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Emptiness And Creation
In a talk, ‘The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics’, given at a conference organized by the Center for Process Studies, David Bohm made the following comments:
“In other words, the energy in empty space is immensely greater than the energy of matter as we know it. Therefore, matter in itself is a kind of ripple in empty space. Matter is a relatively stable and autonomous ripple in the emptiness. Those of you who have studied the theory of solid states may not find this notion of emptiness entirely unfamiliar. For example, in a crystal of very dense material at absolute zero, if the crystal is of perfect order, electrons go right through it as if nothing were there. The suggestion is then that emptiness is really the essence. It contains implicitly all the forms of matter. The implicate order really refers to something immensely beyond matter as we know it — beyond space and time. However, somehow the order of time and space are built in this vacuum.”
This insight has a close resonance with the well-known passage from the Heart Sutra:
Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.
The Buddhist practitioner and translator Karl Brunnhȍlzl says of this in his excellent book The Heart Attack Sutra:
