Truth is to be found in ugliness as well as beauty, in feeling as well as thought, and in sadness as well as happiness. (Vienna Art Exhibition)
Don't think with your head, think with your meat.
If your life was a message, what message would that be?
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
" I thought i was , but i'm not , what i was , or what i thought."
True words are to thought as pure notes are to music -- both capable of expressing the mysteries of the soul.
You were chosen by the Universe as an expression of Its greatness. Yet, with every thought and with every action, you must choose greatness or something less.
Changing our world one thought at a time!
Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make is what the people call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
The only truth in knowing, is knowing you can neverknow the truth.
When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies.
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith!
Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It's just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a 'structure' as they get more rigid.
So it's worth pondering that this whole system, which we are calling 'thought', works as a system of reflexes. The question is: can you become aware of the reflex character of thought--that it is a reflex, that it is a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified, added to, changed? And we could say that as long as the reflexes are free to change then there must be some kind of intelligence or perception, something a bit beyond the reflex, which would be able to see whether it's coherent or not. But when it gets conditioned too strongly it may resist that perception; it may not allow it.
It's useful to look at [thought] as a system of reflexes. A reflex just operates, as we've seen in the case of the knee-jerk. However, we don't usually think that thought is like the knee-jerk reflex. We think we are controlling thought and producing thought. That way of thinking is part of our whole background. But I'm suggesting that it's not generally so--that a vast part of our thought just comes out from the reflex system. You only find out what the thought is after it comes out. Now, this really overturns a great deal of the way we look at the mind or the personality or our entire cultural background.
SECRET is not a mystery, it is analization.
The pleasure-pain reaction is generally appropriate for the animal, but you can see that for thought it is not. The criterion for coherent thought is that it is true and correct. But if you can get pleasure or pain from thought then coherent thought is no longer functioning. Rather, the criterion has become whether the thought gives pleasure or pain, consequently that thought becomes destructive. If thought can be determined by pleasure or pain, that's already the beginning of a lot of trouble. And we conditioned by that.
If we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones. As long as we accept images as realities we are in that trap, because you can't control the images.
If you engage in positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts, the negative thoughts are still there acting. That's still incoherence. It's not enough just to engage in positive thoughts when you have negative thoughts registered, because they keep on working and will cause trouble somewhere else.
Q: You're saying that the pain is being done [to me] by me?
Bohm: By the same thought that does it all in the first place.
The system [of thought] doesn't stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It's conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the thing that's making the unpleasant feeling.
Bohm: Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that's the point. Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption. But that's done non-verbally. Do you see what I mean? To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can't describe.
Q: And that may break all the patterns?
Bohm: Yes, somehow it breaks the pattern. Now, the suggestion is that this pattern of the system is not something with which we are stuck. It may not be absolutely inevitable; there are signs that it could break.
Q: What do you mean when you say that questioning the question has to be non-verbal?
Bohm: If I say I have a question which may contain assumptions that should be questioned, I could question them verbally. But what would lead me to question my question? Eventually I can put it into words; but I'm saying the first step, the first flash of insight, is non-verbal.
When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That's what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things. Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking. Is that clear?
We can't simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes--taking the surface and calling it the reality.
We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something--a trace--which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.
Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.
Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.
Born alone to escape thoughts conceived within a dying star.
