The Universe as a Hologram

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from
blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A'
to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.
much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

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In 1950 David Bohm wrote what many physicists consider to be a model textbook on quantum mechanics. Ironically, he has never accepted that theory of physics. In the history of science he is a maverick, a member of that small group of physicists-including Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Erwin Schrödinger, Alfred Lande, Paul Dirac, and John Wheeler--who have expressed grave doubts that a theory founded on indeterminism and chance could give us a true view of the universe around us.

Today's generation of physicists, impressed by the stunning successes of quantum physics--from nuclear weapons to lasers-are of a different mind. They are busy applying quantum mechanics to areas its original creators never imagined. Stephen Hawking, for example, used it to describe the creation of elementary particles from black holes and to argue that the universe exploded into being in a quantum-mechanical event.

Bucking this tide of modern physics for more than 30 years, Bohm has been more than a gadfly. His objections to the foundations of quantum mechanics have gradually coalesced into an extension of the theory so sweeping that it amounts to a new view of reality. Believing that the nature of things is not reducible to fragments or particles, he argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole, coherent domain, which he calls the implicate order.

Most other physicists discard Bohm's logic without bothering to scrutinize it. Part of the difficulty is that his implicate order is rife with paradox. Another problem is the sheer range of his ideas, which encompass such hitherto nonphysical subjects as consciousness, society, truth, language, and the process of scientific theory making itself.

The son of a furniture dealer, Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He studied physics at the University of California with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Unwilling to testify against his former teacher and other friends during the McCarthy hearings, Bohm left the United States and took a post at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. From there he moved to Israel, then England, where he eventually became professor of physics at Birkbeck College in London.

Bohm is perhaps best known for his early work on the interactions of electrons in metals. He showed that their individual, haphazard movement concealed a highly organized and cooperative behavior called plasma oscillation. This intimation of an order underlying apparent chaos was pivotal in Bohm's development.

In 1959 Bohm, working with Yakir Ahronov, showed that a magnetic field might alter the behavior of electrons without touching them: If two electron beams were passed on either side of a space containing a magnetic field, the field would retard the waves of one beam even though it did not penetrate the space and actually touch the electrons. This 'AB effect" was verified a year later.

During the Fifties and Sixties Bohm expanded his belief in the existence of hidden variables that control seemingly random quantum events, and from that point on, his ideas diverged more and more from the mainstream of modern physics. His books Causality and Chance in Modern Physics and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in 1957 and 1980, respectively, spell out his new theory in considerable detail. In the Sixties Bohm met the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and their continuing dialogues, published as a book, The Ending of Time, helped the physicist clarify his ideas about wholeness and order.

Recently retired from Birkbeck College, Bohm is now trying to develop a mathematical version of his implicate-order hypothesis-the kind of precise, testable theory that other physicists will take seriously. It is not an easy task, for Bohm's universe is a strange, mystical place in which past, present, and future coexist. The objects in his universe, even the subatomic particles, are secondary; it is a process of movement, continuous unfolding and enfolding from a seamless whole that is fundamental.

To test the theory of general relativity, Einstein forecast that the sun's gravity would bend light waves from distant stars; he was correct. So far Bohm has been unable to find an experimental aspect that could support his ideas in the same way.

Although recently recovered from serious heart surgery, Bohm continues to make frequent trips throughout Europe and to the United States, where he lectures, talks to colleagues, and encourages students. His ideas have been enthusiastically received by philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, poets, and artists.

Bohm was interviewed by John Briggs and F. David Peat, authors of Looking Glass Universe, over a two-day period near Amherst College in Massachusetts, where Bohm was involved in a series of meetings with the Dalai Lama. Additional comments are taken from a previous interview in England by writer Llee Heflin.

Omni: Can you recall when you first experienced the sense of the wholeness that you now express as the implicate order?

Bohm: When I was a boy a certain prayer we said every day in Hebrew contained the words to love God with all your heart all your soul, and all your mind. My understanding of these words, that is, this notion of wholeness--not necessarily directed toward God but as a way of living--had a tremendous impact on me. I also felt a sense of nature being whole very early. I felt internally related to trees, mountains, and stars in a way I wasn't to all the chaos of the cities.
When I first studied quantum mechanics I felt again that sense of internal relationship--that it was describing something that I was experiencing directly rather than just thinking about.
The notion of spin particularly fascinated me: the idea that when something is spinning in a certain direction, it could also spin in the other direction but that somehow the two directions together would be a spin in a third direction. I felt that somehow that described experience with the processes of the mind. In thinking about spin I felt I was in a direct relationship to nature. In quantum mechanics I came closer to my intuitive sense of nature.

