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?