12. THE GUIDE
It was Sunday, July 27, 1980. I had resigned from the law firm the week before and was spending day and night writing, thinking, and struggling with the philosophical underpinnings of the new enterprise I had decided to found, especially the new leadership curriculum that would be its foundation.
That day, I got up before dawn and went for a long, slow, easy run in Hyde Park. When I returned, I picked up the Sunday Times and went into my flat. After showering, I was thumbing through the newspaper, and when I got to page fourteen, I saw a headline in the education section: “How the Universe Hangs Together.” There was a picture of Dr. David Bohm, Professor of Theoretical Physics at London’s Birkbeck College, with a caption underneath: “Bohm and his algebra of algebras: ‘religion is wholeness.’” I knew at that moment that this was speaking to me.
I threw the rest of the paper on the floor and read every word of the article about Dr. Bohm. It began by saying that he was soon to publish a revolutionary scientific theory that might at last bring unity to the world of modern physics. “For the first time since the comfortable certitudes of classical physics were shattered—in contradictory ways—by Einstein’s theory of relativity and by quantum theory, there is hope that physicists’ disparate views of reality may be understood in a unified way.”
The article described the new theory, referring to Bohm’s latest book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It described Bohm as a friend and colleague of Einstein’s at Princeton in the forties and fifties, and said he was now one of the most eminent living physicists. Bohm had written two classical works on quantum theory and made significant contributions to plasma physics. The article said that it had been Bohm’s passion, in both his life and his work, to find some unifying concept in physics that could help heal the fragmentation in physics and society. For the past twenty years, Bohm had devoted himself to formulating a general theory that would get beyond the contradictions posed by relativity theory and quantum theory.
Bohm’s theory of the implicate order was highly technical. I didn’t understand a lot of what was said in the article, but at another level, I understood it all. It was the answer that I was searching for. I suddenly felt I had to meet this person. The article continued: “the theory also has deeply important philosophical implications, about which Bohm writes at great length in his book. It provides a worldview that gives a coherent understanding of physical phenomena, and it suggests that both the material world and consciousness are parts of a single unbroken totality of movement.” The article went on:
Bohm’s work on non-locality and his wedding of physics and consciousness have caused some para-psychologists to look to his theory for an explanation of such phenomena as telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis. Bohm is not hostile to this, but maintains firm neutrality.
The Implicate Order (from the Latin “to be enfolded”) is a level of reality beyond our normal everyday thoughts and perceptions, as well as beyond any picture of reality offered by a given scientific theory. These, according to Bohm, belong to “the explicit order.”
In the Implicate Order, the totality of existence is enfolded within each “fragment” of space and time—whether it be a single object, thought or event. Thus everything in the universe affects everything else because they are all part of the same unbroken whole.
Bohm thinks that the current trend towards fragmentation is embedded in the subject-verb-object structure of our grammar, and is reflected at the personal and social levels by our tendency to see individuals and groups as “other” than ourselves, leading to isolation, selfishness and wars.
Bingo. This was it. This was what I’d been feeling and dreaming and thinking about. It was a way of expressing the fundamental basis of our leadership curriculum. It provided the framework for the optimism that I was feeling: that our country could exert moral, transformational leadership if we could only see the world as it really is, in all of its intricate design.
I went to the telephone and began dialing. After several calls, I found Bohm’s home number, and before I knew it, he was at the other end of the line. I was pouring my heart out, telling him what I was about and that I must see him. Almost without hesitation, he agreed to spend the entire next afternoon with me.
This was another of the many predictable miracles that I was to experience as this adventure unfolded. The next day, I was in Bohm’s office and spent over four hours with him, tape-recording our conversation.
We talked about the marriage of the principles of physics and philosophy and its relevance for my dream of the Leadership Forum. He raised questions with me that are both ancient and fundamental. What is mind? What is matter? What is the source of the simple symmetry we see all around us in the natural world? He told me that the old concepts of time, space, and matter no longer apply. We talked about life in the “bubble chamber,” where physicists look at matter and examine particles at a subatomic level. On that level, matter is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave. Matter is constantly in motion. The picture of a rock or a board or a piece of steel as solid matter does not comport with reality. Particles also sometimes move backward in time. In the bubble chamber, notions of earlier and later are no longer clear. Time-space processes sometimes run in reverse causal sequences.
