Product Description

For the first time in a single volume, this offers a comprehensive overview of Bohm's original works from a non-technical perspective.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #335369 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
..."this is an excellent overview of Bohm's contributions to science, philosophy and society. The selections outline the foundations of Bohm's notion of "implicate order," drawing from theoretical physics, consciousness, perception, creativity and cosmology...The reader will appreciate Bohm's status as a provocative, diverse and (at times) somewhat unorthodox probing mind, concerned more with broad understanding than ego." Commentary April 27, 2003."

From the Back Cover
There are few scientists of the twentieth century whose life's work has created more excitement and controversy than that of physicist David Bohm (1917-1992). Exploring the philosophical implication of both physics and consciousness, Bohm's penchant for questioning scientific and social orthodoxy was the expression of a rare and maverick intelligence.
For Bohm, the world of matter and the experience of consciousness were two aspects of a more fundamental process he call the implicate order. Without a working sensibility of what this implicate order might be, our conceptions of the various threads of Bohm's work - whether in quantum theory or social dialogue remain incomplete. But with an enhanced understanding of such an order, the wholeness of Bohm's work becomes apparent and accessible.
For the first time in a single volume, The Essential David Bohm offers a comprehensive overview of Bohm's original works from a non-technical perspective. Including three chapters of previously unpublished material, each reading has been selected to highlight some aspect of the implicate order process, and to provide an introduction to one of the most provocative thinkers of our time.

Customer Reviews

Towards a happier less violent world
Towards a better world

David Bohm is an outstanding scientist that worked extensively with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and made original contributions to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. He was also deeply concerned about the violence and lack of happiness in the world and feared that humanity might be on its way to self-destruction. As a true scientist he tried to identify the causes and what can be done about them. He identified as causes first that human beings believe and act as if they are independent individuals separate from other people and their environment. The second cause is that people think they act and should act guided by their self-interest. The third cause is that people think they have a free will and act accordingly. All three causes lead to wrong actions, violence and destruction. Bohm very lucidly explains how the falseness of the thinking process starting with the emergence of consciousness after birth. He describes practical methods to change the way the mind works.

I recommend reading the book from back to front, starting with the last, and third part -"On dialogue and its applications". It describes how a group of around thirty people with a very diverse background can talk to each other in such a way that all participants enrich their own views and develop a better understanding of the views of others and most importantly develop mutual respect and a sense of community. It is not a debate where people try to convince each other of the correctness of their views but an exploration of why people hold different views (38 pages). The second part -"Knowledge as endarkenment" describes how the structure of our thinking is false because its basis is egocentric. It consists of very readable letters to his brother-in-law (39 pages). The first part is the hardest part to read- "Universal orders". It describes how quantum physics and the relativity theory can be intellectually understood rather than accepting the conclusions as mathematically proven to be correct even though their content contradicts common sense. The conclusion is that the starting point of the thinking process should not be the individual but the universe.(174 pages)

The concepts of Bohm have a great deal of overlap with Buddhist thinking. Properly understood the differences are complementary. This book is therefore also very valuable for students of Buddhism.

Lee Nichol has succeeded to put together in a "short" book that presents in an accessible manner the very important and creative thinking, about how to improve the world, of a great scientist that is also a great humanist

A very good introduction to David Bohm's work
A very good introduction to David Bohm and his legacy of what it means to be a polymath. I don't mean this in the way that say, Goethe or Darcy Thomson was a polymath but rather that David Bohm's character was such that he was interested in almost everything that concerned the human condition. This means anything that shows what it is to be a human being whether this means an interest in philosophy, science, sociology, psychology to name a few. However, it means much more than this, Bohm not only studied these areas of human endeavour but also wanted to know how he could make a contribution to the difficulties faced by humanity as a whole e.g. the proliferation of atomic weapons, how conflict arises, the human ego, the ideas of meaning and so on.

This book introduces a reader to Bohm's works including his seminal "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" as well as "Science, Order and Creativity", "Unfolding Meaning" and "On Dialogue". In some sense his original ideas on the implicate order and the influence of Krishnamurti opened doors to other ideas which have affected all of his works from that time on. His works span the times from 1957 to near his death in 1989. It is seen how his ideas developed especially how the initial ideas of the qualitative infinity of nature (1957), through the physics of perception (1967), led gradually to the concept of the implicate order (1980). These ideas were expanded to study how seemingly disparate subjects such as matter and mind could be related to each other when centuries of thought had insurmountable difficulties doing so. This led to his ideas of soma-significance and signa-somatic affects in his remarkable work "Unfolding Meaning".

It is clear that Bohm did not shirk a study of such ideas as a physicist when most scientists won't touch them as they appear to be so completely different from what they work on. In some ways most scientists are confined by what is expected of them by other scientists and parts of society. This means you are allowed to have plenty of good ideas provided they don't clash with the ways things are, I mean this both in terms of science and society. In other words don't rock the boat or else you'll end up like Bohm who never got another job in the US after his refusal to denounce others in the Macarthy hearings of the '50s and whose physics was ignored to be too far outside the norm. But Bohm knew that to be a human being you must live in a world which contains all of these phenomena, in addition he knew that since science was supposed to be designed to search out the truth it must also find ways to understand these phenomena without leading to contradictions or paradoxes which is still the case today.

David Bohm started the ball rolling and hopefully it will be taken up by those brave souls willing to risk their carreers and reputations on seemingly "crazy" ideas in order to find the truth and stop the current tendency by most people to stay ignorant and blind. Afterall, today's monalithic structures of society virtually force this way of life on us. What else could be the reason for the decay of the joy in learning and life that the child possesses and its gradual eradication by adulthood.