Below are some of the books I refer to in “The Order of Thought”. This list is not com­pre­hens­ive, and is neither to sug­gest that I neces­sar­ily agree with all the assump­tions or con­clu­sions of the vari­ous authors — with the excep­tion of Krish­namurti*, and to a large extent Sheldrake and Bohm.

One example that might be par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant to men­tion here is the con­clu­sion reached by Koes­t­ler in his oth­er­wise excel­lent book, ‘The Ghost in the Machine’: the sal­va­tion, or trans­form­a­tion of ‘homo mani­acus into homo sapi­ens’ is to be sought for through molecu­lar bio­logy and mass med­ic­a­tion. Now it is not, as Koes­t­ler him­self put it, that ‘to hope for sal­va­tion to be syn­thes­ised in the labor­at­ory may seem mater­i­al­istic, crank­ish, or naive’, but rather that he appears to have arrived at his above con­clu­sion without con­sid­er­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of trans­form­a­tion from an alto­gether dif­fer­ent source, for instance one that might ori­gin­ate bey­ond the realms of the meas­ur­able. Indeed, it would have been inter­est­ing to have Koes­t­ler meet and dis­cuss with Krish­namurti and/or Bohm, but as far as I know such meet­ing never transpired…

(*Of course, it isn’t really a ques­tion of agree­ment or dis­agree­ment when it comes to Krishnamurti…)

Thought as a Sys­tem by David Bohm

“In Thought as a Sys­tem the­or­et­ical phys­i­cist David Bohm takes as his sub­ject the role of thought and know­ledge at every level of human affairs, from our private reflec­tions on per­sonal iden­tity to our col­lect­ive efforts to fash­ion a tol­er­able civil­iz­a­tion. Elab­or­at­ing upon prin­ciples of the rela­tion­ship between mind and mat­ter first put for­ward in Whole­ness and the Implic­ate Order, Dr Bohm rejects the notion that our think­ing pro­cesses neut­rally report on what is ʹout thereʹ in an object­ive world. He explores the man­ner in which thought act­ively par­ti­cip­ates in form­ing our per­cep­tions, our sense of mean­ing and our daily actions. He sug­gests that col­lect­ive thought and know­ledge have become so auto­mated that we are in large part con­trolled by them, with a sub­sequent loss of authen­ti­city, free­dom and order.“
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On Dia­logue by David Bohm

“Dur­ing the past few dec­ades, mod­ern tech­no­logy, with radio, tele­vi­sion, and travel, and satel­lites, has woven a net­work of com­mu­nic­a­tions which puts each part of the world into almost instant con­tact with all the other parts. 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. People liv­ing in dif­fer­ent nations, with dif­fer­ent eco­nomic and polit­ical sys­tems, are hardly able to talk to each other without fight­ing. And within every single nation, dif­fer­ent social classes and eco­nomic and polit­ical groups are caught in a sim­ilar pat­tern of inab­il­ity to under­stand each other. Indeed, even within each lim­ited group, people are talk­ing of a “gen­er­a­tion gap,” which is such that order and younger mem­bers do not com­mu­nic­ate, except per­haps in super­fi­cial way. Morever, in schools and uni­ver­sit­ies, stu­dents tend to feel that their teach­ers are over­whelm­ing them with a flood of inform­a­tion which they sus­pect is irrel­ev­ant to actual life. And what appears on the radio and tele­vi­sion, as well as in the news­pa­pers and magazines, is gen­er­ally at best a col­lec­tion of trivial and almost unre­lated frag­ments, while at worst, it can often be a really harm­ful source of con­fu­sion and mis­in­form­a­tion. “
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On Cre­ativ­ity by David Bohm

