his movements more accurate he'll find his intention is not that well defined he doesn't move the way he hopes right he has to learn as somebody who wants to be play the piano has to learn that relation better right so his fingers will do what he wants to do and the uh uh now so the a greater quality of proprioception occurs in that regard right now the uh uh and this intention see the essence of the movement may be in the intention to move you see that uh that it unfolds into the whole movement so like for example that we knew this man who was had a degenerative disease and was unable to move at all we could barely talk and yet he taught movement in a university so the question is how could he do it and you could guess that somehow being very intelligent and unable to move he was much more aware of the intention than we are because we focus our energy our attention on the result so see getting the intention right may be very crucial to make the movement right see so uh anyway uh there is some relation between the intention to move in the movement and something in between which you're vaguely aware of right and the uh and that is proprioception now then but if we say thought as a reflex you know like any other muscular reflex but just a lot more subtle and more complex and changeable or something then we ought to be able to be proprioceptive with thought right thought should be able to perceive its own movement or be aware of its own movement in the process of thought there should be awareness of that movement so that if there's the intention to think and if that thinking produces a result which is we can be aware of how it produces a result outside by being more attentive and then maybe we could even be aware of how it affects perception we should buy that immediately you see it has to be immediate or else it will we will never get it's clear right if there's any time while in there then see if you took time to be aware of this then he would never be able to move right yeah so the um is that proprioception possible and raising that question is it clear what the question means you say and be aware is that the proper way to say it or would you say there was an awareness there may be an awareness and then after the fact some thought being be made about all right let's say what can the movement of the body be aware of its own of itself proprioceptor where you could ask that question right the movement of the body includes all that goes with it i mean any the awareness and everything see a movement without awareness is quite different from a movement with so could we say can the movement of thought be aware of itself can you distinguish that from self-consciousness because yeah because when you move the body and they're aware but you're not self-conscious you see if you were you wouldn't be it wouldn't work see you may be very busy thinking about something else and you're aware that you have moved this right is that clear what i mean you know you directly take that into account whatever you're doing that i have produced that movement and you act accordingly is that like going down the steps you don't think like you yeah yeah that would be more like i said if you're walking down the steps well suppose you're walking down the steps and or wherever you're walking and and you push on something and it moves you see it and you moved it but that's different from saying it suddenly moved by itself now you're aware of that you don't have to be thinking about yourself [Music] you know that sort of awareness is necessary for you to be able to walk properly so that that whole movement is somehow aware of the relation between the intention and the result because it can say that as a result of my my intention to move and this is not this is came from somewhere else but it doesn't put that in words or go through a complicated analysis or anything it's somehow directly aware and then all the reflexes can behave accordingly that clear see now suppose thought could do that i've given an argument saying why shouldn't it do it if thought is just an extension of all those body reflexes uh that uh uh maybe thought could do it and then thought could be aware of what it's doing you see which is the basic trouble with thought that it participates and is not aware of how it is participating i gotta go back to the physical i don't get it because then i can't go on i don't know what this woman meant by self-conscious but yeah um i wouldn't put the self into it but i actually have to be with that movement at that moment or or with a sensation yeah but you're not aware of yourself thinking and being separate from the movement now you say when you say i begin thinking about myself you begin to yeah i can get into that sort of thing now therefore uh now i'm saying see if thought tried to look at itself in the usual way and separate itself from itself then it couldn't do it you see but suppose thought without separating itself in any way would just be aware that it is moving and you're seeing various things are happening including things happening outside and things happening inside not only feelings and things like that but also perceptions are being affected and so on that this change of perception came through thought i immediately see that that change of perception came because the object actually changed it's important because i may say you suddenly became angry at me i perceive that that may be what happened because of what you did but maybe i suddenly thought of something which made me see you as angry right like saying somebody says that's paranoia you see the boss i'm thinking the boss is walking along with the non-descript look on his face right and i'm saying maybe he's unhappy and for hounding him maybe he's