Holographic Universe

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.

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.

Background

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.

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.

Undivided Wholeness

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.

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 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).

Extension to Life, Consciousness and Cosmology

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”.

You Are Computer Projection

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

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"THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE"

MICHAEL TALBOT

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.

Acknowledgments

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.

Introduction

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.

PART I

A REMARKABLE NEW VIEW OF REALITY

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

The Brain as Hologram

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.

The Breakthrough

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.

Vision Also Is Holographic

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."

Other Puzzles Explained by the Holographic Brain Model

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.

THE VASTNESS OF OUR MEMORY

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!

OUR ABILITY TO BOTH RECALL AND FORGET

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.

ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

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.

OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS

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.

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

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.

THE TRANSFERENCE OF LEARNED SKILLS

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.

PHANTOM LIMB SENSATIONS AND HOW WE CONSTRUCT A "WORLD-OUT-THERE"

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.

Experimental Support for the Holographic Brain

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.

The Mathematical Language of the Hologram

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.

The Dancer as Wave Form

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.

The Reaction of the Scientific Community

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."

Pribram Encounters Bohm

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.

The Cosmos as 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.

Bohm and Inter-connectedness

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.

A Living Sea of Electrons

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.

Bohm's Disillusionment

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.

A New Kind of Field and the Bullet That Killed Lincoln

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.

If You Want to Know Where You Are, Ask the Nonlocals

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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.

Enter the Hologram

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
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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).
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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.

Enfolded (wrapped up, implicate) Orders and Unfolded Realities

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.

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things

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.
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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.

Consciousness as a More Subtle Form of Matter

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.
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The Energy of a Trillion Atomic Bombs in Every Cubic Centimeter of Space

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.

Experimental Support for Bohm's Holographic Universe

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).

The Reaction of the Physics Community

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.

Pribram and Bohm Together

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.
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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.

Part 2: MIND AND BODY

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)

The Holographic Model and Psychology

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
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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."

Dreams and the Holographic Universe

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.
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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.

Psychosis and the Implicate Order

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.
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Lucid Dreams and Parallel Universes

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.

Hitching a Ride on the Infinite Subway

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.
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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.
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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.

Holotropic Therapy

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."

Vortices of Thought and Multiple Personalities

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.
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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.

A Flaw in the Fabric of Reality

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.
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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.
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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.

I Sing the Body Holographic

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.
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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.
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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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The Lack of Division Between Health and Illness

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.

The Healing Power of Nothing at All

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.
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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.
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Tumors That Melt Like Snowballs on a Hot Stove

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.

Do Any Drugs Really Work?

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.

The Health Implications of Multiple Personality

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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Pregnancy, Organ Transplants, and Tapping the Genetic Level

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.
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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.
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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.

Images Projected Outside the Brain

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.
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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.
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Laws Both Known and Unknown

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.
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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.

Acupuncture Microsystems and the Little Man in the Ear

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Harnessing the Powers of the Holographic Brain

Throughout this chapter two broad messages come through loud and clear. According to the holographic model, the mind/body ultimately cannot distinguish the difference between the neural holograms the brain uses to experience reality and the ones it conjures up while imagining reality. Both have a dramatic effect on the human organism, an effect so powerful that it can modulate the immune system, duplicate and/or negate the effects of potent drugs, heal wounds with
amazing rapidity, melt tumors, override our genetic programming, and reshape our living flesh in ways that almost defy belief. This then is the first message: that each of us possesses the ability, at least at some level, to influence our health and control our physical form in ways that are nothing short of dazzling.
We are all potential wonderworkers, dormant yogis, and it is clear from the evidence presented in the preceding pages that it would behoove us both as individuals and as a species to devote a good deal more effort into exploring an harnessing these talents. The second message is that elements that go into the making of these neural holograms are many and subtle. They include the images upon which we meditate, our hopes and fears, the attitudes of our doctors, our unconscious prejudices, our individual and cultural beliefs, and our faith in things both spiritual and technological. More than just facts, these are important clues, signposts that point toward those things that we must become aware of and acquire mastery over if we are to learn how to unleash and manipulate these talents. There are, no doubt, other factors involved, other influences that shape and circumscribe these abilities, for one thing should now be obvious. In a holographic universe, a universe in which a slight change in attitude can mean the difference between life and death, in which things are so subtly interconnected that a dream can call forth the inexplicable appearance of a scarab beetle, and the factors responsible for an illness can also evoke a certain pattern in the lines and whorls of the hand, we have reason to suspect that each effect has multitudinous causes. Each linkage is the starting point of a dozen more, for in the words of Walt Whitman, "A vast similitude interlocks all. "

