Thought, meaning and change-

This is based on David Bohms book "thought as a system"

Thought can sustain the meaning that something has for us. We tend to think that each of us holds ideas and beliefs about the world, and we hold values that we attach to the things we choose to do. Describing ourselves as “holding to” ideas, beliefs and values, is a useful way of understanding how “thought” sustains “us”, and as a consequence holds “us” to patterns of behaviour and response to the word. The meaning that many things have for us, although we tend to believe that “we” choose what they mean, are it seems, effected by thought, and thought seems to “choose us”, we don’t choose it.

I think this may have consequences for wanting to change as a person, or as a group, because this process is extremely complex, and a lot of the time, on a day-to-day basis, the activity of thought goes unnoticed; its as if we have become immersed in a process that we aren’t properly aware of. In order to change, one has to try and alter the ways in which things have meaning for them, because if the meaning things have for us, on an individual as well as a collective level, do not change themselves then change at the behavioural level will not come about. We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing, because nothing effects “us”, because the ideas, values etc that “we” hold to, remain unaltered, precisely because there is a level at which the self-awareness of thought is unconscious, and part of its activity is unknown to itself.

Bohm would say that by observing thought, we may be able to begin to percieve its activity, and thus we may begin to percieve a deeper meaning, within the meanings that thought creates and sustains in its activity.

Is it possible to get beyond the activity of thought?
Does it even make sense to say that we can achieve that?