
Michael Talbot's Talks on Youtube |
"The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot |
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Michael Talbot's (non-fiction) books include Mysticism And The New Physics, Beyond The Quantum, and (arguably his most notable work) The Holographic Universe.
In The
Holographic
Universe, Talbot made many references to the work
of David
Bohm and Karl H. Pribram, and
it is quite apparent that the combined work of Bohm and Pribram is
largely the cornerstone upon which Talbot built his ideas. Michael
Talbot attempted to use the holographic perspective to explain
paranormal
activity and extrasensory perception.
Talbot also ties in elements of Carl Jung's "collective unconscious"
theory, as well as the synchronicity
phenomenon, to suggest the existence of an underlying unified field
that ties all things in the universe together.
Talbot also often referenced Stanislav Grof, whose
work on Holotropic Breathwork
was also of obvious influence.
It is said that Talbot has made the often esoteric
concepts of Bohm,
Pribram, et al, accessible to the general public.
This may be in some part due to his earlier work as a science
fiction author.
Talbot attempted to incorporate psychology, anthropology,
spirituality, religion, and science to shed light on truly profound
questions that we have struggled with since the genesis of humanity.
Early death
Michael Talbot
died in 1992 from Leukemia at the age of 38.
Whitley Strieber
refers to Michael Talbot as his "dear friend" on his website and praises him
in eulogy.
Bibliography, Novels
Non-Fiction
The basic idea came to Bohm in the early 1970s, during an extraordinary period of creativity at Birkbeck College in London. The holomovement is one of a number of new concepts which Bohm presented in an effort to move beyond the mechanistic formulations of the standard interpretation of the quantum theory and relativity theory. Along with such concepts as undivided wholeness and the implicate order, the holomovement is central to his formulation of a “new order” in physics which would move beyond the mechanistic order.
Early Development of the Idea
In an essay published in 1971, Bohm carried continued his earlier critique (in "Chance and Causality in Modern Physics") of the mechanistic assumptions behind most modern physics and biology, and spoke of the need for a fundamentally different approach, and for a point of view which would go beyond mechanism. In particular, Bohm objected to the assumption that the world can be reduced to a set of irreducible particles within a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, or even within the four-dimensional curvilinear space of relativity theory. Bohm came instead to embrace a concept of reality as a dynamic movement of the whole: “In this view, there is no ultimate set of separately existent entities, out of which all is supposed to be constituted. Rather, unbroken and undivided movement is taken as a primary notion” (Bohm, 1988, p. 77). He then goes on to paraphrases da Vinci to the effect that movement gives shape to all forms and structure gives order to movement, but adds modern insight when he suggests that “a deeper and more extensive inner movement creates, maintains, and ultimately dissolves structure.” (78).
In another article from the same period, “On the Metaphysics and Movement of Universal Fitting,” Bohm identifies some of the inadequacies of the mechanistic model, particularly the inability to predict the future movement of complex wholes from the initial conditions, and suggests instead a focus on a general laws of interaction governing the relationship of the parts within a whole: “What we are doing in this essay is to consider what it means to turn this prevailing metaphysics of science ‘upside down’ by exploring the notion that a kind of art—a movement of fitting together—is what is universal, both in nature and in human activities” (90). This movement of the whole is what he calls here the artomovement, which he defines as the “movement of fitting” (91), and which is clearly related to what he would later call the holomovement.
The term holomovement is one of many neologisms which Bohm coined in his search to overcome the limitations of the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. This approach involved not just a critique of the assumptions of the standard model, but a set of new concepts in physics which move beyond the conventional language of quantum mechanics. Wholeness and the Implicate Order is the culmination of these reflections, and an attempt to show how the new insights provided by a post-Copenhagen model can be extended beyond physics into other domains, such as life, consciousness, and cosmology.
The holomovement concept is introduced in incremental steps. It is first presented under the aspect of wholeness in the lead essay, called “Fragmentation and Wholeness.” There Bohm states the major claim of the book: “The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement” (Bohm, 1980, 11). This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow. He notes how “each relatively autonomous and stable structure is be understood not as something independently and permanently existent but rather as a product that has been formed in the whole flowing movement and what will ultimately dissolve back into this movement. How it forms and maintains itself, then, depends on its place function within the whole” (14). For Bohm, movement is what is primary; and what seem like permanent structures are only relatively autonomous sub-entities which emerge out of the whole of flowing movement and then dissolve back into it an unceasing process of becoming.
All is Flux (fluctuation, instability, change, alteration, modification, flow, fluidity, movement, motion, transition)
The general concept is further refined in the third chapter, “Reality and Knowledge considered as Process,” this time under the aspect of movement, or process. “Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process” (48). His notion of the whole is s not a static Paramedian oneness outside of space and time. Rather, the wholeness to which he refers here is more akin to the Heraclitian flux, or to the process philosophy of Whitehead.
Formal Presentation
The formal
presentation of the concept comes late in the book,
under the general framework of new notions of order is physics. After
discussing the concepts of undivided wholeness and the implicate and
explicate orders, he presents the formal definition under the
subheading “The Holomovement and its Aspects.”
Consistent with his own earlier Causal Interpretation, and more
generally with the de Broglie-Schroedinger approach, he posits that a
new kind of description would be appropriate for giving primary
relevance to the implicate order. Using the hologram as a model {link
to holographic universe], Bohm argues that the implicate order is
enfolded within a more generalized wave structure of the
universe-in-motion, or what he calls the holomovement:
To generalize so
as to emphasize undivided wholeness, we shall
say that what ‘carries’ an implicate order is the
holomovement, which is an unbroken and undivided totality. In certain
cases, we can abstract particular aspects of the holomovement (e.g.
light, electrons,
sound, etc.),
but more generally, all forms of the holomovement merge and are
inseparable. Thus in its totality, the holomovement is not limited in
any specifiable way at all. It is not required to conform to any
particular order, or to be bounded by any particular measure. Thus, the
holomovement is undefinable and immesasurable.” (151).
As the
interconnected totality of all there is, the
holomovement is of potentially an infinite order, and cannot be pinned
down to any one notion of order. It is important to note that
Bohm’s concepts of the implicate order and the holomovement
are significant departures from the earlier “Hidden
Variables” interpretation, and the conceptual framework is
somewhat different from that articulated in the Bohm-Vigier
interpretation, sometimes called the Causal-Stochastic Interpretation,
and the in interpretations of the proponents of “Bohmian
Mechanics [link],” where the general assumption is of an
underlying Dirac ether (see F. David Peat’s Introduction to
Quantum Implications). While the concept of the holomovement has been
criticized as being “metaphysical,”
it is really more subtle (finely woven), while at the same time
encompassing the whole range of interconnected physical phenomena.
The Law of the Holomovement: Holonomy
The starting point for Bohm’s articulation of what he means by a “new order in physics” is his notion of wholeness. Thus crucial for understanding the holomovement is his notion of how interconnected phenomena are woven together in an underlying unified fabric of physical law. In the following section, called “Law in the Holomovement,” he takes up the question of order, and the laws of organization which relate the parts to each other and to the whole. This is what he calls the “law of the whole,” or holonomy. Rather than starting with the parts and explaining the whole in terms of the parts, Bohm’s point of view is just the opposite: he starts with a notion of undivided wholeness and derives the parts as abstractions from the whole. The essential point is that the implicate order and the holomovement imply a way of looking at reality not merely in terms of external interactions between things, but in terms of the internal (enfolded) relationships among things: “The relationships constituting the fundamental law are between the enfolded structures that interweave and inter-penetrate each other, through the whole of space, rather than between the abstracted and separated forms that are manifest to the senses (and to our instruments)” (185).
In the final chapter of the book, “The enfolding-unfolding universe and consciousness,” Bohm elaborated further on the need for new notions of order of physics, and set forth a general view in which totalities are continually forming and dissolving out of the universal flux, or what he designates as the holomovement. He recapitulates: “Our basic proposal was that what is the holomovement, and that everything is to be explained in terms of forms derived from this holomovement. (178).” And again: “The implicate order has its ground in the holomovement which is, as we have seen, vast, rich, and in a state of unending flux of enfoldment and unfoldment, with laws most of which are only vaguely known (185). As such, the holomovement includes not just physical reality, but life, consciousness and cosmology. As Bohm sums it up at the end of the book: “Our overall approach has thus brought together questions of the nature of the cosmos, of matter in general, of life, and of consciousness. All of these have been considered to be projections of a common ground. This we may call the ground of all that is”.

Our reality is
projected illusion created by a consciousness 'program'. It is a
virtual reality experiment in linear time and emotion created by a
consciousness source through which our souls experience in many
dimensions simultaneously.
This is not
unlike the films 'The Matrix', 'The 13th Floor', the Holodeck in the TV
series Star Trek, among others.
The program is
composed of grids created by the source consciousness and brought into
awareness by electromagnetic energy at the physical level.
Awareness of the
program is created as one's consciousness spirals lower, hence slower,
to experience emotions and linear time.
The computer is
bi-polar, electromagnetic energies. Within the program, the goals of
the VR game is to maintain your balance while the program creates
dramas at ever turn.
The program had a
beginning and it has and end, as consciousness evolves in the alchemy
of time.
The program is
linked through a web, or grid matrixes and is based on the looping
patterns of consciousness called Sacred Geometry: http://www.crystalinks.com/computercreate.html
Michael Talbot was born in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, in 1953. He is the author of Mysticism and the New Physics,
Beyond the Quantum and Your Past Lives: AReincarnation Handbook, as
well as three novels. This book is written in 1991.
The new data are of such far-reaching relevance that they could
revolutionize our understanding of the human psyche, of
psychopathology, and of the therapeutic process. Some of the
observations transcend in their significance the framework of
psychology and psychiatry and represent a serious challenge to the
current Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of Westem science. They could
change drastically our image of human nature, of culture and history,
and of reality.
Dr. Stanislav Grof on holographic phenomena in The Adventure of Self-Discovery
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART 1: A REMARKABLE NEW VIEW OF REALITY
1 The Brain as Hologram 11
2 The Cosmos as Hologram 32
PART II: MIND AND BODY
3 The Holographic Model and Psychology 59
4 I Sing the Body Holographic 82
5 A Pocketful of Miracles 119
6 Seeing Holographically 162
PART III: SPACE AND TIME
7 Time Out of Mind 197
8 Traveling in the Superhologram 229
9 Return to the Dreamtime 286
Recall Bohm's assertion that there is no such thing as disorder, only orders of indefinitely high degree.
Writing is always a collaborative effort
and many people have contributed to the production of this book in
various ways. It is not possible to name them all, but a few who
deserve special mention include: David Bohm, Ph.D., and Karl Pribram,
Ph.D., who were generous with both their time and their ideas, and
without whose work this book would not have been written.
Barbara Brennan, M.S., Larry Dossey, M.D., Brenda Dunne, Ph.D.,
Elizabeth W. Fenske, Ph.D., Gordon Globus, Jim Gordon, Stanislav Grof,
M.D., Francine Rowland, M.D., Valerie Hunt, Ph.D., Robert Jahn, Ph.D.,
Ronald Wong Jue, Ph.D., Mary Orser, F. David Peat, Ph.D., Elizabeth
Rauscher, Ph.D., Beatrice Rich, Peter M. Rojcewicz, Ph.D.,
AbnerShimony, Ph.D., Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., T.M. Srinivasan, M.D.,
Whitley Strieber, Russell Targ, William A. Tiller, Ph.D., Montague
Ullman, M.D., Lyall Watson, Ph.D., Joel L. Whitton, M.D., Ph.D., Fred
Alan Wolf, Ph.D., and Richard Zarro, who were also all generous with
their time and ideas. Carol Ann Dryer, for her friendship, insight, and
support, and for unending generosity when it comes to sharing her
profound talent. Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., for hours of fascinating
conversation and for introducing me to the writings of Henry Corbin.
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., for taking the time to call me or drop me a
note whenever he came across any new leads on the holographic idea.
Terry Oleson, Ph.D., for his time and for kindly allowing me to use his
diagram of the "little man in the ear." Michael Grosso, Ph.D., for
thought-provoking conversation and for helping me track down several
obscure reference works on miracles. Brendan O'Regan of the Institute
of Noetic Sciences, for his important contributions to the subject of
miracles and for helping me track down information on the same.
My longtime friend Peter Brunjes, Ph.D., for using his university
connections to help me obtain several difficult-to-find reference works.
Judith Hooper, for loaning me numerous books and articles from her own
extensive collection of materials on the holographic idea.
Susan Cowles, M.S., of the Museum of Holography in New York for helping me search out illustrations for the book-
Kerry Brace, for sharing his thoughts on the holographic idea as it applies to Hindu thinking, and from whose writings
I have borrowed the idea of using the hologram of Princess Leia from the movie Star' Wars to open the book.
Marilyn Ferguson, the founder of the Brain/Mind Bulletin, who was one
of the first writers to recognize and write about the importance of the
holographic theory, and who also was generous with her time and
thought. The observant reader will notice that my summary of the view
of the universe that arises when one considers Bohm and Pribram's
conclusions in tandem, at the end of Chapter Two, is actually just a
slight rephrasing of the words Ferguson uses to summarize the same
sentiment in her bestselling book The Aquarian Conspiracy.
My inability to come up with a different and better way to summarize
the holographic idea should be viewed as a testament to Ferguson's
clarity and succinctness as a writer.
The staff at the American Society for Psychical Research for assistance
in tracking down references, resources, and the names of pertinent
individuals.
Martha Visser and Sharon Schuyler for their help in researching the book.
Ross Wetzsteon of the Village Voice, who asked me to write the article that started it all.
Claire Zion of Simon & Schuster, who first suggested that I write a book on the holographic idea.
Lucy Kroll and Barbara Hogenson for being the best agents possible.
Lawrence P. Ashmead of HarperCollins for believing in the book, and
John Michel for his gentle and insightful editing.
If there is anyone that I have inadvertently left out, please forgive
me. To all, both named and unnamed, who have helped me give birth to
this book, my heartfelt thanks.
In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker's
adventure begins when a beam of light shoots out of the robot Artoo
Detoo and projects a miniature three-dimensional image of Princess
Leia. Luke watches spellbound as the ghostly sculpture of light begs
for someone named Obi-wan Kenobi to come to her assistance. The image
is a hologram, a three-dimensional picture made with the aid of a
laser, and the technological magic required to make such images is
remarkable. But what is even more astounding is that some scientists
are beginning to believe the universe itself is a kind of giant
hologram, a splendidly detailed illusion no more or less real than the
image of Princess Leia that starts Luke on his quest.
Put another way, there is evidence to suggest that our world and
everything in it—from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars
and spinning electrons—are also only ghostly images, projections
from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both
space and time. The main architects of this astonishing idea are two of
the world's most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David
Bohm, ... one of the world's most respected quantum physicists; and
Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University and author of
the classic neuropsychological textbook Languages of the Brain. Intriguingly,
Bohm and Pribram arrived at their conclusions independently and while
working from two very different directions. Bohm became convinced of
the universe's holographic nature only after years of dissatisfaction
with standard theories' inability to explain all of the phenomena
encountered in quantum physics. Pribram became convinced because of the
failure of standard theories of the brain to explain various
neurophysiological puzzles. However, after arriving at their views,
Bohm and Pribram quickly realized the holographic model explained a
number of other mysteries as well, including the apparent inability of
any theory, no matter how comprehensive, ever to account for all the
phenomena encountered in nature; the ability of individuals with
hearing in only one ear to determine the direction from which a sound
originates; and our ability to recognize the face of someone we have
not seen for many years even if that person has changed considerably in
the interim. But the most staggering thing about the holographic model
was that it suddenly made sense of a wide range of phenomena so elusive
they generally have been categorized outside the province of
scientific understanding. These include telepathy, precognition,
mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis,
or the ability of the mind to move physical objects without anyone
touching them. Indeed, it quickly became apparent to the ever growing
number of scientists who came to embrace the holographic model that it
helped explain virtually all paranormal and mystical experiences, and
in the last half-dozen years or so it has continued to galvanize
researchers and shed light on an increasing number of previously
inexplicable phenomena. For example:
In 1980 University of Connecticut psychologist Dr. Kenneth Ring
proposed that near-death experiences could be explained by the
holographic model. Ring, who is president of the International
Association for Near-Death Studies, believes such experiences, as well
as death itself, are really nothing more than the shifting of a
person's consciousness from one level of the hologram of reality to
another.
In 1985 Dr. Stanislav Grof, chief of psychiatric research at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and an assistant professor of
psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
published a book in which he concluded that existing
neurophysiological models of the brain are inadequate and only a
holographic model can explain such things as archetypal experiences,
encounters with the collective unconscious, and other unusual phenomena
experienced during altered states of consciousness.
At the 1987 annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams held in Washington, D.C., physicist
Fred Alan Wolf delivered a talk in which he asserted that the
holographic model explains lucid dreams (unusually vivid dreams in
which the dreamer realizes he or she is awake). Wolf believes such
dreams are actually visits to parallel realities, and the holographic
model will ultimately allow us to develop a "physics of consciousness"
which will enable us to begin to explore more fully these
other-dimensional levels of existence. In his 1987 book entitled
Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, Dr. F. David Peat, a
physicist at Queen's University in Canada, asserted that
synchronicities (coincidences that are so unusual and so
psychologically meaningful they don't seem to be the result of chance
alone) can be explained by the holographic model. Peat believes such
coincidences are actually "flaws in the fabric of reality." They reveal
that our thought processes are much more intimately connected to the
physical world than has been hitherto suspected. These are only
a few of the thought-provoking ideas that will be explored in this
book. Many of these ideas are extremely controversial. Indeed, the
holographic model itself is highly controversial and is by no means
accepted by a majority of scientists. Nonetheless,
and as we shall see, many important and impressive thinkers do support
it and believe it may be the most accurate picture of reality we have
to date. The holographic model has also received some dramatic
experimental support. In the field of neurophysiology numerous studies
have corroborated Pribram's various predictions about the holographic
nature of memory and perception. Similarly, in 1982 a landmark
experiment performed by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect
at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Optics, in Paris,
demonstrated that the web of subatomic particles that compose our These
findings will also be discussed in the book. In addition to the
experimental evidence, several other things add weight to the
holographic hypothesis. Physical
universe— the very fabric of reality itself—possesses what
appears to be an undeniable "holographic" property. Perhaps the most
important considerations are the character and achievements of the two
men who originated the idea.
Early in their careers, and before the holographic model was even a
glimmer in their thoughts, each amassed accomplishments that would
inspire most researchers to spend the rest of their academic lives
resting on their laurels.
In the 1940s Pribram did pioneering work on the limbic system, a region
of the brain involved in emotions and behavior. Bohm's work in plasma
physics in the 1950s is also considered landmark. But even more
significantly, each has distinguished himself in another way. It
is a way even the most accomplished men and women can seldom call their
own, for it is measured not by mere intelligence or even talent. It is
measured by courage, the tremendous resolve it takes to stand up for
one's convictions even in the face of overwhelming opposition. While he
was a graduate student, Bohm did doctoral work with Robert Oppenheimer.
Later, in 1951, when Oppenheimer came under the perilous scrutiny of
Senator Joseph McCarthy's Committee on Un-American Activities, Bohm was
called to testify against him and refused. As a result he lost his job
at Princeton and never again taught in the United States, moving first
to Brazil and then to London. Early in his career Pribram faced a
similar test of mettle. In 1935 a Portuguese neurologist named Egas
Moniz devised what he believed was the perfect treatment for mental
illness. He discovered that by boring into an individual's skull with a
surgical pick and severing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the
brain he could make the most troublesome patients docile. He called the
procedure a prefrontal lobotomy, and by the 1940s it had become such a
popular medical technique that Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize. In
the 1950s the procedure's popularity continued and it became a tool,
like the McCarthy hearings, to stamp out cultural undesirables. So
accepted was its use for this purpose that the surgeon Walter Freeman,
the most outspoken advocate for the procedure in the United States,
wrote unashamedly that lobotomies "made good American citizens" out of
society's misfits, "schizophrenics, homosexuals, and radicals. " During
this time Pribram came on the medical scene. However, unlike many of
his peers, Pribram felt it was wrong to tamper so recklessly with the
brain of another. So deep were his convictions that while working as a
young neurosurgeon in Jacksonville, Florida, he opposed the accepted
medical wisdom of the day and refused to allow any lobotomies to be
performed in the ward he was overseeing. Later at Yale he maintained
his controversial stance, and his then radical views very nearly lost
him his job.
Bohm and Pribram's commitment to stand up for what they believe in,
regardless of the consequences, is also evident in the holographic
model. As
we shall see, placing their not inconsiderable reputations behind such
a controversial idea is not the easiest path either could have taken.
Both their courage and the vision they have demonstrated in the past
again add weight to the holographic idea.
One
final piece of evidence in favor of the holographic model is the
paranormal itself. This is no small point, for in the last several
decades a remarkable body of evidence has accrued suggesting that our
current understanding of reality, the solid and comforting
sticks-and-stones picture of the world we all learned about in
high-school science class, is wrong. Because these findings cannot be
explained by any of our standard scientific models, science has in the
main ignored them. However, the volume of evidence has reached the
point where this is no longer a tenable situation.
To give just one example, in 1987, physicist Robert G. Jahn and
clinical psychologist Brenda J. Dunne, both at Princeton University,
announced that after a decade of rigorous experimentation by their
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, they had
accumulated unequivocal evidence that the mind can psychically interact
with physical reality. More specifically, Jahn
and Dunne found that through mental concentration alone, human beings
are able to affect the way certain kinds of machines operate. This is an astounding finding and one that cannot be accounted for in terms of our standard picture of reality. It
can be explained by the holographic view, however. Conversely, because
paranormal events cannot be accounted for by our current scientific
understandings, they cry out for a new way of looking at the universe,
a new scientific paradigm. In addition to showing how the holographic
model can account for the paranormal, the book will also examine how
mounting evidence in favor of the paranormal in turn actually seems to
necessitate the existence of such a model. The fact that the paranormal
cannot be explained by our current scientific worldview is only one of
the reasons it remains so controversial. Another
is that psychic functioning is often very difficult to pin down in the
lab, and this has caused many scientists to conclude it therefore does
not exist. This apparent elusiveness will also be discussed in
the book. An even more important reason is that contrary to what many
of us have come to believe, science is not prejudice-free. I first
learned this a number of years ago when I asked a well-known physicist
what he thought about a particular parapsychological experiment. The
physicist (who had a reputation for being skeptical of the
paranormal)looked at me and with great authority said the results
revealed "no evidence of any psychic functioning whatsoever. " I had
not yet seen the results, but because I respected the physicist's
intelligence and reputation, I accepted his judgment without question. Later
when I examined the results for myself, I was stunned to discover the
experiment had produced very striking evidence of psychic ability. I
realized then that even well-known scientists can possess biases and
blind spots. Unfortunately this is a situation that occurs often
in the investigation of the paranormal. In a recent article in American
Psychologist, Yale psychologist Irvin L. Child examined how a
well-known series of ESP dream experiments conducted at the Maimonides
Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, had been treated by the
scientific establishment. Despite
the dramatic evidence supportive of ESP uncovered by the experimenters,
Child found their work had been almost completely ignored by the
scientific community. Even more distressing, in the handful of
scientific publications that had bothered to comment on the
experiments, he found the research had been so "severely distorted" its
importance was completely obscured. How is this possible?
One reason is science is not always as objective as we would like to
believe. We view scientists with a bit of awe, and when they tell us
something we are convinced it must be true. We forget they are only human and subject to the same religious, philosophical, and cultural prejudices as the rest of us.
This is unfortunate, for as this book will show, there is a great deal
of evidence that the universe encompasses considerably more than our
current worldview allows. But why is science so resistant to the paranormal in particular?
This is a more difficult question. In commenting on the resistance he
experienced to his own unorthodox views on health, Yale surgeon Dr.
Bernie S. Siegel, author of the
best-selling book Love, Medicine, and Miracles, asserts that it is
because people are addicted to their beliefs. Siegel says this is why
when you try to change someone's belief they act like an addict. There
seems to be a good deal of truth to Siegel's observation, which perhaps
is why so many of civilization's greatest insights and advances have at
first been greeted with such passionate denial. We are addicted to our
beliefs and we do act like addicts when someone tries to wrest from us
the powerful opium of our dogmas. And since Western science has
devoted several centuries to not believing in the paranormal, it is not
going to surrender its addiction lightly.
I am lucky. I have always known there was more to the world than is
generally accepted. I grew up in a psychic family, and from an early
age I experienced firsthand many of the phenomena that will be talked
about in this book. Occasionally, and when it is relevant to the topic
being discussed, I will relate a few of my own experiences. Although
they can only be viewed as anecedotal evidence, for me they have
provided the most compelling proof of all that we live in a universe we
are only just beginning to fathom, and I include them because of the
insight they offer.
Lastly, because the holographic concept is still very much an idea in
the making and is a mosaic of many different points of view and pieces
of evidence, some have argued that it should not be called a model or
theory until these disparate points of view are integrated into a more
unified whole. As a result, some researchers refer to the ideas as the
holographic paradigm. Others prefer holographic analogy, holographic
metaphor, and so on. In this book and for the sake of diversity I have
employed all of these expressions, including holographic model and
holographic theory, but do not mean to imply that the holographic idea
has achieved the status of a model or theory in the strictest sense of
these terms. In this same vein it is important to note that although
Bohm and Pribram are the originators of the holographic idea, they do
not embrace all of the views and conclusions put forward in this book.
Rather, this is a book that looks not only at Bohm and Pribram's
theories, but at the ideas and conclusions of numerous researchers who
have been influenced by the holographic model and who have interpreted
it in their own sometimes controversial ways.
Throughout this book I also discuss various ideas from quantum physics,
the branch of physics that studies subatomic particles (electrons,
protons, and so on). Because I have written on this subject before, I
am aware that some people are intimidated by the term quantum, physics
and are afraid they will not be able to understand its concepts. My
experience has taught me that even those who do not know any
mathematics are able to understand the kinds of ideas from physics that
are touched upon in this book. You do not even need a background in
science. All you need is an open mind if you happen to glance at a page
and see a scientific term you do not know. I have kept such terms down
to a minimum, and on those occasions when it was necessary to use one,
I always explain it before continuing on with the text. So don't be
afraid. Once you have overcome your "fear of the water, " I think
you'll find swimming among quantum physics' strange and fascinating
ideas much easier than you thought. I think you'll also find that
pondering a few of these ideas might even change the way you look at
the world. In fact, it is my hope that the ideas contained in the
following chapters will change the way you look at the world. It is
with this humble desire that I offer this book.
Sit down before fact like a little child,
and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly
wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn
nothing. —T. H. Huxley
It isn't that the world of appearances is
wrong; it isn't that there aren't objects out there, at one level of
reality. It's that if you penetrate through and look at the universe
with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different
reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto
remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena,
synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.
— Karl Pribram in an interview in Psychology Today.
The puzzle that first started Pribram on the road to formulating his
holographic model was the question of how and where memories are stored
in the brain. In the early 1940s, when he first became interested in
this mystery, it was generally believed that memories were localized in
the brain. Each memory a person had, such as the memory of the last
time you saw your grandmother, or the memory of the fragrance of a
gardenia you sniffed when you were sixteen, was believed to have a
specific location somewhere in the brain cells. Such memory traces were
called engrams, and although no one knew what an engram was made of
— whether it was a neuron or perhaps even a special kind of
molecule — most scientists were confident it was only a matter of
time before one would be found. There were reasons for this confidence.
Research conducted by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the
1920s had offered convincing evidence that specific memories did have
specific locations in the brain. One of the most unusual features of
the brain is that the object itself doesn't sense pain directly. As
long as the scalp and skull have been deadened with a local anesthetic,
surgery can be performed on the brain of a fully conscious person
without causing any pain. In a series of landmark experiments, Penfield
used this fact to his advantage. While operating on the brains of
epileptics, he would electrically stimulate various areas of their
brain cells. To his amazement he found that when he stimulated the
temporal lobes (the region of the brain behind the temples) of one of
his fully conscious patients, they reexperienced memories of past
episodes from their lives in vivid detail. One man suddenly relived a
conversation he had had with friends in South Africa; a boy heard his
mother talking on the telephone and after several touches from
Penfield's electrode was able to repeat her entire conversation; a
woman found herself in her kitchen and could hear her son playing outside. Even when Penfield tried to mislead his
patients by telling them he was stimulating a different area when he
was not, he found that when he touched the same spot it always evoked
the same memory.
In his book "The Mystery of the Mind", published in 1975, just shortly
before his death, he wrote, "It was evident at once that these were not
dreams. They were electrical activations of the sequential record of
consciousness, a record that had been laid down during the patient's
earlier experience. The patient 're-lived' all that he had been aware
of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture 'flashback. '
"! From his research Penfield concluded that everything we have ever
experienced is recorded in our brain, from every stranger's face we
have glanced at in a crowd to every spider web we gazed at as a child.
He reasoned that this was why memories of so many insignificant events
kept cropping up in his sampling. If our memory is a complete record of
even the most mundane of our day-to-day experiences, it is reasonable
to assume that dipping randomly into such a massive chronicle would
produce a good deal of trifling information. As a young neurosurgery
resident, Pribram had no reason to doubt Penfield's engram theory. But
then something happened that was to change his thinking forever. In
1946 he went to work with the great neuropsychologist Karl Lashley at
the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology, then in Orange Park, Florida.
For over thirty years Lashley had been involved in his own ongoing
search for the elusive mechanisms responsible for memory, and there
Pribram was able to witness the fruits of Lashley's labors firsthand.
What was startling was that not only had Lashley failed to produce any
evidence of the engram, but his research actually seemed to pull the
rug out from under all of Penfield's findings. What Lashley had done
was to train rats to perform a variety of tasks, such as run a maze.
Then he surgically removed various portions of their brains and
retested them. His aim was literally to cut out the area of the rats'
brains containing the memory of their mazerunning ability. To his
surprise he found that no matter what portion of their brains he cut
out, he could not eradicate their memories. Often the rats' motor
skills were impaired and they stumbled clumsily through the mazes, but
even with massive portions of their brains removed, their memories
remained stubbornly intact. For Pribram these were incredible findings.