We talked about Bell’s theorem, which was my introduction to the oneness of the subatomic world. Bell’s theorem was proposed in 1964 by J. S. Bell, a Swiss physicist and former student of Bohm. It was confirmed experimentally eight years later by the physicist Alain Aspect at the University of Paris. In his 1975 government-sponsored report, physicist Henry Stapp of the University of California at Berkeley said that Bell’s theorem is “the most profound discovery in the history of science.” It proves, in effect, that the world is fundamentally inseparable.
The simplest explanation I can give of Bell’s theorem is this: Imagine two paired particles in a two-particle system. If you make them fly apart or take them apart any distance—putting one particle in New York, say, and another in San Francisco—then, if you change the spin of one of these particles, the other particle will simultaneously change its own spin. The effect is a simple consequence of the oneness of apparently separate objects. It is a quantum loophole through which physics admits the necessity of a unitary vision. As Bohm said, “We are all one.”
Bohm told me about the general implications of Bell’s theorem. He said the worldview of modern physics is now a systems view. Everything is connected to everything else. We are not sure how this connectedness works, but there is a certainty that there is “separation without separateness.” That is the way our universe is constructed. “The oneness implicit in Bell’s theorem envelops human beings and atoms alike.”
Bohm’s conversation with me was like a bolt of lightning. On the one hand, I felt that I knew this at a deep level and had known it all along. At another level, I felt a fear of knowing. There was a responsibility inherent in this new knowledge. We were talking about a radical, disorienting new view of reality that we couldn’t ignore. We were talking about the awareness of the essential interrelatedness and interdependence of all phenomena—physiological, social, and cultural. We were talking about a systems view of life and a systems view of the universe. Nothing could be understood in isolation, everything had to be seen as a part of the unified whole. It is an abstraction, Bohm said, to talk of nonliving matter. Different people are not that separate, they are all enfolded into the whole, and they are all a manifestation of the whole. It is only through an abstraction that they look separate. Everything is included in everything else.
“You cannot think of existence as local,” Bohm said to me that afternoon. To illustrate, he told me of a simple experiment using a device with two glass concentric cylinders, one fixed and one turning slowly. You put a highly viscous fluid such as glycerin between the cylinders, and you put an insoluble drop of ink in the fluid. As you turn the outer cylinder, the drop of ink gets drawn into a thin thread because the outer cylinder is going faster than the inner cylinder. As the ink particles get farther and farther apart, the ink ultimately becomes invisible. Now comes the amazing part. If you reverse the motion and turn the outer cylinder backward, the ink droplet becomes visible again.
While the ink droplet was invisible, Bohm said, “it still had an order, but it was enfolded into the glycerin. Physics is suggesting that that order is very significant.” So, “Instead of thinking of a particle as a single solid object,” he added, “we can think of it as a series of droplets, enfolded at different numbers of turns. Seen this way, we can say that matter basically has its existence in the whole and manifests in a localized way rather than saying that its fundamental existence is made up of separate parts.”
He said, “Yourself is actually the whole of mankind. That’s the idea of implicate order—that everything is enfolded in everything. The entire past is enfolded in each one of us in a very subtle way. If you reach deeply into yourself, you are reaching into the very essence of mankind. When you do this, you will be led into the generating depth of consciousness that is common to the whole of mankind and that has the whole of mankind enfolded in it. The individual’s ability to be sensitive to that becomes the key to the change of mankind. We are all connected. If this could be taught, and if people could understand it, we would have a different consciousness.
“At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist even when they separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn’t separated. It’s actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another. Cues that pass from one to the other are being picked up with the same awareness, just as we pick up cues in riding bicycles or skiing. Therefore, these people are really all one. The separation between them is not blocking. They are all pulling together. If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be remarkable. They would stand out so much that everyone would know they were different.
