Truth, actuality, and the limits of thought: Twelve conversations with David Bohm, Brockwood Park, UK

1. What is truth and what is reality - 18 May 1975

Duration: 70 minutes

• What is truth and what is reality?

• Anything that thought thinks about or reflects upon or projects, that is reality.

And that reality has nothing to do with truth.

• The art of seeing is to place reality where it is, and not move that in order to get

truth. You can’t get truth.

• How am I to empty that consciousness and yet retain knowledge – otherwise I

couldn’t function – and reach a state which will comprehend reality?

2. Seeing ‘what is’ is action - 24 May 1975

Duration: 122 minutes

• If truth is something totally different from reality then what place has action in

daily life, in relation to truth and reality?

• Seeing ‘what is’ is action.

• What place has love in truth?

• When I separate you, in that separation love cannot exist.

• How are you to convey the sense of truth to a student?

• As long as I live in the field of reality, which has its own energy, that energy will

not free me.

• When the mind is empty, when the mind is nothing, not a thing, in that there is

perception.

3. Thought cannot bring about an insight - 31 May 1975

Duration: 81 minutes

• Is there a thinking without the word?

• The action brought about by thought into the investigation of an analysis is

always incomplete.

• Insight is complete. It is not fragmented as thought is. So thought cannot bring

about an insight.

• I must have an insight into conditioning otherwise I can’t dissolve it.

• What takes place when I have an insight that the observer is the observed?

• In nothingness there is complete security and stability.

4. The intelligence of love - 14 June 1975

Duration: 87 minutes

• Why has desire become such an extraordinarily important thing in life?

• How does desire arise from perception?

• Can I desire truth?

• Is the energy of nothingness different from the energy of things?

• Is that nothingness a hypothesis, a theory, a verbal structure, or truth?

• In dying to the reality only then there is nothingness.

5. Attention implies that there is no centre - 22 June 1975

Duration: 126 minutes

• Consciousness, because it is in constant movement, has never found an energy

which is not contradictory, which is not produced by desire and thought.

• Can thought ever see its own movement and the futility of its own movement?

• Attention implies that there is no centre.

• Is there a perception, a seeing outside the space which is part of consciousness?

• There are two human beings, one gets conditioned and the other doesn’t. Why?

How has it happened the other doesn’t get conditioned?

• How does this perception which is beyond attention, beyond awareness,

beyond concentration come about?

• Thought is rather superficial, it’s merely a very small part of the operation of the

brain.

• Can consciousness be completely empty of its content?

• Order and disorder

6. Perceiving without the perceiver - 28 June 1975 J. KRISHNAMURTI

Duration: 139 minutes

• Can thought naturally cease?

• Perceiving without the perceiver

• Facing the truth of death

• Krishnamurti’s ‘process’ and early years.

• Kundalini

• If you can understand suffering, face it and not escape from it, that has quite a

different energy.

• Truth is a pathless land.

• There is something really tremendously mysterious.

• Knowledge is becoming the curse.

• When the mind, with all the confusion, is nothing, not a thing, then perhaps

there is the other.