If memories possessed specific locations in the brain in the same way
that books possess specific locations on library shelves, why didn't
Lashley's surgical plunderings have any effect on them? For Pribram the
only answer seemed to be that memories were not localized at specific
brain sites, but were somehow spread out or distributed throughout the
brain as a whole. The problem was that he knew of no mechanism or
process that could account for such a state of affairs. Lashley was
even less certain and later wrote, "I sometimes feel, in reviewing the
evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary
conclusion is that learning just is not possible at all. Nevertheless,
in spite of such evidence against it, learning does sometimes occur. "
In 1948 Pribram was offered a position at Yale, and before leaving he
helped write up thirty years of Lashley's monumental research.
At Yale, Pribram continued to ponder the
idea that memories were distributed throughout the brain, and the more
he thought about it the more convinced he became. After all, patients
who had had portions of their brains removed for medical reasons never
suffered the loss of specific memories. Removal of a large section of
the brain might cause a patient's memory to become generally hazy, but
no one ever came out of surgery with any selective memory loss.
Similarly, individuals who had received head injuries in car collisions
and other accidents never forgot half of their family, or half of a
novel they had read. Even removal of sections of the temporal lobes,
the area of the brain that had figured so prominently in Penfield's
research, didn't create any gaps in a person's memories. Pribram's
thinking was further solidified by his and other researchers'
inability to duplicate Penfield's findings when stimulating brains
other than those of epileptics. Even Penfield himself was unable to
duplicate his results in nonepileptic patients. Despite the growing
evidence that memories were distributed, Pribram
was still at a loss as to how the brain might accomplish such a
seemingly magical feat. Then in the mid-1960s an article he read in
Scientific American describing the first construction of a hologram hit
him like a thunderbolt. Not only was the concept of holography
dazzling, but it provided a solution to the puzzle with which he had
been wrestling. To understand why
Pribram was so excited, it is necessary to understand a little more
about holograms. One of the things that makes holography possible is a
phenomenon known as interference. Interference is the crisscrossing
pattern that occurs when two or more waves, such as waves of water, ripple through each other. For example, if you drop a pebble into a pond, it will produce a series of concentric waves that expands outward. If you drop two pebbles into a pond, you will get two sets of waves that expand and pass through one another. The complex arrangement of crests and troughs that results from such collisions is known as an interference pattern. Any wavelike phenomena can create an interference pattern, including light and radio waves. Because laser light is an extremely pure, coherent form of light, it is especially good at creating interference patterns. It provides, in essence, the perfect pebble and the perfect pond. As a result, it wasn't until the invention of the laser that holograms, as we know them today, became possible. A hologram is produced when a single laser light is split into two separate beams. The first beam is bounced off the object to be photographed (in this case an apple). Then the second beam is allowed to collide with the reflected light of the first. When this happens they create an interference pattern which is then recorded on a piece of film.
To the naked eye the image on the film looks nothing at all like the
object photographed. In fact, it even looks a little like the
concentric rings that form when a handful of pebbles is tossed into a
pond. But as soon as another laser beam (or in some instances just a
bright light source) is shined through the film, a three-dimensional
image of the original object reappears. The three-dimensionality of
such images is often eerily convincing. You can actually walk around a
holographic projection and view it from different angles as you would a
real object. However, if you reach out and try to touch it, your hand
will waft right through it and you will discover there is really
nothing there. Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable aspect
of holograms. If a piece of holographic film containing the image of an
apple is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will
still be found to contain the entire image of the apple! Even if the
halves are divided again and then again, an entire apple can still be
reconstructed from each small portion of the film (although the images
will get hazier as the portions get smaller). Unlike normal
photographs, every small fragment of a piece of holographic film
contains all the information recorded in the whole.
A piece of holographic film containing an encoded image. To the naked
eye the image on the film looks nothing like the object photographed
and is composed of irregular ripples known as interference patterns.
However, when the film is illuminated with another laser, a
three-dimensional image of the original object reappears. The
three-dimensionality of a hologram is often so eerily convincing that
you can actually walk around it and view it from different angles. But
if you reach out and try to touch it, your hand will waft right through
it. This was precisely the
feature that got Pribram so excited, for it offered at last a way of
understanding how memories could be distributed rather than localized in the brain. If it was possible for every portion of a piece of holographic film to contain all the information necessary to create a whole image, then it seemed equally possible for every part of the brain to contain all of the information necessary to recall a whole memory. It should be noted that this astounding trait is common only to pieces of holographic film whose images are invisible to the naked eye. If you buy a piece of holographic film (or an object containing a piece of holographic film) in a store and can see a three-dimensional image in it without any special kind of illumination, do not cut it in half. You will only end up with pieces of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every portion of a piece of holographic film contains all of the information of the whole. Thus if a holographic plate is broken into fragments, each piece can still be used to reconstruct the entire image.
Memory is not the only thing the brain
may process holographically. Another of Lashley's discoveries was that
the visual centers of the brain were also surprisingly resistant to
surgical excision. Even after removing as much as 90 percent of a rat's
visual cortex (the part of the brain that receives and interprets what
the eye sees), he found it could still perform tasks requiring complex
visual skills. Similarly, research conducted by Pribram revealed that
as much as 98 percent of a cat's optic nerves can be severed without
seriously impairing its ability to perform complex visual tasks. Such a
situation was tantamount to believing that a movie audience
could still enjoy a motion picture even after 90 percent of the movie
screen was missing, and his experiments presented once again a serious
challenge to the standard understanding of how vision works. According
to the leading theory of the day, there was a one-to-one correspondence
between the image the eye sees and the way that image is represented in
the brain. In other words, when we look at a square, it was believed
the electrical activity in our visual cortex also possesses the form of
a square. Although findings such as Lashley's seemed to deal a
deathblow to this idea, Pribram was not satisfied. While he was at Yale
he devised a series of experiments to resolve the matter and spent the
next seven years carefully measuring the electrical activity in the
brains of monkeys while they performed various visual tasks. He
discovered that not only did no such one-to-one correspondence exist,
but there wasn't even a discernible pattern to the sequence in which
the electrodes fired. He wrote of his findings, "These experimental
results are incompatible with a view that a photographic-like image
becomes projected onto the cortical surface.
Vision theorists once believed there was a one-to-one correspondence
between an image the eye sees and how that image is represented in the
brain. Pribram discovered this is not true.
Once again the resistance the
visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like
memory, vision was also distributed,
and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it,
too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram
certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be
removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks.
If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal
hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still
reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained
the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world
and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using
holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no
more one-to-one correspondence between electrical activity and images
seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference
patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded.
The only question that remained
was what wavelike phenomenon the brain might be using to create such
internal holograms. As soon as Pribram considered the question he
thought of a possible answer. It was known that the electrical
communications that take place between the brain's nerve cells, or
neurons, do not occur alone. Neurons possess branches like little
trees, and when an electrical message reaches the end of one of these
branches it radiates outward as does the ripple in a pond. Because
neurons are packed together so densely, these expanding ripples of
electricity—also a wavelike phenomenon — are constantly crisscrossing one
another. When Pribram remembered this he realized that they were most
assuredly creating an almost endless and kaleidoscopic array of
interference patterns, and these in turn might be what
give the brain its holographic properties. "The hologram was there all
the time in the wave-front nature of brain-cell connectivity, " observed Pribram. "We simply hadn't had the wit to realize it."
Pribram published his first article on the possible holographic nature of the brain in 1966, and continued to expand and refine his ideas during the next several years. As he did, and as other researchers became aware of his theory, it was quickly realized that the distributed nature of memory and vision is not the only neurophysiological puzzle the holographic model can explain.
Holography also explains how our brains
can store so many memories in so little space. The brilliant
Hungarian-born physicist and mathematician John von Neumann once
calculated that over the course of the average human lifetime, the
brain stores something on the order of 2. 8 x 1020 (280, 000, 000, 000,
000, 000, 000) bits of information. This
is a staggering amount of information, and brain researchers have long
struggled to come up with a mechanism that explains such a vast
capability.
Interestingly, holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage.
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. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by
illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as
the original two beams. By employing this method researchers
have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same
amount of information contained in fifty Bibles!
Pieces of holographic film containing multiple images, such as those described above, also provide a way of understanding our ability to both recall and forget. When such a piece of film is held in a laser beam and tilted back and forth, the various images it contains appear and disappear in a glittering stream. It has been suggested that our ability to remember is analogous to shining a laser beam on such a piece of film and calling up a particular image. Similarly, when we are unable to recall something, this may be equivalent to shining various beams on a piece of multiple-image film, but failing to find the right angle to call up the image/memory for which we are searching.
In Proust's Swann's Way a sip of tea and
a bite of a small scallop shaped cake known as a petite madeleine cause
the narrator to find himself suddenly flooded with memories from his
past. At first he is puzzled, but then, slowly, after much effort on
his part, he remembers that his aunt used to give him tea and
madeleines when he was a little boy, and it is this association that
has stirred his memory. We have all had similar experiences—a
whiff of a particular food being prepared, or a glimpse of some
long-forgotten object—that suddenly evoke some scene out of our
past.
The holographic idea offers a further analogy for the associative
tendencies of memory. This is illustrated by yet another kind of
holographic recording technique. First, the light of a single laser
beam is bounced off two objects simultaneously, say an easy chair and a
smoking pipe. The light bounced off each object is then allowed to
collide, and the resulting interference pattern is captured on film.
Then, whenever the easy chair is illuminated with laser light and the
light that reflects off the easy chair is passed through the film, a
three-dimensional image of the pipe will appear. Conversely, whenever
the same is done with the pipe, a hologram of the easy chair appears. So,
if our brains function holographically, a similar process may be
responsible for the way certain objects evoke specific memories from
our past.
At first glance our ability to recognize
familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have
long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute
certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several
hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be
caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing
in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature,
physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability.
In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded
in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special
kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to
strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not
identical to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is
bounced off the
mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of
light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of
light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second
objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of
light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the
holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical
recognition system. Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research
Laboratories in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a
holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively
unnoticed.
A similar technique known as
interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the
familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years.
In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic
film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object
that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect
light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process
has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing
industry.
In 1972, Harvard vision researchers
Daniel Pollen and Michael Tractenberg proposed that the holographic
brain theory may explain why some people possess photographic memories
(also known as eidetic memories). Typically, individuals with
photographic memories will spend a few moments scanning the scene they
wish to memorize. When they want to see the scene again, they "project"
a mental image of it, either with their eyes closed or as they gaze at
a blank wall or screen. In a study of one such individual, a Harvard
art history professor named Elizabeth, Pollen and Tractenberg found
that the mental
images she projected were so real to her that when she read an image of
a page from Goethe's Faust her eyes moved as if she were reading a real
page.
Noting that the image stored in a fragment of holographic film gets
hazier as the fragment gets smaller, Pollen and Tractenberg suggest
that perhaps such individuals have more vivid memories because they
somehow have access to very large regions of their memory holograms. Conversely,
perhaps most of us have memories that are much less vivid because our
access is limited to smaller regions of the memory holograms.
Pribram
believes the holographic model also sheds light on our ability to
transfer learned skills from one part of our body to another. As
you sit reading this book, take a moment and trace your first name in
the air with your left elbow. You will probably discover that this is a
relatively easy thing to do, and yet in all likelihood it is something
you have never done before. It may not seem a surprising ability to
you, but in the classic view that various areas of the brain (such as
the area controlling the movements of the elbow) are "hard-wired, " or
able to perform tasks only after repetitive learning has caused the
proper neural connections to become established between brain cells,
this is something of a puzzle. Pribram points out that the problem becomes much more tractable if the
brain were to convert all of its memories, including memories of
learned abilities such as writing, into a language of interfering wave
forms. Such a brain would be much more flexible and could shift its
stored information around with the same ease that a skilled pianist
transposes a song from one musical key to another.
This same flexibility may explain
how we are able to recognize a familiar face regardless of the angle
from which we are viewing it. Again, once the brain has memorized a
face (or any other object or scene) and converted it into a language of
wave forms, it can, in a sense, tumble this internal hologram around
and examine it from any perspective it wants.
To most of us it is obvious that our
feelings of love, hunger, anger, and so on, are internal realities, and
the sound of an orchestra playing, the heat of the sun, the smell of
bread baking, and so on, are external realities. But it is not so clear
how our brains enable us to distinguish between the two. For example,
Pribram points out that when we look at a person, the image of the
person is really on the surface of our retinas. Yet we do not perceive
the person as being on our retinas. We perceive them as being in the
"world-out-there. " Similarly, when we stub our toe we experience the
pain in our toe. But the pain is not really
in our toe. It is actually a neurophysiological process taking place
somewhere in our brain. How then is our brain able to take the
multitude of neurophysiological processes that manifest as our
experience, all of which are internal, and fool us into thinking that
some are internal and some are located beyond the confines of our gray
matter?
Creating the illusion that things
are located where they are not is the quintessential feature of a
hologram. As mentioned, if you look at a hologram it seems to have
extension in space, but if you pass your hand through it you will
discover there is nothing there. Despite what your senses tell you, no
instrument will pick up the presence of any abnormal energy or
substance where the hologram appears to be hovering. This is because a
hologram is a virtual image, an image that appears to be where it is
not, and possesses no more extension in space than does the
three-dimensional image you see of yourself when you look in a mirror. Just as the
image in the mirror is located in the silvering on the mirror's back
surface, the actual location of a hologram is always in the
photographic emulsion on the surface of the film recording it.
Further evidence that the brain is able to fool us into thinking that
inner processes are located outside the body comes from the Nobel
Prize-winning physiologist Georg von Bekesy. In a series of experiments
conducted in the late 1960s Bekesy placed vibrators on the knees of
blindfolded test subjects. Then he varied the rates at which the
instruments vibrated. By doing so he discovered that he could make his
test subjects experience the sensation that a point source of vibration
was jumping from one knee to the other. He
found that he could even make his subjects feel the point source of
vibration in the space between their knees. In short, he demonstrated
that humans have the ability to seemingly experience sensation in
spatial locations where they have absolutely no sense receptors.
Pribram believes that Bekesy's work is compatible with the holographic
view and sheds additional light on how interfering wave fronts—or
in Bekesy's case, interfering sources of physical vibration—
enable the brain to localize some of its experiences beyond the
physical boundaries of the body. He feels this process might also
explain the phantom limb phenomenon, or the sensation experienced by
some amputees that a missing arm or leg is still present. Such
individuals often feel eerily realistic cramps, pains, and tinglings in
these phantom appendages, but maybe what they are experiencing is the
holographic memory of the limb that is still recorded in the
interference patterns in their brains.
For Pribram the many similarities between
brains and holograms were tantalizing, but he knew his theory didn't
mean anything unless it was backed up by more solid evidence. One
researcher who provided such evidence was Indiana University biologist
Paul Pietsch. Intriguingly, Pietsch began as an ardent disbeliever in
Pribram's theory. He was especially skeptical of Pribram's claim that
memories do not possess any specific location in the brain. To
prove Pribram wrong, Pietsch devised a series of experiments, and as
the test subjects of his experiments he chose salamanders. In previous
studies he had discovered that he could remove the brain of a
salamander without killing it, and although it remained in a stupor
(daze, trance inertia) as long as its brain was missing, its
behavior completely returned to normal as soon as its brain was
restored.
Pietsch reasoned that if a
salamander's feeding behavior is not confined to any specific location
in the brain, then it should not matter how its brain is positioned in
its head. If it did matter, Pribram's theory would be disproven. He
then flip-flopped the left and right hemispheres of a salamander's
brain, but to his dismay, as soon as it recovered, the salamander
quickly resumed normal feeding. He took another salamander and turned
its brain upside down. When it recovered it, too, fed normally. Growing
increasingly frustrated, he decided to resort to more drastic measures.
In a series of over 700 operations he sliced, flipped, shuffled,
subtracted, and even minced the brains of his hapless subjects, but
always when he replaced what was left of their brains, their behavior
returned to normal.
These findings and others turned Pietsch into a believer
and attracted enough attention that his research became the subject of
a segment on the television show 60 Minutes. He writes about this
experience as well as giving detailed accounts of his experiments in
his insightful book Shufflebrain.
While the theories that enabled the
development of the hologram were first formulated in 1947 by Dennis
Gabor (who later won a Nobel Prize for his efforts), in the late 1960s
and early 1970s Pribram's theory received even more persuasive
experimental support. When Gabor first conceived the idea of holography
he wasn't thinking about lasers. His goal was to improve the electron
microscope, then a primitive and imperfect device. His approach was a
mathematical one, and the mathematics he used was a type of calculus
invented by an eighteenth century Frenchman named Jean B. J. Fourier.
Roughly speaking what Fourier developed was a mathematical way of
converting any pattern, no matter how complex, into a language of
simple waves. He also showed how these wave forms could be converted
back into the original pattern. In
other words, just as a television camera converts an image into
electromagnetic frequencies and a television set converts those
frequencies back into the original image, Fourier showed how a similar
process could be achieved mathematically. The equations he developed to
convert images into wave forms and back again are known as Fourier
transforms. Fourier transforms enabled Gabor to convert a picture of an
object into the blur of interference patterns on a piece of holographic
film. They also enabled him to devise a way of converting those
interference patterns back into an image of the original object. In
fact the special whole in every part of a hologram is one of the
by-products that occurs when an image or pattern is translated into the
Fourier language of wave forms.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s various researchers contacted Pribram and told him they
had uncovered evidence that the visual system worked as a kind of
frequency analyzer. Since frequency is a measure of the number of
oscillations a wave undergoes per second, this strongly suggested that
the brain might be functioning as a hologram does. But it wasn't
until 1979 that Berkeley neurophysiologists Russell and Karen
DeValoises made the discovery that settled the matter. Research
in the 1960s had shown that each brain cell in the visual cortex is
geared to respond to a different pattern—some brain cells fire
when the eyes see a horizontal line, others fire when the eyes see a
vertical line, and so on. As a result, many researchers concluded that
the brain takes input from these highly specialized cells called
feature detectors, and somehow fits them together to provide us with
our visual perceptions of the world. Despite the popularity of this
view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their
assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and
checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see
how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new
wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded
not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the
patterns. Only one conclusion
could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same
mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the
Fourier language of wave forms. The DeValoises' discovery was
subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world,
and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a
hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory
was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was
responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various waveforms,
he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses.
It didn't take long for him to
realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by
twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises'
discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz
had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research
revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called
osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin
is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some
evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly,
Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him
to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of
vibration were also of the Fourier genre.
But perhaps the most startling finding Pribram uncovered was Russian scientist Nikolai Bernstein's discovery that even our physical movements may be encoded in our brains in a language of Fourier wave forms. In the 1930s Bernstein dressed people in black leotards and painted white dots on their elbows, knees, and other joints. Then he placed them against black backgrounds and took movies of them doing various physical activities such as dancing, walking, jumping, hammering, and typing. When he developed the film, only the white dots appeared, moving up and down and across the screen in various complex and flowing movements. To quantify his findings he Fourier-analyzed the various lines the dots traced out and converted them, their movements, into a language of wave forms. He discovered they could be analyzed using Fourier mathematics, the same mathematics Gabor used to invent the hologram. To his surprise, he discovered the wave forms contained hidden patterns that allowed him to predict his subjects' next movement to within a fraction of an inch. When Pribram encountered Bernstein's work he immediately recognized its implications. Maybe the reason hidden patterns surfaced after Bernstein Fourier-analyzed his subject's movements was because that was how movements are stored in the brain. This was an exciting possibility, for if the brain analyzed movements by breaking them down into their frequency components, it explained the rapidity with which we learn many complex physical tasks. For instance, we do not learn to ride a bicycle by painstakingly memorizing every tiny feature of the process. We learn by grasping the whole flowing movement. The fluid wholeness that typifies how we learn so many physical activities is difficult to explain if our brains are storing information in a bit-by-bit manner. But it becomes much easier to understand if the brain is Fourier-analyzing such tasks and absorbing them as a whole.
Despite such evidence, Pribram's
holographic model remains extremely controversial. Part of the problem
is that there are many popular theories of how the brain works and
there is evidence to support them all. Some researchers believe the
distributed nature of memory can be explained by the ebb and flow of
various brain chemicals. Others hold that electrical fluctuations among
large groups of neurons can account for memory and learning. Each
school of thought has its ardent supporters, and it is probably safe to
say that most scientists remain unpersuaded by Pribram's arguments. For
example,
neuropsychologist Frank Wood of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, feels that "there are precious few
experimental findings for which holography is the necessary, or even
preferable, explanation. " Pribram is puzzled by statements such as
Wood's and counters by noting that he currently has a book in press
with well over 500 references to such data.
Other researchers agree with Pribram. Dr. Larry Dossey, former chief of
staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital, admits that Pribram's theory
challenges many long-held assumptions about the brain, but points out
that "many specialists in brain function are attracted to the idea, if
for no other reason than the glaring inadequacies of the present
orthodox views. "
Neurologist Richard Restak, author of the PBS series The Brain, shares
Dossey's opinion. He notes that in spite of overwhelming evidence that
human abilities are holistically dispersed throughout the brain, most
researchers continue to cling to the idea that function car be located
in the brain in the same way that cities can be located on a map.
Restak believes that theories based on this premise are not only
"oversimplistic, " but actually function as "conceptual straitjackets"
that keep us from recognizing the brain's true complexities. He feels
that "a hologram is not only possible but, at this moment, represents
probably our best 'model' for brain functioning."
As for Pribram, by the 1970s enough
evidence had accumulated to convince him his theory was correct. In
addition, he had taken his ideas into the laboratory and discovered
that single neurons in the motor cortex respond selectively to a limited bandwidth of frequencies, a finding that further supported his conclusions. The
question that began to bother him was, if the picture of reality in our
brains is not a picture at all, but a hologram, what is it a hologram
of? The dilemma posed by this question is analogous to taking a
Polaroid picture of a group of people sitting around a table and, after
the picture develops, finding that, instead of people, there are only blurry clouds of
interference patterns positioned around the table. In both cases one
could rightfully ask. Which is
the true reality, the seemingly objective world experienced by the
observer/photographer or the blur of interference patterns recorded by
the camera/brain?
Pribram realized that if the
holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened
the door on the possibility that objective reality—the world of
coffee cups, mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps—might
not even exist, or at least not exist in the way we believe it exists.
Was it possible, he wondered, that what the mystics had been saying for
centuries was true, reality was maya, an illusion, and what was out
there was really a vast, resonating symphony of wave forms, a
"frequency domain" that was transformed into the world as we know it
only after it entered our senses?
Realizing that the solution he was
seeking might lie outside the province of his own field, he went to his
physicist son for advice. His son recommended he look into the work of
a physicist named David Bohm. When Pribram did he was electrified. He
not only found the answer to his question, but also discovered that
according to Bohm, the entire universe was a hologram.
One can't help but be astonished at the degree to which [Bohm] has been able to break out of the tight molds of scientific
conditioning and stand alone with a completely new and literally vast Idea, one which has both internal consistency and
the logical power to explain widely diverging phenomena of physical experience from an entirely unexpected point of view.
. . . It is a theory which is so
intuitively satisfying that many people have felt that if the universe
is not the way Bohm describes it, it ought to be. —John P. Briggs and F. David Peat Looking Glass Universe.
The
path that led Bohm to the conviction that the universe is structured
like a hologram began at the very edge of matter, in the world of
subatomic particles. His interest in science and the way things
work blossomed early. As a young boy growing up in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, he invented a dripless tea kettle, and his father, a
successful businessman, urged him to try to turn a profit on the idea.
But after learning that the first step in such a venture was to conduct
a door-todoor survey to test-market his invention, Bohm's interest in
business waned. His interest in science did not, however, and his
prodigious curiosity forced him to look for new heights to conquer. He
found the most challenging height of all in the 1930s when he attended
Pennsylvania State College, for it was there that he first became
fascinated by quantum physics. It is an easy fascination to understand.
The strange new land that physicists had found lurking in the heart of
the atom contained things more wondrous than anything Cortes or Marco Polo ever encountered. What
made this new world so intriguing was that everything about it appeared
to be so contrary to common sense. It seemed more like a land ruled by
sorcery than an extension of the natural world, an Alice-in-Wonderland
realm in which mystifying forces were the norm and everything logical
had been turned on its ear. One startling discovery made by quantum
physicists was that if you break matter into smaller and smaller pieces
you eventually reach a point where those pieces—electrons,
protons, and so on—no longer possess the traits of objects. For example, most of us tend to think of an electron as a tiny sphere or a BB whizzing around, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Although an electron can sometimes behave as if it were a compact
little particle, physicists have found that it literally possesses no
dimension. This is difficult for most of us to imagine because
everything at our own level of existence possesses dimension. And yet
if you try to measure the width of an electron, you will discover it's
an impossible task. An electron is simply not an object as we know it.
Another discovery physicists made is that an electron can manifest as either a particle or a wave!
If you shoot an electron at the screen of a television that's been
turned off, a tiny point of light will appear when it strikes the
phosphorescent chemicals that coat the glass. The
single point of impact the electron leaves on the screen clearly
reveals the particlelike side of its nature. But this is not the only
form the electron can assume. It can also dissolve into a blurry cloud
of energy and behave as if it were a wave spread out over space. When
an electron manifests as a wave it can do things no particle can. If it
is fired at a barrier in which two slits have been cut, it can go
through both slits simultaneously. When wavelike electrons collide with
each other they even create interference patterns. The electron, like
some shapeshifter out of folklore, can manifest as either a particle or
a wave. This chameleonlike ability is common to all subatomic
particles. It is also common to all things once thought to manifest
exclusively as waves. Light, gamma rays, radio waves, X rays—all
can change from waves to particles and back again. Today physicists
believe that subatomic phenomena should not be classified solely as
either waves or particles, but as a single category of somethings that
are always somehow both. These somethings are called quanta, and
physicistsbelieve they are the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made.
Perhaps most astonishing of all is
that there is compelling evidence that the only time quanta ever
manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. For instance,
when an electron isn't being looked at, experimental findings suggest
that it is always a wave. Physicists are able to draw this conclusion
because they have devised clever strategies for deducing how an
electron behaves when it is not being observed (it should be noted that
this is only one interpretation of the evidence and is not the
conclusion of all physicists; as we will see, Bohm himself has a
different interpretation).
Once again this seems more like magic than the kind of behavior we are
accustomed to expect from the natural world. Imagine owning a bowling
ball that was only a bowling ball when you looked at it. If you
sprinkled talcum powder all over a bowling lane and rolled such a
"quantum" bowling ball toward the pins, it would trace a single line
through the talcum powder while you were watching it. But if you
blinked while it was in transit, you would find that for the second or
two you were not looking at it the bowling ball stopped tracing a line
and instead left a broad wavy strip, like the undulating swath of a
desert snake as it moves sideways over the sand. Such a situation is
comparable to the one quantum physicists encountered when they first
uncovered evidence that quanta coalesce into particles only when they
are being observed. Physicist Nick Herbert, a supporter of this
interpretation, says this has sometimes caused him to imagine that behind his back the world is always "a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. "
But whenever he turns around and tries to see the soup, his glance
instantly freezes it and turns it back into ordinary reality. He
believes this makes us all a little like Midas, the legendary king who
never knew the feel of silk or the caress of a human hand because
everything he touched turned to gold. "Likewise
humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality, " says
Herbert, "because everything we touch turns to matter." 'Quanta
is the plural of quantum. One electron is a quantum. Several electrons
are a group of quanta. The word quantum is also synonymous with wave
particle, a term that is also used to refer to something that possesses
both particle and wave aspects.
An aspect of quantum reality that Bohm
found especially interesting was the strange state of
interconnectedness that seemed to exist between apparently
unrelated subatomic events. What was equally perplexing was that most
physicists tended to attach little importance to the phenomenon. In
fact, so little was made of it that one of the most famous examples of
interconnectedness lay hidden in one of quantum physics's basic
assumptions for a number of years before anyone noticed it was there. That assumption was made by one of the founding
fathers of quantum physics, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr
pointed out that if subatomic particles only come into existence in the
presence of an observer, then it is also meaningless to speak of a
particle's properties and characteristics as existing before they are
observed. This was disturbing to many physicists, for much of science
was based on discovering the properties of phenomena. But if the act of
observation actually helped create such properties, what did that imply
about the future of science?
One physicist who was troubled by
Bohr's assertions was Einstein. Despite the role Einstein had played in
the founding of quantum theory, he was not at all happy with the course
the fledgling science had taken. He found Bohr's conclusion that a
particle's properties don't exist until they are observed particularly
objectionable because, when combined with another of quantum physics's
findings, it implied that subatomic particles were interconnected in a
way Einstein simply didn't believe was possible.
That finding was the discovery that some subatomic processes result in the creation of a pair of particles with identical or closely related properties. Consider an extremely unstable atom physicists call positronium. The positronium atom is composed of an electron and a positron (a positron is an electron with a positive charge). Because a positron is the electron's antiparticle opposite, the two eventually annihilate each other and decay into two quanta of light or "photons"
traveling in opposite directions (the capacity to shapeshift from one kind of particle to another is just another of a quantum's abilities). According to quantum physics no matter how far apart the photons travel, when they are measured they will always be found to have identical angles of polarization. (Polarization is the spatial orientation of the photon's wavelike aspect as it travels away from its point of origin. )
In 1935 Einstein and his
colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a now famous paper
entitled "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be
Considered Complete?" In it they explained why the existence of such
twin particles proved that Bohr could not possibly be correct. As they
pointed out, two such particles, say, the photons emitted when
positronium decays, could be produced and allowed to travel a
significant distance apart. * Then they could be intercepted and their
angles of polarization measured. If the polarizations are measured at
precisely the same moment and are found to be identical, as quantum
physics predicts, and if Bohr was correct and properties such as
polarization do not coalesce into existence until they are observed or
measured, this suggests that somehow the two photons must be
instantaneously communicating with each other so they know which angle
of polarization to agree upon. The problem is that according to
Einstein's special theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than
the speed of light, let alone travel instantaneously, for that would be
tantamount to breaking the time barrier and would open the door on all kinds of unacceptable paradoxes.
('Positronium decay is not the subatomic process Einstein and his
colleagues employed in their thought experiment, but is used here
because it is easy to visualize.) Einstein and his colleagues were convinced that no "reasonable
definition" of reality would permit such faster-than-light
interconnections to exist, and therefore Bohr had to be wrong. Their
argument is now known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, or EPR
paradox for short. Bohr remained unperturbed by Einstein's argument.
Rather than believing that some kind of faster-than-light communication
was taking place, he offered another explanation. If subatomic
particles do not exist until they are observed, then one could no
longer think of them as independent "things. " Thus Einstein was basing
his argument on an error when he viewed twin particles as separate.
