Most Remarkable Event.
Universe a Phantasm?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris, a
research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to
be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not
hear it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading
scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though
there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic
particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with
each other regardless of the distance separating them.
It doesn't matter whether they are ten feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The
problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long held tenet that
no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling
faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier,
this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with
elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's
findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its
apparent solidity the Universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and
splendidly detailed hologram!
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first
understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional
photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to
be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second
laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting
interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is
captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless
swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is
illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original
object appears! The three dimensionality of such images is not the only
remarkable characteristic of holograms.
If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each
half will still be found to contain the entire image of a rose. Indeed if
the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to
contain a smaller but intact version of the original image.
Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the
information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a
hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization
and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the
bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog
or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram
teaches us that some things in the Universe may not lend themselves to this
approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we
will not get the pieces of which it is made; we will only get smaller
wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's
discovery.
Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remaining contact
with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because
they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because
their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of
reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually
extensions of the same fundamental something. To enable people to better
visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to
see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains
comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and
the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors,
you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities.
After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the
images will be slightly different.
But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware
that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other
also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn, when one faces the
front the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the
full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the
case. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic
particles in Aspect's experiment.
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between
subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of
reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is
analogous to the aquarium.
And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from
one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such
particles are not separate "parts," but facets of a deeper and more
underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the
previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is
comprised of those "eidolons" the Universe is itself a projection, a
hologram. In addition to the phantom like nature, such a Universe would
possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of
subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality
al things in the Universe are infinitely interconnected.
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the
subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that
beats and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates
everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole
and subdivide, the various phenomena of the Universe, all apportionments are
of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic Universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as
fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in
which nothing is truly separate from everything else, time and
three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors,
would also have to be viewed as projections of this higher order. At its
deeper level reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present
and future all exist simultaneously.
This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to
someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out
scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the superhologram contains is
an open-ended question??? Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the
superhologram is the Matrix that has given birth to everything else in the
Universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has
been or ever will be - every configuration of matter and energy that is
possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays.
It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." Although
Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in
the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume
it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic
level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further
development."
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the Universe is
a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford
neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic
nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle
of how and where memories are stored in the brain.
For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a
specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. In a series
of landmark experiments in the 1920's brain scientist Karl Lashley found
that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to
eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to
surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a
mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of
memory storage.
Then in the 1960's Pribram encountered the concept of holography and
realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for.
Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of
neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire area
of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribam
believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how
the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been
estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the
order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime
(or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the
Encyclopedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information
storage - simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a
piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images
on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of
film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information! Our uncanny ability
to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of
our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to
holographic principles.
If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word
"zebra," you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and
cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead associations like
"striped, "horse like" and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head
instantly. Indeed one of the most amazing things about the human thinking
process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-correlated
with every other piece of information - another feature intrinsic to the
hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected
with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a
cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes
more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another
is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it
receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies and so on)
into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best.
Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to
convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image.
Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic
principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the
senses into the inner-world of our perception. An impressive body of
evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its
operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among
neurophysiologist.
Argentinean-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also
developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to
reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.
Pribam's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by
relying on input from frequency domain has also received a good deal of
experimental support.
It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader
range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have
discovered, for instance that our visual systems are sensitive to sound
frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now
called "cosmic frequencies," and that even the cells in our bodies are
sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is
only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are
sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
The most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is
what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the
concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is there is
actually a holographic blur of frequencies and if the brain is also a
hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and
mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of
objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist.
As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya,
an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through
a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers"
floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency and what we extract from
this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many
extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality,
the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the
Holographic Paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with
skepticism, it has galvanized others.
A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate
model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some
believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable
by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous
researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many
para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the
holographic paradigm.
In a Universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions
of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely connected, telepathy
may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much
easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual
"A" to that of individual "B" at a far distance point and helps to
understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology.
In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for
understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals
during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting
research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one
female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of
a female of the species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her
hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it
felt like to be encapsulated in such a form, but also noted that the portion
of the male of the specie's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the
side of its head.
What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior
knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed
that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the had to indeed play
an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was
not unique.
During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients
regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary
tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the
movie 'Altered States'). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently
contained obscure zoological details, which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological
phenomena Grof encountered.
He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or
racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave
detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from
Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave
persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the
future, of regression into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found that the same range of phenomena manifested in
therapy sessions, which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common
element in such experiences appeared to be transcending of an individual's
consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space
and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences," and
in the late 1960s he helped found a branch of psychology called
"transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology
garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become
a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof nor any of his
colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre
psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the
advent of the holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is
actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to
every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism,
and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is
able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal
experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so called hard sciences,
like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has
pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic
illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces
consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of
the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as
physical. Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has
caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the
healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm.
If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic
projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more
responsible for our health than the current medical wisdom allows. What we
now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes
in consciousness that in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may
work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are
ultimately as real as "reality."
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality becomes
explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book, 'Gifts Of Unknown
Things,' biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian
shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire
grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air! Watson relates that as he and
another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the
trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in
succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such
events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only
a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there"
because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the
level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely
inter-connected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the
holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's
are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the
beliefs that would make them so.
In a holographic Universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can
alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is not only a
canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is
possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the
phantasmagorical events experienced by Casteneda during his encounters with
the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less
miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in
our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become
suspect, for in a holographic Universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even
random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and
therefore determined.
Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and
everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most
haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry. Whether Bohm and
Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an
ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already
had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. Even if it is found
that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the
instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between
subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Bail Hiley, a physicist
at Birbeck College in London. Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be
prepared to consider radically new views of reality."
Ronald Landry (webhawks@bellsouth.net)
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