Krishnamurti: To read between the lines.
Bohm: Yes, to see what it means. There is also another relevant meaning given in the dictionary which is: mental alertness.
Krishnamurti: Yes, mental alertness.
Bohm: Well, this is very different from what people have in mind when they measure intelligence. Now, considering many of the things you have said, you would say intelligence is not thought. You say thought takes place in the old brain, it is a physical process, electrochemical; it has been amply proved by science that all thought is essentially a physical, chemical process. Then we could say perhaps that intelligence is not of the same order, it is not of the order of time at all.
Krishnamurti: Intelligence.
Bohm: Yes, intelligence reads ‘between the lines’ of thought, sees the meaning of it. There is one more point before we start on this question: if you say thought is physical, then the mind or intelligence or whatever you want to call it, seems different, it is of a different order. Would you say there is a real difference between the physical and intelligence?
Krishnamurti: Yes. Are we saying that thought is matter? Let us put it differently.
Bohm: Matter? I would rather call it a material process.
Krishnamurti: All right; thought is a material process, and what is the relationship between that and intelligence? Is intelligence the product of thought?
Bohm: I think that we can take for granted that it is not.
Krishnamurti: Why do we take it for granted?
Bohm: Simply because thought is mechanical.
Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is right.
Bohm: Intelligence is not.
Krishnamurti: So thought is measurable; intelligence is not. And how does it happen that this intelligence comes into existence? If thought has no relationship with intelligence, then is the cessation of thought the awakening of intelligence? Or is it that intelligence, being independent of thought, not of time, therefore exists always?
Bohm: That raises many difficult questions.
Krishnamurti: I know.
Bohm: I would like to put this in a framework of thinking that one could connect with any scientific views that may exist.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: Either to show that it fits or doesn’t fit. So you say intelligence may be there always.
Krishnamurti: I am asking – is it there always?
Bohm: It may or may not be. Or it is possible that something interferes with intelligence?
Krishnamurti: You see the Hindus have the theory that intelligence, or Brahman, exists always and is covered over by illusion, by matter, by stupidity, by all kinds of mischievous things created by thought. I don’t know if you would go as far as that.
Bohm: Well, yes; we don’t actually see the eternal existence of intelligence.
Krishnamurti: They say peel all this off, that thing is there. So their assumption is that it existed always.
Bohm: There is a difficulty in that, in the word ‘always’.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: Because ‘always’ implies time.
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: And that is just the trouble. Time is thought – I would like to put it that thought is of the order of time – or perhaps it is the other way round – that time is of the order of thought. In other words thought has invented time, and in fact thought is time. The way I see it is, that thought may sweep over the whole of time in one moment; but then thought is always changing without noticing that it is changing physically – for physical reasons, that is.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: Not rational reasons.
Krishnamurti: No.
Bohm: The reasons do not have to do with something total, but they have to do with some physical movement in the brain; therefore…
Krishnamurti: …they depend on environment and all kinds of things.
Bohm: So as thought changes with time its meaning is no longer consistent, it becomes contradictory, it changes in an arbitrary way.
Krishnamurti: Yes, I’ll follow that.
Bohm: Then you begin to think, everything is changing, everything changes, and one realizes ‘I am in time’. When time is extended it becomes vast, the past before I was, farther and further back and also forward in the future, so you begin to say time is the essence of all, time conquers everything. First the child may think, ‘I am eternal; then he begins to understand that he is in time. The general view that we get to is, that time is the essence of existence. This I think is not only the common sense view but also the scientific view. It is very hard to give up such a view because it is an intense conditioning. It is stronger even than the conditioning of the observer and the observed.
Krishnamurti: Yes, quite. Are we saying that thought is of time, thought is measurable, thought can change, modify, expand? And intelligence is of a different quality altogether?
Bohm: Yes, different order, different quality. And I get an interesting impression of this thought with regard to time. If we think of the past and the future, we think of the past as becoming the future; but you can see that that can’t be, that it is just thought. Yet one gets the impression that past and future are present together and there is movement in another way; that the whole pattern is moving.
Krishnamurti: The whole pattern is moving.
Bohm: But I can’t picture how it moves. In some sense it is moving in a perpendicular direction to the direction between past and future. That whole movement – then I begin to think that movement is in another time.
Krishnamurti: Quite, quite.
Bohm: But that gets you back into the paradox.
Krishnamurti: Yes, that is it. Is intelligence out of time and therefore not related to thought, which is a movement of time?
Bohm: But thought must be related to it.
Krishnamurti: Is it? I am asking. I think it is unrelated.
Bohm: Unrelated? But there seems to be some relation in the sense that you distinguish between intelligent thought and unintelligent thought.
