Quick Answer
The book in which a serious physicist proposed that the world of separate things is a surface unfolded from a deeper order in which everything is enfolded in everything, and tried to say what that would mean for language, thought and mind. Bohm was not a popular writer, and this is not a popular book; three of its seven chapters assume physics and one is an experiment with grammar that nobody has repeated. But the ink drop in glycerine, the hologram, the holomovement and the consciousness chapter are the origin of an idea that a generation of writers on wholeness has borrowed, usually without reading the source. The source is more careful than its borrowers, and it is worth the effort.
Key Takeaways
- Fragmentation is the disease; the book is a diagnosis of how thought produces it.
- Implicate and explicate: the enfolded whole and the unfolded parts.
- The ink drop and the hologram: order that is present without being visible.
- Hidden variables: the 1952 physics that seeded the idea.
- Mind and matter as two unfoldings of one ground.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Wholeness and the Implicate Order was published by Routledge in 1980. It is a collection of seven essays written over the previous decade, some previously published in physics and philosophy journals, revised and arranged into an argument. It is around two hundred and fifty pages.
The chapters are: fragmentation and wholeness; the rheomode, an experiment with language and thought; reality and knowledge considered as process; hidden variables in the quantum theory; quantum theory as an indication of a new order in physics, in two parts covering the development of new orders and the implicate order; and the enfolding-unfolding universe and consciousness. The order is not quite the order of composition, and readers will notice the seams.
It is the book in which the implicate order was first presented to a general readership, and it is the source for the terms, implicate, explicate, holomovement, enfolding, that have since travelled far from it.
Two books under one cover. Chapters one, two, three and seven are philosophical and address any educated reader. Chapters four, five and six are physics, and while Bohm keeps the mathematics to a minimum, they assume familiarity with quantum mechanics, relativity and the debates over interpretation. Most readers should read one, three, the second half of six, and seven on a first pass, and go back for the rest.
Who David Bohm Was
David Bohm was born in 1917 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, took his doctorate under Oppenheimer at Berkeley, worked on the theory of plasmas, and in 1951 published Quantum Theory, a textbook that remains in print and that presented the orthodox interpretation with such care that it led its author to doubt it. In 1952 he published the hidden-variables interpretation, in which particles have definite trajectories guided by the wave function, which Einstein encouraged and most physicists ignored.
The same year he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was indicted, acquitted, and lost his Princeton post. He went to Brazil, then Israel, then England, where from 1961 he was professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, London. In 1959 he read Krishnamurti and in 1961 met him; the two held dialogues for a quarter of a century. He died in 1992.
The biography matters for the book. Bohm had been treated as a heretic by physics and a subversive by the state, and his preoccupation with fragmentation, in thought and in society, was not an abstraction.
Fragmentation and Wholeness
The first chapter, and the book's real preface.
Bohm begins not with physics but with a diagnosis. Human thought divides the world into fragments, nations, professions, disciplines, self and other, and then treats the fragments as if they were separately existent, and the result is a world that is in fact fragmented, since we act on our thought. The division is useful, since it allows analysis, but it is mistaken for a description of how things are, and the mistake, repeated across every field, produces confusion and conflict.
He argues that wholeness is not an ideal to be achieved but the actual state of things, obscured by a habit of thought, and that the remedy is not a new theory but a new attention to what thought is doing. The chapter reads like Krishnamurti, and Bohm acknowledges the debt. It also sets the terms in which the physics will be read: the quantum theory, in particular, will be presented as evidence that the fragmentary view fails even in physics, the one place it was supposed to be securely at home.
The Rheomode
The second chapter, an experiment with language that most readers find the book's strangest.
Bohm proposes that the subject-verb-object grammar of Indo-European languages reinforces fragmentation by making nouns primary and treating action as something things do. He constructs, as an experiment, a mode of language built on verbs: the rheomode, from the Greek for flow. He takes roots such as vidate, to perceive, and derives from them families of forms, re-vidate, vidation, irre-vidant, so that every term carries the sense of an ongoing activity that may or may not fit its object.
