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.

© 2015 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust (Audiobook): 9781912875559

Release date

Audiobook: November 30, 2015