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David Bohm
This nOde last updated August 18th, 2002 and is permanently morphing...
(9 Ik' (Wind) / 15 Yaxk'in (New Sun) - 22/260 - 12.19.9.9.2)

"matter is just frozen light."

• studied with Niels Bohr
• worked with Oppenheimer
• reinterpreted by Michael Talbot in the book _The Holographic Universe_    
• drum and bass release _Quiet Wars/Frozen Light_ MP3 (192k) 12" by Vector Burn on Cyanide #003 (2001)

One of the most impressive theories emerging out of scientific cosmology respecting the ancient truths was set forth by the late physicist, David Bohm in his book, _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_. Using the language of mathematics, Bohm set out to describe the transcendent reality and its graded energetic hierarchy in four basic states or orders of energy beginning with the physical world, which he called the Explicate Order.

"The Explicate Order, weakest of all energy systems, resonates out of and is an expression of an infinitely more powerful order of energy called the Implicate order. It is the precursor of the Explicate, the dreamlike vision or the ideal presentation of that which is to become manifest as a physical object. The Implicate order implies within it all physical universes. However, it resonates from an energy field which is yet greater, the realm of pure potential. It is pure potential because nothing is implied within it; implications form in the implicate order and then express themselves in the explicate order. Bohm goes on to postulate a final state of infinite [zero point] energy which he calls the realm of insight intelligence. The creative process springs from this realm. Energy is generated there, gathers its pure potential, and implies within its eventual expression as the explicate order."

Will Keepin, David Bohm, Noetic Science Journal

  - David Bohm, _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_ 

Physicist David Bohm, one of Einstein's protégés, delved yet more deeply into the wave/particle duality mystery. He took the implications of the new physics even farther. He discerned that if the nature of subatomic particles depends on an observer’s perspective, then it is futile to search for a particle’s actual properties, as was science’s goal, or to think that subatomic particles, the essence of matter, even exist before someone observes them. In his plasma experiments at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, Bohm found that individual electrons act as part of an interconnected whole. In plasma, a gas composed of electrons and positive ions in high concentration, electrons more or less assume the nature of a self-regulating organism, as if they were inherently intelligent. Bohm found, to his amazement, that the subatomic sea he created was conscious. By extension, the vast sub-atomic reality that is material creation may also be said to be conscious. To those who foresaw the implications, Bohm shattered the useful but limiting premise that led science to its many achievements in modern times, crossing a new barrier, beyond which lurked the unknown, a scientific twilight zone.  Intellectual observation, it turned out, the fulcrum of the scientific method since Francis Bacon, could only take an observer so far.

As with any dogma, what was once a useful guideline became a stifling limitation. Negating the ability of the human intellect alone to fathom ultimate reality, Bohm, then, challenged the scientific world to adopt a more profound understanding.  Reality, Bohm’s work suggests, has a more subtle nature than that which can be defined by linear, human thinking, the province of modern science and the intellect. Within the fabric of reality, Bohm found not just the wave/particle duality phenomenon, as described above, but an interconnectedness, a Non-Space or Non-Local reality where only the appearance of waves also being particles exists. He saw, perhaps intuitively, that it is ultimately meaningless to see the universe as composed of parts, or disconnected, since everything is joined, space and time being composed of the same essence as matter. A subatomic particle, then, does not suddenly change into a wave (at velocities that would have to be beyond the speed of light, as Bohm’s mentor, Einstein, suggested), it already is a wave sharing the same Non-Space as the particle. Reality, then, is not material in any common sense of the word. It is something far more ineffable. Physicists call this Non-Locality. Mystics call it oneness.
 

In spite of those who disagreed, Bohm evolved a yet more profound understanding, that of an interconnected whole with a conscious essence, where all matter and events interact with one another, because time, space and distance are an illusion relative to perspective. He developed, in fact, holographic model of the universe, where the whole can be found in the most minute part, a blade of grass, an atom, and where matter, circumstance and dimension result from holographic projections of subtle, but powerful, conscious energy. Actual location and, by extension, the shape-shifting of particles, all manifest reality, in fact, exist only in the context of relative appearances. Bohm discovered that every thing is connected to everything else, past, present and future, as well as time, space and distance, because it all occupies the same Non-Space and Non-Time.