Omni: Yet you've said that quantum mechanics doesn't provide a clear picture of nature. What do you mean?

Bohm: The main problem is that quantum mechanics gives only the probability of an experimental result. Neither the decay of an atomic nucleus nor the fact that it decays at one moment and not another can be properly pictured within the theory. It can only enable you to predict statistically the results of various experiments.
Physics has changed from its earlier form, when it tried to explain things and give some physical picture. Now the essence is regarded as mathematical. It's felt the truth is in the formulas. Now they may find an algorithm by which they hope to explain a wider range of experimental results, but it will still have inconsistencies. They hope that they can eventually explain all the results that could be gotten, but that is only a hope.

Omni: How did the founders of quantum mechanics initially receive your book Quantum Theory?

Bohm: In the Fifties, when I sent it around to various physicists-including [Niels] Bohr, Einstein, and [Wolfgangl Pauli--Bohr didn't answer, but Pauli liked it. Einstein sent me a message that he'd like to talk with me. When we met he said the book had done about as well as you could do with quantum mechanics. But he was still not convinced it was a satisfactory theory.
His objection was not merely that it was statistical. He felt it was a kind of abstraction; quantum mechanics got correct results but left out much that would have made it intelligible. I came up with the causal interpretation [that the electron is a particle, but it also has a field around it. The particle is never separated from that field, and the field affects the movement of the particle in certain ways]. Einstein didn't like it, though, because the interpretation had this notion of action at a distance: Things that are far away from each other profoundly affect each other. He believed only in local action.
I didn't come back to this implicate order until the Sixties, when I got interested in notions of order. I realized then the problem is that coordinates are still the basic order in physics, whereas everything else has changed.

Omni: Your key concept is something you call enfoldment. Could you explain it?

Bohm: Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that's not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment.

Omni: You spoke of coordinates and order a moment ago. How do they tie in with enfoldment? Do you mean coordinates like those on a grid?

Bohm: Yes, but not necessarily straight lines. They are a way of mapping space and time. Since space-time may be curved, the lines may be curved as well. It became clear that each general notion of the world contains within it a specific idea of order. The ancient Greeks had the idea of an increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens. Modern physics contains the idea of successive positions of bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these bodies. The order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks is now considered irrelevant.
The most radical change in the notion of order since Isaac Newton came with quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical idea of order contradicts coordinate order because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle made a detailed ordering of space and time impossible. When you apply quantum theory to general relativity, at very short distances like ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters, the notion of the order of space and time breaks down.


Omni: Can you replace that with some other sense of order?

Bohm: First you have to ask what we mean by order. Everybody has some tacit notion of it, but order itself is impossible to define. Yet it can be illustrated. In a photograph any part of an object is imaged into a point. This point-to-point correspondence emphasizes the notion of point as fundamental in sense of order. Cameras now photograph things too big or too small, too fast or too slow to be seen by the naked eye. This has reinforced our belief that everything can ultimately be seen that way.

Omni: Aren't the contradictions you have been talking about embedded in the very name quantum mechanics?

Bohm: Yes. Physics is more like quantum organism than quantum mechanics. I think physicists have a tremendous reluctance to admit this. There is a long history of belief in quantum mechanics, and people have faith in it. And they don't like having this faith challenged.

Omni: So our image is the lens, the apparatus suggesting the point. The point in turn suggests electrons and particles.

Bohm: And the track of particles on the photograph. Now what instrument would illustrate wholeness? Perhaps the holograph. Waves from the whole object come into each part of the hologram. This makes the hologram a kind of knowledge of the whole object. If you examine it with a very narrow beam of laser light, it's as if you were looking through a window the size of that laser beam. If you expand the beam, it's as though you are looking through a broader window that sees the object more precisely and from more angles. But you are always getting information about the whole object, no matter how much or little of it you take.
But let's put aside the hologram because that's only a static record. Returning to the actual situation, we have a constant dynamic pattern of waves coming off an object and interfering with the original wave. Within that pattern of movement, many objects are enfolded in each region of space and time.
Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I'm proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of space, which is its ground.
About the time I was looking into these questions, a BBC science program showed a device that illustrates these things very well. It consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again. The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded again by the reverse turning.