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A Pocketful of Miracles

Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature, but in opposition to what we know of Nature. —St. Augustine
Every year in September and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small vial containing a brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305. According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected some of his blood as a relic. No one knows precisely what happened after that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral. The miracle is that twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the liquid is real blood. In 1902 a group of scientists from the University of Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never been thoroughly studied.
But there is further evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in
1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the election of a communist city government in Naples, respectively. Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws. Is the liquefaction caused by San Gennaro himself? My own feeling is that its more likely cause is the intense devotion and belief of the people witnessing the miracle. I say this because nearly all of the miracles performed by saints and wonder-workers of the world's great religions have also been duplicated by psychics. This suggests that, as with stigmata, miracles are produced by forces lying deep in the human mind, forces that are latent in all of us. Herbert Thurston, the priest who wrote "The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism",
himself was aware of this similarity and was reluctant to attribute any miracle to a truly supernatural cause (as opposed to a psychic or paranormal cause). Another piece of evidence supportive of this idea is that many stigmatists, including Padre Pio and Therese Neumann, were also renowned for their psychic abilities. One psychic ability that appears to play a role in miracles is psychokinesis or PK. Since the miracle of San Gennaro involves a physical alteration of matter, PK is certainly a likely suspect. Rogo believes PK is also responsible for some of the more dramatic aspects of stigmata.
He feels that it is well within the normal biological capabilities of the body to cause small blood vessels under the skin to break and produce superficial bleeding, but only PK can account for the rapid appearance of large wounds. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but PK is clearly a factor in some of the phenomena that accompany stigmata. When blood flowed from the wounds in Therese Neumann's feet, it always flowed toward her toes—exactly as it would have flowedfrom Christ's wounds when he was on the cross—regardless of how her feet were positioned. This meant that when she was sitting upright in bed, the blood actually flowed upward and counter to the force of gravity.
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This was observed by numerous witnesses, including many U. S. servicemen stationed in Germany after the war who visited Neumann to witness her miraculous abilities. Gravity-defy ing flows of blood have been reported in other cases of stigmata as well. Such events leave us agog because our current worldview does not provide us with a context with which to understand PK.
Bohm believes viewing the universe as a holomovement does provide us with a context.
To explain what he means he asks us to consider the following situation. Imagine you are walking down a street late one night and a shadow suddenly looms up out of nowhere. Your first thought might be that the shadow is an assailant and you are in danger. The information contained in this thought will in turn give rise to a range of imagined activities, such as running, being hurt, and fighting. The presence of these imagined activities in your mind, however, is not a purely "mental" process, for they are inseparable from a host of related biological processes, such as excitation of nerves, rapid heart beat, release of adrenaline and other hormones, tensing of the muscles, and so on. Conversely, if your first thought is that the shadow, a different set of mental and biological responses will follow. Moreover, a little reflection will reveal that we react both mentally and biologically to everything we experience. According to Bohm, the important point to be gleaned from this is that consciousness is not the only thing that can respond to meaning. The body can also respond, and this reveals that meaning is simultaneously both mental and physical in nature. This is odd, for we normally think of meaning as something that can only have an active effect on subjective reality, on the thoughts inside our heads, not something that can engender a response in the physical world of things and objects. Meaning "can thus serve as the link or 'bridge' between these two sides of reality, " Bohm states. "This link is indivisible (not separated) in the sense that information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the 'mental' side, is at the same time a neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity, which is clearly what is meant by this thought on the 'material' side."
Bohm feels that examples of objectively active meaning can be found in other physical processes. One is the functioning of a computer chip. A computer chip contains information, and the meaning of the information is active in the sense that it determines how electrical currents flow through the computer. Another is the behavior of subatomic particles. The orthodox view in physics is that quantum waves act mechanically on a particle, controlling its movement in much the
same way that the waves of the ocean might control a Ping-Pong ball floating on its surface. But Bohm does not feel that this view can explain, for example, the coordinated dance of electrons in a plasma any more than the wave motion of water could explain a similarly well-choreographed movement of Ping-Pong balls if such a movement were discovered on the ocean's surface. He believes the relationship between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a radar wave pushes a ship. Rather, it provides the electron with information about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own. In other words, Bohm believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity, a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, structureless point. The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all subatomic particles, indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only of consciousness but of all matter. It is this intrinsic commonality, says Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK. He states, "On this basis, psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were focused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding the basic processes of the material systems in which this psychokinesis was to be brought about."
It is important to note that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is, a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics. Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal "resonance of meanings, " or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle of polarization which we saw in chapter 2 (for technical reasons Bohm believes mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of "super" nonlocality, would offer such an explanation).

