---
slug: paper-bohm-d-1980-wholeness-and-the-implicate-order
title: Bohm Wholeness and the Implicate Order
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-bohm-d-1980-wholeness-and-the-implicate-order
---

## What Bohm Saw
David Bohm observed that everyday perception and language divide reality into separate fragments. This division produces conflict in thought and society. He proposed an underlying undivided wholeness instead. The implicate order enfolds all patterns. The explicate order unfolds them into visible forms. The holomovement carries the entire process as continuous flux.

Bohm worked from quantum theory and relativity. He sought a description that preserved wholeness at every scale.

## Core Results
Bohm defined the implicate order as the ground where every element contains the whole in enfolded form. The explicate order appears as separate objects. The holomovement is the universal process of enfoldment and unfoldment. Consciousness arises within this undivided flow rather than as an external observer.

These results appear in chapters on fragmentation, the rheomode experiment in language, and quantum indications of new order.

## Exact Primary Works and Passages
The primary work is Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Key passages:

“Wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.” (Chapter 1, Fragmentation and wholeness.)

“The essential feature in quantum interconnectedness is that the whole universe is enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.” (Chapter 6.)

“Both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.” (Chapter 6.)

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” (Related discussion in holomovement section.)

“The holomovement, which is an unbroken and undivided totality, ‘carries’ implicate order.” (Chapter 6.)

## Convergence Patterns
Bohm’s holomovement produces scale-invariant patterns through flux. This matches the grain of reliable energy flows that yield branching, symmetry, flow networks, and bounded structures. The implicate order supplies memory-like enfolding across scales. The Ladder from difference to flow to structure to memory to mind receives support because consciousness participates directly in the holomovement rather than standing outside it. The Mirror Layer aligns because the reader or observer remains inside the undivided whole.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis
Bohm reaches the implicate-explicate distinction and the participation of mind in the whole. He stops short of explicit mechanisms for specific patterns such as spirals or bounded chaos. The synthesis extends the same wholeness into a fuller account of structural emergence from energy flow.

## Honest Limits and Disconfirming Edges
Bohm’s account remains interpretive. It offers no complete mathematical formalism that replaces standard quantum mechanics. Mainstream physics prefers other interpretations of quantum non-locality. No empirical test isolates the implicate order as a distinct physical layer. Reductionist critiques note that wholeness claims can function as metaphysical assertions without falsifiable predictions. The book supplies philosophical insight grounded in physics rather than new experimental data.
