The Implicate Order — Undivided Wholeness
The Teaching
"Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its 'particles', including those constituting human beings, their laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be understood as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status."
"Flowing movement is what is primary, basic, and universal. It is, to use a word that covers all possible forms of the flowing, 'the holomovement.' Relatively stable and independent forms are abstracted by our perception and thinking from the whole of the flowing movement."
"In the implicate order, everything is enfolded into everything. This is in contrast to the explicate order now dominant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space and time."
All these 'separate' electrons are, on this view, projections of a higher-dimensional implicate order in which they are as intimately connected as different whirlpools in the same body of water.
Commentary
Bohm, one of the 20th century's most important physicists, arrived at a vision of reality that is structurally identical to Indra's Net: a vast undivided wholeness in which every part enfolds every other part. His model emerged from his work on quantum mechanics and from his decades-long dialogue with J. Krishnamurti, one of the most extraordinary conversations in modern intellectual history, a physicist and a philosopher both pointing at the same undivided ground from opposite directions.
Bohm's own image for the holomovement was the whirlpool: a whirlpool is not a separate thing from the river, it is the river whirlpooling. The self is not a separate thing from the cosmos, it is the cosmos selfing. Alan Watts had arrived at precisely this image through philosophical and contemplative inquiry, before Bohm arrived at it through physics. The convergence is not coincidence, it is the perennial hypothesis demonstrating itself.
The implicate order is the Ein Sof of physics, the infinite background from which all finite forms arise and to which they return. The explicate order (the world of separate things we perceive) is Maya, the veil. Bohm did not use these words, but the structure is identical.
The Tao Te Ching's 'ten thousand things arise from the One' describes the same relationship between the implicate and explicate orders. Buddhist sunyata, the emptiness of inherent self-existence in all things, is Bohm's demonstration that particles have no independent existence but only relational being.