thinking he's going to fire me right so i see him as the one who is ready to fire me right so that came from my perception being affected by thought right on the other hand maybe that's what's actually happening the distinction is very important right but you may help to make it happen by seeing it wrongly because you will behave in a way which will induce him to want to do it and see so you see that getting see paranoia is a case where people don't get that straight at all right now that we're usually able to get some of those questions straight saying okay that's just my imagination but very often we don't now then paranoia is a case where it gets much harder so therefore proprioception has failed still more you see you can't tell the difference between what he's doing what what he's done and what has happened independently he sees threats everywhere which may be his own thoughts um i don't know much about it i'm just saying it's just simply that people see of projecting their fears and so on into into their perceptions all the time right and people are doing it anyway but paranoia gets exaggerated right and beyond what people usually do so and they become unable to function i suppose when something happens like a boss is walking down the hall and the fellow has a particular expression on his face that may be just a perceptual fact but any kind of interpretation on that has to be questioned yes but the difficulty is that you don't see it as an especially if you're paranoid you don't see this interpretation you see the thought that you had the interpretation that you had which is a representation of a boss who is ready to fire you becomes the perception of a boss who is ready to fire you right i'm not even talking about the paranoia because i think we all we all do it but different degrees you see that's merely paranoia is merely exaggeration of the usual behavior it's a kind of leprosy and thought well it goes too far you know yesterday you talked about the muscles as if it was some proprioception a problem appropriately so it is in a way the muscles the the nerves which would tell the muscles what they are doing have been damaged and you don't feel the pain you should feel when you over exert and therefore you pull the whole the nose out of joint you pull everything out of the joint and destroy you'll pull your fingers off carrying that back does thought have a problem was like leprosy yeah well it's a similar problem in a sense that that is a problem of lack of bodily for at the bodily level lack of proprioception of the force of the muscles right and you're not being informed properly of the force you're using and then when you see the limbs coming off the fingers coming up you say my god the fingers are coming off by themselves you see but you're actually pulling them off without noticing it doesn't paranoia have qualities like that of course it does because it would produce reactions that would you see if somebody treats somebody as an enemy or as a threat then it will become visible and he may become frightened and respond right are all representations within the system all represented yes the system produces representations there wouldn't be a form of representation of another dimension well there might be but i'm saying i don't know you see insofar as they're based on the past they're in the system yeah the way we function now the brain is not proprioceptive right well it is in many ways but not in this way not in thought there's no proprioception in the box yeah right so you're suggesting that it may be possible to function in a mode that acts as if there were in fact where there would be proprioception yeah i'm saying i don't see from the argument i've given i don't see why i should distinguish what goes on in the brain from what goes on anywhere in the body or what goes on in thought from what goes on with the muscles or with the anywhere anything like that they're all similar basically similar though different in many ways right so now elementary but uh the lack of proprioception as we now know it means that i cannot distinguish whether an image is based on that which is going on what i think is going on yes that's right you see we should be able to say i see what is going on i have formed inferences i distinguish my inferences from what i see i then check my inferences against what i see later but but my seeing is not confused with the inferences now that would be clear thinking common sense clear thinking but now that becomes that stop that's blocked by the fact that some of the things i see are actually been projected into their by my thought or my representations and then when i start thinking about them i'm thinking about them wrongly you see there are conclusions as they say in the court their conclusions are not facts right but they look like facts and sometimes they are terrifying so yeah so you seem that usually we think that that what we perceive is terrifying but it may be actually that the way we perceive is terrifying yes well we are projecting terrible things you see when you're dreaming you may project terrible things into the dream right it's the same sort of thing that there you what you perceive may be entirely due to thought right but it looks it's quite convincing as a perception right i mean that if we had proprioception then probably the first thing we would notice that there is something terrifying going on actually and that's the way we see things i mean the way the thought is working is is dangerous or yeah perhaps if there were proprioception we wouldn't go on with this insane way of proceeding you see uh the in order for it to occur one would have to have no censoring of whatever came up oh yes and that's very painful and difficult well that's part