Roots of Psychological Disorder
David Bohm is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, London University in England. He has written numerous books concerning theoretical physics and the nature of consciousness. Professor Bohm and Mr Krishnamurti have held previous dialogues on many subjects.
In the culture there are conflicting points of view about the proper approach to dealing with one's own or others' psychological problems. And the underlying principles from which these approaches are drawn are in even greater conflict. Without invoking a narrow or specialised point of view, can the mind, the nature of consciousness, its relationship to human suffering, and the potential for change be understood? These are the issues to be explored in these dialogues.
K: Is disorder the very nature of the self?
JH: Why do you say that? Why do you ask that, if it is the nature of the self?
K: That's right. The very nature of the self must intrinsically bring disorder.
Rupert Sheldrake: Sorry, it seems to me that the context is even broader than that of psychology, because in the world we have all sorts of things which are not human beings with selves, there are animals and plants and all the forces of nature and all the stars and so on. Now we see disorder in nature too. It may not be consciously experienced and a cat that's suffering or a lion that is suffering or a mouse or even an earthworm that's suffering may not come into a psychiatrist's office and say so, but the fact is that there seems to be disorder and conflict within nature. There are conflicts between forces of nature, inanimate things, earthquakes and so on; there are conflicts within the animal world; there are even conflicts within the plant world - plants compete for light, and bigger ones get higher up in the forest and the smaller ones get shaded out and die. There's conflict between predators and prey; all animals live on other plants or animals. There's every kind of conflict: there's disease, there's suffering, there's parasites; all these things occur in the natural world. So is the context of psychological suffering and disorder something that's merely something to do with the mind or is it something to do with the whole of nature, the fact that the world is full of separate things and that if we have a world which is full of separate things and these separate things are all interacting with each other, that there's always going to be conflict in such a world.
DB: So, I'm wondering, is it clear that there is that disorder in nature. Would we say that disorder is only in human consciousness?
DB: That is, the phenomena that you have described, are they actually disorder? That's a question we have to go into. Or what is the difference between the disorder in consciousness and whatever is going on in nature?
K: Suffering, yes. So are we saying that it is natural in nature and in human beings to suffer, to go through agonies, to live in disorder?
JH: Yes. Now why does it have to happen that way? Are we saying that's the way it is in nature? Or are we saying that...
RS: Well, I mean, there are certain conflicts in nature. For example, among troops of gorillas or baboons - take baboons or even chimpanzees - there's a conflict among the males. Often the strongest male...
RS: ...wishes to monopolise all the attractive females. Now some of the younger males want to get in on the act as well. They try going off with these females and this younger male will fight and beat them off. So they'll be kept out of this. This selfish activity of this one male keeps most of the females to himself. The same occurs in red deer, where the stag will monopolise the females. Now these are examples of conflict in the animal kingdom which are quite needless. There would be enough food for these hens without pecking each other. Now these are not exceptions; we can find this kind of thing throughout the animal kingdom. So I don't think that the origin of this kind of selfish conflict is something just to do with human societies and the way they are structured. I think we can see in biological nature this kind of thing.
RS: The other kind of conditioning is the kind of argument that I'm putting forward, perhaps: the argument, this has always been so; human nature is like this, there have always been wars and conflicts and all that kind of thing, and therefore there always will be; that the most we can do is try to minimise these, and that there'll always be psychological conflicts within families and between people and that the most we can do is try and minimise these...
K: That is what I want to discuss. Whether it's possible to change the human conditioning. And not accept it, say, as most philosophers, the existentialists and others say, your human nature is conditioned. You cannot change. You can modify it; you can be less selfish, have psychologically less painful problems, bear up with pain, this is natural, we have inherited from the animals; we'll go on like this for the rest of our lives and for the lives to come. Not reincarnation, other people's lives. It'll be our conditioning, human conditioning. Do we accept that? Or should we enquire into whether it's possible to change this conditioning?
RS: I'd like it to be changed, I deeply want it to be changed. So I think that this question of enquiring into the possibility is extremely important. But one of my points, to go back to the conditioning point, is that a lot of this conditioning is deep in our biological nature and people who wish to change it merely by changing the structures of society...
JH: Well, that seems to be part of the problem that we've arrived at. We have said that man is conditioned biologically and socially by his family. The tradition is part of that. We've said that that's the problem that we're up against now. Is it possible for him to change his nature or do we have to deal with each of these problems particularly as they come up?
