Fragments to Flow
How can something be both true and false? It’s a logical contradiction, yet it’s an issue worth discussing in order to reach a philosophy of creativity. Thursday evening at our regular RealitySeeker Zoom meeting, we discussed Chapter One of David Bohm’s, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order.” The book offers a way of looking at the world that holds knowledge lightly rather than treating our understandings as being fixed.
Bohm suggests that our theories about the world can be clear in a particular domain while unclear in another. When we discover an insight that extends our knowledge, it does not render the previous understanding incorrect. We used the example of Newtonian physics. Einstein’s discoveries did not invalidate Newton’s understanding, but rather offered a method of understanding in a domain that extended Newton’s understanding. In fact, Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation are still taught because they predict the world very well under normal circumstances.
Similarly, when we see the world in fragmented fashion with fixed boundaries, as Bohm explains, we run the risk of advancing an understanding that is only partially true. That is not an assertion that a particular understanding is both true and false, which is a logical contradiction, but rather it prevents us from adopting a limited view and assigning it its own independent existence. If someone creates a concept based on the way they think things are, they may be artificially creating a domain and believing it to be absolutely true. Our thinking has a habit of doing this: creating a domain and assigning compartments within it.
When we adopt a limited view as the correct view, and we treat that component part as a separate reality we can lose the ability for the process of understanding to move toward an emergent reality. Trying to attain reality by reaching a culminating definition creates too much pressure and possibly creates stress. We must see that is exactly what we do with our mind. Instead we can understand that there is no reason to believe that there will be a final insight about absolute truth.
A realityseeker, thus, is someone who quests for attainment and experiences all the heartache wrought by that orientation. This philosophy group acknowledges that trying to get closer and closer to something allows people to do some practical things, but science is not actually progress closer and closer to reality. Instead, this group will discuss how an artist would treat philosophy and how we can join with the oneness of experience.
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