Lyall Watson on the enfolded reality
There seem always to have been two ways of looking at the world. One is the everyday way in which objects and events, although they may be related causally and influence each other, are seen to be separate. And the other is a rather special way in which every thing is considered to be part of a much greater pattern.
From childhood, no matter what species we may belong to, we all learn to function in the first way because it has the highest survival value. It keeps the individual alive. The second way has little that is of such immediate and practical importance, and becomes a conscious concept only in certain systems, but it nevertheless plays a large part in every life.
There has never been any question of having to choose between the two. They merely represent the extremes of a spectrum of possible response. At one end is a scientist who sees everything in isolation, and at the other a mystic who experiences only a featureless flow. Both views are restricted and misleading, but there can be a meeting in the middle. When both physicists and mystics are asked for their description of how the world works, they give the same answers. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the two groups of quotations. All agree that there are two viable metaphysical systems, and that the truth lies in a reconciliation between them.
There is nothing new in this notion that all are parts of the whole and that the whole is embodied in all its parts. What is new is that our physical sciences are catching up with us and beginning to reinforce some very old and very basic biological perceptions.
Insight is beginning to substantiate intuition. In traditional physics, the world is thought to be made up of points. If you put a lens in front of an object, it will form an image of that object, and there will be a point-to-point correspondence between the two. This kind of relationship has encouraged us to assume that the whole of reality can be analyzed in terms of points, each with a separate existence. But certainty about this kind of concept has been shaken by quantum mechanics and by the development of a new system of recording reality without the use of lenses. By the invention of the hologram.
If you drop a pebble into a pond, it will produce a series of regular waves that travel outward in concentric circles. Drop two identical pebbles into the pond at different points and you will get two sets of similar waves that move towards each other. Where the waves meet, they will interfere. If the crest of one hits the crest of the other, they will work together and produce a reinforced wave of twice the normal height. If the crest of one coincides with the trough of the other, they will cancel each other out and produce an isolated patch of calm water. In fact, all possible combinations of the two occur, and the final result is a complex arrangement of ripples known as an interference pattern.
Light waves behave in exactly the same way. The purest kind of light available to us is that produced by a laser, which sends out a beam in which all the waves are of one frequency, like those made by an ideal pebble in a perfect pond. When two laser beams touch, they produce an interference pattern of light and dark ripples that can be recorded on a photographic plate. And if one of the beams, instead of coming directly from the laser, is reflected first off an object such as a human face, the resulting pattern will be very complex indeed, but it can still be recorded. The record will be a hologram of the face.
When the plate is developed and fixed, it will look like a totally meaningless jumble of very fine light and dark lines, but these can be unraveled. Simply take the plate into a dark room and illuminate it with the same laser. When you do this, you cancel out interference and what you get is the original pattern of light from the reflected source. Peering through the plate, you find yourself face to face. You get a very realistic view which is a great deal more than a two-dimensional portrait. Hologram means ‘whole record,’ so what you get is more than face value. You get all the information that light can provide about that face. The plate becomes a window. If you move your head to the side, you see the face in profile. Stand up and you get a view of the hairstyle.
This three-dimensionality is fascinating, but there is more. If you illuminate only a small part of the plate with a very narrow laser beam, you can still peer through this spot like a keyhole and see the whole face. No matter which part of the plate you choose to use, the view is still the same. This is the momentous thing about a hologram - every part contains the whole.
Any part of a hologram is a point in space, and yet it contains information about things at other points. Actually, the hologram plate is merely a convenient way of recording what is happening in that region of space. What happens is that there is a movement of light there, and it seems that embraced in that movement is a mass of information about events taking place in other spaces. Cameras have always told us that, but what the hologram says is that any old point in space will do. They all embrace everything, happening everywhere.
David Bohm, an imaginative physicist based at Birkbeck College in London, has used this discovery as the starting point for a new description of reality which he calls the enfolded order.
Newton’s laws of motion make it possible to determine the position occupied by an object in space at a series of times. They assume that it is the same object which moves from place to place. Bohm suggests that what happens is that the object does not move, but is created again in each new position. It folds like the tents of the Arabs and silently steals away; and each time it unfolds and reappears, its form is generally similar, but there are differences in detail. In other words, our description of an object, what we like to think of as objective reality, is merely an appearance which is abstracted from a hidden flow. No unfolded object has an independent, substantial existence in its own right; it depends on the folded order for its form.
Imagine an insoluble ink droplet placed in a viscous fluid. If the fluid is stirred slowly by a mechanical device, the droplet will be drawn out into a fine thread folded into the system in such a way that it is no longer visible to the naked eye. But if the machine is reversed, the fine thread will slowly gather together until it once again unfolds and appears as a visible droplet.