They were part of an indivisible system, and it was meaningless to think of them otherwise.
In time most physicists sided with
Bohr and became content that his interpretation was correct. One factor
that contributed to Bohr's triumph was that quantum physics had proved
so spectacularly successful in predicting phenomena, few physicists
were willing even to consider the possibility that it might be faulty
in some way. In addition, when Einstein and his colleagues first made
their proposal about twin particles, technical and other reasons
prevented such an experiment from actually being performed. This made
it even easier to put out of mind. This was curious, for although Bohr
had designed his argument to counter Einstein's attack on quantum
theory, as we will see, Bohr's view that subatomic systems are
indivisible has equally profound implications for the nature of
reality. Ironically, these implications were also ignored, and once
again the potential importance of interconnectedness was swept under
the carpet.
During his early years as a physicist Bohm also accepted Bohr's position, but he remained puzzled by the lack of interest Bohr and his followers displayed toward interconnectedness. After graduating from Pennsylvania State College, he attended the University of California at Berkeley, and before receiving his doctorate there in 1943, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley
Radiation Laboratory.
There he encountered another
striking example of
quantum interconnectedness. At the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
Bohm began what was to become his landmark work on plasmas. A plasma is
a gas containing a high density of electrons and positive ions, atoms
that have a positive charge. To his amazement he found that once they
were in a plasma, electrons stopped behaving like individuals and
started behaving as if they were part of a larger and interconnected
whole. Although their individual movements appeared random, vast
numbers of electrons were able to produce effects that were
surprisingly well-organized. Like some amoeboid creature, the plasma
constantly regenerated itself and enclosed all impurities in a wall in
the same way that a biological organism might encase a foreign
substance in a cyst. So struck was Bohm by these organic qualities that
he later remarked he'd frequently had the impression the electron sea
was "alive."
In 1947 Bohm accepted an
assistant professorship at Princeton University, an indication of how
highly he was regarded, and there he extended his Berkeley research to
the study of electrons in metals. Once again he found that the
seemingly haphazard movements of individual electrons managed to
produce highly organized overall effects. Like the plasmas he had
studied at Berkeley, these were no longer situations involving two
particles, each behaving as if it knew what the other was doing, but
entire oceans of particles, each behaving as if it knew what untold
trillions of others were doing. Bohm called such collective movements
of electrons plasmons, and their discovery established his reputation
as a physicist.
Both
his sense of the importance of interconnectedness as well as his
growing dissatisfaction with several of the other prevailing views in
physics caused Bohm to become increasingly troubled by Bohr's
interpretation of quantum theory. After three years of teaching the
subject at Princeton he decided to improve his understanding by writing
a textbook. When he finished he found he still wasn't comfortable with
what quantum physics was saying and sent copies of
the book to both Bohr and Einstein to ask for their opinions. He got no
answer from Bohr, but Einstein contacted him and said that since they
were both at Princeton they should meet and discuss the book. In the
first of what was to turn into a six-month series of spirited
conversations, Einstein enthusiastically told Bohm that he had never
seen quantum theory presented so clearly. Nonetheless, he admitted he
was still every bit as dissatisfied with the theory as was Bohm.
During their conversations the two men discovered they each had nothing
but admiration for the theory's ability to predict phenomena. What
bothered them was that it provided no real way of conceiving of the
basic structure of the world. Bohr and his followers also claimed that
quantum theory was complete and it was not possible to arrive at any
clearer understanding of what was going on in the quantum realm. This
was the same as saying there was no deeper reality beyond the subatomic
landscape, no further answers to be found, and this, too, grated on
both Bohm and Einstein's philosophical sensibilities. Over the course
of their meetings they discussed many other things, but these points in
particular gained new prominence in Bohm's thoughts. Inspired by his
interactions with Einstein, he accepted the validity of his misgivings
about quantum physics and decided there had to be an alternative view.
When his textbook Quantum Theory was published in 1951 it was hailed as
a classic, but it was a classic about a subject to which Bohm no longer
gave his full allegiance. His mind, ever active and always looking for
deeper explanations, was already searching for
a better way of describing reality.
After
his talks with Einstein, Bohm tried to find a workable alternative to
Bohr's interpretation. He began by assuming that particles such as
electrons do exist in the absence of observers. He also assumed that
there was a deeper reality beneath Bohr's inviolable wall, a subquantum
level that still awaited discovery by science. Building on these
premises he discovered that simply by proposing the existence of a new
kind of field on this subquantum level he was able to explain the
findings of quantum physics as well as Bohr could. Bohm called his
proposed new field the quantum potential and theorized that, like
gravity, it pervaded all of space. However, unlike gravitational
fields, magnetic fields, and so on, its influence did not diminish with
distance. Its effects were subtle, but it was equally powerful
everywhere. Bohm published his alternative interpretation of quantum
theory in 1952. Reaction to his new approach was mainly negative. Some
physicists were so convinced such alternatives were impossible that
they dismissed his ideas out of hand. Others launched passionate
attacks against his reasoning. In the end virtually all such arguments
were based primarily on philosophical differences, but it did not
matter. Bohr's point of view had become so entrenched in physics that
Bohm's
alternative was looked upon as little more than heresy. Despite the
harshness of these attacks Bohm remained unswerving in his conviction
that there was more to reality than Bohr's view allowed. He also felt
that science was much too limited in its outlook when it came to
assessing new ideas such as his own, and in a 1957 book entitled
Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, he examined several of the
philosophical suppositions responsible for this attitude.
One was the widely held
assumption that it was possible for any single theory, such as quantum
theory, to be complete. Bohm criticized this assumption by pointing out
that nature may be infinite. Because it would not be possible for any
theory to completely explain something that is infinite, Bohm suggested
that open scientific inquiry might be better served if researchers
refrained from making this assumption. In the book he argued that the
way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes.
For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln's death,
they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth's gun.
But a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln's
death would have to include all of the events that led to the
development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to
kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that
allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so
on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the
vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still
felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single
cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the
universe as a whole.
41
During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his
alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully
into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number
of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox
thinking. One was the importance of wholeness.
Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as
merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum
potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole.
This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not
independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step
further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more
primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other
specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like
interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not
scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the
whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet
dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes
that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized
unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the
kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a
machine."
An even more surprising feature of
the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location.
At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations,
but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the
subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated,
location ceased to exist. All points in space became equal to all other
points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being
separate from anything else. Physicists call this property
"nonlocality."
The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain
the connection between twin particles without violating special
relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of
light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a
fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a
fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes
from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front
and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors
you might mistakenly assume that the fish on 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 you will eventually realize there is a relationship between
the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but
corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side,
and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you
might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating
with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking
place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the
aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says
Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays.
Indeed, because the quantum potential permeates all of space, all particles are nonlocally interconnected. Bohm
believes subatomic particles are connected in the same way as the
images of the fish on the two television monitors. Although particles
such as electrons appear to be separate from one another, on a deeper
level of reality—a level analogous to the aquarium—they are
actually just different aspects of a deeper cosmic unity.
More and more the picture of reality Bohm was developing was not one in
which subatomic particles were separate from one another and moving
through the void of space, but one in which all things were part of an
unbroken web and embedded in a space that was as real and rich with
process as the matter that moved through it.
Bohm's ideas still left most physicists unpersuaded, but did stir the
interest of a few. One of these was John Stewart Bell, a theoretical
physicist at CERN, a center for peaceful atomic research near Geneva,
Switzerland. Like Bohm, Bell had also become discontented with quantum
theory and felt there must be some alternative. As he later said: "Then
in 1952 I saw Bohm's paper. His idea was to complete quantum mechanics
by saying there are certain variables in addition to those
which everybody knew about. That impressed me very much."
Bell also realized that Bohm's theory implied the existence of
nonlocality and wondered if there was any way of experimentally
verifying its existence. The question remained in the back of his mind
for years until a sabbatical in 1964 provided him with the freedom to
focus his full attention on the matter. Then he quickly came up with an
elegant
mathematical proof that revealed how such an experiment could be
performed. The only problem was that it required a level of
technological precision that was not yet available. To be certain that
particles, such as those in the EPR paradox, were not using some normal
means of communication, the basic operations of the experiment had to
be performed in such an infinitesimally brief instant that there
wouldn't even be enough time for a ray of light to cross the distance
separating the two particles. This meant that the instruments used in
the experiment had to perform all of the necessary operations within a
few thousand-millionths of a second.
By
the late 1950s Bohm had already had his run-in with McCarthyism and had
become a research fellow at Bristol University, England. There, along
with a young research student named Yakir Aharonov, he discovered
another important example of nonlocal interconnectedness. Bohm and
Aharonov found that under the right circumstances an electron is able
to "feel" the presence of a magnetic field that is in a region
where there is zero probability of finding the electron. This
phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when the two
men first published their discovery, many physicists did not believe
such an effect was possible. Even today there is enough residual
skepticism that, despite confirmation of the effect in numerous
experiments, occasionally papers still appear arguing that it doesn't
exist. As always, Bohm stoically accepted his continuing role as
the voice in the crowd that bravely notes the emperor has no clothes.
In an interview conducted some years later he offered a simple
summation of the philosophy underlying his courage: "In the long run it
is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the
actual fact is."
Nevertheless, the limited response to his ideas about wholeness and
nonlocality and his own inability to see how to proceed further caused
him to focus his attention in other directions. In the 1960s this led
him to take a closer look at order.
Classical science generally divides things into two categories: those
that possess order in the arrangement of their parts and those whose
parts are disordered, or random, in arrangement.
Snowflakes, computers, and living things are all ordered. The pattern a
handful of spilled coffee beans makes on the floor, the debris left by
an explosion, and a series of numbers generated by a roulette wheel are
all disordered. As Bohm delved more deeply into the matter he realized
there were also different degrees of order. Some things were much more
ordered than other things, and this implied that there was, perhaps, no
end to the hierarchies of order that existed in the universe. From this
it occurred to Bohm that maybe things that we perceive as disordered
aren't disordered at all. Perhaps their order is of such an
"indefinitely high degree" that they only appear to us as random
(interestingly, mathematicians are unable to prove randomness, and
although some sequences of numbers are categorized as random, these are
only educated guesses).
While immersed in these thoughts, Bohm saw a device on a BBC television
program that helped him develop his ideas even further. The device was
a specially designed jar containing a large rotating cylinder. The
narrow space between the cylinder and the jar was filled with
glycerine—a thick, clear liquid—and floating motionlessly
in the glycerine was a drop of ink. What interested Bohm was that when
the handle on the cylinder was turned, the drop of ink spread out
through
45
the syrupy glycerine and seemed to disappear. But as soon as the handle
was turned back in the opposite direction, the faint tracing of ink
slowly collapsed upon itself and once again formed a droplet.
Bohm writes, "This immediately struck me as very relevant to the
question of order, since, when the ink drop was spread out, it still
had a 'hidden' (i. e., nonmanifest) order that was revealed when it was
reconstituted. On the other hand, in our usual language, we would say
that the ink was in a state of 'disorder' when it was diffused through
the glycerine. This led me to see that new notions of order must be
involved here."
When a drop of ink is placed in a jar full of glycerine and a cylinder
inside the jar is turned, the drop appears to spread out and disappear.
But when the cylinder is turned in the opposite direction, the drop
comes back together. Bohm uses this phenomenon as an example of how order can be either manifest (explicit) or hidden (implicit).
46
This discovery excited Bohm
greatly, for it provided him with a new way of looking at many of the
problems he had been contemplating. Soon after coming across the
ink-in-glycerine device he encountered an even better metaphor for
understanding order, one that enabled him not only to bring together
all the various strands of his years of thinking, but did so with such
force and explanatory power it seemed almost tailor-made for the
purpose. That metaphor was the hologram.
As soon as Bohm began to reflect on
the hologram he saw that it too provided a new way of understanding
order. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference
patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disordered
to the naked eye. Both possess orders that are hidden or enfolded in
much the same way that the order in a plasma is enfolded in the
seemingly random behavior of each of its electrons. But this was not
the only insight the hologram provided. The more Bohm thought about it
the more convinced he became that the universe actually employed
holographic principles in its operations, was itself a kind of giant,
flouring hologram, and this realization
allowed him to crystallize all of his various insights into a sweeping and cohesive whole.
He published his first papers on his holographic view of the universe
in the early 1970s, and in 1980 he presented a mature distillation of
his thoughts in a book entitled Wholeness and the Implicate Order. In
it he did more than just link
his myriad ideas together. He transfigured them into a new way of looking at reality that was as breathtaking as it was radical.
One
of Bohm's most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our
everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image.
Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary
level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of
our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic
film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this deeper level of reality
the implicate (which means "enfolded") order, and he refers to our
own level of existence as the explicate, or unfolded, order. He uses
these terms because he sees the manifestation of all forms in the
universe as the result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings between
these two orders.
For example, Bohm believes an electron is not one thing, but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space.
When an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is
simply because one aspect of the electron's ensemble has unfolded,
similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerine, at that
particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments. Put another way, electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain.
They are sustained by a constant
influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be
destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper
order from which it sprang.
A piece of holographic film and the image it generates are also an
example of an implicate and explicate order. The film is an implicate
order because the image encoded in its interference patterns is a
hidden totality enfolded throughout the whole. The hologram projected
from the film is an explicate order because it represents the unfolded
and perceptible version of the image. The constant and flowing exchange
between the two orders explains how particles, such as the electron in
the positronium atom, can shapeshift from one kind of particle to
another. Such shiftings can be viewed as one particle, say an electron,
enfolding back into the implicate order while another, a photon,
unfolds and takes its place. It also explains how a quantum can
manifest as either a particle or a wave.
According to Bohm, both aspects are always enfolded in a quantum's
ensemble, but the way an observer interacts with the ensemble
determines which aspect unfolds and which remains hidden. As such, the
role an observer plays in determining the form a quantum takes may be
no more mysterious than the fact that the way a jeweler manipulates a
gem
determines which of its facets become visible and which do not. Because
the term hologram usually refers to an image that is static and does
not convey the dynamic and ever active nature of the incalculable
enfoldings and unfoldings that moment by moment create our universe, Bohm prefers to describe the universe not as a hologram, but as a "holomovement. "
The existence of a deeper and
holographically organized order also explains why reality becomes
nonlocal at the subquantum level. As we have seen, when something is
organized holographically, all semblance of location breaks down.
Saying that every part of a piece of holographic film contains all the
information possessed by the whole is really just another way of saying
that the information is distributed nonlocally. Hence, if the universe
is organized according to holographic principles, it, too, would be
expected to have nonlocal properties.
Most
mind-boggling of all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness.
Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless
holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as
meaningless to view the universe as composed of "parts, " as it is to
view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out
of which they flow.
An electron is not an "elementary particle. " It is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement.
Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always
arbitrary, a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and
everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another
than different patterns in an ornate carpet.
This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity
Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not
separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole
he called the space-time continuum.
(Time and Space do not exist and Einstein's 'space-time continuum' doesn't exist either, LM)
Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in
the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness
of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of
everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders
blend into each other. Take a moment to consider this. Look at
your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you.
And at the dog resting at your feet. You
are not merely made of the same things. You are the same thing. One
thing. Unbroken. One enormous something that has extended its
uncountable arms and appendages into all the apparent objects, atoms,
restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos. Bohm cautions that
this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass.
Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own
unique qualities.
49
To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At
a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many
individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of
rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible
to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between "things" is meaningless. He merely wants
us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the
holomovement into "things" is always an abstraction, a way of making
those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking.
In attempts to correct this,
instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement "things, " he
prefers to call them "relatively independent subtotalities. " Indeed,
Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world
and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible
for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our
society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the
valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it
is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the
whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society,
such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the
problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm
argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into
parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.
In addition to explaining why quantum physicists find so many examples of interconnectedness
when they plumb the depths of matter, Bohm's holographic universe
explains many other puzzles. One is the effect consciousness seems to
have on the subatomic world. As we have seen, Bohm rejects the idea that particles don't exist until they are observed. But he is not in principle against trying to bring consciousness and physics together.
He simply feels that most
physicists go about it the wrong way, by once again trying to fragment
reality and saying that one separate thing, consciousness, interacts
with another separate thing, a subatomic particle. Because
all such things are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no
meaning to speak of consciousness and matter as interacting. In a
sense, the observer is the observed. The observer is also the
measuring device, the experimental results, the laboratory, and the
breeze that blows outside the laboratory. In fact, Bohm believes that
consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any
relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but
deep in the implicate order. Consciousness
is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all
matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of
living things. As Bohm
puts it, "The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic
feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with
the electron." Similarly, he believes that dividing the universe up
into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and
inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded
throughout the totality of
the universe. Even a rock is in some way alive, says Bohm, for life and
intelligence are present not only in all of matter, but in "energy, "
... "the fabric of the entire universe, " and everything else we
abstract out of the holomovement and mistakenly view as separate things.
The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are
ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip
side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the
whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole.
This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda
galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra
meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and
implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small
region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire
cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which
gives new meaning to William Blake's famous poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
51
If
our universe is only a pale shadow of a deeper order, what else lies
hidden, enfolded in the warp and weft of our reality? Bohm has a
suggestion. According to our current understanding of physics, every
region of space is awash with different kinds of fields composed of
waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least some energy.
When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can
possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains
more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known
universe!
Some physicists refuse to take this calculation seriously and believe it must somehow be in error. Bohm thinks
this infinite ocean of energy does
exist and tells us at least a little about the vast and hidden nature
of the implicate order. He feels most physicists ignore the existence
of this enormous ocean of energy because, like fish who are unaware of
the water in which they swim, they have been taught to focus primarily
on objects embedded in the ocean, on matter. Bohm's view that space is
as real and rich with process as the matter that moves through it
reaches full maturity in his ideas about the implicate sea of energy.
Matter does not exist independently from the sea, from so-called empty
space. It is a part of space. To explain what he means, Bohm
offers the following analogy: A crystal cooled to absolute zero will
allow a stream of electrons to pass through it without scattering them.
If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the crystal will lose
their transparency, so to speak, and begin to scatter electrons. From
an electron's point of view such flaws would appear as pieces of
"matter" floating in a sea of nothingness, but this is not really the
case. The nothingness and the pieces of matter do not exist
independently from one another. They are both part of the same fabric,
the deeper order of the crystal. Bohm believes the same is true at our
own level of existence.
Space is not empty. It is full, a
plenum (fullness) as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the
existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not
separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface,
a comparatively small "pattern of excitation" in the midst of an
unimaginably vast ocean.
"This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to
approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a
three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation," states Bohm. In
other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the
universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of
something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not even
a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing
shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things. This infinite
sea of energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order.
Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to
everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every
subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of
matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars
to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix, to the forces that
control the sizes and shapes of galaxies. And even this is not all it
may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to believe the
implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed of
orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development.
A number of tantalizing findings in physics suggest that Bohm may be correct. Even
disregarding the implicate sea of energy, space is filled with light
and other electromagnetic waves that constantly crisscross and
interfere with one another. As we have seen, all particles are also
waves. This means that physical objects and everything else we perceive
in reality are composed of interference patterns, a fact that has
undeniable holographic implications.
Another compelling piece of evidence comes from a recent experimental
finding. In the 1970s the technology became available to actually
perform the two-particle experiment outlined by Bell, and a number of
different researchers attempted the task. Although the findings were
promising, none was able to produce conclusive results. Then in 1982
physicists Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard and Gerard Roger of the
Institute of Optics at the University of Paris succeeded. First they
produced a series of twin photons by heating calcium atoms with lasers.
Then they allowed each photon to travel in opposite directions through
6. 5 meters of pipe and pass through special filters that directed them
toward one of two possible polarization analyzers. It took each filter
10 billionths of a second to switch between one analyzer or the other,
about 30 billionths of a second less than it took for light to travel
the entire 13 meters separating each set of photons. In this way Aspect
and his colleagues were able to rule out any possibility of the photons
communicating through any known physical process. Aspect and his team
discovered that, as quantum theory predicted, each photon was still
able to correlate its angle of polarization with that of its twin.
This meant that either Einstein's
ban against faster-than-light communication was being violated, or the
two photons were nonlocally connected. Because most physicists are
opposed to admitting faster-than-
light processes into physics, Aspect's experiment is generally viewed
as virtual proof that the connection between the two photons is
nonlocal. Furthermore, as
physicist Paul Davis of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England,
observes, since all particles are continually interacting and
separating, "the nonlocal aspects of quantum systems is therefore a
general property of nature. " Aspect's findings do not prove that
Bohm's model of the universe is correct, but they do provide it with
tremendous support. Indeed, as mentioned, Bohm does not believe any
theory is correct in an absolute sense, including his own. All are only
approximations of the truth, finite maps we use to try to chart
territory that is both infinite and indivisible.
This does not mean he feels his theory is not testable. He is confident
that at some point in the future techniques will be developed which
will allow his ideas to be tested (when Bohm is criticized on this
point he notes that there are a number of theories in physics, such as
"superstring theory, " which will probably not be testable for several
decades).
Most
physicists are skeptical of Bohm's ideas. For example, Yale physicist
Lee Smolin simply does not find Bohm's theory "very compelling,
physically." Nonetheless, there is an almost universal respect for
Bohm's intelligence. The opinion of Boston University physicist Abner
Shimony is representative of this view. "I'm afraid I just don't
understand
his theory. It is certainly a metaphor and the question is how
literally to take the metaphor. Still, he has really thought very
deeply about the matter and I think he's done a tremendous service by
bringing these questions to the forefront of physics's research instead
of just having them swept under the rug. He's been a courageous,
daring, and imaginative man." Such skepticism notwithstanding, there
are also physicists who are sympathetic to Bohm's ideas, including such
big guns as Roger Penrose of Oxford, the creator of the modern theory
of the black hole; Bernard d'Espagnat of the University of Paris, one
of the world's leading authorities on the conceptual foundations of
quantum theory; and Cambridge's Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973
Nobel Prize in physics. Josephson believes Bohm's implicate order may
someday even lead to the inclusion of ... Mind within the framework of
science, an idea Josephson supports.
Considered together, Bohm and Pribram's theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world:
Our brains mathematically construct
objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately
projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is
beyond both space and time:
The brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.
For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world
does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing.
What is "out there" is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and
reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take
this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks and stones and
other familiar objects that make up our world. How is the brain (which
itself is composed of frequencies of matter) able to take something as
insubstantial as a blur of frequencies and make it seem solid to the
touch?
"The kind of mathematical process that Bekesy simulated with his vibrators is basic to how our brains construct our
image of a world out there, " Pribram states. In other words, the
smoothness of a piece of fine china and the feel of beach sand beneath
our feet are really just elaborate versions of the phantom limb
syndrome.
55
According to Pribram this does not mean there aren't china cups and
grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has
two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through
the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of
our lenses, we'd experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is
real and which is illusion? "Both are real to me, " says Pribram, "or,
if you want to say, neither of them are real." This state of affairs is
not limited to china cups. We, too, have two very different aspects to
our reality. We can view ourselves as physical bodies moving through
space. Or we can view ourselves as
a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the cosmic
hologram. Bohm believes this second point of view might even be the
more correct, for to think of ourselves as a holographic mind/brain
looking at a holographic universe is again an abstraction, an attempt
to separate two things that ultimately cannot be separated.
Do not be troubled if this is difficult to grasp. It is relatively easy
to understand the idea of holism in something that is external to us,
like an apple in a hologram. What makes it difficult is that in this case we are not looking at the hologram. We are part of the hologram.
The difficulty is also another indication of how radical a revision
Bohm and Pribram are trying to make in our way of thinking. But it is
not the only radical revision. Pribram's assertion that our brains
construct objects pales beside another of Bohm's conclusions: that we even construct space and time.
The implications of this view are just one of the subjects that will be
examined as we explore the effect Bohm and Pribram's ideas have had on
the work of researchers in other fields.
If
we were to look closely at an individual human being, we would
immediately notice that it is a unique hologram onto itself;
self-contained, selfgenerating, and self-knowledgeable.
Yet if we were to remove this being from its planetary context, we
would quickly realize that the human form is not unlike a mandala or
symbolic poem, for within its form and flow lives comprehensive
information about various physical, social, psychological, and
evolutionary contexts within which it was created. —Dr. Ken
Dychtwald in The Holographic Paradigm (Ken Wilber, editor)
While the traditional model of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical, modern consciousness research has added new levels, realms, and dimensions and shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole universe and all of existence. — Stanislav Grof "Beyond the Brain".
One
area of research on which the holographic model has had an impact is
psychology. This is not surprising, for, as Bohm has pointed out,
consciousness itself provides a perfect example of what he means by
undivided and flowing movement. The ebb and flow of our consciousness
is not precisely definable but can be seen as a deeper and more
fundamental reality out of which our thoughts and ideas unfold. In
turn, these thoughts and ideas are not unlike the ripples, eddies, and
whirlpools that form in a flowing stream, and like the whirlpools in a
stream some can recur and persist in a more or less stable way, while
others are evanescent and vanish almost as quickly as they appear. The
holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that
can sometimes occur between the consciousnesses of two or more
individuals.
One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied in Swiss
psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious. Early in
his career Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies,
and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas
that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal
history. Instead, such symbols more closely resembled the images and
themes of the world's great mythologies and religions.
Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations, and religious
visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that
is shared by all people. One experience that led Jung to this
conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young
man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his
rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at
the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a
curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that
he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side
to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. At the time
Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But
several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand
year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to
bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the
participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it,
and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to
blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had
had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the
man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had
bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the
human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they
were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a
two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our
unconscious minds. Although Jung's concept of a collective unconscious
has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now embraced by untold
thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current understanding
of the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its existence. The
interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic model,
however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things
are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also
interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or
as
61
Bohm puts it, "Deep down the
consciousness of mankind is one." If each of us has access to the
unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all
walking encyclopedias?
Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes
it is because we are only able to tap into information in the implicate
order that is directly relevant to our memories. Anderson calls this
selective process personal resonance and likens it to the fact that a
vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or set up a vibration in)
another tuning fork only if the second tuning fork possesses a similar
structure, shape, and size. "Due to personal resonance, relatively few
of the almost infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate holographic
structure of the universe are available to an individual's personal
consciousness, " says Anderson. "Thus, when enlightened persons
glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write
out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a
context similar to that in which Einstein studied physics."
Another
researcher who believes Bohm's implicate order has applications in
psychology is psychiatrist Montague Ullman, the founder of the Dream
Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and
a professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, also in New York.
Ullman's initial interest in
the holographic concept stemmed also from its suggestion that all
people are interconnected in the holographic order.
He has good reason for his interest. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he
was responsible for many of the ESP dream experiments mentioned in the
introduction. Even today the ESP dream studies conducted at Maimonides
stand as some of the best empirical evidence that, in our dreams at
least, we are able to communicate with one another in ways that cannot
presently be explained. In a typical experiment a paid volunteer who
claimed to possess no psychic ability was asked to sleep in a room in
the lab while a person in another room concentrated on a randomly
selected painting and
tried to get the volunteer to dream of the image it contained.
Sometimes the results were inconclusive. But other times the volunteers
had dreams that were clearly influenced by the paintings. For exampie,
when the target painting was Tamayo's Animals, a picture depicting two
dogs flashing their teeth and howling over a pile of bones, the test
subject dreamed she was at a banquet where there was not enough meat
and everyone was warily eyeing one another as they greedily ate their
allotted portions. In another experiment the target picture was
Chagall's Paris from a Window, a brightly colored painting depicting a
man looking out a window at the Paris skyline. The painting also
contained several other unusual features, including a cat with a human
face, several small figures of men flying through the air, and a chair
covered with flowers. Over the course of several nights the test
subject dreamed repeatedly about things French, French
architecture,
a French policeman's hat, and a man in French attire gazing at various
"layers" of a French village. Some of the images in these dreams also
appeared to be specific references to the painting's vibrant colors and
unusual features, such as the image of a group of bees flying around
flowers, and a brightly colored Mardi Gras-type celebration in which
the people were wearing costumes and masks.
Although Ullman believes such
findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness
Bohm is talking about, he feels that an even more profound example of
holographic wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming. That
is the ability of our dreaming selves often to be far wiser than we
ourselves are in our waking state. For instance, Ullman says that in
his psychoanalytic practice he could have a patient who seemed
completely unenlightened when he was awake—mean, selfish,
arrogant, exploitative, and manipulative; a person who had fragmented
and dehumanized all of his interpersonal relationships. But no matter
how spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or
her own shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly
and contain metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into
a state of greater self-awareness. Moreover, such dreams were not
one-time occurrences. During the course of his practice Ullman noticed
that when one of his patients failed to recognize or accept some truth
about himself, that truth would surface again and again in his dreams,
in different metaphorical guises and linked with different related
experiences from his past, but always in an apparent attempt to offer
him new opportunities to come to terms with the truth. Because a
man can ignore the counsel of his dreams and still live to be a
hundred, Ullman believes this self-monitoring process is striving for more than just the welfare of the individual.
63
He believes that nature is
concerned with the survival of the species. He also agrees with Bohm on
the importance of wholeness and feels that dreams are nature's way of
trying to counteract our seemingly unending compulsion to fragment the
world. "An individual can disconnect from all that's cooperative,
meaningful, and loving and still survive, but nations don't have that
luxury. Unless we learn how to overcome all the ways we've fragmented
the human race, nationally, religiously, economically, or whatever, we
are going to continue to find ourselves in a position where we can
accidentally destroy the whole picture, " says Ullman. "The only way we
can do that is to look at how we fragment our existence as individuals.
Dreams reflect our individual experience, but I think that's because
there's a greater underlying need to preserve the species, to maintain
species-connectedness." What is the source of the unending flow of
wisdom that bubbles up in our dreams? Ullman admits that he doesn't
know, but he offers a suggestion. Given that the implicate order
represents in a sense an infinite information source, perhaps it is the
origin of this greater fund of knowledge. Perhaps dreams are a bridge
between the perceptual and nonmanifest orders and represent a "natural
transformation of the implicate into the explicate." If Ullman is
correct in this supposition it stands the traditional psychoanalytic
view of dreams on its ear, for instead of dream content being something
that ascends into consciousness from a primitive substratum of the
personality, quite the opposite would be true.
