Divine Humanity is a spiritual and religious philosophy[i] based on radical nonduality or where spirit and matter mutually permeate—no separation between the seen and unseen worlds or between mind and body—all things have consciousness and are connected in a “web” of love.[ii] This philosophy is substantiated by the work of Physicist David Bohm (1917 – 1992) a colleague of Albert Einstein.
Additionally, my firsthand experience of the Otherworld has been of the type that William James documented in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this classic study, he “finds the origin of belief in an ‘unseen’ world in the experience of ‘religious geniuses’ who experience firsthand the realities of which religion speaks, and carefully distinguishes this primal experience from what he calls ‘secondhand’ religion, the beliefs that people acquire through tradition.”
Superimplicate, Implicate and Explicate Orders of the Universe
Physicist David Bohm theorized a different view of the universe than the one that is commonly accepted by science. Briefly he theorized a model of wholeness that constituted reality, which consisted of two orders: the explicate order and the implicate order. The explicate order is the manifest realm of the physical universe in space and time. The other order, implicate, is the un-manifested unseen (hidden) universe that has an unknown number of layers. The primary universe is not the explicate order but the implicate order. Additionally, he conceived of a ‘deeper’ hidden un-manifest layer of the implicate order, which he named the superimplicate order—the eternal order. Bohm also utilized an approximately comparable term for the implicate order—the holomovement. This indicated that the implicate order was always in dynamic flux.
From his research and from his own intuitive side, Bohm concluded that the universe, seen and unseen, is an inseparable whole that is full of energy and contains an unknowable number of universes enfolded, intertwined and interpenetrated into each other.
Similar to Einstein, Bohm was not a narrow focused physicist as he extended his theories outwardly to the fields of philosophy and ontology. His “ontological ideas are well summarized in the introduction to a popular paper from his own hand:
“In my work in physics, which was originally aimed at understanding relativity and the quantum theory on a deeper basis common to both, I developed the notion on the enfolded or implicate order (Bohm, 1980b). The essential feature of this idea was that the whole of the universe is in some way enfolded in everything and that each thing is enfolded in the whole. From this it follows that in some ways, and to a certain degree, everything enfolds or implicates everything. The basic proposal is that this enfoldment relationship is not merely passive or superficial. Rather it is active and essential to what each is. It follows that each thing is internally related to the whole and therefore to everything else. The external relationships are then displayed in the unfolded or explicate order in which each thing is seen as separate and extended and related only externally to other things. The explicate order, which dominates everyday experience as well as classical physics, is however secondary in the sense that ultimately it flows out of the primary reality of the implicate order.
“Since the implicate order is basically dynamic in nature, I called it the holomovement. All things found in the unfolded explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which they are enfolded as potentialities, and ultimately they fall back into it. They endure only for some time, and while they last, their existence is sustained in a constant process of unfoldment and reenfoldment, that gives rise to the relatively stable and independent forms in which they appear in the explicate order (Bohm, 1986b, p. 2-3).”[iii]
Bohm and Consciousness
Today’s world is still based on Descartes’ philosophy of the separation of body and mind—dualism.[iv] Bohm, however, felt that Descartes was off the mark and that reality was simply composed of one energy—Oneness not dualism. This would then indicate that mind and matter are united as one and are not separate entities as proposed by Descartes.
Bohm felt that this separation of mind and matter as well as humanity only recognizing the explicate order and its illusion of separateness, had resulted in people’s minds fragmenting into a reality of separateness that then dictated their thoughts, actions and behaviors:
“A major problem of the world today, according to Bohm, is that our minds as well as society have become overly explicate, so to speak, or fragmented, in Bohm’s terms. This happens when the order of our thoughts is projected onto reality, that is, when we think that the world actually has compartments and divisions that correspond to the concepts we use to grasp it. The remedy proposed against fragmentation is, to put it simply, getting in touch with the energy of the implicate order. This will dispel confusion and fragmentation, bring about clarity and help people realize their “true potential for participating harmoniously in universal creativity…” (Bohm, 1986d, pp. 207-208)
Bohm’s “ recommendations as to how to get out of fragmentation and restore wholeness may be thought of as general guidelines for human action. However, Bohm is extremely reluctant about calling fragmentation “bad” and wholeness “good,” since he considers precisely this kind of division of the world into opposing categories the essence of the fragmentary approach. Thinking in terms of good and evil only propagates the antagonisms and conflicts between people and within the individual.
Instead, he prefers to speak of the mind as being in a state of “confusion” or “clarity,” respectively, the latter describing the state associated with direct insight and “serious attention.” In another analogy, he speaks of the confused mind as missing the point and being “off the mark.” In a conversation he remarks: “There are not two things, good and evil, but rather there is… attention which keeps you on the mark, or failure of attention which makes you go off” (1985b, p. 157).[v]
Interestingly, Bohm’s solution to fragmentation mirrors to an extent Divine Humanity’s concept of Awakening, Firsthand Experience and “Second Attention.” The unawaken person views the world in separate and dualistic terms (good and evil, light and dark, male and female) where the seen and materialistic world are the primary aspects of life. Consciousness is based on a separation of subject and object. Contrary to this, the awaken person views the world as One and in non-dualistic terms that interpenetrate or mutually permeate. Awakening is not immediate but gradually occurs with the realization of the Oneness of subject and object.
[i] It may also be a person’s religion and spiritual belief.
[ii] Love in its pure meaning is unity or oneness.
[iii] Ib Ravn, Chapter 2: David Bohm on the Implicate Order in Ontology, Physics, Epistemology and Human Existence, http://www.ibravn.dk/22126-impordgoodlife-2.htm
[iv] Jung appeared to be undecided in his own mind about the question of the ontological status of the archetypes (see e.g., 1968d [1936], p.58; see also Dourley, 1993); and this state of affairs has led to considerable controversy. But I believe that the ambiguity was necessitated by Jung’s inability to scientifically reconcile his conviction that the archetypes are at once embodied structures and bear the imprint of the divine; that is, the archetypes are both structures within the human body, and represent the domain of spirit. Jung’s intention was clearly a unitary one, and yet his ontology seemed often to be dualistic, as well as persistently ambiguous, and was necessarily so because the science of his day could not envision a non-dualistic conception of spirit and matter.
Jung’s dualism is apparent in his distinction between the archetypes and the instincts which required for him a polarization of the psyche into those products derived from matter and those derived from spirit. He imagined the psyche as the intersection at the apex of two cones, one of spirit and the other of matter (1969a [1946], p. 215). (Charles D. Laughlin http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_10_3_laughlin.pdf)
[v] Ib Ravn, Chapter 2: David Bohm on the Implicate Order in Ontology, Physics, Epistemology and Human Existence, http://www.ibravn.dk/22126-impordgoodlife-2.htm