“On Cre­ativ­ity sur­veys two dec­ades of David Bohm’s reflec­tions on what dis­tin­guishes cre­at­ive pro­cesses from those which are merely mech­an­ical. While much of the mater­ial in the volume explores the nature of human cre­ativ­ity, Bohm through­out links mind to the realm of nat­ural pro­cess, ulti­mately sug­gest­ing that mani­fest­a­tions of cre­ativ­ity in human­kind are not merely sim­ilar to the cre­at­ive pro­cesses of nature. Rather, they are of the same intrinsic nature as the cre­at­ive forces in the uni­verse at large. The human being is thus in the unique pos­i­tion of per­ceiv­ing the dynam­ism and move­ment of the world around him, while at the same time real­iz­ing that the means by which this per­cep­tion takes place—one’s own mind—is of an equi­val­ent order of cre­ativ­ity, par­ti­cip­at­ing intim­ately with the world which it observes. To the extent that our per­cep­tions of the world affect “reality”—and the evid­ence for this is con­sid­er­able— we have a cor­res­pond­ing respons­ib­il­ity to attempt to bring into being a coher­ent rela­tion­ship between our thought pro­cesses and the world they emerge from and inter­pret.“
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The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens by Ant­o­nio Damasio

“Tack­ling a great com­plex of ques­tions that poets, artists and philo­soph­ers have con­tem­plated for gen­er­a­tions, Dam­a­sio (Descartes’ Error) exam­ines cur­rent neur­o­lo­gical know­ledge of human con­scious­ness. Con­scious­ness, argues Dam­a­sio, is linked to emo­tion, to our feel­ings for the images we per­ceive. There are in fact sev­eral kinds of con­scious­ness, he says: the proto-self, which exists in the mind’s con­stant mon­it­or­ing of the body’s state, of which we are unaware; a core con­scious­ness that per­ceives the world 500 mil­li­seconds after the fact; and the exten­ded con­scious­ness of memory, reason and lan­guage. Dif­fer­ent from wake­ful­ness and atten­tion, con­scious­ness can exist without lan­guage, reason or memory: for example, an amne­siac has con­scious­ness. But when core con­scious­ness fails, all else fails with it. More import­ant for Damasio’s argu­ment, emo­tion and con­scious­ness tend to be present or absent together.“
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On Intel­li­gence by Jeff Hawkins

“You may be won­der­ing why a com­puter designer is writ­ing a book about brains. Or put another way, if I love brains why didn’t I make a career in brain sci­ence or in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence? The answer is I tried to, sev­eral times, but I refused to study the prob­lem of intel­li­gence as oth­ers have before me. I believe the best way to solve this prob­lem is to use the detailed bio­logy of the brain as a con­straint and as a guide, yet think about intel­li­gence as a com­pu­ta­tional problem—a pos­i­tion some­where between bio­logy and com­puter sci­ence. Many bio­lo­gists tend to reject or ignore the idea of think­ing of the brain in com­pu­ta­tional terms, and com­puter sci­ent­ists often don’t believe they have any­thing to learn from bio­logy. “
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The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler

“In a pre­vi­ous book, The Act of Cre­ation, I dis­cussed art and dis­cov­ery, the glory of man. The present volume ends with a dis­cus­sion of the pre­dic­a­ment of man, and thus com­pletes the cycle. The cre­ativ­ity and patho­logy of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evol­u­tion­ary mint. The first is respons­ible for the splendor of our cathed­rals, the second for the gar­goyles that dec­or­ate them to remind us that the world is full of mon­sters, dev­ils and suc­cubi. They reflect the streak of insan­ity which runs through the his­tory of out spe­cies, and which indic­ates that some­where along the line of its ascent to prom­in­ence some­thing has gone wrong.  Evol­u­tion has been com­pared to a labyrinth of blind alleys, and there is noth­ing very strange or improb­able in the assump­tion that man’s nat­ive equip­ment, though super­ior to that of any other liv­ing spe­cies, nev­er­the­less con­tains some built-in error or defi­ciency which pre­dis­poses him towards self-destruction.”

