Q: Can you clarify for me what you understand by psychic energy and thought, and the connection between both of them.
Bohm: Thought will liberate through the reflexes all sorts of energies. Thought is in command, as it were, of a whole range of energies, which in turn affect thought. These energies are not the most subtle energies of the unconditioned, but there are a great range of energies there.
Q: Isn't thought primarily dominated by conditioning, but we do have a small percentage there where we have the opportunity to see things differently? And the new conditioning comes out of that, and then there is a change?
Bohm: That's right. Thought works by conditioning. It has to get conditioned. You need conditioning to learn a language, to learn how to write, or to do all sorts of things. When the conditioning gets too rigid, though, it won't change when it should. But there may be areas where it is not that rigid and it could change, and then you can get something new - a new set of reflexes.
Q: But there's a window of opportunity occasionally where we see something. That's the reason we sometimes get an insight to change.
Bohm: Yes. The window may arise in all sorts of fortuitous ways, or perhaps non-fortuitous. What we are doing now is, I hope, creating some kind of window. In other words, perhaps the unconditioned energy is awakening, or something, and therefore it can begin to look at this conditioning.
Q: When there's the disappearance of the endorphins and then the agitation of the brain to get that state back, what are the other possibilities besides what thought does?
Bohm: If thought didn't do anything, it might be that another solution would come. The agitation might just disappear. It may be that if you stay with the fact that there are no endorphins for a little while, the system will soon come to an equilibrium. There may be no real problem at all except that thought says 'quick, I must do something'.
Let me say a few more points here. We have this question of thought affecting perception. This will be very crucial tomorrow when we discuss the thought and the thinker or the observer and the observed, or whatever you want to call it, because the question arises: if thought affects what we perceive, how are we going to separate the two?
We have with the body a very interesting situation called proprioception, which means 'self-perception'. If you move any part of your body, you know that you have moved it the movement resulted from your intention. You know that immediately, without time, without an observer, without having to think. If you can't tell that, then you're in a very bad way. There are people who have lost it and they can't move coherently, because you must be able to distinguish between a movement that you have created and one that occurred independently.
I've often cited the case of a woman who woke up in the middle of the night hitting herself. What had happened was that she'd had a stroke that damaged her sensory nerves, which would tell her what she was doing. But the stroke left the motor nerves so that she could still move her muscles. Apparently she had touched herself, but since she wasn't being informed that it was her own touch she assumed right away that it was an attack by somebody else. Then the more she defended the worse the attack got. When the light was turned on, the proprioception was reestablished because she could then see with her eyes what she was doing, so she stopped hitting herself. There was also a case published of another woman who somehow lost proprioception overnight, and couldn't move her body without watching every movement. She had to learn to watch very skilfully and somehow to get along; apparently that never changed.
Normally this quality of proprioception exists for the body. And one of the things we need to see is the relation between the intention to move and the movement - to see immediately that relation, to be aware of it. We're usually not very aware of this intention to move, but we can be. If somebody wants to make his movements more accurate or skilled he will find his intention is not that well defined - he doesn't move the way he hopes. Somebody who wants to play the piano, for instance, has to learn that relation better so that his fingers will do what he wants them to do. So a greater quality of proprioception occurs in that regard.
The essence of the movement may be in the intention to move, which unfolds into the whole movement. For example, we knew of a man who had a degenerative disease and was unable to move at all. He could barely talk. And yet he taught movement in a university. The question is how he could do it. You could guess that, being very intelligent and unable to move, he was somehow much more aware of the intention than we are, because we focus our attention on the result. Therefore, getting the intention right may be very crucial to making the movement right. Thus there is some relation between the intention to move and the movement; and there is something in between that you are vaguely aware of, which is proprioception.
There is one point I would like to bring up now which is related to this. I'm going to say that thought is a movement - every reflex is a movement really. It moves from one thing to another. It may move the body or the chemistry or just simply the image or something else. So when 'A' happens 'B' follows. It's a movement.
All these reflexes are interconnected in one system, and the suggestion is that they are not in fact all that different. The intellectual part of thought is more subtle, but actually all the reflexes are basically similar in structure. Hence, we should think of thought as a part of the bodily movement, at least explore that possibility, because our culture has led us to believe that thought and bodily movement are really two totally different spheres which are not basically connected. But maybe they are not different. The evidence is that thought is intimately connected with the whole system.
If we say that thought is a reflex like any other muscular reflex-just a lot more subtle and more complex and changeable - then we ought to be able to be proprioceptive with thought. Thought should be able to perceive its own movement, be aware of its own movement. In the process of thought there should be awareness of that movement, of the intention to think and of the result which that thinking produces. By being more attentive, we can be aware of how thought produces a result outside ourselves. And then maybe we could also be attentive to the results it produces within ourselves. Perhaps we could even be immediately aware of how it affects perception. It has to be immediate, or else we will never get it clear. If you took time to be aware of this, you would be bringing in the reflexes again. So is such proprioception possible? I'm raising that question. Is it clear what the question means?
Q: Do 'we' have to be aware? Or could you say that there may be an awareness; and then after that moment of awareness some thought may be made about it?
Bohm: Can the movement of the body be aware of itself proprioceptively? You could ask that question. The movement of the body includes all that goes with it - the awareness and everything. A movement without awareness is quite different from a movement with. So could we also say, 'can the movement of thought be aware of itself?".
Q: Can you distinguish that from self-consciousness?
Bohm: Yes, because when you move the body and are aware
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