Introduction
You live in a world that feels permanently broken into separate pieces, nations, minds, and objects. You struggle to solve complex personal and global crises because your language and habits of thought slice reality into isolated fragments.
David Bohm argues in Wholeness and the Implicate Order that this fragmentation is an illusion. The universe is an undivided wholeness in flowing movement, where separate objects and thoughts are merely transient abstractions enfolded within a deeper multidimensional implicate order.
The book bridges quantum physics, everyday language, and the nature of thought itself. It shows how traditional modes of thinking trap you in contradiction and introduces a new framework for reality.
- How does language reinforce the illusion of separate things?
- What order lies hidden beneath our observable reality?
- How can you transform thought to perceive unbroken wholeness?
1. Fragmentation and Wholeness
Humanity divides art, science, nations, religion, and the self into separate compartments. This happens because you mistake the content of your thought for a direct description of objective reality.
Fragmentation is a widespread illusion arising from the habit of treating our thoughts and distinctions as real, objective divisions in the world.
Societal divisions manifest as separate nations, conflicting political and religious groups, and individuals fragmented by conflicting ambitions to the point of neurosis. These divisions lead directly to crises such as pollution, political disorder, and psychological neurosis.
The Nature of Theories
Scientific theories are not absolute truths about reality, but ever-changing forms of insight or ways of looking that eventually become unclear when extended beyond their proper domain. The word theory derives from theoria, meaning to view.
Theories organize your factual knowledge and shape your experience, but they are neither strictly true nor false. When you confuse a theory with absolute truth, you treat theoretical distinctions as permanent fragments.
Newtonian physics worked for centuries until new domains required relativity and quantum theory, which completely altered the picture of the physical world.
Physics of Wholeness
Modern physics, through relativity and quantum theory, demonstrates that the universe must be viewed as an undivided wholeness in flowing movement. Quantum theory shows that atomic particles behave like waves and depend on their entire environment, making the division between observer and observed invalid.
Relativity theory replaces rigid building blocks with a universal flux of events, where stable entities are merely transient abstractions like vortices in a flowing stream.
Vortex structures or wave forms in a flowing stream appear as stable patterns, such as vortices A and B, but are actually part of one unbroken fluid movement.
The fragmentation in your thoughts cannot be fixed by changing the content while leaving the actual process of thinking untouched, because process and content are one unbroken movement. You commonly assume the thinking process is separate from its content and can judge it objectively.
Because content and process are inseparable aspects of a single whole, fragmentary content and fragmentary process must end together through careful attention and learning. You cannot eliminate turbulent vortices in a stream without changing the formative activity of the stream itself.
2. The Rheomode Experiment
Language and Thought Fragmentation
The standard subject-verb-object structure of modern languages fosters a fragmented world view by implying that all action arises in a separate, fixed subject and crosses over to another separate object. Grammar conditions you to divide the world into static entities. When carried to its limit, this leads to the scientific view that everything is constituted of basic fixed particles.
Even phrases like "It is raining" impose a false rainer where it is more accurate to state "Rain is going on." Saying "It is raining" or "One elementary particle acts on another" falsely separates the actor from the action, whereas particles are actually on-going movements that merge and interpenetrate.
The rheomode is an experimental language structure where movement is taken as primary and the verb rather than the noun plays the fundamental role, aiming to eliminate hard and fast divisions.
Truth and Fact in Language
By building language forms from verbal roots, the rheomode prevents the language from implying static, separately existent objects. The word rheomode derives from a Greek verb meaning to flow, and its use makes thought and language call attention to their own symbolic function. You can use novel verbal forms such as to levate, to vidate, and to ordinate to express dynamic relationships without relying on nouns.
Truth and fact are flowing movements of perception and testing rather than static fragments, understood in the rheomode through verbs like to verrate and to con-statate. Truth is apprehended moment to moment by observing whether a content fits a broader context. The root to verrate means to perceive truth, while to con-statate refers to how actions or facts stand together stably through testing. Persistent holding to a truth beyond its proper limits is termed irre-verration.
3. Reality and Knowledge as Process
What exists is the process of becoming itself. Drawing on Heraclitus and Whitehead, David Bohm argues that reality is an unbroken process of universal flux.
Reality is fundamentally an unbroken process of universal flux, where all objects and events are merely transitory forms abstracted from this movement.
Even elementary particles in physics are not ultimate substances. They are relatively constant forms abstracted from a deeper, unknown level of movement.
