The search for the distinction between what is real and what is an illusion also involves making the distinction between what the intellect can perceive and what our intuition can apprehend. David Bohm, called by some the most significant theoretical physicist of the 20th century, was also wrestling with this challenge when he claimed that matter and consciousness could both be understood.
The Implicate Order and the explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory and are terms coined by Bohm in the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks or paradigms for understanding the same phenomenon or aspects of perceived “reality.” These concepts correspond to Paradigm-A (Implicate Order) and Paradigm-B (explicate order), which are described in detail throughout the content of the Simple Reality Project.
Nevertheless, there have been physicists other than Bohm, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who felt that we need to broaden our definition of Reality. A colleague of Oppenheimer’s remarked that: “Some may call it a lack of faith, but in my opinion it was more a turning away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.”[i] That would be a paradigm shift!
So, which best supports our endeavors to create a more conscious human being, our intellect or our intuition?
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Supplemental Reading: The Brain, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#66 Within or Without
[i] Rhodes, Richard. “I Am Become Death: The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” American Heritage. October 1977, p. 75.
