When most people look at the world, they see separate things: tables, trees, stars, atoms, thoughts. David Bohm saw something different. He saw one seamless whole, flowing like a vast river with endless currents and eddies.
This wasn’t just philosophy. As a quantum physicist in the 1950s, Bohm confronted a puzzling reality: particles that seemed millions of miles apart could instantly affect each other. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” But Bohm realized something profound: maybe they weren’t really separate at all.
He developed a radical idea: everything we see as separate objects is actually just different forms of one deeper reality. Think of a whirlpool in a stream. The whirlpool looks like a distinct thing, but it’s really just water flowing in a pattern. Bohm suggested everything in the universe – from galaxies to electrons to consciousness itself – was like this. Different patterns in one vast flowing whole.
He called the surface level of reality, where things appear separate, the “explicate order.” But beneath it lay what he named the “implicate order” – a deeper level where everything enfolds into everything else, like ripples in a pond merging and flowing through each other.
This wasn’t just abstract theory. It helped explain quantum mechanics’ strangest features. Those “spooky” connected particles? In Bohm’s view, they were never truly separate – just different expressions of the same underlying whole, like two ends of a single piece of paper folded over.
His idea reached beyond physics. He saw human thought, consciousness, and society as part of this same flowing whole. Our tendency to break everything into pieces – to see ourselves as separate from nature, mind as separate from matter – was, to him, the source of many human problems.
Bohm’s vision was revolutionary. While other scientists tried to break reality into smaller and smaller pieces, he showed how everything might be connected in ways we’re only beginning to understand. In a world that often feels fragmented, his insight offers a profound reminder: beneath all our apparent divisions lies an unbroken wholeness.