Conversations in Consciousness

From a series of conversations between Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm, on the subject of Nothingness

Preface

I can barely contain my delight in finally being able to read the recorded conversations between Dr. David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Their dialogues—collected in The Ending of Time: Where Philosophy and Physics Meet—return again and again to what they call Nothingness. That subject has also shaped parts of my own inner life, and their clarity has encouraged me to speak more openly about a few personal experiences that I would otherwise leave unmentioned.

Because the subject is unusually significant—and easily misunderstood—this essay requires a longer introduction than most.

What follows does three things:

1. It offers brief background on Bohm and Krishnamurti, to establish why these conversations matter.

2. It frames what “Nothingness” is and is not meant to convey.

3. It then enters into selected excerpts from their dialogues, interwoven with my own commentary.

1. World-class explorers of Nothingness

In The Ending of Time, we encounter two seasoned investigators approaching the same frontier from different directions. Bohm arrived through the rigor and paradoxes of quantum physics. Krishnamurti emerged from Indian mysticism, yet refused its traditional authority structures.

By the time they met in Ojai, California, both men were already well-traveled in their respective domains. Their conversations are striking not only because of what they discuss, but because of how they discuss it: without performance, without jargon, and with a seriousness that feels rare.

There is an enormous amount of biographical material available on both men. I will keep that background brief, offering only what helps illuminate how these two ended up speaking together about the limits of mind, self, and time.

2. The Theosophical Society’s part in the story

Krishnamurti’s early life is unusual, and its origins trace back to the Theosophical Society—an organization founded in 1875 to integrate Eastern philosophies and Western esoteric traditions.

Associated with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Society emphasized universal brotherhood, comparative religion, and the investigation of latent human capacities. Spiritualism and mediumship were popular at the time, as was the idea of “Hidden Masters” guiding humanity.

Eventually, the Society began preparing for the anticipated arrival of a “World Teacher.” This expectation becomes relevant only because Krishnamurti was later positioned—against his own nature—as the vehicle for that role.

3. Krishnamurti and “that which is beyond words”

In 1909, Charles Leadbeater identified a thin, undernourished thirteen-year-old boy on a beach in Adyar, India—Jiddu Krishnamurti—whom he believed would become a great spiritual teacher.

Krishnamurti was groomed for years as the expected World Teacher, envisioned as a global religious figure. But in 1929, still a young man, he publicly repudiated that entire structure. He disbanded the organization built around him and refused the role completely.

A few years earlier, in 1922, Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya had moved to Ojai, California. What occurred there appears to have shaped the remainder of his life. According to accounts recorded later, Krishnamurti underwent a series of intense physical, psychological, and spiritual episodes referred to as “the process,” often accompanied by what was described as “the benediction” or “the otherness.”

However one interprets these events, they marked an irreversible threshold. Krishnamurti’s later work consistently attempts to point toward what can be sensed when the mind is no longer confined to its habitual structures.

His influence reached widely—artists, writers, scientists, and spiritual figures alike. Eckhart Tolle later observed that Krishnamurti spent decades trying to convey, through words, that which lies beyond words.

Aldous Huxley, introducing The First and Last Freedom, emphasized a theme that runs throughout Krishnamurti’s work: clarity cannot be organized, inherited, or transferred as belief. It must be discovered directly.

This insistence explains Krishnamurti’s uncompromising stance on belief. For him, belief was not merely opinion—it was often a substitute for perception.

4. David Bohm and the question of underlying reality

David Bohm (1917–1992) was a major twentieth-century physicist whose work intersected quantum theory, hidden variables, and the possibility of an underlying order beneath apparent randomness.

His life included political suspicion, exile, and years abroad, yet his intellectual impact is unquestioned. Dissatisfied with orthodox interpretations of quantum mechanics, Bohm explored whether deeper coherence might exist beneath surface discontinuity.

Among his better-known contributions was the idea of a hidden order—a deeper structure beneath the apparent chaos described by standard quantum mechanics. His interests expanded into models of mind and perception, including holographic interpretations of the brain and universe.

Bohm’s seriousness about consciousness eventually led him toward Krishnamurti, and their meeting represents a rare junction where physics and contemplative inquiry genuinely intersected.

5. Meetings in consciousness

Bohm first encountered Krishnamurti’s work in 1959. What struck him most was Krishnamurti’s insight into the relationship between observer and observed—a question Bohm already recognized as central to the meaning of quantum theory.

Bohm later described the ease of communication he felt with Krishnamurti: intense listening, minimal barrier, and an absence of self-protective posturing. He compared this quality to the openness he had encountered in some of his conversations with Einstein.

Their recorded meetings—the basis of The Ending of Time—took place at the Oak Grove School in Ojai.

6. Nothingness — some context

When we examine Nothingness within mysticism or physics, it is surprisingly possible to speak across both fields—provided one essential rule is observed:

Don’t speak in jargon.

