Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm’s line quietly detonates a common, comforting assumption: that thought is a neutral camera aimed at an external world. He doesn’t romanticize “mind” as some pure observer; he treats it as an event with momentum. The key move is rhetorical as much as philosophical: “careful attention” is an invitation to experiment on yourself, not to debate abstractions. If you actually watch thinking, Bohm implies, you’ll notice it doesn’t sit still long enough to be a mirror. It moves, edits, anticipates, defends, and loops.

That matters because Bohm came out of a 20th-century physics culture already scarred by quantum mechanics’ lesson that observation and description are not innocent. His broader project (especially in Wholeness and the Implicate Order) tries to dissolve the rigid split between “mind” and “world” without collapsing into woo. The subtext is a warning to scientists and intellectuals: your theories are not simply about reality; they’re also artifacts of the mind’s unfolding processes - habits, categories, fears, and the craving for closure.

“Relationship” is the pressure point. Bohm isn’t asking whether thought corresponds to reality the way a map corresponds to territory; he’s suggesting the map redraws itself while you’re using it. By framing thought as “an actual process,” he drags cognition out of the realm of static propositions and into time: something that can be observed, interrupted, or re-patterned. It’s a scientist’s way of smuggling in a radical ethical demand: if thinking is movement, you can’t pretend you’re not steering it.