Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Ch 1: Fragmentation and Wholeness

• “Men have been aware from time immemorial of this state of apparently autonomously existent fragmentation and have often projected myths of a yet earlier ‘golden age’, before the split between man and nature and between man and man had yet taken place. Indeed, man has always been seeking wholeness - mental, physical, social, individual.”
  • The fall, mundakya upanishad 3.1
• “It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning whole’: that is, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘shalem’. Likewise, the English ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.”
• “…in scientific research, a great deal of our thinking is in terms of theories. The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria’, which has the same root as ‘theatre, in a word meaning to view’ or ‘to make a spectacle. Thus, it might be said that a theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e. a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is.”
• “As the Greek root of the word indicates, a hypothesis is a supposition, that is, an idea that is put under’ our reasoning, as a provisional base, which is to be tested experimentally for its truth or falsity. As is now well known, however, there can be no conclusive experimental proof of the truth or falsity of a general hypothesis which aims to cover the whole of reality.“
• Bohm’s proposed theory is that reality is an Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement, rather than fragmentary, static, divided.
• “To be confused about what is different and what is not, is to be confused about everything.”
• “In a way, techniques of meditation can be looked on as measures (actions ordered by knowledge and reason) which are taken by man to try to reach the immeasurable, i.e., a state of mind in which he ceases to sense a separation between himself and the whole of reality. But clearly, there is a contradiction in such a notion, for the immeasurable is, if anything, just that which cannot be brought within limits determined by man’s knowledge and reason.”
• “…original and creative insight within the whole field of measure is the action of the immeasurable. For when such insight occurs, the source cannot be within ideas already contained in the field of measure but rather has to be in the immeasurable, which contains the essential formative cause of all that happens in the field of measure. The measurable and the immeasurable are then in harmony and indeed one sees that they are but different ways of considering the one and undivided whole.”

Chapter 2: The Rheomode - An Experiment with Language and Thought

• “The word ‘relevant’ derives from a verb ‘to relevate’, which has dropped out of common usage, whose meaning is ‘to lift’ (as in ‘elevate’). In essence, ‘to relevate’ means ‘to lift into attention’, so that the content thus lifted stands out ‘in relief’. When a content lifted into attention is coherent or fitting with the context of interest, i.e. when it has some bearing on the context of some relationship to it, then one says that this content is relevant; and, of course, when it does not fit in this way, it is said to be irrelevant.”
• “’re’ signifies ‘again’, ie. on another occasion. It evidently implies time and similarity (as well as difference, since each occasion is not only similar but also different).”
• pronounced with a break, as indicated by the hyphen). Of course, in those cases in which perception reveals non-fitting, we say ‘to re-levate is irre-levant.
• “We see, then, that adjectives have been built from the verb as a root form. Nouns also can be constructed in this way, and they will signify not separate objects but, rather, continuing states of activity of the particular form indicated by the verbs. Thus, the noun ‘re-levation’ means a continuing state of lifting a given content into attention’.”
  • The revelation is revelating, John is Johning, the tree is treeing, the mother is mothering. Nouns imply some continuous process that maintains its identity through coherent change.
• Fact etymology is similar to manufacture, as in they are things we make. Not necessarily ‘make up’, but things crafted through participation that maintain constancy. Constant comes from the Latin ‘constare’, meaning stand together. Facts ‘stand together’ (withstand) when put to the test, but they are always in a process of standing, rather than static abstraction.
• “…all is an unbroken and undivided whole movements, and [each] ‘thing’ is abstracted only as a relatively invariant side or aspect of this movement.”

Chapter 3: Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process

• In intelligent, rather than mechanical, perception, “the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux [like a radio picks up a signal through co-alignment, and thus brings a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure] that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures.

Chapter 4: Hidden Variables in the Quantum Theory

Chapter 5/6: Quantum Theory as an Indication of a New Order in Physics

• Perceiving order as ‘to give attention to similar differences and different similarities.’

• Similar differences could be similar spacings (i.e., on a ruler)

• If the ruler bends, say 30 degrees, and keeps going with regular spacing, there will be two different similarities. These two different similarities can be grouped into a second degree of similarity in the differences of spacing

• Turbulent motion is not necessarily disordered. ‘Rather, it has a certain kind of order which is of an indefinitely high degree.’ Rather than use the term disorder, orders of varying degrees.
• To be orderly is not necessarily to be predictable. ‘A good painting is highly ordered, and yet this order does not permit one part to be predicted from another.’
• “The consideration of the working together of order and meas in ever-broader and more complex contexts leads to the notion structure. As the Latin root ‘struere’ indicates, the essential meaning of the notion of structure is to build, to grow, to evolve.”
• “Structation thus implies a harmoniously organized totality of order and measures, which is both hierarchic (i.e., built on many levels) and extensive (i.e., ‘spreading out’ on each level). The Greek root of the word ‘organize is ‘ergon’ which is based on a verb meaning ‘to work’. So one may think of all aspects of a structure as ‘working together’ in a coherent way.”
• “Actually, relativity implies that neither the point particles nor the quasi-rigid body can be taken primary concepts. Rather, these have to be expressed in terms of events and processes.”
• “Einstein did in fact very seriously try to obtain such a description in terms of a unified field theory. He took the total field of the whole universe as a primary description. This field is continuous and indivisible. Particles are then to be regarded as certain kinds of abstraction from the total field, corresponding to regions of very intense field (called singularities). As the distance from the singularity increases, the field gets weaker, until it merges imperceptibly with the fields of other singularities. But nowhere is there a break or a division. Thus, the classical idea of the separability of the world into distinct but interacting parts is no longer valid or relevant. Rather, we have to regard the universe as an undivided and unbroken whole. Division into particles, or into particles and fields, is only a crude abstraction and approximation. Thus, we come to an order that is radically different from that of Galileo and Newton - the order of undivided wholeness.”
• “The ‘quantum’ context thus calls for a new kind of description that does not imply the separability of the ‘observed object’ and ‘observing instrument’. Instead, the form of the experimental conditions and the meaning of the experimental results have now to be one whole, in which analysis into autonomously existent elements is not relevant.”
• “It may indeed be said that although Einstein’s unified field theory denies the possibility of ultimate analysis of the world into autonomous component elements, nevertheless, the notion that the possibility of a signal plays such a basic role implies a different and more abstract sort of analysis based on a kind of independent and autonomous ‘information content’ which is different in different regions. This abstract kind of analysis may not only be inconsistent with quantum theory but, very probably, also with the undivided wholeness implied in the other aspects of the theory of relativity.”
• Laws as invariant relationships.
• Facts as ‘things made’. Establishing fact requires participation.
• “As relativity and quantum theory have shown that it has no meaning to divide the observing apparatus from what is observed, so the considerations discussed here indicate that it has no meaning to separate the observed fact (along with the instruments used to observe it) from the theoretical notions of order that help to give ‘shape’ to this fact.”

Chapter 7: The Enfolding-Unfolding Universe and Consciousness

• “What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.”
• “…One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments. Such a projection can be described as creative, rather than mechanical, for by creativity one means just the inception of new content, which unfolds into a sequence of moments that is not completely derivable from what came earlier in this sequence or set of such sequences. What we are saying is, then, that movement is basically such a creative inception of new content as projected from the multidimensional ground. In contrast, what is mechanical is a relatively autonomous sub-totality that can be abstracted from that which is basically a creative movement of unfoldment.”