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Editor’s Note: This archive features recordings of Seminars conducted by David Bohm from 1986 to 1992 exploring the nature of thought and the thinking process. A transcript of the December 1989 Seminar edited by Dr. Bohm is titled, Proprioception Of Thought (with an extensive, linked INDEX). As he notes, “‘Proprioception’ is a technical word, and you may not like it. You can use ‘self-perception of thought’, ‘self-awareness of thought’, ‘thought is aware of itself in action’.” A participant in the Seminar asked, “Why doesn’t the proprioception of thought operate? And how did that get separated from proprioception of the body?” Bohm responded: “Thought is more subtle than the body movements. It is further in the brain, and so on, so it could easily have been lost. But let me suggest, for the sake of a proposal, that in the tacit process of thinking maybe there is proprioception, just as there is in riding the bicycle.”
April 2025: Work is proceeding to digitize the remaining 4 Seminars from their original cassette tape sets.
David Bohm
Consciousness and the Nature of Thought
I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence starting with very young children. If people could see the vast incoherence that is going on in society they would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do something. If you’re not sensitive to it you don’t feel disturbed and you don’t feel you need to do anything.
I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her mother, “this school is terrible, the teacher is terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy things,” and so on. Finally the mother was saying, “You’d better stop this—in this house the teacher is always right.” Now she understood that the teacher was wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use. Even the message may have been right in some sense, but still it illustrates that the predicament is that in order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very young children, we are trained to become insensitive to incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.
—David Bohm Seminar #1, 4 November 1989
Seminars
•   1986 October 24-26 [7]
•   1987 November 6-8 [9]
•   1988 November 11-13 [10]
•   1988 December 2-4 [9]
•   1989 November 3-5 [9]
•   1989 December 1-3 [9]
•   1990 November 2-4 [9]
•   1990 Nov 30 - Dec 1-2
•   1992 March 20-22 [9]
Sources
David Bohm: Proprioception of Thought excerpts:

p.17
We raised the notion that thought is based on memory. That’s an interesting point, which may be a clue. I want to distinguish between thinking and thought. I say ‘thinking’ is an active process which is actually going on. The syllable ‘ing’ suggests something active. And ‘thought’ is the past.

We suppose that we think, and that the thinking then vanishes. It is assumed that thinking tells you what is right – the way things really are. Then you decide what to do, and you do it. And then it’s all gone. But in fact, I say thinking doesn’t vanish. It becomes thought, and it goes onto a program. What you have been thinking goes onto a program – especially the conclusions and the assumptions and the general things like that....

p.19
We’re saying you have thinking and thought. Thinking is a bit more active, because when you are thinking you can sometimes detect incoherence – you can detect there is something wrong with what you are thinking. But thought acts like a program, and works so fast you can’t do that. Then how do you detect incoherence? You get a feeling – a sense something is wrong. And you require sensitivity to that.

That sensitivity is crucial. We won’t have time to go into it this evening, but I think society systematically destroys sensitivity in order to avoid being upset. It would rather people not notice incoherence, because then they don’t upset the apple cart too much. Therefore, we have learned to cover it up.

Let’s say that we have this sensitivity which is very subtle, which can show us incoherence in our thought and action. It can show us that we say one thing and do another, and so forth. But usually we don’t want to be sensitive to that.

We have thinking and thought. Besides that, we have feeling or emotion – whatever you want to call it. Now, feeling has the suffix ‘ing’, which suggests something that is always active and primary and real. But that’s not true. Unfortunately, the English language is deficient in this regard. It has introduced the distinction of thinking and thought, but it has not made a corresponding distinction among feelings. I will do it for the moment now.

I say there are feelings and ‘felts’. Feelings you had in the past have gone into the memory and become programs. You can remember feelings you have had – feelings of traumatic events, feelings of pleasure, nostalgia, and so on. That has a powerful effect. You find it hard to distinguish them from some genuine feeling....

pp.51-53
We can hold a block of concrete in our hands; that’s what is called ‘manifest’. In Latin, ‘manifest’ means literally ‘what you could hold in your hand’. But the thing that holds society together isn’t manifest. You can’t put it in your hand. The things you can put in your hand will not hold society together.

We have raised the question: what is the nature of this subtle concrete, glue, cement? I say it is the sharing of meaning. I am saying that the concrete basis of society is that meaning – whatever meaning is.

Now, meaning is not just abstract. You see, behind the abstraction is something concrete – the concrete reality of the very thought process itself – or more generally, of the overall mind process. And underlying this is meaning. In an elementary case it is thought which has a certain meaning, words which have a certain meaning; but there may be more subtle meanings.

Q: For an individual, the concrete reality is the meaning. For instance, with a table the meaning is in a sense what the table is – what it represents to him.

Bohm: Yes. And also the meaning of the whole room is what holds it all together as a room. The meaning of your life is what would hold it together. If it lacks that meaning, then you feel it is falling apart. If society lacks a common meaning, or the culture lacks it, it won’t hold.

Culture is the shared meaning. And meaning includes not only significance, but also value and purpose. According to the dictionary, these are the three meanings of the word ‘meaning’. I am saying that common significance, value, and purpose will hold the society together. If society does not share those, it is incoherent and it goes apart. And now we have a lot of subgroups in our society which don’t share meanings, and so it actually starts to fall apart.

Q: This almost sounds too mechanical – that these things can hold society together. It sounds as though they couldn’t really.

52

Bohm: Why not?

Q: Well, it would seem like the thing that would hold the society together wouldn’t be a ‘thing’.

Bohm: But meaning is not a thing. You can’t point to the meaning. It is very subtle.

Q: Then you say ‘shared values’?

Bohm: That is one of the aspects of meaning. If we want to say what the meaning itself is – the concrete reality of the meaning – we can’t get hold of it. But we can experience it in various forms – like the significance, the value, and the purpose. If we share meanings, then we will have a common purpose and a common value, which certainly will help hold us together. We have to go more deeply into what that means.

Q: Is the difference between significance, value, and purpose important for this discussion? And if so, could you expand on that?

Bohm: There is not a fundamental difference. They are really different aspects of the same thing. ‘Significance’ has the word ‘sign’ in it, indicating that it sort of points to something: ‘What is the significance of what we are talking about? What is the significance of what we are doing?’ That is one idea of meaning.

Value is something which is part of it. If something is very significant, you may sense it as having a high value. The word ‘value’ has a root which is interesting – the same root as ‘valor’ and ‘valiant’. It means ‘strong’. You might suppose that in early times, when people sensed something of high value they didn’t have a word for it, although it moved them strongly. Later they found a word for it and said it has high value. And then later the word itself may convey that.

If something is significant it may have a high value. And if it has a high value, you may have or you may develop a strong purpose or intention to get it, or to sustain it, or something. Things that do not have high value will not generate any very strong purpose. You would say, “It’s not interesting. It doesn’t mean much to me.”

53

“It means a lot to me” means it has a high value. And “I mean to do it” is the same as to say, “It’s my purpose.” You can see that the word ‘meaning’ has those three meanings. And I don’t think it is an accident; I think they are very deeply related.

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