Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 30, Summer 1994, pages 10-16 David Bohm: A Life of Dialogue Between Science and Spirit
William Keepin

Editor’s note: David Bohm was a rare scientist. He matched profound contributions to quantum physics with a persistent investigation of their philosophical implications, supported by deep spiritual insight. Perhaps his greatness is due to his ability to carry his burning questions well beyond the boundaries of science. He spent much of his later life in dialogues with the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, exploring questions of truth, reality, meaning, language and thought. From these conversations, Bohm refined a process he called "dialogue"—a method for inquiry into the nature of thought itself and into the dynamics of group or collective consciousness.

Since his death in 1992, a growing interest in this aspect of his work has led to the spread of Bohmian "dialogue groups". In many countries, groups of between five to forty-five people come together to explore issues ranging through consciousness, community, business, environment, health and education. Honoring the extent of Bohm’s diverse contributions in a single article necessarily means being selective. Last year, physicist and eco-spiritual practitioner William Keepin published a lengthy overview of Bohm’s "Lifework" in ReVision (Summer 1993). Keepin’s overview is a particularly coherent and comprehensive summary for lay readers of Bohm’s sometimes technical and difficult body of work. Here, we excerpt sections which connect Bohm’s views on human thought, quantum physics, the "implicate order", truth, reality and dialogue.

Thoughts About Thinking
Before delving into David Bohm’s substantive contributions to science, it is important to consider his ideas about language and thought. In his penchant for precision, Bohm analyzed ways that our language deceives us about the true nature of reality. We generally consider ordinary language to be a neutral medium for communication that does not restrict our worldview in any way. Yet Bohm showed that language imposes strong, subtle pressures to see the world as fragmented and static. He emphasized that thought tends to create fixed structures in the mind, which can make dynamic entities seem to be static. To illustrate with an example, we know upon reflection that all manifest objects are in a state of constant flux and change. So there is really no such thing as a thing; all objects are dynamic processes rather than static forms. To put it crudely, one could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a "slow" verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly as to appear static. For example, the paper on which this text is printed appears to have a stable existence, but we know that it is, at all times including this very moment, changing and evolving toward dust. Hence paper would more accurately be called papering—to emphasize that it is always and inevitably a dynamic process undergoing perpetual change.

A primary tenet of Bohm’s thinking is that all of reality is dynamic process. Included in this is the very process of thinking about the nature of reality. If we split thought off from reality, as we are conditioned to do, and then speak of our thought about reality, we have created a fragmentary view in which knowledge and reality are separate. Knowledge is then in danger of becoming static and somehow exempt from the conditions of reality. Bohm emphasizes that "a major source of fragmentation is the presupposition that the process of thought is sufficiently separate from and independent of its content, to allow us generally to carry out clear, orderly, rational thinking, which can properly judge this content as correct or incorrect, rational or irrational, fragmentary or whole, etc." (Bohm, 1980). In his writing and talks, he was fond of referring to A. Korzybski’s admonition that whatever we say a thing is, it is not that. It is both different from that, and more than that (Korzybski, 1950).

The artificial separation of process and content in knowledge becomes especially problematic in systems of thought that seek to encompass the totality of existence (as do grand unified theories in physics, for example).
Bohm suggests that the movement of thought is a kind of artistic process that yields ever-changing form and content. He says "there can no more be an ultimate form of such thought than there could be an ultimate poem (that would make all further poems unnecessary)". Indeed, imagine a Grand Unified Symphony that encompassed all possible symphonies—past, present, and future—thereby rendering all further musical composition redundant and unnecessary. The idea is preposterous, and yet many physicists, not recognizing their theories as art forms, strive for just such an ultimate scientific theory. In truth, science is essentially a creative art form that paints dynamic portraits of the natural world, using the human intellect as its canvas and the tools of reason as its palette. Bohm was rare among physicists in recognizing this, and he exhibited commensurate humility in the interpretation and extrapolation of his theories.

Wholeness and Holomovement
David Bohm’s most significant contribution to science is his interpretation of the nature of physical reality, which is rooted in his theoretical investigations, especially quantum theory and relativity theory. Bohm postulates that the ultimate nature of physical reality is not a collection of separate objects (as it appears to us), but rather it is an undivided whole that is in perpetual dynamic flux. For Bohm, the insights of quantum mechanics and relativity theory point to a universe that is undivided and in which all parts "merge and unite in one totality". This undivided whole is not static but rather in a constant state of flow and change, a kind of invisible ether from which all things arise and into which all things eventually dissolve. Indeed, even mind and matter are united: "In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement" (Hayward, 1987). Similarly, living and nonliving entities are not separate. As Bohm puts it, "The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mind-like already with the electron." Thus, matter does not exist independently from so-called empty space; matter and space are each part of the wholeness.

