Theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917–1992) came to my attention when I learned of his twenty‑five‑year collaboration with the spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Though they came from different worlds, they arrived at the same insight: that our suffering comes from inner fragmentation, and healing begins when we sense the underlying wholeness of life.
You’d think Bohm would be more widely known, given he was admired by figures such as Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the Dalai Lama. He was even nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1958. And some of his early ideas are now being picked up again in fields ranging from computing to neuroscience.
Yet much of the scientific community chose to ignore or reject him. It wasn’t that his work was disproved, but that he challenged the prevailing scientific framework and stepped beyond accepted boundaries. At the time, many scientists assumed the universe was fixed and fully knowable, rather than something deeper, creative, and unfolding.
He also struggled with his mental health, and many of his peers saw this as a weakness in character. But his difficulties aren’t surprising when you consider the constant pressures he lived under — childhood trauma, political persecution, exile from the United States, professional marginalisation, and decades of feeling intellectually isolated.
Early Life and Academic Promise
Bohm’s interest in space and his escape into imagined better worlds began when he was young, likely as a way to cope with the realities of his childhood. His mother suffered from depression and bouts of psychosis, and his father was cold and dismissive, often treating her harshly. Later in life Bohm spoke of feeling “broken up inside.” This early suffering became one of the forces behind his lifelong quest to create a better world.
There was more to his early experience that led him to carry the world’s problems on his shoulders. Growing up in the mining town of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, he watched his community fall into poverty during the Depression, then decline further as coal was replaced by oil. The troubled history of his Jewish ancestry also deepened his sense of the world’s injustices.
All of this fed his passion for learning and creating. He poured himself into a wide range of interests: reading and writing, with his first interests in science fiction, and into small inventions, sketching out simple machines, electrical gadgets, homemade circuits, and imagined technologies that showed how restless and far‑reaching his curiosity already was.
Despite his father’s dismissal of these interests as impractical, it was his father who paid his tuition at Pennsylvania State College. In the 1930s physics was still a marginal subject in the United States, and the university’s focus was mostly on practical fields such as agriculture and engineering. Because of this Bohm had the freedom to pursue independent study. His intensity and originality soon stood out, and this path eventually led him to graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he came under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. His work was beginning to attract attention, and people around him felt he was on the verge of making significant contributions.
Political Pressure and Exile
However, his productivity was significantly curtailed by career challenges that began in his early thirties. Oppenheimer, who was his mentor, distanced himself as Bohm’s work began to question established assumptions in physics. Under growing political pressure, Oppenheimer feared for his own position, and his withdrawal left Bohm feeling abandoned. In time, Bohm became depressed and contemplated suicide.
Soon after, Bohm became entangled in the McCarthy investigations. He was arrested, put on trial and after refusing to testify against colleagues, effectively exiled from the United States. The loss of his home, community, and professional standing was abrupt and devastating. In Brazil he struggled with isolation and financial insecurity. When he later moved to Israel, he met Saral who helped him find some stability. Yet he continued to face professional marginalisation there, and later in England.
Collaboration with Krishnamurti
Bohm first encountered Krishnamurti when he was forty‑two. Saral, now his wife, had found one of Krishnamurti’s books in the library and, thinking it might interest him, brought it home. Bohm resonated deeply with Krishnamurti’s views on wholeness and unity.
A few months after discovering Krishnamurti’s work, Bohm met him at a talk in London. Both men believed that societal change begins with the individual. When the mind is caught in inner disturbance — confusion, pressure, and conflict — the world we create mirrors that. But when a person begins to understand the movement of their own mind and senses the deeper unity beneath it, their way of living naturally shifts.
Even though Bohm spoke of inner transformation, and perhaps hoped to experience the effortless sense of interconnectedness Krishnamurti described, he continued to struggle with his mental health during their many years of collaboration. Meeting Krishnamurti offered Bohm a bridge between science and the spiritual, giving him a sense that real change was possible. But Krishnamurti’s emphasis on inner transformation without outside guidance may have kept him from seeking help earlier.
