David Bohm: The Quantum Physicist Who Found Wholeness Beneath the Fragments

How One of Einstein’s Proteges Arrived at Mysticism Through Mathematics

David Joseph Bohm is widely regarded as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the twentieth century — and one of the most tragic. A student of Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, a colleague of Einstein at Princeton, and a contributor to quantum mechanics whose work is cited in every modern textbook on the subject, Bohm spent his career pursuing a vision of wholeness that his own discipline was determined to deny.

He was driven from the United States during the McCarthy witch hunts for refusing to testify against his colleagues. He lived in exile in Brazil, Israel, and finally England, where he spent the rest of his life at Birkbeck College, University of London. He developed an interpretation of quantum mechanics that was mathematically equivalent to the standard formalism but philosophically radical: a deterministic, non-local, wholeness-based model that made mainstream physicists profoundly uncomfortable.

And then, in the last decades of his life, he proposed something that went far beyond physics: a model of reality in which consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter but a fundamental aspect of the cosmos, and in which the separation between observer and observed, mind and matter, self and world, is an illusion created by a particular mode of perception.

He called this model the Implicate Order. It is one of the most important ideas in the history of thought, and it has influenced fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology to art to spiritual practice.

The Early Years: Quantum Mechanics with Einstein’s Ghost

Bohm’s scientific career began in the most prestigious possible context. After completing his undergraduate work at Penn State, he went to Berkeley to study under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where he became part of the team working on quantum mechanics and the emerging field of plasma physics. His doctoral work on plasma behavior was so significant that it was classified by the Manhattan Project — even though Bohm himself was denied security clearance because of his leftist political associations.

After the war, Bohm took a position at Princeton, where he wrote what is still considered one of the finest textbooks on quantum mechanics: Quantum Theory (1951). The book presented the standard Copenhagen interpretation with exceptional clarity — the view that quantum objects do not have definite properties until measured, that the act of measurement forces the wave function to “collapse” into a specific state, and that the question “what is the particle doing before we measure it?” is meaningless.

But as Bohm wrote the book, he became increasingly troubled by the implications of what he was describing. The Copenhagen interpretation treated measurement as a fundamental, irreducible concept but could not explain what a measurement actually is. It required the observer to be outside the system being observed — but in quantum mechanics, the observer is always part of the system. The interpretation created an unbridgeable gap between the quantum world (probabilistic, superposed, non-local) and the classical world (definite, local, deterministic) and declared the gap to be a fundamental feature of reality rather than a limitation of the theory.

Bohm sent a copy of his textbook to Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein invited him for a conversation. What followed was a series of discussions that would shape the rest of Bohm’s career. Einstein shared with Bohm his deep dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation — his famous conviction that quantum mechanics, as formulated, was incomplete. There must be a deeper level of reality beneath the quantum probabilities, Einstein argued, and that deeper level must be deterministic and local.

Inspired by Einstein’s challenge, Bohm in 1952 published two papers that proposed what became known as the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation or Bohmian mechanics: a reformulation of quantum mechanics in which particles have definite positions at all times (not just when measured) and are guided by a “quantum potential” or “pilot wave” that carries information about the entire experimental setup.

The pilot wave provides a mechanism for quantum effects that the Copenhagen interpretation describes but does not explain. In the double-slit experiment, for example, the particle goes through one slit (it always has a definite position), but the pilot wave goes through both slits and creates an interference pattern that guides the particle’s trajectory. The wave function does not “collapse” at measurement; it is the pilot wave, modified by the measurement apparatus, that guides the particle to a definite outcome.

The Bohm-Aharonov Effect: Non-Locality Proven

In 1959, Bohm and his student Yakir Aharonov predicted a quantum mechanical phenomenon that would bear their names: the Aharonov-Bohm effect. They showed that a charged particle can be affected by an electromagnetic potential even in regions where the electromagnetic field itself is zero.

