Thanks James. Yes I think the subject of free will (or lack thereof!) comes in to play here based on the programming of the brain and that the brain shows signs of decision making and association seconds before we become consciously aware of the thought. I would go so far as saying all thought is delusional in that it is a unique combination of stored experience (so around 8 billion versions of reality). And I totally agree re the quality of thought (and its impact on our emotional experience). We are imploding as a species I feel, as our machinery has outsmarted our ability to use it. But I’m not sure about ‘intelligence’ in its traditional definition being ‘right seeing’ (and ‘actual reality’ is a whole other subject!). Perhaps being evolved? Gaining wisdom? Only that I would say most of our thinking is unnecessary regurgitation, it has a tendency toward a negativity bias (prone to all sorts of dysfunction) and yes, is an obstacle to the only life there is and ever has been: the present moment
This seems to me a too simple argument.
On the one hand, I admire your almost surgical approach and on the other, I am left with the feeling :
‘Within the whole there are no borders!’.
So as attractive as your explanation is to adopt it is too analytical for me. There is no openness to a possibly different explanation, the organic , the living seems to have disappeared. This I don’t have from the Bohm - Kishnamurti dialogues.
Unfortunately I cannot articulate it better or come up with counter-arguments.
Yes. This is interesting. Conscious awareness is always late. I wonder if where there is total attention (which is not a conscious process, according to K) there is no more lateness? - But this is another matter.
Could you explain a little more what you mean here Kym?
Why do you object to intelligence ‘seeing correctly’? What is the particular issue you have with this way of articulating it?
And what is your objection to the words ‘actual reality’? (by which was meant the distinction between a thought-created reality, and the reality or actuality of one’s sense-perceptions, of nature, of the objective world, etc).
Are you able to express what it is you object to here Wim? Are you objecting to my reasoning, my logic? Or are you objecting to the statement that all imagination is born from the past (the past being knowledge, as memory, stored up from previous experience)?
I am not being argumentative, I am simply trying to understand your point of view.
You may be aware that David Bohm made a distinction between the creative imagination and fantasy.
Creative imagination - such as the creative imagination of a great artist - involves creative insight. While fantasy is just the movement of thought from the past.
Perhaps this distinction helps?
The traditional definition of the word intelligence (and testing of it) is using the very thing that we are saying is being overridden: memory/thinking. Whereas wisdom in my experience emerges from a space… a stillness, openness, a potential. It’s like the victor frankl quote: between stimulus and response there is a space…
And if everyone’s perception is obscured by thought, how can we speak to an objective reality? There can’t be one given what we have already concluded about thought. There can be an individual direct experience, but to then agree on that with another would bring back in thought and conditioning
I don’t quite follow what you are saying here Kym? If you have read the thread we are posting on you will see that I have said that for me intelligence has to do with quick perception, sensitivity, heightened awareness, attention holistically in the present moment (which implies “stillness, space, openness”). Intelligence for me is a form of creative perception. This is not the traditional view of intelligence as I.Q. (i.e. the intelligence of thought and memory).
This issue has been discussed many times on Kinfonet. Just recently there was a thread in which this topic was being explored:
So for me, there is a distinction between conceptual thinking (living in thought) and sense-perception (which can be distorted by thought, but left to itself perceives the world adequately).
So:
-
When we think, we are living in “reality” (to use Krishnamurti’s and Bohm’s language above).
-
When we perceive without the gross interference of thought we are living in “actuality”.
-
When thought (and the thought created ‘me’, along with all the thought-created contents of consciousness) has come completely to an end - if this is possible for us - then we are living in “truth” according to Krishnamurti.
I hope you don’t find this too confusing.
Must admit I’m still not convinced that perceptual and conceptual should be split. But even if we assume they are, what about the functional patterns of thought, its behaviors? A new way of thinking is built on old ways of thinking, sure, but it also adds genuine newness into the brew. As the integralists would say: Include and transcend.
I agree that conventional thinking sees in fragments. But I am entertaining the possibility that there is thinking that sees the whole, If such a thing exists, I doubt many people are up to it.