The Gremlin in the Machine

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Another researcher whose ideas about PK are similar to Bohm's, but who has taken them one step further, is Robert G. Jahn, a professor of aerospace sciences and dean emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. Jahn's involvement in the study of PK happened quite by accident. A former consultant for both
NASA and the Department of Defense, his original field of interest was deep space propulsion. In fact, he is the author of Physics of Electric Propulsion, the leading textbook in the field, and didn't even believe in the paranormal when a student first approached him and asked him to oversee a PK experiment she wanted to do as an independent study project. Jahn reluctantly agreed, and the results were so provocative they inspired him to found the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab in 1979. Since then PEAR researchers have not only produced compelling evidence of the existence of PK, but have gathered more data on the subject than anyone else in the country. In one series of experiments Jahn and his associate, clinical psychologist Brenda Dunne, employed a device called a random event generator, or REG. By relying on an unpredictable natural process such as radioactive decay, a REG is able to produce a string of random binary numbers. Such a string might look something like this: 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1. In other words, a REG is a kind of automatic coinflipper capable of producing an enormous number of coin flips in a very short time. As everyone knows, if you flip a perfectly weighted coin 1, 000 times, the odds are you will get a 50/50 split between heads and
tails. In reality, out of any 1, 000 such flips, the split may vary a little in one direction or the other, but the greater the number of flips, the closer to 50/50 the split will become. What Jahn and Dunne did was have volunteers sit in front of the
REG and concentrate on having it produce an abnormally large number of either heads or tails. Over the course of literally hundreds of thousands of trials they discovered that, through concentration alone, the volunteers did indeed have a small but statistically significant effect on the REG's output. They discovered two other things as well.
The ability to produce PK effects was not limited to a few gifted individuals but was present in the majority of volunteers they tested. This suggests that most of us possess some degree of PK. They also discovered that different volunteers produced different and consistently distinctive results, results that were so idiosyncratic that Jahn and Dunne started calling them "signatures." In another series of experiments Jahn and Dunne employed a
pinball-like device that allows 9, 000 three-quarter-inch marbles to circulate around 330 nylon pegs and distribute themselves into 19 collecting bins at the bottom. The device is contained in a shallow vertical frame ten feet high and six feet wide with a clear glass front so that volunteers can see the marbles as they fall and collect in the bins. Normally, more balls fall in the center bins than in the outer ones, and the overall distribution looks like a bell-shaped curve. As with the REG, Jahn and Dunne had volunteers sit in front of the machine and try to make more balls land in the outer bins than in the center ones. Again, over the course of a large number of runs, the operators were able to create a small but measurable shift in where the balls landed. In the REG experiments the volunteers only exerted a PK effect on microscopic processes, the decay of a radioactive substance, but the pinball experiments revealed that test subjects could use PK to influence objects in the everyday world as well. What's more, the "signatures" of individuals who had participated in the REG experiments surfaced again in the pinball experiments, suggesting that the PK abilities of any given individual remain the same from experiment to experiment, but vary from individual to individual just as other talents vary. Jahn and Dunne state, "While small segments of these results might reasonably be discounted as falling too close to chance behavior to justify revision of prevailing scientific tenets, taken in concert the entire ensemble establishes an incontrovertible aberration of substantial proportions." Jahn and Dunne think their findings may explain the propensity
some individuals seem to have for jinxing machinery and causing equipment to malfunction. One such individual was physicist Wolfgang Pauli, whose talents in this area are so legendary that physicists have jokingly dubbed it the "Pauli effect. " It is said that Pauli's mere presence in a laboratory would cause a glass apparatus to explode, or a sensitive measuring device to crack in half. In one particularly famous incident a physicist wrote Pauli to say that at least he couldn't blame Pauli for the recent and mysterious disintegration of a complicated piece of equipment since Pauli had not been present, only to find that Pauli had been passing by the laboratory in a train at the precise moment of the mishap! Jahn and Dunne think the famous "Gremlin effect, " the tendency of carefully tested pieces of equipment to undergo
inexplicable malfunctions at the most absurdly inopportune moments, often reported by pilots, aircrew, and military operators, may also be an example of unconscious PK activity. If our minds can reach out and alter the movement of a cascade of marbles or the operation of a machine, what strange alchemy might account for such an ability?
Jahn and Dunne believe that since all known physical processes possess a wave/particle duality, it is not unreasonable to assume that consciousness does as well. When it is particlelike, consciousness would appear to be localized in our heads, but in its wavelike aspect, consciousness, like all wave phenomena, could also produce remote influence effects. They believe one of these remote influence effects is PK. But Jahn and Dunne do not stop here. They believe that reality is itself the result of the interface Boundary) between the wavelike aspects of consciousness and the wave patterns of matter.
However, like Bohm, they do not believe that consciousness or the material world can be productively represented in isolation, or even that PK can be thought of as the transmission of some kind of force. "The message may be more subtle than that, " says Jahn. "It may be that such concepts are simply unviable, that we cannot talk profitably about an abstract environment or an abstract consciousness. The only thing we can experience is the interpenetration of the two in some way." If PK cannot be thought of as the transmission of some kind of force, what terminology might better sum up the interaction of mind and matter?
In thinking that is again similar to Bohm's, Jahn and Dunne propose that PK actually involves an exchange of information between consciousness and physical reality, an exchange that should be thought of less as a flow between the mental and the material, and more as a resonance between the two. The importance of resonance was even sensed and commented on by the volunteers in the PK experiments, in that the most frequently mentioned factor associated with a successful performance was the attainment of a feeling of "resonance" with the machine.
One volunteer described the feeling as "a state of immersion in the process which leads to a loss of awareness of myself.
I don't feel any direct control over the device, more like a marginal influence when I'm in resonance with the machine. It's like being in a canoe; when it goes where I want, I flow with it. When it doesn't I try to break the flow and give it a chance to get back in resonance with me."
Jahn and Dunne's ideas are similar to Bohm's in several other key ways. Like Bohm, they believe that the concepts we use to describe reality—electron, wavelength, consciousness, time, frequency—are useful only as "information-
organizing categories" and possess no independent status. They also believe that all theories, including their own, are only metaphors. Although they do not identify themselves with the holographic model (and their theory does in fact differ from Bohm's thinking in several significant ways), they do recognize the overlap.
"To the extent that we're talking about a rather basic reliance on wave mechanical behavior, there is some commonality between what we're postulating and the holographic idea, " says Jahn. "It gives to consciousness the capacity to function in a wave mechanical sense and thereby to avail itself (take advantage of it), one way or another, of all of space and time." Dunne agrees: "In some sense the holographic model could be perceived as addressing the mechanism whereby the consciousness interacts with that wave mechanical, aboriginal, sensible muchness, and somehow manages to convert it into usable information. In another sense, if you imagine that the individual consciousness has its own characteristic wave patterns, you could view it—metaphorically, of course—as the laser of a particular frequency that intersects with a specific pattern in the cosmic hologram."
As might be expected, Jahn and Dunne's work has been greeted with considerable resistance by the scientific orthodox community, but it is gaining acceptance in some quarters. A good deal of PEAR's funding comes from the McDonnell Foundation, created by James S. McDonnell III, of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, and the New York Times Magazine recently devoted an article to Jahn and Dunne's work. Jahn and Dunne themselves remain undaunted by the fact that they are devoting so much time and effort to exploring the parameters of a phenomenon considered nonexistent by most other scientists. As Jahn states, "My sense of the importance of this topic is much higher than anything else I've ever worked on."

