The physicist David Bohm (1917 to 1992) used ‘implicate order’ for a deeper, enfolded level of reality in which everything is folded into everything else, and ‘explicate order’ for the unfolded, everyday world of things that seem separate from one another. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) he argued that the separate objects we see are relatively stable patterns unfolding from an undivided whole. Therapeutic Shamanism uses his picture as a bridge to the shamanic idea of a deeper reality behind the physical one, and goes further in holding that this underlying energy is alive and conscious.
Who was David Bohm? #
An American-born physicist who spent most of his working life in Britain. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917, took his doctorate under J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, and after the Second World War taught at Princeton, where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. In 1949 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to testify; he was arrested, acquitted in 1951, and lost his post. He left the United States for the University of São Paulo in Brazil, then worked in Israel and at Bristol, where in 1959 he and Yakir Aharonov described what is now called the Aharonov–Bohm effect.
From 1961 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College in London, where he spent the rest of his working life, latterly with his long-standing collaborator Basil Hiley. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990 and died in London in 1992. From 1961 he also held a long series of dialogues with the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, lasting about twenty-five years.
What is the implicate order? #
A deeper order of reality in which everything is enfolded. ‘Implicate’ comes from a Latin word meaning to fold inward, and ‘explicate’ from one meaning to unfold. In the explicate order, the world of everyday experience, things appear as separate objects located in their own places. In the implicate order the whole is folded into each region, and what we take for separate things are relatively stable forms that unfold from it and fold back into it again.
Bohm gave two images for this. In one, a drop of ink is placed in thick glycerine between two cylinders, and the glycerine is turned very slowly. The drop is drawn out into a fine thread until it vanishes, yet when the turning is reversed it gathers together and reappears. While invisible it was not gone; its pattern was enfolded in the whole fluid. In the other, a hologram, every part of the photographic plate holds information about the whole image. Because a hologram is still, Bohm added the word ‘holomovement’, the movement of the whole, for an underlying reality that is always in flowing change, like a stream in which eddies and whirlpools hold their shape for a while without ever being separate from the water.1
Why did Bohm think we needed it? #
Partly for physics and partly for how we live. In physics, he saw the two great theories of the century, quantum theory and relativity, as resting on different and contradictory pictures of the world, and suggested that a new starting point, which he called undivided wholeness, might be needed to bring them together.
But the book opens with something wider. Its first chapter, “Fragmentation and Wholeness”, argues that the habit of treating the world as made of separate fragments, and of seeing ourselves as separate from it, is not just an error of thinking but a source of the crises of the modern world, from social conflict to the damage done to the Earth.2 Bohm came to see matter and consciousness as both enfolding the whole, two sides of one process, an idea he explored with the neuroscientist Karl Pribram, who proposed that memory may be stored throughout the brain rather than in one place, much as an image is stored throughout a hologram.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use the implicate order? #
As a way into the shamanic idea of a deeper reality. Shamanism holds that behind this day-to-day, physical reality there is another, deeper one, and that physical matter is organised and held together from the patterns, or blueprints, in that deeper reality. Bohm’s explicate and implicate orders describe something very like this from within physics. Shamans have long described the same two levels, in modern shamanism sometimes with the Toltec terms ‘tonal’ for the surface world and ‘nagual’ for the deeper one; Therapeutic Shamanism calls them ‘ordinary reality’ and ‘shamanic reality’, and the glossaries of its books give the Explicate Order and the Implicate Order as other names for each.3
In shamanic reality everything is connected to, and a part of, everything else. Things that look separate in ordinary reality are “merely protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy”. Read this way, the connection runs so deep that, in principle, following the connections of any single atom far enough would tell us what every other atom in the universe is doing, what it has done and what it is likely to do next. A shamanic journey is a way of entering that deeper reality and experiencing for oneself how everything is connected.3 Shamanic practice rests on being aware of both levels, with “one foot in this world and one in the other”, since having both feet stuck permanently in either is a form of madness. See What are the three shamanic realms? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go further than Bohm? #
In two ways. The first is about what the deeper reality is made of. Modern physics tells us that everything is made of energy, and shamans have known this for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Where shamanism goes further than physics is in saying, and actually experiencing, that this energy is both alive and conscious, so that everything around us is alive and conscious and can, in principle, be communicated with.4 Bohm came close at times to saying that mind runs all the way through matter, but his implicate order is not a world of persons, and it has no realms, GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this or Peoples in it.
The second is about how anyone comes to know it. Bohm reached his view through mathematics and thought experiments. In Therapeutic Shamanism the deeper reality is met directly, in journeying, as something experienced and tested in practice rather than believed, so physics is a parallel to the teaching, not its foundation. See How does Therapeutic Shamanism sit with science?
Is the implicate order accepted physics? #
Not as settled physics, and Bohm’s ideas have long divided opinion. Most physicists treat the implicate order as a philosophical framework rather than a tested theory, since it has not produced predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics. The writer Martin Gardner, a well-known sceptic, criticised Bohm’s turn towards mysticism and his long friendship with Krishnamurti, writing that his view of mind and matter flirted with panpsychism, and Hiley himself worried that such associations could harm the standing of their physics.5
On the other side, Bohm always presented the implicate order as an exploratory way of seeing that might lead to new theories, not as a finished one, and he and Hiley went on working together until his death; their last book, The Undivided Universe (1993), sets out mainly their ‘ontological’ interpretation of quantum theory, built on his pilot-wave theory, with a closing discussion of the implicate order.6 That earlier ‘pilot-wave’ interpretation, from 1952, is today taken seriously as one of the main alternative readings of quantum mechanics, and the physicist John Bell, whose work transformed the field, was among those who championed it.7