The chapter is heavy going and Bohm presents it as a thought experiment, to see whether such a language can be consistently formed, rather than as a proposal for use. Nobody has used it. Its value is diagnostic: working through it makes visible how much of our sense that the world is made of things is a grammatical habit. Readers who skip it lose nothing of the argument and something of the experience.
Reality and Knowledge as Process
The third chapter, and the philosophical hinge.
Bohm argues that knowledge is not a static representation of a static reality but a process within a process: reality is movement, knowledge is a movement that participates in it, and the notion of a fixed true theory of a fixed world is itself a fragment mistaken for a whole. Theories are forms of insight, ways of seeing, and their value is in what they let us see and do, not in their correspondence to a final fact.
The chapter draws on Heraclitus and, though Bohm does not name him, on Whitehead, and it prepares the ground for the physics: if reality is process, then an order that captures process, rather than one that captures things at instants, is what physics should be seeking. That is what the implicate order will be.
Hidden Variables
The fourth chapter, the most technical, and the book's physical root.
Bohm restates his 1952 interpretation. In orthodox quantum mechanics a particle has no definite position until measured, and the wave function gives probabilities. In Bohm's version the particle always has a definite position and is guided by the wave function through a term he calls the quantum potential, which depends on the form of the whole wave and not on its intensity, so that a distant change in the experimental arrangement changes the particle's behaviour without any transfer of energy. The theory reproduces every prediction of orthodox quantum mechanics and is deterministic.
The point for the book is the quantum potential's dependence on the whole. The particle's motion is determined by the entire system, not by local forces, and this non-locality, which Bell's theorem later showed to be a feature of any theory that reproduces the quantum predictions, is for Bohm the first physical sign that the world is undivided. The hidden-variables theory is, he says, a way of showing that a coherent account of the quantum facts is possible if one gives up the fragmentary assumption that parts have properties independent of the whole.
The Ink Drop in Glycerine
The book's clearest image and the one every reader remembers.
A transparent cylinder contains glycerine, and inside it a second cylinder can be turned. A drop of insoluble ink is placed in the glycerine. The inner cylinder is turned slowly; the drop is drawn out into a thread, then a smear, then vanishes into a uniform grey. The cylinder is then turned back the same number of times, and the drop reappears, as a drop, where it was.
The drop was not destroyed by the stirring. It was enfolded into the whole volume of glycerine, present everywhere and visible nowhere, and unfolded again by the reverse process. Bohm calls its enfolded state an implicate order and its visible state an explicate order, and he asks the reader to consider that the explicate order of things in space is like the visible drop: a stable pattern unfolded from an enfolded whole, and capable of being folded back. Place several drops at different positions and stir; unfold them in sequence, and a single drop appears to move across the vessel, though no drop moved. That, he suggests, is what a particle's trajectory may be.
The Hologram
The second image, more famous and more often misused.
In a hologram, laser light reflected from an object interferes with a reference beam, and the interference pattern is recorded on a plate. The plate looks like nothing; illuminate it with the reference beam and the object appears in three dimensions. Cut the plate in half and each half still shows the whole object, less sharply. Every region of the plate contains information about the whole, because light from every point of the object reached every point of the plate.
Bohm uses the hologram to show that an order in which the whole is enfolded in each part is not a mystical notion but a physical one, realised in a laboratory. He is careful that the hologram is a static record and only an analogy; the reality he is pointing to is a movement, not an image. Popularisers have not always kept the distinction, and the phrase holographic universe, which is not Bohm's, comes from dropping it.
Implicate and Explicate Order
The central proposal, set out in the sixth chapter.
