Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Bohm addresses the question “what does quantum theory tell us about the universe?” Apparently he was a leader in asking the question and others are still trying to answer. If one wants to understand the issues that must be addressed this is a good read. Also the general form of an answer is arrived at. There’s a bit of math but it can be skipped over. The reader may end up agreeing with the physicists that Bohm challenges but this is an effort by someone who has had a big impact on a generation of physicists to address a non-expert audience.

I rarely take the time to write reviews, but forty years after its publication, this book deserves to be far more widely read and referenced. It has tremendous implications for our understanding of science and consciousness. Even for a non-scientist, like myself, it offers a profoundly different way to understand what is going on in my own mind and direct experience.The author was a peer to the great physicists of the twentieth century, and made numerous important contributions to the intellectual edifice of that field. Sadly, due to his interest in Marxist ideas he was persecuted by the ardent anti-communists of the 1950’s (HUAC) and basically driven out of the US. Later in his career, he again defied the strict norms of the traditional physics community by engaging in extensive dialog with the Indian philosopher J Krishnamurthi. In a less conformist era or community, his ideas likely would have gained much wider and more serious traction. It is well past time for a fresh look at his amazing insights.Although this book has some technical content, his writing is extraordinarily clear and precise. I did give up on Chapter 4 about halfway through, as the math was simply beyond me. But as far as I can tell, nothing in chapter 4 is critical to the overall thesis of the book. One could go straight from chapter 3 to 5 without losing any comprehension or appreciation for the depth and subtlety of Bohm’s arguments.His first critical point comes on page 4, where he points out our tendency to conflate thinking about things with direct experience itself, or as he states: “our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality.” The result is that any dominant way of seeing the world becomes at once both largely unconscious and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bohm argues that in order to properly understand reality, we must “be aware of the activity of thought as such; i.e. as a form of insight, a way of looking, rather than a ‘true copy of reality as it is’.”Bohm uses the term “fragmentation” to describe the traditional Western paradigm for understanding physical reality, going back at least to the Greeks. Fragmentation has several manifestations. In academic fields, it manifests as the continual division of fields into specialities and sub-specialities. In society, people are “broken up into separate nations and different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc.” And in physics, we have come to regard “as an absolute truth the notion that the whole of reality is actually constituted of nothing but ‘atomic building blocks’, all working together more or less mechanically.” Over time, this fragmentary worldview and the resulting empirical data have circularly reinforced each other. Obviously, the associated theories have led to many great and useful insights. But we should not lose sight of the fact that “all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which it is clear and accurate.” An overly fundamentalist application of the fragmentary worldview is blinding us to see larger (or at least alternative orders) in the nature of reality and of consciousness.He then goes on to show that both relativity and the quantum theory “show that the attempt to describe and follow an atomic particle in precise detail has little meaning.” Instead, “it can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the observing instrument.” He offers an alternative analogy for thinking about relatively stable and autonomous “objects” and how they relate to the broader environment: as vortices in a flowing stream (think of whirlpools in a fast-flowing brook). Viewed in a certain way, such a vortex might appear to be quite consistent and independent of other features appearing elsewhere in the stream. And yet, without the overall flow of water, these seemingly independent “things” would instantly disappear. Bohm offers a “proposal for a new general form of insight…That is, there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can only be known implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.”All of what I’ve described is laid out in the first 14 pages! He goes on to describe and illustrate his thesis with penetrating analyses of language, key unresolved questions in physics, the nature of time, and various mathematical paradoxes. The logic is crisp and internally consistent. The breadth of both his scholarship and the conceptual landscape he covers are tremendous. In the end, he offers a whole new way to conceive of physical reality and consciousness. And although he doesn’t mention it, this alternative worldview has much in common with Eastern philosophy and the reports of mystics from all sorts of religious traditions.In short, this book provides profound insights into most of the great unanswered questions: what is consciousness?, what is time?, what is the nature of physical reality?, and so on.

A deep and enlightening book that ventures beyond the mechanistic paradigm of classical physics. I am not a physicist and as a layman, I found this book overall understandable, except the mathematical equations Bohm employs in areas of relativity, quantum computations and other physic equations of algebraic and geometric means. It really is a brilliant piece of work and not easy book to explain, but I can say as a novice, this is a superior work.Bohm starts out with our Western fragmented view of reality, failing to see wholeness, thinking through our lenses of space, time, matter, mechanics, causality, contingency and so forth, as Kant pointed out how we categorize our perceptions. The notion we view in fragment is our illusion which cause confusion. It is our measuring net over reality that fragments it. While the Newtonian works for much it is also the fragmentation of our cultures, cities, religions political systems, etc. Our mechanics look for absolutes and any theory of absolute truths results in fragmentation, thus the differences between the atomic theory, the theory of relativity and the quantum theory into a form of reality that is moving, resulting in what he calls a undivided wholeness in flowing movement.Bohm describes a language he calls the Rheomode. Basically it is the opposite of our views where language describes a noun in action. The Rheomode. describes the verb center of action. Rather than the order of "I" am typing, it would be, there is typing being done. Beyond all of the sequential order expressed in terms of our divisional language their is the movement of attention. Evidently, by our ability to perceive and understand is limited by the freedom with which the ordering of attention can change, so as to fit the order that is to be observed. There is allot more to this, apparently this changes our atomistic view, changes our world views of self and truth, by taking away the importance from our world views, removing the fragmentary breaks we project.Bohm describes reality and knowledge considered as a process. There is something above memory and the mechanical process to reason in what Bohm calls intelligence. One might suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be denied in theories of knowable structure. There's an intense outlay between thought and non=thought, knowledge considered as a process, a free movement of the mind needed for clarity of perception, which contributes to a pervasive distortion and confusion of every experience.Bohm believes there are hidden variables in the quantum theory, despite its indeterminism of the Heisenberg principle and Von Neumanns arguments and the paradox of Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky. In this he attempts to resolve, it gets a little heavy here for the layman in treatment of the quantum fluctuations.It is here where the quantum theory is seen as an indication of a new order. While the theory of relativity recognizes continuity and strict causality and locality, a singular overall pattern of curvular continuous connection, the quantum recognizes an order measured in non locality in autonomous groups but not continuously connected, an undivided wholeness with separate groupings, the observer and observed become one, while separate, a holomovement where each part contains the whole in some way, a relative autonomy, different closed circuits of particles of autonomous groups.The enfolding and unfolding universe and consciousness completely removes the Cartesian grid. It is the idea of a projected hologram from a non locality that enfolds into itself. From a void that contains all, a movement which unfolds in explicate order which enfolds in implicate order back unto itself. The electrons enter a different kind of state, in which they are no longer relatively independent. Rather, each electron acts as a projection share a non-local, non-causal correlation, which is such that they go round obstacles co-operatively without being scattered or diffused, without resistance, all so into a multidimensional reality There are infinite relatively independent sub-totalities which are abstracted, explicated as autonomous.