There was turmoil in David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti’s friendship that will not be rehashed in this post.  The difficult part for those of us continuing to investigate the various proposals about thought is that the waters have been muddied.  Jiddu Krishnamurti has been presented in a super-human light at times, as if he were a medium for something beyond man.  Bohm too has been presented as a super-genius whom should not be questioned.  Yet for both men we have reasons to have doubts, to question, and to not accept anything they said absolutely.  Arguably both men never wanted any kind of blind acceptance or faith and would be happy to have people continue their inquiries without taking a single thing for granted.

The Afterword of the softcover edition of F. David Peat’s biography of David Bohm contains excerpts from letters written between David Bohm and Fritz Wilhelm in the 1970s and 1980s.  There are some interesting and surprising criticisms of Krishnamurti by Bohm in these letters.  No one truly knows what happened between Bohm and Krishnamurti and these letters may not have been Bohm’s final appraisal of the man.

The following are just a few examples of statements made by bohm:

• “It is crucial that K says “You have to listen to me to the very end, because I am always Truth.”.  The difficulty is, that if K is like all of us, a mixture of what is true and what is not, then we are compelled to treat K’s false aspects as inseperable from the living truth and thus we become deeply confused and enter into deep inner conflict.  He does not allow anyone to say “Stop, this part of the teaching is not true.” for this would be to challange the whole of K’s life.”
• “I would say that K was conditioned in a differeny way from most people, and this made certain insights possible to him, while he is even more caught in nonsense than most people in certain other areas…”
• “At present, one must say that the teachings do not go far enough so that a person who lives them will change fundamentally (and in fact this has happened to non one, not even to K, who is cuaght in his own nonsense.)”

We do not mention this criticisms so to attack Krishnamurti and suggest that Bohm is right.  Criticisms can be made about any work.  The point is that we have to be careful in our undertaking of how we approach Bohm’s work and Krishnamurti’s work, and we have to see where we are accepting something based on faith and when we have seen something for ourselves.  Both these men arguably did the world a great service in their pursuit of the source of humanity’s difficulties.  It is up to those of us who share their concern to act with care in continuining to find and address the source of our difficulties.  It does seem unfortunate that the two, both of whom obviously felt at some point the other had a great energy and capacity, couldn’t have had a happier ending in regards to each other.