Over the years pressures were building around him. His relationship with Saral had become strained, as she also struggled with her mental health. He was increasingly questioning Krishnamurti’s authenticity, sensing a divide between certain teachings and aspects of his personal life. And even though Krishnamurti rejected the role of a guru, many around him treated him as one and worked hard to preserve that image. Added to this were his growing concerns about the way the Krishnamurti schools and educational centres—institutions to which he had devoted years of his life—were being managed.
These concerns that he never aired publically, along with his inner turmoil, left him disillusioned. As Bohm became increasingly unwell, Krishnamurti stepped back from the relationship saying he ‘can’t have learnt anything’. This withdrawal hurt Bohm deeply and he fell into a further decline.
Final Years
The last fews years Bohm’s life says a great deal about him. Even as he suffered, he still achieved an incredible amount. In between periods of collapse and despair, he kept working, kept thinking, and kept reaching for coherence, even as his body and mood were failing him.
As Bohm’s condition worsened, he was hospitalised and treated with antidepressants. This involved experimenting with different combinations because of side effects. When he was well enough to be released, he began group sessions with a Freudian analyst. This stood against Krishnamurti’s teachings that psychological clarity arises from direct observation, not analysis.
Yet Bohm found the sessions helpful. They slowed his racing thoughts and opened new ways of thinking about consciousness. He tried to bring these insights into his own work, believing that shared thought shapes consciousness at the level of neurons. For him, dialogue wasn’t debate but a way to heal fragmentation. It is a space where collective attention can steady the mind and soften the patterns that keep people divided. This gave him a renewed sense of direction, and he soon set up his own dialogue groups, which continued long after his death.
During this time Bohm also spent periods with the Dalai Lama, who came to call him his “science guru.” Their conversations were fruitful, especially when they talked about the Big Bang theory, and Bohm became more open about his doubts. While not rejecting it outright, they felt that a single explosive beginning didn’t fit his sense of reality as something continuously unfolding.
But even with these moments of clarity, Bohm’s health, already fragile since the 1970s, deteriorated further. His energy was low, and he fell once again into severe depression, expressing doubts that his work had meant anything at all. He was admitted into psychiatric care again, where he underwent fourteen bilateral ECT treatments, which calmed him and led to his release.
Though Bohm was troubled by his loss of memory and ongoing lack of energy, there were still moments of real uplift before his death around a year later. He participated in dialogues with Western scientists and Native American elders who welcomed him with unusual warmth. They also treated him as a distinguished elder in his own right. Their way of seeing the world resonated with him. And this experience seemed to steady him at a time when he felt depleted and unsure of himself.
Bohm died of a heart attack in 1992, aged seventy‑four. His last words to Saral were, “You know, it’s tantalizing. I feel I’m on the edge of something.”
Legacy
In his dialogues with Krishnamurti about healing, Bohm spoke often about the brain, returning again and again to the idea that it becomes fragmented by trauma and conditioning. He also spoke of the mind–body connection, and could see how the trajectory of his life had shaped his mental and physical health. Yet he grappled with how little science could tell us about these impacts and also what to do about them. He turned the suffering that shaped him into a gift for the world, though at a huge personal cost, as he never found ways to ease it.
Today we know far more. Research shows that significant trauma can affect the whole body, dysregulating the nervous system and contributing to conditions such as depression and chronic illness when such experiences remain unresolved. We also know that healing often involves learning to regulate the nervous system, creating the conditions for the body and mind to recover. There are many books on healing that try to bridge science and spirituality, and speak to the sense of wholeness he spent his life seeking.
The very things Bohm struggled with now inform a wide range of fields. His ideas on fragmentation, and his insistence that thought and feeling are inseparable, sit at the centre of disciplines from trauma studies to body-based therapies. Practices that might have supported his own healing had he lived to see them. As researchers across physics and neuroscience continue to explore the questions he dedicated his life to, his work is quietly finding its place.