Krishnamurti: Yes, but that requires intelligence: to recognise unintelligent thought.
Bohm: But when intelligence reads thought, what is the relationship?
Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly…
Bohm: And does thought respond to intelligence? Doesn’t thought change?
Krishnamurti: Let us be simple. Thought is time. Thought is movement in time. Thought is measurable and thought functions in the field of time, all moving, changing, transforming. Is intelligence within the field of time?
Bohm: Well, we’ve seen that in one sense it can’t be. But the thing is not clear. First of all, thought is mechanical.
Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is clear.
Bohm: Secondly, in some sense there is a movement which is of a different direction.
Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical; being mechanical it can move in different directions and all the rest of it. Is intelligence mechanical? Let’s put it that way.
Bohm: I would like to ask the question, what does mechanicalness mean?
Krishnamurti: All right: repetitive, measurable, comparative.
Bohm: I would say also dependent.
Krishnamurti: Dependent, yes.
Bohm: Intelligence – let us get it clear – intelligence cannot be dependent on conditions for its truth. Nevertheless, it seems that in some sense intelligence doesn’t operate if the brain is not healthy.
Krishnamurti: Obviously.
Bohm: In that sense intelligence seems to depend on the brain.
Krishnamurti: Or is it the quietness of the brain?
Bohm: All right, it depends on the quietness of the brain.
Krishnamurti: Not on the activity of the brain.
Bohm: There is still some relation between intelligence and the brain. We once discussed this question many years ago, when I raised the idea that in physics you could use a measuring instrument in two ways, the positive and the negative. For example, you can measure an electric current by the swing of the needle in the instrument, or you can use the same instrument in what is called the Wheatstone bridge, where the reading you look for is a null reading; a null reading indicates harmony, balance of the two sides of the whole system as it were. So if you are using the instrument negatively, then the non-movement of the instrument is the sign that it is working right. Could we say the brain may have used thought positively to make an image of the world…
Krishnamurti: …which is the function of thought – one of the functions.
Bohm: The other function of thought is negative, which is by its movement to indicate non-harmony.
Krishnamurti: Yes, non-harmony. Let us proceed from there. Is intelligence dependent on the brain – have we come to that point? Or when we use the word ‘dependent’ what do we mean by that?
Bohm: It has several possible meanings. There may be simple mechanical dependence. But there is another kind: that one can’t exist without the other. If I say, ‘I depend on food to exist,’ it doesn’t mean that everything I think is determined by what I eat.
Krishnamurti: Yes, quite.
Bohm: So I propose that intelligence depends for its existence on this brain, which can indicate non-harmony, but the brain does not have anything to do with the content of intelligence.
Krishnamurti: So if the brain is not harmonious, can intelligence function?
Bohm: That is the question.
Krishnamurti: That is what we are saving. It cannot function if the brain is hurt.
Bohm: If the intelligence doesn’t function, is there intelligence? Therefore it seems that intelligence requires the brain in order to exist.
Krishnamurti: But the brain is only an instrument.
Bohm: Which indicates this harmony or disharmony.
Krishnamurti: But it is not the creator of the other.
Bohm: No.
Krishnamurti: Let us go into this slowly.
Bohm: The brain doesn’t create intelligence but it is an instrument which helps intelligence to function. That is it.
Krishnamurti: That’s it. Now if the brain is functioning within the field of time, up and down, negatively, positively, can intelligence operate in that movement of time? Or must that instrument be quiet for the intelligence to operate?
Bohm: Yes. I would put it possibly slightly differently. The quietness of the instrument is the operation of intelligence.
Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right. The two are not separate.
Bohm: They are one and the same. The non-quietness of the instrument is the failure of the intelligence.
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: But I think it would be useful to go back into questions which tend to be raised in the whole of scientific and philosophical thinking. We would ask the question: is there some sense in which intelligence exists independently of matter? You see that some people have thought that mind and matter have some separate kind of existence. This is one question that comes up. It may not be relevant, but I think the question should be considered in order to help to make the mind quiet. The consideration of questions that cannot be clearly answered is one of the things that disturbs the mind.
Krishnamurti: But you see, Sir, when you say, ‘Help to make the mind quiet,’ will thought help the awakening of intelligence? It means that, doesn’t it? Thought and matter and the exercise of thought and the movement of thought, or thought saying to itself, ‘I will be quiet in order to help the awakening of intelligence’. Any movement of thought is time, any movement, because it is measurable, it is functioning positively or negatively, harmoniously, or disharmoniously, in this field. And realizing that thought may say unconsciously, or unknowingly, that ‘I would be quiet in order to have this or that,’ then that is still within the field of time.