Good. I’d add that thought/thinking can solve problems, create, destroy, make decisions, invent and adopt and thwart moral codes, learn, imagine, daydream, analyze, reflect, communicate, plan, time travel, process emotions and information, form and store and retrieve memories, adapt, conceptualize, dream, extrapolate, etc. ad infinitum (well, maybe not infinitum). Its powers are truly, in a word: awesome. And dangerous as all get-out!
I don’t feel it does. Whatever newness there is which is injected into thought comes from creative perception, awareness, intelligence, insight, etc. It does not come from thought.
You are still assuming that a thought can exist de nouveau, out of nothing. But thought is not a miracle. Thought is the image-capture of memory of experience, stored up in the brain chemically and physically, and recycled (through associative reaction) as thought. There is no such thing as a thought which is not already based on past experience and knowledge. So thought is always from the known, from the past, as memory.
You seem not to accept this point, but we have been over it a dozen times or more, and you have nowhere convincingly explained how thought can exist independently of past knowledge and experience.
Sot thought is always the past. Creative perception - where it exists - is the new.
I think we can be certain that thinking does not see the whole, so such a thing does not exist. You seem not to accept this, but - as with thought being “new” - you have nowhere explained clearly and coherently how a fragmentary movement (thoughts are fragmentary by nature) can perceive or be in contact with a situation in its wholeness.
Awesome, yes. But the basis for the religion you seem to be intent on making it into? no. All thought is limited, and incapable of perceiving the living truth of life.
I feel that unless this is clearly understood, we will go around and around in these discussions to no purpose.
The memory of an experience is not the actual experiencing of it. The actual experiencing of it can only happen in the present moment of perceiving and living - not by regurgitating past memory (thought).
I suppose you know that one can be integral with an illusion? For me, integralism is just a word. Knowledge is not integral. One can delude oneself into thinking one has knowledge of the whole, but this is an illusion that knowledge has produced.
I think, Rick, it is worth asking why one wants to live in knowledge? What is the drive, the purpose, the meaning of wanting to live in thought and knowledge, and to invest them with mystery and miracle?
I can see that this is clearly a religion for some people.
Maybe it because it is satisfying to spend time escaping into the imagination.
When one reads a good book, or watches a really well made, well acted drama 
, one can escape into a rich, imaginative world, and forget about the actual world. It is both fun and necessary to do this from time to time. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the imaginative release of great fiction, or of listening to beautiful music, and so on.
But there is clearly a difference between living in one’s imagination for a while, and living there permanently. To live permanently in one’s imagination is to be insane. It may be comfortable or fun to live in one’s thoughts, but thoughts are just thoughts. They are not real.
The danger of living in one’s thoughts is that one begins to lose contact with reality, with what is actually there to be perceived and to live.
And - at least at the level of rhetoric - you seem to me to be wanting to establish a worldview in which thought encompasses the whole of reality, in which thought is sacred, and so making an excuse for the mind to live completely divorced from the actuality of the world, of human relationships, war, nature, the destruction of nature, etc - as well as from the possibility of discovering true love, true compassion. You want to live in thought, and to integrate love, compassion and insight into thought.
Please let’s steer away from the cul de sac this yes/no volleying is heading towards. Can we reset and return to our earlier agreement, and restart from there:
Good question, definitely worth its own thread.
I’d say mind is sacred, though my understanding of ‘sacred’ is probably different from yours.
I love living in thought-feeling. But I wonder if “that’s all there is.” Hence my presence here!
Is there anything fundamental to the distinction between thought and intelligence that does not emerge from these statements?
A cul-de-sac is a dead end, isn’t it?
Haven’t you noticed that we reach this dead-end constantly in our discussions over the years?
Partly it is a problem of not being able to communicate directly. Our conversations are dilated over hours and days, meaning that what was agreed upon before is now forgotten, and so we never get anywhere.
In my mind I thought we had discussed thought sufficiently yesterday or the day before (or whenever it was!), and come to an agreement about its nature and its limits.