In classical physics, only fields affect particles. Potentials are mathematical conveniences — they have no direct physical significance. The Aharonov-Bohm effect demonstrated that in quantum mechanics, the potential is physically real — it affects the behavior of particles even in the absence of any field.

The effect was experimentally confirmed in 1960 and has been verified numerous times since. It is now a standard result in quantum mechanics, cited in every graduate textbook.

The Aharonov-Bohm effect is significant for Bohm’s larger philosophical project because it demonstrates that quantum reality is non-local in a deep sense. The potential that affects the particle is not located at the particle’s position — it extends throughout space. The particle is influenced by conditions in regions it never enters. This is non-locality at its most concrete: a particle responding to a field structure that is everywhere, not just at the point where the particle happens to be.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bohm’s thinking expanded from the specific problems of quantum mechanics to the much larger question of the nature of reality itself. This expansion is documented in his most important philosophical work, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980).

The core idea:

Reality has two orders: the explicate order and the implicate order.

The explicate order is the order of separate, distinct things — the order perceived by the senses and described by classical physics. In the explicate order, there are particles, objects, people, planets — distinct entities separated by space and time. The explicate order is what we see when we look at the world.

The implicate order is a deeper level of reality in which everything is enfolded into everything else. There are no separate things in the implicate order — there is only a continuous, undivided wholeness from which the explicate order unfolds. The implicate order is not accessible to the senses. It is the hidden ground from which the visible world arises.

Bohm’s metaphor for the relationship between the implicate and explicate orders is the hologram. In a hologram, every part of the holographic plate contains information about the whole image. If you break a holographic plate in half, each half still produces the complete image (though with reduced resolution). The information about the whole is enfolded in every part.

Similarly, Bohm proposed that every region of space-time contains (enfolds) information about the entire universe. The explicate order — the world of separate things — is like the image projected from the holographic plate. The implicate order is like the plate itself: a level of reality in which everything is interconnected, information is non-local, and separation is an appearance rather than a fundamental feature.

This model resolves several long-standing puzzles in physics:

Non-locality. In the implicate order, entangled particles are not “connected” across space. They are aspects of a single, undivided wholeness that appears as two separate particles only in the explicate order. Entanglement is not a mysterious connection between separate things; it is a manifestation of the undivided wholeness of the implicate order.

The measurement problem. Measurement does not “collapse” the wave function. It unfolds a particular aspect of the implicate order into the explicate order. Before measurement, the system is enfolded in the implicate order as a set of potentialities. Measurement is the process by which one potentiality becomes explicit.

The observer problem. The observer is not separate from the observed. Both the observing consciousness and the observed object arise from the same implicate order. The apparent separation between subject and object is an artifact of the explicate order — it does not exist at the deeper level.

The Holomovement: Reality as a Flowing Wholeness

Bohm refined the implicate order concept into a more dynamic model he called the holomovement — reality conceived as a flowing, undivided wholeness in which the implicate and explicate orders are continuously enfolding and unfolding.

The holomovement is not a thing. It is a movement — a process of continuous unfoldment and enfoldment. What we perceive as stable objects (a chair, a planet, a person) are relatively stable patterns in the holomovement — standing waves in the flux. They are like eddies in a river: they appear to be stable, enduring things, but they are actually patterns in a continuously flowing medium.

This model has profound implications for the nature of time. In the holomovement, time is not a linear sequence of discrete moments. It is a dimension of the implicate order in which past, present, and future are enfolded together. The explicate order creates the appearance of linear time by unfolding the implicate order sequentially, like a movie projector displaying individual frames from a continuous reel.

Bohm and Krishnamurti: The Scientist-Mystic Dialogue

One of the most remarkable intellectual partnerships of the twentieth century was the decades-long dialogue between David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher.

