What is the Root of Human Conflict, externally, as well as internally?
What leads to the belief that ‘What Is’ should be ‘Other than it actually is revealed to be in awareness’?
If we see that identification with a specific organized religion, or county leads to conflict and division, do we then register a psychological belief that “it’s wrong to do this?” And when we meet someone who has this sort of belief, do we defend this belief because it’s taken to be, “my belief,” “what I know is the truth?”
Should these persons not have the belief in a religion or country, that they actually do have? Is that ‘thought expectation’ rational or coherent?
Do these quotes below point us in the right place to explore?
K: Now, is there a division between the observer and the observed?
Bohm: We have this picture of someone inside us who is given all this information and then decides to have the intention to do something based on that. I’m suggesting however, that that is not so.
Is this belief in a chooser or observer, inside our head, reflecting what’s going on in external relationship, in the conditioning, in the thought patterns? Is there an idea that there’s a separate “chooser,” separate from the knowledge we each have, that “should be choosing” the view we believe, instead of the view they actually have?
And ‘internally’, do we have the idea that “I’m in conflict,” because we have the idea that I’m an ‘I’ separate from the opposing ideas, and ‘I’ should not have conflicting views?
Do we also assume that others should be other than they are, because we believe there’s a ‘you’ inside their head too, that’s using the information and choosing poorly? Not “choosing” to act differently than their actual views?
And what about this quote from K:
K: For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, ‘Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. - Freedom From the Known
**If K is correct in suggesting this, does this failure to look for ourselves explain why we have conflicting opinions?
But again, is there an 'I" that chose these views? Is there a you that “failed to look for itself?” When did this ‘I’ choose to ‘not look for itself’? Did we choose to believe there’s a chooser inside our head? Did we choose the identity we have?
Or, are these actually commonly shared patterns in the cultural conditioning?
Would there be any conflict if there was no imagined me that should have an understanding other than what the person actually has?
David Bohm: Thought is conditioned to react somewhat as if it were a computer disk and therefore can respond extremely rapidly. It is helpful to regard thought as basically acting like a conditioned reflex. It takes time to build up the memory-based reactions, but once this is done the responses are so fast that it is difficult to see their mechanical nature.
Bohm: The principal difficulty in our whole thought process is the thought about the self - about the ego, or whatever you want to call it. The ego seems to be so important that we are ready to distort everything in order to protect it. We will deceive ourselves, engage in violence, and do all sorts of things. - Dec. 1989 Ojai Seminar
Bohm: It’s very important to see this - that this thought goes out and spreads all over the world. Other people pick it up and they make it part of their reflexes. But it’s all thought. - Thought As A System