David Boehm, physicist, suggests that behind the scenes in everyday life, probalities that potential acts (including potential thought acts) will occur are very real (tantamount to a ‘force’). In light of this, it is useful to imagine multiple potential thought acts, with varying degrees of potency, ‘virtually’ duking it out from moment to moment, victors crossing a threshold from potential to real.

Interestingly we are often aware of being ambivalent or ‘of two minds’. We are often surprised by what comes out of our mouth (speech acts). The complexity of our own experience is now better understood as we appreciate the ‘reality’ of two (or more) potential thoughts (or lines of thought) in play with only ’victorious’ thoughts eventually manifesting as real thoughts.

Those of you who would like to explore the work of Boehm might start with ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order‘. Boehm’s good friend Paavo Pylkkanen has just published a nice discussion of his theories with numerous references to contemporary science, see Mind Matter and the Implicate Order.