Ullman
believes that some aspects of psychosis can also be explained by the
holographic idea. Both Bohm and Pribram have noted that the experiences
mystics have reported throughout the ages—such as feelings of
cosmic oneness with the universe, a sense of unity with all life, and
so forth—sound very much like descriptions of the implicate
order. They suggest that perhaps mystics are somehow able to peer
beyond ordinary explicate reality and glimpse its deeper, more
holographic qualities. Ullman believes that psychotics are also able to
experience certain aspects of the holographic level of reality. But
because they are unable to order their experiences rationally, these
glimpses are only tragic parodies of the ones reported by mystics. For
example, schizophrenics often report oceanic feelings of oneness with
the universe, but in a magic, delusional way. They describe feeling a
loss of boundaries between themselves and others, a belief that leads
them to think their thoughts are no longer private. They believe they
are able to read the thoughts of others. And instead of viewing people,
objects, and concepts as individual things, they often view them as
members of larger and larger subclasses, a tendency that seems to be a
way of expressing the holographic quality of the reality in which they
find themselves. Ullman believes that schizophrenics try to convey
their sense of unbroken wholeness in the way they view space and time.
Studies have shown that schizophrenics often treat the converse of any
relation as identical to the relation. For instance, according to the
schizophrenic's way of thinking, saying that "event A follows event B"
is the same as saying "event B follows event A. " The idea of one event
following another in any kind of time sequence is meaningless, for all
points in
time are viewed equal. The same is true of spatial relations. If a
man's head is above his shoulders, then his shoulders are also above
his head. Like the image in a
piece of holographic film, things no longer have precise locations, and
spatial relationships cease to have meaning. Ullman believes that
certain aspects of holographic thinking are even more pronounced in
manic-depressives. Whereas the schizophrenic only gets whiffs of the
holographic order, the manic is deeply involved in it and grandiosely
identifies with its infinite potential- "He can't keep up with all the
thoughts and ideas that come at him in so overwhelming a way, " states
Ullman. "He has to lie, dissemble, and manipulate those about him so as
to accommodate to his expansive vista. The end result, of course, is
mostly chaos and confusion mixed with occasional outbursts of
creativity and success in consensual reality.
In turn, the manic becomes depressed after he returns from this surreal
vacation and once again faces the hazards and chance occurrences of
everyday life. If it is true that we all encounter aspects of the
implicate order when we dream, why don't these encounters have the same
effect on us as they do on psychotics? One reason, says Ullman, is that
we leave the unique and challenging logic of the dream behind when we
wake. Because of his condition the psychotic is forced to contend with
it while simultaneously trying to function in everyday reality. Ullman
also theorizes that when we dream, most of us have a natural protective
mechanism that keeps us from coming into contact with more of the implicate order than we can cope with.
65
In recent years psychologists have become increasingly interested in lucid dreams, a type of dream in which the dreamer maintains full waking consciousness and is aware that he or she is dreaming. In addition to the consciousness factor, lucid dreams are unique in several other ways. Unlike
normal dreams in which the dreamer is primarily a passive participant,
in a lucid dream the dreamer is often able to control the dream in
various ways—turn nightmares into pleasant experiences, change
the setting of the dream, and/or summon up particular individuals or
situations. Lucid dreams are also much more vivid and suffused with
vitality than normal dreams. In a lucid dream marble floors seem eerily
solid and real, flowers, dazzlingly colorful and fragrant, and
everything is vibrant and strangely energized. Researchers studying
lucid dreams believe they may lead to new ways to stimulate personal
growth, enhance self-confidence, promote mental
and physical health, and facilitate creative problem solving.
At the 1987 annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams
held in Washington, D. C., physicist Fred Alan Wolf delivered a talk in
which he asserted that the holographic model may help explain this
unusual phenomenon. Wolf, an occasional lucid dreamer himself, points
out that a piece of holographic film actually generates two images, a
virtual image that appears to be in the space behind the film, and a
real image that comes into focus in the space in front of
the film. One difference between the two is that the light waves that
compose a virtual image seem to be diverging from an apparent focus or
source. As we have seen, this is an illusion, for the virtual image of
a hologram has no more extension in space than does the image in a
mirror. But the real image of a hologram is formed by light waves that
are coming to a focus, and this is not an illusion. The real image does
possess extension in space. Unfortunately, little attention is paid
to this real image in the usual applications of holography because an
image that comes into focus in empty air is invisible and can only be
seen when dust particles pass through it, or when someone blows a puff
of smoke through it.
Wolf believes that all dreams are
internal holograms, and ordinary dreams are less vivid because they are
virtual images. However, he thinks the brain also has the ability to
generate real images, and that is exactly what it does when we are
dreaming lucidly. The unusual vibrancy of the lucid dream is due to the
fact that the waves are converging and not diverging. "If there is a
Viewer' where these waves focus, that viewer will be bathed in the
scene, and the scene coming to a focus will 'contain' him. In this way
the dream experience will appear 'lucid, ' " observes Wolf. Like
Pribram, Wolf believes our minds create the illusion of reality "out
there" through the same kind of processes studied by Bekesy. He
believes these processes are also what allows the lucid dreamer to
create subjective realities in which things like marble floors and
flowers are as tangible and real as their so-called objective
counterparts. In fact, he thinks our ability to be lucid in our dreams
suggests that there may not be much difference between the world at
large and the world inside our heads. (It
looks like Lucid dreams are generated by us, but ordinary dreams are
artificial Holographic Imprints imprinted into our Mind by someone
else, LM).
"When the observer and the observed can separate and say this is the
observed and this is the observer, which is an effect one seems to be
having when lucid, then I think it's questionable whether [lucid
dreams] should be considered subjective, " says Wolf. Wolf
postulates that lucid dreams (and perhaps all dreams) are actually
visits to Parallel Universes. They are just smaller holograms within
the larger and more inclusive cosmic hologram. He even suggests that
the ability to lucid-dream might better be called parallel universe
awareness. "I call it parallel universe awareness because I believe
that parallel universes arise as other images in the hologram, "
Wolf states. This and other similar ideas about the ultimate
nature of dreaming will be explored in greater depth later in the book.
The idea that we are able to access images from the collective unconscious, or even visit parallel dream universes,
pales beside the conclusions of another prominent researcher who has
been influenced by the holographic model. He is Stanislav Grof, chief
of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and
an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine.
67
After more than thirty years of studying nonordinary states of consciousness, Grof has concluded that the avenues of exploration available to our psyches via holographic interconnectedness are more than vast. They are virtually endless.
Grof first became interested in nonordinary states of consciousness in
the 1950s while investigating the clinical uses of the hallucinogen LSD
at the Psychiatric Research Institute in his native Prague,
Czechoslovakia. The purpose of his research was to determine whether
LSD had any therapeutic applications. When Grof began his research, most
scientists viewed the LSD experience as little more than a stress
reaction, the brain's way of responding to a noxious chemical. But when
Grof studied the records of his patient's experiences he did not find
evidence of any recurring stress reaction. Instead, there was a
definite continuity running through each of the patient's sessions.
"Rather than being unrelated and random, the experiential content
seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels
of the unconscious, " says Grof. This suggested that repeated LSD
sessions had important ramifications for the practice and theory of
psychotherapy, and provided Grof and his colleagues with the impetus
they needed to continue the research. The results were striking. It
quickly became clear that serial LSD sessions were able to expedite the
psychotherapeutic process and shorten the time necessary for the
treatment of many disorders. Traumatic memories that had haunted
individuals for years were unearthed and dealt with, and sometimes even
serious conditions, such as schizophrenia, were cured. But what was
even more startling was that many of the patients rapidly moved beyond
issues involving their illnesses and into areas that were uncharted by
Western psychology. One common experience was the reliving of what it
was like to be in the womb. At first Grof thought these were just
imagined experiences, but as the evidence continued to amass he
realized that the knowledge of embryology inherent in the descriptions
was often far
superior to the patients' previous education in the area. Patients
accurately described certain characteristics of the heart sounds of
their mother, the nature of acoustic phenomena in the peritoneal
cavity, specific details concerning blood circulation in the placenta,
and even details about the various cellular and biochemical processes
taking place. They also described important thoughts and feelings their
mother had had during pregnancy and events such as physical traumas
she had experienced. Whenever possible Grof investigated these
assertions, and on several occasions was able to verify them by
questioning the mother and other individuals involved. Psychiatrists,
psychologists, and biologists who experienced prebirth memories during
their training for the program (all the therapists who participated in
the study also had to undergo several sessions of LSD psychotherapy)
expressed similar astonishment at the apparent authenticity of the
experiences. Most disconcerting of
all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness
appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore
what it was like to be other living things and even other objects.
For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced
she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not
only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be
encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of
the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of
colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior
knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist
later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on
the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.
Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their
relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be
her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening
event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a
precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the
white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later
confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other
patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen
ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other
experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories.
Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to
participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to
dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation
rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims
of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure
historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at
odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the
subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed
account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming
and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets
and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the
mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other
esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services.
69
Other individuals tuned into the
cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of
what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but
also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings. In fact, there did
not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into.
They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and
even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was
like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the
sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness
of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to
transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily
accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they
sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral
travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of
consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects
also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels
of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering
from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension.
It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he
sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a
presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate
with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who
lived in the Moravian city
of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken
care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street
address, and telephone number.
The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and
seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment.
Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation
and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would
have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, "
says Grof.
"I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I
could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other
side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with
a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we
lost him three weeks ago.' In the 1960s Grof was offered a position at
the Maryland Psychiatric. Research Center and moved to the United
States. The center was also doing controlled studies of the
psychotherapeutic applications of LSD, and this allowed Grof to
continue his research. In addition to examining
the effects of repeated LSD sessions on individuals with various mental
disorders, the center also studied its effects on "normal"
volunteers— doctors, nurses, painters, musicians, philosophers,
scientists, priests, and theologians. Again Grof found the same kind of
phenomena occurring again and again. It was almost as if LSD provided
the human consciousness with access to a kind of infinite subway
system, a labyrinth of tunnels and byways that existed in the
subterranean reaches of the unconscious, and one that literally
connected everything in the universe with everything else. After
personally guiding over three thousand LSD sessions (each lasting at
least five hours) and studying the records of more than two thousand
sessions conducted by colleagues, Grof became unalterably convinced
that something extraordinary was going on. "After years of conceptual
struggle and confusion, I have concluded that the data
from LSD research indicate an urgent need for a drastic revision of the
existing paradigms for psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and possibly
science in general, " he states. "There is at present little doubt in
my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature
of reality, and particularly of human beings, is superficial,
incorrect, and incomplete. " Grof coined the term transpersonal to
describe such phenomena, experiences in which the consciousness
transcends the customary boundaries of the personality, and in the late
1960s he joined with several other like-minded professionals, including
the psychologist and educator Abraham Maslow, to found a new branch of
psychology called transpersonal psychology. If our current way of
looking at reality cannot account for transpersonal events, what new
understanding might take its place?
Grof believes it is the holographic
model. As he points out, the essential characteristics of transpersonal
experiences—the feeling that all boundaries are illusory, the
lack of distinction between part and whole, and the interconnectedness
of all things—are all qualities one would expect to find in a
holographic universe. In addition, he feels the enfolded nature of
space and time in the holographic domain explains why transpersonal
experiences are not bound by the usual spatial or temporal limitations.
Grof thinks that the almost endless capacity holograms have for
information storage and retrieval also accounts for the fact that
visions, fantasies, and other "psychological gestalts, " all contain an
enormous amount of information about an individual's personality.
A single image experienced during an LSD session might contain
information about a person's attitude toward life in general, a trauma
he experienced during childhood, how much self-esteem he has, how he
feels about his parents, and how he feels about his marriage—all
embodied in the overall metaphor of the scene.
Such experiences are holographic in
another way, in that each small part of the scene can also contain an
entire constellation of information. Thus, free association and other
analytical techniques performed on the scene's miniscule details can
call forth an additional flood of data about the individual involved.
The composite nature of archetypal images can be modeled by the
holographic idea. As Grof observes, holography makes it possible to
build up a sequence of exposures, such as pictures of every member of a
large family, on the same piece of film. When this is done the
developed piece of film will contain the image of an individual that
represents not one member of the family, but all of them at the same
time. "These genuinely composite images represent an exquisite
model of a certain type of transpersonal experience, such as the
archetypal images of the Cosmic Man, Woman, Mother, Father, Lover,
Trickster, Fool, or Martyr (sufferer), " says Grof. If each exposure is
taken at a slightly different angle, instead of resulting in a
composite picture, the piece of film can be used to create a series of
holographic images that appear to flow into one another. Grof believes
this illustrates another aspect of the visionary experience, namely,
the tendency of countless images to unfold in rapid sequence, each one
appearing and then dissolving into the next as if
by magic. He thinks holography's success at modeling so many different
aspects of the archetypal experience suggests that there is a deep link
between holographic processes and the way archetypes are produced.
Indeed, Grof feels that evidence of
a hidden, holographic order surfaces virtually every time one
experiences a nonordinary state of consciousness:
Bohm's concept of the unfolded and
enfolded orders and the idea that certain important aspects of reality
are not accessible to experience and study under ordinary circumstances
are of direct relevance for the understanding of unusual states of
consciousness. Individuals who have experienced various nonordinary
states of consciousness, including well educated and sophisticated
scientists from various disciplines, frequently report that they
entered hidden domains of reality that seemed to be authentic and in
some sense implicit in (meant, unspoken), and supraordinated to,
everyday reality.
Perhaps
Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by
individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without
resorting to drugs of any kind. To this end, Grof and his wife,
Christina, have developed a simple, nondrug technique for inducing
these holotropic, or nonordinary, states of consciousness. They define
a holotropic state of consciousness as one in which it is possible to
access the holographic labyrinth that connects all aspects of
existence. These include one's biological, psychological, racial, and
spiritual history, the past, present, and future of the world, other
levels of reality, and all the other experiences already discussed in
the context of the LSD experience. The Grofs call their technique
holotropic therapy and use only rapid and controlled breathing,
evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of
consciousness. To date, thousands of individuals have attended their
workshops and report experiences that are every bit as spectacular and
emotionally profound as those described by subjects of Grofs previous
work on LSD. Grof describes his current work and gives a detailed
account of his methods in his book "The Adventure of Self-Discovery."
A
number of researchers have used the holographic model to explain
various aspects of the thinking process itself. For example, New York
psychiatrist Edgar A. Levenson believes the hologram provides a
valuable model for understanding the sudden and transformative changes
individuals often experience during psychotherapy.
73
He bases his conclusion on the fact that such changes take place no matter what technique or psychoanalytic approach the therapist uses.
Hence, he feels all psychoanalytic
approaches are purely ceremonial, and change is due to something else
entirely. Levenson believes that something is resonance. A therapist
always knows when therapy is going well, he observes. There is a strong
feeling that the pieces of an elusive pattern are all about to come
together. The therapist is not saying anything new to the patient, but
instead seems to be resonating with something the patient already
unconsciously knows: "It is as though a huge, three-
dimensional, spatially coded representation of the patient's experience
develops in the therapy, running through every aspect of his life, his
history and his participation with the therapist. At some point there
is a kind of 'overload' and everything falls into place."
Levenson believes these three-dimensional representations of experience
are holograms buried deep in the patient's psyche, and a resonance of
feeling between the therapist and patient causes them to emerge in a
process similar to the way a laser of a certain frequency causes an
image made with a laser of the same frequency to emerge from a multiple
image hologram." The holographic model suggests a radically new
paradigm which might give us a fresh way of perceiving and connecting
clinical phenomena which have always been known to be important, but
were relegated to the 'art' of psychotherapy" says Levenson. "It
offers a possible theoretical template for change and a practical hope
of clarifying psychotherapeutic technique."
Psychiatrist David Shainberg, associate dean of the Postgraduate
Psychoanalytic Program at the William Alanson White Institute of
Psychiatry in New York, feels
Bohm's assertion that thoughts are
like vortices in a river should be taken literally and explains why our
attitudes and beliefs sometimes become fixed and resistant to change.
Studies have shown that vortices are often remarkably stable (whirlwinds, whirls of mass or air).
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a giant vortex of gas over 25, 000 miles
wide, has remained intact since it was first discovered 300 years ago.
Shainberg believes this same tendency toward stability is what causes
certain vortices of thought (our ideas and opinions) to become
occasionally cemented in our consciousness. He feels the virtual
permanence of some vortices is often detrimental to our growth as
human beings. A particularly powerful vortex can dominate our behavior
and inhibit our ability to assimilate new ideas and information. It can
cause us to become repetitious, create blockages in the creative flow
of our consciousness, keep us from seeing the wholeness of ourselves,
and make us feel disconnected from our species.
Shainberg believes that vortices may even explain things like the nuclear arms race: "Look at the nuclear arms race as a vortex
arising out of the greed of human beings who are isolated in their
separate selves and do not feel the connection to other human beings.
They are also feeling a peculiar emptiness and become greedy for
everything they can get to fill themselves. Hence nuclear industries proliferate because they provide large amounts of money and the greed is so
extensive that such people do not care what might happen from their actions."
Like Bohm, Shainberg believes our consciousness is constantly unfolding
out of the implicate order, and when we allow the same vortices to take
form repeatedly he feels we are erecting a barrier between ourselves
and the endless positive and novel interactions we could be having with
this infinite source of all being.
To catch a glimmer of what we are
missing, he suggests we look at a child. Children have not yet had the
time to form vortices, and this is reflected in the open and flexible
way they interact with the world. According to Shainberg the sparkling
aliveness of a child expresses the very essence of the unfolding-
enfolding nature of consciousness when it is unimpeded.
If you want to become aware of your own frozen vortices of thought,
Shainberg recommends you pay close attention to the way you behave in
conversation. When people with set beliefs converse with others, they
try to justify their identities by espousing and defending their
opinions. Their judgments seldom change as a result of any new
information they encounter, and they show little interest in allowing
any real conversational interaction to take place. A person who is open
to the flowing nature of consciousness is more willing to see the
frozen condition of the relationships imposed by such vortices of
thought. They are committed to exploring conversational interactions,
rather than endlessly repeating a static litany of opinions.
"Human response and articulation of that response, feedback of
reactions to that response and the clarifying of the relationships
between different responses, are the way human beings participate in
the flow of the implicate order, " says Shainberg.
Another psychological phenomena
that bears several earmarks of the implicate is multiple personality
disorder, or MPD. MPD is a bizarre syndrome in which two or more
distinct personalities inhabit a single body.
Victims of the disorder, or "multiples, " often have no awareness of
their condition. They do not realize that control of their body is
being passed back and forth between different personalities and instead
feel they are suffering from some kind of amnesia, confusion, or
black-out spells. Most multiples average between eight to thirteen
personalities, although so-called super-multiples may have more than a
hundred subpersonalities. One of the most telling statistics regarding
multiples is that 97 percent of them have had a history of severe
childhood trauma, often in the form of monstrous psychological,
physical, and sexual abuse. This has led many researchers to conclude
that becoming a multiple is the psyche's way of coping with
extraordinary and soul-crushing pain. By dividing up into one or more
personalities the psyche is able to parcel out the pain, in a way, and
have several personalities bear what would be too much for just one
personality to withstand. In this sense becoming a multiple may be the
ultimate example of what Bohm means by fragmentation. It is interesting
to note that when the psyche fragments itself, it does not become a
collection of broken and jagged-edged shards (pieces), but a collection
of smaller wholes, complete and self-sustaining with their own traits,
motives, and desires. Although these wholes are not identical copies of
the original personality, they are related to the dynamics of the
original personality, and this in itself suggests that some kind of
holographic process is involved. Bohm's assertion that fragmentation
always eventually proves destructive is also apparent in the syndrome.
Although becoming a multiple allows a person to survive an otherwise
unendurable childhood, it brings with it a host of unpleasant side
effects. These may include depression, anxiety and panic attacks,
phobias, heart and respiratory problems, unexplained nausea,
migrainelike headaches, tendencies toward self-mutilation, and many
other mental and physical disorders. Startlingly, but regular as
clockwork, most multiples are diagnosed when they are between the ages
of twenty-eight and thirty-five, a "coincidence" that suggests that
some inner alarm system may be going off at that age, warning them that
it is imperative they are diagnosed and thus obtain the help they need.
This idea seems borne out by the fact that multiples who reach their
forties before they are diagnosed frequently report having the sense
that if they did not seek help soon, any chance of recovery would be
lost. Despite the temporary advantages the tortured psyche gains by
fragmenting itself, it is clear that mental and physical well-being,
and perhaps even survival, still depend on wholeness. Another unusual
feature of MPD is that each of a multiple's personalities possesses a
different brain-wave pattern. This is surprising, for as Frank Putnam,
a National Institutes of Health psychiatrist who has studied this
phenomenon, points out, normally a person's brain-wave pattern does not
change even in states of extreme emotion. Brainwave patterns are not
the only thing that varies from personality to personality. Blood flow
patterns, muscle tone, heart rate, posture, and even allergies can all
change as a multiple shifts from one self to the next. Since brain-wave
patterns are not confined to any single neuron or group of neurons, but
are a global property of the brain, this too suggests that some kind of
holographic process may be at work. Just as a multiple-image hologram
can store and project dozens of whole scenes, perhaps the brain
hologram can store and call forth a similar multitude of whole
personalities. In other words, perhaps what we call "self" is also a
hologram, and when the brain of a multiple clicks from one holographic
self to the next, these slide-projector like shuttlings are reflected
in the global changes that take place in brain-wave activity as well as
in the body in general. The physiological changes that occur as a
multiple shifts from one personality to the next also have profound
implications for the relationship between mind and health, and will be
discussed at greater length in the next chapter.
Another
of Jung's great contributions was defining the concept of
synchronicity. As mentioned in the introduction, synchronicities are
coincidences that are so unusual and so meaningful they could hardly be
attributed to chance alone. Each of us has experienced a synchronicity
at some point in our lives, such as when we learn a strange new word
and then hear it used in a news broadcast a few hours later, or when we
think about an obscure subject and then notice other
people talking about it.
77
The brain-wave patterns of four subpersonalities in an individual
suffering from multiple personality disorder. Is it possible that the
brain uses holographic principles to store the vast amount of
information necessary to house dozens and even hundreds of
personalities in a single body? A few years back I experienced a series of synchronicities involving the rodeo showman Buffalo Bill. Occasionally, while doing a modest
workout in the morning before I start writing, I turn on the
television. One morning in January 1983, I was doing push-ups while a
game show was on, and I suddenly found myself shouting out the name
"Buffalo Bill!" At first I was puzzled by my outburst, but then I
realized the game-show host had asked the question "What other name was
William Frederick Cody known by?" Although I had not been paying
conscious attention to the show, for some reason my unconscious mind
had zeroed in on this question and had answered it. At the time I did
not think much of the occurrence and went about my day. A few hours
later a friend telephoned and asked me if I could settle a friendly
argument he was having concerning a piece of theater trivia. I offered
to try, whereupon my friend asked, "Is it true that John Barrymore's
dying words were, 'Aren't you the illegitimate son
of Buffalo Bill?' " I thought this second encounter with Buffalo Bill
was odd but still chalked it up to coincidence until later that day
when a Smithsonian magazine arrived in the mail, and I opened it. One
of the lead articles was titled "The Last of the Great Scouts Is Back
Again. " It was about... you guessed it: Buffalo Bill. (Incidentally,
I was unable to answer my friend's trivia question and still have no idea whether they were Barrymore's dying words or not. )
As incredible as this experience was, the only thing that seemed
meaningful about it was its improbable nature. There is, however,
another kind of synchronicity that is noteworthy not only because of
its improbability, but because of its apparent relationship to events
taking place deep in the human psyche. The classic example of this is
Jung's scarab story. Jung was treating a woman whose staunchly rational
approach to life made it difficult for her to benefit from therapy.
After a number of frustrating sessions the woman told Jung about a
dream involving a scarab beetle. Jung knew that in Egyptian mythology
the scarab represented rebirth and wondered if the woman's unconscious
mind was symbolically announcing that she was about to undergo some
kind of psychological rebirth. He was just about to tell her this when
something tapped on the window, and he looked up to see a gold-green
scarab on the other side of the glass
(it was the only time a scarab beetle had ever appeared at Jung's
window). He opened the window and allowed the scarab to fly into the
room as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The woman was so
stunned that she tempered her excessive rationality, and from that
point on her response to therapy improved. Jung encountered many such
meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work and noticed
that they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and
transformation: fundamental changes in belief, sudden and new insights,
deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they
tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to
surface in a patient's consciousness. As his ideas became more widely
known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with
synchronicity. For example, Zurich-based psychiatrist Carl Alfred
Meier, a longtime associate of Jung's, tells of a synchronicity that
spanned many years. An American woman suffering from serious depression
traveled all the way from Wuchang, China, to be treated by Meier. She
was a surgeon and had headed a mission hospital in Wuchang for twenty
years. She had also become involved in the culture and was an expert in
Chinese philosophy. During the course of her therapy she told Meier of
a dream in which she had seen the hospital with one of its wings
destroyed. Because her identity was so intertwined with the hospital,
Meier felt her dream was telling her she was losing her sense of self,
her American identity, and that was the cause of her depression.
79
He advised
her to return to the States, and when she did her depression quickly
vanished, just as he had predicted. Before she departed he also had her
do a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital. Years later the
Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent
Meier a copy of Life magazine containing a double-page photograph of
the partially destroyed hospital, and it was identical to the drawing
she had produced nine years earlier. The symbolic and highly personal
message of her dream had somehow spilled beyond the boundaries of her
psyche and into physical reality. Because of their striking nature,
Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance
occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of
the individuals who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how
an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of
events in the physical world,
at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle
must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to
science. When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not
take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang
Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the
subject entitled "The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche"). But
now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established,
some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. * Physicist Paul
Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of
synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection—more
precisely a correlation—between events for which any form of
causal linkage is forbidden." As has been mentioned, nonlocal effects are not due to a cause-and-effect relationship and are therefore acausal.
Another physicist who takes
synchronicity seriously is F. David Peat. Peat believes that
Jungian-type synchronicities are not only real, but offer further
evidence of the implicate order. As we have seen, according to Bohm the
apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an
artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate
world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division
between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all
things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might
still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. Peat
believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric
of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the
immense and unitary order underlying all of nature. Put another way,
Peat thinks that synchronicities reveal the absence of division between
the physical world and our inner psychological reality. Thus the
relative scarcity of synchronous experiences in our lives shows not
only the extent to which we have fragmented ourselves from the general
field of consciousness, but also the degree to which we have sealed
ourselves off from the infinite and dazzling potential of the deeper
orders of mind and reality. According to Peat, when we experience a
synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind
operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout
society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety,
reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.
This is an astounding notion. Virtually all of our commonsense
prejudices about the world are based on the premise that subjective and
objective reality are very much separate. That is why synchronicities
seem so baffling and inexplicable to us. But if there is ultimately no
division between the physical world and our inner psychological
processes, then we must be prepared to change more than just our
commonsense understanding of the universe, for the implications are
staggering.
One implication is that objective (imparial, unbiased, detached)
reality is more like a dream than we have previously suspected. For
example, imagine dreaming that you are sitting at a table and having an
evening meal with your boss and his wife. As you know from experience,
all the various props in the dream—the table, the chairs, the
plates, and salt and pepper shakers— appear to be separate
objects. Imagine also that you experience a synchronicity in the dream;
perhaps you are served a particularly unpleasant dish, and when you ask
the waiter what it is, he tells you that the name of the dish is Your
Boss. Realizing that the unpleasantness of the dish betrays your true
feelings about your boss, you become embarrassed and wonder how an
aspect of your "inner" self has managed to spill over into the "outer"
reality of the scene you are dreaming. Of course, as soon as you wake
up you realize the synchronicity was not so strange at all, for there
was really no division between your "inner" self and the "outer"
reality of the dream. Similarly, you realize that the apparent
separateness of the various objects in the dream was also an illusion,
for everything was produced by a deeper and more fundamental
order—the unbroken wholeness of your own unconscious mind. If
there is no division between the mental and physical worlds, these same
qualities are also true of objective reality. According to Peat, this
does not mean the material universe is an illusion, because both the
implicate and the explicate play a role in creating reality. Nor does
it mean that individuality is lost, any more than the image of a rose
is lost once it is recorded in a piece of holographic film. It
simply means that we are again like vortices in a river, unique but
inseparable from the flow of nature (Bohm's assertion that thoughts are
like vortices in a river). Or as Peat puts it, "the self lives on
but as one aspect of the more subtle movement that involves the order
of the whole of consciousness."
And so we have come full circle, from the discovery that consciousness
contains the whole of objective (unbiased) reality—the entire
history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and
mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars—to
the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its
warp (distortion) and weft the innermost processes of consciousness.
Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all
things in a holographic universe. In the next chapter we
will explore how this connectivity, as well as other aspects of the
holographic idea, affect our current understanding of health.
You will hardly know who I am or what I
mean. But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. .
. —Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
A sixty-one-year-old man we'll call Frank was diagnosed as having an
almost always fatal form of throat cancer and told he had less than a 5
percent chance of surviving. His weight had dropped from 130 to 98
pounds. He was extremely weak, could barely swallow his own saliva, and
was having trouble breathing. Indeed, his doctors had debated whether
to give him radiation therapy at all, because there was a distinct
possibility the treatment would only add to his discomfort
without significantly increasing his chances for survival. They decided
to proceed anyway. Then, to Frank's great good fortune, Dr. 0. Carl
Simonton, a radiation oncologist and medical director of the Cancer
Counseling and Research Center in Dallas, Texas, was asked to
participate in his treatment. Simonton suggested that Frank himself
could influence the
course of his own disease. Simonton then taught Frank a number of
relaxation and mental-imagery techniques he and his colleagues had
developed. From that point on, three times a day, Frank pictured the
radiation he received as consisting of millions of tiny bullets of
energy bombarding his cells. He also visualized his cancer cells as
weaker and more confused than his normal cells, and thus unable to
repair the damage they suffered.
82, 83
Then he visualized his body's white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, coming in, swarming over the dead
and dying cancer cells, and carrying them to his liver and kidneys to
be flushed out of his body. The results were dramatic and far exceeded
what usually happened in such cases when patients were treated solely
with radiation. The radiation treatments worked like magic. Frank
experienced almost none of the negative side effects—damage to
skin and mucous membranes— that normally accompanied such
therapy. He regained his lost weight and his strength, and in a mere
two months all signs of his cancer had vanished. Simonton believes
Prank's remarkable recovery was due in large part to his daily regimen
of visualization exercises.
