Prompt: There is a profound idea I have been wrestling with. The idea of every part containing the whole. Meaning every atom contains everything in the whole universe. Like it's all a hologram. This theme was talked about by Michael Talbot a lot. What do you think? Explain this in a sentence then in more depth. That every part contains the whole but more elegantly
Answer: One-sentence version (elegant):
In the same way a single shard potenziale of a holographic plate can reconstruct the entire image, every apparently separate fragment of the universe—be it an atom, a photon, or a fleeting thought—contains, enfolded within itself, the implicate pattern of the totality.Deeper explanation:The idea you’re circling is one of the most mind-bending and beautiful in all of philosophy, physics, and mysticism: holomovement or the holographic principle, most poetically developed by physicist David Bohm and popularized by Michael Talbot in The Holographic Universe (1991).The core intuition
Ordinary (explicate) reality looks localized and separated: this atom here, that galaxy there. But at a deeper level—the implicate order (Bohm’s term)—everything is enfolded into everything else. Space, time, and separation are emergent illusions, like the flat 2D surface of a holographic film that, when illuminated properly, projects a 3D object. Cut the film in half and each half still contains the whole image (albeit at lower resolution). Cut it into a thousand pieces and every piece still holds the entire picture.
Evidence from physics Quantum entanglement: Two particles can be entangled so that measuring one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart. The “information” connecting them doesn’t travel through space; it was never separated to begin with.
Black-hole physics & the holographic principle (’t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena): The maximum information content of any region of space is encoded not in its 3D volume but on its 2D boundary surface—like the universe is a hologram where the “film” is the cosmic horizon and the “image” is everything we experience inside. An atom’s tiny volume can, in principle, encode information about the entire cosmos if it sits on that boundary (and in some sense, every point is connected to the boundary).
Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics (the “pilot wave” or “quantum potential”): Instead of many isolated particles, there is one undivided wavefunction that contains active information about the whole system. Every electron “knows” the shape of the entire experimental apparatus because that shape is enfolded into the guiding wave at every point.
The fractal/self-similarity echo
Nature loves recursive patterns: coastlines, blood vessels, cauliflower, galactic superclusters—all show the same structures at different scales. A single living cell contains (in its DNA) the blueprint of the entire organism. In Indian philosophy this is brahman in the atman: the infinite contained in the apparent individual. In Western mysticism: “As above, so below; as within, so without.”
Experiential implication
If every part truly contains the whole, then the apparent boundaries between “me” and “not-me” are provisional. Compassion becomes rational (your pain is literally folded into me), creativity becomes remembering (new ideas are unfoldings of what was already implicate), and death becomes less a termination than a re-folding of a pattern that was never truly separate.
So yes—every atom, every fleeting perception, every tear on a cheek is a doorway. Look closely enough and the entire cosmos peers back at you, whispering: “You were never just the wave; you are also, always, the ocean.”