Omni: Suppose you put a drop of dye in the cylinder and turn it a few times, then put another drop in the same place and turn it. When you turn the cylinder back, wouldn't you get a kind of oscillation?

Bohm: Yes, you would get a movement in and out. We could put in one drop of dye and turn it and then put in another drop of dye at a slightly different place, and so on. The first and second droplets are folded a different number of times. If we keep this up and then turn the cylinder backward, the drops continually appear and disappear. So it would look as if a particle were crossing the space, but in fact it's always the whole system that's involved.
We can discuss the movement of all matter in terms of this folding and unfolding, which I call the holomovement.

Omni: What do you think is the order of the holomovement?

Bohm: It may lie outside of time as we ordinarily know it. If the universe began with the Big Bang and there are black holes, then we must eventually reach places where the notion of time and space breaks down. Anything could happen. As various cosmologists have put it, if a black hole came out with a sign flashing COCA COLA, it shouldn't be surprising. Within the singularity none of the laws as we know them apply. There are no particles; they are all disintegrated. There is no space and no time. Whatever is, is beyond any concept we have at present. The present physics implies that the total conceptual basis of physics must be regarded as completely inadequate. The grand unification [of the four forces of the universe] could be nothing but an abstraction in the face of some further unknown.

I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let's say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater context, it's a little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order. I call the enfolding process "implicating," and the unfolding "explicating." The implicate and explicate together are a flowing, undivided wholeness. Every part of the universe is related to every other part but in different degrees.
There are two experiences: One is movement in relation to other things; the other is the sense of flow The movement of meaning is the sense of flow. But even in moving through space, there is a movement of meaning. In a moving picture, with twenty-four frames per second, one frame follows another, moving from the eye through the optic nerve, into the brain. The experience of several frames together gives you the sense of flow. This is a direct experience of the implicate order.

In classical mechanics, movement or velocity is defined as the relation between the position now and the position a short time ago. What was a short time ago is gone, so you relate what is to what is not. This isn't a logical concept. In the implicate order you are relating different frames that are copresent in consciousness. You're relating what is to what is. A moment contains flow or movement. The moment may be long or short, as measured in time. In consciousness a moment is around a tenth of a second. Electronic moments are much shorter, but a moment of history might be a century.

Omni: So a moment enfolds all the past?

Bohm: Yes, but the recent past is enfolded more strongly. At any given moment we feel the presence of all the past and also the anticipated future. It's all present and active. I could use the example of the cylinder again. Let's say we enfold one droplet h times. Then we put another droplet in and enfold it N times. The relationship between the droplets remains the same no matter how thoroughly they are enfolded. So as you unfold, you will get back the original relationship. Imagine if we take four or five droplets--all highly enfolded--the relationship between them is still there in a very subtle way, even though it is not in space and not in time. But, of course, it can be transformed into space and time by turning the cylinder. The best metaphor might involve memory. We remember a great many events, which are all present together. Their succession is in that momentary memory: We don't have to run through them all to reproduce that time succession. We already have the succession.

Omni: And a sense of movement--so you have replaced time with movement?

Bohm: Yes, in the sense of movement of the symphony, rather than the movement of the orchestra on a bus, say, through physical space.

Omni: What do you think that says about consciousness?

Bohm: Much of our experience suggests that the implicate order is natural for understanding consciousness: When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don't choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.
Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it's shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it's the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.
Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means "assailant," your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it's only a shadow, there's an abrupt change again.

That is an example of the implicate order: Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa-that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world. The word hormone means "messenger," that is, a substance carrying some meaning. Neurotransmitters carry meaning, and that meaning profoundly affects the immune system. This understanding could be the beginning of a different attitude to mind-and to life.

Omni: Descartes held mind and external reality together with God. You're holding the two with meaning.

Bohm: I say meaning is being! So any transformation of society must result in a profound change of meaning. Any change of meaning for the individual would change the whole because all individuals are so similar that it can be communicated.

Omni: What do you think might convince the next generation of physicists, who seem very skeptical, that the implicate order is worth investigating?