In a follow-up study, Simonton and his colleagues taught their
mental-imagery techniques to 159 patients with cancers considered
medically incurable. The expected survival time for such a patient is
twelve months. Four years later 63 of the patients were still alive. Of
those, 14 showed no evidence of disease, the cancers were regressing in
12, and in 17 the disease was stable. The average survival time of the
group as a whole was 24.4 months, over twice as long as the
national norm. Simonton has since conducted a number of similar
studies, all with positive results. Despite such promising findings,
his work is still considered controversial. For instance, critics argue
that the individuals who participate in Simonton's studies are not
"average" patients. Many of them have sought Simonton out for the
express purpose of learning his techniques, and this shows that they
already have an extraordinary fighting spirit. Nonetheless, many
researchers find Simonton's results compelling enough to support his
work, and Simonton himself has set up the Simonton Cancer Center, a
successful research and treatment facility in Pacific Palisades,
California, devoted to teaching imagery techniques to patients who are
fighting various illnesses. The therapeutic use of imagery has also
captured the imagination of the public, and a recent survey revealed
that it was the fourth most frequently used alternative treatment for
cancer. How is it that an image formed in the mind can have an effect
on something as formidable as an incurable cancer? Not surprisingly the holographic theory of the brain can be used to explain this phenomenon as well.
Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, director of research and rehabilitation
science at the University of Texas Health Science Center in
Dallas, Texas, and one of the scientists who helped develop the imagery
techniques Simonton uses, believes
it is the holographic imaging
capabilities of the brain that provide the key. As has been noted, all
experiences are ultimately just neurophysiological processes taking
place in the brain. According to the holographic model the reason we
experience some things, such as emotions, as internal realities and
others, such as the songs of birds and the barking of dogs, as external
realities is because that is where the brain localizes them when it
creates the internal hologram that we experience as reality. However,
as we have also seen, the brain cannot always distinguish between what
is "out there" and what it believes
to be "out there, " and that is why amputees sometimes have phantom
limb sensations. Put another way, in a brain that operates
holographically, the remembered image of a thing can have as much
impact on
the senses as the thing itself.
It can also have an equally powerful effect on the body's physiology, a
state of affairs that has been experienced firsthand by anyone who has
ever felt their heart race after imagining hugging a loved one. Or
anyone who has ever felt their palms grow sweaty after conjuring up the
memory of some unusually frightening experience. At first glance the
fact that the body cannot always distinguish between an imagined event
and a real one may seem strange, but when one takes the
holographic model into account—a model that asserts that all
experiences, whether real or imagined, are reduced to the same common
language of holographically organized wave forms—the situation
becomes much less puzzling. Or as Achterberg puts it, "When images are
regarded in the holographic manner, their omnipotent influence on
physical function logically follows. The image, the behavior, and the
physiological concomitants are a unified aspect of the same phenomenon.
Bohm uses his idea of the implicate order, the deeper and nonlocal
level of existence from which our entire universe springs, to echo the
sentiment: "Every action starts from an intention in the implicate
order. The imagination is already the creation of the form; it already
has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it
out. And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place
in that way from the subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes
through them until it manifests in the explicate. " In other words, in
the implicate order, as in the brain itself, imagination and reality
are ultimately indistinguishable, and it should therefore come as no
surprise to us that images in the mind can ultimately manifest as
realities in the physical body.
85
Achterberg found that the physiological effects produced through the
use of imagery are not only powerful, but can also be extremely
specific. For example, the term white blood cell actually refers to a
number of different kinds of cell. In one study, Achterberg decided to
see if she could train individuals to increase the number of only one
particular type of white blood cell in their body. To do this she
taught one group of college students how to image a cell known as a
neutrophil,
the major constituent of the white blood cell population. She trained a
second group to image T-cells, a more specialized kind of white blood
cell. At the end of the study the group that learned the neutrophil
imagery had a significant increase in the number of neutrophils in
their body, but no change in the number of T-cells. The group that
learned to image T-cells had a significant increase in the number of
that kind of cell, but the number of neutrophils in their body remained
the same. Achterberg says that belief is also critical to a person's health.
As she points out, virtually everyone who has had contact with the
medical world knows at least one story of a patient who was sent home
to die, but because they "believed" otherwise, they astounded their
doctors by completely recovering. In her fascinating book "Imagery in
Healing" she describes several of her own encounters with such cases.
In one, a woman was comatose on admission, paralyzed, and diagnosed
with a massive brain tumor. She underwent surgery to "debulk" her tumor
(remove as much as is safely possible), but because she was considered
close to death, she was sent home without receiving either radiation or
chemotherapy. Instead of promptly dying, the woman became stronger by
the day. As her biofeedback therapist, Achterberg was able to monitor
the woman's progress, and by the end of sixteen months the woman showed
no evidence of cancer. Why? Although the woman was intelligent in a
worldly sense, she was only moderately educated and did not really know
the meaning of the word tumor—or the death sentence
it imparted. Hence, she did not believe she was going to die and
overcame her cancer with the same confidence and determination she'd
used to overcome every other illness in her life, says Achterberg. When
Achterberg saw her last, the woman no longer had any traces of
paralysis, had thrown away her leg braces and her cane, and had even
been out dancing a couple of times. Achterberg backs up her claim by
noting that the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed -
individuals who cannot comprehend the death sentence society attaches
to cancer - also have a significantly lower cancer rate. Over a 4-year
period in Texas, only about 4 % of the deaths in these 2 groups were
from cancer, compared to the state norm, which was 15 to 18 %.
Intriguingly, there was not one recorded case of leukemia the years
1925 and 1978 in these 2 groups. Studies have reported similar results
in the United States as a whole, as well as in various other countries
including England, Greece and Romania. Because of these and other
findings Achterberg thinks that a person with an illness, even a common
cold, should recruit as many "neural holograms" of health as possible -
in the form of beliefs, images of well-being and harmony, and images of
specific immune functions being activated. She feels we must also
exorcise (drive away) any beliefs and images that have negative
consequences for our health, and realize that our body holograms are
more than just pictures. They contain a host of other kinds of
information including intellectual understandings and interpretations,
prejudices both conscious and unconscious, fears, hopes, worries, and
so on. Achterberg's recommendation that we rid ourselves of
negative images is well taken, for there is evidence that imagery can
cause illness as well as cure it. In "Love, Medicine and Miracles"
Bernie Siegel says he often incounters instances where the mental
pictures patients use to describe themselves or their lives seem to
play a role in the creation of their conditions. Examples include
a mastectomy patient who told him she "needed to get something off her
chest";
a patient with multiple myeloma in his backbone he said he "was always
considered spineless"; and a man with carcinoma of the larynx whose
farther punished him as a child by constantly squeezing his throat and
telling him to "shut up!"
Sometimes the relationship between the image and the ilness is so
striking it is difficult to understand why it is not apparent to the
individual involved, as in the case of a psychotherapist who had
emergency surgery to remove several feet of dead intestine and
then told Siegel, "I'm glad you're my surgeon. I've been undergoing
teaching analysis.
I couldn't handle all the shit that was coming up, or digest the crap
in my life." Incidents such as these have convinced Siegel that nearly
all diseases originate at least to some degree in the mind, but he
doesn't think this makes them psychosomatic or unreal. He prefers to
say they are soma-significant, a term coined by Bohm to sum up better the relationship, and derived from the Greek word soma meaning "body". That
all diseases might have their origin in the mind doesn't disturb
Siegel. He sees it rather as a sign of a tremendous hope, an indicator
that if one has the power to create sickness, one also has the power to
create wellness!
The connection between image and illness is so potent, imagery even can
be used to predict a patient's prospects for survival. In another
landmark experiment, Simonton, his wife, psychologist Stephanie
Matthews-Simonton, Achterberg, and psychologist G. Frank Lawlis
performed a battery of blood tests on 126 patients with advanced
cancer. Then they subjected the patients to an equally intensive array
of psychological tests, including exercises in which the patients were
asked to draw images of themselves, their cancer, their treatment, and
their immune systems. The blood tests offered some information about
the patients' condition, but provided no major revelations. However,
the results of the psychological tests, particularly the drawings, were
encyclopedias of information about the status of the patient's health.
Indeed, simply by analyzing patient's drawings, Achterberg later
achieved a 95% rate of accuracy in predicting who would die in within a
few months and who will beat their illness and go into remission.
Basketball Games of the Mind
As incredible as the evidence culled by the above-mentioned researchers is, it
is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the control the
holographic mindhas over the physical body. And the practical
applications of such control are not limited strictly to matters of
health. Numerous studies conducted around the world have shown that
imagery also has an enormous on physical and athletic performance.
In a recent experiment, psychologist Shlomo Breznitz at Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, had several groups of Israeli soldiers march 40
km, but gave each group different information. He had some groups march
30 km and then told them they had another 10 to go. He told others
they were going to march 60 km, but in reality only marched them 40. He
allowed some to see distance markers, and provided no clues to others
as to how far they had walked. At the end of the study Breznitz
found that the stress hormone
levels in the soldiers' blood always reflected their estimates and
not the actual distance they had marched. In other words, their
bodies responded not to reality, but to what they were imaging as
reality. According to Dr. Charles A. Garfield, a former National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researcher and current
president of the Performance Sciences Institute in Berkeley,
California, the Soviets have extensively researched the relationship
between imagery and physical performance. In one study a phalanx of
world-class Soviet athletes was divided into four groups. The first
group spent 100 percent of their training time in training. The second
spent 75 percent of their time training and 25 percent of their time
visualizing the exact movements and accomplishments they wanted to
achieve in their sport. The third spent 50 percent of their time
training and 50 percent visualizing, and the fourth spent 25 percent
training and 75 percent visualizing. Unbelievably, at the 1980 Winter
Games in Lake Placid, New York, the fourth group showed the greatest
improvement in performance, followed by groups three, two, and one, in
that order. Garfield, who has spent hundreds of hours interviewing
athletes and sports researchers around the world, says that the Soviets
have incorporated sophisticated imagery techniques into many of their
athletic programs and that they believe mental images act as precursors
in the process of generating neuromuscular impulses. Garfield believes
imagery works because movement is recorded holographically in the
brain. In his book Peak Performance: Mental Training Techniques of the
World's Greatest Athletes, he states, "These images are holographic and
function primarily at the subliminal level. The holographic imaging
mechanism enables you to quickly solve spatial problems such as
assembling a complex machine, choreographing a dance routine, or
running visual images of plays through your mind." Australian
psychologist Alan Richardson has obtained similar results with
basketball players. He took three groups of basketball players and
tested their ability to make free throws. Then he instructed the first
group to spend twenty minutes a day practicing free throws. He told the
second group not to practice, and had the third group spend twenty
minutes a day visualizing that they were shooting perfect baskets. As
might be expected, the group that did nothing showed no improvement.
The first group improved 24 percent, but through the power of imagery
alone, the third group improved an astonishing 23 percent, almost as
much as the group that practiced.
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Physician Larry Dossey believes that
imagery is not the only tool the holographic mind can use to effect
changes in the body. Another is simply the recognition of the unbroken
wholeness of all things. As Dossey observes, we have a tendency to view
illness as external to us. Disease comes from without and besieges us,
upsetting our wellbeing.
But if space and time, and all other things in the universe, are truly
inseparable, then we cannot make a distinction between health and
disease. How can we put this knowledge to practical use in our lives?
When we stop seeing illness as something separate and instead view it
as part of a larger whole, as a milieu of behavior, diet, sleep,
exercise patterns, and various other relationships with the world at
large, we often get better, says Dossey. As evidence he calls attention
to a study in which chronic headache sufferers were asked to keep a
diary of the frequency and severity of their headaches. Although the
record was intended to be a first step in preparing the headache
sufferers for further treatment, most of the subjects found that when
they began to keep a diary, their headaches disappeared!
In another experiment cited by Dossey, a group of epileptic children
and their families were videotaped as they interacted with one another.
Occasionally, there were emotional outbursts during the sessions, which
were often followed by actual seizures. When the children were shown
the tapes and saw the relationship between these emotional events and
their seizures, they became almost seizure-free. Why? By keeping a
diary or watching a videotape, the subjects were able to see their
condition in relationship to the larger pattern of their lives. When
this happens, illness can no longer be viewed "as an intruding disease
originating elsewhere, but as part of a process of living which can
accurately be described as an unbroken whole, " says Dossey. "When our
focus is toward a principle of relatedness and oneness, and away from
fragmentation and isolation, health ensues (follow, succeed)."
Dossey feels the word
patient is as misleading as the word particle. Instead of being
separate and fundamentally isolated biological units, we are
essentially dynamic processes and patterns that are no more analyzable
into parts than are electrons. More than this, we are connected,
connected to the forces that create both sickness and health, to the
beliefs of our society, to the attitudes of our friends, our family,
and our doctors, and to the images, beliefs, and even the very words we
use to apprehend the universe. In a holographic universe we are also
connected to our bodies, and in the preceding pages we have seen some
of the ways these connections manifest themselves. But there are
others, perhaps even an infinity of others.
As Pribram states, "If indeed every
part of our body is a reflection of the whole, then there must be all
kinds of mechanisms to control what's going on. Nothing is firm at this point." Given our ignorance in the matter, instead of asking how
the mind controls the body holographic, perhaps a more important
question is, What is the extent of this control? Are there any
limitations on it, and if so, what are they? That is the question to which we now turn our attention.
Another medical phenomenon that provides
us with a tantalizing glimpse of the control the mind has over the body
is the placebo effect. A placebo is any medical treatment that has no
specific action on the body but is given either to humor a patient, or
as a control in a double-blind experiment, that is, a study in which
one group of individuals is given a real treatment and another group is
given a fake treatment. In such experiments neither the researchers nor
the individuals
being tested know which group they are in so that the effects of the
real treatment can be assessed more accurately. Sugar pills are often
used as placebos in drug studies. So is saline solution (distilled
water with salt in it), although placebos need not always be drugs.
Many believe that any medical benefit derived from crystals, copper
bracelets, and other nontraditional remedies is also due to the
placebon effect. Even surgery has been used as a placebo. In the 1950s,
angina pectoris, recurrent pain in the chest and left arm due to
decreased blood flow to the heart, was commonly treated with surgery.
Then some resourceful doctors decided to conduct an experiment. Rather
than perform the customary surgery, which involved tying off the
mammary artery, they cut patients open and then simply sewed them back
up again. The patients who received the sham surgery reported just as
much relief as the patients who had the full surgery.
91
The full surgery, as it turned out, was only producing a placebo
effect. Nonetheless, the success of the sham surgery indicates that
somewhere deep in all of us we have the ability to control angina
pectoris. And that is not all. In the last half century the placebo
effect has been extensively researched in hundreds of different studies
around the world. We now know that on average 35 percent of all people
who receive a given placebo will experience a significant effect,
although
this number can vary greatly from situation to situation. In addition
to angina pectoris, conditions that have proved responsive to placebo
treatment include migraine headaches, allergies, fever, the common
cold, acne, asthma, warts, various kinds of pain, nausea and
seasickness, peptic ulcers, psychiatric syndromes such as depression
and anxiety, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation
sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Clearly these
range from the not so serious to the life threatening, but placebo
effects on even the mildest conditions may involve physiological
changes that are near miraculous. Take, for example, the lowly wart.
Warts are a small tumorous growth on the skin caused by a virus. They
are also extremely easy to cure through the use of placebos, as is
evidenced by the nearly endless folk rituals—ritual itself being
a kind of placebo—that are used by various cultures to get rid of
them. Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan- Kettering
Cancer Center in New York, tells of one physician who
regularly rid his patients of warts simply by painting a harmless
purple dye on them. Thomas feels that explaining this small miracle by
saying it's just the unconscious mind at work doesn't begin to do the
placebo effect justice. "If my unconscious can figure out how to
manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for
deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue
rejection, then all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot
further along
than I am, " he states. The effectiveness of a placebo in any given
circumstance also varies greatly. In nine double-blind studies
comparing placebos to aspirin, placebos proved to be 54 percent as
effective as the actual analgesic. From this one might expect that
placebos would be even less effective when compared to a much stronger
painkiller such as morphine, but this is not the case. In six
double-blind studies placebos were found to be 56 percent as effective
as morphine in relieving pain! Why? One factor that can affect the
effectiveness of a placebo is the method in which it is given.
Injections are generally perceived as more potent than pills, and
hence giving a placebo in an injection can enhance its effectiveness.
Similarly, capsules are often seen as more effective than tablets, and
even the size, shape, and color of a pill can play a role. In a study
designed to determine the suggestive value of a pill's color,
researchers found that people tend to view yellow or orange pills as
mood manipulators, either stimulants or depressants. Dark red pills are
assumed to be sedatives; lavender pills, hallucinogens; and white
pills, painkillers. Another factor is the attitude the doctor conveys
when he prescribes the placebo. Dr. David Sobel, a placebo specialist
at Kaiser Hospital, California, relates the story of a doctor treating
an asthma patient who was having an unusually difficult time keeping
his bronchial tubes open. The doctor ordered a sample of a potent new
medicine from a pharmaceutical company and gave it to the man. Within
minutes the man showed spectacular improvement and breathed more
easily. However, the next time he had an attack, the doctor decided to
see what would happen if he gave the man a placebo. This time the man
complained
that there must be something wrong with the prescription because it
didn't completely eliminate his breathing difficulty. This convinced
the doctor that the sample drug was indeed a potent new asthma
medication—until he received a letter from the pharmaceutical
company informing him that instead of the new drug, they had
accidentally sent him a placebo! Apparently it was the doctor's
unwitting enthusiasm for the first placebo, and not the second, that
accounted for the discrepancy.
In terms of the holographic model, the man's remarkable response to the
placebo asthma medication can again be explained by the mind/ body's
ultimate inability to distinguish between an imagined reality and a
real one. The man believed he was being given a powerful new asthma
drug, and this belief had as dramatic a physiological effect on
his lungs as if he had been given a real drug. Achterberg's warning
that the neural holograms that impact on our health are varied and
multifaceted is also underscored by the fact that even something as
subtle as the doctor's slightly different attitude (and perhaps body
language) while administering the two placebos was enough to cause one
to work and the other to fail.
It is clear from this that even information received subliminally can
contribute greatly to the beliefs and mental images that impact on our
health. One wonders how many drugs have worked (or not worked) because of the attitude the doctor conveyed while administering them.
93
Understanding the role such factors play
in a placebo's effectiveness is important, for it shows how our ability
to control the body holographic is molded by our beliefs. Our minds
have the power to get rid of warts, to clear our bronchial tubes, and
to mimic the painkilling ability of morphine, but
because we are unaware that we possess the power, we must be fooled
into using it. This might almost be comic if it were not for the
tragedies that often result from our ignorance of our own power. No
incident better illustrates this than a now famous case reported by
psychologist Bruno Klopfer. Klopfer was treating a man named Wright who
had advanced cancer of the lymph nodes. All standard treatments had
been exhausted, and Wright appeared to have little time left. His neck,
armpits, chest, abdomen, and groin were filled with tumors the size of
oranges, and his spleen and liver were so enlarged that two quarts of
milky fluid had to be drained out of his chest every day. But Wright
did not want to die. He had heard about an exciting new drug called
Krebiozen, and he begged his doctor to let him try it. At first his
doctor refused because the drug was only being tried on people with a
life expectancy of at least three months. But Wright was so unrelenting
in his entreaties, his doctor finally gave in. He gave Wright an
injection of Krebiozen on Friday, but in his heart of hearts he did not
expect Wright to last the weekend. Then the doctor went home. To his
surprise, on the following Monday he found Wright out of bed and
walking around. Klopfer reported that his tumors had "melted like
snowballs on a hot stove" and were half their original size. This was a
far more rapid decrease in size than even the strongest X-ray
treatments could have accomplished. Ten days after Wright's first
Krebiozen treatment, he left the hospital and was, as far as his
doctors could tell, cancer free. When he had entered the hospital he
had needed an oxygen mask to breathe, but when he left he was well
enough to fly his own plane at 12, 000 feet with no discomfort. Wright
remained well for about two months, but then articles began to appear
asserting that Krebiozen actually had no effect on cancer of the lymph
nodes. Wright, who was rigidly logical and scientific in his thinking,
became very depressed, suffered a relapse, and was readmitted to the
hospital. This time his physician decided to try an experiment. He told
Wright that Krebiozen was every bit as effective as it had seemed, but
that some of the initial supplies of the drug had deteriorated during
shipping. He explained, however, that he had a new highly concentrated
version of the drug and could treat Wright with this. Of course the
physician did not have a new version of the drug and intended to inject
Wright with plain water. To create the proper atmosphere he even went
through an elaborate procedure before injecting Wright with the
placebo. Again the results were dramatic. Tumor masses melted, chest
fluid vanished, and Wright was quickly back on his feet and feeling
great. He remained symptom-free for another two months, but then the
American Medical Association announced that a nationwide study of
Krebiozen had found the drug worthless in the treatment of cancer. This
time Wright's faith was completely shattered. His cancer blossomed anew
and he died two days later. Wright's story is tragic, but it contains a
powerful message: When we are fortunate enough to bypass our disbelief
and tap the healing forces within us, we can cause tumors to melt away
overnight. In the case of Krebiozen only one person was involved, but
there are similar cases involving many more people.
Take a chemotherapeutic agent called cis-platinum. When cis-platinum
first became available it, too, was touted as a wonder drug, and 75
percent of the people who received it benefited from the treatment. But
after the initial wave of
excitement and the use of cis-platinum became more routine, its rate of
effectiveness dropped to about 25 to 30 percent. Apparently most of the
benefit obtained from cis-platinum was due to the placebo effect.
Such incidents raise an important
question. If drugs such as Krebiozen and cis-platinum work when we
believe in them and stop working when we stop believing in them, what
does this imply about the nature of drugs in general? This is a
difficult question to answer, but we do have some clues. For instance,
physician Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School points out that the
vast majority of treatments prescribed prior to this century, from
leeching to consuming
lizard's blood, were useless, but because of the placebo effect, they were no doubt helpful at least some of the time.
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Benson, along with Dr. David P. McCallie, Jr., of Harvard's Thorndike
Laboratory, reviewed studies of various treatments for angina pectoris
that have been prescribed over the years and discovered that although
remedies have come and gone, the success rates—even for
treatments that are now discredited—have always remained high.
From these two observations it is evident that the placebo effect has
played an important role in medicine in the past, but does it still play
a role today? The answer, it seems, is yes. The federal Office of
Technology Assessment estimates that more than 75 % of all current
medical treatments have not been subjected to sufficient scientific
scrutiny, a figure that suggests that doctors may still be giving
placebos and not know it (Benson, for one, believes that, at the very
least, many over-the-counter medications act primarily as placebos).
Given the evidence we have looked at so far, one might almost wonder if
all drugs are placebos. Clearly the answer is no. Many drugs are
effective whether we believe in them or not: Vitamin C gets rid of
scurvy, and insulin makes diabetics better even when they are
skeptical. But still the issue is not quite as clear-cut as it may
seem. Consider the following. In a 1962 experiment Drs. Harriet Linton
and Robert Langs told test subjects they were going to participate in a
study of the effects of LSD, but then gave them a placebo instead.
Nonetheless, half an hour
after taking the placebo, the subjects began to experience the classic
symptoms of the actual drug, loss of control, supposed insight into the
meaning of existence, and so on. These "placebo trips" lasted several
hours. A few years later, in 1966, the now infamous Harvard
psychologist Richard Alpert journeyed to the East to look for holy men
who could
offer him insight into the LSD experience. He found several who were
willing to sample the drug and, interestingly, received a variety of
reactions. One pundit told him it was good, but not as good as
meditation. Another, a Tibetan lama, complained that it only gave him a
headache. But the reaction that fascinated Alpert most came from a
wizened little holy man in the foothills of the Himalayas. Because the
man was over sixty, Alpert's first inclination was to give him a gentle
dose of 50 to 75 micrograms. But the man was much more interested in
one of the 305 microgram pills Alpert had brought with him, a
relatively sizable dose. Reluctantly, Alpert gave him one of the pills,
but still the man was not satisfied. With a twinkle in his eye he
requested another and then another and placed all 915 micrograms of LSD
on his tongue, a massive dose by any standard, and swallowed them (in
comparison, the average dose Grof used in his studies was about 200
micrograms). Aghast, Alpert watched intently, expecting the man to
start waving his arms and whooping like a banshee, but instead he
behaved as if nothing had happened. He remained that way for the rest
of the day, his demeanor as serene and unperturbed as it always was,
save for the twinkling glances he occasionally tossed Alpert. The LSD
apparently
had little or no effect on him. Alpert was so moved by the experience
he gave up LSD, changed his name to Ram Dass, and converted to
mysticism. And so taking a placebo may well produce the same effect as
taking the real drug, and taking the real drug might produce no effect.
This topsy-turvy state of affairs has also been demonstrated in
experiments
involving amphetamines. In one study, ten subjects were placed in each
of two rooms. In the first room, nine were given a stimulating
amphetamine and the tenth a sleep-producing barbiturate. In the second
room the situation was reversed. In both instances, the person singled
out behaved exactly as his companions did. In the first room instead of
falling asleep the lone barbiturate taker became animated and speedy,
and in the second room the lone amphetamine taker fell asleep. There is
also a case on record of a man addicted to the stimulant Ritalin, whose
addiction is then transferred to a placebo. In other words, the man's
doctor enabled him to avoid all the usual unpleasantries of Ritalin
withdrawal by secretly replacing his prescription with sugar pills.
Unfortunately the man then went on to display an addiction to the
placebo!
Such events are not limited to experimental situations. Placebos also
play a role in our everyday lives. Does caffeine keep you awake at
night? Research has shown that even an injection of caffeine won't keep
caffeine-sensitive individuals awake if they believe they are receiving
a sedative. Has an antibiotic ever helped you get over a cold or sore
throat? If so, you were experiencing the placebo effect. All colds are
caused by viruses, as are several types of sore throat, and
antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections, not viral
infections. Have you ever experienced an unpleasant side effect after
taking a medication? In a study of a tranquilizer called mephenesin,
researchers found that 10 to 20 percent of the test subjects
experienced negative side effects—including nausea, itchy rash,
and heart palpitations—
regardless of whether they were given the actual drug or a placebo.
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Similarly, in a recent study of a new kind of chemotherapy, 30 percent of the individuals in the control group, the group
given placebos, lost their hair. So if you know someone who is
taking chemotherapy, tell them to try to be optimistic in their
expectations.
The mind is a powerful thing.
In addition to offering us a glimpse of this power, placebos also
support a more holographic approach to understanding the mind/body
relationship. As health and nutrition columnist Jane Brody observes in
an article in the New York Times, "The effectiveness of placebos
provides dramatic support for a 'holistic' view of the human organism,
a view that is receiving increasing attention in medical research. This
view holds that the mind and body continually interact and are too
closely interwoven to be treated as independent entities." The placebo
effect may also be affecting us in far vaster ways than we realize, as
is evidenced by a recent and extremely puzzling medical mystery. If you
have watched any television at all in the last year or so, you have no
doubt seen a blitzkrieg of commercials promoting aspirin's ability to
decrease the risk of heart attack. There is a good deal of convincing
evidence to back this up, otherwise television censors, who are real
sticklers for accuracy when it comes to medical claims in commercials,
wouldn't allow such copy on the air. This is all
well and good. The only problem is that aspirin doesn't seem to have
the same effect on people in England. A six-year study of 5, 139
British doctors revealed no evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of
heart attack. Is there a flaw in somebody's research, or is it possible
that some kind of massive placebo effect is to blame? Whatever the
case, don't stop believing in the prophylactic benefits of aspirin. It
still may save your life.
Another
condition that graphically illustrates the mind's power to affect the
body is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). In addition to possessing
different brain-wave patterns, the subpersonalities of a multiple have
a strong psychological separation from one another. 'Of course I am by
no means suggesting that all drug side effects are the result of the
placebo effect. Should you experience a negative reaction to a drug,
always consult a physician. Each has his own name, age, memories, and
abilities. Often each also has his own style of handwriting, announced
gender, cultural and racial background, artistic talents, foreign
language fluency, and IQ. Even more noteworthy are the biological
changes that take place in a multiple's body when they switch
personalities. Frequently a medical condition possessed by one
personality will mysteriously vanish when another personality takes
over. Dr. Bennett Braun of the International Society for the Study of
Multiple Personality, in Chicago, has documented a case in which all of
a patient's subpersonalities were allergic to orange juice, except one.
If the man drank orange juice when one of his allergic personalities
was in control, he would break out in a terrible rash. But if he
switched to his nonallergic personality, the rash would instantly start
to fade and he could drink orange juice freely.
Dr. Francine Rowland, a Yale psychiatrist who specializes in treating
multiples, relates an even more striking incident concerning one
multiple's reaction to a wasp sting. On the occasion in question, the
man showed up for his scheduled appointment with Rowland with his eye
completely swollen shut from a wasp sting. Realizing he needed medical
attention, Rowland called an ophthalmologist. Unfortunately,
the soonest the opthalmologist could see the man was an hour later, and
because the man was in severe pain, Rowland decided to try something.
As it turned out, one of the man's alternates was an "anesthetic
personality" who felt absolutely no pain. Rowland had the anesthetic
personality take control of the body, and the pain ended. But something
else also happened. By the time the man arrived at his appointment with
the ophthalmologist, the swelling was gone and his eye had returned to
normal. Seeing no need to treat him, the ophthalmologist sent him home.
After a while, however, the anesthetic personality relinquished control
of the body, and the man's original personality returned, along with
all the pain and swelling of the wasp sting. The next day he went back
to the ophthalmologist to at last be treated. Neither Rowland nor her
patient had told the ophthalmologist that the man was a multiple, and
after treating him, the ophthalmologist telephoned Rowland. "He thought
time was playing tricks on him. " Rowland laughed. "He just wanted to
make sure that I had actually called him the day before and he had not
imagined it."
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Allergies are not the only thing
multiples can switch on and off. If there was any doubt as to the
control the unconscious mind has over drug effects, it is banished by
the pharmacological wizardry of the multiple. By changing
personalities, a multiple who is drunk can instantly become sober.
Different personalities also respond differently to different drugs.
