K in Media

Here we present pieces on Krishnamurti appearing in different publications and magazines.

Seeds of Dialogue   by F. David Peat in Life Positive Jan. 2006

The physicist David Bohm saw in modern physics an expression of the essential wholeness of nature. In particular, that wholeness was present in the act of quantum observation when observer and observed are united into an unanalysable whole. Bohm felt that a similar wholeness must be present both in the life the individual and in society in general. Indeed he saw this wholeness as an integration of the Cosmic (or religious), Social and Individual dimensions of each human being.

Inevitably Bohm was drawn to the Indian teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti. It is said that at the time of their first meeting, Bohm explained that in quantum theory "the observer is the observed" which echoed Krishnamurti's "the thinker is the thought." and so the teacher enthusiastically embraced the physicist. Over many years, Bohm and Krishnamurti continued their dialogue together. For Krishnamurti something else operated when thought was silent, something that could transform the physical brain. Bohm himself developed a theory of active information, an activity that could transform both raw  energy and matter itself. Indeed for Bohm, there was no division between matter and mind, since 'proto-mind' had been present from the very beginning of the cosmos. (See D. Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, Routledge, London, 1983, and D. Bohm and F.D.Peat Science, Order and Creativity, Routledge, London and New York, 2000) For a time, as is shown in the video tapes and the transcriptions of their discussions, both men explored together with great honesty. Tragically, however, a break occurred between them that was never reconciled.

There is a certain irony in this fracture between Krishnamurti and Bohm, for the latter often pointed to what he termed "the breakdown in communication between Bohr and Einstein". As younger men. while taking opposing positions on the interpretation of quantum theory, the two men felt deep affection, even love for each other, and engaged in a very active debate about their differences. Yet Bohm remembered a reception given for the ageing Bohr at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies at which Bohr and his students stood at one end of the room and Einstein and his students at the other. The two men had nothing to say to each other. Bohm believed that the failure to communicate lay deep within the way each man used language – and that enfolded within language lay our worldview and even our fixed non-negotiable positions. Was something similar at work, some profound and hitherto hidden division, between Bohm and Krishnamurti or even at the heart of the dialogue between science and religion?