David Bohm

The teaching

Taught from his own books and papers, above all Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) and On Dialogue.

The implicate order, in brief

David Bohm proposes that the separate things of the world are unfolded from a deeper order in which everything is enfolded in everything else, as a drop of ink drawn out into glycerine vanishes and returns, or as each part of a hologram holds the whole scene. The visible world is the explicate order, the enfolded ground the implicate, and the whole is one unbroken flowing movement which he calls the holomovement. Those images are taught in the branch The physicists who read the mystics. What follows is what he drew from them for language, for meaning and for thought.

Fragmentation

The deepest trouble of the modern mind, he holds, is fragmentation: the habit of dividing the world into separate pieces and then taking the division for the way things are. It is useful in practical life to treat a chair or a nation as a thing apart; it becomes destructive when the pieces are believed to be truly independent, and people, nations, religions and sciences set themselves against one another as if they had no common ground. He notes that the English words health, whole and holy share one root: to heal is to make whole.

The rheomode

Since language shapes thought, he proposed an experiment with it, which he called the rheomode, from the Greek for flowing. Ordinary language is built on nouns, fixed things acting on other fixed things, and so it hides movement. The rheomode gives the verb the first place. From the root of relevant he made the verb to levate, to lift into attention; to re-levate, to lift again what was lifted before; and to irrelevate, to see that something does not fit and let it drop. Speaking this way for a while, he hoped, would let a person feel the world as process rather than as a collection of objects.

Active information

In his reading of quantum theory a particle always has a definite place and is guided by its wave, but the wave acts by its form and not by its strength. He likens it to a ship on automatic pilot steered by radio signals: the energy comes from the ship's own engines, while the form of the signal directs where it goes. He calls this active information, information that literally in-forms, giving form to the activity of something that has its own energy, and in it he saw, even in the simplest matter, a quality something like mind.

Soma-significance

Mind and matter, he teaches, are not two substances but two sides of one process. Every physical thing, which he calls soma, has a significance, a meaning; and every meaning is carried in something physical, the brain, the body, the sound of a word. Meaning is active, and a change of meaning is a change of being: a shadow at night taken for an intruder sets the heart racing and the body moving before any thought corrects it. What a person takes things to mean shapes what they are and what they do.

Music and the enfolded

He finds the implicate order in everyday experience in music. When a melody is heard, each note, after it has sounded, still reverberates in awareness, and the sense of movement and of form comes from many notes present together, enfolded in a single moment. The listener is not adding one sound to the next but living, for that moment, in an enfolded order, and the same, he suggests, is true of the flow of awareness itself.

Thought as a system

Thought, in his later teaching, is not a neutral tool that a person uses but a system that takes in feelings, the body, memory and the whole culture, and it works largely by reflex, as conditioned response. Its central fault is that it produces results and then says it has not: an assumption creates a conflict, and the conflict is blamed on others or on the world. He proposed a proprioception of thought: as the body senses its own movement from within, thought might come to sense its own movement as it happens.

His practical form of this is suspension. When anger or a hurt reaction rises, the person neither acts on it nor pushes it down, but holds it in view, feeling the impulse and its effects in the body, and so watches thought at work.

Dialogue

Dialogue, in the sense he gave it, is meaning flowing through a group, from the Greek dia, through, and logos, the word or meaning. A group of some twenty to forty people sits in a circle and meets regularly for a couple of hours, with no agenda, no leader beyond a facilitator who soon steps back, and no decision to reach. Each speaks and listens, and above all suspends their assumptions, neither pressing them on others nor hiding them, so that the group can see how its own thought works. It differs from discussion, which is like a game of ping-pong played to win. Its aim is shared meaning, which he held to be the cement of any society, and which no one in a dialogue owns.