Physics since Descartes has described the world in what Bohm calls the Cartesian order: a grid of coordinates in which separate things occupy separate places and interact by contact or by fields. Quantum theory and relativity both strain this order, relativity by making the grid depend on the observer and quantum theory by making the parts depend on the whole. Bohm proposes that the Cartesian order is a special case, the explicate order, in which things are unfolded into separate regions, and that the fundamental order is implicate, in which everything is enfolded in everything, as in the plate or the glycerine.
The explicate order is what emerges when the implicate order unfolds certain relatively stable and independent sub-wholes, which we then call objects. They are real, but they are not fundamental, and their apparent separateness is an abstraction from a movement of enfolding and unfolding in which nothing is finally separate. Bohm sketches an algebra for such an order, drawing on his work with Basil Hiley, and presents it as a research programme rather than a finished theory.
The Holomovement
The name for the ground.
Since the hologram is static, Bohm needs a term for the process of which the plate is only a snapshot. He calls it the holomovement: the undivided flowing movement in which all implicate orders are carried, unfolding and enfolding without end. The holomovement is not a thing and cannot be described directly; every description is of some sub-order abstracted from it. It is, he says, undefinable and immeasurable, and physics can approach it only through the orders it unfolds.
Readers of the mystical traditions will recognise the structure: a ground that cannot be named, from which the named world unfolds, and to which it returns. Bohm was aware of this and did not disown it. He insisted only that he had arrived at it from the physics, and that the physics required something of the kind.
The move that makes the book more than a metaphor is the reversal of priority. Common sense, and classical physics, take the separate objects as basic and their connections as secondary. Bohm takes the connection, the enfolded whole, as basic and the separate objects as what it produces under certain conditions. Nothing in ordinary experience changes; the drop still looks like a drop. What changes is which of the two states one regards as the truth about the ink. The book's claim is that quantum theory has already forced physics to make this reversal, without noticing, and that noticing is the beginning of a different kind of science.
Relativity and Quantum Theory
The chapter that gives the physical motivation, for readers who want it.
Bohm argues that relativity and quantum theory are both, in different ways, incompatible with the Cartesian order and with each other, and that the incompatibility is a sign that both are approximations to a deeper order. Relativity requires continuity and locality and strict causality; quantum theory requires discontinuity, non-locality and a whole that is not the sum of its parts. Their one common feature is undivided wholeness: relativity's field is a single unbroken whole, and quantum theory's system is a whole whose parts are not separately definable.
He suggests that the implicate order is the framework within which both could be understood as unfoldings, and that the problems of reconciling them arise from trying to fit both into the explicate order they have each, in their own way, outgrown. This was in 1980 a speculation and it remains one; but the demand for a framework beyond both theories has not gone away.
Matter, Consciousness and the Implicate Order
The final chapter, and the reason the book is read outside physics.
Bohm asks whether consciousness, too, may be understood through the implicate order. He observes that consciousness is not, in experience, a sequence of separate instants but a flow in which the past is enfolded in the present: listening to music, one hears each note against the enfolded presence of those before, and the whole is present in every moment. Memory, he suggests, is enfolded, and perception unfolds. Thought is a process of enfolding and unfolding, and its fragmentation is the mistaking of unfolded contents for separate things.
He then proposes that matter and consciousness are not two substances, nor one reducible to the other, but two unfoldings from a common implicate ground, which explains both their difference and their intimate relation. The proposal is stated with care and without the extravagance of some who have taken it up. It does not say that mind creates matter or that the universe is conscious. It says that the split between them is an explicate feature, and that at the implicate level the question of which is prior does not arise.
The Krishnamurti Connection
Worth a section, since it shaped the book's first and last chapters.
Bohm read Krishnamurti in 1959 and was struck by a passage on the observer and the observed being one, which he recognised as the quantum problem in another vocabulary. Their dialogues, from 1961 until Krishnamurti's death in 1986, were published in The Ending of Time and elsewhere. Bohm took from them the conviction that thought is a material process with the same limitations as any other, that its fragmentation is the root of human conflict, and that a direct attention to thought's movement, rather than a better theory, is what changes it.
