10 02 08 Implicate Order
Sat Oct 04 22:57:48 2008
"Luminous bliss." From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. "Luminous bliss." That was as near as one could come to it. But it - this timeless and ever-changing Event - was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things."
from Island, by Aldous Huxley, page 271 of the 1989 reprint edition published by Perennial Library, New York
"The underlying region described by the quantum wave function (called the implicate order by [David] Bohm) is nonlocal, as indicated by the quantum bond. Light is also nonlocalized. That is, if someone could ride a light beam, it would appear that time stands still. This hidden domain can be seen as an ocean of light in which some light rays move back and forth rather than straight ahead, and it is this back and forth movement which forms particles. How this happens is not completely understood because physicists do not have a theory covering this underlying region. But in essence, this view indicates that matter is arrested or frozen light floating in a sea of light, like an iceberg floating in the ocean."
from The Hidden Domain, by Norman Friedman, page 47 of the 1997 edition published by the Woodbridge Group, Eugene Oregon
"I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let's say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; in a greater context, it's a little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order. I call the enfolding process "implicating" and the unfolding process "explicating." The implicate and explicate together are a flowing undivided wholeness. Every part of the universe is related to every other part but in different degrees."
David Bohm in Interview with David Bohm, by F. David Peat and John Briggs, Omni magazine, January 1987
"Socrates: ...of motion then there are...these two kinds, change and motion in place.
Theodorus: You are right
Socrates: And now, having made this distinction, let us address ourselves to those who say that all is motion, and ask them whether all things according to them have the two kinds of motion, and are changed as well as move in place, or is one thing moved in both ways and another in one only?
Theodorus: Indeed, I do not know what to answer, but I think they would say that all things are moved in both ways.
Socrates: Yes, comrade, for if not, they would have to say that the same things are in motion and at rest, and there would be no more truth in saying that all things are in motion, than that all things are at rest."
Theatatus ss182 in The Dialogues of Plato, volume 4, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1892
Yvgeny Porchik: By quoting Plato your are comparing David Bohm's ideas to something of which Plato was aware, or perhapa a number of the Greek philosophers of his day. Whether there is motion and rest, or two kinds of motion, it seems as if they knew something of this state within the quantum world, although strictly by intuition.
Roy Waidler: I don't know that it was intuition although it could have been. It's likely that most of the people in Plato's world had a psychedelic experience. There was a religious rite called 'The Mysteries of Eleusis' in which those who partook in it were led through a kind of confession of sins by priests, then brought into a darkened temple and given a potion full of something very much like LSD. After it kicked in there was a musical drama of sorts. No matter what the drama portrayed, and even Stro doesn't know that, the people who underwent the ceremony had to have had at least a glimpse of the ethernal world.
Yvgeny Porchik: Now I understand why you lead the quotations with the excerpt from Island! In itself it is quite lovely and describes perfectly well what I had experienced when I was with you in altered states. What we have come to affectionately call "the Outlands." In my studies I can tell you that I have come to believe that something of David Bohm's "infinite sea of energy" is experienced by those who pay attention. You see, the math allows for such a quantum state, where there is an infinite underlying reality which must be there but cannot be shown. This is the biggest flaw in the whole notion: it can be illustrated mathematically but cannot be proven in the physical sense. And you know that science relies upon peer review, where others can duplicate your work.
Roy Waidler: Nothing that John Bell did, or perhaps John Wheeler, got anywhere to proving or disproving what Bohm had hypothesized?
Yngeny Porchik: No. The fault with David Bohm's earlier models was that they all tried to reinstate a kind of classical physics into the scheme of things.
Roy Waidler: Suppose you explain a little bit about the world of physics for our readers? Anyone who gets past the quotations deserves as much!