David Bohm brought to physics and the scientific world the understanding that has propelled mystics and sages since the dawn of time. Rejecting the idea that particles do not exist until they are observed, he, like Noble laureate and renowned physicist Brian Josephson, saw that physics must see the nature of subatomic reality in a new way. It is not simply that conscious perspective effects the nature of the subatomic quanta, Bohm revealed, but that the subatomic quanta is conscious, which means that everything is conscious, even inanimate objects and seemingly empty space, the very definition, if one were possible, of mystical or spiritual reality.

"..according to David Bohm 1952 the quantum jump is controlled by a subquantum hidden variable which is nonlocal: here, there, and everywhere in space: now, then, and everywhen in time.  If Bohm is right, the primate brain (which devised Lear and Beethoven's Ninth and tic-tac-toe along with quantum mechanics) is the product of DNA architectural design to terraform Terra which is dependent upon quantum bonding of the DNA Helix which, in turn, is determined by quantum jumpiness determined itself by the hidden variable nonlocal in spacetime omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent as any theologian's god. "

- Simon Moon - _Quantum Mechanics As A Branch Of Primate Psychology_

Weber:  When mystics use the visualization of light they don't use it only as a metaphor; to them it seems to be a reality.  Have they tapped into matter and energy at a level where time is absent?

Bohm: It may well be.  That's one way of looking at it.  As I've suggested the mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation.  It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this (timeless state) is the primary actuality.  Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure that emerges as an overtone of the primary structure...

Bohm:  Light is what enfolds all the universe as well.  For example, if you're looking at this room, the whole room is enfolded into light which enters the pupil of your eye and unfolds into the image and into your brain. Light in its generalized sense (not just ordinary light) is the means by which the entire universe unfolds into itself.

Weber:  Is this a metaphor for you or an actual state?

Bohm: It's an actuality.  At least as far as physics is concerned.

Weber: Light is energy, of course.

Bohm:  It's energy and it's also information-content, form, and structure. It's the potential of everything.
 

Weber: Physicists are not satisfied that they have understood light up to now because of the particle-wave paradox, right?

Bohm:  Yes, I think that to understand light we'll have to understand the structure underlying time and space more deeply.  you can see that these issues are related in the sense that light transcends the present structure of time and space and we will never understand it properly in that present structure.

Weber: How would implicate order philosophy handle light?

Bohm: It could handle it more naturally, mathematically speaking, because it doesn't commit itself to the idea of seperate points in space; but it may say that the underlying reality is something which is not localized.  One view says that light also moves from one place to another through a series of positions, and the other view says it doesn't do that at all.  Rather, light exists, it just simply IS.

****************************************************************
This dialogue between Renee Weber and David Bohm  is from Weber's book
_Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity_

Dr. David Bohm argues that the best way of understanding the non-local connection in modern physics - Herbert's "cosmic glue" - is to regard both Mind and Universe as holograms.  In a hologram, any part contains the information of the whole, as any page of _Finnegans Wake_, fully analyzed, seems to contain the information of the whole - "the park is gracer than the whole" - Philip K. Dick writes in VALIS: "... Hermes Trismegistos... said "that which is above is that which is below."  By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term." - VALIS means Vast Active Living Information System, or Joyce's - "The task above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes, " FW, 263, - note the backward (Alice through the looking glass) initials of the dreamer, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker - Joyces's enthusiasm for Giordano Bruno  began in adolescense and lasted his lifetime, and if you read Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and Frances Boldereff's Hermes to his son Thoth: Joyce's Use of Giordano Bruno in _Finnegans Wake_, you will see that Bruno was also trying to tell us our universe is a hologram, and Joyce understood him that way.
 - _Coincidance_ by Robert Anton Wilson off of _Semiotext USA_

Michael Talbot and David Bohm (in quotes) in Talbot's _The Holographic Universe_, Chapter 2:
The Cosmos as Hologram, p.51

According to our current understanding of physics, every region of space is awash with different kinds of fields composed of waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least some energy. When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe!

Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small "pattern of excitation" in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. "This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation," states Bohm.[12] In other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not even a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things.

     [12] Bohm, _Wholeness_, p.192

As he explains (in Bohm and Peat 1987, 185-186 and Weber 1986, 215), "Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter. . . Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation in common loops. In this view, mind and matter are two aspects of one whole and no more separable than are form and content. "Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it."

"We may compare the structure of the totality of natural law to an object with a very large number (in reality infinite) of sides, having facets within facets, facets reflecting facets, facets consisting of mosaics of facets, etc.  To know what the object is, then, we must have a large number of different  kinds of views and cross-sections.  Each view or cross-section then contributes to our understanding of many aspects of the object.  The relationships between the views are, however, equally important, for they serve to correct the errors which arise as a result of regarding one or a limited number of views as a complete representation of the whole object; and they also indicate qualitatively new properties not apparent in the separate views (as two plane views of a scene taken from different angles permit us to infer its three-dimensional character).  We see, then, that while each view and  cross-section may vary depending on our own relationship to the object, we can obtain a closer and closer approximation to a concept of the real nature of the object by considering more and more views and cross-sections and their relationships.  This concept, then, becomes less and less dependent on our own relationship to the object as the number of views and cross-sections is increased."

_Causality & Chance in Modern Physics_ - David Bohm

The universe according to Bohm actually has two faces, or more precisely, two orders. One is the explicate order, corresponding to the physical world as we know it in day-to-day reality, the other a deeper, more fundamental order which Bohm calls the implicate order.  The implicate order is the vast holomovement.  We see only the surface of this movement as it presents or "explicates" itself from moment to moment in time and space.  What we see in the world - the explicate order - is no more than the surface of the implicate order as it unfolds.  Time and space are themselves the modes or forms of the unfolding process.  They are like the screen on the video game.  The displays on the screen may seem to interact directly with each other but, in fact, their interaction merely reflects what the game computer is doing.  The rules which govern the operation of the computer are, of course, different from those that govern the behavior of the figures displayed on the screen.  Moreover, like the implicate order of Bohm's model, the computer might be capable of many operations that in no way apparent upon examination of the game itself as it progresses on the screen.

- _Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and The Trickster_    by Allan Combs & Mark Holland

David Bohm feels that examples of objectively active meaning can be found in other physical processes.  One is the funcitoning of a computer chip.  A computer chip contains information, and the meaning of the information is active in the sense that it determines how electrical currents flow through the computer.  Another is the behavior of subatomic particles.  The orthodox view in physics is that quantum waves act mechanically on a particle, controlling its movement in much the same way that the waves of the ocean might control a Ping-Pong ball floating on its surface.  But Bohm does not feel that this view can explain, for example, the coordinated dance of electrons in a plasma any more than the wave motion of water could explain a similarly well-choreographed movement of Ping-Pong balls if such a movement were discovered on the ocean's surface.  He believes the relationship between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves.  A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a radar wave pushes a ship.  Rather, it provides the electron with information about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own.

In other words, Bohm believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity, a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, structureless point.  The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all subatomic particles, indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only of consciousness but of all matter.  It is this intrinsic commonality, says Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK.  He states, "On this basis, psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were refocused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding basic processes of the material systems in which this psychokineseis was to be brought about."

It is important to note that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is, a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics.  Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal "resonance of meanings," or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle of polarization which we saw in chapter 2 (for technical reasons Bohm believes mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of "super" nonlocality, would offer such an explanation).

- Michael Talbot - _The Holographic Universe_

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