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David Bohm - A Forerunner

During my meditation course I was asked to write a paper on a forerunner and chose David Bohm. The paper was later chosen for publication in The Beacon of May/June 1997.

David Joseph Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the 20th December, 1917, his death occurring some 75 years later, on 27th October, 1992.

His life was devoted to science, having been educated at the California Institute of Technology, gaining his PhD from the University of California in Berkeley. He spent time in professorial positions at Princeton and the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and authored three books on the quantum theory, the special theory of relativity, causality and chance in modern physics, plus many articles for journals. His main focus was on theoretical physics.

An astrological noon chart for his date of birth (time unknown) gives him a Sagittarian Sun. It is of interest that the symbol of Sagittarius, a centaur (or an archer, in India), has a meaning related to the upward evolution of the soul from the animal to the human state, and its aspiration to evolve still further. In brief, a person born under a Sagittarian Sun tends to the universal, the mind soaring quickly from particulars to the over-all. Jupiter is said to rule Sagittarius, and its contribution to the energies of the solar system is expansion of consciousness and spiritual development. A study of David Bohm's life and impact on our thinking is a verification of this symbolism. Another interesting feature of his chart is the placing of his planets; five opposing five, a pattern known as a seesaw, or hourglass. This indicates that his energies and interests constantly flow from one side to another, showing the ability to achieve a resolution of any polarities that emerge into his consciousness.

David Bohm grew up in a Jewish household and in his childhood was exposed to the influence of Eastern mysticism. Beginning in 1959, Bohm displayed an interest in Jiddhu Krishnamurti, the two of them having a dialogue between April and September in 1980, which was recorded in a book called The Ending of Time. It is fair to say that the potential of his birth chart was realised to a large measure, throughout his life. The functioning of his hourglass pattern is evidenced by his great interest in both the physical and the spiritual, and the reflection of each in the other.

He is a forerunner in the sense that his view of the universe, reality, and the meaning of life, resulted in theories that have been controversial, and still are. Most physicists do not accept them, and this is understandable when one realises that our entire society, in general, is weighted towards specialisation in a particular profession, trade, or interest, Education, at all levels, tends to be oriented towards a particular stream of knowledge, and it is not common for adults, in whatever leisure time they have, to incorporate many diverse views into their thinking. It is the lot of certain individuals to introduce a radical theory which is then worked over by his peers until it either becomes accepted thought, is rejected, or remains in abeyance until it inspires a later resurgence.

A quotation from The Mind of God (Paul Davies) reads, "Some scientists, a notable one being David Bohm, believe that regular mystical insights achieved by quiet meditative practices can be a useful guide in the formulation of scientific theories." Fritjof Capra, in Uncommon Wisdom, stated, "I noticed quickly that Bohm was a deep and careful thinker".

David Bohm can be said to have brought science and spirituality (religion) together, as a result of his special ability to flow between these two, apparently opposite, methods of developing theories on what life is. It is stated in The Aquarian Conspiracy that Karl Pibram was electrified by one of Bohm's papers describing a holographic universe: "what appears to be a stable, tangible, visible, audible world, said Bohm, is an illusion. It is dynamic and kaleidoscopic - not really there". All apparent substance and movement are illusory. They emerge from another, more primary order of the universe. Bohm called this phenomenon the Holomovement.

In collaboration with Karl Pibram, a neuroscientist, David Bohm proposed that "our brains mathematically construct concrete reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe". Bohm says that primary physical laws cannot be discovered by a science that attempts to break the world into parts.

When we say that we are all brothers, that I am them and they are us, are we not in effect looking at a hologram? A hologram can be cut up into a myriad of pieces, yet every piece, when illuminated, will give a representation of the whole. A piece will give a fuzzy picture of the whole, not a perfect representation, but as pieces become joined together they will represent a closer representation of the original whole. And isn't this what we are taught by the Ageless Wisdom, that we must begin to think of, and work in, groups; a first step in the clumping of men into more complex structures, in the same way that molecules congregate to form more complex units. Surely the Plan must be to energise all life so that it begins to merge at ever higher levels until that perfect Oneness is reached; the hologram in its entirety is realised in the Mind of God.

Until recent years, it must have been difficult for many of us to imagine, with any degree of certainty, a world devoid of physical substance. Faith could do it but mentally there was a stumbling block. Now we are told by scientists that all life is energy; physical appearances are constructs made out of vibrations that are interpreted by our brains to give a "picture" that appears to exist in actuality. Yes, it is there, but it is an illusion as such, and we are now prompted to search for the reality behind the illusion.