Braun records a case in which 5 milligrams of diazepam, a tranquilizer,
sedated one personality, while 100 milligrams had little or no effect
on another. Often one or several of a multiple's personalities are
children, and if an adult personality is given a drug and then a
child's personality takes over, the adult dosage may be too much for
the child and result in an overdose. It is also difficult to
anesthetize some multiples, and there are accounts of multiples waking
up on the operating table after one of their "unanesthetizable"
subpersonalities has taken over.
Other conditions that can vary from
personality to personality include scars, burn marks, cysts, and left-
and right-handedness. Visual acuity can differ, and some multiples have
to carry two or three different pairs of eyeglasses to accommodate
their alternating personalities. One personality can be color-blind and
another not, and even eye color can change. There are cases of women
who have two or three menstrual periods each month because each of
their subpersonalities has its own cycle. Speech pathologist Christy
Ludlow has found that the voice pattern for each of a multiple's
personalities is different, a feat that requires such a deep
physiological change that even the most accomplished actor cannot alter
his voice enough to disguise his voice pattern. One multiple, admitted
to a hospital for diabetes, baffled her doctors by showing no symptoms
when one of her nondiabetic personalities was in control. There are
accounts of epilepsy coming and going with changes in personality, and
psychologist Robert A. Phillips, Jr., reports that even tumors can
appear and disappear (although he does not specify what kind of tumors).
Multiples also tend to heal faster
than normal individuals. For example, there are several cases on record
of third-degree burns healing with extraordinary rapidity. Most eerie
of all, at least one researcher— Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the
therapist whose pioneering treatment of Sybil Dorsett was portrayed in
the book Sybil—is convinced that multiples don't age as fast as
other people. How could such things be? At a recent symposium on the
multiple personality syndrome, a multiple named Cassandra provided a
possible answer, Cassandra attributes her own rapid healing ability
both to the visualization techniques she practices and to something she
calls parallel processing. As she explained, even when her alternate
personalities are not in control of her body, they are still aware.
This enables her to "think" on a multitude of different channels at
once, to do things like work on several different term papers
simultaneously, and even "sleep" while other personalities prepare her
dinner and clean her house.
Hence, whereas normal people only
do healing imagery exercises two or three times a day, Cassandra does
them around the clock. She even has a subpersonality named Celese who
possesses a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and whose
sole function is to spend twenty-four hours a day meditating and
imaging the body's well-being. According to Cassandra, it is this
full-time attention to her health that gives her an edge over normal
people. Other multiples have made similar claims.
We are deeply attached to the inevitability of things. If we have bad
vision, we believe we will have bad vision for life, and if we suffer
from diabetes, we do not for a moment think our condition might vanish
with a change in mood or thought. But the phenomenon of multiple
personality challenges this belief and offers further evidence of just
how much our psychological states can affect the body's biology. If the
psyche of an individual with MPD is a kind of multiple image hologram,
it appears that the body is one as well, and can switch from one
biological state to another as rapidly as the
flutter of a deck of cards. The systems of control that must be in
place to account for such capacities is mind-boggling and makes our
ability to will away a wart look pale. Allergic reaction to a wasp
sting is a complex and multifaceted
process and involves the organized activity of antibodies, the
production of histamine, the dilation and rupture of blood vessels, the
excessive release of immune substances, and so on. What unknown
pathways of influence enable the mind of a multiple to freeze all these
processes in their tracks? Or what allows them to suspend the effects
of alcohol and other drugs in the blood, or turn diabetes on and off?
At the moment we don't know and must console ourselves with one simple
fact. Once a multiple has undergone therapy and in some way becomes
whole again, he or she can still make these switches at will. This
suggests that somewhere in our psyches we all have the ability to
control these things. And still this is not all we can do.
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As we have seen, simple everyday belief can also have a powerful effect on the body. Of course most of us do not have the mental discipline to completely control our beliefs (which is why doctors must use placebos to fool us into tapping the healing forces within us). To regain that control we must first understand the different types of belief that can affect us, for these too offer their own unique window on the plasticity of the mind/body relationship.
CULTURAL BELIEFS
One type of belief is imposed on us
by our society. For example, the people of the Trobriand Islands engage
freely in sexual relations before marriage, but premarital pregnancy is
strongly frowned upon. They use no form of contraception, and seldom if
ever resort to abortion. Yet premarital pregnancy is virtually unknown.
This suggests that, because of their cultural beliefs, the unmarried
women are unconsciously preventing themselves from getting pregnant (I
have to disagree. I personally didn't want to get pregnant for 17 years
of my life and all those years I was pregnant and had numerous
abortions, probably more than 30, LM).
There is evidence that something similar may be going on in our own
culture. Almost everyone knows of a couple who have tried
unsuccessfully for years to have a child. They finally adopt, and
shortly thereafter the woman gets pregnant. Again this suggests that
finally having a child enabled the woman and/or her husband to overcome
some sort of
inhibition that was blocking the effects of her and/or his fertility.
The fears we share with the other members of our culture can also
affect us greatly. In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis killed tens
of thousands of people, but starting in the 1880s, death rates began to
plummet. Why? Previous to that decade no one knew what caused TB, which
gave it an aura of terrifying mystery. But in 1882 Dr. Robert Koch made
the momentous discovery that TB was caused by a bacterium.
Once this knowledge reached the general public, death rates fell from
600 per 100, 000 to 200 per 100, 000, despite the fact that it would be
nearly half a century before an effective drug treatment could be
found. Fear apparently has been an important factor in the success
rates of organ transplants as well. In the 1950s kidney transplants
were only a tantalizing possibility. Then a doctor in Chicago made what
seemed to be a successful transplant. He published his findings,
and
soon after other successful transplants took place around the world.
Then the first transplant failed. In fact, the doctor discovered that
the kidney had actually been rejected from the start. But it did not
matter. Once transplant recipients believed they could survive, they
did, and success rates soared beyond all expectations.
THE BELIEFS WE EMBODY IN OUR ATTITUDES
Another way belief manifests in our lives is through our attitudes.
Studies have shown that the attitude an expectant mother has toward her
baby, and pregnancy in general, has a direct correlation with the
complications she will experience during childbirth, as well as with
the medical problems her newborn infant will have after it is born.
Indeed, in the past decade an avalanche of studies has poured in
demonstrating the effect our attitudes have on a host of medical
conditions. People who score high on tests designed to measure
hostility and aggression are seven times more likely to die from heart
problems than people who receive low scores. Married women have
stronger immune systems than separated or divorced women, and happily
married women have even stronger immune systems. People with AIDS who
display a fighting spirit live longer than AIDS-infected individuals
who have a passive attitude. People with cancer also live
longer if they maintain a fighting spirit. Pessimists get more colds
than optimists. Stress lowers the immune response; people who have just
lost their spouse have an increased incidence of illness and disease,
and on and on.
THE BELIEFS WE EXPRESS THROUGH THE POWER OF OUR WILL
The types of belief we have examined so far can be viewed largely as
passive beliefs, beliefs we allow our culture or the normal state
of our thoughts to impose upon us. Conscious belief in the form of
a steely and unswerving will can also be used to sculpt and control the
body holographic. In the 1970s, Jack Schwarz, a Dutch-born author and
lecturer, astounded researchers in laboratories across the United
States with his ability to willfully control his body's internal
biological processes. In studies conducted at the Menninger Foundation,
the University of California's Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric
Institute, and others Schwarz astonished doctors by sticking mammoth
six-inch sailmaker's
needles completely through his arms without bleeding, without
flinching, and without producing beta brain waves (the type of brain
waves normally produced when a person is in pain).
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Even when the needles were removed, Schwarz still did not bleed, and
the puncture holes closed tightly. In addition, Schwarz altered his
brain-wave rhythms at will, held burning cigarettes against his flesh
without harming himself,
and even carried live coals around in his hands. He claims he acquired
these abilities when he was in a Nazi concentration camp and had to
learn how to control pain in order to withstand the terrible beatings
he endured. He believes anyone can learn voluntary control of their
body and thus gain responsibility for his or her own health.
Oddly enough, in 1947 another Dutchman demonstrated similar abilities.
The man's name was Mirin Dajo, and in public performances at the Corso
Theater in Zurich, he left audiences stunned. In plain view Dajo would
have an assistant stick a fencing foil completely through his body,
clearly piercing vital organs but causing Dajo no harm or pain. Like
Schwarz, when the foil was removed, Dajo did not bleed and only a faint
red line marked the spot where the foil had entered and
exited. Dajo's performance proved so nerve-racking to his audiences
that eventually one spectator suffered a heart attack, and Dajo was
legally banned from performing in public. However, a Swiss doctor named
Hans Naegeli-Osjord learned of Dajo's alleged abilities and asked him
if he would submit to scientific scrutiny. Dajo agreed, and on May 31,
1947, he entered the Zurich cantonal hospital. In addition to Dr.
Naegeli-Osjord, Dr. Werner Brunner, the chief of surgery at the
hospital, was also present, as were numerous other doctors, students,
and journalists. Dajo bared his chest and concentrated, and then, in
full view of the assemblage, he had his assistant plunge the foil
through his body. As always, no blood flowed and Dajo remained
completely at ease. But he was the only one smiling. The rest of the
crowd had turned to stone. By all rights, Dajo's vital organs should
have been severely damaged, and his seeming good health was almost too
much for the doctors to bear. Filled with disbelief, they asked Dajo if
he would submit to an X ray. He agreed and without apparent effort
accompanied them up the stairs to the X-ray room, the foil still
through his abdomen. The X ray was taken and the result was undeniable.
Dajo was indeed impaled. Finally, a full twenty minutes after he had
been pierced, the foil was removed, leaving only two faint scars.
Later, Dajo was tested by scientists in Basel, and even let the doctors
themselves run him through with the foil. Dr. Naegeli-Osjord later
related the entire case to the German physicist Alfred Stelter, and
Stelter reports it in his book Psi-Healing. Such supernormal feats of
control are not limited to the Dutch. In the 1960s Gilbert Grosvenor,
the president of the National Geographic Society, his wife, Donna, and
a team of Geographic photographers visited a village in Ceylon to
witness the alleged miracles of a local wonderworker named Mohotty. It
seems that as a young boy Mohotty prayed to a Ceylonese divinity named
Kataragama and told the god
that if he cleared Mohotty's father of a murder charge, he, Mohotty,
would do yearly penance in Kataragama's honor. Mohotty's father was
cleared, and true to his word, every year Mohotty did his penance. This
consisted of walking through fire and hot coals, piercing his cheeks
with skewers, driving skewers into his arms from shoulder to wrist,
sinking large hooks deep into his back, and dragging an enormous sledge
around a courtyard with ropes attached to the hooks. As the Grosvenors
later reported, the hooks pulled the flesh in Mohotty's back quite
taut, and again there was no sign of blood. When Mohotty was finished
and the hooks were removed, there weren't even any traces of wounds.
The Geographic team photographed this unnerving display and published
both pictures and an account of the incident in
the April 1966 issue of National Geographic. In 1967 Scientific
American published a report about a similar annual ritual in India. In
that instance a different person was chosen each year by the local
community, and after a generous amount of
ceremony, two hooks large enough to hang a side of beef on were buried
in the victim's back. Ropes that were pulled through the eyes of the
hooks were tied to the boom of an ox cart, and the victim was then
swung in huge arcs over the fields as a sacramental offering to the
fertility gods. When the hooks were removed the victim was completely
unharmed, there was no blood, and literally no sign of any punctures in
the flesh itself.
OUR UNCONSCIOUS BELIEFS
As we have seen, if we are not fortunate enough to have the selfmastery
of a Dajo or a Mohotty, another way of accessing the healing force
within us is to bypass the thick armor of doubt and skepticism that
exists in our conscious minds.
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Being tricked with a placebo is one way of accomplishing this. Hypnosis
is another. Like a surgeon reaching in and altering the condition of an
internal organ, a skilled hypnotherapist can reach into our psyche and
help us change the most important type of belief of all, our
unconscious beliefs. Numerous studies have demonstrated irrefutably
that under hypnosis a person can influence processes usually considered
unconscious. For instance, like a multiple, deeply hypnotized persons
can control allergic reactions, blood flow patterns, and
nearsightedness. In addition, they can control heart rate, pain, body
temperature, and even will away some kinds of birthmarks. Hypnosis can
also be used to accomplish something that, in its own way, is every bit
as remarkable as suffering no injury after a foil has been stuck
through one's abdomen. That something involves a horribly disfiguring
hereditary condition known as Brocq's disease. Victims of Brocq's
disease develop a thick, horny covering over their skin that resembles
the scales of a reptile. The skin can become so hardened and rigid that
even the slightest movement will cause it to crack and bleed. Many of
the so-
called alligator-skinned people in circus sideshows were actually
individuals with Brocq's disease, and because of the risk of infection,
victims of Brocq's disease used to have relatively short lifespans.
Brocq's disease was incurable until 1951 when a sixteen-year-old boy
with an advanced case of the affliction was referred as a last resort
to a hypnotherapist named A. A. Mason at the Queen Victoria Hospital in
London. Mason discovered that the boy was a good hypnotic subject
and could easily be put into a deep state of trance. While the boy was
in trance, Mason told him that his Brocq's disease was healing and
would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's
left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh beneath. By the end of
ten days the arm was completely normal. Mason and the boy continued to
work on different body areas until all of the scaly skin was gone. The
boy remained symptom-free for at least five years, at which point Mason
lost touch with him. This is extraordinary because Brocq's disease is a
genetic condition, and getting rid of it involves more than just
controlling autonomic processes such as blood flow patterns and various
cells of the immune
system. It means tapping into the masterplan, our DNA programming
itself. So, it would appear that when we access the right strata of our
beliefs, our minds can override even our genetic makeup.
1962 X ray showing the degree to which Vittorio Michelli's hip bone had
disintegrated as a result of his malignant sarcoma. So little bone was
left that the ball of his upper leg was free-floating in a mass of soft
tissue, rendered as gray
mist in the X ray. After a series of baths in the spring at Lourdes,
Michelli experienced a miraculous healing. His hip bone completely
regenerated over the course of several months, a feat currently
considered impossible by medical science. This 1965 X ray shows his
miraculously restored hip joint. Source: Michel-Marie Salmon, The
Extraordinary Cure of Vittorio Michelli.
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THE BELIEFS EMBODIED IN OUR FAITH
Perhaps the most powerful types of belief of all are those we express
through spiritual faith. In 1962 a man named Vittorio Michelli was
admitted to the Military Hospital of Verona, Italy, with a large
cancerous tumor on his left hip. So dire was his prognosis that he was
sent home without treatment, and within ten months his hip had
completely disintegrated, leaving the bone of his upper leg floating in
nothing more than a mass of soft tissue. He was, quite literally,
falling apart. As a last resort he traveled to Lourdes and had himself
bathed in the spring (by this time he was in a plaster cast, and his
movements were quite restricted). Immediately on entering the water he
had a sensation of heat moving through his body. After the bath his
appetite returned and he felt renewed energy. He had several more baths
and then returned home.
Over the course of the next month he felt such an increasing sense of
well-being he insisted his doctors X-ray him again. They discovered his
tumor was smaller. They were so intrigued they documented every step in
this improvement. It was a good thing because after Michelli's tumor
disappeared, his bone began to regenerate, and the medical community
generally views this as an impossibility. Within two months he was up
and walking again, and over the course of the next
several years his bone completely reconstructed itself. A dossier on
Michelli's case was sent to the Vatican's Medical Commission, an
international panel of doctors set up to investigate such matters, and
after examining the evidence the commission decided Michelli had indeed
experienced a miracle. As the commission stated in its official report,
"A remarkable reconstruction of the iliac bone and cavity has taken
place. The X rays made in 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1969
confirm categorically and without doubt that an unforeseen and even
overwhelming bone reconstruction has taken place of a type unknown in
the annals of world medicine." Was Michelli's healing a miracle in the
sense that it violated any of
the known laws of physics? Although the jury remains out on this
question, there seems no clear-cut reason to believe any laws were violated".
In a truly stunning example of synchronicity, while I was in the middle
of writing these very words a letter arrived in the mail informing me
that a friend who lives in Kauai, Hawaii, and whose hip had
disintegrated due to cancer has also experienced an "inexplicable" and
complete regeneration of her bone. The tools she employed to effect her
recovery were chemotherapy, extensive meditation, and imagery
exercises. The story of her healing has been reported in the Hawaiian
newspapers.
108 Rather,
Michelli's healing may simply be due to natural processes we do not yet
understand. Given the phenomenal range of healing capacities we have
looked at so far, it is clear there are many pathways of interaction
between the mind and body that we do not yet understand. If Michelli's
healing was attributable to an undiscovered natural process, we might
better ask, Why is the regeneration of bone so rare and what triggered
it in Michelli's case? It may be that bone regeneration is rare because
achieving it requires the accessing of very deep levels of the psyche,
levels usually not reached through the normal activities of
consciousness. This appears to be why hypnosis is needed to bring about
a remission of Brocq's disease. As for what triggered Michelli's
healing, given the role belief plays in so many examples of
mind/body plasticity it is certainly a primary suspect. Could it be
that through his faith in the healing power of Lourdes, Michelli
somehow, either consciously or serendipitously, effected his own cure?
There is strong evidence that belief, not divine intervention, is the
prime mover in at least some so-called miraculous occurrences. Recall
that Mohotty attained his supernormal self-control by praying to
Kataragama, and unless we are willing to accept the existence of
Kataragama,
Mohotty's abilities seem better explained by his deep and abiding
belief that was divinely protected. The same seems to be true of many
miracles produced by Christian wonder-workers and saints. One Christian
miracle that appears to be generated by the power of the mind is
stigmata. Most church scholars agree that St. Francis of Assisi was the
first person to manifest spontaneously the wounds of the crucifixion,
but since his death there have been literally hundreds of other
stigmatists. Although no two ascetics exhibit the stigmata in quite the
same way, all have one thing in common... Nails inserted through the
hands cannot support the weight of a body hanging on a cross. Why did
St. Francis and all the other stigmatists who came after him believe
the nail holes passed through the hands? Because that is the way the
wounds have been depicted by artists since the eighth century.
109
That the position and even size and shape of stigmata have been
influenced by art is especially apparent in the case of an Italian
stigmatist named Gemma Galgani, who died in 1903. Gemma's wounds
precisely mirrored the stigmata on her own favorite crucifix. Another
researcher who believed stigmata are self-induced was Herbert Thurston,
an English priest who wrote several volumes on miracles. In his tour de
force "The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism", published posthumously in
1952, he listed several reasons why he thought stigmata were a product
of autosuggestion. The size, shape, and location of the wounds varies
from stigmatist to stigmatist, an inconsistency that indicates they are
not derived from a common source... A comparison of the visions
experienced by various stigmatists also shows little consistency,
suggesting that they are not re-enactments of the historical
crucifixion, but are instead products of the stigmatists' own minds.
And perhaps most significant of all, a surprisingly large percentage of
stigmatists also suffered from hysteria, a fact Thurston interpreted as
a further indication that stigmata are the side effect of a volatile
and abnormally emotional psyche, and not necessarily the product of an
enlightened one. In view of such evidence it is small wonder that even
some of the more liberal members of the Catholic leadership believe
stigmata are the product of "mystical contemplation, " that is, that
they are created by the mind during periods of intense meditation. If
stigmata are products of autosuggestion, the range of control the mind
has over the body holographic must be expanded even further.
Like Mohotty's wounds, stigmata can also heal with disconcerting speed.
The almost limitless plasticity of the body is further evidenced in the
ability of some stigmatists to grow nail-like protuberances in the
middle of their wounds. Again, St. Francis was the first to display
this phenomenon. According to Thomas of Celano, an eyewitness to St.
Francis's stigmata and also his biographer: "His hands and feet seemed
pierced in the midst by nails. These marks were round on the inner side
of the hands and elongated on the outer side, and certain small pieces
of flesh were seen like the ends of nails bent and driven back,
projecting from the rest of the flesh." Another contemporary of St.
Francis's, St. Bonaventura, also witnessed the saint's stigmata and
said that the nails were so clearly defined one could slip a finger
under them and into the wounds. Although St. Francis's nails appeared
to be composed of blackened and hardened flesh, they possessed another
nail-like quality.
110
According to Thomas of Celano, if a nail were pressed on one side, it
instantly projected on the other side, just as it would if it were a
real nail being slid back and forth through the middle of the hand!
Therese Neumann, the well-known Bavarian stigmatist who died in 1962,
also had such nail-like protuberances. Like St. Francis's they were
apparently formed of hardened skin. They were thoroughly examined by
several doctors and found to be structures that passed completely
through her hands and feet. Unlike St. Francis's wounds, which were
open continuously, Neumann's opened only periodically, and when they
stopped bleeding, a soft, membrane-like tissue quickly grew over them.
Other stigmatists have displayed similarly profound alterations in
their bodies. Padre Pio, the famous Italian stigmatist who died in
1968, had stigmata wounds that passed completely through his hands. A
wound in his side was so deep that doctors who examined it were afraid
to measure it for fear of damaging his internal organs. Venerable
Giovanna Maria Solimani, an eighteenth-century Italian stigmatist, had
wounds in her hands deep enough to stick a key into. As with
all stigmatists' wounds, hers never became decayed, infected, or even
inflamed. And another eighteenth-century stigmatist, St. Veronica
Giuliani, an abbess at a convent in Citta di Castello in Umbria, Italy,
had a large wound in her side that would open and close on command.
The holographic model has aroused the interest of researchers in the Soviet Union,
and two Soviet psychologists, Dr. Alexander P. Dubrov and Dr. Veniamin
N. Pushkin, have written extensively on the idea. They believe that the
frequency processing capabilities of the brain do not in and of
themselves prove the holographic nature of the images and thoughts in
the human mind. They have, however, suggested what might constitute
such proof. Dubrov and Pushkin believe that if an example could be
found where the brain projected an image outside of itself, the
holographic nature of the mind would be convincingly demonstrated. Or
to use their own words, "Records of ejection of psychophysical structures outside the brain would provide direct evidence of brain holograms."
In fact, St. Veronica Giuliani seems to supply such evidence.
111
During the
last years of her life she became convinced that the images of the
Passion—a crown of thorns, three nails, a cross, and a
sword—had become emblazoned on her heart. She drew pictures of
these and even noted where they were located. After she died an autopsy
revealed that the symbols were indeed impressed on her heart exactly as
she had depicted them. The two doctors who performed the autopsy signed
sworn statements attesting to their finding. Other stigmatists have had
similar experiences. St. Teresa of Avila had a vision of an angel
piercing her heart with a sword, and after she died a deep fissure was
found in her heart. Her heart, with the miraculous sword wound still
clearly visible, is now on display as a relic in Alba de Tormes,
Spain. A nineteenth-century French stigmatist named Marie-Julie
Jahenny kept seeing the image of a flower in her mind, and eventually a
picture of the flower appeared on her breast. It remained there twenty
years." Nor are such abilities limited to stigmatists. In 1913 a
twelve-year-old girl from the village of Bussus-
Bus-Suel, near Abbeville, France, made headlines when it was discovered
that she could consciously command images, such as pictures of dogs and
horses, to appear on her arms, legs, and shoulders. She could also
produce words, and when someone asked her a question the answer would
instantly appear on her skin. Surely such demonstrations are examples of the ejection of psychophysical structures outside the brain.
In fact, in a way stigmata themselves, especially those in which the
flesh has formed into nail-like protrusions, are examples of the brain
projecting images outside itself and impressing them in the soft clay
of the body holographic. Dr. Michael Grosso, a philosopher at Jersey
City State College who has written extensively on the subject of
miracles, has also arrived at this conclusion. Grosso, who traveled to
Italy to study Padre Pio's stigmata firsthand, states, "One of the
categories in my attempt to analyze Padre Pio is to say that he had an
ability to symbolically transform physical reality. In other words, the
level of consciousness he was operating at enabled him to transform
physical reality in the light of certain symbolic ideas. For example,
he identified with the wounds of the crucifixion and his body became
permeable to those psychic symbols, gradually assuming their form. "
So it appears that through the use
of images, the brain can tell the body what to do, including telling it
to make more images. Images making images. Two mirrors reflecting each
other infinitely. Such is the nature of the mind/body relationship in a
holographic universe.
112
At
the beginning of this chapter, I said that instead of examining the
various mechanisms the mind uses to control the body, the chapter would
be devoted primarily to exploring the range of this control. In doing
so I did not mean to deny or diminish the importance of such
mechanisms. They are crucial to our understanding of the mind/body
relationship, and new discoveries in this area seem to appear every
day. For example, at a recent conference on psychoneuroimmu-
nology—a new science that studies the way the mind (psycho), the
nervous system (neuro), and the immune system (immunology)
interact—Candace Pert, chief of brain biochemistry at the
National Institute of Mental Health, announced that
immune cells have neuropeptide receptors. Neuropeptides are molecules
the brain uses to communicate, the brain's telegrams, if you will.
There was a time when it was believed that neuropeptides could only be
found in the brain. But the existence of receptors (telegram receivers)
on the cells in our immune system implies that the immune system is not
separate from but is an extension of the brain. Neuropeptides have also
been found in various other parts of the body, leading Pert to admit
that she can no longer tell where the brain leaves off and the body
begins. I have excluded such particulars, not only because I felt
examining the extent to which the mind can shape and control the body
was more relevant to the discussion at hand, but also because the
biological processes responsible for mind/body interactions are too
vast a subject for this book. At the beginning of the section on
miracles I said there was no clear-cut reason to believe Michelli's
bone regeneration could not be explained by our current understanding
of physics. This is less true of stigmata. It also appears to be very
much not true of various paranormal phenomena reported by credible
individuals throughout history, and in recent times by various
biologists, physicists, and other researchers.
In this chapter we have looked at astounding things the mind can do
that, although not fully understood, do not seem to violate any of the
known laws of physics. In the next chapter we will look at some of the
things the mind can do that cannot be explained by our current
scientific understandings. As we will see, the holographic idea may
shed light in these areas as well.
113
Venturing into these territories will occasionally
involve treading on what might at first seem to be shaky ground and
examining phenomena even more dizzying and incredible than Mohotty's
rapidly healing wounds and the images on St. Veronica Giuliani's heart.
But again we will find that, despite their daunting nature, science is
also beginning to make inroads into these territories.
Before
closing, one last piece of evidence of the body's holographic nature
deserves to be mentioned. The ancient Chinese art of acupuncture is
based on the idea that every organ and bone in the body is connected to
specific points on the body's surface. By activating these acupuncture
points, with either needles or some other form of stimulation, it is
believed that diseases and imbalances affecting the parts of the body
connected to the points can be alleviated and even cured. There are
over a thousand acupuncture points organized in imaginary lines called
meridians on the body's surface. Although still controversial,
acupuncture is gaining acceptance in the medical community and has even
been used successfully to treat chronic back pain in racehorses.
In 1957 a French physician and acupuncturist named Paul Nogier
published a book called "Treatise of Auriculotherapy", in which he
announced his discovery that in addition to the major acupuncture
system, there are two smaller acupuncture systems on both ears. He
dubbed these acupuncture microsystems and noted that when one played a
kind of connect-
the-dots game with them, they formed an anatomical map of a miniature
human inverted like a fetus. Unbeknownst to Nogier, the Chinese had
discovered the "little man in the ear" nearly 4, 000 years earlier, but
a map of the Chinese ear
system wasn't published until after Nogier had already laid claim to the idea.
The little man in the ear is not just a charming aside in the history
of acupuncture. Dr. Terry Oleson, a psychobiologist at the Pain
Management Clinic at the University of California at Los Angeles School
of Medicine, has discovered that the ear microsystem can be used to diagnose accurately what's going on in the body.
114
For instance, Oleson has
discovered that increased electrical activity in one of the acupuncture
points in the ear generally indicates a pathological condition (either
past or present) in the corresponding area of the body. In one study,
forty patients were examined to determine areas of their body where
they experienced chronic pain. Following the examination, each patient was draped in a sheet to conceal any visible problems.
C • Chinese Ear Acupuncture System
E • European Auriculotherapy System
The Little Man in the Ear. Acupuncturists have found that the
acupuncture points in the ear form the outline of a miniature human
being. Dr. Terry Oleson, a psychobiologist at UCLA's School of
Medicine, believes it is because the body is a hologram and each of its portions contains an image of the whole.
115
Then an acupuncturist with no knowledge of the results examined only
their ears. When the results were tallied it was discovered that the
ear examinations were in agreement with the established medical
diagnoses 2 % of the time. Ear examinations can also reveal problems
with the bones and internal organs. Once when Oleson was out boating
with an acquaintance he noticed an abnormally flaky patch of skin in
one of the man's ears. From his research Oleson knew the spot
corresponded to the heart, and he suggested to the man that he might
want to get his heart checked. The man went to his doctor the next day
and discovered he had a cardiac problem which required immediate
open-heart surgery. Oleson also uses electrical stimulation of the
acupuncture points in the ear to treat chronic pain, weight problems,
hearing loss, and virtually all kinds of addiction. In one study of 14
narcotic-addicted individuals, Oleson and his colleagues used ear
acupuncture to eliminate the drug requirements of 12 of them in an
average of 5 days and with only minimal withdrawal symptoms. Indeed,
ear acupuncture has proved so successful in bringing about rapid
narcotic detoxification that clinics in both Los Angeles and New York
are now using the technique to treat street addicts. Why
would the acupuncture points in the ear be aligned in the shape of a
miniature human? Oleson believes it is because of the holographic
nature of the mind and body. Just as every portion of a hologram
contains the image of the whole, every portion of the body may also
contain the image of the whole. "The ear holograph is, logically,
connected to the brain holograph which itself is connected to the whole
body," he states."The way we use the ear to affect the rest of the body
is by working through the brain holograph."
Oleson believes there are probably acupuncture microsystems in other
parts of the body as well. Dr. Ralph Alan Dale, the director of the
Acupuncture Education Center in North Miami Beach, Florida, agrees.
After spending the last two decades tracking down clinical and research
data from China, Japan, and Germany, he
has accumulated evidence of eighteen different microacupuncture
holograms in the body, including ones in the hands, feet, arms, neck,
tongue, and even the gums. Like Oleson, Dale feels these microsystems
are "holographic reiterations of the gross anatomy, " and believes
there are still other such systems waiting to be discovered. In a
notion reminiscent of Bohm's assertion that every electron in some way
contains the cosmos, Dale hypothesizes that every finger, and even
every cell, may contain its own acupuncture microsystem. Richard
Leviton, a contributing editor at East West magazine, who has written
about the holographic implications of acupuncture microsystems, thinks
that alternative medical techniques—such as reflexology, a type
of massage therapy that involves accessing all points of the body
through stimulation of the feet, and iridology, a diagnostic technique
that involves examining the iris of the eye in order to determine the
condition of the body—may also be indications of the body's
holographic nature.