Bohm: Yes. It is still projecting.
Krishnamurti: It is projecting it to capture it. So how does this intelligence take place – not how – when does it awaken?
Bohm: Once again the question is in time.
Krishnamurti: That is why I don’t want to use the words ‘when’, ‘how’.
Bohm: You might perhaps say the condition for it to awaken is the non-operation of thought.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: But that is the same as the awakening, it is not merely the condition. You can’t even ask if there are conditions for intelligence to awaken. Even to talk about a condition is a form of thought.
Krishnamurti: Yes. Let us agree, any movement of thought in any direction, vertical, horizontal, in action or non-action, is still in time – any movement of thought.
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: Then what is the relationship of that movement to this intelligence which is not a movement, which is not of time, which is not the product of thought? Where can the two meet?
Bohm: They don’t meet. But there is still a relation.
Krishnamurti: That is what we are trying to find out. Is there any relationship at all, first? One thinks there is a relationship, one hopes there is a relationship, one projects a relationship. Is there a relationship at all?
Bohm: That depends what you mean by relationship.
Krishnamurti: Relationship: being in contact with, recognition, a feeling of being in touch with.
Bohm: Well, the word relationship might mean something else.
Krishnamurti: What other meaning has it?
Bohm: For example there is a parallel, isn’t there? The harmony of the two. That is, two things may be related without contact, but by simply being in harmony.
Krishnamurti: Does harmony mean a movement of both in the same direction?
Bohm: It might also mean in some way keeping in the same order.
Krishnamurti: In the same order: same direction, same depth, same intensity – all that is harmony. But can thought ever be harmonious? – thought as movement, not static thought.
Bohm: I understand. There is that thought which you abstract as static, in geometry let us say, that may have some harmony; but thought as it actually moves is always contradictory.
Krishnamurti: Therefore it has no harmony in itself. But intelligence has harmony in itself.
Bohm: I think I see the source of the confusion. We have the static products of thought that seem to have a certain relative harmony. But that harmony is really the result of intelligence, at least it seems so to me. In mathematics we may get a certain relative harmony of the product of thought, even though the actual movement of thought of a mathematician is not necessarily in harmony, generally won’t be in harmony. Now that harmony which appears in mathematics is the result of intelligence, isn’t it?
Krishnamurti: Proceed, Sir.
Bohm: It is not perfect harmony because every form of mathematics has been proved to have some limit; that is why I call it only relative.
Krishnamurti: Yes. Now, in the movement of thought is there harmony? If there is, then it has relationship with intelligence. If there is no harmony but contradictions and all the rest of it, then thought has no relationship with the other.
Bohm: Then would you say that we could do entirely without thought?
Krishnamurti: I would put it round the other way. Intelligence uses thought.
Bohm: All right. But how can it use something which is disharmonious?
Krishnamurti: Expression, communication, using thought which is contradictory, which is not harmonious, to create things in the world.
Bohm: But still, there must be harmony in some other sense, in what is done with thought, in what we have just described.
Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly in this. Can we first put into words, negatively or positively, what is intelligence, what is not intelligence? Or is that impossible because words are thought, time, measure and so on?
Bohm: We can’t put it in words. We are trying to point. Can we say that thought can function as the pointer to intelligence, and then its contradiction doesn’t matter.
Krishnamurti: That is right. That is right.
Bohm: Because we are not using it for its content, or its meaning, but rather as a pointer which points beyond the domain of time.
Krishnamurti: So thought is a pointer. The content is intelligence.
Bohm: The content which it points to.
Krishnamurti: Yes. Can we put this thing entirely differently? May we say, thought is barren?
Bohm: Yes. When it moves by itself, yes.
Krishnamurti: Which is mechanical and all the rest of it. Thought is a pointer, but without intelligence the pointer has no value.
Bohm: Could we say that intelligence reads the pointer? If the pointer has nobody to see it then the pointer doesn’t point.
Krishnamurti: Quite. So intelligence is necessary. Without it thought has no meaning at all.
Bohm: But could we now say: that if thought is not intelligent it points in a very confused way?
Krishnamurti: Yes, in an irrelevant way.
Bohm: Irrelevant, meaningless and so on. Then with intelligence it begins to point in another way. But then somehow thought and intelligence seem to fuse in a common function.
Krishnamurti: Yes. So we can ask: what is action in relationship to intelligence? Right?
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: What is action in relation to intelligence, and in the carrying out of that action is thought necessary?
Bohm: Yes; well, thought is necessary and this thought points obviously towards matter. But it seems to point both ways – back towards intelligence as well. One of the questions which always comes up is: should we say that intelligence and matter are merely a distinction within the same thing, or are they different? Are they really separate?