Bohm, in his contact with Indian philosophy, notably through the sage, Krishnamurti, was convinced that thought, the form of consciousness most familiar to us, and in which we habitually function, corrupts reality. Surely he was saying that thinking about possibilities is not the answer, because we cannot escape the concrete world through thought; we must enter that world through the medium of meditation, which ultimately relies on contact with the soul, that ephemeral construct which formed our physical body. It is not an easy process for most of us, but the foundation provided by David Bohm can give us the impetus to accept the reality behind the glamour of physical existence and work towards a higher plane of being.

Bohm admits that there are parallels between his views and certain philosophers of the past but he insists on working out a given problem afresh without leaning on the past. It is a modern reinforcement of past philosophies and is needed to meet the mental sophistication of present-day man. He argues that the non-manifest is n-dimensional and atemporal, and cannot be handled in any way whatever by three-dimensional thought. This is an echo of Ouspensky's illustration of the difficulty of moving into higher dimensions when he gives the example of a snail, which inhabits a two-dimensional world and could not conceive of time and space. Bohm's emphasis is on the methodology of the self-deconditioning process, not on the promised land which might lie at the end of it. A concentration on the end will not provide the means of achieving it and this is what is consistently repeated in the Tibetan's works; we must learn the Laws of the unseen world and serve our fellowmen without thought for self, to release our egos from their physical case.

David Bohn is holding out for the death of the three-dimensional thinker and his rebirth within the n-dimensional domain of consciousness. Such an event would usher in a dynamic state in which creation and dissolution would flow through us simultaneously, like quanta of energy, born and borne away in the split micro-second, ever welling up afresh without being arrested, clutched at, or sullied. And isn't that what we should attempt, to flow with life, to accept whatever comes to us without resisting it, but to use that inflowing energy to mould our personality into a better channel of communication with all of our environment, which is, in effect, the Body of God. That in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Fritjof Capra, in The Turning Point, quotes Bohm's theory - the notion of "unbroken wholeness" and his aim to explore the order he believes to be inherent in the cosmic web of relationships at a deeper, "non-manifest" level. He calls this order "implicate", or "enfolded", and describes it in his analogy of life as a hologram, in which each part, in some sense, contains the whole.

The work of David Bohm that related to the thought of a multi-dimensional universe and the hologram was initially criticised by fellow scientists as akin to oriental mysticism but his causal interpretation of Life has been gaining increasing respectability with physicists, not least because it was enthusiastically championed by John Bell, a great admirer of Bohm.

In working with quantum theory, Bohm and Hiley postulated that nonlocality is a property of the quantum world. In brief, this states that something can affect something else that is not within its immediate area, and does so without any physical force and at speeds faster than light. Einstein was disturbed by this theory as locality was essential to his relativity theory and he wrote that physics should be "free from spooky actions at a distance" (that is, nonlocality).

The existence of a creative Being that is omnipotent and omniscient becomes more credible when science can say that this view of reality is possible. Metaphysics accepts the notion that the future can be contacted, but in a world that was believed to be a linear progression of events this was easily disputed by those of a scientific bent and those who were completely cynical about any thought that there was any basis for belief in supernatural forces. Those "supernatural forces" are now being put forward as the happenings in a quantum world that cannot readily be accessed through the laws of classical physics.

So back to the holomovement or the "implicate order". The whole universe is a basic reality. Bohm and Hiley divide reality into supersystem, system, and subsystem. The subsystems are dependent on the systems that include them and they form a chain extending to the whole universe. This dependency is wholeness of form and denies the ability to provide a complete description - only God, the all-inclusive, can do that. Every system is in a supersystem so that any theory that claims it is complete has closed itself off from the unknown into which everything merges. And isn't this borne out by scientific investigation? Every theory is superseded; there is always an elusiveness about mental constructs that purport to explain existence and its processes. It will never be possible to explain everything until we ourselves are that "everything". But the search must go on for God must find Himself, reflected in all of the eternity He created.

In Bohm's thinking, everything is folded into everything; it is "implicate order". Reality as implicate means that any portion of it involves every other portion; each portion of reality contains information on every other portion. Out of the implicate order comes the "explicate order", apparently independent entities which we experience in our physical existence and believe to be real life, the only existence we can acknowledge until we are prompted to search behind it for the true reality.

If David Bohm had not been born with his particular matrix of energies that destined him to flow back and forth (his hourglass pattern) between science and religion, he may well have concentrated on one or the other, but destiny needed a reconciliation of the two and so another forerunner was born. Hopefully, his inclusiveness and his particular genius will spark many who read of his work to search beyond the mundane world and look for answers on the spiritual plane.

References

Relating the Physics and Religion of David Bohm. Zygon Vol 25 No 1.

The Aquarian Conspiracy. Marilyn Ferguson.

The Turning Point. Fritjof Capra.

Uncommon Wisdom. Fritjof Capra.

The Mind of God. Paul Davies.

The Holographic Paradigm. Ed. Ken Wilber.

The Ending of Time. Krishnamurti and Bohm.