I’m fascinated by the thinking of David Bohm. Here’s an interview with him from 1987. Serious brain food.
One of Bohm’s ideas was that of the implicate order; that everything in the world arises from an unseen world and will eventually revert there. An acorn is not so much the source of the oak tree as an aperture through which the tree unfolds into the world. In the interivew Bohm uses this metaphor:
Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram.
And here’s his take on death:
Death must be connected with questions of time and identity. When you die, everything on which your identity depends is going. All things in your memory will go. Your whole definition of what you are will go. The whole sense of being separate from anything will go because that’s part of your identity. Your whole sense of time must go. Is there anything that will exist beyond death? That is the question everybody has always asked. It doesn’t make sense to say something goes on in time. Rather I would say everything sinks into the implicate order, where there is no time. But suppose we say that right now, when I’m alive, the same thing is happening. The implicate order is unfolding to be me again and again each moment. And the past me is gone.
Hat tip: Tweet from David Holzmer
