When we study the evolution of human learning through pairs of words such as esoteric and exoteric, implicit and explicit, involve and evolve, and unconscious and conscious, we see that humans have long been aware of the existence of a world beyond and beneath superficial appearances.

In 1980, David Bohm explicitly brought this hidden world into science in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, reminding us that a theory is a form of insight. By doing so, he implicitly used the Cosmic Equation to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which he said should really be called ‘quantum non-mechanics’.

For, as Bohm pointed out in the final chapter of this seminal book, there is a dual relationship between these two fundamental theories of physics, with the theory of relativity having the attributes of continuity, causality, and locality, and quantum effects demonstrating the characteristics of noncontinuity, noncausality, and nonlocality.

Bohm used the metaphor of a fish swimming in a tank with two television cameras filming it to show how relativity and quantum theories could be unified. The television screens would then display opposite characteristics of a single, underlying reality, as the Implicate Order, illustrated here:

Inspired by the process philosophies of Heraclitus and A. N. Whitehead, Bohm also used the metaphor of an undivided flowing stream, which he called the holomovement, to illustrate the relationship of the implicate and explicate orders. As he said, “On this stream, one may see an everchanging pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”

In Panosophy, this one-dimensional Holoflux flows into the multidimensional Ocean of Consciousness, where waves and currents on and below the surface, are inseparable from the Ocean, viewed as a Hyperball, with infinite diameter. At the centre of this vast Ocean lies the Divine Origin of the Universe, which brings everything into existence through the creative power of Life in a wonderful playful dance, called Leelā or Līlā in Sanskrit. We can thus why see the entire world of form is called māyā in Sanskrit, as abstractions from Consciousness, usually translated as ‘deception, illusion, or appearance’.