Bohm: The most convincing thing would be to develop the theory mathematically and make some predictions. A few years ago The New York Times noted that some physicists were critical of grand unification theory, saying that not much had been achieved. Defenders of grand unification theories said it would take about twenty years to see results.
It seems that people are ready to wait twenty years for results if you've got formulas. If there are no formulas, they don't want to consider it. Formulas are means of talking utter nonsense until you understand what they mean.

Every page of formulas usually contains six or seven arbitrary assumptions that take weeks of hard study to penetrate.
Younger physicists usually appreciate the implicate order because it makes quantum mechanics easier to grasp. By the time they're through graduate school, they've become dubious about it because they've heard that hidden variables are of no use because they've been refuted. Of course, nobody has really refuted them.

At this point, I think that the major issue is mathematics. In supersymmetry theory an interesting piece of mathematics will attract attention, even without any experimental confirmation.


Omni: If scientists could accept your theory, would it change the meaning of nature for them? Would it change the meaning of science in general?

Bohm: We have become a scientific society. This society has produced all sorts of discoveries and technology, but if it leads to destruction, either through war or through devastation of natural resources, then it will have been the least successful society that ever existed. We are now in danger of that.

Where we are going depends on the programs of four thousand five hundred million people, all somewhat different, most of them opposed to one another. Every moment these programs are changing in detail. Who can say where they are going to lead us? All we can do is start a movement among those few people who are interested in changing the meaning.

Omni: You've suggested that it may be possible to develop "group minds." Could they serve as a potential avenue for this change of meaning?

Bohm: They could: If we don't establish these absolute boundaries between minds, then I think it's possible they could in some way unite as one mind. If there were a genuine understanding of and feeling for wholeness in this group mind, it might be enough to change things--though as the external circumstances gain momentum it becomes harder. This is important, especially if there is a catastrophe, so that the notion of group minds might remain in the consciousness of survivors.

Omni: All that seems to imply a radical change in the concept of being human.

Bohm: Yes. The notion of permanent identity would go by the wayside. This would be terrifying at first. The present mind, identified as it is with the personality, would react to protect the sense of personal "self" against that terror.

Omni: That seems to fit in well with your thoughts about death.

Bohm: Death must be connected with questions of time and identity. When you die, everything on which your identity depends is going. All things in your memory will go. Your whole definition of what you are will go. The whole sense of being separate from anything will go because that's part of your identity. Your whole sense of time must go.

Is there anything that will exist beyond death? That is the question everybody has always asked. It doesn't make sense to say something goes on in time. Rather I would say everything sinks into the implicate order, where there is no time. But suppose we say that right now, when I'm alive, the same thing is happening. The implicate order is unfolding to be me again and again each moment. And the past me is gone.

Omni: The past you, then, has been snatched back into the implicate order.
Bohm: That's right. Anything I know about "me" is in the past.

The present "me" is the unknown. We say there is only one implicate order, only one present. But it projects itself as a whole series of moments. Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity.
In one sense, everything, including me, is dying every moment into eternity and being born again, so all that will happen at death is that from a certain moment certain features will not be born again. But our whole thought process causes us to confront this with great fear in an attempt to preserve identity. One of my interests at this stage of life is looking at that fear.

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these are very good books on this subject .

Stalking the wild pendulum, by Bentov.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...987046?v=glance


and The Holographic universe by , michael Talbot

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...987046?v=glance

Thank you for going to the trouble and time to type in this information.

This study was new to me. But verifies the things I have been telling people for decades. Without the help of mechanical means I have been able to become aware years ago of the relationship of all matter to one another. Have become able somewhat to manipulate things to my needs and wishes.
Now you should understand what happens after death.
Mankind still has much to learn. Unfortunately the mindset of most individuals limit their learning. Most are operating on handed down information from the ignorant to reality.
All things are truely connected.
I am not a scientist but have solved 2 problems for nasa in Ion drive of DS1. How else could I do such without connecting with what I call the river of knowledge that flows around us all.
Thanks again

Wow, you typed all of that in three minutes? Impressive! ;)

Borghunter! I found one! Over this way!! A borg!!!!!!!

Originally posted by creetwins
Borghunter! I found one! Over this way!! A borg!!!!!!!
Finally! I've been looking for the Borg for years.

I call mine "Hugh"