Bohm did not rush to equations. Krishnamurti did not retreat into scripture. Both spoke plainly.

In this essay, Nothingness is approached in two related ways.

First, it can describe a state of mind—a stillness in which thought no longer dominates perception.

Second, it can point toward what many traditions describe as a void—not as oblivion, but as the ground out of which insight, intention, and form arise. Where do creative ideas come from? Where do thoughts themselves originate? What precedes intention?

I want to be explicit here: I have never meant that the Nothingness is nothing. For me, “Nothingness” is only a word—an imperfect pointer—toward something vast and difficult to describe: a still, dark sea that is somehow full of light. Not absence, but depth. Not negation, but living quiet.

Many traditions reach toward the same territory with different language.

Thomas Merton spoke of a “point of nothingness” at the center of the soul, describing it as radiant rather than empty. Sufi Irina Tweedie wrote of being scattered into Nothingness beyond the personal self—not as annihilation, but as passage. The Taoists observed that what appears empty is often what makes anything usable at all—the hollow of a vessel, the space within a room.

So when this essay uses the word Nothingness, it is not meant to imply nihilism or despair. It points toward stillness, and toward potential.

I come out of the world of the martial arts. A serious student, under an excellent teacher, can develop what is often called an “empty mind.” I prefer the term still mind, because “empty” can imply absence, while stillness implies presence.

An empty mind suggests a drained lake. A still mind suggests a calm one.

A mind that can be still can observe what cannot be observed when the mind is occupied. Or, more bluntly:

If you have too many thoughts, you can’t think.

It took many years, but I was fortunate to receive training that made stillness practical rather than theoretical. I mention this only because it mattered. Without it, I doubt I would have been able to remain coherent within the experiences I later encountered in the Nothingness. Those experiences, in turn, have contributed significantly to my ability to contribute as a witness.

When Krishnamurti and Bohm discuss Nothingness, they are largely speaking in the second sense—the void, the “no-thing.” I strongly suspect Krishnamurti also knew the first sense intimately.

I want to be explicit about one further point. When I speak of the Nothingness, I am not describing an idea I adopted or an image assembled from the words of others. I am describing something I directly encountered. I use the word saw deliberately—not as metaphor, but as the closest approximation language allows. What I experienced was immediate, lucid, and unmistakably present.

I am not asking anyone to believe this account. I am not offering doctrine or proof. I am recounting it as a Witness. A witness does not persuade or convert; a witness simply reports what was seen, leaving others free to accept, reject, or ignore it entirely.

7. Separation distorts our perception

One of the first ways Nothingness enters the Bohm–Krishnamurti dialogue is through a discussion of where the human being begins and ends. This has less to do with death and creation, and more to do with the consequences of psychological separation.

Both men return repeatedly to the idea that separateness is not merely social, but perceptual. Krishnamurti suggests that the urge to maintain a separate self is a root of suffering, and that time itself becomes entangled with this structure.

When division ends, the mind encounters something it cannot frame through the past. It approaches Nothingness.

Conversation: Separation distorts our perception

(excerpt)

JK: We said nothingness, that nothingness is everything, and so it is that which is total energy… Is there something beyond that?
DB: I don’t know.

Commentary

I have experienced, on multiple occasions, an effortless sense of timelessness. These experiences were lucid and arose through meditation (guided and unguided), clinical hypnosis, and at times spontaneously.

Once, around 1990, I focused on a simple question: Where do my thoughts come from?

Searching inward, I found no origin point—only a sense of a larger, undefined field. As I widened my attention, I had the clear intuition that no origin would ever be found—only continuity.

From that experience arose an early hypothesis: the brain may function as a step-down transformer for something we call mind.

I later came to understand this territory as the Nothingness—not a void, but no thing.

8. Facing emptiness: the fear of annihilation

Mystics and Zen teachers have long warned that we misunderstand emptiness. Most people experience it as a deficiency—a hole to be filled with distraction, ambition, or stimulation.

But what if emptiness is not a defect?

What if it is a threshold?

Krishnamurti and Bohm speak directly to this fear: the ordinary mind wants something to cling to. When the past is released, the mind discovers there is nothing to reach for—and that is frightening.

Yet this Nothingness is not barren. What appears empty to fear may be fullness without form.

9. Movement

Martial arts is a study of cause and effect—movement practiced through disciplined stillness. Physics, too, rests on observation.

Einstein once said, “Nothing happens until something moves.”

Another way to say this is: Nothingness exists, until something moves.

In my own experience, the Nothingness is a vast, dark sea of light. This was not imagination or poetic overlay. It was direct perception—clear, stable, unforced.

Thoughts arose like brief pillars from the stillness and dissolved back without ripple. Larger intentions created larger movement. Yet the sea itself remained calm.

And there, it became clear that something exists which precedes even intention.

I can only call it Potential.

I offer this description not as explanation, but as testimony.