Leviton concedes that neither field has been experimentally vindicated (studies of iridology, in particular, have produced
extremely conflicting results) but feels the holographic idea offers a
way of understanding them if their legitimacy is established. Leviton
thinks there may even be something to palmistry. By this he does not
mean the type of hand reading practiced by fortune-tellers who sit in
glass storefronts and beckon people in, but the 4, 500-year old Indian
version of the science. He bases this suggestion on his own profound
encounter with an Indian hand reader living in Montreal who
possessed a doctorate in the subject from Agra University, India." The
holographic paradigm provides palmistry's more esoteric and
controversial claims a context for validation, " says Leviton.
It is difficult to assess the type of palmistry practiced
by Leviton's Indian hand reader in the absence of double-blind studies,
but science is beginning to accept that at least some information about
our body
is contained in the lines and whorls of our hand. Herman Weinreb, a
neurologist at New York University, has discovered that a fingerprint
pattern called an ulnar loop occurs more frequently in Alzheimer's patients than in nonsufferers.
Neurologists have found that Alzheimer's patients have a more
than average chance of having a distinctive fingerprint pattern known
as an ulnar
loop. At least ten other common genetic disabilities are also
associated with various patterns in the hand. Such findings may provide
evidence of the holographic model's assertion that every portion of the
body contains information
about the whole.
117
In a study of 50 Alzheimer's patients and 50 normal individuals, 72
percent of the Alzheimer's group had the pattern on at least 8 of their
fingertips, compared to only 26 percent in the control group. Of those
with ulnar loops on all 10 fingertips, 14 were Alzheimer's sufferers,
but only 4 members of the control group had the pattern. It is now
known that 10 common genetic disabilities, including Down's syndrome,
are also associated with various patterns in the hand. Doctors in West
Germany are now using this information to analyze parents' hand prints
and help determine whether expectant mothers should undergo
arnniocentesis, a potentially dangerous genetic screening procedure in
which a needle is inserted into the womb to draw off amniotic fluid for
laboratory testing. Researchers at West Germany's Institute of
Dermatoglyphics in
Hamburg have even developed a computer system that uses an optoelectric
scanner to take a digitized "photo" of a patient's hand. It then
compares the hand to the 10, 000 other prints in its memory, scans it
for the nearly 50 distinctive patterns now known to be associated with
various hereditary disabilities, and quickly calculates the patient's
risk
factors. So perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss palmistry out
of hand. The lines and whorls in our palms may contain more about our
whole self than we realize.
Does Consciousness Create Subatomic Particles or Not Create Subatomic Particles, That Is the Question
This difference of opinion indicates once
again that the holographic theory is still very much an idea in the
making, not unlike a newly formed Pacific island whose volcanic
activity keeps it from having clearly defined shores. Although some
might use this lack of consensus to criticize it, it should be
remembered that Darwin's theory of evolution, certainly one of the most
potent and successful ideas science has ever produced, is also still
very much in a state of flux, and evolutionary theorists continue to
debate its scope, interpretation, regulatory mechanisms, and
ramifications.
The difference of opinion also reveals just how complex a puzzle
miracles are. Jahn and Dunne offer yet another opinion on the role
consciousness plays in the creation of day-to-day reality, and although
it differs from one of Bohm's basic premises, because of the possible
insight it offers into the process by which miracles are effected, it
deserves our attention.
Unlike Bohm, Jahn and Dunne believe
subatomic particles do not possess a distinct reality until
consciousness enters the picture." I think we have long since
passed the place in high energy physics where we're examining the
structure of a passive universe, " Jahn states. "I think we're into the
domain where the interplay of consciousness in the environment is
taking place on such a primary scale that we are indeed creating
reality by any reasonable definition of the term." As has been
mentioned, this is the view held by most physicists. However, Jahn and
Dunne's position differs from the mainstream in an important way. Most
physicists would reject the idea that the interplay
between consciousness and the subatomic world could in any way be used
to explain PK, let alone miracles. In fact, the majority of physicists
not only ignore any implications this interplay might have but actually
behave as if it doesn't exist. "Most physicists develop a somewhat
schizophrenic view, " says quantum theorist Fritz Rohrlich of Syracuse
University. "On the one hand they accept the standard interpretation of
quantum theory. On the other they insist on the reality of quantum
systems even when these are not observed." This bizarre
I'm-not-going-to-think-about-it-even-when-I-know-it's true
attitude keeps many physicists from considering even the philosophical
implications of quantum physics' most incredible findings. As N.
David Mermin, a physicist at Cornell University, points out, physicists
fall into three categories: a small minority is troubled by the
philosophical implications; a second group has elaborate reasons why
they are not troubled, but their explanations tend "to miss the point
entirely"; and a third group has no elaborate explanations but also
refuses to say why they aren't troubled. "Their position is
unassailable (not able to be challenged)," says Mermin.
Jahn and Dunne are not so timid.
They believe that instead of discovering particles, physicists may
actually be creating them. As evidence, they cite a recently discovered
subatomic particle called an anomalon, whose properties vary from
laboratory to laboratory. Imagine owning a car that had a different
color and different features depending on who drove it! This is
very curious and seems to suggest that an anomalon's reality depends on
who finds/creates it. Similar evidence may also be found in another
subatomic particle. In the 1930s Pauli proposed the existence of a
massless particle called
a neutrino to solve an outstanding problem concerning radioactivity.
For years the neutrino was only an idea, but then in 1957 physicists
discovered evidence of its existence. In more recent years, however,
physicists have realized that if the neutrino possessed some mass, it
would solve several even thornier problems than the one facing Pauli,
and lo and behold in 1980 evidence started to come in that the neutrino
had a small but measurable mass! This is not all. As it turned out,
only laboratories in the Soviet Union discovered neutrinos with mass.
Laboratories in the United States did not. This remained true for the
better part of the 1980s, and although other laboratories have now
duplicated the Soviet findings, the situation is still unresolved. Is
it possible that the different properties displayed by neutrinos are
due at least in part to the changing expectations and different
cultural biases of the physicists who searched for them? If so, such a
state of
affairs raises an interesting question. If physicists do not discover
the subatomic world but create it, why do some particles, such as
electrons, appear to have a stable reality no matter who observes them?
In other words, why does a physics student with no knowledge of an
electron still discover the same characteristics that a seasoned
physicist
discovers? One possible answer is that our perceptions of the world may
not be based solely on the information we receive through our five
senses.
141
As fantastic as this may sound, a very good case can be made for such a
notion. Before explaining, I would like to relate an occurrence I
witnessed in the middle 1970s. My father had hired a professional
hypnotist to entertain a group of friends at his house and had invited
me to attend the event. After quickly determining the hypnotic
susceptibility of the various individuals present, the hypnotist chose
a friend of my father's named Tom as his subject. This was the first
time Tom
had ever met the hypnotist. Tom proved to be a very good subject, and
within seconds the hypnotist had him in a deep trance. He then
proceeded with the usual tricks performed by stage hypnotists. He
convinced Tom there was a giraffe
in the room and had Tom gaping in wonder. He told Tom that a potato was
really an apple and had Tom eat it with gusto. But the highlight of the
evening was when he told Tom that when he came out of trance, his
teenage daughter, Laura, would be completely invisible to him. Then,
after having Laura stand directly in front of the chair in which Tom
was sitting, the hypnotist awakened him and asked him if he could see
her. Tom looked around the room and his gaze appeared to pass right
through his giggling daughter. "No, " he replied. The hypnotist asked
Tom if he was certain, and again, despite Laura's rising giggles, he
answered no. Then the hypnotist went behind Laura so he was hidden from
Tom's view and pulled an object out of his pocket. He kept the object
carefully concealed so that no one in the room could see it, and
pressed it against the small of Laura's back. He asked Tom to identify
the object. Tom leaned forward as if staring directly through Laura's
stomach and said that it was a watch. The hypnotist nodded and asked if
Tom could read the watch's inscription. Tom squinted as if struggling
to make out the writing and recited both the name of the watch's owner
(which happened to be a person unknown to any of us in the room) and
the message. The hypnotist then revealed that the object
was indeed a watch and passed it around the room so that everyone could see that Tom had read its inscription correctly.
When I talked to Tom afterward, he said that his daughter had been
absolutely invisible to him. All he had seen was the hypnotist standing
and holding a watch cupped in the palm of his hand. Had the hypnotist
let him leave without telling him what was going on, he never would
have known he wasn't perceiving normal consensus reality. Obviously
Tom's perception of the watch was not based on information he was
receiving through his five senses. Where was he getting the information
from?
One explanation is that he was
obtaining it telepathically from someone else's mind, in this case, the
hypnotist's. The ability of hypnotized individuals to "tap" into the
senses of other people has been reported by other investigators.
The British physicist Sir William Barrett found evidence of the phenomenon in a series of experiments with a young girl. After
hypnotizing the girl he told her that she would taste everything he
tasted. "Standing behind the girl, whose eyes I had securely bandaged,
I took up some salt and put it in my mouth; instantly she sputtered and
exclaimed, 'What for are you putting salt in my mouth?' Then I tried
sugar; she said That's better'; asked what it was like, she said
'Sweet. ' Then mustard, pepper, ginger, et cetera were tried; each was
named and apparently tasted by the girl when I put them in my own
mouth."
In his book "Experiments in
Distant Influence" the Soviet physiologist Leonid Vasiliev cites a
German study conducted in the 1950s that produced similar findings. In
that study, the hypnotized subject not only tasted what the hypnotist
tasted, but blinked when a light was flashed in the hypnotist's eyes,
sneezed when the hypnotist took a whiff of ammonia, heard the ticking
of a watch held to the hypnotist's ear, and experienced pain when the
hypnotist pricked himself with a needle,
all done in a manner that
safeguarded against her obtaining the information through normal
sensory cues. Our ability to tap into the senses of others is not
limited to hypnotic states. In a now famous series of experiments
physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research
Institute in California found that just about everyone they tested had
a capacity they call "remote viewing, " the ability to describe
accurately what a distant test subject is seeing. They found that
individual after individual could remote-view simply by relaxing and
describing whatever images came into their minds. Puthoff and Targ's
findings have been duplicated by dozens of laboratories around the
world, indicating that remote viewing is probably a widespread latent
ability in all of us. The Princeton Anomalies Research lab has also
corroborated Puthoff and Targ's findings. In one study Jahn himself
served as the receiver and tried to perceive what a colleague was
observing in Paris, a city Jahn has never visited. In addition to
seeing a bustling street, an image of a knight in armor came into
Jahn's mind. It later turned out that the sender was standing in front
of a government building
ornamented with statuary of historical military figures, one of whom was a knight in armor.
143
So it appears that we are deeply
interconnected with each other in yet another way, a situation that is
not so strange in a holographic universe. Moreover, these
interconnections manifest even when we are not consciously aware of
them. Studies have shown that when a person in one room is given
an electric shock, it will register in the polygraph readings of
a person in another room. A light flashed in a test subject's eyes will
register in the EEG readings of a test subject isolated in another
room, and even the blood volume of a test subject's finger changes, as
measured by a plethysmograph, a sensitive indicator of autonomic
nervous system functioning—when a "sender" in another room
encounters the name of someone they know while reading a list composed
mainly of names unknown to them.
Given both our deep
interconnectedness and our ability to construct entirely convincing
realities out of information received via this interconnectedness, such
as Tom did, what would happen if two or more hypnotized individuals
tried to construct the same imaginary reality?
Intriguingly, this question has been answered in an experiment
conducted by Charles Tart, a professor of psychology at the Davis
campus of the University of California. Tart found two graduate
students, Anne and Bill, who could go into deep trance and were also
skilled hypnotists in their own right. He had Anne hypnotize Bill and
after he was hypnotized, he had Bill hypnotize her in return. Tart's
reasoning was that the already powerful rapport that exists between
hypnotist and subject would be strengthened by using this unusual
procedure. He was right. When they opened their eyes in this mutually
hypnotized state everything looked gray. However, the grayness quickly
gave way to vivid colors and glowing lights, and in a few moments they
found themselves on a beach of unearthly beauty. The sand sparkled like
diamonds, the sea was filled with enormous frothing bubbles and
glistened like champagne, and the shoreline was dotted with translucent
crystalline rocks pulsing with internal light. Although Tart could not
see what Anne and Bill were seeing, from the way they were talking he
quickly realized they were experiencing the same hallucinated reality.
Of course, this was immediately obvious to Anne and Bill and they set
about to explore their newfound world, swimming in the ocean and
studying the glowing crystalline rocks. Unfortunately for Tart they
also stopped talking, or at least they stopped talking from Tart's
perspective. When he questioned them about their silence they told him
that in their shared dreamworld they were talking, a phenomenon
Tart feels involved some kind of paranormal communication between
the two. In session after session Anne and Bill continued to construct
various realities, and all were as real, available to the five senses,
and dimensionally realized, as anything they experienced in their
normal waking state. In fact, Tart resolved that the worlds Anne and
Bill visited we're
actually more real than the pale,
lunar version of reality with which most of us must be content. As he
states, after "they had been talking about their experiences to each
other for some time, and found they had been discussing details of the
experiences they had shared for which there were no verbal stimuli on
the tapes, they felt they must have actually been 'in' the nonworldly
locales they had experienced." Anne and Bill's ocean world is the perfect example of a holographic
reality—a three-dimensional construct created out of interconnectedness, sustained by the flow of consciousness, and ultimately as plastic as the thought processes that engendered it. This plasticity was evident in several of its features. Although it was three-dimensional, its space was more flexible than the space of everyday reality and sometimes
took on an elasticity Anne and Bill had no words to describe. Even
stranger, although they were clearly highly skilled at sculpting
a shared world outside themselves,
they frequently forgot to sculpt their own bodies, and existed more
often than not as floating faces or heads. As Anne reports, on one
occasion when Bill told her to give him her hand, "I had to kind of
conjure up a hand." How did this experiment in mutual hypnosis end?
Sadly, the idea that these spectacular visions were somehow real,
perhaps even more real than everyday reality, so frightened both Anne
and Bill that they became increasingly nervous about what they were
doing. They eventually stopped their explorations, and one of them,
Bill, even gave up hypnosis entirely. The extrasensory
interconnectedness that allowed Anne and Bill to construct their shared
reality might almost be viewed as a kind of field effect between them,
a "reality-field" if you will. One wonders what would have
happened if the hypnotist at my father's house had put all of us into a
trance? In light of the evidence above, there is every reason to
believe that if our rapport were deep enough, Laura would have become
invisible to us all. We would have collectively constructed a
reality-field of a watch, read its inscription, and been completely
convinced that what we were perceiving was real.
145
If consciousness plays a role in
the creation of subatomic particles, is it possible that our
observations of the subatomic world are also reality-fields of a kind?
If Jahn can perceive a suit of armor through the senses of a friend in
Paris, is it any more farfetched to believe that physicists all around
the world are unconsciously interconnecting with one another and using
a form of mutual hypnosis similar to that used by Tart's subjects to
create the consensus characteristics they observe in an electron?
This possibility may be supported by another unusual feature of
hypnosis. Unlike other altered states of consciousness, hypnosis is not
associated with any unusual EEC patterns. Physiologically speaking, the mental state hypnosis most closely resembles is our normal waking consciousness. Does
this mean that normal waking consciousness is itself a kind of
hypnosis, and we are all constantly tapping into reality-fields?
Nobelist Josephson has suggested that something like this may be going
on. Like Globus, he takes Castaneda's work seriously and has attempted
to relate it to quantum physics. He proposes that objective reality is
produced out of the collective memories of the human race while
anomalous events, such as those experienced by Castaneda, are the
manifestation of the individual will. Human consciousness may not be
the only thing that participates in the creation of reality-fields.
Remote viewing experiments have shown that people can accurately
describe distant locations even when there are no human observers
present at the locations. Similarly, subjects can identify the contents
of a sealed box randomly selected from a group of sealed boxes and
whose contents are therefore completely unknown. This means that we can
do more than just tap into the senses of other people. We can also tap
into reality itself to gain information.
As bizarre as this sounds, it is
not so strange when one remembers that in a holographic universe,
consciousness pervades (saturate) all matter, and "meaning" has an
active presence in both the mental and physical worlds.
Bohm believes the ubiquitousness (ever-present, omnipresent, universal)
of meaning offers a possible explanation for both telepathy and remote
viewing. He thinks both may actually be just different forms of
psychokinesis. Just as PK is a resonance of meaning conveyed from a
mind to an object, telepathy can be viewed as a resonance of meaning
conveyed from a mind to a mind, says Bohm. In like manner, remote
viewing can be looked at as a resonance of meaning conveyed from an
object to a mind. "When harmony or resonance of 'meanings' is
established, the action works both ways, so that the 'meanings' of the
distant system could act in the viewer to produce a kind of inverse
psychokinesis that would, in
effect, transmit an image of that system to him, " he states.
146
Jahn and Dunne have a similar view. Although they believe reality is
established only in the interaction of a consciousness with its
environment, they are very liberal in how they define consciousness. As
they see it, anything capable of generating, receiving, or utilizing
information can qualify. Thus, animals, viruses, DNA, machines
(artificially
intelligent and otherwise), and so-called nonliving objects may all
have the prerequisite properties to take part in the creation of
reality. If such assertions are true, and we can obtain information not
only from the minds of other human beings but from the living hologram
of reality itself, psychometry—the ability to obtain information
about an object's history simply by touching it—would also be
explained. Rather than being inanimate, such an object would be
suffused with its own kind of consciousness. Instead of being a "thing"
that exists separately from the universe, it would be part of the
interconnectedness of all things—connected to the thoughts of
every person who ever came in contact with it, connected to the
consciousness that pervades every animal and object that was ever
associated with its existence, connected via the implicate to its own
past, and connected to the mind of the psychometrist holding it.
Do physicists play a role in the creation of subatomic particles? At present the puzzle remains unresolved, but our ability to interconnect with one another and conjure up realities that are as real as our normal waking reality
is not the only clue that this may be the case. Indeed, the evidence of
the miraculous indicates that we have scarcely even begun to fathom our
talents in this area. Consider the following miraculous healing
reported by Gardner. In 1982 an English physician
named Ruth Coggin, working in Pakistan, was visited by a thirty-five-
year-old Pakistani woman named Kamro. Kamro was eight months pregnant
and for the better part of her pregnancy had suffered from bleeding and
intermittent abdominal pain. Coggin recommended that she go into the
hospital immediately, but Kamro refused.
147
Nonetheless, two days later her bleeding became so severe that she was
admitted on an emergency basis. Coggin's examination revealed that
Kamro's blood loss had been "very heavy, " and her feet and abdomen
were pathologically swollen. The next day Kamro had "another heavy
bleed, " forcing Coggin to perform a cesarean section. As soon as
Coggin opened the uterus even more copious amounts of dark blood
flooded out and continued to flow so heavily it became clear that
Karnro had virtually no clotting ability. By the time Coggin delivered
Kamro's healthy baby daughter, "deep pools of unclotted blood" filled
her bed and continued to flow from her incision. Coggin managed to
obtain two pints of blood to transfuse the gravely anemic woman, but it
was not nearly enough to replace the staggering loss. Having no other
options, Coggin resorted to prayer... Then they waited. For the next
several hours Kamro continued to bleed, but instead of getting worse,
her general condition stabilized. That evening Coggin prayed with Kamro
again, and although her "brisk bleeding" continued unabated, she seemed
unaffected by the loss. Forty-eight hours after the operation her blood
finally began to clot and her recovery started in full. Ten days later
she went home with her baby. Although Coggin had no way of measuring
Kamro's actual blood loss, she had no doubts that the young mother had
lost more than her
total blood volume during the surgery and the profuse bleeding that
ensued. After Gardner examined the documentation of the case, he
agreed. The trouble with this conclusion is that human beings cannot
produce new blood fast enough to cover such catastrophic losses; if
they could, many fewer people would bleed to death.
This leaves one with the unsettling
conclusion that Kamro's new blood must have materialized out of thin
air. The ability to create an infinitesimal particle or two pales in
comparison to the materialization of the ten to twelve pints of blood
necessary to replenish the average human body. And blood is not the
only thing we can create out of thin air. In June of 1974, while
traveling in Timor Timur, a small island in easternmost Indonesia,
Watson encountered an equally confounding example of
materialization. Although his original intention had been to visit a
famous matan do'ok, a type of Indonesian wonder-worker who was said to
be able to make it rain on
demand, he was diverted by accounts of an unusually active buan, an
evil spirit, wreaking havoc in a house in a nearby village. The family
living in the house consisted of a married couple, their two small
boys, and the husband's unmarried younger half-sister. The couple and
their children were typically Indonesian in appearance, with dark
complexions and curly hair, but the half-sister, whose name was Alin,
was physically very different and had a much lighter complexion
and features that were almost Chinese, which accounted for her
inability to obtain a husband. She was also treated with indifference
by the family, and it was immediately plain to Watson that she was the
source of the psychic disturbance.
That evening during dinner in the family's grass-roofed home, Watson
witnessed several startling phenomena. First, without warning, the
couple's eight-year-old boy screamed and dropped his cup on the table
as the back of his hand began to bleed inexplicably. Watson, who was
sitting next to the boy, examined his hand and saw that there was
a semicircle of fresh punctures on it, like a human bite, but with a
diameter larger than the boy's. Alin, always the odd person out, was
busy at the fire opposite the boy when this occurred. As Watson was
examining the wounds, the lamp flame turned blue and abruptly flared
up, and in the suddenly brighter light a shower of salt began to pour
down over the food until it was completely covered and inedible. "It
wasn't a sudden deluge, but a slow and deliberate action which lasted
long enough for me to look up and see that it seemed to begin in
midair, just about eye level, perhaps four feet over
the table, " says Watson. Watson immediately leapt up from the table,
but the show wasn't over. Suddenly a series of loud rapping sounds
issued from the table, and it began to wobble. The family also jumped
up and all watched as the table bucked "like the lid on a box
containing some wild animal," and finally flipped over on its side.
Watson first reacted by running out of the house with the rest of the
family, but when he recovered his senses he returned and searched the
room for evidence of any trickery that might account for the
occurrence. He found none. The events that took place in the little
Indonesian hut are classic examples of a poltergeist haunting, a type
of haunting typified by mysterious sounds and psychokinetic activity
rather than the appearances of ghosts or apparitions.
149
Because poltergeists tend to center more around people, in this case Alin, rather than places, many parapsychologists
believe they are actually manifestations of the unconscious
psychokinetic ability of the person around whom they are most active.
Even materialization has a long and illustrious history in the annals
of poltergeist research. For instance, in his classic work on the
subject "Can We Explain the Poltergeist" A. R. G. Owen, a fellow and
lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, gives numerous
examples of objects materializing out of thin air in poltergeist cases
dating from A. D. 530 to modern times. Small stones and not salt,
however, are the objects that materialize most often. In the
"Introduction" I mentioned that I had experienced firsthand many of the
paranormal phenomena that would be discussed in this book and would
relate a few of my own experiences. It is thus time to come clean and
confess that I know how Watson must have felt after witnessing the
sudden onslaught of psychokinetic activity in the little Indonesian hut
because when I was a child, the house in which my family had recently
moved (a new house that my parents themselves had built) became the
site of an active poltergeist haunting. Since
our poltergeist left my family's home and followed me when I went away
to college, and since its activity very definitely seemed connected to
my moods - its antics becoming more malicious when I was angry or my
spirits were low, and more impish and whimsical (playful, fantastic)
when my mood was brighter—I have always accepted the idea that
poltergeists are manifestations of the unconscious psychokinetic
ability of the person around whom they are most active. This connection
to my emotions displayed itself frequently. If I was in a good mood, I
might wake up to find all of my socks draped over the house plants. If
I was in a darker frame of mind, the poltergeist might manifest by
hurling a small object across the room or occasionally even by breaking
something. Over the years both I and various family members and friends
witnessed a wide range of psychokinetic activity. My mother tells me
that even when I was a toddler pots and pans had already begun to jump
inexplicably from the middle of the kitchen table to the floor. I have
written about some of these experiences in my book "Beyond the Quantum".
I do not make these disclosures lightly. I am aware of how alien such
occurrences are to most people's experience and fully understand the
skepticism with which they will be greeted in some quarters.
Nonetheless, I am compelled to talk about them because I think it is vitally important that we try to understand such phenomena and not just sweep them under the carpet.
150
Still it is with some trepidation that I admit that my own poltergeist
also occasionally materialized objects. The materializations started
when I was six years old, and inexplicable showers of gravel rained
down on our roof at night. Later it took to pelting me inside my home
with small polished stones and pieces of broken glass with edges worn
like the shards of drift glass one finds on the beach. On rarer
occasions it materialized other objects including coins, a necklace,
and several odder trifles. Unfortunately, I usually did not see the
actual materializations, but only witnessed their aftermath, such as
when a pile of spaghetti noodles (sans sauce) fell on my chest one day
while I was taking a nap in my New York apartment. Given that I was
alone in a room with no open windows or doors, there was no one else in
my
apartment, and there was no sign that anyone had either cooked
spaghetti or broken in to throw spaghetti at me, I can only assume
that, for reasons unknown, the handful of cold spaghetti noodles that
dropped out of midair and onto my chest materialized out of nowhere. On
a few occasions, however, I did see objects actually materialize. For
example, in 1976 I was working in my study when I happened to look up
and see a small brown object appear suddenly in midair just
a few inches below the ceiling. As soon as it popped into existence it
zoomed down at a sharp angle and landed at my feet. When I picked it up
I saw that it was a piece of brown drift glass that originally might
have been used in making beer bottles. It was not quite as spectacular
as a shower of salt lasting several seconds, but it taught me that such
things were possible. Perhaps the most famous modern-day
materializations are those produced by Sathya Sai Baba, a sixty-four-
year-old Indian holy man living in a distant corner of the state of
Andhra Pradesh in southern India. According to numerous eyewitnesses,
Sai Baba is able to produce much more than salt and a few stones. He
plucks lockets, rings,
and jewelry out of the air and passes them out as gifts. He also
materializes an endless supply of Indian delicacies and sweets, and out
of his hands pour volumes of vibuti, or sacred ash. These events have
been witnessed by literally thousands of individuals, including both
scientists and magicians, and no one has ever detected any hint of
trickery. One witness is psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson of the
University of Iceland.
151
Haraldsson has spent over ten years studying Sai Baba and has published
his findings in a recent book entitled "Modern Miracles: An
Investigative Report on Psychic Phenomena Associated with Sathya Sai
Baba". Although Haraldsson admits that he cannot prove conclusively
that Sai Baba's productions are not the result of deception and sleight
of hand, he offers a large amount of evidence that strongly suggests
something supernormal is taking place. For starters, Sai Baba can
materialize specific objects on request. Once when Haraldsson was
having a conversation with him about spiritual and ethical issues, Sai
Baba said that daily life and spiritual life should "grow together like
a double rudraksha, " When
Haraldsson asked what a double rudraksha was, neither Sai Baba nor the
interpreter knew the English equivalent of the term. Sai Baba tried to
continue with the discussion, but Haraldsson remained insistent. "Then
suddenly, with a sign of impatience, Sai Baba closed his fist and waved
his hand for a second or two. As he opened it, he turned to me and
said: 'This is it. ' In his palm was an acorn-like object. This was two
rudrakshas grown together like a twin orange or a twin
apple, " says Haraldsson. When Haraldsson indicated that he wanted to
keep the double-seed as a memento, Sai Baba agreed, but first asked to
see it again. "He enclosed the rudraksha in both his hands, blew on it,
and opened his hands toward me. The double rudraksha was now covered,
on the top and bottom, by two golden shields held together by a short
golden chain. On the top was a golden cross with a small ruby affixed
to it, and a tiny opening so that it could hang on a chain around the
neck." Haraldsson later discovered that double rudrakshas were
extremely rare botanical anomalies. Several Indian botanists he
consulted said they had never even seen one, and when he finally found
a small,
malformed specimen in a shop in Madras, the shopkeeper wanted the
Indian equivalent of almost three hundred dollars for it. A London
goldsmith confirmed that the gold in the ornamentation had a purity of
at least twenty-two carats. Such gifts are not rare. Sai Baba
frequently hands out costly rings, jewels, and objects made of gold to
the throngs who visit him daily and who venerate him as a saint. He
also materializes vast quantities of food, and when the various
delicacies he produces fall from his hands they are sizzling hot, so
hot that people sometimes cannot even hold them. He can make sweet
syrups and fragrant oils pour from his hands (and even his feet), and
when he is finished there is no trace of the sticky substance on his
skin. He can produce exotic objects such as grains of rice with tiny,
perfectly carved pictures of Krishna on them, out-of-season fruits (a
near impossibility in an area of the country that has no electricity or
refrigeration), and anomalous fruits, such as apples that, when peeled,
turn out to be an apple on one side and another fruit on the other.
Equally astonishing are his productions of sacred ash. Every time he
walks among the crowds that visit him, prodigious amounts of it pour
from his hands. He scatters it everywhere, into offered containers and
outstretched hands, over heads, and in long serpentine trails on the
ground. In a single transit of the grounds around his ashram he can
produce enough of it to fill several drums. On one of his visits,
Haraldsson, along with Dr. Karlis Osis, the director of research for
the American Society for Psychical Research, actually saw some of the
ash in the process of materializing. As Haraldsson reports, "His palm
was open and turned downwards, and he waved his hand in a few quick,
small circles. As he did, a grey substance appeared in the air just
below his palm. Dr. Osis, who sat slightly closer, observed that
this material first appeared entirely in the form of granules (that
crumbled into ash when touched) and might have disintegrated earlier if
Sai Baba had produced them by a sleight of hand that was undetectable
to us." Haraldsson notes that Sai Baba's manifestations are not the
result of mass hypnosis because he freely allows his open-air
demonstrations
to be filmed, and everything he does still shows up in the film.
Similarly, the production of specific objects, the rarity of some of
the objects, the hotness of the food, and the sheer volume of the
materializations seem to rule against deception as a possibility.
Haraldsson also points out that no one has ever come forth with any
credible evidence that Sai Baba is faking his abilities. In addition,
Sai Baba has been producing a continuous flow of objects for half a
century, since he was
fourteen, a fact that is further testament to both the volume of the
materializations and the significance of his untarnished reputation. Is
Sai Baba producing objects out of nothingness? At present the jury is
still out, but Haraldsson makes it clear what his position is. He
believes Sai Baba's demonstrations remind us of the "enormous
potentials that may lie dormant somewhere within all human beings."