Krishnamurti: I think they are separate, they are distinct.
Bohm: They are distinct, but are they actually separate?
Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the word ‘separate’? Not related, not connected, with no common source?
Bohm: Yes. Do they have a common source?
Krishnamurti: That is just it. Thought, matter and intelligence, have they a common source? (Long pause.) I think they have.
Bohm: Otherwise there could be no harmony, of course.
Krishnamurti: But you see thought has conquered the world. You understand? – conquered.
Bohm: Dominates the world.
Krishnamurti: Thought, the intellect, dominates the world. And therefore intelligence has very little place here. When one thing dominates, the other must be subservient.
Bohm: One asks, I don’t know if it is relevant, how that came about.
Krishnamurti: That is fairly simple.
Bohm: What would you say?
Krishnamurti: Thought must have security; it is seeking security in all its movement.
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: But intelligence is not seeking security. It has no security. The idea of security doesn’t exist in intelligence. Intelligence itself is secure, not, ‘It seeks security.’
Bohm: Yes, but how did it come about that intelligence allowed itself to be dominated?
Krishnamurti: Oh, that is fairly clear. Pleasure, comfort, physical security, first of all physical security: security in relationship, security in action, security…
Bohm: But that is the illusion of security.
Krishnamurti: Illusion of security, of course.
Bohm: You could say that thought got out of hand and ceased to allow itself to be orderly, ordered in general by intelligence, or at least to stay in harmony with intelligence, and began to move on its own accord.
Krishnamurti: On its own accord.
Bohm: Seeking security and pleasure and so on.
Krishnamurti: As we were saying the other day when we were talking together, the whole Western world is based on measure; and the Eastern world tried to go beyond that. But they used thought to go beyond it.
Bohm: Tried to anyway.
Krishnamurti: Tried to go beyond the measure by exercising thought; therefore they were caught in thought. Now security, physical security, is necessary and therefore physical existence, physical pleasures, physical well-being became tremendously important.
Bohm: Yes, I was thinking about that a little. If you go back to the animal, then there is instinctive response towards pleasure and towards security: that would be right. But now when thought comes in, it can dazzle the instinct and produce all sorts of glamour, more pleasure, more security. And the instincts are not intelligent enough to deal with the complexity of thought, therefore thought went wrong, because it excited the instincts and the instincts demanded more.
Krishnamurti: So thought really created a world of illusion, miasma, confusion, and put away intelligence.
Bohm: Well, as we said before, that has made the brain very chaotic and noisy and intelligence is the silence of the brain; therefore the noisy brain is not intelligent.
Krishnamurti: The noisy brain is not intelligent, of course!
Bohm: Well that more or less explains the origin of the thing.
Krishnamurti: We are trying to find out what is the relationship, in action, of thought and intelligence. Everything is action or inaction. And what is the relationship of that to intelligence? Thought does produce chaotic action, fragmentary action.
Bohm: When it is not ordered by intelligence.
Krishnamurti: And it is not ordered by intelligence in the way we all live.
Bohm: That is because of what we have just said.
Krishnamurti: It is fragmented activity; it is not an activity of a wholeness. The activity of wholeness is intelligence.
Bohm: Intelligence also has to understand the activity of thought.
Krishnamurti: Yes, we said that.
Bohm: Now would you say that when intelligence understands the activity of thought, then thought is different in its operation?
Krishnamurti: Yes, obviously. That is, if thought has created nationalism as a means of security and then one sees the fallacy of it, the seeing of the fallacy of it is intelligence. Thought then creates a different kind of world in which nationalism doesn’t exist.
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: And also division, war, conflict and all the rest.
Bohm: That is very clear. Intelligence sees the falseness of what is going on. When thought is free of this falseness it is different. Then it begins to be a parallel to intelligence.
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: That is, it begins to carry out the implication of intelligence.
Krishnamurti: Therefore thought has a place.
Bohm: That is very interesting because thought is never actually controlled or dominated by intelligence, thought always moves on its own. But in the light of intelligence, when the falseness is seen, then thought moves parallel or in harmony with intelligence.
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: But there is never anything that forces thought to do anything. That would suggest that intelligence and thought have this common origin or substance, and that they are two ways of calling attention to a greater whole.
Krishnamurti: Yes. One can see how politically, religiously, psychologically, thought has created a world of tremendous contradiction, fragmentation, and the intelligence that is the product of this confusion then tries to bring order in this confusion. It is not that intelligence which sees the falseness of all this. I don’t know if I am making myself clear. You see, one can be terribly intelligent although one is chaotic.