Bohm calls this flow the holomovement. The component terms holo and movement refer to two fundamental features of reality. The movement portion refers to the fact that reality is in a constant state of change and flux as mentioned above. The holo portion signifies that reality is structured in a manner that can be likened to holography.

As is well known, holography is a relatively new type of photography, in which the photographic record is not an image of the object (as in normal photography) but rather a set of interference patterns made by splitting a laser beam, and then reflecting one component of the beam off the object before reuniting the two component beams at the photographic plate. When laser light is shined on the hologram, a full three-dimensional image of the object appears, as opposed to the usual two-dimensional photograph. What is especially remarkable about a hologram is that if laser light is shined on just a small part of it, the entire image still appears, although in less refinement and detail. Thus, each small portion of the hologram contains information about the entire image, whereas in a normal photograph, each small portion of film contains a correspondingly small part of the image.

In analogy to holography but on a much grander scale, Bohm believes that each part of physical reality contains information about the whole. Thus in some sense, every part of the universe "contains" the entire universe—a very remarkable claim that at first seems, perhaps, implausible. Yet we have all experienced a glimmer of this in the following commonplace example. Imagine yourself gazing upward at the night sky on a clear night, and consider what is actually taking place. You are able to discern structures and perceive events that span vast stretches of space and time, all of which are, in some sense, contained in the movements of the light in the tiny space encompassed by your eyeball. The photons entering your pupil come from stars that are millions of light years apart, and some of these photons embarked on their journey billions of years ago to reach their final destination, your retina. In some sense, then, your eyeball contains the entire cosmos, including its enormous expanse of space and immense history in time—although, of course, the details are not highly refined. Optical and radio telescopes have much larger apertures, or "holographic plates", and consequently they are able to glean much greater detail and precision than the unaided eye. But the principle is clear, and it is extraordinary to contemplate.

Evidence for this kind of holographic structure in nature has emerged recently in the burgeoning field of chaos theory and its close cousin, fractal geometry. The term chaos theory is somewhat of a misnomer because the new discoveries are more about order than chaos.

It has been found that most nonlinear systems embody a multitude of self-similar structures that are nested within one another at different scales. A well-known example is the Mandelbrot set, which is a fractal that appears in computer representations much like a black bug, with an infinity of similar "bugs" embedded at innumerable smaller scales. Each of these "bugs" replicates the whole, in a sense, and contains information about the entire nonlinear process.

Putting the holographic structure of reality together with its perpetual dynamism, we get the holomovement: an exceedingly rich and intricate flow in which, in some sense, every portion of the flow contains the entire flow. The physical evidence that forms the basis for postulating the holomovement comes primarily from Bohm’s interpretation of physics, especially quantum theory, which led to his most celebrated concept: the implicate order.

The Implicate Order
The holomovement is, admittedly, a rather subtle concept to grasp; indeed, it is generally invisible to us. Bohm proposes that the holomovement consists of two fundamental aspects: the explicate order and the implicate order. He illustrates the concept of the implicate order by analogy to a remarkable physical phenomenon involving a drop of ink in glycerine, where the drop disappears and reappears as the mixture is rotated (see below).

Bohm views the nature of physical reality in a fashion analogous to the example of this drop of ink "enfolded" in glycerine. An electron is understood to be a set of enfolded ensembles, which are generally not localized in space. At any given moment, one of these ensembles may be unfolded and localized, and the next moment, this one enfolds and is replaced by another that unfolds. If this process continues in a rapid and regular fashion in which each unfoldment is localized adjacent to the previous one, it gives the appearance of continuous motion of a particle, to which we humans have given the name electron. Yet there is no isolated particle, and its apparent continuous motion is an illusion generated by the rapid and regular sequence, or "ensembles", of unfoldings (much as a spinning airplane propeller gives the appearance of a solid disk).