Accounts of individuals who can materialize are not unknown in India.
In his book Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952),
the first eminent holy man of India to set up permanent residence in
the West, describes his meetings with several Hindu ascetics who could
materialize out-of-
season fruits, gold plates, and other objects.
153
Interestingly,
Yogananda cautioned that such powers, or siddis, are not always
evidence that the person possessing them is spiritually evolved. "The
world [is] nothing but an objectivized dream, " says Yogananda, and "whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely instantly comes to pass."
Have such individuals discovered a
way to tap just a little of the enormous sea of cosmic energy that Bohm
says fills every cubic centimeter of empty space?
A remarkable series of materializations that has received even greater
confirmation than that bestowed by Haraldsson on Sai Baba was produced
by Therese Neumann. In addition to her stigmata, Neumann also displayed
inedia, the supernormal ability to live without food. Her inedia began
in 1923 when she "transferred" the throat disease of a young priest to
her own body and subsisted solely on liquids for several years. Then,
in 1927, she gave up both food and
water entirely. When the local bishop in Regensburg first learned of
Neumann's fast, he sent a commission into her home to investigate. From
July 14, 1927, to July 29, 1927, and under the supervision of a medical
doctor named Seidl, four Franciscan nursing sisters scrutinized her
every move. They watched her day and night, and the water she used for
washing and rinsing her mouth was carefully measured and weighed. The
sisters discovered several unusual things about Neumann. She never went
to the bathroom (even after a period of six weeks she only had one
bowel movement, and the excrement, examined by a Dr. Reismanns,
contained only a small amount of mucus and bile, but no traces of
food). She also showed no signs of dehydration, even though the average
human expels about four hundred grams (fourteen ounces) of water daily
in the air he or she exhales, and a like amount through the pores. And
her weight remained constant; although she lost nearly nine pounds (in
blood) during the weekly opening of her stigmata, her weight returned
to normal within a day or two later. At the end of the inquiry Dr.
Seidl and the sisters were completely convinced that Neumann had not
eaten or drunk a thing for the entire fourteen days. The test seems
conclusive, for while the human body can survive two weeks without
food, it can rarely survive half that time without water.
Yet this was nothing for Neumann; she did not eat or drink a thing for
the next thirty-five years. So it appears that she was not only
materializing the enormous amount of blood necessary to perpetuate her
stigmata, but also regularly materializing the water and nutrients she
needed to stay alive and in good health. Inedia is not unique to
Neumann. In The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, Thurston gives several
examples of stigmatists who went for years without eating or drinking.
Materialization may be more common than we realize. Compelling accounts
of bleeding statues, paintings, icons, and even rocks that have
historical or religious significance abound in the literature on the
miraculous. There are also dozens of stories of Madonnas and other
icons shedding tears. A virtual epidemic of "weeping Madonnas" swept
Italy in 1953- 62. And in India, followers of Sai Baba showed
Haraldsson pictures of the ascetic that were miraculously exuding
sacred ash.
In a way materialization challenges our
conventional ideas about reality most of all, for although we can, with
effort, hammer things such as PK into our current world view, the
creation of an object out of thin air rocks the very foundation of that
world view. Still, it is not all the mind can do. So far we have looked
at miracles that involve only "parts" of reality
—examples of people psychokinetically moving parts around, of
people altering parts (the laws of physics) to make themselves immune
to fire, and of people materializing parts (blood, salt, stones,
jewelry, ash, nutrients, and tears). But if reality is really an
unbroken whole, why do miracles seem to involve only parts? If miracles
are examples of the mind's own latent abilities, the answer, of course,
is
because we ourselves are so deeply
programmed to see the world in terms of parts. This implies that if we
were not so inculcated (to teach by constant repetition) in
thinking in terms of parts, if we viewed the world differently,
miracles would also be different. Rather than finding so many examples
of miracles in which the parts of reality had been transformed, we
would find more instances in which the whole of reality had been
transformed. In fact a few such examples exist, but they are rare
and offer an even graver challenge to our conventional ideas about
reality than materializations do. Watson
provides one. While he was in Indonesia he also encountered another
young woman with power. The woman's name was Tia, but unlike Alin's
power, hers did not seem to be an expression of an unconscious psychic
gift. Instead it was consciously controlled and stemmed from Tia's
natural connection to forces that lie dormant in most of us.
155
Tia was, in short, a shaman in the making. Watson witnessed many
examples of her gifts. He saw her perform miraculous healings, and
once, when she was engaged in a power struggle with the local Moslem
religious leader, he saw her use the power of her mind to set the
minaret of the local mosque on fire. But he witnessed one of Tia's most
awesome displays when he accidentally stumbled upon her talking with a
little girl in a shady grove of kenari trees. Even at a distance,
Watson could tell from Tia's gestures that she was trying to
communicate something important to the child. Although he could not
hear their conversation, he could tell from her air of frustration that
she was not succeeding. Finally, she
appeared to get an idea and started an eerie dance. Entranced, Watson
continued to watch as she gestured toward the trees, and although she
scarcely seemed to move, there was something hypnotic about her subtle
gesticulations. Then she did something that both shocked and dismayed
Watson. She caused the entire grove of trees suddenly to blink out of
existence. As Watson states, "One moment Tia danced in a grove of shady
kenari; the next she was standing alone in the hard, bright light of
the sun." A few seconds later she caused the grove to reappear, and
from the way the little girl leapt to her feet and rushed around
touching the trees, Watson was certain that she had shared the
experience also. But Tia was not finished. She caused the grove to
blink on and off several times as both she and the little girl linked
hands, dancing and giggling at the wonder of it all. Watson simply
walked away, his head reeling.
In 1975 when I was a senior at Michigan State University I had a similarly profound and reality-challenging experience.
I was having dinner with one of my professors at a local restaurant,
and we were discussing the philosophical implications of Carlos
Castaneda's experiences. In particular our conversation centered around
an incident Castaneda
relates in Journey to Ixtlan. Don Juan and Castaneda are in the desert
at night searching for a spirit when they come upon a creature that
looks like a calf but has the ears of a wolf and the beak of a bird. It
is curled up and screaming as if in the throes of an agonizing death.
At first Castaneda is terrified, but after telling himself that what he
is seeing can't possibly be real, his vision changes and he sees that
the dying spirit is actually a fallen tree branch trembling in the wind.
Castaneda proudly points out the thing's true identity, but as usual
the old Yaqui shaman rebukes him. He tells Castaneda that the branch
was a dying spirit while it was alive with power, but that it had
transformed into a tree branch when Castaneda doubted its existence.
However, he stresses that both realities were equally real. In my
conversation with my professor, I admitted that I was intrigued by Don
Juan's assertion that two mutually exclusive realities could each be
real and felt that the notion could explain many paranormal events.
Moments after discussing this incident we left the restaurant and,
because it was a clear summer night, we decided to stroll. As we
continued to converse I became aware of a small group of people walking
ahead of us. They were speaking an unrecognizable foreign language, and
from their boisterous behavior it appeared that they were drunk. In
addition, one of the women was carrying a green umbrella, which was
strange because the sky was totally cloudless and there had been no
forecast of rain. Not wanting to collide with the group, we dropped
back a little, and as we did, the woman suddenly began swinging the
umbrella in a wild and erratic manner. She traced out huge arcs in the
air, and several times as she spun around, the tip of the umbrella
nearly grazed us. We slowed our pace even more, but it became
increasingly apparent that her performance was designed to attract our
attention. Finally, after she had our gaze firmly fixed on what she was
doing, she held the umbrella with both hands over her head and then
threw it dramatically at our feet. We both stared at it dumbly,
wondering why she had done such a
thing, when suddenly something remarkable began to happen. The umbrella
did something that I can only describe as "flickering" like a lantern
flame about to go out. It emitted an odd, crackling sound like the
sound of cellophane being crumpled, and in a dazzling array of
sparkling, multicolored light, its ends curled up, its color changed,
and it reshaped itself into a gnarled, brown-gray stick. I was so
stunned I didn't say anything for several seconds. My professor spoke
first and said in a quiet, shocked voice that she had thought the
object had been an umbrella. I asked her if she had seen something
extraordinary happen and she nodded. We both wrote down what we thought
had transpired and our accounts matched exactly. The only vague
difference in our descriptions was that my professor said the umbrella
had
"sizzled" when it transformed into a stick, a sound not too terribly
dissimilar from the crackly sound of cellophane being crumpled.
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This incident raises many questions for
which I have no answers. I do not know who the people were who threw
the umbrella at our feet, or if they were even aware of the magical
transformation that took place as they strolled away, although the
woman's bizarre and seemingly purposeful performance suggests that they
were not completely unwitting.
Both my professor and I were so transfixed by the magical
transformation of the umbrella that by the time we had the presence of
mind to ask them, they were long gone. I do not know why the event
happened, save that it seems obvious it was connected in some way to
our talk about Castaneda encountering a similar occurrence. I do not
even know why I have had the privilege of experiencing so many
paranormal occurrences, save that it appears to be related to the fact
that I was born with a great deal
of native psychic ability. As an adolescent I started having vivid and
detailed dreams about events that would later happen. I often knew
things about people I had no right knowing. When I was seventeen I
spontaneously developed the ability to see an energy field, or "aura, "
around living things, and to this day can often determine things about
a person's health by their pattern and colors of the mist of light that
I see surrounding them. Above and beyond that, all I can say is that we
are all gifted with different aptitudes and qualities. Some of us are
natural artists. Some dancers. I seem to have been born with the
chemistry necessary to trigger shifts in reality, to catalyze somehow
the forces required to precipitate paranormal events. I am grateful for
this capacity because it has taught me a great deal about the universe,
but I do not know why I have it. What I do know is that the
"umbrella incident, " as I have come to call it, entailed a radical
alteration in the world. In this chapter we have looked at miracles
that have involved increasingly greater shifts in reality. PK is easier
for us to fathom than the ability to pluck an object out of the air,
and the materialization of an object is easier for most of us to accept
than the appearance and disappearance of an entire grove of trees, or
the paranormal appearance of a group of people capable of
transmogrifying matter from one form into another. More and more these incidents suggest that reality is, in a very real sense, a hologram, a construct.
The question becomes, Is it a hologram that is relatively stable for
long periods of time and subject to only minimal alterations by
consciousness, as Bohm suggests?
Or is it a hologram that only seems stable, but under special
circumstances can be changed and reshaped in virtually limitless ways,
as the evidence of the miraculous suggests? Some researchers who have
embraced the holographic idea believe the latter is the case. For
example, Grof not only takes materialization and other extreme
paranormal phenomena seriously, but feels that reality is indeed
cloud-built and pliant to the subtle authority of consciousness. "The
world is not necessarily as solid as we perceive it, " he says.
Physicist William Tiller, head of the Department of Materials Science
at Stanford University and another supporter of the holographic idea,
agrees. Tiller thinks reality is similar to the "holodeck" on the
television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the series, the
holodeck is an environment in which occupants can call up a holographic
simulation of literally any reality they desire, a lush forest, a
bustling city. They can also change each simulation in any way they
want, such as cause a lamp to materialize or make an unwanted table disappear. Tiller
thinks the universe is also a kind of holodeck created by the
"integration" of all living things. "We've created it as a vehicle of
experience, and we've created the laws that govern it, " he asserts.
"And when we get to the frontiers of our understanding, we can in fact
shift the laws so that we're also creating the physics as we go along."
If Tiller is right and the universe is an enormous holodeck, the
ability to materialize a gold ring or cause a grove of kenari trees to
flick on and off is no longer so strange. Even the umbrella incident
can be viewed as a temporary aberration in the holographic simulation
we call ordinary reality. Although my professor and I were unaware that
we possessed such an ability, it may be that the emotional fervor of
our discussion about Castaneda caused our unconscious minds to change
the hologram of reality to better reflect what we were believing at the
moment. Given Ullman's assertion
that our psyche is constantly trying to teach us things we are unaware
of in our waking state, our unconscious may even be programmed to
produce occasionally such miracles in order to offer us glimpses of
reality's true nature, to show us that the world we create for
ourselves is ultimately as creatively infinite as the reality of our
dreams. Saying that reality
is created by the integration of all living things is really no
different from saying that the universe is comprised of reality fields.
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If this is true, it explains why the reality of some subatomic particles, such as electrons, seems relatively fixed, while the
reality of others, such as anomalons, appears to be more plastic. It
may be that the reality fields we now perceive as electrons became part
of the cosmic hologram long ago, perhaps long before human beings were
even part of the integration of all things. Hence, electrons may be so
deeply ingrained in the hologram they are no longer as susceptible to
the influence of human consciousness as other newer reality fields.
Similarly, anomalons may vary from lab to lab because they are more
recent reality fields and are still inchoate (immature), still
floundering around in search of an identity, as it were. In a sense,
they are like the champagne beach Tart's subjects perceived while it
was still in its gray state and had not yet fully coalesced out of the
implicate. This may also explain why aspirin helps prevent heart
attacks in Americans, but not in the British. It, too, may be a
relatively recent reality field and one that is still in the making.
There is even evidence that the ability to materialize blood is a
comparatively recent reality field. Rogo notes that accounts of blood
miracles began with the fourteenth-century miracle of San Gennaro. The
fact that no blood miracles are known to predate San Gennaro seems to
indicate that the ability flickered into existence at that time. Once
it was thus established it would be easier for others to tap into the
reality field of its possibility, which may explain why there have been
numerous blood miracles since San Gennaro, but none before. Indeed, if
the universe is a holodeck, all things that appear stable and eternal,
from the laws of physics to the substance of galaxies, would have to be
viewed as reality fields, will-or-the-wisps no more or less real than
the props in a giant, mutually shared dream. All permanence would have
to be looked at as illusory, and only consciousness would be eternal,
the consciousness of the living universe. Of course, there is one other
possibility. It may be that only anomalous events, such as the umbrella
incident, are reality fields, and the world at large is still every bit
as stable and unaffected by consciousness as we have been taught to
believe. The problem with this assumption is that it can never be
proved. The only litmus test we have of determining whether something
is real, say a purple elephant that has just strolled into our living
room, is to find out if other people can see it as well. But once we
admit that two or more people can create a reality—whether it is
a transforming umbrella or a vanishing grove of kenari trees—we
no longer have any way of proving that every thing else in the world is
not created by the mind. It all boils down to a matter of personal
philosophy. And personal philosophies vary. Jahn prefers to think that
only the reality created by the interactions of consciousness are real.
"The question of whether there's an 'out there' out there is abstract.
If we
have no way of verifying the abstraction, there is no profit in
attempting to model it, " he says. Globus, who willingly admits that
reality is a construct of consciousness, prefers to think that there is
a world beyond the bubble of our perceptions. "I'm interested in nice
theories," he says," and a nice theory postulates existence." However,
he admits that this is merely his bias, and there is no empirical way
to prove such an assumption. As for me, as a result of my own
experiences I agree with Don Juan when he states:
"We are perceivers. We are an
awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless.
The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on
earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us.
We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a
description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious
circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime."
Put another way, there is no reality above and beyond that created by
the integration of all consciousnesses, and the holographic universe
can potentially be sculpted in virtually limitless ways by the mind. If
this is true, the laws of physics and the substance of galaxies are not
the only things that are reality fields. Even our bodies, the vehicles
of our consciousness in this life, would have to be looked upon as no
more or less real than anomalous and champagne beaches. Or as Keith
Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Interment College and another
supporter of the holographic idea, states, "Contrary to what everyone
knows is so, it may not be the brain that produces consciousness, but
rather consciousness that creates the appearance of the
brain—matter, space, time and everything else we are pleased to
interpret as the physical universe." This is perhaps most disturbing of
all, for we are so deeply convinced that our bodies are solid and
objectively real it is difficult for us even to entertain the idea that
we, too, maybe no more than will-or- the-
wisps. But there is compelling evidence that this is also the case.
Another phenomenon often associated
with saints is bilocation, or the ability to be in two places at once.
According to Haraldsson, Sai Baba does biolocation one better.
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Numerous witnesses have reported watching him snap his fingers and
vanish, instantly reappearing a hundred or more yards away. Such
incidents very much suggest that our bodies are not objects, but
holographic projections that can blink "off" in one location and "on"
in another with the same ease that an image might vanish and reappear
on a video screen. An incident that further underscores the holographic
and immaterial nature of the body can be found in phenomena produced by
an Icelandic medium named Indridi Indridason. In 1905 several of
Iceland's leading scientists decided to investigate the paranormal and
chose Indridason as one of their subjects. At the time, Indridason was
just a country bumpkin with no previous experience with things psychic,
but he quickly proved to be a spectacularly talented medium. He could
go into trance quickly and produce dramatic displays of PK. But most
bizarre of all, sometimes while he was deep in trance, different parts
of his body would completely dematerialize. As the astonished
scientists watched, an arm or a hand would fade out of existence, only
to rematerialize before he awakened. Such events again offer us a
tantalizing glimpse of the enormous potentialities that may lie dormant
in all of us. As we have seen, our current scientific understanding of
the universe is completely incapable of explaining the various
phenomena we have examined in this chapter and therefore has no choice
but to ignore them. However, if researchers such as Grof and Tiller are
correct and the mind is able to intercede in the implicate order, the
holographic plate that gives birth to the hologram we call the
universe, and thus create any reality or laws of physics that it wants
to, then not only are such things
possible, but virtually anything is possible. If this is true, the
apparent solidity of the world is only a small part of what is
available to our perception. Although most of us are indeed entrapped
in our current description of the universe, a few individuals do have
the ability to see beyond the world's solidity.
In the next chapter we will take a look at some of these individuals and examine what they see.
We human beings consider ourselves to be made up of "solid matter." Actually, the physical body is the end product, so to speak, of the subtle information fields, which mold our physical body as well as all physical matter. These fields are holograms which change in time (and are) outside the reach of our normal senses. This is what clairvoyants perceive as colorful eggshaped halos or auras surrounding our physical bodies. —Itzhak Bentov "Stalking the Wild Pendulum".
A number of years ago I was walking along
with a friend when a street sign caught my attention. It was simply a
No Parking sign and seemed no different from any of the other No
Parking signs that dotted the city streets. But for some reason it held
me transfixed. I wasn't even aware that I was staring at it until my
friend suddenly exclaimed, "That sign is misspelled!" Her announcement
snapped me out of my reverie, and as I watched, the i in the word
Parking quickly
changed into an e. What happened was that my mind was so accustomed to
seeing the sign spelled correctly that my unconscious edited out what
was there and made me see what it expected to be there. My friend, as
it turned out, had also seen the sign spelled correctly at first, which
was why she had such a vocal reaction when she realized it was
misspelled. We continued to walk on, but the incident bothered me. For
the first time I realized that the eye/brain is not a faithful camera,
but tinkers with the world before it gives it to us. Neurophysiologists
have long been aware of this fact. In his early studies of vision,
Pribram discovered that the visual information a monkey receives via
its optic nerves does not travel directly into its visual cortex, but
is first filtered through other areas of its brain. Numerous studies
have shown that the same is true of human vision. Visual information
entering our brains is edited and modified by our temporal lobes before
it is passed on to our visual cortices.
Some studies suggest that less
than 50 percent of what we "see" is actually based on information entering our eyes. The remaining 50 percent plus
is pieced together out of our expectations of what the world should
look like (and perhaps out of other sources such as reality fields).
The eyes may be visual organs, but it is the brain that sees. This is
why we don't always notice when a close friend shaves off his mustache,
and why our house always looks strangely different when we return to it
after a vacation. In both instances we are so used to responding to
what we think is there, we don't always see what really is there. Even
more dramatic evidence of the role the mind plays in creating what we
see is provided by the eye's so-called blind spot. In the middle of the
retina, where the optic nerve connects to the eye, we have a blind spot
where there are no photoreceptors. Even when we look at the world
around us we are totally unaware that there are gaping holes in our
vision. It doesn't matter whether we are gazing at a blank piece of
paper or an ornate Persian carpet. The brain artfully fills in the gaps
like a skilled tailor reweaving a hole in a piece of fabric. What is all the more remarkable is that it reweaves
the tapestry of our visual reality so masterfully we aren't even aware
that it is doing so. This leads to a disturbing question. If we are
seeing less than half of what is out there, what is out there that we
are not seeing? What misspelled street signs and blind spots are
escaping our attention
completely? Our technological prowess provides us with a few answers.
For example, although spiderwebs look drab and white to us, we now know
that to the ultraviolet-sensitive eyes of the insects for whom they
were designed, they are actually brightly colored and hence alluring.
Figure 15. To demonstrate how our brains construct what we perceive as
reality, hold the illustration at eye level, close your left eye, and
stare at the circle in the middle of the grid with your right eye.
Slowly move the book back and forth along the line of your vision until
the star vanishes (about 10 to 15 inches). The star disappears because
it is falling on your blind spot. Now close your right eye and stare at
the star. Move the book back and forth until the circle in the middle
of the grid vanishes. When it does, notice that although the circle
disappears, all the lines of the grid remain intact. This is because
your brain is filling in what it thinks should be there. (I
found the blind spot and the circle disappeared in my case too, but
when I stared at the ring with only left eye and kept the book to my
left, the ring didn't disappear, but started moving. I checked it a few
times at daytime and in the evening: still it moves! LM).
Our technology also tells us that fluorescent lamps do not continuously provide light, but are actually flickering on and off
at a rate that is just a little too fast for us to discern. Yet this
unsettling strobelike effect is quite visible to honeybees, who must be
able to fly at breakneck speed over a meadow and still see every flower
that whizzes by.
But are there other important aspects of reality that we are not
seeing, aspects that are beyond even our technological grasp? According
to the holographic model, the answer is yes. Remember that in Pribram's
view, reality at large is really a frequency domain, and our brain is a
kind of lens that converts these frequencies into the objective world
of appearances. Although Pribram began by studying the frequencies of
our normal sensory world, such as frequencies of sound and light, he
now uses the term frequency domain to refer to the interference
patterns that compose the implicate order.
Pribram believes there may be all kinds of things out there in the
frequency domain that we are not seeing, things our brains have learned
to edit out regularly of our visual reality.
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He thinks that when mystics have transcendental experiences, what they
are really doing is catching glimpses of the frequency domain.
"Mystical experience makes sense when one can provide the mathematical
formulas that take one back and forth between the ordinary world, or
'image-object' domain, and the 'frequency' domain, " he states.
One mystical phenomenon that appears to
involve the ability to see reality's frequency aspects is the aura, or
human energy field. The notion that there is a subtle field of energy
around the human body, a halolike envelope of light that exists just
beyond normal human perception, can be found in many ancient
traditions. In India, sacred writings that date back over five thousand
years refer to this life energy as prana. In China, since the third
millennium B. C., it has been
called ch'i and is believed to be the energy that flows through the
acupuncture meridian system... In their book Future Science, writer
John White and parapsychologist Stanley Krippner list 97 different
cultures that refer to the aura with 97 different names. Many
cultures believe the aura of an extremely spiritual individual is so
bright it is visible even to normal human perception, which is why so
many traditions, including Christian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, and
Egyptian, depict saints as having halos or other circular symbols
around their heads. In his book on miracles Thurston devotes an
entire chapter to accounts of luminous phenomena associated with
Catholic saints, and both Neumann and Sai Baba are reported to have
occasionally had visible auras of light around them.
The great Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat
Khan, who died in 1927, is said to have sometimes given off so much
light that people could actually read by it.
Under normal circumstances, however, the human energy field is visible
only to individuals who have a specially developed capacity to see it.
Sometimes people are born with the ability. Sometimes it develops
spontaneously at a certain point in a person's life, as it did in my
case, and sometimes it develops as the result of some practice or
discipline, often of a spiritual nature.
The first time I saw the distinctive mist of light around my arm I
thought it was smoke and jerked my arm up to see if I had somehow
caught my sleeve on fire. Of course, I hadn't and quickly discovered
that the light surrounded my entire
body and formed a nimbus (luminous mist, cloud) around everyone else's
as well. According to some schools of thought the human energy field
has a number of distinct layers. I do not see layers in the field and
have no personal basis to judge if this is true or not. These layers
are actually said to be three-dimensional energy bodies that occupy the
same space as the physical body but are of increasingly larger size so
that they only look like layers, or strata, as they extend outward from
the body. Many psychics assert that there are seven main layers, or
subtle bodies, each progressively less dense than the one before it,
and each increasingly more difficult to see. Different schools of
thought refer to these energy bodies by different names. One common
system of nomenclature refers to the first four as the etheric body;
the astral, or emotional
body; the mental body, and the causal, or intuitive body. It is
generally believed that the etheric body, the body that is closest in
size to the physical body, is a kind of energy blueprint and is
involved in guiding and shaping the growth of the physical body. As
their names suggest, the next three bodies are related to emotional,
mental, and intuitive processes. Virtually no one agrees on what to
call the remaining three bodies, although it is commonly agreed that
they have to do with the soul and higher spiritual functioning.
According to Indian yogic
literature, and to many psychics as well, we also have special energy
centers in our body. These focal points of subtle energy are connected
to endocrine glands and major nerve centers in the physical body, but
also extend up and into the energy field. Because they resemble
spinning vortices of energy when they are looked at head-on, yogic
literature refers to them as chakras, from the Sanskrit word for
"wheel, " and this term is still used today.
The crown chakra, an important chakra that originates in the uppermost
tip of the brain and is associated with spiritual awakening, is often
described by clairvoyants as looking like a little cyclone whirling in
the energy field on top of the head, and it is the only chakra I see
clearly. (My own abilities appear to be too rudimentary to permit
me to see the other chakras) It ranges from a few inches to a foot or
more in height. When people are in a joyous state, this whirlwind of
energy grows taller and brighter, and when they dance, it bobs and
sways like a candle flame...
167
The human energy field is not
always bluish white, but can possess various colors. According to
talented psychics, these colors, their muddiness or intensity, and
their location in the aura are related to a person's mental state,
emotional state, activity, health, and assorted other factors. I
can only see colors occasionally and sometimes can interpret their
meaning, but again my abilities in this area are not terribly advanced.
One person who does have advanced
abilities is therapist and healer Barbara Brennan. Brennan began her
career as an atmospherics physicist working for NASA at the Goddard
Space Flight Center, and later left to become a counselor. Her first
inkling that she was psychic came when she was a child and discovered
she could walk blindfolded through the woods and avoid the trees simply
by sensing their energy fields with her hands. Several years after she
became a counselor, she began seeing halos of colored light around
people's heads. After overcoming her initial shock and skepticism, she
set about to develop the ability and eventually discovered she had an
extraordinary natural talent as a healer. Brennan not only sees the
chakras, layers, and other fine structures of the human energy field
with exceptional clarity, but can make startlingly accurate medical
diagnoses based on what she sees.
After looking at one woman's energy field, Brennan told her there was
something abnormal about her uterus. The woman then told Brennan that
her doctor had discovered the same problem, and it had already caused
her to have one miscarriage. In fact, several physicians had
recommended a hysterectomy and that was why she was seeking Brennan's
counsel. Brennan told her that if she took a month off and took care of
herself, her problem would clear up. Brennan's advice turned out to be
correct, and a month later the woman's physician confirmed that her
uterus had returned to normal. A year later the woman gave birth to a
healthy baby boy. In another case Brennan was able to see that a man
had problems performing sexually because he had broken his coccyx
(tailbone) when he was twelve. The still out-of-place coccyx was
applying undue pressure to his spinal column, and this in turn was
causing his sexual dysfunction.
There seems to be little Brennan cannot pick up by looking at the human
energy field. She says that in its early stages cancer looks gray-blue
in the aura, and as it progresses, it turns to black. Eventually, white
spots appear in the black, and if the white spots sparkle and begin to
look as if they are erupting from a volcano, it means the cancer has
metastasized. Drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine are also
detrimental to the brilliant, healthy colors of the aura and create
what Brennan calls "etheric mucus. " In one instance she was able to
tell a startled client which nostril he habitually used to snort
cocaine because the field over that side of his face was always gray
with the sticky etheric mucus. Prescription drugs are not exempt, and
often cause dark areas to form in the energy field over the liver.
Potent drugs such as chemotherapy "clog" the entire field, and Brennan
says she has even seen auric traces of the supposedly harmless
radiopaque dye used to diagnose spinal injuries, a full ten years after
it has been injected into a person's spine. According to Brennan, a
person's psychological condition is also reflected in their energy
field. An individual with psychopathic
tendencies has a top-heavy aura. The energy field of a masochistic
personality is coarse and dense and is more gray than blue. The field
of a person with a rigid approach to life is also coarse and grayish,
but with most of its energy concentrated on the outer edge of the aura,
and so on. Brennan says that illness can actually be caused by tears,
blockages, and imbalances in the aura, and by manipulating these
dysfunctional areas with her hands and her own energy field, she can
greatly enhance a person's own healing processes. Her talents have not
gone unnoticed. Swiss psychiatrist and thanatologist Elisabeth Kubler-
Ross says Brennan is "probably one of the best spiritual healers in the
Western Hemisphere." Bernie Siegel is equally laudatory: "Barbara
Brennan's work is mind opening. Her concepts of the role disease plays
and how healing is achieved certainly fit in with my experience." As a
physicist, Brennan is keenly interested in describing the human energy
field in scientific terms and believes Pribram's assertion that there
is a frequency domain beyond our field of normal perception is the best
scientific model we have so far for understanding the phenomenon.
"From the point of view of the holographic universe, these events [the
aura and the healing forces required to manipulate its energies] emerge
from frequencies that transcend time and space; they don't have to be
transmitted. They are potentially simultaneous and everywhere, " she
says. (yes, in Physical domain of this Universe, LM).
169
That the human energy field exists
everywhere and is nonlocal until it is plucked out of the frequency
domain by human perception is evidenced in Brennan's discovery that she
can read a person's aura even when the person is many miles distant.
The longest-distance aura reading she has done so far was during a
telephone conversation between New York City and Italy. She discusses
this, as well as many other aspects of her remarkable abilities, in her
recent and fascinating book "Hands of Light."
Another gifted psychic who can see the aura in great detail is Los Angeles-based "human energy field consultant" Carol Dryer. Dryer says she has been able to see auras for as long as she can remember, and indeed it was quite some time before she realized other people couldn't see auras. Her ignorance in this regard frequently landed her in trouble as a child when she would tell