Concept
One ground
A comparison room, not a doctrine
Read through
Viewing through Science context. Marked in the reading below.
What is this lens?
Science can sit beside spiritual questions about self and awareness, especially where psychology and neuroscience study attention, mind-wandering, and self-referential thought. Shared themes are invitations to compare carefully. This lens stays inside evidence boundaries and leaves spiritual conclusions open.
What does it look for?
- Evidence boundary. It helps to distinguish established findings, mainstream interpretation, open questions, and spiritual parallels—without collapsing them into one verdict.
- Name the kind of claim. A laboratory result, a physicist’s philosophical reading, a psychological hypothesis, and a mystical doctrine can share a hunger for one ground. They are still four kinds of sentence.
- Keep metaphors honest. Physics and neuroscience do not automatically confirm mystical doctrines, even when metaphors feel tempting. The double-slit experiment and entanglement do not establish that consciousness creates reality.
- Specific experimental claims need named studies before they can be stated more strongly.
- Brain correlates of self-related processing are not a verdict on the existence or nature of Self.
- Shared hunger for one ground is not one theory.
Some physicists, psychologists, philosophers, and mystics reach for one underlying reality—a ground that is not just another object in the room. They do not mean the same thing. This page is a place to set the claims beside each other. It is not a proof, and it is not Ring 0 wearing a lab coat.
Established physics: quantum field theory describes particles as excitations of fields. Measurement in quantum theory is subtle; physicists disagree about what that implies. The double-slit experiment and entanglement are real results. They do not, by themselves, establish that consciousness creates reality.
- They do not, by themselves, establish that consciousness creates realityFinding, interpretation, psychology, metaphysics, and spiritual parallel stay in separate sentences. Similarity is not proof.
Interpretation: David Bohm proposed an implicate order—wholeness enfolded, then unfolded. That is his reading, not a consensus textbook.
Psychology: Jung’s collective unconscious is a hypothesis about shared psychic forms. It is not a physical field.
Metaphysics: Spinoza’s one substance—God, or Nature—is a seventeenth-century system. Plotinus’s One is a third-century philosophical source. Kabbalah’s Ein Sof is Jewish mystical speech. Advaita’s Brahman is a different claim again.
The Thread’s interest is the recurring question: is there one ground? The honest answer on this site is that the hunger recurs, and the theories do not collapse. Similarity is not proof.
Words used here
Plain meanings for words on this page.
quantum field theory
The mathematical framework in modern physics that treats particles as excitations of fields. It is a precise, tested account of forces and matter at small scales. It is not a spiritual “quantum field” that fulfills wishes, and it does not by itself confirm that consciousness creates reality.
implicate order
David Bohm’s name for a proposed deeper order in which what we see as separate things is folded together, later unfolding as the explicate world of ordinary objects. It is his interpretation of physics and wholeness—not a laboratory proof that mystics were right, and not Spinoza’s substance under a new label.
collective unconscious
In Carl Jung’s psychology, a proposed layer of the psyche shared across people, carrying typical forms (archetypes) that show up in dreams, myths, and symptoms. It is a psychological hypothesis, not a physical field and not God.
pantheism
The view that God and the universe are, in some sense, identical—God is not a separate creator standing outside the world. The label is often applied to Spinoza, though scholars debate whether it fits his actual teaching.
A little deeper
“Pan” means all; “theism” suggests God. Pantheism is one philosophical option among many. It is not the same as Christian creation theology, Advaita Brahman, or ordinary poetic language that calls nature “divine.”
the One (Plotinus)
In the philosophy of Plotinus, the One is the source of all that is—beyond ordinary naming, not a person among persons, and not a pile of things. Everything else, in this school, flows from it without emptying it.
Featured connections
Where One ground meets other voices
One groundDavid Bohm
shared concept
One interpretation in the room
Bohm’s implicate order belongs in the comparison of one-ground claims as a physicist’s philosophical reading—not as the winner of the room.
Continue from here
Open a related page.
David Bohm
Person
Baruch Spinoza
Person
Carl Jung
Person
Plotinus
Person
Sources
What this reading rests on
Quantum Mechanics – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (interpretations)
encyclopedia
Quantum theory and the plurality of interpretations.
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
original work
Implicate order as a named interpretation.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
original work
Collective unconscious as psychological hypothesis.
Ethics (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata)
original work
God as one substance.