of the thought process which tells you that it's painful and difficult you see the pain may come from the same system which is causing all the rest of the trouble see the thought process says that's going to be very painful and difficult and therefore you will feel it just as you feel the reality of the table right so are you saying then that the human species doesn't know what it does and doesn't know how it perceives we absolutely don't know most of the time and there must be another way of seeing that yes well i see the first thing is the thought itself must change in some way you see i would like to give a sort of an image or an analogy that see i wanted to say thought is takes itself as a very big but maybe it's just the ripple on the stream and the stream is the stream of consciousness right so the the stream of consciousness has to be aware of itself but that's not no great thing because consciousness is just about to be aware so the therefore but can the stream of consciousness be aware of this ripple that it has produced by proprioceptively as it's aware of how it moved the body right so that's somehow addressing this difficulty i've been having about understanding thought being aware of itself it seems to make perfect sense when you describe it but i have some notion that thought being memory can only describe it can't be aware that thought is also more than memory is that's what i mean so you use the phrase the movement of thought being awareness yeah so now we're getting into the movement i see memory is more than memory too because memory is a set of reflexes it's a movement right you see what memory actually is is movement but memory is a just mirror memory is a representation of something much greater do you see much more the word memory usually represents something as just stored up but memory is a movement in the brain perhaps if memory is a movement then the recording conditioning and assumptions that's a movement too yeah so the aquatic conditioning or recording assumptions taped in the memory so that's a movement that's a movement i would rather not say tape but condition you see then the tape is too mechanical in analogy but conditioning is such that you can think that each time you do it it leaves a little bit of change in the nerve so it builds up a pattern it gets more and more fixed when you say that there's a ripple on the thought it's like the ripple on the surface of the ocean of consciousness that makes it sound as if in principle it should be very simple and easy to see this ripple but instead it may be actually but we don't we're sort of being in this mode of consciousness we are now in this ripple seems to be everything right it appears it is represented as everything and therefore perceived as everything right that might be one of the mistakes that we think it's more difficult than it can actually be it may that may be so easy as we can't count on what thought tells us about how difficult it is thought doesn't know really so it's best to say we don't know how difficult it is right you see if you could be serious about that saying that whatever thought says about this it doesn't really know can you say all over again what you've been saying in a different way what part how far back do i have to go i think appropriate functioning in the uh thought process the thought being aware of itself can you approach that in some different way well i don't quite see uh you see uh thought has now conditioned to the assumption you know to to the representation of itself as in various ways you say saying what that it's different from the body it's uh it's it doesn't affect perception and so it says it's just telling you the way things are and therefore that is the way you perceive how thought works because thought is capable of whatever it represents can be become how you perceive it now outside you have a check if i perceive this this as a cup when it's let's say something else i will soon find out by sensory experience that it's incoherent so perceptions that are mistaken show up as incoherence and we correct them but inside it's much harder because you haven't got any you can't get hold of it right i see thought is going on inside and whatever you think in the whole being is going on inside so if thought presents itself which is inside presumably as it isn't really because it's also the whole world right as uh as separate from perception and just telling you the way things are that thought has this picture of how it works right that it you see how things are you see certain things and thought really tells you more about them right which is the way you know it draws inferences and does nothing and has no effect now that's what thought and therefore that's the way you see it now i say but thought is actually doing more than that it is affecting how you see it okay so there you're saying that the thought body process is one movement yeah okay yeah and also the perception and the sense perception [Music] okay there's awareness which may however be sort of captured in all this system right well okay awareness must be upstream from all of this uh fundamentally yes you see that there is possible there's available an awareness a conscious stream of consciousness which is more fundamental you know which i imaged as being in the in the depths of the ocean you see we see if we say thought is a representation it's a form right a representation is this always a certain form the rainbow is a certain form the letters are a certain form the artist makes a form a representation is always a form right [Music] is that clear but that form then becomes apparently a part of what is right so therefore that the representation everybody can see it is hardly more than a ripple it doesn't have