Thought and Intelligence
Thought is not merely a collection of static ideas. It is the active response of memory across intellectual, emotional, and physical dimensions.
Thought operates mechanically as either a repetition of existing memory structures or a combinatorial arrangement of them. Because it is mechanical, there is no inherent reason for your thoughts to fit an actual situation correctly.
Intelligence is an unconditioned act of perception that discerns new orders and judges whether specific thoughts are relevant or fitting. Unlike mechanical thought rooted in memory structures, true intelligence is unconditioned by physical cells or knowable laws. It operates through flashes of understanding that reveal new structures and orders beyond past conditioning.
Thought and Non-Thought
Conscious thought begins when the mind distinguishes thought from non-thought. While a practical distinction between mental images and independent reality is necessary for sanity, the rigid Aristotelian division breaks down when applied to the totality.
Thought is a material process involving electrical and chemical brain activity, muscular tensions, and environmental interactions, forming an unbroken cycle. You can categorize this interplay through logical rules:
- T is not NT (thought and non-thought are different and mutually exclusive).
- All is either T or NT (thought and non-thought cover the whole of what can exist).
When thought attempts to encompass reality as a whole, lacking sensuously perceivable objects for verification, it easily slips into treating its own abstractions as static reality. To prevent this, comprehensive thought must be approached like poetry, designed to inspire fresh perceptions and harmonious actions rather than ultimate dogmas. Thinking about the totality of all that exists should be treated as an art form rather than a system of final, fixed truths.
4. Hidden Variables in Quantum Theory
Standard quantum theory lacks a consistent underlying reality. It presents a world of mathematical probabilities rather than definite physical processes. You face an apparent contradiction between relativity and quantum correlations.
Quantum theory lacks a consistent underlying reality in its standard form, prompting the exploration of hidden variables and the quantum potential to provide a coherent physical foundation.
The Paradox of EPR
Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky formulated a famous paradox in 1935. They aimed to show that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
A molecule of zero total spin disintegrates into two atoms of spin $\hbar / 2$. When two atoms originate from a molecule with zero spin, measuring the spin of atom A instantly determines the opposite spin of atom B without interacting with it. This implies either faster-than-light signals or non-local hidden variables.
Bohr resolved the EPR paradox by asserting the radical indivisibility of quantum processes and experimental arrangements. In the quantum domain, an observed system and its measuring apparatus form a single indivisible experimental situation, rendering concepts like unmeasured properties meaningless. The classical domain requires separate objects, but the quantum domain refuses such divisions.
Preliminary Interpretation
David Bohm proposed a preliminary hidden variable interpretation where the wave function represents an objectively real field acting on particles via a quantum potential. Particles possess well-defined trajectories influenced by both classical potential and a quantum potential derived from the wave function. The field itself undergoes rapid random fluctuations from a deeper sub-quantum level.
- Particles possess definite positions and trajectories at all times.
- The psi-field exerts a new type of force called the quantum potential.
- Sub-quantum fluctuations provide a statistical basis for quantum probabilities.
5. Orders and Physics
Revolutions in physics require perceiving new orders and developing appropriate language rather than merely adapting fixed traditional concepts to fit contradictory facts.
Historically, physics has transitioned through distinct frameworks of order. Ancient thinkers viewed the universe through degrees of perfection relative to the center of the Earth and compared it to a living organism.
Ancient astronomers and Ptolemaic scholars accommodated observational discrepancies in planetary orbits by adding epicycles, demonstrating how a fixed notion of order adapts to preserve itself despite contradictory evidence.
A revolutionary shift occurred with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. They established that basic laws apply to matter moving in empty space without friction rather than in a viscous medium, leading to the mechanistic view of the universe.
Order, Measure, and Structure
Order is not restricted to regular lines or grids. It encompasses growth, evolution, art, and communication, characterized by hierarchies of similar differences and different similarities.
Measure originally meant limit or boundary, dictating the proper bounds of behavior, health, and physical phenomena. Together, order and measure govern structation, which is the dynamic creation and dissolution of structures across multiple levels.
Geometric curves are classified by their independent differences. They range from straight lines of the first class to helices and indefinitely complex random curves of high degree resembling Brownian motion.
Theory of Relativity
The theory of relativity breaks classical notions by establishing the speed of light as an unreachable horizon and replacing rigid bodies and separate particles with events, processes, and continuous fields. Einstein perceived that light is fundamentally different from other forms of motion and cannot be overtaken.
