The Implicate Order

David Bohm (1917–1992) was an American theoretical physicist whose career was shaped by two forces: his extraordinary insight into quantum mechanics, and his political persecution — he was one of the scientists called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and was forced to leave the United States in 1951. He eventually settled in London, where he spent the rest of his career at Birkbeck College.

Bohm had worked closely with Einstein, who considered him one of the few physicists who genuinely understood the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. Einstein's famous objection to quantum mechanics — that it was incomplete, that "God does not play dice" — resonated with Bohm's own discomfort with the Copenhagen interpretation's refusal to describe what was actually happening in quantum systems between measurements.

In 1952, Bohm published a paper that shocked the physics community: a hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics — later called pilot wave theory or Bohmian mechanics — that described quantum particles as having definite positions at all times, guided by a "pilot wave" that carried information about the entire experimental setup. This showed that the Copenhagen interpretation's claim that quantum mechanics was complete was not necessarily true — there were alternative interpretations that were equally consistent with all experimental data. The implications were profound: the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics might conceal a deeper deterministic order.

Over the following decades, Bohm developed his pilot wave theory into the much larger framework of the implicate and explicate orders — a comprehensive vision of the nature of reality that addressed not only quantum mechanics but consciousness, meaning and the relationship between mind and matter.

Bohm's central insight is contained in the distinction between the explicate order and the implicate order. The explicate order is the visible world of separate things in space and time — the world of ordinary experience, where objects have distinct identities, clear boundaries and definite locations. This is the order that classical physics describes so successfully.

But Bohm argued that the explicate order is not fundamental — it is a kind of surface manifestation of a deeper, more primary order: the implicate order, in which everything is enfolded into everything else. Nothing in the implicate order is truly separate; every region of space enfolds, in some sense, the whole. The separate objects of the explicate order are not independent things that happen to be related — they are temporary unfoldings from a wholeness that is never actually divided.

Bohm's key analogy: imagine a hologram — a photographic plate that encodes a three-dimensional image in such a way that any piece of the plate, however small, contains information about the whole image (though with less resolution). The three-dimensional image is the explicate order; the holographic plate is the implicate order. Every part of the plate enfolds the whole — and this is Bohm's model for how every region of space enfolds information about the entire universe.

The holomovement — Bohm's term for the dynamic process underlying both orders — is the continuous unfolding and enfolding of the implicate into the explicate and back again. Reality is not a static structure but an ongoing process of becoming: the implicate order continuously unfolds into the manifest world of separate things, and those things continuously enfold back into the implicate ground. Everything that appears to be a separate object is really a temporary unfolding — a ripple in the holomovement — that will eventually enfold back into the whole.

Bohm's holographic model of reality was developed in parallel with the work of neuroscientist Karl Pribram, who proposed that the brain processes information holographically — that memories are not stored in specific locations but distributed throughout the neural field, so that any part of the brain contains information about the whole (again with less resolution). The convergence of Bohm's physics hologram and Pribram's brain hologram led to what became known as the "holonomic brain theory" and, more broadly, the "holographic paradigm."

The holographic model has a striking implication: if the universe is structured like a hologram, then every part of it contains, in some sense, information about the whole. This resonates with Leibniz's monadology (each monad mirrors the entire universe from its own perspective), with the Vedantic teaching that each individual self contains the universal self, with the Hermetic "as above so below" and with Blake's "to see a world in a grain of sand."

Bohm was careful to distinguish his holographic model from a claim that the universe is literally a hologram generated by some external projector. The hologram is an analogy for the relationship between the implicate and explicate orders — not a complete description of reality. The universe is not a hologram. It is hologram-like in a specific and technically defined sense — and that specific sense has profound implications for how we understand the relationship between parts and wholes, individuals and totalities, separateness and unity.

One of the most remarkable intellectual friendships of the 20th century was the decades-long dialogue between David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti — the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher. From the late 1970s until Krishnamurti's death in 1986, they met regularly in what became one of the most profound recorded exchanges between a physicist and a spiritual teacher.

Krishnamurti's central teaching — that the observer is the observed, that the self is not separate from what it perceives, that thought itself is the source of fragmentation and suffering — resonated deeply with Bohm's implicate order. Both were pointing at the same thing from different directions: the fundamental wholeness of reality, and the tragedy of a consciousness that mistakes its own fragmented self-image for the whole.

Bohm proposed that what Krishnamurti called "the observer and the observed" was the psychological equivalent of the implicate-explicate distinction in physics. The sense of being a separate observer looking at a separate world is the psychological explicate order — the surface manifestation of a deeper wholeness in which the observer, the observed and the act of observation are one movement. The implicate order, in its psychological dimension, is what Krishnamurti called "choiceless awareness" — the state of mind that is not divided against itself. Their dialogue remains one of the most extraordinary documents of the 20th century: physics and mysticism discovering that they have been asking the same question.

Bohm was explicit about the convergence between his implicate order and the insights of the world's mystical traditions — particularly Vedanta, Buddhism and the Hermetic tradition. This convergence was not incidental to his work but central to it: he believed that the fragmentation of modern thought — the separation of physics from philosophy, science from spirituality, self from world — was itself a manifestation of the confusion between the implicate and explicate orders, and that a more adequate physics would naturally converge with a more adequate understanding of mind and consciousness.

The Vedantic concept of Brahman as the one undivided ground of all apparent multiplicity maps precisely onto Bohm's implicate order. Maya — the creative power by which Brahman appears as the many — corresponds to the holomovement, the process by which the implicate unfolds into the explicate. The Buddhist teaching of interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda) — that all phenomena arise in dependence on all other phenomena, that nothing exists independently — is the experiential equivalent of Bohm's enfolded wholeness. Bohm gave these ancient insights the language of contemporary physics — and in doing so, made them available to a culture that had largely forgotten how to hear them in their original form.