The Implicate Order, Explained in Plain English

What is the implicate order?

The implicate order is quantum physicist David Bohm's term for a hidden, deeper level of reality in which everything is enfolded into everything else. What we experience as separate objects, people, and events is the explicate order — the same reality unfolded, the way a folded map flattens out into roads and cities. Bohm's claim, laid out in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is that the unfolded world we see is secondary — and the enfolded, interconnected level is the fundamental one.

Two Latin roots do most of the work here. Implicate means "folded inward." Explicate means "folded outward." Bohm's picture: at the deepest level, the universe is not a collection of separate things that interact. It is one undivided whole, and separation is something the whole does — the way a whirlpool is something a river does, not a thing the river contains.

That's the one-paragraph answer. The rest of this article is why a serious physicist felt forced into such a strange picture, and why a 12th century mystic had already drawn the same map 800 years earlier.

Why did Bohm need a hidden level of reality?

Bohm proposed the implicate order because quantum mechanics kept producing results that make no sense if objects are truly separate. The most famous is nonlocality: two particles that once interacted remain correlated instantly, across any distance, in ways confirmed again and again by experiment. Bohm's response was to ask whether the separation itself is the illusion — whether both particles remain, at a deeper level, one undivided system.

This is the problem Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen sharpened in 1935 (the EPR paradox), and it never really went away. Measure one particle here, and its entangled partner — light-years away, with no signal passing between them — shows matching behavior. Experiments since the 1980s have confirmed these correlations beyond reasonable doubt. What remains contested is the interpretation. Bohm's interpretation: the particles were never two things. They are two unfoldments of one enfolded reality, and at the implicate level there is no "distance" for a signal to cross.

One honesty note before we go further: nonlocality is experimentally solid; the implicate order is not. It is an interpretation — a coherent, serious one, developed by a first-rate physicist — but it is not a proven fact, and most working physicists don't use it. Keep that distinction and the rest is fascinating rather than credulous.

The hologram analogy

Bohm's favorite illustration was the hologram. Cut a holographic plate in half, and you don't get half the picture — each piece contains the whole image, just at lower resolution. Cut it again, same thing. Every region of the plate holds the entire scene, enfolded as interference patterns. That, Bohm argued, is the structure of reality: each part contains information about the whole, because at the implicate level the whole is enfolded in every part.

If you arrived here searching for a plain-English version of the holographic universe theory, this is its source. Popular books turned the hologram into a metaphor for everything from memory to mysticism; Bohm himself used it more carefully, as a model for how the whole can be present in the parts. The metaphor survives the popularization. The math is harder.

The part nobody mentions: Ibn Arabi mapped it in 1165

Over eight centuries before Bohm, the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi described a structurally identical picture of reality. His doctrine of wahdat al-wujud — the unity of being — holds that all apparently separate things are self-disclosures of one undivided reality, each of them reflecting the whole in its own way. Two men, two traditions, zero contact — and the same architecture.

Ibn Arabi was not guessing poetically in the way the phrase "medieval mystic" suggests. He wrote hundreds of works of extreme systematic precision about how the One unfolds into the many and how every particular thing contains the whole. Around 1165, as a young man in Seville, he began the work that would become a complete account of how consciousness and reality form a single system — the visible world being the unfolded surface of a hidden, unified depth.

Set the two maps side by side:

The rows are not perfect synonyms, and serious scholars of either man would (correctly) object to flattening the differences. But the shared skeleton is hard to dismiss: one hidden, undivided level; one visible, divided level; the visible continually generated from the hidden; and every part carrying the whole within it. Same map. Different languages. 800 years apart.

That convergence is the premise of my book, the book connecting Bohm and Ibn Arabi. Full disclosure: it's mine. I wrote it because I couldn't find anyone else willing to put these two maps on the same page and ask what follows if they're describing the same territory.

What can you actually do with the implicate order?

Practically, the implicate order reframes you from a spectator of reality into a participant in it. If observer and observed are one process at the enfolded level, then your inner state — attention, assumption, intention — is not private commentary on the world; it is one of the levers the world is built from. The practical move is to stop treating that as a metaphor and start treating it as a testable hypothesis.

Bohm himself took the observer problem seriously — measurement in quantum mechanics is never a passive look from outside. Ibn Arabi took it further: the human being is where the whole becomes conscious of itself, which makes your state of consciousness a load-bearing part of the structure, not decoration on it. Both men, in their own vocabulary, put the observer inside the system.

I'm a software developer, so my response to all this was embarrassingly literal: if assumption shapes reality, it should behave like code — run it, log the output, compare. I spent fifteen years doing exactly that, and wrote up what survived testing as 27 chapters of field report rather than theory. The daily version of the practice lives in the Reality Tracker app; the full argument is in the book. If you want the hands-on starting point, the free 91-question workbook turns these ideas into questions you answer against your own life — the same questions I used to write the book.

And if you're the skeptical type who wants the short version first: the landing page FAQ answers what is the implicate order in three sentences, alongside the other questions people usually ask before buying.

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