Psychokinesis on a Grander Scale

So far, PK effects produced in the lab have been limited to relatively small objects, but the evidence suggests that some individuals at least can use PK to bring about even greater changes in the physical world.
Biologist Lyall Watson, author of the bestselling book "Supernature" and a scientist who has studied paranormal events all over the world, encountered one such individual while visiting the Philippines.
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The man was one of the so-called Philippine psychic healers, but instead of touching a patient, all he did was hold his hand about ten inches over the person's body, point at his or her skin, and an incision would appear instantaneously. Watson not only witnessed several displays of the man's psychokinetic surgical skills, but once, when the man made a
broader sweep with his finger than usual, Watson received an incision on the back of his own hand. He bears the scar to this day. There is evidence that PK abilities can also be used to heal bones. Several examples of such healings have been reported by Dr. Rex Gardner, a physician at Sunderland District General Hospital in England. One interesting aspect of a 1983 article in the British Medical Journal is that Gardner, an avid investigator of miracles, presents contemporary miraculous healings side by side with examples of virtually identical healings collected by seventh-century English historian and theologian the Venerable Bede. The present-day healing involved a group of Lutheran nuns living in Darmstadt, Germany. The nuns were building a chapel when one of the sisters broke through a freshly cemented floor and fell onto a wooden beam below. She was rushed to the hospital where X rays revealed that she had a compound pelvic fracture. Instead of relying on standard medical techniques, the nuns held an all-night prayer vigil. Despite the doctors' insistence that the sister should remain in traction for many weeks, the nuns took her home two days later and continued to pray and perform a laying on of hands. To their surprise, immediately following the laying on of hands, the sister stood up from her bed, free of the excruciating pain of the fracture and apparently healed. It took her only two weeks to achieve a full recovery, whereupon she returned to the hospital and presented herself to her astonished
doctor. Although Gardner does not try to account for this or any of the other healings he discusses in his article, PK seems a likely explanation. Given that the natural healing of a fracture is a lengthy process, and even the miraculous regeneration of Michelli's pelvis took several months, it is suggested that perhaps the unconscious PK abilities of the nuns performing the laying on of hands accomplished the task. Gardner describes a similar healing that occurred in the seventh century during the building of the church at Hexham, England, and involving St. Wilfrid, then the bishop of Hexham. During the construction of the church a mason named Bothelm fell from a great height, breaking both his arms and legs. As he lay dying, Wilfrid prayed over him and asked the other workmen to join him. They did, "the breath of life returned" to Bothelm, and he healed rapidly. Since the healing apparently did not take place until St. Wilfred asked the other workmen to join him, one wonders if St. Wilfred was the catalyst, or again if it was the combined unconscious PK of the entire assemblage? Dr. William Tufts Brigham, the curator of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and a noted botanist who devoted much of his private life to investigating the paranormal, recorded an incident in which a broken bone was instantaneously healed by a native Hawaiian shaman, or kahuna. The incident was witnessed by a friend of Brigham's named J. A. K. Combs. Combs's grandmother-in-law was considered one of the most powerful women kahunas in the islands, and once, while attending a party at the woman's home, Combs observed her abilities firsthand. On the occasion in question, one of the guests slipped and fell in the beach sand, breaking his leg so severely that the bone ends pressed
visibly out against the skin. Recognizing the seriousness of the break, Combs recommended that the man be taken to a hospital immediately, but the elderly kahuna would hear none of it. Kneeling beside the man, she straightened his leg and pushed on the area where the fractured bones pressed out against his skin. After praying and meditating for several minutes she stood up and announced that the healing was finished. The man rose wonderingly to his feet, took a step, and then another. He was completely healed and his leg showed no indication of the break in any way.

