Is Intelligence Awake 1.4

Conversation With Professor David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti Brockwood Park 7th October 1972

Continued…

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.