Bohm: Well, in some ways.
Krishnamurti: That is what is happening in the world.
Bohm: But I suppose it is rather hard to understand that at this moment. You could say that in some limited sphere it seems that intelligence is able to operate, but outside it doesn’t.
Krishnamurti: We are, after all, concerned with living, not with theories. One is concerned with a life in which intelligence operates. Intelligence which is not of time, which is not of measure, which is not the product or the movement of thought, or of the order of thought. Now a human being wants to live a different kind of life. He is dominated by thought, his thought is always functioning in measurement, in comparison, in conflict. He asks, ‘How am I to be free of all this in order to be intelligent?’ ‘How can the ‘me’, how can ‘I’ be the instrument of this intelligence?’
Bohm: Obviously it can’t be.
Krishnamurti: That is just it!
Bohm: Because this thought in time is the essence of unintelligence.
Krishnamurti: But one is thinking in terms of that all the time.
Bohm: Yes. That is thought projecting some sort of phantasy of what intelligence is, and trying to achieve it.
Krishnamurti: Therefore I would say that thought must be completely still for the awakening of intelligence. There can’t be a movement of thought and yet the awakening of that.
Bohm: That is clear on one level. We consider thought to be actually mechanical and this may be seen on one level – but still the mechanism continues.
Krishnamurti: Continues, yes…
Bohm: …through instincts and pleasure and fear and so on. The intelligence has to come to grips with this question of the pleasures, the fears, the desires, which make thought continue.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: And you see there is always a trap: this is our concept or image of it, which is partial.
Krishnamurti: So as a human being I would be concerned only with this central issue. I know how confused, contradictory, disharmonious one’s life is. Is it possible to change that so that intelligence can function in my life, so that I live without disharmony, so that the pointer, the direction is guided by intelligence? That is perhaps why the religious people, instead of using the word intelligence, have used the word God.
Bohm: What is the advantage of that?
Krishnamurti: I don’t know what the advantage is.
Bohm: But why use such a word?
Krishnamurti: It came from primitive fear, fear of nature, and gradually out of that grew the idea that there is a super-father.
Bohm: But that is still thought functioning on its own, without intelligence.
Krishnamurti: Of course. I am just recalling that. They said trust God, have faith in God, then God will operate through you.
Bohm: God is perhaps a metaphor for intelligence – but people didn’t generally take it as a metaphor.
Krishnamurti: Of course not, it is a terrific image.
Bohm: Yes. You could say that if God means that which is immeasurable, beyond thought… Krishnamurti:… it is unnameable, it is immeasurable, therefore don’t have an image.
Bohm: Then that will operate within the measurable.
Krishnamurti: Yes. What I am trying to convey is, that the desire for this intelligence, through time, has created this image of God. And through the image of God, Jesus, Krishna, or whatever it is, by having faith in that – which is still the movement of thought – one hopes that there will be harmony in one’s life.
Bohm: And this sort of image because it is so total produces an overriding desire, urge; that is, it overrides rationality… everything.
Krishnamurti: You heard the other day what the archbishops and bishops were saying, that only Jesus matters, nothing else matters.
Bohm: But it is the same movement whereby pleasure overrides rationality.
Krishnamurti: Fear and pleasure.
Bohm: They override; no proportion can be established.
Krishnamurti: Yes, what I am trying to say is: you see the whole world is conditioned this way.
Bohm: Yes, but the question is what you have hinted at: what is this world which is conditioned this way? If we take this world as existing independently of thought, then we have fallen into the same trap.
Krishnamurti: Of course, of course.
Bohm: That is, the whole conditional world is the result of this way of thinking, it is both the cause and the effect of this way of thinking.
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: And this way of thinking is disharmony and chaos and unintelligence and so on.
Krishnamurti: I was listening to the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool – how clever, some of them very serious, double talk and all that, thinking in terms of Labour Party and Conservative Party. They don’t say, ‘Let all of us get together and see what is the best thing for human beings.’
Bohm: They are not capable.
Krishnamurti: That is it, but they are exercising their intelligence!
Bohm: Well, in that limited framework. That is what our trouble has always been; people have developed technology and other things in terms of some limited intelligence, which is serving highly unintelligent purposes.
Krishnamurti: Yes, that is just it.
Bohm: For thousands of years that has been going on. Then of course the reactions arise: the problems are much too big, too vast.
Krishnamurti: But it is really very simple, extraordinarily simple, this sense of harmony. Because it is so simple it can function in the most complex field.
Krishnamurti: Let us go back. We said the source is common to both thought and intelligence…
Bohm: Yes, we got that far.