“There is a difficulty with only one person changing,” said Bohm. “People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, ‘Well, he’s different from me—I could never do it.’ What’s wrong with most people is that they have this block—they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.”
At this point I told Bohm a story about an extraordinary experience I had had a number of years before. A friend had invited me to go skeet shooting while I visited him in Georgia. I had not used a shotgun for about ten years, so early that morning I went out for a run, then came back and sat still and pictured myself shooting in the perfect way. As soon as I finished meditating, my friend came by to pick me up to go to the skeet range.
In skeet shooting, twenty-five targets comprise the usual round. A highly accomplished skeet shooter might hit twenty-three out of twenty-five targets, so hitting twelve targets in itself is a pretty good score for a novice like me. We started going from station to station, and by the time we came to number twelve, I had hit all twelve of the targets. A few people gathered around to watch. I hit target after target—fourteen, eighteen, twenty. … At the twenty-fifth target I was still in the flow state and was totally peaceful. By this time, there were quite a few onlookers. Then someone turned to me and said, “You realize you’ve got one more to shoot a perfect score.” At that point, I started trying, and I missed.
I learned from this and other experiences that the mind has powers that allow us to go beyond our normal or habitual way of being, and beyond what we think is possible. When people join together and go beyond their habitual way of being as a group, even more possibilities open up. But somehow a kind of block prevents these extraordinary experiences from happening.
Bohm said, “You’ve got to give attention to that block. You’ve got to find out where it comes from both in yourself and in anybody. If you were able to get a group of people working together with one another at a different plane, they might find a new way to operate that would not be simply individual. A new individual arises which is the whole concept, you see? The individuals would operate as if with one mind. If the results were in the domain of public knowledge, public experience, then people couldn’t explain it away. If such a group got beyond a certain point, it could have a real impact.”
Bohm then told me, “You’ve got to give a lot of attention to consciousness. This is one of the things of which our society is ignorant. It assumes consciousness requires no attention. But consciousness is what gives attention. Consciousness itself requires very alert attention or else it will simply destroy itself. It’s a very delicate mechanism.
“We have to think with everything we have. We have to think with our muscles. We have to think, as Einstein said, with feelings in our muscles. Think with everything. And so it is a flowing process which also goes outward and inward and makes communication possible.”
Even as he spoke, I thought about the way I was able to communicate with the ermine. I thought about meeting Manny Deitz and Bernadette and the language of the eyes.
Bohm then told me that we have capacities within us that we do not recognize. “For example, when you ride a bicycle, you are engaging in a movement you can’t describe or even comprehend. That’s the implicate order that is enfolded in you. You have capacities within you that are phenomenal, if you only knew how to release them.”
As we were walking out, Bohm gave me some advice. He said, “You’re on the verge of a creative movement. Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you’re going about it any more than you would be fixed if you were setting about to paint a great work of art. Be alert, be self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, you can actually rise to it.”
When I left Bohm’s office, my mind was reeling. I knew I had been in the presence of greatness and that it would take a lifetime to fully understand what Bohm had said. It had truly been a life-changing experience for me. More immediately, the fundamental precept for the Leadership Forum had been validated. It was my feeling all along that a number of committed people could literally change the world. I realized now that this was not just an idle dream or unwarranted optimism, but a principle I could hang my hat on because it was consistent with the laws of natural order.
During our conversation, Bohm had emphasized as an essential feature of modern physics that all things were in sympathy. He mentioned Mach’s principle: “The whole is as necessary to the understanding of its parts, as the parts are necessary to the understanding of the whole.” I felt the implications of this were profound. The universe as a whole influences local events. Local events have an influence, however small, on the universe as a whole. I recalled the Chinese proverb, “If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the universe.”
When we parted, Bohm’s final words to me were, “Everything starts with you and me.” As I walked away, I knew I would have to find a way for the Leadership Forum to give its fellows an “inner education” so that they would identify themselves with all humanity. If they could do that, they could literally help change the world.