The Implicate Order — Undivided Wholeness

Tradition Science Source David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) Era c. 1980 CE

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.”

“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.”

Commentary

David Bohm was one of the twentieth century’s major physicists. In 1952 he published a version of quantum mechanics that makes the same predictions as the standard one while giving particles real positions, guided by a wave. It is a minority view, but it is real physics, and it is still taught and argued over.

The implicate order came later, and it is a different kind of claim. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), Bohm proposed that the separate things we see are unfolded from a deeper order in which everything is enfolded in everything else. His own illustration was a drop of ink stirred into a thick fluid until it vanishes, which can then be unstirred back into a drop. He called the whole flowing totality the holomovement. That is philosophy built on physics, and he offered it as a proposal. No experiment has confirmed it, and most physicists don’t hold it.

It belongs on this Map because of the shape of the picture. Bohm’s undivided whole sits very close to Indra’s Net, where every jewel holds every other, and to the Kabbalists’ Ein Sof, the infinite from which every finite thing unfolds. He spent more than twenty years in conversation with Krishnamurti, a physicist and a philosopher working at the same question from opposite ends.

The resemblance is real, and it is worth sitting with. It is not a demonstration. A physicist reaching for the mystics’ picture shows that a rigorous mind can take the picture seriously. It doesn’t show that the picture is true.