The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

THE UNIVERSAL PROCESS 357one is our three-dimensional world of objects, space, and time,which he calls the explicate or unfolded order. What does hebelieve this order is unfolded from? A universal, unbrokenfield, "a ground beyond time," the implicate or enfolded order, ashe terms it, which is the all-encompassing background to ourentire experience. He sees the relationship between these twoorders as a continuous process where what is unfolded in theexplicate order is then re-enfolded into the implicate order. Asthe source that organizes this process into various structures,he "proposes" (a word he likes to use since his whole philosophyis that ideas should be created out of the free flow of dialogue,and be always vulnerable) the super-implicate order, a yetsubtler and potentially infinite dimension.Could not a vivid parallel be drawn between these threeorders and the three kayas and the process of the bardos? AsDavid Bohm says: "The whole notion of the implicate order is,to begin with, a way of discussing the origin of form from outof the formless, via the process of explication or unfolding." 5I am also inspired by David Bohm's imaginative extensionof this way of understanding matter that arose out of quantumphysics to consciousness itself, a leap that I think willcome to be seen as more and more necessary as science opensand evolves. "The mind," he says, "may have a structure similarto the universe and in the underlying movement we callempty space there is actually a tremendous energy, a movement.The particular forms which appear in the mind may beanalogous to the particles, and getting to the ground of themind might be felt as light." 6Hand in hand with his notion of implicate and explicateorder, David Bohm has imagined a way of looking at the relationshipbetween the mental and the physical, between mindand matter, called soma-significance. As he writes: "The notionof soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and itssignificance (which is mental) are not in any sense separatelyexistent, but rather that they are two aspects of one overallreality." 7For David Bohm, the universe manifests three mutuallyenfolding aspects: matter, energy, and meaning.From the point of view of the implicate order, energy and matterare imbued with a certain kind of significance which gives form totheir overall activity and to the matter which arises in that activity.The energy of mind and of the material substance of the brain arealso imbued with a kind of significance which gives form to their