much substance anybody can see that is that but when it sort of fuses with perception then it seems to have all the substance the representation is an abstraction it's a symbol yes it also has this physical component it has but but as a physical thing it's very very tiny you see i mean it's a few bits of ink or something on paper or some little electric current in the brain does not have a structure it has a structure the form has a structure but it has no independent uh substance and has no inherent internal necessity so quick video represented as the surface with the grotesque and there's something you're saying there's something more subtle underneath yeah you take the surface of the ocean all sorts of forms will appear in those waves you see they change this way and that way and the other way they're very very little to hold them right there's very little in it and then you have the depth now then but that those forms however have a meaning right in the mind and the whole thing is following according to that meaning which it has to but the meaning is wrong because one important part of the meaning is wrong because one part is missing namely it should mean that that is only an outward form on the surface but instead it means that's the basic substance of what is are you is there an innuendo in that that there are two kinds of perception one superficial and one of essence well there may be a deeper perception i'm saying a a deeper one which starts from these depths and that there is a perception which is highly affected we said by thought and our ordinary sense perception certainly is generally of that nature though it may perhaps occasionally get out of it but the uh but what we ordinarily take to be perception or at least what thought takes to be perception and which is ordinarily called perception is affected by thought right so we just have to say we only have to worry at this moment about what thought is taking as the source of its information exactly now thought takes sense perception as the source of its information among other things and that it says if that sense perception is just unaffected by thought it's just telling you something then thought will then proceed from there but it may turn out that this has been affected already and therefore a thought is taking something that it has done as a as an independent fact which prevents the depth perception eventually it muddles the brain up so much that it you know prevents almost everything right you see because based on that fact a lot of other things start to happen that apparent fact and the brain muddles up you see you see from that fact going from not going wrong it spreads and it becomes a systemic fault it's present to everything would you say that there's non-perception of the interference of the thought yes there's perception of the interference of thought and there's no thought interfering yeah those are possible states right now you see if let's say that the thought is able to perceive to be aware of its own effects then when it's producing effects that make no sense it would simply stop them you see thought is not malicious just trying to destroy everything but it's just doing whatever it does not apparently according to its own mechanism and the uh so see when when you have proprioception of the body you wouldn't attempt to do this sort of mistake that you would get into if you didn't have it i mean that like this woman got into of attacking herself right but you see when you don't proprioceph thought if i may coin that word then the uh then you may start attacking yourself you hurt yourself you say i'm hurt but then under the impression that the attack has come from outside so what we're saying uh it's not a way of thinking so much as it's a way of perception yes it's some extension of perception right you see that uh i'm saying that perhaps that is a possible such an extension of perception would proprioception of thought um take place not in what we think of this thought but actually in the physical since they are all the same yeah that's actually the case they say since it's all physical it's an extension of the ordinary proprioception into something more subtle but still of the same general nature so that's the point i'm trying to make that this distinction between thought and the physical is one of those we should just draw a dotted line but we have drawn a great big gulf between them you see in our thought and therefore we perceive them that way i wonder if one of the reasons that people ask to have this explained over and over again is that when you say thought being aware of its own movement a proprioception that my my thinking makes an image of what that would be and rather than just listening to what you're saying about thought noticing its activity or the kind of thing it does i start trying to make a percep a description of what it would be like to be aware yeah and the difficulty with that description is that it enters your perception you see it would be all right to describe it if you said this is a speculative description if you said frankly this is a speculative attempt to imagine what it might be but it might not be that at all but instead you just start presenting it it just represented the imagination and very quickly it spreads over and becomes apparently some kind of reality which misleads you see in other words that very process is part of the thing of the system fault in the system the thing we just described it's just another form of default all right i just i'm not able to make much of a description and i say i can't do this yeah but then that answers your perception as impossible and you will feel you perceive a block right yeah so i'm saying in some way it seems like that i don't hear