Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm

I am truly in love with the mind of David Bohm even though a good chunk of Wholeness and the Implicate Order was over my head. You need a thorough grounding in math and physics to understand all of this book. I was chuckling over terms like "vector in Hilbert space" and "Riemannian geometry." However, Bohm's conclusion that relativity and quantum theory imply oneness (and therefore connectedness) is something I've believed for a long time. Holography plays a big part in his rumination because he sees reality as "interference patterns" in energy that enfolds and unfolds. Holographic images "can distinguish different orders and measures in the whole illuminated structure." I think that this means the images contain information we humans lose when our eyes assemble the picture that makes sense in our minds.

Sometimes Bohm uses the word "autonomous" in describing how the universe works. To me autonomy suggests consciousness (How can you make decisions if you're not conscious of choices? Is growth a manifestation of autonomy?) but Bohm does not explicitly state that the Universe is conscious, so evidently that conclusion -- to which I believe science is pointing -- remains a leap of faith.

The other belief Bohm corroborates for me is that there is no such thing as nothing. What we perceive as "empty space" is actually a huge background of energy; and what we perceive as "matter" is small wavelike excitations in this background like ripples on a vast sea (p. 242).