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The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion).

David Bohm

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David Bohm
Age: 74 †
Born: 1917
Born: December 20
Died: 1992
Died: October 27
Nuclear Physicist
Philosopher
Physicist
University Teacher
Wilkes-Barre
Pennsylvania
David Joseph Bohm
Truth
False
Relevance
Trying
Question
Assert
Asks
Confusing
Whether
Irrelevant
Comes
Statement
Science
Relevant
Irrelevance
True
Statements
Falsity
Form
Confusion
Presupposes

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If each one of us can give full attention to what is actually ‘blocking’ communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.
David Bohm
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Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.
David Bohm
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Thus, in a dialogue each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it can be said that collectively they are making something in common
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But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.
David Bohm
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Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.
David Bohm
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Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.
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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.
David Bohm
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From the point of view of the species, death is part of this whole process. You could say that species have evolved in such a way that individual members last a certain time. Perhaps a certain kind of species would be better able to survive if the individuals didn't last too long. Other kinds could last longer.
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In the long run, it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.
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Can we learn to become more learning-oriented individually and collectively, rather than 'I know' oriented?
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Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.
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One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.
David Bohm
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The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.
David Bohm
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The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.
David Bohm
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Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.
David Bohm
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Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.
David Bohm
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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.
David Bohm
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So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.
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Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.
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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.
David Bohm