Einstein contemplated at age fifteen what would happen if one moved at the speed of light and looked in a mirror. He deduced that light behaves fundamentally differently from ordinary mechanical motion.
Relativity makes time relative to the speed of coordinate frames and introduces the signal as a key descriptive element. Because extended rigid bodies imply faster-than-light signals, particles cannot be treated as primary concepts. Instead, Einstein's unified field theory treats the universe as an undivided and unbroken whole where particles are merely intense regions or singularities within a continuous field.
Quantum theory introduces a radical shift in physics through four primary features:
- the indivisibility of the quantum of action, meaning transitions between stationary states are discrete;
- the wave-particle duality where matter exhibits properties of both;
- wave functions describing statistical potentialities rather than actual individual states;
- non-causal correlations between spatially separated events as demonstrated by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.
Overcoming the impasse between relativity and quantum theory requires abandoning both the foundational role of signals and the reduction of quantum states to separate statistical entities. Both frameworks retain hidden attachments to analysis into separate components. Progress demands dropping these assumptions in favor of a deeper theory based on thoroughgoing non-linearity and undivided wholeness at all levels.
6. Implicate and Explicate Order
Physical law should give primary relevance to the implicate order, where structures are enfolded, treating the explicate order as secondary.
The Lens and the Hologram
A lens maps point P to point Q. This process reinforces the classical order of analysis and synthesis.
A hologram records an interference pattern where each region of the plate is relevant to the whole structure. Every part of the structure is relevant to the whole plate.
When laser light illuminates a developed photographic plate of a hologram, viewing a small region still reveals the entire three-dimensional structure from a limited angle.
The Holomovement
Implicate means folding inward. In an implicate order, a total structure is enfolded within each region of space and time. Cartesian coordinates describe the explicate order of unfolded explicit parts.
A visual image translated into a radio wave during a television broadcast is carried in an implicate order until a receiver unfolds it.
The holomovement is an unbroken, undivided, undefinable, and immeasurable totality that carries all implicate orders. Light, electron beams, and sound are abstractable aspects of the holomovement, but in its totality, it is limitless. Theories relevate certain contents into attention for limited contexts, but no single theory can provide a permanent foundational basis.
Conclusion
You can resolve the deep conflict between fragmentation and wholeness by recognizing that physical reality, language, and thought are an unbroken, flowing movement.
The implicate order, the holomovement, and the rheomode fit together into a single worldview. They show that separate objects, static concepts, and rigid identities are merely superficial abstractions arising from a deeper, multidimensional reality. When you understand that thought itself creates division and then falsely claims the division exists objectively, you free yourself to perceive the world as an undivided whole.
To apply this worldview to your daily life, you must change how you observe and participate in the flow of existence.
- Watch your thoughts without interference to see how your mind continuously generates fragmentation.
- Catch the moment when you treat a transitory abstraction or mental category as a permanent, independent entity.
- Experiment with language by emphasizing verbs and flowing processes rather than static nouns to describe experiences.
- Treat problems not as isolated mechanical failures to be fixed, but as enfolded parts of a broader relational context.
- Participate in open dialogue to let shared meaning emerge collectively without holding onto fixed personal assumptions.
10 Key Ideas
- Fragmentation is a widespread illusion arising from the habit of treating our thoughts and distinctions as real, objective divisions in the world.
- Scientific theories are not absolute truths about reality, but ever-changing forms of insight or ways of looking that eventually become unclear when extended beyond their proper domain.
- Modern physics, through relativity and quantum theory, demonstrates that the universe must be viewed as an undivided wholeness in flowing movement.
- The rheomode is an experimental language structure where movement is taken as primary and the verb rather than the noun plays the fundamental role, aiming to eliminate hard and fast divisions.
- Reality is fundamentally an unbroken process of universal flux, where all objects and events are merely transitory forms abstracted from this movement.
- Unlike mechanical thought rooted in memory structures, true intelligence is unconditioned by physical cells or knowable laws and operates through flashes of understanding that reveal new orders.
- Quantum theory lacks a consistent underlying reality in its standard form, prompting the exploration of hidden variables and the quantum potential to provide a coherent physical foundation.
- Revolutions in physics require perceiving new orders and developing appropriate language rather than merely adapting fixed traditional concepts to fit contradictory facts.
- Physical law should give primary relevance to the implicate order, where structures are enfolded, treating the explicate order as secondary.
- You can resolve the deep conflict between fragmentation and wholeness by recognizing that physical reality, language, and thought are an unbroken, flowing movement.