Chris Clarke rediscovers a visionary integration of science, spirituality and politics.

David Bohm (1917 - 1992) is perhaps the most quoted physicist after Einstein, and yet his work is almost unknown among other physicists. For many years he has fascinated and baffled me. Now, for the first time, the whole range of his thought is covered in a single collection, drawn from eight published works, together with three chapters previously unpublished, made accessible to the general reader with an authoritative commentary by Lee Nichol. It provides a full account of his monumental vision of the way things are, which in its broad outlines I found thoroughly convincing.

His starting point lies in the mystery of "The Qualitative Infinity of Nature¹⁷" [numbers denote page numbers] – his conviction that our knowledge of reality at any stage of enquiry will be valid only within a limited context. When we travel beyond this context our previous knowledge is revealed as an approximation, and we need to change to a qualitatively new structure of understanding, again and again. Beneath any level of knowledge will lie an ultimately unknowable depth that constitutes an "implicate order". Implicate means ‘folded in’, because this order folds into itself each phenomenon after it has appeared, and repeatedly unfolds into new phenomena in the higher "explicate" (unfolded) order. Consequently "the totality of the universe is too much to be grasped definitively in any form of knowledge⁷⁴." Bohm only explicitly articulates this idea in the case of physics, the realm of matter, using quantum mechanics; but he takes it as a universal principle. He sees this world as an undivided whole in which "mind and matter cannot be understood as two⁶," though neither can be reduced to the other. "Everything has a kind of mental side¹⁷¹," and in our own consciousness we can observe the implicate/explicate dynamics being played out at many levels¹⁰⁶.

It is in the mental and social realms that his vision takes on its most compelling form. In the course of his exploration of the relation between matter and mind, Bohm comes to see that each human is trapped, through their cultural patterning, in a vicious circle of illusion. Our basic assumptions^212-3 lead us into conflict, conflict evokes emotion, and the strength of the emotion seems to reinforce our basic assumptions. Yet now "[humanity] is suddenly entering a situation where the whole idea of this mode of life is evidently absurd²¹⁷." Individual intellectual activity provides no way out of this trap. It is useless to say "‘I must think about it to solve it’" because "thought is the problem³⁰⁶." Yet until one is freed from the multiplicity of these mental traps, all apparent knowledge is "endarkenment²⁸⁸."

He explores two solutions to this. First²¹³, he describes investigations where he uses his bodily reactions as the key to understanding the vicious circle of coupled assumptions and emotions,. His method is to rehearse a train of thought which provokes feelings such as anger, and to observe the changes in the state of his body in the course of this, but to "suspend" the actual expression of the emotion. This, he says, leads to a habit in which we think, and are also at the same time aware of the whole bodily process of thought.

Later in his life, as his awareness of the ecological crisis³²⁸ grows, he comes to focus on a tool he calls "dialogue" as a means of social as well as individual transformation. In dialogue the participants listen to each other’s views, but renounce their attempt to convert each other. Attending to the group dynamic takes precedence over attending to bodily emotions, because in a close group the interpersonal connections can be even more powerful than our connections with our own body³²⁵. The aim is not to negotiate a compromise between conflicting views (which leaves the underlying dysfunction intact), but to stay with observing the interplay of emotions raised by conflict until their absurdity is revealed to the participants. Then truth can emerge and the deeper creative level of the common consciousness can generate a genuinely shared understanding.

These, in very barest outline, are some of the main points of his life’s work, which he supports by careful and detailed argument. For me, its most significant aspect is a spiritual one. In Bohm’s picture we are ripples on an unfathomable sea. What we think is our freedom and wisdom is in fact our enslavement and darkness – and yet the means are available to change this. What is new here is not the message itself, which is a core of many teachings, but its presentation within a vision that makes sense to our scientific age. For this reason David Bohm needs to be heard; but to enable him to be heard we need to understand why he is so rejected by the scientific establishment.

The stumbling block is clear. The intellectual basis of his thought lies in quantum mechanics, and yet Bohm rejected the usual version of quantum mechanics, proposing instead an alternative formulation¹⁸³ that is vastly more complex than the conventional theory. Almost no physicists are willing to pay this price for the sake of philosophical coherence. Bohm himself recognises that the essence of his approach is in fact contained in the conventional theory as it was interpreted by Bohr^169-70, but he was driven to his own alternative formulation by the deficiencies of the early forms of quantum theory. One can see this in his summary of quantum theory early in the volume⁸³, which is almost unrecognisable from a modern perspective. While the alternative formalism was historically necessary for the development of his own thinking, it can now be seen as inessential.

The greatest tribute to any thinker is to continue their work where they left off. The time is ripe for enlarging mainstream science so as to encompass Bohm’s thought. We now have the mathematical tools and theoretical concepts that can bring out the important aspects of quantum theory while staying within the conventional formalism. Other disciplines can now also take up Bohm’s ideas: the remarkable way in which spirituality has entered cognitive psychology and psychotherapy over the last few years provides a setting where his analysis of the human condition can be developed. If this can happen, his vision of the transformation of our ways of acting and deciding as a society, as a web of communities and groups, can be a prophetic message of hope for our future.