Moreover, at any stage of this process, an ensemble may suddenly unfold that is very different from the previous one, which would give the appearance in the explicate order of the electron suddenly jumping discontinuously from one state to another. This offers a new way of understanding what lies behind the well-known quantum mechanical behavior of electrons as they jump discontinuously from one quantum state to another. Indeed, what we call matter is merely an apparent manifestation of the explicate order of the holomovement. This explicate order is the surface appearance of a much greater enfolded or implicate order, most of which is hidden. Contemporary physics and, indeed, most of science deals with explicate orders and structures only, which is why physics has encountered such great difficulty in explaining a variety of phenomena that Bohm would say arise from the implicate order.

The radical implications of Bohm’s implicate order take some time to fully grasp, especially for Western minds that have been steeped in the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of classical physics that still dominates contemporary science. For example, it might be tempting to assume that the implicate order refers to a subtle level of reality that is secondary and subordinate to the primary explicate order, which we see manifest all around us. However, for Bohm, precisely the opposite is the case: The implicate order is the fundamental and primary reality, albeit invisible. Meanwhile, the explicate order—the vast physical universe we experience—is but a set of "ripples" on the surface of the implicate order. The manifest objects that we regard as comprising ordinary reality are only the unfolded projections of the much deeper, higher dimensional implicate order, which is the fundamental reality. The implicate and explicate orders are interpenetrating in all regions of space-time, and each region enfolds all of existence, that is, everything is enfolded into everything.

Bohm’s understanding of physical reality turns the commonplace notion of "empty space" completely on its head. For Bohm, space is not some giant vacuum through which matter moves; space is every bit as real as the matter that moves through it. Space and matter are intimately interconnected. Indeed, calculations of the quantity known as the zero-point energy suggest that a single cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than all of the matter in the known universe! From this result, Bohm (1980) concludes that "space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty." For Bohm, this enormous energy inherent in "empty" space can be viewed as theoretical evidence for the existence of a vast, yet hidden realm such as the implicate order.

Dialogues With Krishnamurti
In any authentic scientific quest, obstacles of tremendous challenge are confronted periodically that make it very difficult to see how to proceed further. Indeed, if it were otherwise, great science would be much more prevalent than it is. Excruciating trials and tribulations characterize these junctures, which occur all the more frequently when working at the foundational levels of science. When Bohm encountered such obstacles, he responded in a way that is unusual for scientists. His greatness is due in significant measure to his frequent habit of carrying his burning questions well beyond science and deep into other epistemological realms, leaving behind everything he knew in the search for new clues and insights. In so doing, Bohm exemplified his commitment to wholeness, not only in his theories, but in his epistemology.

The most significant example of this process was Bohm’s extensive dialogues with the Indian spiritual master and mystic J. Krishnamurti. Bohm was first exposed to Krishnamurti’s teaching when his wife, Sarah, brought home to him one of Krishnamurti’s books from the library because she noticed that it centered on the observer/ observed relationship, which is so crucial in quantum theory. Bohm and Krishnamurti eventually developed a close friendship, and they carried on an intensive dialogue over several years that entailed deep explorations of the ultimate meaning and nature of thought, insight, existence, death, truth, reality, intelligence, and so on.

The Bohm-Krishnamurti dialogue set a profound precedent in being one of the first enduring dialogues between a leading Western physicist and a world-renowned Eastern spiritual master. Their discussions probed deeply into various dimensions of human knowledge and experience, including in-depth discussions of the limitations of human thought, the nature of insight and intelligence beyond thought, as well as many other topics such as truth, reality, death, existence, fragmentation, and the future of humanity. In exploring the distinction between truth and reality, for example, some of the jewels of insight that emerged may be summarized as follows (which, in the spirit of Bohm and Krishnamurti themselves, should perhaps be read slowly and contemplatively to be absorbed).

• There is a gulf between truth and reality; they are not the same thing. Illusion and falsehood are certainly part of reality, but they are not part of truth.
• Truth includes all that is; it is one. Reality is conditioned and multiple.
• Truth is beyond reality; it comprehends reality, but not vice versa. Reality is everything; truth is no-thingness.
• We need truth, but our minds are occupied with reality. We seek security in reality, but authentic security comes only in complete nothingness, that is, only in truth.
• The seed of truth is a mystery that thought cannot encompass; it is beyond reality.

