F. David Peat’s Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind and the Implicate Order

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The Physicist Who Built Jung’s Bridge

F. David Peat (1938-2017) was a theoretical physicist, author, and intellectual polymath who spent the last three decades of his life building the conceptual bridge that Jung had sketched and Pauli had endorsed: the bridge between mind and matter, between physics and meaning, between the measurable world of science and the felt world of human experience.

Peat was not a fringe figure. He held a PhD in physics from Queen’s University, Ontario, and spent years at the National Research Council of Canada working on quantum theory, nuclear physics, and the foundations of mathematics. He published in mainstream physics journals. He was taken seriously by serious physicists.

What made Peat unusual was his willingness to follow the implications of physics to their radical conclusions — conclusions that most physicists prefer to leave in the realm of “philosophical interpretation” rather than confront directly. And the most radical conclusion, the one that organized his life’s work, was this: the division between mind and matter is not fundamental. It is a surface phenomenon, an artifact of the way we have chosen to divide reality into categories. At the deeper level — the level that David Bohm called the implicate order — mind and matter are aspects of one undivided flowing movement.

Synchronicity, in Peat’s framework, is what happens when the implicate order becomes briefly visible — when the seam between mind and matter parts, and the underlying unity shows through.

David Bohm’s Implicate Order: The Physics That Makes Synchronicity Possible

To understand Peat’s contribution, you must first understand the physics of David Bohm — because Peat’s synchronicity theory is built on Bohm’s ontology.

David Bohm (1917-1992) was one of the most original and controversial physicists of the twentieth century. A student of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, Bohm made significant contributions to plasma physics, quantum theory, and neurophysiology. His 1951 textbook “Quantum Theory” was considered one of the finest expositions of the Copenhagen interpretation — which makes it remarkable that Bohm himself found the Copenhagen interpretation deeply unsatisfying and spent the rest of his life developing an alternative.

The alternative was the implicate order. Bohm’s key insight, developed through decades of work culminating in “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” (1980), was that the reality we perceive — the world of separate objects, discrete events, and causal chains — is not fundamental. It is an unfolding, or explication, of a deeper level of reality in which everything is enfolded, or implicated, in everything else.

The explicate order is the surface level of reality — the world as it appears to our senses and our instruments. In the explicate order, things are separate, localized, and connected by causal chains. A billiard ball strikes another billiard ball and transfers momentum. A neuron fires and triggers a cascade of downstream neurons. Events are discrete, sequential, and mechanistic.

The implicate order is the deeper level from which the explicate order unfolds. In the implicate order, everything is enfolded in everything else. Separation is an illusion of the explicate level. Location is an illusion of the explicate level. Even time — the sequential ordering of events — is an illusion of the explicate level. In the implicate order, the entire universe is present in every point, just as the entire hologram is present in every fragment of the holographic plate.

Bohm’s favorite analogy was the ink-drop experiment. Imagine a cylinder of glycerine (a viscous fluid) with a smaller cylinder inside it, the gap between them filled with glycerine. Drop a spot of ink into the glycerine and rotate the inner cylinder slowly. The ink drop stretches out into a thin thread that eventually becomes invisible — it is enfolded into the glycerine. Now rotate the cylinder in the reverse direction. The ink thread contracts, and the spot of ink re-forms — it is unfolded back into visibility.

The ink spot in its visible form is an explicate order phenomenon. The invisible thread is the implicate order — the same information, enfolded into a form that is not perceptible at the surface level but is fully present in the medium.

Now imagine multiple ink drops, each added at a different stage of rotation, so that when you reverse the rotation, the drops unfold in sequence — appearing to move through the glycerine like a particle. But there is no particle. There is no movement. There is only the sequential unfolding of enfolded information. The appearance of a moving object is an artifact of the explicate order; the reality is a pattern in the implicate order.

Bohm proposed that all of physical reality works this way. Particles, forces, fields, spacetime itself — these are not fundamental entities. They are explicate-order phenomena — the visible surface of a deeper implicate order in which information is non-locally enfolded and from which it continuously unfolds into the appearance of a physical world.

Peat’s Synthesis: Synchronicity as Eruption of the Implicate Order

Peat’s 1987 book “Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind” took Bohm’s physics and applied it directly to Jung’s synchronicity. The result was the most physically grounded theory of synchronicity ever proposed.

Peat’s central argument:

1. Mind and matter are both explicate-order manifestations of the same implicate-order reality. What we call “consciousness” (subjective experience, thoughts, feelings, dreams) and what we call “matter” (physical objects, energy, forces) are not two different substances. They are two different modes of unfolding from the same implicate source. They appear separate at the explicate level, but they are identical at the implicate level — just as the visible ink spot and the invisible thread are the same ink.

