David Bohm & J. Krishnamurti

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) was a protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein referred to him as his successor. In his work on plasma, Bohm was headed for a Nobel Prize before being blackballed by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy Red Scare era of the 1950s. As a naive Berkeley graduate student he had attended Communist party meetings for a few weeks, and joined the party before losing interest and dropping out. Loyal to his friends, he refused to give names and pleaded his Fifth Amendment rights. Under pressure from a wealthy donor, Princeton University let his contract lapse and refused to renew it. Eventually he became Professor of Theoretical Physics, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Jiddu Krishanamurti (1895-86) was raised by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater to become the prophesied world teacher of the Theosophical Society, headquartered in Adyar, Chennai, India. As a young man, Krishnamurti turned his back on the Society and all organized religion, insisting that no dogma or doctrine could lead down the spiritual path to awakening. Ironically, he developed a world-wide following, with his business headquarters in Ojai, California.

Alert to body and mental states since a child, Bohm had experiences for which he sought explanations. In both his physics and in his life, his momentum carried him in quest of a way to understand the universe as a whole. In other words, he did not see separation between science and life as people lived it. He believed that if only they could understand their lives, people would see how all was part of a seamless web. Wholeness and The Implicate Order, a title of one of his books, reflects this belief. Because of his view, he was drawn to Krishnamurti.

Bohm allowed that Krishnamurti might be on to something he could not discern. Perhaps some people do have an awareness to which most are not privy. Bohm argued that at the most primitive level we perceive movement. Motion, both scientifically and conceptually, is prior to the idea of a separate space and a separate time. In Bohm’s The Special Theory of Relativity (1965) he demonstrated an Einsteinian world in harmony with our deepest modes of perception. As we grow, we learn to separate the world into that reflected by classical physics. To get at a true understanding of physics, one had to peel away the layers of cognition that present a divided world.

Krishnamurti told Bohm to “start with the unknown,” by which he meant that Bohm should see where knowledge is encrusted, as it were, in dead layers. Just as Einstein had to reconceive the world, Bohm believed he had to do so also. In Krishnamurti, he believed he found a concise description of the problems of consciousness. Krishnamurti wrote, “When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion.” The self is a fiction. Krishnamurti explained that the thinker is the thought. In his life, Bohm had experiences he could not explain with common sense, and so to understand the universe as a whole, he became Krishnamurti’s disciple. As their relationship developed, Bohm helped Krishnamurti refine his teachings so that they gained in precision what they lost in poetry.

The two eventually had a falling-out. In this, Krishnamurti is instructive as to why gurus lack credibility among serious, professional researchers of consciousness. One problem has to do with the concepts of the gurus. Many offer simplistic, even foolish, explanations for what has been termed “the higher consciousness.” Of Krishnamurti, David Bohm wrote to Donald Schumacher, “More deeply, what is wrong with the ‘teachings’ is the prevalence in them of ‘always, forever, totality, sacred,' [and so on]. These words not only cannot be justified by the actual observation of fact, more important they radically disorganize the mind and fix it in a static and fragmented mode of activity.” (Infinite Potential, F.David Peat) Bohm also became disenchanted with the man because he saw Krishnamurti manipulating words so he could never be challenged as mentor. This feature is common among gurus. According to them, they never speak in error, but always from the absolute. Confronted with absolutisms, how can a relative perspective be anyting but wrong? In my mind, Ramesh Balsekar, rife with contradiction, is a prime example.

Despite their falling out, Bohm remained a believer that Krishnamurti was on to something. His guru had spoken of the ending of thought, at which point the mind becomes quiet so that, in silence, consciousness is transformed, the brain mutated. Bohm waited, and he waited, but nothing happened. Toward the end of his life, he began to question Krishnamurti's explanations. He asked, “What is it that observes this nondualistic state? What is it that observes consciousness?” He speculated that this new mode of consciousness might be merely another variation of thought. He came to suspect Krishnamurti’s view of self as wrong. Self existed, not as an object, but as an entire mental process.*

Bohm finally conceded that his mental investigation would not yield an answer. He allowed that perhaps, just perhaps, something else had to happen, something beyond his control.
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* In this I agree completely; the self is a network of mental processes, none of which "talk" to one another to give a single self-impression, but which, in their unobserved operations, are essential for survival. Without a sense of self, there would be no survival "instinct." To be sure, thoughts wither away under introspection which knows them as containing both thought and thinker. Moreover, the thinker cannot cause the thought because it is bound up in the thought observed. With expertise in observation, they lose force, even become wearisome, leaving a peace in their stead. But reason is missing if one then concludes that here is an illusion that proves no self exists. The thought/thinker were observed by a mental process. That process itself is responsible for survival of the individual. Call it the functional self rather than the self as "personality." (See Mind Shadows, "Of Selves & Cars". Understand that a provisional view of the self is possible. As evolutionarily functional, it insures genetic survival; as "personality," it is also a construct as Hume and Krishnamurti surmised. On the other hand, Near Death Experiences suggest that identity is part of the many, as in the One and The Many, yet can fit with nondualism.)