Dr. David Bohm was an associate of A. Einstein and author of the acclaimed Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980).  One of the w­orld’s foremost theoretical physicists, Bohm published classic works on quantum and relativity theory and was an important contributor to the debate concerning hidden variables in quantum theory.  Because of his eminence as a physicist, David Bohm was in the privileged position of being able to espouse his radical theoretical model–one that postulated the undivided wholeness of reality.  Dr. Bohm’s ideas generated widespread interest not only amongst scientists but also within philosophical, religious and New Age circles. Bohm’s work figured prominently in the holographic model of consciousness which arose during the 1980s.   Bohm’s conclusions about the unity and interrelatedness of all things have profound implications for the study of both physics and human consciousness.            

Bohm’s model of wholeness and the implicate orders arose from his attempt to reconcile relativity and quantum theory while accounting for non-local effects and other quantum paradoxes.  He distinguished between the outward, manifest physical reality—the “explicate order”—and the underlying, un-manifest realm—the “implicate order.”  In the explicate order, we have separate little bits—the isolated quanta existing outside of each other in separate regions of spacetime and interacting only through local effects.  However, Bohm suggests that beyond the explicate order, beyond the quantum level, are the implicate and super-implicate orders.  Quanta which appear in the explicate order to be separate in space and time are interconnected within the underlying implicate and super-implicate orders.  There is thus a deeper reality which plays a determining role in relationship to the manifestation of material particles or quanta within spacetime. 

The implicate orders underlie the explicate orders and material reality in a sense unfolds from WITHIN/WITHOUT.

 ... a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning ‘to enfold’ or ‘to fold inward’). In terms of the implicate order one may say that everything is enfolded into everything. This contrasts with 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) and outside the regions belonging to other things. (Bohm, p. 177)

Within Bohm’s framework, all manifest phenomena of the explicate order (the manifest physical world) must be understood as particular cases of the unfolding of a more general set of implicate orders (the unmanifest underlying realm). The fundamental relationships are between the implicated structures, which interpenetrate each other throughout the whole of space and time. The explicate order flows out of the laws and processes of a multi-dimensional implicate order—as apparent differentiations of an undivided whole!  Bohm explains:

Bohm’s basic thesis is that even the whole of the Universe is implicated within any point. Such a view is remarkable–a profound revision of centuries of fragmentary little-bit scientific thought. Bohm turns everything upside down:  whereas we had viewed causes as deriving from motion within the explicate order, now the causes are within the hidden implicate orders.  Manifest reality is but a shadow of the deeper underlying realities.

science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view, in the sense that the present approach of analysis of the world into independently existent parts does not work very well in modern physics. It is shown that both in relativity theory and quantum theory, notions implying the undivided wholeness of the universe would provide a much more orderly way of considering the general nature of reality. (1980, pp. xi-xii)

In his attempt to integrate relativity theory and quantum mechanics within one framework, Bohm noted that despite their perceived differences, they shared the notion of wholeness:

It is instructive to contrast the key features of relativistic and quantum theories. ... relativity theory requires continuity, strict causality (or determinism) and locality. On the other hand, quantum theory requires non-continuity, non-causality and non-locality. So the basic concepts of relativity and quantum theory directly contradict each other. It is therefore hardly surprising that these two theories have never been unified in a consistent way. ... What is very probably needed instead is a qualitatively new theory, from which both relativity and quantum theory are to be derived as abstractions, approximations and limiting cases.

The basic notions of this new theory evidently cannot be found by beginning with those features in which relativity and quantum theory stand in direct contradiction.  The best place to begin is with what they have basically in common. This is undivided wholeness. Though each comes to such wholeness in a different way, it is clear that it is this to which they are both fundamentally pointing.

To begin with undivided wholeness means, however, that we must drop the mechanistic order. But this order has been, for many centuries, basic to all thinking on physics.  (p.176)

Einstein proposed that, instead of taking reality as composed of particles, we should take fields as the starting point. However, Bohm notes that Einstein’s views of fields retained an essential feature of the mechanistic order—the belief in only ‘local effects.’  This is because:

 ... the field concept, which is his basic starting point, still retains the essential features of a mechanistic order, for the fundamental entities, the fields, are conceived as existing outside of each other, at separate points of space and time, and are assumed to be connected with each other only through external relationships which indeed are also taken to be local, in the sense that only those field elements that are separated by ‘infinitesimal’ distances can affect each other. (p. 174)

    Bohm notes that the unified field theory was not successful in the attempt to provide an ultimate mechanistic basis for physics in terms of the field concept, since it implied that “no coherent concept of an independently existent particle” is possible.  However, unified field theory “showed in a concrete way how consistency with the theory of relativity may be achieved by deriving the particle concept as an abstraction from an unbroken and undivided totality of existence.” (pp. 173-4)  

            In Bohm’s analysis, a unified field theory of relativity leads to one view of wholeness. However, it is quantum theory, which Bohm describes as posing a second and “much more serious challenge to this mechanistic order, going far beyond that provided by the theory of relativity.” (p. 175) According to Bohm, there are three features to quantum theory which challenge the mechanistic view within science.

 1.  Movement is in general discontinuous, in the sense that action is constituted of indivisible quanta (implying also that an electron, for example, can go from one state to another, without passing through any states in between).

2.  Entities, such as electrons, can show different properties (e.g., particle-like, wavelike, or something in between), depending on the environmental context within which they exist and are subject to observation.

3.  Two entities, such as electrons, which initially combine to form a molecule and then separate, show a peculiar non-local relationship, which can best be described as a non-causal connections of elements that are far apart (as demonstrated in the experiments of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen). (Bohm, 1980, p.175)