More generally, due to lack of adequate finances, recently I have been finding less time for writing than I would like to have. Having said that, I am able to fit in at least some work on average about five days a week — but it is proving somewhat difficult to secure adequate stretches of time on these occasions. If you have any concrete suggestion with regards to financial support — which would certainly translate into more writing-time — please do get in contact. I estimate that if all goes well, the book should be completed by the end of the spring/beginning of the summer. Finishing by then is all the more important because of our anticipated move back to the United Kingdom, which will of course require much time and energy. So if you can help in any way, any time now would be good… Naturally, I would be happy to give more information, if necessary, over the telephone, etc.

In my next update I will say a little about future plans, including a conference in London, and also a related substantial documentary film project.

“Throughout history human beings have been attempting to discover and identify the nature of the world and themselves in terms of static descriptions. Yet if life is never static — but rather, a fundamentally undivided flowing movement — then static descriptions will eventually always turn out to be inadequate. Substituting static, or ‘state’ descriptions with ‘process’ descriptions has played a central role in the development of science. Although the “description” is clearly never “the described”, the way we describe anything, obviously affects our relationship to it. I am suggesting that it is time we deployed our energies to develop and articulate a process description both of the world and our consciousness.”

—

It has become somewhat fashionable in recent years to begin discussion of just about any topic by stating that we are living in revolutionary times. Even annually updated consumer-electronic items get described as revolutionary. However, there is little consensus about the actual scope and nature of the revolution coming, or the revolution already upon us. Is this unfolding revolution really to do with advances in technology? Is it to do with overpopulation, or with aging populations? Is it to do with the financial system, or the ecological crisis? Is it to do with a crisis in education? Or with a rising, global middle-class; or increasing authoritative centralised powers?

In this book I will argue that the source of the revolution taking place in the fabric of human reality is to be found much “deeper”, as it were, than any of the above and similar wide ranging issues and changes people generally might think of. Put simply, the real revolution of our times is the revolution in thought*.

Now to many people it may not be immediately obvious why we need to discuss thought at all, what the relevance of any enquiry into thought might be with regards to the various and seemingly increasingly complex challenges facing humanity. ‘We have all these problems to deal with’, people might say, ‘we have no time for such philosophising.’ Indeed, and without doubt, the suggestion that thought might in fact be the source of all our current troubles might at first sound rather strange.

To clarify the point, we might consider the word ‘problem’. Generally people might feel that our difficulties are to do with problems: that there are pressing problems “out there” and somehow we need to solve them. For example, there is the problem of the economy, or the problems of the ecological and environmental crisis, the problem of unemployment, the problem of relationship, be it on a personal, community, or international level, and so on. Now the meaning of the word ‘problem’, via Latin from the Greek ‘problēma’, is actually to ‘put forth,’ from pro ‘before’ and ballein ‘to throw.’ This way we might regard a problem as either something put forth for consideration, or something that is thrown at us. Now generally we might believe that our problems in the world originate in the world, and not with us. However, and somewhat surprisingly, on inspection we may find that in fact — and more often than not — it turns out that we, human beings, are the source of our troubles. In other words, with regards to most, if not all of the problems life is seemingly throwing at us, we ourselves are the “thrower”.

Following on from his numerous talks with J. Krishnamurti, David Bohm argued that there is a pervasive fault in thought, affecting all areas of thought and everything thought does, including everything thought creates. Which is actually an awful lot — no pun intended. Society, culture, our various world-views, religion, philosophy, nationalism, law, any form of authority, the financial system, various political ideologies, technology, jealousy, greed, aggression, hope, notions of individualism, a feeling of self: the “me”, etc., are all put together by thought, and rely on thought. To all these and more, any fault in thought is inevitably passed on: The pollution upstream affects everything downstream. We find that the general incoherence in the movement of thought is there at every turn.

Indeed, a crucial element in the overall situation that is inevitably polluted by the general incoherence is our very understanding of the nature and proper role of thought itself. As Bohm suggested, ‘‘We need to present some sort of a map of thought which may be more coherent than the unspoken map implicit in our culture, because if we are guided by incoherent ideas we will go wrong.’

In view of the above, the initial intention behind writing this book is simple: it is to produce a map; not of a particular surface, but of thought. More specifically, there are two main questions the book sets out to answer: “What is the place and relevance of the legacy of J. Krishnamurti and the work of Prof. David Bohm in the 21st Century?”, and “How can we — individually and collectively — move beyond the fatal paradox of the concurrent rationality and irrationality of the human mind?”

There is an urgency especially to the latter question. It isn’t merely that if we cannot resolve that paradox then all our attempts at social reform and bettering the world through various ideologies, theories and methods will remain futile. What we also need to bear in mind is this: as the complexity and the interconnectedness of our world increases, so do the consequences of our general incoherence grow.

* revolution |rɛvəˈluːʃ(ə)n|
noun
[…] a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from late Latin revolutio(n-), from revolvere ‘roll back’.

I have also made some changes to the outline of Chapter 2 | Meaning as Action’, to include the following: ‘Now some philosophers would likely disagree with this connection, arguing that this is in fact a mistaken interpretation of Greek thought.’ Thank you to Dr. David Lewin from Liverpool Hope University, England, for pointing this out.

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