The process of unfolding and enfolding suggests a whole exists primarily as a base, and although Bohm described the whole as being dynamic and in constant motion in most of his writings, in his later years he began to describe time as occurring within timelessness. In hindsight it appears that Bohm didn’t focus enough on the timeless nature of patterns. He didn’t recognize consciously enough that ordinary patterns reveal the implicate order, although in Bohm’s analogies you find the same type of examples that I use to explain the transition from grouping to symmetry order. One of Bohm’s favorite analogies spawned from a scientific program he’d seen on a television show. The program featured a small scientific wonder, where an insoluble drop of dark ink in one process disappears uniformly into a glycerin, then in the opposite process the drop reappears.

About the time I was looking into these questions, a BBC science program showed a device that illustrates these things very well. It consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again. The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded again by the reverse turning.

Of course we can accomplish this same transformation less dramatically with any container filled with water and oil, and simply shake the container until the two liquids mix together evenly. Then at rest electrostatic cohesion and gravity will rather quickly re-separate the liquids into two pure groups. What these analogies of mixing and separation attempt to convey is that material form can integrate and disappear into a whole. This suggests an equivalency between matter and that invisible background, a background which we know simply to be space. All the empty space in the universe, which we naturally assume to be less than the physical matter we are able to interact with, is actually more full of content than the surface of form we see due to light waves. What we imagine to be empty space contains the whole of everything. It is a considerably different way of looking at the world, but the message is that matter is constantly unfolding out of and refolding into a larger balanced whole. Bohm writes:

Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I'm proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of space, which is its ground.

In the book, The Holographic Universe the writer Michael Talbot integrated Bohm’s vision of two kinds of order with the work of Karl Pribram, a famed neurophysiologist who also became interested in holographic photography as a means of explaining the mysteries of human memory. Talbot also suggests the whole universe is a hologram. He writes: 

Just as every portion of the hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of your left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, every dust mote…

Unfortunately, the mainstream of other scientists didn’t catch on to Bohm’s vision of two kinds of order, and he struggled with despair and depression at not being able to convince the scientific community of the scientific value of an enfolded order, a struggle I inherited. Without knowing I was dramatically influenced, I encountered Bohm’s concept of implicate order many years before I discovered and learned to present my own system of seeing the same thing, the same principles, the same process in nature. Then rediscovering and studying Bohm’s work in greater detail, I now realize my practical grouping order and symmetry order concepts are simply an extension of Bohm’s concepts. I now believe the only reason Bohm’s visionary accomplishments were kept from having greater impact is that he was led more to challenge how quantum mechanics was being interpreted in his day rather than led to explore how the terms order and disorder are defined, as well as the second law’s usage of the terms order and disorder. Also I think he tried to convince the wrong audience. Judging from my own experiences I am sure it would have taken years for even a fully convincing challenge to sink in to the sometimes dull collective mind of science, which grounded in the present dry paradigm tends to shy away from profound concepts altogether.

Both the Irish poet William Yeats, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson who received a Nobel in literature in 1927, wrote of two fundamental orders at work in the evolutionary process of the universe. Although the nature of the orders was not described as clearly as Bohm managed with his implicate and explicate concepts, both men recognized the exclusive quality of the two orders more clearly than Bohm. In his book entitled Creative Evolution Bergson writes:

The two orders are not organized into a linear hierarchy or a graduated spectrum in which one is on the top, the other beneath it, and absolute 'disorder' constituting a third alternative, at the very bottom of the hierarchy - 'one nature in graded powers', to use Plotinus's words. Instead, the 'absence of one of the two orders, consists in the presence of the other'. 

Obviously Bergson somehow recognized how any decrease in the measure of one type of order, increases the order of the other type. This can be recognized if we consider a breakdown in the purity of each order. Suppose we switch two oppositely colored squares on a checkerboard. The inconsistency in the symmetrical arrangement stands out like a beacon. The rhythmic order of symmetrical pattern has been broken. The symmetry order is clearly diminished. And yet the fusing of three colored squares into one larger block is an increase in a type of order. Grouping order has increased. The greater measure of symmetry order isn’t suddenly destroyed, we are only one step away from an unbroken perfect lattice, it is merely diminished.