Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN swinging pendulum - are easy to deal with. The subtle descriptions are harder for they require mathematical untangling before we can interpret them in terms of everyday objects. David Schrum and I discussed such ideas for many long hours in our office in Ottawa. We began to wonder if these more subtle descriptions may be the natural way of dealing with the quantum world. We guessed, from the perspective of the atom, that particles which move along welldefined paths may look just as tangled and incomprehensible as the intersection of abstract hypersurfaces does to inhabitants of the large-scale world. With such thoughts in mind, I made my trip to England only to discov er that David Bohm, at the University of London, had pushed the ideas even further with his notion of the 'implicate order'. Bohm claimed that a subtle, enfolded pattern stretched across the universe, which he called the implicate order. What to us appears clear and explicit is but one aspect of this greater order. Bohm would speak of this as the explicate order, which had been unfolded from a more general play of forms. This enfolding and unfolding of order was not some arcane proposition or Cabbalistic hypothesis, for its foundations lay within the framework of theoretical physics. The implications were far-reaching, for one could speculate that this movement between the explicit and the implicit occurred in thought as well. What would be called the unconscious was in essence the enfolded or implicit movement of the human mind. The analogies with Jung's synchronicity and the ancients' 'higher world' order became obvious. A general and subtle movement is common to both matter and mind: when unfolded in a linear sequence it is seen as the movement of thought in time or the motion of material bodies. The appearance of synchronicity is the manifestation of one of these points of parallelism between the unfolding of matter and of mind. It becomes clear that there is no causal relationship between the two events, no chain of action and reaction which links cause to effect. Both events are simply manifestations which have surfaced from a common ground and represent a chink in our temporal world through which may be glimpsed an intimation of something far deeper. The circle is completed; from that curious phenomenon of inspiration 142