But today you come along and say that - contrary to all we have been discussing over the last several days - thought can see the whole, thought can see the new, and thought is not different from perception.
So you will forgive me if I feel I am not solely responsible for creating this dead-end.
This is why I think we need - or you need - to be more explicit about why you are wanting to make thought into something sacred, something holy, whole.
I don’t feel that thought has anything to do with the whole of anything. I have given clear reasons for why I feel this way, and I had thought we were in agreement on why this is so. If you recall I summarised our discoveries by listing all the ways in which thought is limited:
I then said what thought can do (in reply to your question), while saying that thought cannot
I had thought - though clearly I was mistaken in this - that you were in broad agreement with me about all this.
But it seems that you want to go back to a point in the discussion that preceded all this: to go back, in other words, to your view that thought is the whole mind (i.e. that thought is also awareness, attention, intelligence, perception, the senses, insight, etc).
This is the bottom of the sack.
So where are we Rick?
As I said above, the limitations of this platform is that it is very difficult to be in the same time-space as another person so that the conversation doesn’t dilate. It seems again that our posts are speaking past each other for this reason.
I honestly cannot sympathise with this perception of yours. Thought-feeling is not just pleasure, it is also attachment and suffering.
Furthermore thought-feeling are clearly not all there is. I am not the universe (except in some speculative or very abstract sense). My thought-feeling has no impact on the planet Venus.
I do not understand the question you are asking here (in relation to the two statements you made about intelligence and thought). If it is an important question for you, maybe you can ask it again without introducing a negative?
Ja! It’s kind of our thing.
I think we co-create our dead ends. Our brains fall in and out of sync.
What I want to go back to is simple distilled definitions that accommodate the fine points we talked about during the last few days. Variants (improved versions) of:
Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.
Would you say that this is a showstopper for you that needs to be resolved before you are able to move freely forward? (If not, we can let my feelings about the power of thought slide for now.)
It’s the whole palette! The full human experience. (Or is it? That’s a big question for me.)
I’m asking what the statements still need to satisfactorily distinguish thought from intelligence:
Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.
This is what I attempted to do by writing:
I feel there is truth in these statements. Each of them can be stated at further length, amplified to accommodate different contexts, and I have given logical reasons for stating them in the way I have done.
As I said a couple of days ago, intelligence, for me, has to do with heightened awareness, with the degree of sensitivity, the capacity to perceive a situation in its wholeness. In this sense intelligence shares more with perceptual seeing and listening, as well as with awareness and attention, than with thinking.
For me, awareness is not thought. And because Intelligence, for me, relates to awareness, not to thought, I cannot follow you into the cup-de-sac of making thought synonymous with awareness (if this is what you wish to do).
Or perhaps I can ask this as a question of you?
Is awareness (or attention) - for you - the same thing as thought? or are they (awareness and thought) completely different, qualitatively distinct actions of the mind?
If you don’t see their difference, or if you want to conflate them according to some “integral” theory, then we are clearly using words in such a different way as to make communication very difficult.
Would you be willing to distill the gist of your statements down to their essence and fold them into the statements here, staying as concise as possible (for my little brain to digest):
Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.
intelligence shares more with perceptual seeing and listening, as well as with awareness and attention, than with thinking.
I get that.
Is awareness (or attention) - for you - the same thing as thought? or are they (awareness and thought) completely different, qualitatively distinct actions of the mind?
I understand awareness to be prior to and distinct from thought. Thought supervenes on awareness, awareness is more fundamental.
Yes, ok.
Thought is memory.
Awareness is not memory.
Intelligence is related to choiceless awareness.
Memory is not.
What do you mean by the word ‘supervene’ here?
Sorry but that doesn’t work for me. 
I love the concision, but don’t agree thought is memory.
I guess we can agree to disagree and continue exploring with that in mind, or we can keep hashing things out and see where we get?
I’m using supervene (a bit loosely*) to mean that thought is dependent on (arises/emerges from) awareness.
* “X supervenes on Y” means, formally, that any change in X brings about a change in Y, and that is not necessarily true for thought and awareness.