Krishnamurti was not a guru in the traditional sense. He had been chosen as a boy by the Theosophical Society to be the vehicle for a “World Teacher,” a role he famously repudiated in 1929, declaring that “truth is a pathless land” and dissolving the organization that had been built around him. For the rest of his life, he taught a radical form of inquiry — not a system, not a method, but a direct, moment-to-moment attention to the workings of consciousness itself.

Bohm encountered Krishnamurti’s teachings in the early 1960s and found in them a remarkable parallel to his own scientific work. Krishnamurti’s description of the “observer” as inseparable from the “observed,” his insistence that thought creates the division between self and world, and his vision of a wholeness beyond the fragmented mind resonated deeply with Bohm’s implicate order.

Their conversations, recorded and published in books including The Ending of Time (1985) and The Future of Humanity (1986), represent one of the deepest explorations of the relationship between science and consciousness ever documented. The two men explored questions that neither could have addressed alone: How does thought create the illusion of separation? What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? Is there a perception beyond thought that can directly apprehend the implicate order?

Bohm came to see thought itself as a movement within the explicate order — a process that, by its very nature, fragments reality into separate concepts, categories, and objects. The implicate order cannot be apprehended by thought, because thought operates by division and the implicate order is undivided. To perceive the implicate order directly requires a mode of consciousness that Krishnamurti called “choiceless awareness” and that Bohm recognized as analogous to the direct, non-analytical perception that quantum mechanics seems to require.

Dialogue as Consciousness Practice

In his later years, Bohm developed a practice of Dialogue (with a capital D) as a method for accessing coherent, non-fragmentary thinking in groups.

Bohm’s Dialogue is not conversation, discussion, or debate. It is a structured practice in which a group of people (typically 15-40) sit in a circle and participate in a shared inquiry without agenda, without leader, and without any attempt to reach consensus or solve problems. The purpose is not to exchange information but to observe the process of thought itself — to notice how thought fragments reality, creates assumptions, generates reactions, and produces the illusion of separate selves.

Bohm proposed that most human communication is incoherent because people are not actually listening to each other — they are listening to their own thoughts about what the other person is saying. Dialogue creates conditions under which genuine listening can occur: when participants suspend their assumptions, attend to the movement of thought in themselves and in the group, and allow meaning to emerge that no individual participant could have produced alone.

The practice is remarkably similar to certain forms of meditation and to the group coherence practices described in various wisdom traditions. Bohm saw it as a practical application of his implicate order model: when individual minds stop fragmenting reality through habitual thought patterns and instead attend to the undivided wholeness of the present moment, a form of collective intelligence emerges that transcends individual capability.

Critics and Controversies

Bohm’s work has been controversial on multiple fronts:

The physics community’s rejection. Bohmian mechanics was largely ignored by mainstream physics for decades after its publication in 1952. Some physicists (notably Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg) dismissed it as metaphysical speculation. The primary objection was not mathematical (Bohmian mechanics is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics) but philosophical: the pilot wave is a non-local entity that violates the spirit of relativity, and the implicate order is seen as untestable metaphysics rather than physics.

In recent decades, however, Bohmian mechanics has experienced a renaissance. A growing number of physicists take it seriously as an interpretation of quantum mechanics, and experimental work on quantum non-locality has made Bohm’s non-local framework more palatable than it was during the Cold War era of physics.

The consciousness connection. Bohm’s suggestion that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the implicate order — not a product of brain activity — has been resisted by both physicists and neuroscientists. Physicists argue that consciousness is not a physical concept and should not be imported into physics. Neuroscientists argue that consciousness is adequately explained as a product of neural computation without invoking implicate orders.

The Krishnamurti association. Bohm’s long association with Krishnamurti led some colleagues to view him as having crossed the line from science into mysticism. The fact that Bohm’s philosophical work resonated more with spiritual seekers than with physicists reinforced this perception.

The holographic model. The Bohm-Pribram holographic model (the combination of Bohm’s implicate order with Karl Pribram’s holographic brain theory) has been criticized as an oversimplification. The brain is far more complex than a holographic plate, and the holographic metaphor, while suggestive, may not capture the actual mechanisms of neural information processing.

