David Bohm's Implicate Wholeness
David Bohm, a distinguished theoretical quantum physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, dedicated much of his later life to exploring the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. His work led him to propose a view of reality that challenges conventional understanding and aligns closely with dual-aspect monism. While Bohm as a physicist didn’t rigidly apply philosophical labels, his concepts offer a scientific framework for the nondual perspective.
Bohm felt that the Cartesian model of reality—that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical which somehow interact—was too limited. Quantum mechanics, with its nonlocal correlations and the observer effect, suggested a universe far more interconnected than classical physics allowed. To address this, Bohm proposed a new ontology based on the concept of the Implicate Order.
Bohm’s analogy for reality is a hologram. Each part of a holographic plate contains information about the whole image. In the same way, the Implicate Order is the underlying, hidden, undivided reality, a realm of pure potential and dynamic flux. The Explicate Order, then, is the manifest, visible world of objects, space, and time; it is the phenomena that is projected from the Implicate Order.
For Bohm, the universe is in a constant state of becoming, of transformation, which he termed the Holomovement. This undivided wholeness is the source of all forms, both physical and mental. The Implicate and Explicate Orders are aspects or phases of this movement.
Consciousness, intricately linked to the Explicate and Implicate Order, is a dynamic process of unfolding and enfolding, where information from the non-physical reality of the Implicate Order enters into and shapes the physical reality of the Explicate Order. In this view thought and matter are not two different kinds of stuff interacting but fundamentally interwoven processes within the Holomovement.
The central concept of the Holomovement as the ultimate, undivided ground mirrors the nondual assertion that reality is ultimately one. The apparent fragmentation and separation we experience in the Explicate Order is analogous to the nondual concept of maya, the illusion of separateness arising from the one reality.
Bohm’s model provides a framework for understanding how a single reality could consistently present as both subjective experience and objective physicality.
By approaching reality from the rigorous discipline of theoretical physics, Bohm arrived at a metaphysical vision that complements the insights of nondual traditions. His concept of the Holomovement as the undivided ground from which mind and matter unfold provides a scientific argument for a form of dual-aspect monism. This framework offers a modern, physics-informed language to describe a picture of the cosmos that looks remarkably like the undivided reality described by sages and mystics across millennia.