 

The End­ing of Time by J.Krishnamurti and David Bohm

“Krish­namurti and David Bohm probe such ques­tions as: Is the source of human con­flict the individual’s inab­il­ity to face the fact of what he or she actu­ally is, psy­cho­lo­gic­ally, res­ult­ing in the impos­i­tion of an illus­ory goal of what one must try to become? Why has human­ity made thought so import­ant in every aspect of life? Has tech­nical and time-restricted thought been allowed to slip over into more subtle areas of func­tion­ing, where it is inap­pro­pri­ate? How does one cleanse the mind of the “accu­mu­la­tion of time” and break “the pat­tern of ego-centered activ­ity?” Can someone who has achieved self-transcendent insight help free oth­ers from the world of illu­sion? Is it pos­sible that, through insight, the brean can renew itself, heal­ing the dam­age caused by years of wrong func­tion?“
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The Col­lec­ted Works of J.Krishnamurti

“Krishnamurti’s work is per­meated by what may be called the essence of the sci­entific approach, when this is con­sidered in its very highest and purest form. Thus, he begins from a fact like the nature of our thought pro­cesses. This fact is estab­lished through close atten­tion, involving care­ful listen­ing to the pro­cess of con­scious­ness, and observing it assidu­ously. In this, one is con­stantly learn­ing, and out of this learn­ing comes insight into the over­all or gen­eral nature of the pro­cess of thought. This insight is then tested. First, one sees whether it holds together in a rational order. And then one sees whether it leads to order and coher­ence in what flows out of it in life as a whole. Krish­namurti con­stantly emphas­izes that he is in no sense an author­ity. He has made cer­tain dis­cov­er­ies, and he is simply doing his best to make these dis­cov­er­ies access­ible to all those who are able to listen. His work does not con­tain a body of doc­trine, nor does he offer tech­niques or meth­ods for obtain­ing a silent mind. He is not aim­ing to set up any new sys­tem of reli­gious belief. Rather, it is up to each human being to see if he can dis­cover for him­self that to which Krish­namurti is call­ing atten­tion, and to go on from there to make new dis­cov­er­ies on his own. (…extract from an art­icle writ­ten by David Bohm in 1982.)“
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Out of Our Minds By Ken Robin­son

“…Rais­ing aca­demic stand­ards alone will not solve the prob­lems we face: it may com­pound them. To move for­ward we need a fresh under­stand­ing of intel­li­gence, of human capa­city and of the nature of cre­ativ­ity. Human intel­li­gence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal aca­demic edu­ca­tion. Advances in the sci­entific stud­ies of the brain are con­firm­ing that human intel­li­gence is com­plex and mul­ti­fa­ceted. We can think about the world and our exper­i­ences in terms of sight, in touch, in sound, in move­ment and in many other ways. This is why the world is full of music, dance, archi­tec­ture, design, prac­tical tech­no­logy, rela­tion­ships and val­ues. Brain-scanning tech­niques show that even simple actions draw sim­ul­tan­eously on dif­fer­ent func­tions and regions of the brain…“
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Morphic Res­on­ance By Rupert Sheldrake

“A New Sci­ence of Life was re-published in Amer­ica in Octo­ber 2009 in a com­pletely revised new edi­tion, with an update on research on morphic resonance. Challenging the fun­da­mental assump­tions of mod­ern sci­ence, this ground-breaking rad­ical hypo­thesis sug­gests that nature itself has memory. The ques­tion of morpho­gen­esis — how things take their shape — remains one of the great mys­ter­ies of sci­ence. What makes a rab­bit rabbit-shaped? How do newts regen­er­ate limbs? Why are molecules shaped the way they are? Why do soci­et­ies arrange them­selves in cer­tain pre­dict­able pat­terns? Accord­ing to Sheldrake’s hypo­thesis of form­at­ive caus­a­tion, these ques­tions remain unanswered in part because con­ven­tion is hobbled by the reduc­tion­ist assump­tion that find­ing the answers to such ques­tions is largely a mat­ter of fig­ur­ing out the machinery of nature, of get­ting to the bot­tom of an ulti­mately mech­an­ical uni­verse. But Sheldrake sug­gests that nature is not a machine and that each kind of sys­tem — from crys­tals to birds to soci­et­ies — is shaped not by uni­ver­sal laws that embrace and dir­ect all sys­tems but by a unique “morphic field” con­tain­ing a col­lect­ive or pooled memory. So organ­isms not only share genetic mater­ial with oth­ers of their spe­cies, but are also shaped by a “field” spe­cific to that spe­cies.“
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