the rest of i don't hear the simplicity of what you say well if it's impossible it's not even necessary to listen right you see i mean you don't have to take it seriously at all right you see the rest follows right so we're not going to get out of the situation where our representations or thinking have an effect but rather to to be more aware of what's happening and also to describe it correctly when we do see what's happening because if we see what's happening and describe it wrongly we will be misinforming the the system about what it's doing right and the system will then get more confused see all the information that the system has about itself affects what it does the uh yeah so it's important to grasp this you see that grasping it intellectually perhaps a little bit beyond would be the first step right because this will help clear away this a lot of the confusion so as long as you're tacitly accepting all the other ideas about this process you're going to see it that way and you will never get into it you see what i mean so it's very important to draw in correct inferences about thought you see these are not mere idol speculations but rather we have been observing and then drawing inferences and then trying to test them as far as we can see whether we feel they're reasonable or and this this is just a kind of extension of common sense you see when it's used properly that it's the way you proceed right to you observe something you draw inferences from it you then look again and see whether your inferences are correct and so on and whether they're coherent and and so on so this is the sort of way we're going now we're proceeding by inference but this as we've said before is not enough right because it will still not get rid of the reflexes right but it is a necessary step right it is a useful step there whether it's necessary i can't say but i think that it will the important step uh to be able to clear up some of this confusion which has been in the previous set of assumptions and ideas that the system has about itself would it be possible for a person to describe the proprioceptive process that we're pointing at as it actually functions well perhaps a little later you see in other words there could arise a correct description as far as i can see you see anything you have seen might be given a correct description but if you haven't yet seen it then it becomes fanciful and it starts entering the other way it affects your perception as if you had seen it the question seems to be that how are you going to bring how are we going to bring forward that subtle gap so we can start dissipating this growth abnormality of thought that doesn't see itself working and operating yes well let's see it this question how is it it can be taken to be what is the system or how will the system do it you see the yeah well see the first thing is we're saying for the time being you can consider the question but you see the attempt to regard this as solving a problem is going to get in the way isn't it yes you see now somehow we have to have another approach you see that that problem-solving attitude is okay in a certain area where the system works right if thought is from the past experiences and projected to the future then will it be the requiring the present we can see these thought process working well that may well be but then you have the question of how we get into the present you see why aren't we in the present right you see i think we obviously we must be in the present where else could we be but why don't we see this you see i see we we don't live in the pa some people are said to live in the past but not really you don't address letters to them into the past it's only a figure of speech you see that the the question is why are we not seeing that we live in the present you see if it is in fact true they say that's the way the system is working we'll have to it will require that we go into the question of time which is part of the system also contains the whole system of time right as well as the system of the self and the observer and the observer you see there are other features of this system that require going into right uh and the you know but i think we've begun to see enough of it to see that there might be a way out you see it i'm saying not to say there is but there might be uh now that requires that we see the thought process as no one whole with the whole physical system and chemical and all that so is proprioception proprioception something different from representing yes clearly when you have proprioception of the arm you don't represent the arm to yourself in any way right you're just simply are directly aware you know you're not thinking representing the arm and how it's moving but is anything perceiving anything else no you see i'm trying to say that we have also part of our language which says that if anything is perceived there must be something else to perceive it but that may not be so you see that that may be getting in the way right say why can't we say that consciousness the stream of consciousness can be aware of itself you see that we don't need a separate perceiver to perceive but then it would also be hard for this consciousness only to be sort of physical newtonian matter no we're not saying it's just physical antimatter but i said before i think that matter may be unlimited and it's subtlety see in other words that that's part of the trouble with our thought which said you know that matter is very limited and that it's only this or this or this and that which wouldn't be able to do this at all right but then it suggests that we already know everything about matter you see but i think that it's crucial to say we don't know everything about matter right but are we