2. Synchronicity occurs when the implicate order unfolds simultaneously into both mind and matter. A synchronistic event is not a causal connection between a psychic event and a physical event. It is a single event in the implicate order that unfolds into two explicate-order manifestations: one psychic (a dream, a thought, a feeling) and one physical (an external occurrence). The meaningful connection between the two is not accidental — they are the same event, appearing in two different domains.

3. Meaning is a feature of the implicate order, not a human projection. In the materialist worldview, meaning is something that human minds impose on a meaningless physical universe. In Peat’s framework, meaning is inherent in the implicate order — it is the organizing principle that determines how the implicate order unfolds into the explicate order. The patterns we call “archetypes” (in psychology) and “laws of nature” (in physics) are both expressions of the meaning-structure of the implicate order.

4. Synchronicity reveals the implicate order directly. Most of the time, the implicate order is hidden — its unfoldings into mind and matter appear separate and unrelated. But under certain conditions — psychological intensity, transitional states, moments of deep engagement — the implicate order’s unity becomes visible at the surface level. Inner and outer events align meaningfully, and the seam between mind and matter temporarily opens. This is synchronicity: a window into the implicate order.

The Holomovement: Reality as a Flowing Hologram

Bohm’s ultimate term for the implicate order in motion was the holomovement — the undivided flowing wholeness that underlies all of reality. The word combines “hologram” (every part contains the whole) with “movement” (reality is not a static structure but a dynamic process).

Peat took the holomovement concept and showed how it provides a mechanism for every aspect of synchronicity that Jung described:

Non-locality. In the implicate order, everything is enfolded in everything else. There is no separation by distance. This explains how a psychic event (a dream in Zürich) can correspond to a physical event (a beetle flying to a window) without any causal signal traveling between them. They are not separated in the implicate order, even though they appear separated in the explicate order.

Acausality. In the implicate order, events are not connected by causal chains. They are expressions of a single underlying pattern. The dream and the beetle are not cause and effect — they are co-expressions. This is precisely Jung’s definition of synchronicity: acausal meaningful connection.

Archetypal ordering. The “meaning” that organizes synchronistic events corresponds to what Bohm called the “super-implicate order” — a higher level of enfoldment that organizes the patterns of the implicate order, just as a computer program organizes the pattern of pixels on a screen. Jung’s archetypes, in Peat’s framework, are structures in the super-implicate order that determine how the implicate order unfolds into explicate-level events.

The role of consciousness. Consciousness, in this framework, is not a passive observer of the explicate order. It is an active participant in the holomovement — a mode of the implicate order that can perceive its own depth. When consciousness turns inward (in meditation, dreaming, or intense psychological engagement), it accesses levels of the implicate order that are normally hidden. Synchronistic events are moments when this deeper access manifests at the surface level — when the consciousness-mode and the matter-mode of the implicate order align visibly.

Peat and Bohm: The Personal Connection

Peat’s relationship with Bohm was not merely academic. They were close collaborators and friends for over two decades. Their 1987 co-authored book “Science, Order, and Creativity” explored the relationship between scientific discovery and artistic creation, arguing that both arise from the same deep order — what Bohm called “generative order” — that underlies both mind and matter.

Peat described conversations with Bohm that lasted for days, in which they explored the implications of the implicate order for consciousness, meaning, and the nature of reality. These conversations convinced Peat that Bohm’s physics was not merely a reinterpretation of quantum mechanics but a fundamentally new ontology — a new picture of what reality is — with implications that extended far beyond physics.

One implication was for language itself. Both Bohm and Peat argued that the subject-verb-object structure of Indo-European languages enforces a fragmented view of reality — a view in which subjects act on objects through forces, creating the illusion of separate entities connected by causal chains. Bohm proposed a new mode of language, the “rheomode” (from the Greek rheo, “to flow”), in which verbs are primary and nouns are secondary — reflecting the holomovement’s nature as flowing process rather than static structure. This linguistic work parallels the indigenous understanding of many Algonquian languages, which are verb-based and process-oriented, encoding the world as a flowing network of relationships rather than a collection of separate things.

The Generative Order: Where Creativity and Synchronicity Meet

One of Peat’s most original contributions was his identification of synchronicity as a creative phenomenon — an expression of the same generative order that produces art, music, mathematical insight, and scientific discovery.

The generative order, as Bohm and Peat defined it, is a level of order that does not merely arrange existing elements but creates new forms. It is the order of growth, development, and emergence — the order by which an acorn generates an oak, by which a musical theme generates a symphony, by which a mathematical axiom generates a theory.

Synchronicity, Peat argued, is a manifestation of the generative order operating across the mind-matter boundary. When a synchronistic event occurs, something new is created — a new meaning, a new connection, a new understanding — that did not exist before. The dream-scarab and the physical-scarab, considered separately, are unremarkable. Considered together, they generate a new meaning — a meaning that transforms the patient’s psychological situation and opens new possibilities for healing.

