The Failings of the David Bohm Society

In our second podcast episode we provide a very honest reflection about what is going on in our society and in the greater community. We must be concerned with something that will work and what we’ve all been attempting appears not to be working.

Transcript

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

This is the second episode of More Important Than Physics, the podcast of the David Bohm Society.

In the first episode of this podcast, from May of 2023, I mentioned that I would aim for a monthly release schedule, albeit with some months missed. This clearly has not happened. Later in this podcast, I’ll explain why.

We are calling this episode “The Failings of the David Bohm Society.” This is not self-deprecating; these are just the facts that we must face.

If you accept that the world is in crisis, then it’s only natural to consider what the response to this crisis must be. Many of us have taken interest in David Bohm’s work because he proposed a general framework for what is going wrong in human culture, and how we might begin to do something about it. That is, doing something about thought, because Bohm proposed that thought is in crisis. So while the Society exists to do many expected functions, like preserving and promoting the legacy of David Bohm, the most important reason for the existence of the Society is to support this response to the crisis. And this response must be serious and multidisciplinary.

You can find any number of organizations working towards a particular cause that are vastly better resourced than any effort in this field that we’re calling advanced metacognition. For example, there’s the Save the Whales organization that has eight PhD science advisors, several full-time paid staff, a board of directors, volunteers, and more. There are non-profits that are about video gaming. There’s a world mime organization, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The point is, people are coming together for many causes and purposes, but not to explore this field of advanced metacognition. And we need many different types of explorers in this field. We need practitioners, just like how you would need meditators if you’re studying meditation. This group is the most important, for without them we have nothing of substance. We need scientists from different fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and computer science. We need writers and filmmakers and artists. We need analysts and researchers and people who can do all the work and investigation that complements what the practitioners are doing. We need outreach and representation and to become part of the cultural conversation.

Because the one thing that should be very apparent is that the proposals that Bohm and Krishnamurti made are not represented in common culture. We need full-time people dedicated to this work. You could have 10,000 people dedicated to this exploration globally as their full-time vocation. And that would seem appropriate given the potential that advanced metacognition has to divert humanity from catastrophe.

But to my knowledge, we really have zero people working in this area. Or if you want to count the Society and people from the Krishnamurti world, then we have a small pod of people participating mostly in a limited and part-time fashion.

We at the Society have failed to bring about this necessary collective movement to seriously investigate the proposals. You could argue that we have gathered some of the right ingredients, but even then we certainly haven’t started baking. And clearly there’s an urgency to this collective investigation, as humanity has civilization-ending technology. But even if we didn’t have that technology, the urgency would still be there, simply on account of what we’re doing to each other and to the earth. And even what the mind does to itself demands attention, as there’s so much individual suffering and mental health struggles that have resulted from the incoherence in our thinking.

Most people who read about Bohm’s proposals want to discuss them, but they don’t want to do work in regards to them. And they especially don’t want to do boring, hard, and long-term work. These comments apply probably both to the arduous process of being aware of the movements of thought, and to actually doing the formal work, research, and investigations in regards to the proposals that Bohm made. This whole enterprise has really become an intellectual pastime for most people, and they remain unchanged from it.

If we were a group of geologists or engineers, there’d be a very different quality, and it would be very easy to spot someone who wasn’t serious or lacked credentials. But in the field of advanced metacognition, it’s not like that. This is the whole problem of the black box of the mind that the field of psychology has to deal with also.

We at the Society have failed to create the soil that the collective investigation can grow from, and there are a few reasons for this failure. For one thing, we have no full-time people, and no means to pay anyone yet. And this work demands numerous people applying themselves full-time. I would say this is one of the greatest difficulties that the field of advanced metacognition faces.

And let’s take the board, for example. Until recently, we had five board members; now we have four. But not everyone on the board is willing or able to engage in all of the different kinds of work necessary, and that we’re proposing. Most of the board members are only able to participate partially and in a part-time manner. And it’s not because they aren’t serious. And several of them are doing very active work in their local areas. But we need people dedicated to a collective body of work that is grounded in their local work. And this collective work is hard. Hard in the same way it’s hard for scientists to investigate a cure for an autoimmune disease. You have to turn over so many rocks and make so many investigations that fail before you find something that doesn’t.

We also have several volunteers, but we don’t have a volunteer coordinator. Even the work itself is not well-defined because it’s such early days. We have proposed 12 specific projects, and you can see those on the cogscilabs.com website. But once you look at any of these projects, you’ll see that there’s much that’s unanswered and much groundwork that needs to be done. So the volunteers are in the thick of the unknown with us, working to help define the work as we go along. And they’re very busy with life and have quite limited time.

And this work is not easy. These are giant projects. The train is difficult. Imagine you received a grant of several million dollars, and you’re being asked to do the following: Find out if Bohm’s proposals are correct, actual, and true. And if they are, find a way to interface with the common culture and the culture of science. You would have to find a group of serious enough people who will attempt to live the proposals and investigate the truth of the proposals directly. And you would need to gather a second group of people to document it, to write about it, to evaluate what’s going on. And because this must all interface with science, then you would need a third group of scientists from varied disciplines to help apply the methods of science to what is going on. And really, we need to bring the proposals explicitly under the gaze of scientific scrutiny.

Then we’d also need outreach, which includes new writing and new video content that’s fresh, not just replaying Bohm and Krishnamurti endlessly. There must be an approach to reach the public, to help create awareness and provide instructions for advanced metacognition. We really have to show that proprioception of thought is possible.

But everything I just said depends on a group of people who serve as a living example for the proposals. And we don’t have that. Nor has the Krishnamurti world seemingly produced that. There are pockets here and there of passionate people getting together to discuss the proposals. There’s some dialogue groups. Of course, there’s the study centers and the schools. And no doubt, you can go to any of these places and find some serious people. But this has not amalgamated into a collective movement of the type that we’ve been describing.

And we’ve spoken with many people from these places. And while some describe success stories, there always seems to be an ingredient missing. The success never seems to spread beyond the individuals in the group. Nor is it taken up by the common culture in any way, not even an informational kind of way.

There must be a microcosm, a nucleus, a living example, an observable body of work at the heart of all of this. Which means either people who are interacting in close contact consistently in the same physical space or people who are living together at a center dedicated to this purpose. Which means you have to rent or own or be given such a place. But even if you did have such a place, you likely won’t find the right people in your local area. So you’d have to support and fund people and bring them in from all over the globe.

There’s some historical precedent for what we’re talking about here in the Eastern world. Those on the spiritual path would pursue their spiritual practices full-time. And beg for food or get it provided by their ashram. Society supported these individuals because they thought this pursuit was worthy and valuable. Even though most common people could not give themselves full-time to this task, they appreciated it when others were doing that and would support them.

We need to come together and support the individuals in our community. Or no one else in the entire world will. Obviously, this Eastern model doesn’t apply to the current circumstances. But we don’t even have this basic sense anymore. We don’t even have this sense of this work being so important and so valuable and so necessary to the future of humanity that we need to find a way to make it happen no matter what. If we did see this, if people saw this, then this purpose of getting together for inner transformation would be at the forefront of all of our minds.

Another way we failed at the society is in regards to our communication. We’ve connected with hundreds of people and many people write into us. But we haven’t been able to communicate the deep importance and value of producing this collective investigation.

We’ve met with intelligent people, including scientists, but this all seems so theoretical and far removed to them. This is why we need the living example. You can describe something to someone endlessly, but show it to them and then it’s undeniable. It’s a fact, a truly radical fact, or we should say here, a potential fact.

We’re starting from the proposal that advanced metacognition has a potential to radically transform human culture. We can’t guarantee or promise to anyone in advance that this will work or that this is true. We’re only saying that this proposal must be investigated and is worthy of serious investigation.

I mentioned earlier that I would explain why I haven’t produced more podcast episodes. I’m wearing too many different hats and juggling too much work for the society, while also working a full-time demanding job. The kind of tasks I do I can’t hand off to my board members for a variety of reasons, including some are just too busy, there are some linguistic barriers, and others are focusing on different work. And it’s good people are focusing on different work. That’s the whole point of collective inquiry. A bunch of serious people try different things and report back to a shared body. That’s probably our only hope. But if you look at people who made significant discoveries, who built something valuable for humanity, it was almost always something they were either doing full-time or gave their entirety of their free time to it.

And this field of advanced metacognition deserves as many full-time people as possible. We’re not trying to imply that everyone should be working in this field, but the number of people applying themselves full-time to this field that holds so much promise is so small it seems almost unbelievable. There are more people trying to break the record score at Tetris than there are actively working in the field of advanced metacognition. Part of the issue is that this field isn’t well-defined. Most don’t even know it exists. So we have the onus of better establishing it.

The last area of failure that I’m going to mention, and it’s not for a lack of trying, is getting Bohm’s material more released and available to the public. There’s excellent material being held at the Birkbeck Library. It’s been over three decades since Bohm’s passing. And so much material just sits on a hard drive or paper unavailable to the public except perhaps to those who can travel in person to the library. We’ve reached out to the rights holders, but unfortunately we were not successful in getting them to view this subject the same way that we do.

So what do we do now? We could throw in the towel. We could say this is too big, too hard, and too under-resourced. So nothing is ever going to happen. I really can’t blame someone if they take this option. This is daunting, what’s in front of us. I will not be taking this road. It feels like we’re close. It feels like we’re on the edge of something. We just need to represent it well enough. Get it in front of enough people. And just get a few full-time people pushing it forward. We just need one small living example to spark the fire, to make this undeniable. Every movement that was large once started from a very small group, sometimes even an individual. But we must also face the facts: there’s much to be done and not enough concentrated or consistent attention to this.

Thus I am proposing the following. First, we establish an international body and working group to support the exploration in this field, and to provide a singular place where findings can be shared. This will be called the Advanced Metacognition Working Group. It’s important this is not formally tied to Bohm or Krishnamurti, the same way a physics institute isn’t tied to any particular physicist and welcomes any new finding in the field from any scientist. It’s kind of ironic that the Bohm and Krishnamurti communities, their efforts are siloed and fragmented from each other when we’re all supposed to be working together.

Secondly, we must find a way to get several people exploring these proposals full-time, whatever it takes. CogSci Labs was set up to be a model for how we might go about some of the work. We should start with a single project listed there, and take it to its very ends to see what comes from that. We will first need a significant fundraising effort to achieve this.

Thirdly, we must create an easy-to-replicate model so that anyone, anywhere can start to attempt something in this field locally in their area. This itself is another full-time project. Serious enough people will already be attempting something locally, but having a prototype that we can verify works will make the uptake much more likely.

And lastly, we must develop an outreach wing to help counter all the noise in culture presently. Turn on the TV, go on YouTube, go to the bookstore, talk to people on the street. You won’t see these proposals anywhere; they’re virtually non-existent in the current culture. And fresh new content, which is not just a replaying of Bohm and Krishnamurti, is even more rare.

But we need your help. We must admit to our failings, and where our current approach is not working. It’s up to the community now what happens.

As a reminder, this podcast, More Important Than Physics, the podcast of the David Bohm Society, can be found on all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.