Mass Psychokinesis in Eighteenth-Century France

Such incidents notwithstanding, one of the most astounding manifestations of psychokinesis, and one of the most remarkable displays of miraculous events ever recorded, took place in Paris in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The events centered around a puritanical sect of Dutch-influenced Catholics known as the Jansenists, and were
precipitated by the death of a saintly and revered Jansenist deacon named Francois de Paris. Although few people living today have even heard of the Jansenist miracles, they were one of the most talked about events in Europe for the better part of a century. To understand fully the Jansenist miracles, it is necessary to know a little about the historical events that preceded François de Paris's death.
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Jansenism was founded in the early seventeenth century, and from the start it was at odds with both the Roman Catholic Church and the French monarchy. Many of the beliefs diverged sharply with standard church doctrine but it was a popular movement and quickly gained followers among the French populace. Most damning of all, it was viewed by both the papacy and King Louis XV, a devout Catholic, as Protestantism only masquerading as Catholicism. As a result, both
the church and the king were constantly maneuvering to undermine the movement's power. One obstacle to these maneuverings, and one of the factors that contributed to the movement's popularity, was that Jansenist leaders seemed especially skilled at performing miraculous healings. Nonetheless, the church and the monarchy persevered, causing
fierce debates to rage throughout France. It was on May 1, 1727, at the height of this power struggle, that Francois de Paris died and was interred in the parish cemetery of Saint-Medard, Paris. Because of the abbe's saintly reputation, worshipers began to gather at his tomb, and from the beginning a host of miraculous healings were reported. The ailments thus cured included cancerous tumors, paralysis, deafness, arthritis, rheumatism, ulcerous sores, persistent fevers, prolonged hemorrhaging, and blindness. But this was not all. The mourners also started to experience strange involuntary spasms or convulsions and to undergo the most amazing contortions of their limbs. These seizures quickly proved contagious, spreading like a brush fire until the streets were packed with men, women, and children, all twisting and writhing as if caught up in a surreal enchantment. It was while they were in this fitful and trancelike state that the
"convulsionaires, " as they have come to be called, displayed the most phenomenal of their talents. One was the ability to endure without harm an almost unimaginable variety of physical tortures. These included severe beatings, blows from both heavy and sharp objects, and strangulation—all with no sign of injury, or even the slightest trace of wounds or bruises. What makes these miraculous events so unique is that they were witnessed by literally thousands of observers. The frenzied gatherings around Abbe Paris's tomb were by no means short-lived. The cemetery and the streets surrounding it were crowded day and night for years, and even two decades later miracles were still being reported
(to give some idea of the enormity of the phenomena, in 1733 it was noted in the public records that over 3, 000 volunteers were needed simply to assist the convulsionaires and make sure, for example, that the female participants did not become immodestly exposed during their seizures). As a result, the supernormal abilities of the convulsionaires became an international cause celebre, and thousands flocked to see them, including individuals from all social strata and officials from every educational, religious, and governmental institution imaginable; numerous accounts, both official and unofficial, of the miracles witnessed are recorded in the documents of the time. Moreover, many of the witnesses, such as the investigators from the Roman Catholic Church, had a vested interest in refuting the Jansenist miracles, but they still went away confirming them (the Roman Catholic Church later remedied this embarrassing state of affairs by conceding that the miracles existed but were the work of the devil, hence proving that the Jansenists were depraved). One investigator, a member of the Paris Parliament named Louis- Basile Carre de Montgeron, witnessed enough miracles to fill four thick volumes on the subject, which he published in 1737 under the title "La Vérité des Miracles". In the work he provides numerous examples of the convulsionaries' apparent invulnerability to torture. In one instance a twenty-year-old convulsionaire named Jeanne Maulet leaned against a stone wall while a volunteer from the crowd, "a very strong man, " delivered one hundred blows to her stomach with a thirty-pound hammer (the convulsionaires themselves asked to be tortured because they said it relieved the excruciating pain of the convulsions). To test the force of the blows, Montgeron himself then took the hammer and tried it on the stone wall against which the girl had leaned. He wrote, "At the twenty-fifth blow the stone upon which I struck, which had been shaken by the preceding efforts, suddenly became loose and fell
on the other side of the wall, making an aperture more than half a foot in size." Montgeron describes another instance in which a convulsionaire bent back into an arc so that her lower back was supported by "the sharp point of a peg. " She then asked that a fifty-pound stone attached to a rope be hoisted to "an extreme height" and allowed to fall with all its weight on her stomach. The stone was hoisted up and allowed to fall again and again, but the woman seemed completely unaffected by it. She effortlessly maintained her awkward position, suffered no pain or harm, and walked away from the ordeal without even so much as a mark on the flesh of her back. Montgeron noted that while the ordeal was in progress she kept crying out, "Strike harder, harder!"
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In fact, it appears that nothing could harm the convulsionaires. They could not be hurt by the blows of metal rods, chains, or timbers. The strongest men could not choke them. Some were crucified and afterward showed no trace of wounds. Most mind-boggling of all, they could not even be cut or punctured with knives, swords, or hatchets! Montgeron cites an incident in which the sharpened point of an iron drill was held against the stomach of a convulsionaire and then pounded so violently with a hammer that it seemed "as if it would penetrate through to the spine and rupture all the entrails. " But it
didn't, and the convulsionaire maintained an "expression of perfect rapture," crying, "Oh, that does me good! Courage, brother; strike twice as hard, if you can!" Invulnerability was not the only talent the Jansenists displayed during their seizures. Some became clairvoyant and were able to "discern hidden things. " Others could read even when their eyes were closed and tightly bandaged, and instances of levitation were reported. One of the levitators, an abbe named Bescherand from Montpellier, was so "forcibly lifted into the air" during his convulsions that even when witnesses tried to hold him down they could not succeed in keeping him from rising up off of the ground. Although we have all but forgotten about the Jansenist miracles today, they were far from ignored by the intelligentsia of the time. The niece of the mathematician and philosopher Pascal succeeded in having a severe ulcer in her eye vanish within hours as the result of a Jansenist miracle. When King Louis XV tried unsuccessfully to stop the convulsionaires by closing the cemetery of Saint-Medard, Voltaire quipped, "God was forbidden, by order of the King, to work any miracles there. " And in his Philosophical Essays the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, "There surely never was so great a number of miracles ascribed to one person as those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbe Paris. Many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world. "
How are we to explain the miracles produced by the convulsionaires?
Although Bohm is willing to consider the possibility of PK and other paranormal phenomena, he prefers not to speculate about specific events such as the supernormal abilities of the Jansenists. But once again, if we take the testimony of so many witnesses seriously, unless we are willing to concede that God favored the Jansenist Catholies over the Roman, PK seems the likely explanation. That some kind of psychic functioning was involved is strongly suggested by the appearance of other psychic abilities, such as clairvoyance, during the seizures. In addition, we have already looked at a number of examples where intense faith and hysteria have triggered the deeper forces of the mind, and these too were present in ample portions. In fact, instead of being produced by one individual, the psychokinetic effects may have been created by the combined fervor and belief of all those present, and this might account for the unusual vigor of the manifestations. This idea is not new. In the 1920s the great Harvard psychologist William McDougall also suggested that religious miracles might be the result of the collective psychic powers of large numbers of worshipers. PK would explain many of the convulsionaire's seeming invulnerabilities.
In the case of Jeanne Maulet it could be argued that she unconsciously used PK to block the effect of the hammer blows. If the convulsionaires were unconsciously using PK to take control of chains, timbers, and knives, and stop them in their tracks at the precise moment of impact, it would also explain why these objects left no marks or bruises. Similarly, when individuals tried to strangle , perhaps their hands were held in place by PK and although they thought they were squeezing flesh, they were really only flexing in the nothingness.