Krishnamurti: What is that source? It is generally attributed to some philosophical concept, or they say that source is God – I am just using that word for the moment – or Brahman. That source is common, is the central movement which divides itself into matter and intelligence. But that is just a verbal statement, it is just an idea, which is still thought. You can’t find it through thought.
Bohm: That raises the question: if you find it then what are ‘you’?
Krishnamurti: ‘You’ don’t exist. ‘You’ can’t exist when you are asking what is the source. You are time, movement, environmental conditioning – you are all that.
Bohm: In that question the whole of this division is put aside.
Krishnamurti: Absolutely. That is the point, isn’t it?
Bohm: There is no time…
Krishnamurti: Yet we still say, ‘I am not going to exercise thought.’ When the ‘me’ enters it means division: so understanding the whole of this – what we have been talking about – I put away the ‘me’ altogether.
Bohm: But that sounds like a contradiction.
Krishnamurti: I know. I can’t put it away. It takes place. Then what is the source? Can it ever be named? For instance the Jewish religious feeling is that it is not nameable: you don’t name it, you can’t talk about it, you can’t touch it. You can only look. And the Hindus and others say the same thing in a different way. The Christians have trapped themselves up over this word Jesus, this image, they have never gone to the source of it.
Bohm: That is a complex question; it may be that they were trying to synthesize several philosophies, Hebrew, Greek, and Oriental.
Krishnamurti: Now I want to get at this: what is the source? Can thought find it? And yet thought is born from that source; and also intelligence. It is like two streams moving in different directions.
Bohm: Would you say matter is also born from that source more generally?
Krishnamurti: Of course.
Bohm: I mean the whole universe. But then the source is beyond the universe.
Krishnamurti: Of course. Could we put it this way? Thought is energy, so is intelligence.
Bohm: So is matter.
Krishnamurti: Thought, matter, the mechanical, is energy. Intelligence is also energy. Thought is confused, polluted, dividing itself, fragmenting itself.
Bohm: Yes, it is multiple.
Krishnamurti: And the other is not. It is not polluted. It cannot divide itself as ‘my intelligence’ and ‘your intelligence’. It is intelligence, it is not divisible. Now it has sprung from a source of energy which has divided itself.
Bohm: Why has it divided itself?
Krishnamurti: For physical reasons, for comfort…
Bohm: To maintain physical existence. So a part of intelligence has been changed in such a way as to help to maintain physical existence.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Bohm: It has developed in a certain way.
Krishnamurti: And gone on in that way. Both are energy. There is only one energy.
Bohm: Yes, they are different forms of energy. There are many analogies to this, although it is on a much more limited scale. In physics you could say light is ordinarily a very complex wave motion, but in the laser it can be made to move all together in a very simple and harmonious way.
Krishnamurti: Yes. I was reading about the laser. What monstrous things they are going to do with it.
Bohm: Yes, using it destructively. Thought may get something good but then it always gets used in a broader way that is destructive.
Krishnamurti: So there is only energy, which is the source.
Bohm: Would you say energy is a kind of movement?
Krishnamurti: No, it is energy. The moment it is a movement it goes off into this field of thought.
Bohm: We have to clarify this notion of energy. I have also looked up this word. You see, it is based on the notion of work; energy means, ‘To work within.’
Krishnamurti: Work within, yes.
Bohm: But now you say there is an energy which works, but no movement.
Krishnamurti: Yes. I was thinking about this yesterday – not thinking – I realized the source is there, uncontaminated, non-movement, untouched by thought, it is there. From that these two are born. Why are they born at all?
Bohm: One was necessary for survival.
Krishnamurti: That is all. In survival this – in its totality, in its wholeness – has been denied, or put aside. What I am trying to get at is this, Sir. I want to find out, as a human being living in this world with all the chaos and suffering, can the human mind touch that source in which the two divisions don’t exist? – and because it has touched this source, which has no divisions, it can operate without the sense of division. I don’t know if I am conveying this?
Bohm: But how is it possible for the human mind not to touch the source? Why does it not touch the source?
Krishnamurti: Because we are consumed by thought, by the cleverness of thought, by the movement of thought. All their gods, their meditations – everything is that.
Bohm: Yes. I think this brings us to the question of life and death. This relates to survival; because that is one of the things that gets in the way.
Krishnamurti: Thought and its field of security, its desire for security, has created death as something separate from itself.
Bohm: Yes, that may be the key point.
Krishnamurti: It is.
Bohm: You can look at it this way. Thought has constructed itself as an instrument for survival. Now therefore…
Krishnamurti: …it has created immortality in Jesus, or in this or that.
