A Bohmian take on the current state of thinking

[findingblanks]

[Soul is moderating my posts so I apologize if there is an odd rhtyem to my responses]

Hey Lou,

"For me, it just "felt right" and during the early 1970s (heady anti-war protest days) I was invited to participate in a seminar with David at the University of Illinois."

If you feel like it, I'd love to hear more about how you got invited at this particular time and place. I love getting a feel for how these things were unfolding 'on the streets' so to speak between actual human beings. Thanks.

[findingblanks]

Lou you wrote:

"Now I speculate: Might Ashvin/Steiner call this the moment when intellectual thoughts become Thought? Might a mindfulness meditator call this a quieting of the mind or cessation of mental chatter? Might others call it "no thinking" or "being in the zone"? And might the different interpretive names or representational models eventually meld into something called THE REAL?"

These are great questions. I want to respond but probably better to see what comes up in the wider group. As you know I am very very interested in the way our favorite and preferred schemas and maps and narratives interact with how such depth experiences are constituted and how they unfold and are expressed.

[Lou Gold]

[Soul is moderating my posts so I apologize if there is an odd rhtyem to my responses]

Hey Lou,

"For me, it just "felt right" and during the early 1970s (heady anti-war protest days) I was invited to participate in a seminar with David at the University of Illinois."

If you feel like it, I'd love to hear more about how you got invited at this particular time and place. I love getting a feel for how these things were unfolding 'on the streets' so to speak between actual human beings. Thanks.

The late 60s and early 70s were a rare time when one might indulge in the illusion that the university campus just might be the center of the universe. The curtain had fallen on the great stage and the angels and demons were freely dancing in a creative chaotic crucible. I got invited to the seminar by a physicist friend who had become acquainted with Bohm at one of his dialogs with Krishnamurti. There was a lot of "freewheeling" going on, both in the seminar rooms and on the streets. It was a mix of blessing and curse, of what the Chinese refer to as "interesting times."

[AshvinP]

Hi Ashvin,

Soul says I can't speak to you in the other thread.

When you say:

"Rather it's serving as the concrete bridge between what we perceive in the world, including ideal temporal phenomena, and the deeper layers of meaning we can potentially discern in that same world. We should try hard to remember this when we start lapsing back towards viewing this philosophy of Thinking as just another abstract thought-system among the plethora of such systems out there (which I also do, but fortunately less and less often the more I inhabit this approach as a living ecosystem of ideas). Remember the enormous practical difference it makes when we confront otherwise convoluted and complex ideal phenomena."

In your opinion has Bohm captured the essence of what Steiner is hoping the reader understands in The Philosophy of Freedom? Thanks.

Actually, I think Bohm may have gotten closer to it than nearly everyone else operating at an intellectual level in the 20th century, except for Barfield. These two had an amazing discussion with each other, which is posted on Mark Vernon's website, which your comment reminded me of. I can't help but notice, everytime Bohm makes a key insight which Barfield (and I) agree with, Barfield also tries to restate it in more concrete terms related to our own immanent spiritual activity of Thinking. Not much unlike what I was trying to do here on this thread with my own intellectual capacity. And then they get to the real heart of the matter, as expressed by Barfield below (I have emphasized Barfield's key points with underline and Bohm's responses in bold), and then take careful note of how and what Bohm responds. That shows me he is still keeping his own Thinking in the blind spot, despite his otherwise fantastic intellectual insights into these matters. Perhaps he discovered this concrete Thinking within himself at a later date, I am not sure, but at this point I think it is clear he had not.

[Barfield] believes this is possible because it is also possible to gain knowledge of the non-phenomenal world, even if it’s beyond language. It is possible to bring back knowledge and experience from across the threshold, so to speak, and clothe it in thoughts and language. To put it another way, the individual who has left the Platonic cave can come back into the cave and communicate an idea of what the world outside the cave is like, and what this means for life in the cave.

Barfield believes that this is what Rudolf Steiner was able to do, for example. His perception beyond the threshold leads to an ability to expound things that have utility and that can be informative. Barfield says he is “not qualified to speak about it at great length” but that this is the “sort of knowledge I feel must be acquired it we are to get ourselves out of the mess we are in.”

In the conversation, this is related back to Bohm’s discussion of how ordinary knowledge gains new insights. It would be via imagination, inspiration and intuition that comes from beyond the phenomenal and beyond accepted categories that shape phenomena. This can be cultivated via the kind of exercises Steiner described, which are in part about intensifying the attention to thinking as you are thinking.

Barfield continues. It’s also about coming to knowledge of all that we are beyond the material aspects of reality. Coming to knowledge of oneself as a soul is to come to knowledge of the reality of souls. “A person who has not attended to a direct knowledge of the independent existence of his own soul as an immaterial subject, such a person has no capacity to know the existence of an immaterial world.”