Reprogramming the Cosmic Motion Picture Projector

PK does not explain every aspect of the convulsionaires' invulnerability, however. There is the problem of inertia—the tendency of an object in motion to stay in motion—to consider. When a fifty-pound stone or a piece of timber comes crashing down, it carries with it a lot of energy, and when it is stopped in its tracks, the energy has to go somewhere.
For example, if a person in a suit of armor is struck by a thirty-pound hammer, although the metal of the armor may deflect
the blow, the person is still considerably shaken. In the case of Jeanne Maulet it appears that the energy somehow bypassed her body and was transferred to the wall behind her, for as Montgeron noted, the stone was "shaken by the efforts. " But in the case of the woman who was arched and had the fifty-pound stone dropped on her abdomen, the matter is less clear.
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One wonders why she wasn't driven into the ground like a croquet hoop, or why, when they were struck with timbers, the convulsionaires were not knocked off their feet? Where did the deflected energy go? Again, the holographic view of reality provides a possible answer. As we have seen, Bohm believes that consciousness and matter are just different aspects of the same fundamental something, a something that has its origins in the implicate order.
Some researchers believe this suggests that the consciousness may be able to do much more than make a few psychokinetic changes in the material world.
For example, Grof believes that if the implicate and explicate orders are an accurate description of reality, "it is conceivable that certain unusual states of consciousness could mediate direct experience of, and intervention in, the implicate order. It would thus be possible to modify phenomena in the phenomenal world by influencing their generative
matrix." Put another way, in addition to psychokinetically moving objects around, the mind may also be able to reach down and reprogram the cosmic motion picture projecter that created those objects in the first place.
Thus, not only could the conventionally recognized rules of nature, such as inertia, be completely bypassed, but the mind could alter and reshape the material world in ways far more dramatic than even psychokinesis implies.
That this or some other theory must be true is evidenced in another supernormal ability displayed by various individuals throughout history: invulnerability to fire. In his book "The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism", Thurston gives numerous examples of saints who possessed this ability, one of the most famous being St. Francis of Paula. Not only could St. Francis of Paula hold burning embers in his hands without being harmed, but at his canonization hearings in 1519 eight
eyewitnesses testified that they had seen him walk unharmed through the roaring flames of a furnace to repair one of the furnace's broken walls... It seems that challenges to faith, such as the one King Louis XV tried to impose on the Jansenists, have engendered miracles in more than one instance. Although the kahunas of Hawaii do not walk through roaring furnaces, there are reports that they can stroll across hot lava without being harmed. Brigham told of meeting three kahunas who promised to perform the feat for him, and of following them on a lengthy trek to a lava flow near the erupting Kilauea. They chose a 150-foot-wide lava flow that had cooled enough to support their weight, but was so hot that patches of incandescence still coursed through its surface. As Brigham watched, the kahunas took off their sandals and started to recite the lengthy prayers necessary to protect them as they strolled out onto the barely hardened molten rock. As it turned out, the kahunas had told Brigham earlier that they could confer their fire immunity on him if he wanted to join them, and he had bravely agreed. But as he faced the baking heat of the Java he had second and even third thoughts. "The upshot of the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots, " Brigham wrote in his account of the incident. After they finished invoking the gods, the oldest kahuna scampered out onto the lava and crossed the 150 feet without harm. Impressed, but still adamant about not going, Brigham stood up to watch the next kahuna, only to be given a shove that forced him to break into a run to keep from falling face first onto the incandescent rock. And run Brigham did. When he reached higher ground on the other side he discovered that one of his boots had burned off and his socks were on fire. But, miraculously, his feet were completely unharmed. The kahunas had also suffered no harm and were rolling in laughter at Brigham's shock. "I laughed too, " wrote Brigham. "I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe. There is little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on
my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet."
