Newsletter #127 — Closing the year

‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’
- David Bohm-

In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, the physicist and philosopher David Bohm invites us to rethink the very structure of reality, and the way we experience it. He suggests that our usual way of perceiving the world, as a collection of separate things, is only a partial view. Beneath this visible surface, he proposes a deeper dimension of existence, an order that is whole, fluid, and continuous.
Bohm calls the world we normally perceive, the world of objects, events, and distinct moments, the explicate order. It is the “unfolded” level of reality, where things appear separate: a hand here, a thought there, a movement beginning and ending. But this visible world, he says, arises from a deeper level of organization, the implicate order, or “enfolded” order — a realm where everything is connected to everything else, existing as patterns of potential that continually unfold into the explicate world.

To imagine this, think of a seed and a tree. The seed contains the whole pattern of the tree in an enfolded form; the tree is that pattern unfolded into space and time. Similarly, every action, thought, or movement we make unfolds from and returns to this deeper, implicate wholeness.

For students of the Feldenkrais Method, Bohm’s insight feels immediately familiar. An Awareness Through Movement lesson can begin in the explicate order with concrete sensations and observable actions. As we slow down and refine attention, however, we begin to sense the implicate order, the web of relationships beneath the surface: how the turning of the head changes breathing, how the movement of the eyes softens the spine, how thought itself shapes action.

Feldenkrais often reminded us that “movement is life.” From Bohm’s perspective, movement is the visible unfolding of an invisible wholeness, a dance between the implicate and explicate. When we attend fully, we begin to sense not just what moves, but the deeper coherence from which movement arises.

To live and learn in this way is to rediscover what Bohm called undivided wholeness in flowing movement. It is to feel that awareness, thought, and action are not separate, but expressions of one continuous process, the living implicate order of being.