This creative dimension is what distinguishes synchronicity from mere coincidence. A coincidence is a conjunction of existing events. A synchronicity is a generative event — it creates a meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not a repetition of known patterns but an emergence of something genuinely new.

In engineering terms: coincidence is like finding two matching puzzle pieces. Synchronicity is like the puzzle pieces assembling themselves into a picture you have never seen before.

The Alchemical Connection: Transformation Through Synchronicity

Peat, like Jung, recognized that alchemy was not primitive chemistry but a sophisticated system for working with the implicate order. The alchemical opus — the Great Work of transforming base matter into gold — was, psychologically, the work of transforming unconscious contents into conscious awareness. And physically, it was the work of engaging with the implicate order through ritual, intention, and attention to meaningful correspondences.

Peat drew attention to a key alchemical principle: solve et coagula — dissolve and coagulate. The first phase (solve) involves dissolving the existing structure — breaking down the rigid patterns of the explicate order to access the fluid potential of the implicate order. The second phase (coagula) involves allowing a new structure to crystallize from this fluid potential — a structure that is more integrated, more complex, more alive than what it replaced.

Synchronicity follows the same pattern. It typically occurs during phases of dissolution — psychological crises, transitions, breakdowns of old structures. The rigid patterns of the ego’s explicate-order worldview dissolve, exposing the fluid potential of the implicate order. From this fluid potential, synchronistic events emerge — new meaningful connections that reorganize the person’s understanding of their situation and catalyze the formation of a new, more integrated structure.

This is why synchronicities are not just intellectually interesting. They are transformative. They are not just observations about reality. They are interventions in reality — eruptions of the implicate order into the explicate order that restructure both mind and matter simultaneously.

Peat’s Later Work: The Blackfoot Physics

In his 1994 book “Blackfoot Physics: An Exploration of the Native American Universe,” Peat took his synthesis to its most radical conclusion. Living with the Blackfoot people of Alberta, Canada, Peat discovered that indigenous science — the knowledge system that has sustained Native American cultures for millennia — is based on precisely the ontology that Bohm’s physics describes.

The Blackfoot worldview is process-based, not object-based. Reality is a web of relationships, not a collection of things. Events are connected by meaning, not just by causality. The natural world is alive, conscious, and communicative. And the human task is not to dominate nature but to participate in its flowing order — to live in alignment with what Bohm called the holomovement.

Peat found that Blackfoot ceremonial practices — the sweat lodge, the sun dance, the vision quest, the medicine wheel — are technologies for engaging with the implicate order. They dissolve the rigid structures of everyday consciousness (solve), open the participant to the deeper reality where mind and matter are not separated, and allow new patterns to emerge (coagula) that integrate the individual with the larger order.

This is not a romanticization of indigenous culture. It is a recognition that indigenous science and Bohmian physics are describing the same reality from different angles — just as Jung and Pauli described the same reality from different angles. The bridge between matter and mind that Peat sought to build was not a new construction. It was a reconstruction of a bridge that indigenous peoples never destroyed — a bridge that Western civilization demolished four centuries ago in the name of a mechanistic worldview that has now been undermined by its own physics.

The Legacy: Why Peat Matters Now

Peat died in 2017 in the Italian village of Pari, where he had founded the Pari Center for New Learning — a small institute dedicated to exploring the dialogue between science, consciousness, and culture. He left behind over twenty books and a body of work that remains largely unknown outside the interdisciplinary community that straddles physics, psychology, and indigenous knowledge.

His obscurity is not accidental. Peat’s work challenges the two most powerful intellectual establishments of the Western world: the scientific establishment (by insisting that consciousness is not reducible to brain activity) and the New Age establishment (by insisting on rigorous physics rather than vague spirituality). He satisfied neither tribe, which is usually a sign that a thinker is onto something important.

The core of Peat’s legacy is this: he demonstrated, with physical rigor and conceptual clarity, that synchronicity is not a mystical curiosity but a natural phenomenon with a specific physical basis in the implicate order. He showed that the bridge between matter and mind is not a gap to be bridged but a unity to be recognized — that mind and matter were never separated except in our conceptual models.

And he showed that the indigenous worldview — the worldview that perceives reality as alive, meaningful, and interconnected — is not a primitive precursor to science but a sophisticated engagement with the same deep order that Bohm’s physics describes. The shaman and the physicist are studying the same implicate order. They are using different instruments. They are arriving at the same conclusion.

The bridge between matter and mind is not a bridge at all. It is the ground you are standing on. You have been on it your entire life. You just did not have the conceptual framework to recognize it.

Peat provided that framework. The question now is whether Western civilization has the courage to walk where its own physics leads.