Yvgeny Porchik: (laughing) Yes, I know that this is so! It was not so long ago that it was all a big mystery to me! Very well. Physics is the study of physical reality. That is as simply as I can put it. Back in the time of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived, what, 2300 years ago? After our friend Plato? It was generally agreed that the world was composed of four major elements, earth, water, air and fire. Some went a bit further and said that these four elements were contained within a fifth, aether. This was a bit refined, in purely scientific terms - something that could be repeated - by Empedocles, who taught that all things are composed of undivideble bits which he called "atoms." Such was the state of practical physics until Isaac Newton. Newton worked out, largely with math, that the universe seemed to run like a gigantic mechanism. One of the principal ideas in Newton's physics was the notion of cause and effect, that if you did "this" then "that" happened. Another was that we lived in a world of three dimensions, length, width and breadth, or height.
Roy Waidler: I'm thinking of a snooker table, or a pool table. You hit one ball which hits others and they move. And a three dimensional picture would be the corner of a room.
Yvgeny Porchik. Yes, that is a good example. In the universe of Newton, things were made of smaller things, which were made of smaller things. They worked together somewhat after the manner of gears in a very large clock. Here is an example of that. It was known in the 19th century that the moon was smaller than the Earth, and that the Earth was smaller than the sun. The Earth rotated around the sun. The moon rotated around the earth. All three of these things, Earth, moon and sun exerted a pull of gravity on each other. The clearest indicator of this are the ocean tides; the pull of the moon's gravity as it orbits our world is enough to pull the water of the seas along with it, creating tides.
Roy Waidler: I suppose that that is how most of see the world, that it all meshes together. But what happened?
Yvgeny Porchik: There were two things that happened. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his papers on relativity. Two things emerged from that. One was that there was a fourth dimension to our world and that this fourth dimension was time. There is no clear way to illustrate that, unfortunately. It can be shown very prettily using math, real and imaginary numbers, but I do not wish to go there now. The other thing that came out of Einstein was that because of gravity at work in these four dimensions, there were, technically speaking, no such things as straight lines. Everything had a curve built into it, only our perceptions did not need that information to help us live, so we did not normally "see" the world that way. Of course it becomes obvious in varied altered states, but they have no practical value for navigating the physical world in an appropriate way. The other "revolution" was the work of a Dane, Neils Bohr. Very simply put, he said that all things may exist as either waves or as particles. You understand waves as something that you see at the seaside, or perhaps in your work with music.
Roy Waidler: My understanding of waves in either water or the air - that is, sound - is that it is an energy moving through them in pulses. In the ocean, the water is actually not moving very much, but it is the energy of the wave-pulses that disturbs it.
Yvgeny Porchik: Yes, and that is called "kinetic energy." I would include light in your example, because light is a series of waves moving through....well, moving through the world, shall we say. Light does not need water or air to travel in wave-pulses, as kinetic energy.
Roy Waidler: Okay, but in each instance you're describing kinetic energy passing as waves through the world. But Bohr said that it can manifest as particles?
Yvgeny Porchik: (sighs) Yes. I suppose the clearest example would be the photon. Today everyone thinks of photons as "particles of light" and up to a point they are correct. When a photon is a particle, it occupies a certain amount of space - not very much space, you know - and because it does, it has a weight.
Roy Waidler: And not much weight either, I suppose.
Yvgeny Porchik: No, not much weight either! (grins) But the totally crazy thing about a photon as a wave is that it does not really occupy any space at all, it merely passes through it. Passes through space as a packet of kinetic energy. Physicists call such packets "quanta," which is where the name "quantum physics" comes from.
Roy Waidler: By this defintion we are actually living in two worlds at once, one of solid matter and a second of kinetic energy which passes through matter.
Yvgeny Porchik: I doubt very much that Bohr would claim as much, but as an oversimplified view, that is correct. His ideas are known as the "Copenhagen Interpretation," by the way. There was one other disturbing thing that arose from the Copenhagen Interpretation, that all things were in an undefinable state until they were somehow observed or recorded. In practical terms, it sounded like they were saying that things did not exist until we looked at them.