Suppose that a droplet is folded into the syrup in this way. Another droplet is then introduced at a slightly different position, and it too is folded in the same number of times. Repeat this with a whole series of droplets in progressively different positions. Then start unfolding.
What will happen is that each of the droplets will appear briefly before being folded back in again in the opposite direction. And if the stirrer moves fast enough to produce, say, twenty-four droplets per second like the frames in a film, an object that looks like a single droplet will appear to move through the fluid. There is, however, no such object. It is an illusion whose existence depends entirely on the fluid.
With the hologram we have found a way of showing this works for light, but the same rules could apply to sound or to the movement of electrons.
So what Bohm is suggesting is that matter, all matter, can be understood as a set of forms, which enjoy a certain amount of autonomy, but are really based on a process - a sort of universal flux. Matter is independent enough to be investigated in itself, but only up to a point. You can discover a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both. Some things can never ben known, because ultimately there are no particles.
So I and the squid, the sea and the reef, and the rocks on which we all rest, are only relatively stable forms derived from the flux. Anything that can be seen or heard or handled by scientific instruments is an abstraction unfolded from the invisible, inaudible, intangible ground of all matter.
I like the idea. It fits in rather well with our general experience of things. In fact, it even begins to make some kind of sense of purely mental forms. Thoughts can be considered as particular objects unfolded from the deeper ground movement of mind. And everything, the whole of existence, can be seen to have its origins in a single source - universal life energy.
Exercising my bias as a biologist, I suspect that there must be degrees of foldedness. I would expect to find that living organisms have some sort of hot line, a more direct connection with the energy source than inanimate matter could have or would need. And that we lose this link, our lifeline, we cease to be subscribers to the service, when we die.
I have seen some extraordinary holograms in which a lens has been included as part of the scene. As in ordinary photographs, whatever lies behind the lens is distorted, but as you move towards or away from the hologram plate, the objects seen through the lens are magnified or diminished appropriately.
Theoretically, one could produce holograms including microscopes and telescopes that would give you a view of everything from single cells to double stars. Then you could carry one small chip around as a charm, a sort of concentrated cosmos imprisoned in a signet ring. But all that effort would be pointless, because in essence that is what we already have, in every cell of our bodies. That is what the lifeline means. It is the lens in the hologram, our connection to the cosmos. Direct dialing to anywhere in the universe.
This notion of continuity keeps cropping up.
It can be found in the works of Whitehead and Leibniz, of Spinoza and Heraclitus. It is embodied in the poetry of Whitman and Blake, of Verlaine and Baudelaire. It is a recurring them in all Hindu Upanishads and in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is the mainstay of every ancient mystical tradition and it is the essence of the modern science of ecology (although few who use the word seem willing or able to take it to its logical limits). But most important of all, a sense of oneness is at the core of every system of belief, every view of the world, held by every child everywhere.
Children have a very powerful sense of the propriety of certain things. They believe that rocks and houses are alive, that bears and elephants have feelings, and that it all matters. Every child of five knows everything there is to know; but when children turn six we send them to school, and then the rot sets in.
I wish there were some way of reconciling formal education and natural knowing. Our inability to do this is a terrible waste of one of our most valuable resources. There is a fund of knowledge, a different kind of information, common to all people everywhere. It is embodied in folklore and superstition, in mythology and old wives’ tales. It has been allowed to persist simply because it is seldom taken seriously and has never been seen to be a threat to organized science or religion. It is a threat, because inherent in the natural way of knowing is a sense of rightness that in this time of transition and indecision could serve us very well.
Both poet and scientist deal in human truths, but we have relinquished control of our destiny to science alone - and that is a mistake, because scientists are missing something. Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion. We know they are not, but our scientists have delusions of their own. There are whole areas of experience left virtually unexplored because they conflict with current orthodoxy. Most of us pass by on the other side with our senses discreetly averted, but fortunately there are some whose curiosity cannot be so simply circumscribed. Poets and children and other wise and primitive people often stop to look and wonder. Some try to tell of it, but the words they use are simple ones, fully of mystery and rhyme, and the scientific journal has yet to be founded that would accept a report in blank verse whose sense was in the sound and not in the syntax.
The grammar and the goals of science are incompatible with certain kinds of truth. There are levels of reality far too mysterious for totally objective common sense. There are things that cannot be known by exercise only of the scientific method.
How then can we affirm the existence of that which is folded? How can we validate experience which does not readily lend itself to description in the precise language of technology?