Bohm in the Digital Dharma Framework: The Operating System Architecture

David Bohm’s implicate order is the theoretical foundation for the Digital Dharma’s understanding of how consciousness, as the operating system, relates to physical reality, the hardware it runs on.

If the body is wetware, Bohm’s model explains the relationship between the wetware and the OS: the physical body (explicate order) is an unfolding of a deeper pattern (implicate order) that is itself an expression of consciousness. The body is not hardware that produces consciousness; it is consciousness that has unfolded into hardware. This is precisely the Vedantic model: Brahman (consciousness, the implicate order) manifests as the physical universe (the explicate order) through a process of unfolding (maya, the creative power that projects the implicate into the explicate).

If DNA is source code, Bohm’s model suggests that the code is not the ultimate source of biological information. DNA is an explicate-order expression of implicate-order information. The “real” code — the deeper pattern that DNA expresses — is enfolded in the implicate order, non-local, and accessible to consciousness that can perceive beyond the explicate. This is the shamanic understanding: the medicine person “reads” the patient’s energy body (implicate order) to understand the source of disease, which may not be visible in the physical body (explicate order).

If consciousness is the operating system, Bohm’s implicate order is the kernel — the deepest level of the OS, from which all higher-level processes unfold. Individual consciousness is a process running in the explicate order, but its source is the implicate order — the undivided wholeness from which all things arise. Meditation, in this framework, is not “going within” in a spatial sense but “enfolding” — returning attention from the explicate (fragmented, conceptual, divided) to the implicate (whole, direct, unified).

Bohm’s concept of the holomovement maps directly onto the yogic concept of the dance of Shiva (Nataraja) — the continuous creation and dissolution of the manifest universe from the unmanifest source. The holomovement is Shiva’s dance described in the language of physics. Both traditions point to the same insight: reality is not a collection of things but a movement — a flowing wholeness that creates the appearance of separate things through a process of unfolding.

The holographic principle — that every part contains information about the whole — is the physics of the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below.” It is the scientific expression of the shamanic understanding that any part of the body contains information about the whole body, that any organism contains information about the whole ecosystem, that any moment contains information about all of time. The holographic principle explains why divination works: because every fragment of the explicate order enfolds the entire implicate order.

Key Works

• Quantum Theory (1951) — The definitive textbook on quantum mechanics
• “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables” (Physical Review, 1952) — The foundational papers on Bohmian mechanics
• “Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in the Quantum Theory” (with Yakir Aharonov, Physical Review, 1959) — The Aharonov-Bohm effect
• Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) — The implicate order model
• The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (with Basil Hiley, 1993) — The mature formulation of Bohmian mechanics
• The Ending of Time (with J. Krishnamurti, 1985) — Dialogues on consciousness and reality
• On Dialogue (1996, posthumous) — The theory and practice of Bohmian Dialogue

The Bottom Line

David Bohm arrived at mysticism through the most rigorous possible route: quantum mechanics. He did not begin with spiritual experience or philosophical intuition. He began with the mathematics of the quantum world and followed it to its logical conclusion: that reality is an undivided wholeness, that the separation between things is an appearance, and that consciousness is not a product of matter but a fundamental aspect of the cosmos.

His implicate order is not mysticism dressed in scientific language. It is a physical model — rooted in the mathematics of quantum mechanics, consistent with all experimental data, and offering a resolution to paradoxes that have troubled physics for a century. That it also resonates with the deepest teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, and shamanic cosmology is not a weakness but a strength. It suggests that the convergence between physics and mysticism is not coincidental but fundamental — that both are describing the same undivided reality from different vantage points.

Bohm died on October 27, 1992, in London, at the age of 74. He left behind a body of work that is only now beginning to receive the recognition it deserves — as both the most rigorous and the most radical vision of reality that physics has produced.