David Bohm was an explorer in fundamental physics who felt that it had lost its way. He saw that researchers at the forefront were no longer deeply interested in creative insight into fundamental processes and structures but were satisfied merely to produce algorithms, without much concern about why these mathematical forms produced results. Bohm looked to earlier greats in physics who had gone beyond the forms and norms of the science that had preceded them and who, through revolutionary insight, had created an understanding that was profoundly new. Bohm also studied creativity itself. He came to feel that true creativity must reach beyond the boundaries of our entire framework of thinking in order to discover something not bound by that.
I recall Bohm pointing out that society tends to have a sense that our universe is pretty much in principle known, in the sense that we have a well-defined concept of reality and a relatively fixed framework of thinking. For Bohm, deep creativity demands that we go beyond that definiteness and that we appreciate the universe as mysterious, as had Newton and Einstein, and as did he. As well, Krishnamurti, with whom he had for years explored the nature of mind, emphasized the necessity of “freedom from the known” in order to significantly explore and to come upon something fundamentally new.
Bohm noted of Einstein and Krishnamurti—it would seem the two most influential relationships in his life—that with these two men he had a communication in which there was an extraordinary openness and intensity. It is just this that deep creativity requires: freedom from the boundaries that constrain our consciousness and the energy that comes with that freedom.
All three—Bohm, Einstein, Krishnamurti—had an appreciation of life’s depths as unfathomable and for life’s undivided wholeness, so that they were not constrained by the boundaries that hold most of us, and were freed, each in his way, to act with profound creativity.