Bohm: Thought cannot possibly contemplate its own death. So if it tries to do so, it always projects something else, some other broader point of view from which it seems to look at it. If anybody tries to imagine that he is dead, then he is still imagining that he is alive and looking at himself as dead. You can always complicate this in all sorts of religious notions; but it seems to be built into thought that it cannot possibly consider death properly.
Krishnamurti: It cannot. It means ending itself.
Bohm: That is very interesting. Suppose we take the death of the body, which we see outwardly; the organism dies, it loses its energy and therefore it falls apart.
Krishnamurti: It is really that the body is the instrument of the energy.
Bohm: So let us say the energy ceases to imbue the body and therefore the body no longer has any wholeness. You could say that with thought also; the energy in some ways goes to thought, as to the body – is that so?
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: You and other people have often used the phrase: ‘The mind dies to the whole of thought.’ That way of putting it is puzzling at first, because you would think it was thought that should die.
Krishnamurti: Quite, quite.
Bohm: But now you are saying that it is the mind that dies, or the energy that dies to thought. The nearest I can see to what that means is, that when thought is working it is invested with a certain energy by the mind or the intelligence; and when thought is no longer relevant, then the energy goes and thought, as to the body-is that so?
Krishnamurti: That is right.
Bohm: Now it is very hard for the mind to accept this. The comparison between thought and the organism seems so poor, because thought is insubstantial and the organism is substantial. So the death of the organism appears to be something far more than the death of thought. Now this is a point that is not clear. Would you say that in the death of thought we have the essence of the death of the organism as well?
Krishnamurti: Obviously.
Bohm: Although it is on a small scale, as it were, it is of the same nature?
Krishnamurti: As we said, there is energy in both, and thought in its movement is of this energy, and thought cannot see itself die.
Bohm: It has no way of imagining, or projecting, or conceiving its own death.
Krishnamurti: Therefore it escapes from death.
Bohm: Well, it gives itself the illusion.
Krishnamurti: Illusion of course. And it has created the illusion of immortality or a state beyond death, a projection of its own desire for its own continuity.
Bohm: Well, that is one thing, that thought may have begun by desiring the continuity of the organism.
Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right, and then gone on beyond it.
Bohm: Gone beyond that, to desire its own continuity. That was the mistake, that was where it went wrong. It regarded itself as an extension, not merely an extension, but the essence of the organism. At first thought is functioning merely in the organism and then thought begins to present itself as the essence of the organism.
Krishnamurti: That’s right.
Bohm: Then thought begins to desire its own immortality.
Krishnamurti: And thought itself knows, is very well aware that it is not immortal.
Bohm: It knows it only outwardly, though. I mean, it knows it as an outward fact.
Krishnamurti: Therefore it creates immortality in pictures, images.
I listen to all this as an outsider and I say to myself, ‘This is perfectly true, so clear, logical, sane; we see it very clearly, both psychologically and physically.’ Now my question, observing all this, is: can the mind keep the purity of the original source? The original pristine clarity of that energy which is not touched by the corruption of thought? I don’t know if I am conveying it?
Bohm: The question is clear.
Krishnamurti: Can the mind do it? Can the mind ever discover that?
Bohm: What is the mind?
Krishnamurti: The mind, as we now say, or organism, thought, the brain with all its memories, experiences and all that, which is all of time. And the mind says, ‘Can I come to this?’ It cannot. Then I say to myself, ‘As it cannot, I will be quiet.’ You see the tricks it has played.
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: I will learn how to be quiet; I will learn how to meditate in order to be quiet. I see the importance of having a mind that is free of time, free of the mechanism of thought, I will control it, subjugate it, put away thought. But it is still the operation of thought. That is very clear. Then what is it to do? Because a human being lives in this disharmony, he must enquire into this. And that is what we are doing. As we begin to enquire into it, or in enquiring, we come to this source. Is it a perception, an insight, and has that insight nothing whatsoever to do with thought? Is insight the result of thought? The conclusion of an insight is thought, but insight itself is not thought. So I have got a key to it. Then what is insight? Can I invite it, cultivate it?
Bohm: You can’t do any of that. But there is a kind of energy that is needed.
Krishnamurti: That is just it. I can’t do any of that. When I cultivate it, it is desire. When I say I will do this or that, it is the same. So insight is not the product of thought. It is not in the order of thought. Now, how does one come upon this insight? (Pause) We have come upon it because we denied all that.
Bohm: Yes, it is there. You can never answer that question, how you come upon anything.
Krishnamurti: No. I think it is fairly clear, Sir. You come upon it when you see the whole thing. So insight is the perception of the whole. A fragment cannot see this, but the ‘I’ sees the fragments and the ‘I’ seeing the fragments sees the whole, and the quality of a mind that sees the whole is not touched by thought; therefore there is perception, there is insight.