Roy Waidler: A few centuries ago the philosopher George Berkeley proposed that a tree which fell in a forest in which there were no people would not make any noise because there would be no-one to hear it.
Yvgeny Porchik: What is the sound of one hand clapping, eh? Lord Berkeley's proposal was interesting but unprovable, and it did in a certain way point ahead to quantum physics. What drives modern physicists crazy is that they of course want to observe the unobservable, to hear that tree fall while not being in that forest, to see this undefined state of the universe while it is....shall we say, a chaotic quantum soup out of which anything and everything might emerge once it is observed. Of course they cannot do this so they do a lot of math to demonstrate that it's there and that it's doing this or that. Many of the experiments conducted since Einstein's day have gone toward unpacking some knowledge about this chaotic quantum soup. Very simply put, these experiments are designed to show that if the quantum world is doing "this," "that" will happen in the material world., or might. Which is how we now have very small particles such as quarks, gluons and so forth which make up larger particles - particles, mind you - such as the more familiar electrons, protons and protons. We will never "see" a quark, although they'll be detectable in the Large Hadron Collider experiments, but we know that they exist. And of course, Einstein's work conflicts with the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Roy Waidler: Is that a tale simply told?
Yvgeny Porchik: I'll do my best! Very simply, Einstein's view said that everything in the universe was predictable if you only had enough information. Bohr's said that you could never know what was coming next, that the best that you could do was have levels of probability that things would occur or not occur. Let us go back to your pool table. In Einstein's view, if you knew exactly how much force to exert on the cue stick, and how much the balls on the table weighed, and what the precise angle was needed to hit the cue ball just so, that it struck, say, the number two ball, you would always get the two ball into the pocket you were aiming for. But with Bohr's view, you probably would sink the shot, but then again, you just might not. But that is modern physics very simply said.
Roy Waidler: Alright. So we have this quantum sea underlying all that is. I suppose my question at this point is, is what Will Farnaby experienced in Island, and what countless other visionaries have experienced over the ages, this quantum sea...this "ocean of light" or "infinite sea of energy;" is this actually an experience of that reality?
Yvgeny Porchik: I wish that it were. It is not. It comes close. It is a vision of that underlying sea, a reflection, a manifestation of it, but it is not as it is in its own state. If it were an actual experience of this infinite sea, everyone would have the same vision and there would be no questions about it. No philosophic or religious quabbles about it.
Roy Waidler: After all of these years of voyaging "out there" I realize that all of my experiences, everyone's experiences are ultimately personal and subjective. As such they are illusion, what the Hindus call MAYA. Is there a qualitative difference between your experience of the universe and mine? I'm the mortal here, you're the ethereal human.
Yvgeny Porchik: Are you asking me to describe my perceptions?
Roy Waidler: (grins) I guess I am!
Yvgeny Porchik: Well, then. I could begin with my perception of myself. I have no visual perception of myself per se, but I know that I am a group of quanta - packets of energy. I f I wanted to, I would see myself as a sphere of light.
Roy Waidler: I've seen all of you as spheres of light at one time or another. Myself too, once or twice.
Yvgeny Porchik: When did you see yourself as a sphere of light?
Roy Wailder: Once when I was dead and another time when I was rolling with Sara.
Yvgeny Porchik: You must have been hit pretty hard in that roll! (laughing) But when I perceive your world in a way in which I can interact with it, I see it almost as you do, only the colors are much more intense and blur from one into another. Physical motion arises up out of intersections of energy. I see sound more than I can hear it, and I see heat and odors. They are kinds of colors is the best that I can do to describe these things.
Roy Waidler: So here's the big question, then. Do things - like our universe - arise from this quantum sea?
Yvgeny Porchik: I am studying quantum, my brother, and the best that I can tell you is, probably. But I too have experienced the vision of it, as described by Huxley, Friedman and Bohm, and I believe that it is there. Wherever there is!
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