Fragmentation

“One of the obvious things wrong with thought is fragmentation.  Thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken up.” 

“It seems very hard for human beings to accept seriously this simple fact of the effect of fragmentation. Nations fight each other and people kill each other. You are told that for the nation you must sacrifice everything.”

• Bohm saw the divisions going down into the family – he said that, “People are supposed to be getting together, but they can’t seem to.”
• “In science, for instance, every little thing is fragmented from every other one.  People hardly know what is happening in a somewhat different field.  And it goes on.  Knowledge is fragmented.  Everything gets broken up.”

In Bohm’s vision we should be moving to a more holistic view of the world, realizing our common humanity, not fragmenting our view of the world with false divisions.

“Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly.  And as we’ll discuss further in, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person.  Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that s not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information.  The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you.”

“Until thought is understood – better yet, more than understood, perceived – it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do.”

Thoughts and feelings affect each other...” there is a false division between thinking and feeling.”

“This is another major feature of thought: thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing.  It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it.”

Thought can generate incoherence and thought can also generate habits and habitual behaviour.  Bohm saw thought as a system, a set of connected things or parts.

He said, “thought is a system.  That system not only includes thoughts, ‘felts’ 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.”

Bohm said that we have this system of thought, “Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a systemic fault.  It’s not a fault here, there or there, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system.”

He added that, “Something has happened in the entire system which makes the thought wrong – the whole process in the system is not straight.”