suggesting that there is nature that matter can perceive so may i don't know what perceive we won't not come to that but matter is capable of something far more subtle than than we might think now at the very least it's going to respond to perception in new ways you see for example a new perception might begin to change some of these synapses or you know these things that are rigidly stuck and so on we'll come to that later you said earlier about proprioception that the body obviously has it and thought seems to be lacking it and at the same time that the body and thought processes have a dotted line such that thought at some level it would seem would have to have the movement of proprioception in its nature yeah but something about the for the lack of a better term at the moment amplitude shocks happening so the noise happening in thought is drowning out sensitivity to this movement which is almost necessarily available in the thought yeah something is happening in thought that rejects it or prevents it or resists it or you know it's clear you could guess what's happening that if you could see that you were producing this you might discover that most of the things we are counting on actually are just nothing is they're produced by thought right you know like the self and the society and so on and so on when when you when we perceive when we perceive with proprioception we are perceiving directly foreign the movement the movement as it is is somehow perceiving itself right yeah we perceive without proposition we are proceeding from memory well yes from the reflexes of memory right so there's a possibility of something more direct yeah yeah and memory is not adequate for perceiving the movement of thought i mean that seems clear because you know that memory will never perceive the immediate direct movement of thought it seems to me i don't know when i think about you know if i can become aware start to become more aware of thought it seems to me like i've seen a lot of my friends that are interested in this and it seems like they become more and more muddled and theoretical and sort of inhibited and you know and start to lose some sort of common sense almost in in dealing with life become so caught up in trying to be aware of themselves that it makes me cautious like oh yeah i'm gonna start getting all muddled and anxious and and stop living because i'm so worried about about being aware of myself yeah well you see i'm not suggesting that you do that you see that the uh the first point is uh if you just look at yourself without understanding the questions we've been raising you will be looking at something that you have invented by thought right you will get modeled inevitably i'm trying to say i'm explaining why you do get muddled when you just simply engage in introspection because whatever you see has been produced by thought and apparently it's presented as perception so therefore you're saying what you're seeing is just a lot of forms and clouds and you know what are the wisps and so on so you don't strike me as muddled at all and i'm just trying to understand you know what it is but you have an assumption that whoever looks at this is going to get muddled you see we have which is an assumption of necessity i'm just trying to understand what it is that determines if you get muddled or not yeah yeah but i mean the fact that you raised the question suggests to me that there's a sort of an assumption underneath it you see that you see it whatever happens often we'll all see that's the way we build these assumptions whatever happens often we say will happen always it's it's necessary and it's always necessary and we get stuck you see but that's the sort of thing we slip into right right yeah you see so we can now so uh though it may happen often or very frequently or so and so see once again we have to say we don't know everything about it whenever we can't say it happens always now that's the first point then the second point is that uh we've explained that if you don't look into these questions such as proprioception and some of the others you're surely going to get muddled i mean from the explanation i've given it becomes inevitable that exactly the experience you described is going to happen right so it explains your experience the third point is that if we don't look into it's not as if we don't look into this everything is going to be all right we are then going to have this model going on in the world which i described last night which will lead ultimately to heaven knows what right and even in a short time we don't even know what it's going to do it could lead to some pretty disastrous things so it's not as if you could say well leave this alone and everything is going to be all right it's you know we're going to be in nice common sense because common sense has broken down in the face of this you see it's not that common sense is wrong but you cannot carry out common sense when all this is going on you see so the um so i would say you have to look at it very carefully and think carefully you see and that um it's true that there are all the dangers you say but they're also dangerous and not doing it right you know then what will we do with that you see it seems to me that people generally would would be reasonable to say if we have faced all the several alternatives are dangerous but one of them is surely going to fail namely what's going on now almost surely and then as far as we could see and then the other may have some possibility of working right you know because i think that what i've said explains it gives a it's a it gives a a coherent explanation of the various phenomena which are actually happening right that's one of the things it does and all the reasons all the times you