On Dialogue (Routledge Classics) (Volume 76)

by David Bohm

Another example would be a rainbow – everybody sees the same rainbow. There’s a collective representation of the rainbow – we all have a consensus about it. But physics, which looks at things “literally,” says, “No, there is no rainbow. There are a lot of droplets of water, the sun is in back of you and it’s being reflected and refracted off the water and forming colors. In seeing this, each person is forming his own perception of a rainbow. It happens they all look very similar, therefore they all think they’re all looking at the same rainbow.” (You could also argue that by adopting that view you are taking physics as the real thing.) The point, though, is that a lot of our collective representations – a country, a religion, General Motors, the ego – are of the same quality as the rainbow. A great many things which we take as solid reality are very similar to the rainbow. In fact, it’s not wrong to do that. The difficulty arises because we do not realize that this is happening, and we therefore give the representation the value of independent fact. If we could see it happening, it would produce no problem at all. We would then be able to value the “fact” for whatever it is. But in our current approach, we are able to take “facts” which have very little value, and value them very highly.