I think there is at least one way - the one I found in Indonesia.
I learned to dance.
- Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. ISBN 0-671-22632-0), pp. 37-44.
From childhood, no matter what species we may belong to, we all learn to function in the first way because it has the highest survival value. It keeps the individual alive. The second way has little that is of such immediate and practical importance, and becomes a conscious concept only in certain systems, but it nevertheless plays a large part in every life.
There has never been any question of having to choose between the two. They merely represent the extremes of a spectrum of possible response. At one end is a scientist who sees everything in isolation, and at the other a mystic who experiences only a featureless flow. Both views are restricted and misleading, but there can be a meeting in the middle. When both physicists and mystics are asked for their description of how the world works, they give the same answers. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the two groups of quotations. All agree that there are two viable metaphysical systems, and that the truth lies in a reconciliation between them.
There is nothing new in this notion that all are parts of the whole and that the whole is embodied in all its parts. What is new is that our physical sciences are catching up with us and beginning to reinforce some very old and very basic biological perceptions.
Insight is beginning to substantiate intuition. In traditional physics, the world is thought to be made up of points. If you put a lens in front of an object, it will form an image of that object, and there will be a point-to-point correspondence between the two. This kind of relationship has encouraged us to assume that the whole of reality can be analyzed in terms of points, each with a separate existence. But certainty about this kind of concept has been shaken by quantum mechanics and by the development of a new system of recording reality without the use of lenses. By the invention of the hologram.
If you drop a pebble into a pond, it will produce a series of regular waves that travel outward in concentric circles. Drop two identical pebbles into the pond at different points and you will get two sets of similar waves that move towards each other. Where the waves meet, they will interfere. If the crest of one hits the crest of the other, they will work together and produce a reinforced wave of twice the normal height. If the crest of one coincides with the trough of the other, they will cancel each other out and produce an isolated patch of calm water. In fact, all possible combinations of the two occur, and the final result is a complex arrangement of ripples known as an interference pattern.
Light waves behave in exactly the same way. The purest kind of light available to us is that produced by a laser, which sends out a beam in which all the waves are of one frequency, like those made by an ideal pebble in a perfect pond. When two laser beams touch, they produce an interference pattern of light and dark ripples that can be recorded on a photographic plate. And if one of the beams, instead of coming directly from the laser, is reflected first off an object such as a human face, the resulting pattern will be very complex indeed, but it can still be recorded. The record will be a hologram of the face.
When the plate is developed and fixed, it will look like a totally meaningless jumble of very fine light and dark lines, but these can be unraveled. Simply take the plate into a dark room and illuminate it with the same laser. When you do this, you cancel out interference and what you get is the original pattern of light from the reflected source. Peering through the plate, you find yourself face to face. You get a very realistic view which is a great deal more than a two-dimensional portrait. Hologram means ‘whole record,’ so what you get is more than face value. You get all the information that light can provide about that face. The plate becomes a window. If you move your head to the side, you see the face in profile. Stand up and you get a view of the hairstyle.
This three-dimensionality is fascinating, but there is more. If you illuminate only a small part of the plate with a very narrow laser beam, you can still peer through this spot like a keyhole and see the whole face. No matter which part of the plate you choose to use, the view is still the same. This is the momentous thing about a hologram - every part contains the whole.
Any part of a hologram is a point in space, and yet it contains information about things at other points. Actually, the hologram plate is merely a convenient way of recording what is happening in that region of space. What happens is that there is a movement of light there, and it seems that embraced in that movement is a mass of information about events taking place in other spaces. Cameras have always told us that, but what the hologram says is that any old point in space will do. They all embrace everything, happening everywhere.
David Bohm, an imaginative physicist based at Birkbeck College in London, has used this discovery as the starting point for a new description of reality which he calls the enfolded order.
Newton’s laws of motion make it possible to determine the position occupied by an object in space at a series of times. They assume that it is the same object which moves from place to place. Bohm suggests that what happens is that the object does not move, but is created again in each new position. It folds like the tents of the Arabs and silently steals away; and each time it unfolds and reappears, its form is generally similar, but there are differences in detail. In other words, our description of an object, what we like to think of as objective reality, is merely an appearance which is abstracted from a hidden flow. No unfolded object has an independent, substantial existence in its own right; it depends on the folded order for its form.
Imagine an insoluble ink droplet placed in a viscous fluid. If the fluid is stirred slowly by a mechanical device, the droplet will be drawn out into a fine thread folded into the system in such a way that it is no longer visible to the naked eye. But if the machine is reversed, the fine thread will slowly gather together until it once again unfolds and appears as a visible droplet.