find it it isn't working it explains why it isn't working which means we still have a challenge you see we haven't got to the bottom to the end of it what i mean why so what do you mean by that we have still have a challenge well because we have got so far explained all these things but we have not touched these reflexes sufficiently right we have had some effect on them probably but these reflexes will still work right explanation isn't doing it yes the explanation is useful but it is necessary but there isn't something more is needed and you think it's reasonable to assume that the phenomena are there and the explanation is correct well i would just say as far as we can see the up until now the explanation is correct you see that we have gone through this thing by careful observation and inference and testing it all seems reasonable if anybody who thought it wasn't reasonable had a chance to say so and the uh and so far we can't find a hole in it right no it does explain all these cases where all these different difficulties that arise it explains them they're to be expected within this thing and not to be surprised by them i still want to go into the present i have i'm stuck there uh author is conditioned by the past and it projects what's going to happen to the future now if i can be the president not only body i know where all body embodies here now is my mind condition that what has happened or what's going to happen and i'm missing what's happening where if i'm in the present i'm actually not only hearing everything that's going around whether they're playing with the tape or whatever have you but at the same time i'm listening to what you're saying and i'm also listening to how my body feels and it's a it's a one movement that there's no separation i'm i'm one with you yes and being to the state but presence i can i can watch my thoughts yeah and what happens then and by watching my thoughts i release the hold on me because it's like they're moving and i'm watching them i'm not caught up in them right and by watching them i i have i i'm i'm watching them so not them so i can question what they're telling me oh if that can indeed happen was that a description of proprioception functioning well they say what we need is a further insight to make possible this proprioception so what she was describing did not seem to you to contain this appropriate well i don't know whether you say uh uh it may be or may not be you see the uh is there value in the objective of trying to describe it rather than somehow challenging ourselves to have it yes well you can this you see it when you have it you could say something about it now the question is to say something that will actually communicate what it is right and communicate not only to someone else but to yourself to yeah now you see if you say i'm watching then you have to you can say yes but then somebody would ask who's watching you know is there a separation and so on we have to go into all that yeah i was going to ask who's the i that's watching and also it's it seems too neat of the package just to watch it and talk about it but when the emotions kick in then we lose it something else comes out yes well we have to have this thing so powerful and firm that it works when the emotions come in and so on you see uh now that i think that um well the time is getting late now so we might want to discuss this tomorrow you see but uh the uh uh and there there has got to be a change really and to make this thing really work there has got to be a change in the uh in this conditioning you see in this material base of the conditioning right so that it doesn't hold so strongly and i think that that requires an insight you know which you know we could discuss now this watching the ability to watch what's happening in thought may be part may be moving to give rise to some more perception i don't think we can use the word i am watching it is watching because i and thought we are together we we're not separated when i say i'm watching it's like the me and the thought which are one thing it's a kind of a deception that i am watching well perhaps we would try to go into that further you see tomorrow that uh the i mean it is getting late and the um uh i think that we need um you know to really get to the to change this we need a kind of insight that will change this physical situation in this physical chemical situation could you give and i think the best thing would be to do what we were discussing this morning that is to look to try to use these words to bring up the process right and and uh you see not only with anger with say whatever it may be their fear or even pleasure or you know jealousy or what even anger anger too yeah any of any of those right how about a resistance you mean well that's a wonderful um emotion i mean not just an emotion but well yeah if you have resistance then the point is try to find the thought behind the resistance to put the words okay yeah that whatever you'll find the words which are behind that right and which i think that would be a good thing if you want to do an exercise then that would be a good one to try and would you recommend that sharing with somebody or writing yourself a letter well you could write it down for yourself as a diary you see i think if you want you could discuss it with somebody else i mean whatever way you find convenient you

Channel: David Bohm Society

Views: 184

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: David Bohm, Metacognition, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Consciousness, Psychology, Culture, Society, Coherence, Incoherence, Self-Understanding, Self-Inquiry

Id: 5z7LQSan91M

Length: 136min 59sec (8219 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021