If you managed to read the last post and managed to think a bit about it you may have some questions. You might ask how can thought be flawed? If it is more than the things I think about what is the system of thought? Where do thoughts come from? Do I control my thoughts? If thought is flawed what makes it flawed? Is it even possible to fix it from inside?

Before I get more into what Bohm talked about lets investigate some of these questions a bit. The last question struck me quite strongly. At the beginning of the twentieth century one of the aims in mathematics was to create a completely consistent system from a set of axioms. It was one of the big problems David Hilbert proposed at the end of his career. Many people worked on this including giants such as Whitehead and Russell. Shocking to the community, Godel proved that no self consistent system can be built based on a set of axioms. This leads to the last question in the previous paragraph, if I’m inside a system with its built-in assumptions and it is flawed how can I get the perspective to fix it? Somehow to do this you have to break the shell of your assumptions and create something new. This is a big program.

I’d like you to consider spending a little time trying to understand what thoughts are. Where do they come from? Can you control your thoughts? Can you stop your thoughts?

The Taoists and Buddhists think that thoughts are what creates evil in the world. Bohm agrees in a funny way. What he is saying though is that since thought is a system and it has broken pieces, perhaps we can repair it and quit wrecking havoc on the world. The meditative world think that the only way to do this is to have no thoughts. Bohm clearly believes that we can fix the system so we have correct thoughts only.

So let me know what you believe about your thoughts after answering the questions in the paragraph above. Please post your answers in the reply under the posts so we can share our collective insights. Please pay attention to the origin of a given thought. If you are walking somewhere let your mind alone and watch for a thought to appear. When it does where does it come from?

These are difficult questions to think about. The history of consciousness research and thought will be discussed next as we try to get a handle on what Bohm is doing. And we get clearer on happiness.