Suppose that a droplet is folded into the syrup in this way. Another droplet is then introduced at a slightly different position, and it too is folded in the same number of times. Repeat this with a whole series of droplets in progressively different positions. Then start unfolding.
What will happen is that each of the droplets will appear briefly before being folded back in again in the opposite direction. And if the stirrer moves fast enough to produce, say, twenty-four droplets per second like the frames in a film, an object that looks like a single droplet will appear to move through the fluid. There is, however, no such object. It is an illusion whose existence depends entirely on the fluid.
With the hologram we have found a way of showing this works for light, but the same rules could apply to sound or to the movement of electrons.
So what Bohm is suggesting is that matter, all matter, can be understood as a set of forms, which enjoy a certain amount of autonomy, but are really based on a process - a sort of universal flux. Matter is independent enough to be investigated in itself, but only up to a point. You can discover a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both. Some things can never ben known, because ultimately there are no particles.
So I and the squid, the sea and the reef, and the rocks on which we all rest, are only relatively stable forms derived from the flux. Anything that can be seen or heard or handled by scientific instruments is an abstraction unfolded from the invisible, inaudible, intangible ground of all matter.
I like the idea. It fits in rather well with our general experience of things. In fact, it even begins to make some kind of sense of purely mental forms. Thoughts can be considered as particular objects unfolded from the deeper ground movement of mind. And everything, the whole of existence, can be seen to have its origins in a single source - universal life energy.
Exercising my bias as a biologist, I suspect that there must be degrees of foldedness. I would expect to find that living organisms have some sort of hot line, a more direct connection with the energy source than inanimate matter could have or would need. And that we lose this link, our lifeline, we cease to be subscribers to the service, when we die.
I have seen some extraordinary holograms in which a lens has been included as part of the scene. As in ordinary photographs, whatever lies behind the lens is distorted, but as you move towards or away from the hologram plate, the objects seen through the lens are magnified or diminished appropriately.
Theoretically, one could produce holograms including microscopes and telescopes that would give you a view of everything from single cells to double stars. Then you could carry one small chip around as a charm, a sort of concentrated cosmos imprisoned in a signet ring. But all that effort would be pointless, because in essence that is what we already have, in every cell of our bodies. That is what the lifeline means. It is the lens in the hologram, our connection to the cosmos. Direct dialing to anywhere in the universe.
This notion of continuity keeps cropping up.
It can be found in the works of Whitehead and Leibniz, of Spinoza and Heraclitus. It is embodied in the poetry of Whitman and Blake, of Verlaine and Baudelaire. It is a recurring them in all Hindu Upanishads and in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is the mainstay of every ancient mystical tradition and it is the essence of the modern science of ecology (although few who use the word seem willing or able to take it to its logical limits). But most important of all, a sense of oneness is at the core of every system of belief, every view of the world, held by every child everywhere.
Children have a very powerful sense of the propriety of certain things. They believe that rocks and houses are alive, that bears and elephants have feelings, and that it all matters. Every child of five knows everything there is to know; but when children turn six we send them to school, and then the rot sets in.
I wish there were some way of reconciling formal education and natural knowing. Our inability to do this is a terrible waste of one of our most valuable resources. There is a fund of knowledge, a different kind of information, common to all people everywhere. It is embodied in folklore and superstition, in mythology and old wives’ tales. It has been allowed to persist simply because it is seldom taken seriously and has never been seen to be a threat to organized science or religion. It is a threat, because inherent in the natural way of knowing is a sense of rightness that in this time of transition and indecision could serve us very well.
Both poet and scientist deal in human truths, but we have relinquished control of our destiny to science alone - and that is a mistake, because scientists are missing something. Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion. We know they are not, but our scientists have delusions of their own. There are whole areas of experience left virtually unexplored because they conflict with current orthodoxy. Most of us pass by on the other side with our senses discreetly averted, but fortunately there are some whose curiosity cannot be so simply circumscribed. Poets and children and other wise and primitive people often stop to look and wonder. Some try to tell of it, but the words they use are simple ones, fully of mystery and rhyme, and the scientific journal has yet to be founded that would accept a report in blank verse whose sense was in the sound and not in the syntax.
The grammar and the goals of science are incompatible with certain kinds of truth. There are levels of reality far too mysterious for totally objective common sense. There are things that cannot be known by exercise only of the scientific method.
How then can we affirm the existence of that which is folded? How can we validate experience which does not readily lend itself to description in the precise language of technology?
I think there is at least one way - the one I found in Indonesia.
I learned to dance.
- Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. ISBN 0-671-22632-0), pp. 37-44.