Such insights are characteristic of Krishnamurti’s teachings. Indeed, perhaps the greatest impact of these dialogues on Bohm was a cultivated understanding of the limitations of human thought, as well as a deep realization of the existence of pure awareness beyond thought, wherein lies the source of all true insight, intelligence, and creativity. Bohm also had a number of meetings with other spiritual masters, most notably the Dalai Lama. The influence of spiritual teachings is apparent in all of Bohm’s later work, and, indeed, they are perhaps particularly significant in his formulation of the [yet deeper] superimplicate order. Bohm’s work in physics is unique in that he built a spiritual foundation into his theories that gives them a profound philosophical and metaphysical significance while rigorously preserving their empirical and scientific basis.

A highly fruitful outcome of these dialogues was the cultivation of dialogue itself as a path to greater wisdom and learning. Bohm refined dialogue to a creative art, and his teachings have been published in a book entitled On Dialogue (1990). Indeed, so influential was his example that several groups have been formed around the world to engage in "Bohmian dialogue", and a Dialogue Project is thriving at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bohm believed that the fragmentation and breakdown in communication in our culture are reinforced by our ways of thinking, and that through free-form dialogue it is possible to reestablish a genuine and creative collective consciousness.

Dialogue differs from ordinary conversation, where people generally hold a point of view that they feel compelled to defend. In dialogue, participants give serious consideration to views that may differ substantially from their own, and they are willing to hold many conflicting possibilities in their minds simultaneously and to accept what is, however uncomfortable. By this means, people in dialogue can together create the possibility for new insights and creativity to emerge, which would not be possible by merely thinking on their own.

Science and Spirit
Thomas Kuhn has eloquently shown that scientists’ preference for one paradigm over another is determined by a host of nonscientific, nonempirical factors. Bohm also points out that there is no scientific evidence that argues for the dominant fragmented scientific worldview over his hypothesis of undivided wholeness. However, while scientific evidence offers no help in this regard, other forms of evidence may, indeed, shed some light on the matter. Mystical and spiritual teachings down through the ages have spoken about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and that the microcosm somehow contains the macrocosm.

Bohm himself sounds indistinguishable from a spiritual master at times: "When we come to light, we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground. . . . Light is the potential of everything. . . . This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light."

Of course we must remember that mystical experience ultimately transcends intellectual experience, theories, and insights. The concepts and descriptions of superimplicate order and the holomovement may sound similar in some ways to descriptions of mystical experience. However, these correlations in language court the danger of equating concepts relevant to mystical experience with the experience itself. Ken Wilber (1982) cautions against this with his inimitable wit: "To be sure, there are similarities of language—the holographic blur (no space, no time) sounds like a mystical state. It also sounds like passing out."
The implicate order has been likened to an ultimate realm beyond matter and thought that is the wellspring of true knowledge and wisdom. Bohm and Peat (1987) emphasize that the suspension of "explicate" activity is essentially the same in Taoism, Yoga, Buddhism, and Krishnamurti’s teachings. From an ontological point of view, the superimplicate orders may be seen as symbolic of a realm of Mystery, the Unknown, the Unseen, as referred to in the world’s spiritual and mystical traditions.

When Krishnamurti asked Bohm what is the point of the mystery, Bohm (Krishnamurti and Bohm, 1987) gave the following succinct reply:
Of the mystery? I think you could see it like this: that if you look into the field of thought and reason and so on, you finally see it has no clear foundation. Therefore, you see that ‘what is’ must be beyond that. ‘What is’ is the mystery.

Visualizing the Implicate Order
Consider a cylindrical jar with a smaller concentric cylinder (of the same height) inside it that has a crank attached, so that the inner cylinder can be rotated while the outer cylinder remains stationary. Now fill the volume between the two cylinders with a highly viscous fluid such as glycerine, so that there is negligible diffusion. If a droplet of ink is placed in the fluid, and the inner cylinder is turned slowly, the ink drop will be stretched out into a fine, threadlike form that becomes increasingly thinner and fainter until it finally disappears altogether. At this point, it is tempting to conclude that the ink drop has been thoroughly mixed into the glycerine, so that its order has been rendered chaotic and random. However, if the inner cylinder is now rotated slowly in the opposite direction, the thin ink form will reappear, retrace its steps, and eventually reconstruct itself into its original form of the drop again. Such devices have been constructed, and the effect is quite dramatic.