“You always know a spiritual person because a spiritual person is a person who knows that the reason his body feels the way his body feels is because he in his soul chooses that his body feels this way.” It’s why spiritual people can say they neither feel nor see evil if they choose not to. Augustine was one to say something like this.

Knowledge of yourself as a soul independent from your body is “the first step… Every 14 year old, I think, is capable of it.”

Abundance of spiritual being

There is also the question of the relation between spiritual beings. “It’s quite clear as Plato says, and as the whole tradition says, they indwell one another, and one of the amazing things is that once the principle of indwelling is discovered then we can say souls lives within souls live within souls in an almost endless abundance of riches and chain of being.”

People can learn what this experience is like, much as they can learn what the experience of throwing a rubber ball is like.

Barfield is more optimistic about language too. He proposes, via the theologian Jonathan Edwards, that “God created the physical world as basically a language that would be adequate for our describing our spiritual experiences.” The physical world is not just “accidentally the case that we can use it in a rough way, but it’s attuned to its very purpose, so the physical world is intrinsically symbolic, it is aiming to be, if we may say this, understood and taken up in language.” As is sometimes said, that which is revealed remains hidden in what’s apparent.

An analogy would be the word “chair”, which is not any actual chair, but is something immaterial, a thought, related to any actual chair. “If words can do it, I see no particular reason why the world which words express for us shouldn’t themselves do it.”

Another way of making the point is to challenge the assumption that what’s in the mind isn’t real, and that only what’s outside the mind is real, which language symbolises. What makes more sense is, as Anselm of Canterbury put it, that things are real in at least two senses: outside the mind, inside the mind and in the mind of God.

Hence: “a word is the reality of a thing inside the mind. The word ‘tree’ is a reality of the tree in the mind.”
...
[Bohm] then continues, pointing out that feeling you are the work of many people may be part of the “sickness of the modern period” because the inner and the outer have become alienated. “I mean, to me, there’s only this world, this life, and that’s all I believe, and all this other stuff, that I have being fragmented and so on, is essentially the reflection in my own life of modernity that has become unavoidable.”

However, he also continues: “Maybe Owen’s right. We’re not ready for rapture and wholeness in any kind of instantaneous sense. Certainly I couldn’t take it. I have to muddle with fragmentation for a whole but nevertheless, you asked me why and I guess, I can’t prove it, but it’s a conviction that I have that the universe is whole.”

The same would true of language. There’s the explicit content of a word but also its implicit movement. Meaning arises from the implicit as well as the explicit because we are, at some level, aware of both elements. Further, it’s broadly an assumption that as thoughts come, lots of assumptions slip in too, as if from the implicate order. “No system can be complete.” Bohm likens this to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
...
[Barfield] takes over at this point, saying he experiences thinking differently. “It’s like Heidegger would say, thinking is thought thinking through me…. that our job is not to produce thought but our job is to put our mind into thought so that thought can actualise itself, or thought can be present in our mind. I want a word like open illumination.”

“Now I experience that as psychologically much truer to the way that thinking takes place.” Also, Barfield continues, when you find contradictions, you are forced to struggle better to discern the structure that’s antecedently there.
...
[and Barfield concludes, saving the best and most important insight for last]
Thinking is not an abstract activity about something… It’s more like uniting with the phenomenon, a participation with the experience, and that kind of thinking brings us into a language,” Barfield continues. “And the language of thought is really the language of participation in experience and the thought is not something that one generates in the brain but that one, as it were, receives…”

“One does generate and yet is receiving,” Barfield adds. “And that is the nature of thought. The mind is related to thought as the eye is to light. But the eye has got to look, and the mind has got to look at, the mind’s eye has got to look at it deliberately by an act of attention or will. When it does that, when, as you say, it’s really merging in the objective, individual nature of thought itself.” It’s what Coleridge referred to as “the mind’s self experience in the act of thinking.”

The conversation draws to a close. Barfield finishes his thoughts by commending the work of Steiner as a way of developing insights. Bohm finishes by stressing the flow between language and what is beyond language. The two aspects, the polarity, must always be born in mind.

[Lou Gold]

Lou you wrote:

"Now I speculate: Might Ashvin/Steiner call this the moment when intellectual thoughts become Thought? Might a mindfulness meditator call this a quieting of the mind or cessation of mental chatter? Might others call it "no thinking" or "being in the zone"? And might the different interpretive names or representational models eventually meld into something called THE REAL?"

These are great questions. I want to respond but probably better to see what comes up in the wider group. As you know I am very very interested in the way our favorite and preferred schemas and maps and narratives interact with how such depth experiences are constituted and how they unfold and are expressed.

And to expand the conversation into the multi-sensual depths of cross-cultural possibility let me add this nonverbal exploration into previously unexpressed communion...