The convulsionaires also occasionally displayed complete immunity to fire. The two most famous of these "human salamanders"—in the middle ages the term salamander referred to a mythological lizard believed to live in fire—were Marie Sonnet and Gabrielle Moler. On one occasion, and in the presence of numerous witnesses, including Montgeron,
Sonnet stretched herself on two chairs over a blazing fire and remained there for half an hour. Neither she nor her clothing showed any ill effects.
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In another instance she sat with her feet in a brazier full of burning coals. As with Brigham, her shoes and stockings
burned off, but her feet were unharmed. Gabrielle Moler's exploits were even more dumbfounding. In addition
to being impervious to the thrusts of swords and blows delivered by a shovel, she could stick her head into a roaring hearth fire and hold it there without suffering any injury. Eyewitnesses report that afterward her clothing was so hot it could barely be touched, yet her hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows were never so much as singed. No doubt she was great fun at parties. Actually the Jansenists were not the first convulsionary movement in France. In the late 1600s, when King Louis XIV tried to purge the country of the unabashedly Protestant Huguenots, a group of Huguenot resisters in the valley of the Cevennes and known as the Camisards displayed similar abilities. In an official report sent to Rome, one of the persecutors, a prior named Abbe du Chayla, complained that no matter what he did, he could not succeed in harming the Camisards. When he ordered them shot, the musket balls would be found flattened between their clothing and their skin. When he closed their hands upon burning coals, they were not harmed, and when he wrapped them head to toe in cotton soaked with oil and set them on fire, they did not burn. As if this weren't enough, Claris, the Camisard leader, ordered that
a pyre be built and then climbed to the top of it to deliver an ecstatic speech. In the presence of six hundred witnesses he ordered the pyre be set on fire and continued to rant as the flames rose above his head. After the pyre was completely consumed, Claris remained, unharmed and with no mark of the fire on his hair or clothing. The head of the French troops sent to subdue the Camisards, a colonel named Jean Cavalier, was later exiled to England where he wrote a book on the
event in 1707 entitled "A Cry from the Desert". As for Abbe du Chayla, he was eventually murdered by the Camisards during a retaliatory raid. Unlike some of them, he possessed no special invulnerability. Literally hundreds of credible accounts of fire immunity exist. It is reported that when Bernadette of Lourdes was in ecstasy she was also impervious to fire. According to witnesses, on one occasion her hand dropped so close to a burning candle while she was in trance that the flames licked around her fingers. One of the individuals present was Dr. Dozous, the municipal physician of Lourdes. Being of quick mind, Dozous timed the event and noted that it was a full ten minutes before she came out of trance and removed her hand. He later wrote, "I saw it with my own eyes. But I swear, if anyone had tried to make me believe such a story I would have laughed him to scorn."
On September 7, 1871, the New York Herald reported that Nathan Coker, an elderly Negro blacksmith living in Easton, Maryland, could handle red-hot metal without being harmed. In the presence of a committee that included several doctors, he heated an iron shovel until it was incandescent and then held it against the soles of his feet until it was cool. He also licked the edge of the red-hot shovel and poured melted lead shot in his mouth, allowing it to run over his teeth and
gums until it solidified. After each of these feats the doctors examined him and found no trace of injury.
While on a hunting trip in 1927 in the Tennessee mountains, K. R. Wissen, a New York physician, encountered a twelve-year-old boy who was similarly impervious. Wissen watched the boy handle red-hot irons out of a fireplace with impunity. The boy told Wissen he had discovered his ability by accident when he picked up a red-hot horseshoe in his uncle's blacksmith shop. The pit of flaming embers the Grosvenors watched Mohotty walk through was twenty-feet long
and measured 1328 degrees Fahrenheit on the National Geographic team's thermometers. In the May 1959 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Leonard Feinberg of the University of Illinois reports witnessing another Ceylonese fire-walking ritual during which the natives carried red-hot iron pots on their heads without being harmed. In an article in Psychiatric Quarterly, psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz reports watching Appalachian Pentecostals hold their hands in an acetylene
flame without being harmed, ™ and so on, and so on.

The Laws of Physics as Habits and Realities Both Potential and Real

Just as it is hard to imagine where the deflected energy goes in some of the examples of PK we have looked at, it is equally difficult to understand where the energy of a red-hot iron pot goes while the pot is resting flat against the hair and flesh of a Ceylonese native's head.
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But if consciousness can mediate directly in the implicate order, it becomes a more tractable problem. Again, rather than being due to some undiscovered energy or law of physics (such as some kind of insulating force field) that operates within the framework of reality, it would result from activity on an even more fundamental level and involve the processes that create both the physical universe and the laws of physics in the first place. Looked at another way, the ability of consciousness to shift from one entire reality to another suggests that the usually inviolate rule that fire burns human flesh may only be one program in the cosmic computer, but a program that has been repeated so often it has become one of nature's habits. As has been mentioned, according to the holographic idea, matter is also a kind of habit and is constantly born anew out of the implicate, just as the shape of a fountain is created anew out of the constant flow of water that gives it form. Peat humorously refers to the repetitious nature of this process as one of the universe's neuroses. "When you have a neurosis you tend to repeat the same pattern in your life, or do the same action, as if there's a memory built up and the thing is stuck with that," he says. "I tend to think things like chairs and tables are like that also. They're a sort of material neurosis, a repetition. But there is something subtler going on, a constant enfolding and unfolding. In this sense chairs and tables are just habits in this flux, but the flux is the reality, even if we tend only to see the habit." Indeed, given that the universe and the laws of physics that govern it are also products of this flux, then they, too, must be viewed as habits. Clearly they are habits that are deeply ingrained in the holomovement,
but supernormal talents such as immunity to fire indicate that, despite their seeming constancy, at least some of the rules that govern reality can be suspended. This means the laws of physics are not set in stone, but are more like Shainberg's vortices, whirlpools of such vast inertial power that they are as fixed in the holomovement as our own habits and deeply held convictions are fixed in our thoughts.
Grof's proposal that altered states of consciousness may be required in order to make such changes in the implicate is also attested to by the frequency with which fire immunity is associated with heightened faith and religious zeal. The pattern that began to take shape in the last chapter continues, and its message becomes increasingly clear—the deeper and more emotionally charged our beliefs, the greater the changes we can make in both our bodies and reality itself.
At this point we might ask, if consciousness can make such extraordinary alterations under special circumstances, what role does it play in the creation of our day-to-day reality? Opinions are extremely varied. In private conversation
Bohm admits to believing that the universe is all "thought" and reality exists only in what we think,
but again he prefers not to speculate about miraculous occurrences. Pribram is similarly reticent to comment on specific events but does believe a number of different potential realities exist and consciousness has a certain amount of latitude in choosing which one manifests. "I don't believe anything goes, " he says, "but there are a lot of worlds out there that we don't understand."
After years of firsthand experiences with the miraculous, Watson is bolder. "I have no doubt that reality is in a very large part a construct of the imagination. I am not speaking as a particle physicist or even as someone who is totally aware of what's going on in the frontier of that discipline, but I think we have the capacity to change the world around us in quite fundamental ways" (Watson, who was once enthusiastic about the holographic idea, is no longer convinced that
any current theory in physics can adequately explain the supernormal abilities of the mind).
Gordon Globus, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, has a different but similar view. Globus thinks the holographic theory is correct in its assertion that the mind constructs concrete reality out of the raw material of the implicate. However, he has also been greatly influenced by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda's now famous otherworldly experiences with the Yaqui Indian shaman, Don Juan.
In stark contrast to Pribram, he believes that the seemingly inexhaustible array of "separate realities" Castaneda experienced under Don Juan's tutelage—and indeed even the equally vast array of realities we experience during ordinary dreaming—indicate that there are an infinite number of potential realities enfolded in the implicate. Moreover, because the holographic mechanisms the brain uses to construct everyday reality are the same ones it uses to construct our dreams and the realities we experience during Castaneda-esque (esque - possession of a specified quality) altered states of consciousness, he believes all three types of reality are fundamentally the same.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

You Can Get Something for Nothing

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Changing the Whole Picture

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.
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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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What Does It All Mean?

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.

Seeing Holographically

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.

The Human Energy Field

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...
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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).
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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."

The Energy Field of the Human Psyche

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

The Universal Shifts of Consciousness

Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe"

Michael Talbot's Talks on Youtube

Michael Talbot's Talks on Youtube

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Undivided Wholeness

Extension to Life, Consciousness and Cosmology