The lesson in this analogy is that a hidden order may be present in what appears to be simply chance or randomness. When the ink form disappears, its order is not destroyed but rather is enfolded in the glycerine. When the drop is reconstructed, its order is unfolded and becomes explicit. To develop this analogy further, imagine that a whole series of droplets is enfolded, as follows. The first drop is enfolded with n turns. Next, a second drop is placed in the glycerine, and it is enfolded after another n turns (the first drop is now enfolded 2n turns). Then a third drop is placed in the glycerine, which is enfolded after n turns (the first drop is now enfolded 3n turns, and the second drop 2n turns). Continuing in this way, a whole series of droplets is enfolded in the glycerine. When the direction of rotation is reversed, the drops unfold one at a time, and if this is done quickly enough, the effect is that of a stationary ink drop or "particle" subsisting for a time in the moving fluid. One can also imagine that each successive drop is placed at an adjacent position in the glycerine, so that when the inner cylinder is reversed, the appearance is that of a particle moving along a continuous path. In either case, the sequence of enfolded ink droplets in the glycerine constitutes the implicate order, and the visible droplet that is unfolded at any given moment is the explicate order.
—W. K.

Bohm’s Legacy:
Physics and Beyond
David Bohm has shown that physics is rigorously
consistent with a radical reinterpretation of reality that goes quite beyond the revolutionary new physics of the early twentieth century. Contemporary scientists may ignore Bohm’s work (as many have done), but they cannot escape its implications. Bohm approached science as a quest for truth, and, in this spirit, he unpacked and revealed the epistemological foundations of science (in his study of order), and he utilized these insights to conceive a profound ontological hypothesis (the holomovement and implicate orders). This hypothesis is rigorously grounded in the experimental evidence of physics, and as such it is not just a new way of thinking about physics, it is a new physics; that is, it is an entirely new way of understanding the fundamental nature of the physical universe, as glimpsed through the data and laws of physics.

As such, Bohm’s worldview has profound implications for the whole of science. Prior to Bohm, science had generally regarded the universe as a vast multitude of separate interacting particles. Bohm offers an altogether new view of reality to underpin the entire body of theory and data that we call science. The single most important feature of this reality is "unbroken wholeness in flowing movement".
What is remarkable about Bohm’s hypothesis is that it is also consistent with spiritual wisdom down through the ages. Moreover, Bohm shows that there is no concrete evidence in science to favor its fragmented worldview over the unbroken, flowing holomovement he proposes; it is a matter of individual beliefs and predilections.

Within physics, Bohm has demonstrated that one way to interpret the Shrödinger equation in quantum field theory is to introduce a wavelike information field called the superquantum potential, whose action transcends all of space in a timeless unity. This is not to say that Bohm has discovered God in the Shrödinger equation; it is to say that he has found theoretical precedent within physics for a subtle realm that lies beyond physics, as usually conceived. This does not prove anything, but it does show that physics can be rigorously consistent with the existence of higher realms of truth, order, existence, and eternity.

The great strength of science is that it is rooted in actual experience; the great weakness of contemporary science is that it admits only certain types of experience as legitimate. Bohm responded to this by carrying his quest for knowledge not only deeply into science, but also far beyond science. He did not restrict himself to laboratory data or accepted theoretical methods—though he was master at both. His passion for truth carried him wherever it might possibly find nourishment, and his theories consequently reflect tremendous breadth and depth in accounting for a wide range of truths that stem from a diverse spectrum of epistemologies. If the greatness of scientific work can be measured by its depth and general applicability in a multiplicity of fields, then David Bohm is clearly one of the greatest physicists of this century.

Bohm was deeply troubled by the suffering in the world, and his vision called for a complete restructuring of our fragmented collective consciousness in a new Renaissance (Bohm and Peat, 1987).

What is needed today is a new surge that is similar to the energy generated during the Renaissance but even deeper and more extensive . . . the essential need is for a ‘loosening’ of rigidly held intellectual content in the tacit infrastructure of consciousness, along with a ‘melting’ of the ‘hardness of the heart’ on the side of feeling. The ‘melting’ on the emotional side could perhaps be called the beginning of genuine love, while the ‘loosening’ of thought is the beginning of awakening of creative intelligence. The two necessarily go together.

Genuine love and creative intelligence were, indeed, the hallmarks of David Bohm’s life work. Through his mind and heart, he has given us a magnificent gift, which he offers to us in the grace of yet another gift. Bohm cautions us not to take any ideas—including his own—too literally. Indeed, he encourages us all to go far beyond theories of any kind.

This whole construction of the implicate order is a kind of bridge [that] leads to somewhere beyond. . . . However, if you don’t cross the bridge and leave it behind, you know, you’re always on the bridge. No use being there! The purpose of a bridge is to cross . . .
David Bohm lived his life committed to this crossing.