Sublime

Mystical quantum physicist David Bohm called the realm of the quantum the implicate order where everything is connected. He called the explicit order the material realm of separation.2

Practically all of what has been called nature has been arranged by thought. Yet thought also goes wrong somehow, and produces destruction. This arises from a certain way of thinking, i.e., fragmentation. This is to break things up into bits, as if they were independent. It’s not merely making divisions, but it is breaking things up which are not r

Bohm considered unexamined thought to be the crux of most issues that humans face. He says, “When we see a ‘problem,’ whether pollution, carbon dioxide, or whatever, we then say, ‘We have got to solve that problem.’ But we are constantly producing that sort of problem — by the way we go on with our thought.” His concept of dialogue is meant to she

Bohm believed that the alternative way toward understanding a whole arises through participation rather than abstraction. “A different kind of consciousness is possible among us, a participatory consciousness.” In a genuine dialogue, “each person is participating, is partaking of the whole meaning of the group and also taking part in it.” This is n

Bohm suggests that while literal thought has been predominant since the inception of civilization, a more archaic form of perception, formed over the whole of human evolution, remains latent – and at times active – in the structure of our consciousness. This he refers to as “participatory thought,” a mode of thought in which discrete boundaries are

There are a lot of ways that Bohm’s concept of a dialogue influences how I think about building Are.na: the idea of building a shared meaning, of being able to build ideas with other people over time and the way one can refine their own thinking by bouncing ideas off of other people.

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.

This odd phrase, “take part in truth,” points to, what seems to me, Bohm’s second foundational idea: what it means to understand wholes.