Person
David Bohm
Wholeness and the implicate order
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David Bohm (1917–1992) was an American-born physicist who worked on quantum theory and later proposed the implicate order: a picture in which the world of separate things unfolds from a deeper, folded wholeness. He is included here as a scientist offering a philosophical reading of physics—not as a spiritual authority, and not as proof that mystics already knew quantum mechanics.
Bohm made contributions to physics, including work connected with plasma and with hidden-variable approaches to quantum theory. Those are technical debates among physicists. The book most often cited by spiritual readers is Wholeness and the Implicate Order. There he argues that fragmentation—in science and in culture—is a mistake, and that a deeper order may be implicate: enfolded, then unfolded as the explicate world we measure.
That is his interpretation. It is not the same sentence as quantum field theory, which is a mathematical account of particles and forces. It is not Jung’s collective unconscious, which is a psychological hypothesis. It is not Spinoza’s one substance, which is seventeenth-century metaphysics. The hunger for one ground is real. The theories are not one theory. Bohm also spoke with Jiddu Krishnamurti; dialogue is not identity of claim.
Words used here
Plain meanings for words on this page.
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.
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.
Featured connections
Where David Bohm meets other voices
David BohmOne ground
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.
David BohmBaruch Spinoza
parallel
Wholeness, not one system
Each treats separation as not the last word about what is.
Both refuse a universe of sealed-off fragments. Spinoza argues one substance. Bohm proposes an implicate order in conversation with physics. Related hunger; different centuries and methods.
Where they differ
Deus sive Natura is a geometric metaphysics of God-or-Nature. Implicate order is a twentieth-century interpretation of wholeness in physics. Neither is a laboratory proof of the other.
David BohmCarl Jung
parallel
Psyche is not a quantum field
Each proposes that the obvious separate self or object is not the whole story.
Jung’s collective unconscious and Bohm’s implicate order both imagine a depth that particular minds or objects do not exhaust. One is psychology. The other is a reading of physics. They are not a single discovery.
Where they differ
Archetypes are psychic forms in a model of the mind. Implicate order is a claim about physical wholeness. Mixing them into one “quantum unconscious” is a later spiritual overlay.
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One ground
Idea
Reality
Idea
Baruch Spinoza
Person
Sources
What this reading rests on
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
original work
Primary source for implicate order as Bohm’s reading.
Quantum Mechanics – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (interpretations)
encyclopedia
Keeps quantum theory’s interpretations in scholarly view.