Unfolding Meaning Quotes

“Most of the material environment in which we live — houses, cities, factories, farms, highways, and so on — can be described as the somatic result of the meaning that material objects have had for human beings over the ages. Going on from there, even relationships with nature and with the cosmos flow out of what they mean to us. These meanings fundamentally affect our actions toward nature, and thus indirectly, the action of nature back on us is affected.”
― David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

“The important point is that the intention is a kind of implicate order; the intention unfolds from the whole meaning. It doesn’t just come out of nothing. Therefore a person cannot form intentions except on the basis of what the situation means to him, and if he misses the mark on what it means, he will form the wrong intentions.”
― David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

“Fragmentation is therefore an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. For example, though all parts of mankind are fundamentally interdependent and interrelated, the primary and overriding kind of significance given to the distinctions between people, family, profession, nation, race, religion, ideology, and so on, is preventing human beings from working together for the common good, or even for survival. When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first — his own person, his own group — he can’t seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people.”
― David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

“Fragmentation is therefore an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. For example, though all parts of mankind are fundamentally interdependent and interrelated, the primary and overriding kind of significance given to the distinctions between people, family, profession, nation, race, religion, ideology, and so on, is preventing human beings from working together for the common good, or even for survival.”
― David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

“The division between mind and matter, or the observer and the observed, has produced very serious consequences in attempting to see that the world is a whole, because even if you are thinking of wholeness, you are thinking of an observer who is looking at this wholeness, and this creates a division. This starts to break up the whole, because you identify with one part of it, and then there is another part you are not identified with, and therefore the whole is broken up in two. And then it breaks up further, because there are many observers, and each observer is an external object for all the others. The many parts obtained in this way are related, and you have to break things up even more in order to understand their relationships. So the implicate order can be important as a way of seeing how this particular problem might be dealt with.”
― David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm