Changing Consciousness:

Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing our World

David Bohm was a brilliant theoretical physicist — Einstein called him his intellectual successor — and one of the most original thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.

The following is an excerpt from David Bohm’s ‘Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing Our World’:

David Bohm: Every nation has come into existence through some thought that said, “We exist; we declare that we exist, we have our independence”, or else it gradually came to that. Thus, we now have a lot of nations that never existed before — a hundred years ago the world map was utterly different. And yet people are supposed to die for nations, and give up all their possessions for them, and put their children into the army for them and sacrifice everything for them. People forget that the boundaries between nations are created entirely by thinking. As you cross the boundary there is no physical change, and very often the people are not all that different. The difference is entirely due to differences in custom and habit and history that began by their thinking differently. They gradually came to have different languages and to have somewhat different ways of life. Then they said, “Here we have a nation,” and they thought, “We’re all united within our nation — we’re different from all other nations.”

Of course, nations may serve a useful purpose as convenient administrative units, and these may correspond to groups of people with a fairly common culture as well as other common interests. But the importance of the differences between nations has always been enormously exaggerated. Indeed, different nations are fairly closely connected physically, and now in the modern world the connection is much closer. Economically we all depend on one another, and ecologically we’re seeing that, with the change of climate and for other reasons, we will all suffer together when things go wrong. So there are a great many key points at which we are intimately bound together. The idea of national sovereignty denies this and says that each nation can do what it likes. This would only make sense if the nations really were independent of each other. But people are overlooking our interdependence and saying that no one can tell our nation what to do. Yet, for example, in Brazil they are cutting down and burning the rainforests. Some of the Brazilian politicians are saying with resentment that you northern, prosperous people are producing most of the carbon dioxide and you are then blaming us for changing the climate. Who do you think you are to tell us what to do with our Amazon? And we in the north similarly say, who do you in Brazil think you are to tell us what to do with our industries? But talking this way, how can we ever get together to stop all this destructive activity?

This way of thinking has been given a name: fragmentation. The word fragment means to smash, to break up. It doesn’t mean to divide. The parts of a watch could be divided, but they could still make up the whole. However, if you smashed the watch, you would get fragments, parts just arbitrarily broken up. People tend to think of nations as parts, but they are really fragments. If you try to take out one nation from the whole context, trade and all sorts of other connections would be broken. Moreover, people pretend that their nation is more united than it actually is. There are all sorts of divisions within each nation that are often far worse than those between nations.

Fragmentation consists of false division, making a division where there is a tight connection, and also false unification, uniting where there is not unity. For example, I say there is no nation that is really united. There is tremendous conflict within each nation — between the poor and the rich, between the bureaucracy and the people, between one ethnic group and another. So it is a fiction that any nation is united and that one nation is sharply distinct from another. And evidently, if we try to live by fiction, we are going to get into trouble. So it is this fragmentation, this fictional way of thinking, that has created all this trouble and produced the armies and the nuclear bombs and the refugees with all their suffering and also our inability to solve the ecological problems, and economic problems, and so on.

Mark Edwards: I think it is difficult to see that thought can create what appear to be independently real things, things like these divisions. Thought tends to assume that it is only reflecting what is actually there, not producing what is there.

DB: Yes. Of course, there is a kind of thought that is more or less a representation of what is there, like a map. However, thought has a creative function as well, to create what is there. In fact, almost everything we see around us in the world was created from thought, including all the cities, all the buildings, all the science, all the technology, and almost everything that we call nature. Farmland was produced by thought, by people thinking what they’re going to do with the land and then doing it. So without thought we wouldn’t have farms; we wouldn’t have factories; we wouldn’t have ships; we wouldn’t have airplanes; we wouldn’t have governments. Supposing we have a company like General Motors. People have to think to know what they are supposed to be doing — if they all forgot this, the company would collapse and would cease to exist. So thought can take part in creativity. Thought has created a lot of good things. It is a very powerful instrument, but if we don’t notice how it works, it can also do great harm.

Thought is a very powerful instrument, but if we don’t notice how it works, it can also do great harm…

ME: Some in the environmental movement are pointing out that nationalism makes it very difficult to solve the world’s environmental problems. And they feel that nationalism in some magical way will lose its hold on people. I can’t see that happening without a sustained inquiry into the process of thought that has produced nationalism — in fact, the reverse seems more likely, especially if conditions get worse along lines that are predicted.

DB: What we must do first is understand the source, otherwise what one says about ending nationalism may be just a vain hope. People in the Middle Ages hoped that the plague would go away, but they didn’t realize that it was carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats, which were carried by ships from one country to another. They didn’t think about the fleas and the rats and the ships. Later people saw the rats coming out of the ships, and they knew they were carrying fleas and realized the connection between fleas and plague and on the ropes holding the ships they built plates so that rats couldn’t come ashore. That was a big step in stopping the plague, because they’d learned how it was carried. So if nationalism is the plague, we have to understand the origin of that plague.

To meet this challenge, we have to begin by examining the general nature of thought. To begin with, we can say that thought is knowledge that is being applied to a particular case or that is being created by thinking about things. You begin to think, “What shall I do? What’s this all about?” What you think then goes into the memory; it becomes a kind of program. In thinking something, it becomes thought — the language says so. The word thinking means something active is going on; the word thought means it has gone on. You usually think that thought has gone and therefore has no effect. But thought has actually gone into the program, into the memory. It’s not really just the memory of what has happened, but also of what to do, of what to believe, of how things should be divided up or united, of who you are, of what you belong to, and all that. Now, when this memory works, it doesn’t come back as thinking; it works almost immediately, without thinking, through the way you respond, through its effect on how you see things, and so on.

Young children never know that one nation is different from another until they’re told. But when they’re told by people whom they believe — their parents or whoever it is — they think, “Well, now we know.” And when they know, they don’t have to think anymore. It is thought that now works and, for example, makes them feel uneasy with a foreign person. Thought affects the body, creating the stance of being cautious. And the adrenaline flows, because there is a certain amount of fear and mistrust, not quite the sense of ease you have with someone you know. Thought works in this way for all sorts of things. If you want to drive a car, you have to be told all sorts of things; you have to learn how. But when you drive, you act without thinking. If you had to think before applying what you’ve learned, it would be too late. The same kind of thought that enables you to drive a car operates when you become hostile to someone of another group, whether it be a different race, nation, or religion.

Suppose you have two religions. Thought defines religion — the thought about the nature of God and various questions like that. Such thought is very important because it is about God, who is supposed to be supreme. The thought about what is of supreme value must have the highest force. So if you disagree about that, the emotional impact can be very great, and you will then have no way to settle it. Two different beliefs about God will thus produce intense fragmentation — similarly with thoughts about the nature of society, which is also very important, or with ideologies such as communism and capitalism, or with different beliefs about your family or about your money. Whatever it is that is very important to you, fragmentation in your thought about it is going to be very powerful in its effects.

ME: Yes, and politicians are particularly adroit at manipulating this tendency to fragmentary thinking in the form of nationalism. In fact, their careers depend on it.

DB: Well, they think about it all the time, and it’s now in their thought. People accept it as a matter of course that they can’t trust people in another country. And when they think about it, they see that equally one can’t trust the people in their own country. Fundamentally the people in one’s own country are no more trustworthy than they are anywhere else — every politician knows that.

Young children never know that one nation is different from another until they’re told. But when they’re told by people whom they believe — their parents or whoever it is — they think, “Well, now we know.” And when they know, they don’t have to think anymore.

ME: There are some divisions that appear to be more real than national boundaries — the Asiatic world, with its religious traditions, and the industrialized world, with its materialistic traditions emphasizing technology. However, in the long run, the differences may not be so great. The industrial world is poisoning the entire planet with chemical pollution, and in the Third World more and more land is being destroyed by deforestation and overpopulation caused mainly by poverty. I don’t think that people are particularly happy or fulfilled in either culture. In the East people think that if they had our riches and security they’d be happy beyond measure; in the West we feel that we have lost something that they still have in the East. If we had a simpler life, closer to nature, we suppose, we would be at peace. (The rich have always romanticized poverty.) Can we examine this difference between the Asiatic world and the industrialized world in the light of what you have just said?

DB: First of all, this division arises out of the way people historically have thought differently in the Asiatic and the Western worlds. In the Western world thought has turned toward science and technology. Some historians, such as Joseph Needham, have asked why the Chinese didn’t develop technology though they had a higher civilization than Europe had in the Middle Ages. He gave several explanations — we don’t need to go into them in detail here. But for various reasons Western thought has turned toward technology and industrial development, perhaps partly because of its early emphasis on the concept of measure, which goes back to ancient Greece and even before. By contrast, partly because of the kind of philosophy that prevailed in the East, which put the immeasurable into first place, Eastern thought has been more static in its treatment of the domain of the measurable, and so people there have been more satisfied to stay with things as they are. But ultimately this difference is due to thought. It seems very unlikely that it is due to race; in many ways, the Japanese are doing better at certain key aspects of our Western thought than we are.

So there isn’t any intrinsic distinction between Eastern and Western humanity that I can see operating. Differences exist because thought develops like a stream that happens to go one way here and another way there. Once it develops it produces real physical results that people are looking at, but they don’t see where these results are coming from — that’s one of the basic features of fragmentation. When they have produced these divisions they see that real things have happened, so they’ll start with these real things as if they just suddenly got there by themselves, or evolved in nature by themselves. That’s the second mistake that thought makes.

It produces a result, and then it says, “I didn’t do it; it’s there by itself, and I must correct it”. But if thought is constantly making this result and then saying, “I’ve got to stop it”, this is absurd. Because thought is caught up in this absurdity, it is producing all sorts of negative consequences, then treating them as independent and saying, “I must stop them.” It is as if man with his right hand were doing things he didn’t want to do, and with the left hand he tried to hold back his right hand. All he has to do is to stop the whole process, and then he doesn’t have that problem.

ME: What is it that would look at thought?

DB: This is a very subtle question. Let me begin by pointing out that the most fundamental characteristic of the word thought is that it is in the past tense. It is what has been thought, though it’s still not gone. One of the common beliefs is that thought, when you’ve finished with it, has gone. But we’ve said that it is actually there, as if it were on the computer disk. The computer disk not only repeats all sorts of facts, but, even more important, it actually operates the computer in a certain way. That way has to be changed from time to time because things change. Or as Krishnamurti put it, thought and knowledge are limited. They cannot cover everything, if only because they are based on things that have happened in the past, whereas everything changes. However, one of the most common assumptions of thought is that thought is not limited.

Thought produces a result, and then it says, “I didn’t do it; it’s there by itself, and I must correct it”. But if thought is constantly making this result and then saying, “I’ve got to stop it”, this is absurd. Because thought is caught up in this absurdity, it is producing all sorts of negative consequences.

ME: Most of us would see that thought is limited by experience and in its own way reflects experience.

DB: Thought is not just reflecting whatever is there, but on the basis of what is known from the past, it helps to create the impression of what is there. It selects; it abstracts; and in doing this, it chooses certain aspects, which then attract our attention. But what is there is immensely beyond what thought can grasp. As an analogy, consider a map: a map does not correspond with a territory in a direct and immediately perceptible way; it’s only in some very abstract sense that it corresponds. For example, if you have a division between one country and another, there’s a line on the map — that’s an abstraction. And there’s another line that is supposed to be somewhere in between the two countries — that’s another abstraction. So there’s a correspondence of these two abstractions. In this way, the map may enable you to see certain abstract relationships that could help guide you in the territory. But the map is much, much less than the territory, and it’s not always even right. Thought could be regarded as a more abstract and generalized kind of map of reality.

ME: The difficulty here is to distinguish perception of the fact from the thought.

DB: That’s right. That’s one of the problems, that thought affects the way you see the fact and affects the way you see the territory. For example, when you cross from one country to another, you see another nation, but really, where is it? It’s not there by itself; it’s only there because you think it’s there or because of what people have done because they think it’s there. Therefore, thought is not keeping track of its own consequences, of its own activity. You need some sort of process of perception to keep track of that. You cannot by thinking alone look at the territory.

Thought is conditioned to react somewhat as if it were a computer disk and can therefore respond extremely rapidly. It is helpful to regard thought as acting basically 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. For example, if you look at a tree, you’ll immediately say the word tree rather as a disk on a computer set up to recognize the shape of a tree might do. All the information and general responses connected with this word are then called up automatically.

But reactive thought and perception of an actual fact are very different. The first point to notice is that we are able to perceive an actual fact through our senses. Everybody can see that we can perceive this through our senses, whether it be our eyes or our ears or our sense of touch, and that in this way we get information that thought cannot possibly supply. The least we can say, therefore, is that we have a combination of sense perception and thought.

I think that when this happens, we begin to go a bit beyond thought. Indeed, thought stops for a moment. In some sense we are then perceiving, but not through our senses; we are looking through the mind. Such perception, in which one goes deeply into the more subtle aspects of incoherence, can invalidate a false program so that subsequent thought can be free from it and therefore more coherent.

To sum up, then, thought is a response based on memory, but as one can discover by actual experience in the way that has just been described, it can be affected by perception, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is evidently not based primarily on memory. Through such perception, we can see the incoherence in our thought (for example, we can detect fragmentation). We can then go on to perceiving new ways of making distinctions and new relationships among the things thus distinguished that were more congruent with actual fact.

I suggest that this approach can be carried further to make possible new discoveries, new ideas, and new insights. All this indicates some faculty that goes beyond memory, that is not just sense perception. This is something we will explore in more detail later on, because it is of fundamental significance.

If I’m right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source, it follows that if we don’t do anything about thought, we won’t get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way.

So I’m saying that we have got to examine the question of thought. Now, how can you influence all these people? Well, you’ve got to begin with those who can listen, because everything new started with a few people. At the time of Newton, for example, there were not a hundred scientists of any merit in Europe. They could have said, “Look at this vast mass of ignorant people, going around just living their lives.” Nevertheless, science had a tremendous effect, though not all to the good. But still, it shows that small things can have big effects — one small thing being, for example, more and more people understanding that something has to change. We see the Green movement growing. They are doing good work, and much more should be done along these lines. But the important point is that they’re not considering thought. That is to say, they are not considering the fundamental cause, just the effect.

Our technology may give us an illusion of superiority. If our present activities continue and the climate changes, it could easily happen that the entire grain belt of the Northern Hemisphere could become a desert, and in that case America would become very poor. The whole world would starve. Billions of people might die.

Thought is a response based on memory, but it can be affected by perception, both through the senses and through the mind. Through such perception, we can see the incoherence in our thought [and] then go on to perceiving new ways of making distinctions and new relationships among the things thus distinguished.

ME: One of the problems is that we don’t really feel we are in the same boat. We pay lip service to the idea sometimes — we imagine that there are no countries and that the world is one — but this does not go very deep into the consciousness from which our actions ultimately arise.

DB: The isolation comes from the way we think. We are drawing false boundaries between ourselves and other people, and we experience these boundaries in our feelings. Unless our thinking changes, any change of feeling can’t really be sustained, and so, as you have said, the overall change will not be very significant.

Even if we were to take some concrete practical steps to reforest Africa and to do all sorts of other things — stop the emissions that produce acid rain, reduce the production of carbon dioxide, and so on — still, vast numbers of poor people are going to be driven to do all sorts of things against the ecological balance unless we all feel responsible for them. And the basic pattern of our thought is that we do not feel this way. The ordinary, everyday person has an everyday family life and an everyday working life and does not think that way. Most of what you can generally think and read has it the other way. We have to notice this, and we have to bring things up and ask, for example, “Do you really not care that your grandchildren and those who follow them are going to starve to death and fight for the little that may be left, as long as you can have your hamburgers today?” Most people will agree, of course, that this can’t be right. But the disk keeps pushing away that question, saying or implying that it’s not an important question. The disk generally determines what questions seem to be the most important.

This is in part because most people lack the ability to grasp abstractions; that is one of the problems. Abstractions are actually very significant. In fact, abstractions have produced science and technology with all these problems. The fact that health has improved and the birth rate has gone up, the nuclear problems, the carbon dioxide — it’s all due to abstractions. But people don’t take them very seriously. Our education has not developed in us the ability to grasp the importance of abstractions. It is, on the whole, a very poor education anyway, and this is indeed part of the overall problem. I think we’ll have to begin with those who can grasp abstractions, and we’ll then have to try to bring these abstractions to wide public notice in a way that people can understand. And that requires creative action. That becomes part of the task, which is not only to understand these abstractions but to understand how to make them alive in the present to people generally.

ME: Can you explain this more fully?

DB: To abstract means literally to take something away, to separate something from its context. It’s very similar to the word exact. The question is, Why should you want to take something away from its context? This is what thought is always doing. It picks on something that seems to be relevant and important and tries to discuss this in the abstract, because that simplifies it and enables us to focus on the main point. The opposite of the abstract is the concrete. The word concrete comes from the Latin word conscrescent, meaning “grown together”. You may imagine a jungle with a vast amount of concrete reality. You are generally, however, interested not in the whole jungle, but rather in certain animals or certain plants. In your mind you abstract a plant out of that vast jungle and say, “My mind is on that plant, I want to find that plant, because I want to eat it.” You can see here the importance of abstraction. Even animals must abstract what is relevant in this jungle.

Reality is everything concrete and is much too much to be grasped by the mind in detail, so you make abstractions — call that foreground — and leave the rest as background, which you don’t notice very much. In this process of abstraction, the word calls attention to something and gives it shape. For example, we have a very patterned carpet here in this room. Once I lost a coin on this carpet and couldn’t see it. But I saw a glint, and as soon as I saw this I saw the coin. The glint enabled me to abstract the coin from the carpet; otherwise, it was lost in the details of the pattern.

We are constantly even in such elementary ways using abstraction, and we build on that. Indeed, every name is an abstraction of a class or category like water, air, fire. Even the name of a person is an abstraction — it doesn’t tell you all about the person; you usually associate with it a few things about that person.

Knowledge is built up from such abstractions, which are then abstracted yet further. For example, you have chairs, tables, bookcases, and you abstract that as furniture. You can abstract the furniture further as material objects, and you can go on in this way to more and more general abstractions. This hierarchy of abstractions enables you to reason.

By abstracting you do two things: first of all, you leave out the vast complexity that you can’t handle, and secondly, you begin to put some order into it, a logical coherent order, which enables you to reason. The word reason is based on the Latin ratio. This can be a numerical ratio, as with two numbers, like three over four. But a ratio can also be taken qualitatively: as A is related to B, so C is related to D. For example, as two things are related in thought, they are related in reality. Using abstract ratio, or reason, you can start from some fact and come to a conclusion.

Without abstraction we couldn’t function; thought would be of no use; there would be no point in it. The choice of abstractions may be partly by memory, which tells you what is important, but it should also involve direct perception, to see whether the object of our thought really is as we think, or whether our thought is not working coherently. But if you are too stuck to your thought and identified with it, you can’t change it by such perception.

So we really need to be able to change our abstractions when it is necessary to do so. But to do this, we have to see that they are abstractions. This is often difficult, because abstractions, though insubstantial in themselves, can produce substantial concrete results that, in a cursory inspection, give the appearance of an independently existent reality. For example, we may feel that a country is such a reality. But without the abstract thought of a nation, the country would vanish. If people didn’t know that they belonged to a certain nation, there would be no country, in spite of all the houses, factories, legislation, and so on. Nobody would know that it was all related, that it made up a particular country that, for example, must be defended at all costs.

The essential point is, then, that abstractions can produce sustained concrete results, and that thought loses track of this. In a way that we have described earlier, it then calls such concrete results independent realities. It then says, “I’m only telling you about this concrete reality.” This leads to confusion. It means, for example, that you might now try to correct this supposedly independent reality while your abstractions are working constantly to prevent you from correcting it. Indeed, they are constantly making you recreate it as it was before, while at the same time you make another abstraction that says you should change it. That may happen in a revolution. We see the terrible mess in society. We take this mess as a concrete reality independent of thought, and we make an abstraction of a revolution to change it. However, we have all sorts of other abstractions in human relationships, such as who’s the boss, who has power, and so on. So the revolution produces basically the same sort of society, with just a change in its details.

Even if we were to take some concrete practical steps to reforest Africa and stop the emissions — still, vast numbers of poor people are going to be driven to do all sorts of things against the ecological balance unless we all feel responsible for them. And the basic pattern of our thought is that we do not feel this way.

ME: You are calling for a new kind of intelligence.

DB: Yes. We need a new kind of intelligence because we have created a world that requires it. In the Stone Age the ordinary practical intelligence was good enough. People then had an instinctive sort of intelligence developed somewhat by culture. But today we have created a complex world based on the abstractions of thought. To deal with nature we need a certain kind of intelligence, but to deal with thought we need a much higher sort of intelligence.

We tend to think that thought is this sort of intelligence, but it isn’t. The key point about thought is that it is like the program, the disk, that responds to the situation. There is no reason why a disk should respond intelligently — a thing might change, and the disk might no longer be appropriate.It responds quickly and automatically according to what has been programmed into it. Similarly, what we have been thinking and learning is programmed into our memory. It’s not merely a picture of what happened in the past but a program for potential action. That program is extremely subtle; to deal with it takes much more subtlety than to deal with the objects the program deals with.

Here we come to what I call the process of thought. Thought has a content, that is, a certain substance or meaning. In the past, people may have just prayed to the rain god. Now we say that the weather is a process. We don’t understand it fully, but at least we see that it is a process. And insofar as we do understand it, we can predict it to some extent, and adapt to it. We are even beginning to look into the process of maintaining or changing climate, and we can now act more intelligently in this regard if we want to.

So we understand that there is this process of the weather. But as for thought, nobody ever looks at it. We just take it for granted, the way people used to do with the weather. It’s as if we supposed that inside us there is a thought god who produces thought, according to arbitrary whim. That thought god could be called “I” or “me” or “the self”. Thus it is implied that each of us is somehow in control of his or her own thoughts. But what I am suggesting is that, as a process, thought moves, for the most part, on its own, and that there is little possibility of this process coming to order until we understand it fairly well.

Development, which is called progress, has become a menace. As long as there is money to be made by developing and money available to do it, it seems almost impossible to stop it. You may resist it for a while, but they are going to keep working until they find a way around it. That is, again, the way we think. Development is thought to be absolutely necessary, so that we mustn’t stop it, no matter what it does to destroy the ecological balance of nature or its beauty, or to turn our cities into unlivable jungles of concrete. But we’ve got to stop this heedless rush into development, because that way lies a meaningless life and eventually disaster.

There is hardly a politician who would dare say that sooner or later this sort of growth must stop. Yet you can see that such growth must ultimately destroy the world. As we pointed our earlier, if all the nations in the world tried to obtain the present Western standard of living, our planet would be devastated. Just to consider one point alone, the amount of carbon dioxide would multiply by many times. Indeed, you can apply the sort of calculation that I have made about population growth to the economy instead. If the economy grows by 2.5% per year, which is very small, in a thousand years it will have grown ten thousand million times! We will have to stop it somewhere, and it is clear that we have passed the point at which we should begin seriously to consider what would be a right approach to this whole question. For it makes no sense to go on giving growth such a high priority, so that it ultimately overrides almost everything else. What is of primary importance is to have a healthy ecological balance in nature and a good quality of life for everyone. Within the context of these requirements we can then see the kind and degree of growth that is called for.

It is very hard for people to change their thought about all this, however. What prevents us from stopping our present unintelligent sort of growth is ultimately the thought that the continuation of such growth is absolutely necessary and that we can’t live without it. But we can live without it, as long as we don’t make these material products the main point of life. For example, we have to reorganize life fundamentally so that we don’t flood our roads with cars. We have to have other ways of getting around, or perhaps we may not even get around so much. We may instead try to make our living places, our cities, so good that we don’t have to rush off to somewhere else. All that would mean reorganizing life almost totally. The general momentum of the last few hundred years is in the wrong direction. People have thought mainly of progress, growth and development as the prime goals of our society. But this movement has by now become destructive. One could indeed say that Western countries have already carried their current lines of development too far, while the other countries cannot stand much further development of this kind.

It is clear that we have a crisis developing. And if we go on with this momentum, the end is certain; it is only a question of when. Will it be in fifty years? Or in a hundred years? It’s hard to estimate. But you can see that if we continue to grow for a thousand years, we’ll have overgrown ten thousand million times — there will be nothing left on this planet or on any planet around it. You see the power of that sort of growth? It has tremendous power — it is only an abstraction, but it has all that power.

But how is this abstraction to change? People don’t see the meaning of abstract thought. They’re not used to thinking about abstract thought. As I’ve said earlier, we have got to develop the ability to see what abstraction is, to see its power. These abstractions are doing the job. These abstractions are actually concrete realities when considered as an actual process. That is to say, the process of thought itself is a concrete reality whose product is abstractions. This concrete process is running away with us. The first thing is to become conscious and aware that this is happening, to find ways to enable people to appreciate the importance of these abstractions. They are not really just shadowy abstractions; they are being projected by a concrete process that produces very big concrete results.

Development, which is called progress, has become a menace… There is hardly a politician who would dare say that sooner or later this sort of growth must stop. Yet you can see that such growth must ultimately destroy the world. If all the nations in the world tried to obtain the present Western standard of living, our planet would be devastated.

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