The first chapter on fragmentation and the closing pages on consciousness carry this. Readers who come to the book from Krishnamurti will find its physics harder than they expected; readers who come from physics will find its opening and close more contemplative than they expected. The book is the meeting point, and Bohm meant it to be.
The Reception Among Physicists
Mixed to cool, and it is worth being honest about why.
The hidden-variables interpretation, which the book restates, has gained standing since 1980: Bell's theorem showed that its non-locality was not a defect but a feature of any adequate theory, and the interpretation now has serious defenders. The implicate order is a different matter. It is not a theory that makes predictions and cannot be tested, and physicists have mostly regarded it as a philosophical proposal or a metaphor. Bohm and Hiley's later The Undivided Universe, 1993, gave the physics more fully and is the book physicists cite.
That is not a refutation. Bohm presented the implicate order as a framework for a physics that did not yet exist, not as that physics, and he was clear that its value would be shown by what it made possible. Forty years on the verdict is still open, and the demand it answers, for an order in which quantum wholeness is fundamental rather than anomalous, is still unmet.
The Influence Beyond Physics
Very large, and not always faithful.
Karl Pribram's holographic model of memory, developed independently, was joined to Bohm's in the 1980s, and the pairing was popularised by Michael Talbot in The Holographic Universe, which extended it to the paranormal in ways Bohm did not endorse. Ken Wilber anthologised Bohm in The Holographic Paradigm. The implicate order has been taken up in consciousness studies, in transpersonal psychology, in the arts, in organisational theory through Bohm's later work on dialogue, and in quantum consciousness writing of every quality. Readers of Capra and Zukav will find Bohm cited throughout.
Bohm is not responsible for what was built on him, and the source is more cautious than the building. Anyone who has read the popularisations owes it to the idea to read where it came from.
The Prose
Plain, careful and slow. Bohm writes like a physicist explaining something to a colleague from another field: no rhetoric, many qualifications, long sentences that circle a point until it is exact. The ink-drop and hologram passages are lucid; the rheomode and the algebraic sketch are dense. There is no wit and no colour. There is, throughout, the sense of a serious person thinking, and readers who want that will forgive the rest.
The Objections
Three, and the book invites all of them.
It is not testable. The implicate order predicts nothing, and a framework that cannot be wrong is not physics.
The analogies carry the argument. Ink drops and holograms show that enfolded order is possible; they do not show that the world is so ordered.
The consciousness chapter outruns the evidence. That experience feels enfolded does not establish that it shares a ground with matter.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have read Talbot, Capra or any of the holographic literature and want the source, which is more modest and more interesting than what was made of it.
Read it if you know some physics and want to see the hidden-variables interpretation extended into a worldview by its author.
Read it if you come from Plotinus or Spinoza or the mystical traditions and want to see a physicist arrive at something like the One from the other direction.
Read chapters one, three and seven if you read nothing else. The argument about fragmentation is the book's lasting contribution and it needs no physics.
The book's real teaching is in the first chapter and it is about attention. Thought divides, and the division is useful, and the trouble begins when the division is mistaken for the thing divided. Bohm spent a career watching physics make this mistake with particles and a quarter of a century with Krishnamurti watching people make it with themselves. The implicate order is his attempt to say what the world would be like if the mistake were not made: not a world without distinction, but one in which every distinction is held as a temporary unfolding from a whole that was never actually broken. The ink drop is still in the glycerine. It only looks as though it is gone.
The enfolded whole, the ink drop, the hologram and the holomovement, from the physicist who framed them.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's difficulty and of its standing among physicists is set out above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Wholeness and the Implicate Order about?
David Bohm's proposal that the world we observe, with its separate objects in space and time, is an explicate order unfolded from a deeper implicate order in which everything is enfolded in everything else. The book argues this from quantum theory and relativity and extends it to language, thought and consciousness.
