Chapter 3: The Nature of Collective Thought
"Why have we accepted this state of affairs which is so destructive and so dangerous and so conductive to unhappiness? It seems we're mesmerized in some way. We go on with this insanity and nobody seems to know what to do or say. In the past people used to hope that some solution would appear, such as democracy or socialism or something else, perhaps religion; but this hopeful state of mind is very much weakened now because it has not worked out at all. I am suggesting that underneath it there's something we don't understand about how thought works."
- David Bohm
As this quote says, we are in a world where people don’t understand the problems we are facing and the worst part of all is that we are doing very little to eradicate problems like poverty, indebtedness, pollution, wars, starvation, and fatal diseases, just to mention some of the troubles of the world.
“Things which really fit, and belong together, are treated as if they do not. That’s one of the features of thought that’s going wrong.”
Thought plays an important role in us, since it has been essential in everything we see now a day. The problem is when thought starts creating problems without us realizing that, for example with fragmentation.
In order to deal with the problems occasioned by thought, we must solve the source, like a polluted river.
“I mean that thought is a real process, and that we have got to be able to pay attention to it as we pay attention to processes taking place outside in the material world, in the world that we can see.”
“The real crisis is not in these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; it’s really in the thought which is making it – all the time… I say thought pervades us. It’s similar to a virus – somehow this is a disease of thought, of knowledge, of information, spreading all over the world… the only way to stop it is to recognize it, to acknowledge it, to see what it is.”
We must also recognize that this process of thought is mostly collective; it includes all of us. “It originates in the whole culture and it pervades us.”
- Content of thought and the deep structure are not separate things.
- “You build up knowledge through experience, through practice. You think about it, you organize it, it goes into memory and becomes knowledge.
- Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge. You know how to ride a bicycle, but you can’t state how. We know more than we can explain.
- One process: experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, practice.
Thought: response from memory (past)
Thinking: present
Felts: feelings which have been recorded.
Feeling: active present
“Thoughts and felts are one process; they are not two. They both come from the memory; in the memory they are probably all mixed. Memory also affects the physical body. It affects the sensations.”
- Limbic system
“Perception presents something, and thought represents it in abstraction.”
- Representations fuse with the actual perceptions or experiences. “In other words, the representation fuses with the “presentation”, so that what is “presented” (as perception) is already in large part a representation.”
- This forms a two-way connection
- We usually don’t see that this is happening, we must be metacognitive to see this.
- We tend to accept representations of the majority, so we consent to that representations and then it becomes part of us, maybe without us realizing it.
- “Fact” means “what has been made”, as in “manufacture”.
- We give a great value to facts, when they are actually of little value. The role of suspending assumptions to take away these collective representations. Only after that we can see the problem and find it’s solution. Avoid misrepresentations!
- We must drop the general collective representations circulating around society and culture. Only by doing this, we can see the world different, maybe as it is.
- “The real change is the change of collective representations.”
- David Bohm
As this quote says, we are in a world where people don’t understand the problems we are facing and the worst part of all is that we are doing very little to eradicate problems like poverty, indebtedness, pollution, wars, starvation, and fatal diseases, just to mention some of the troubles of the world.
“Things which really fit, and belong together, are treated as if they do not. That’s one of the features of thought that’s going wrong.”
Thought plays an important role in us, since it has been essential in everything we see now a day. The problem is when thought starts creating problems without us realizing that, for example with fragmentation.
In order to deal with the problems occasioned by thought, we must solve the source, like a polluted river.
“I mean that thought is a real process, and that we have got to be able to pay attention to it as we pay attention to processes taking place outside in the material world, in the world that we can see.”
“The real crisis is not in these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; it’s really in the thought which is making it – all the time… I say thought pervades us. It’s similar to a virus – somehow this is a disease of thought, of knowledge, of information, spreading all over the world… the only way to stop it is to recognize it, to acknowledge it, to see what it is.”
We must also recognize that this process of thought is mostly collective; it includes all of us. “It originates in the whole culture and it pervades us.”
- Content of thought and the deep structure are not separate things.
- “You build up knowledge through experience, through practice. You think about it, you organize it, it goes into memory and becomes knowledge.
- Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge. You know how to ride a bicycle, but you can’t state how. We know more than we can explain.
- One process: experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, practice.
Thought: response from memory (past)
Thinking: present
Felts: feelings which have been recorded.
Feeling: active present
“Thoughts and felts are one process; they are not two. They both come from the memory; in the memory they are probably all mixed. Memory also affects the physical body. It affects the sensations.”
- Limbic system
“Perception presents something, and thought represents it in abstraction.”
- Representations fuse with the actual perceptions or experiences. “In other words, the representation fuses with the “presentation”, so that what is “presented” (as perception) is already in large part a representation.”
- This forms a two-way connection
- We usually don’t see that this is happening, we must be metacognitive to see this.
- We tend to accept representations of the majority, so we consent to that representations and then it becomes part of us, maybe without us realizing it.
- “Fact” means “what has been made”, as in “manufacture”.
- We give a great value to facts, when they are actually of little value. The role of suspending assumptions to take away these collective representations. Only after that we can see the problem and find it’s solution. Avoid misrepresentations!
- We must drop the general collective representations circulating around society and culture. Only by doing this, we can see the world different, maybe as it is.
- “The real change is the change of collective representations.”