Bohm: Perhaps we will go over that more slowly. We see all the fragments: could we say the actual energy, activity, which sees those fragments is whole?
Krishnamurti: Yes, yes.
Bohm: We don’t manage ever to see the whole because…
Krishnamurti: …we are educated – and all the rest of it.
Bohm: But I mean, we wouldn’t anyway see the whole as something. Rather, wholeness is freedom in seeing all the fragments.
Krishnamurti: That is right. Freedom to see. The freedom doesn’t exist when there are fragments.
Bohm: That makes a paradox.
Krishnamurti: Of course.
Bohm: But the whole does not start from the fragments. Once the whole operates then there are no fragments. So the paradox comes from supposing that the fragments are real, that they exist independently of thought. Then you would say, I suppose, that the fragments are there with me in my thoughts, and then I must somehow do something about them – that would be a paradox. The whole starts from the insight that these fragments are in a way nothing. That is the way it seems to me. They are not substantial. They are very insubstantial.
Krishnamurti: Insubstantial, yes.
Bohm: And therefore they don’t prevent wholeness.
Krishnamurti: Quite.
Bohm: You see, one of the things that often causes confusion is that, when you put it in terms of thought, it seems that you are presented with the fragments that are real, substantial reality. Then you have to see them, and nevertheless you say, as long as the fragments are there, there is no wholeness so that you can’t see them. But that all comes back to the one thing, the one source.
Krishnamurti: I am sure, Sir, really serious people have asked this question. They have asked it and tried to find an answer through thought.
Bohm: Yes, well it seems natural.
Krishnamurti: And they never saw that they were caught in thought.
Bohm: That is always the trouble. Everybody gets into this trouble: that he seems to be looking at everything, at his problems, saying, ‘Those are my problems, I am looking.’ But that looking is only thinking, but it is confused with looking. This is one of the confusions that arises. If you say, don’t think but look, that person feels he is already looking.
Krishnamurti: Quite. So you see, this question has arisen and they say, ‘All right, then I must control thought, I must subjugate thought and I must make my mind quiet so that it becomes whole, then I can see the parts, all the fragments, then I’ll touch the source.’ But it is still the operation of thought all the time.
Bohm: Yes, that means the operation of thought is unconscious for the most part and therefore one doesn’t know it is going on. We may say consciously we have realized that all this has to be changed, it has to be different.
Krishnamurti: But it is still going on unconsciously. So can you talk to my unconscious, knowing my conscious brain is going to resist you? Because you are telling me something which is revolutionary, you are telling me something which shatters my whole house which I have built so carefully, and I won’t listen to you – you follow? In my instinctive reactions I push you away. So you realize that and say, ‘Look, all right, old friend, just don’t bother to listen to me. I am going to talk to your unconscious. I am going to talk to your unconscious and make that unconscious see that whatever movement it does is still within the field of time and so on.’ So your conscious mind is never in operation. When it operates it must inevitably either resist, or say, ‘I will accept; therefore it creates a conflict in itself. So can you talk to my unconscious?
Bohm: You can always ask how.
Krishnamurti: No, no. You can say to a friend, ‘Don’t resist, don’t think about it, but I am going to talk to you.’ ‘We two are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening.’
Bohm: Yes.
Krishnamurti: I think this is what really takes place. When you were talking to me – I was noticing it – I was not listening to your words so much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not to your words, as you explained and so on. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words which you use, but to the meaning, to the inward quality of your feeling that you want to communicate to me.
Bohm: I understand.
Krishnamurti: That changes me, not all this verbalization. So can you talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind interfering and saying, ‘Please don’t touch all this, leave me alone!’ They have tried subliminal propaganda in advertising, so that whilst you don’t really pay attention, your unconscious does, so you buy that particular soap! We are not doing that, it would be deadly. What I am saying is: don’t listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning because I am terribly interested in the source, as you are. You follow, Sir? I am really interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood – but to come to that thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly, but you understand what I mean?
Say for instance I have a conditioning; you can point it out a dozen times, argue, show the fallacy of it, the stupidity – but I still go on. I resist, I say what it should be, what shall I do in this world otherwise, and all the rest of it. But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened, but it sees the danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does. As when I was walking in California high in the mountains: I was looking at birds and trees and watching, and I heard a rattler and I jumped. It was the unconscious that made the body jump; I saw the rattler when I jumped, it was two or three feet away, it could have struck me very easily. If the conscious brain had been operating it would have taken several seconds.
Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn’t directly appeal to the conscious.
Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else.