Who was David Bohm?
An American-born theoretical physicist, 1917 to 1992, who worked with Oppenheimer, wrote a standard textbook on quantum theory, lost his US position in the McCarthy era, and settled in London at Birkbeck College. He is known for the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, for the Aharonov-Bohm effect and for his dialogues with Krishnamurti.
What is the implicate order?
The order in which the whole is enfolded in every region, as a hologram enfolds the whole image in every part of the plate. Bohm proposes that this, not the explicate order of separate things, is the fundamental reality, and that explicate things are relatively stable patterns unfolded from it and folded back.
What is the holomovement?
Bohm's name for the undivided flowing whole from which all orders unfold. The hologram is a static image; the holomovement is the process of enfolding and unfolding itself, which he takes to be the ground of both matter and mind.
What is the rheomode?
An experimental form of language, developed in chapter two, built on verbs rather than nouns, to see whether a grammar that treated flow as primary would make fragmentation harder to think. Bohm regarded it as a thought experiment rather than a proposal and it has had no successors.
Does it connect to Bohm's quantum theory?
Yes. The 1952 hidden-variables interpretation, in which particles have definite positions guided by a quantum potential that depends on the whole system, is the physical seed of the implicate order. The book's chapter on hidden variables sets it out and the later chapters generalise it.
Is the ink-drop example important?
It is the book's clearest image. A drop of ink in glycerine between two cylinders, stirred until it disappears into a grey smear, returns as a drop when the stirring is reversed. The drop was enfolded, not destroyed, and the smear was its implicate form. Bohm uses it to show that order can be present without being visible.
What does it say about consciousness?
The final chapter proposes that matter and consciousness are both unfolded from the implicate order, so that neither reduces to the other and their relation is one of common ground. Bohm connects this to the way memory and perception enfold time, and to his work with Krishnamurti on fragmentation in thought.
Is it accepted physics?
The Bohm interpretation is a respected minority position. The implicate order is not a physical theory in the testable sense and was not received as one; it is a proposed framework, and physicists have mostly treated it as philosophy. Its influence has been in consciousness studies, transpersonal psychology and the arts.
How hard is it to read?
Uneven. The first chapter on fragmentation and the ink-drop passages are clear. The hidden-variables chapter and the algebraic sketch of the implicate order assume physics. The rheomode chapter is heavy going. Most readers skip the middle and return to it.
How does it compare to The Holographic Universe?
Michael Talbot's 1991 book popularised Bohm and Karl Pribram for a general audience and extended their ideas into the paranormal. Bohm's own book is more careful, more difficult and makes far fewer claims. Talbot is the introduction; Bohm is the source.
Who should read it?
Readers who want the origin of the holographic and implicate-order ideas from the physicist who framed them, students of Krishnamurti curious about his scientific interlocutor, and anyone who has met the word wholeness in a hundred lesser books and wants the one that meant it.
Watch one thought unfold
Bohm's practical suggestion, borrowed from Krishnamurti and given a physicist's precision, is to watch thought as a movement rather than to argue with its contents. Take one division you rely on, work and rest, self and other, mine and not mine, and instead of asking whether it is true, watch it being made: the moment the line is drawn, the sense of solidity that follows, the actions that flow from treating the line as a wall. The book's bet is that the line is an unfolding, useful and temporary, and that seeing it unfold is different from believing it. The ink drop is not an argument against the drop. It is an invitation to remember the glycerine.
Sources & References
- Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1980; Routledge Classics edition.
- Bohm, David. "A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of Hidden Variables," Physical Review 85, 1952.
- Bohm, David and Basil Hiley. The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory, 1993.
- Krishnamurti, Jiddu and David Bohm. The Ending of Time, 1985.
- Peat, F. David. Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, 1997.
- Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe, 1991, for the popularisation.