Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe...

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Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe

Jagbir

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 6:52 pm

 

Quote:

It might even be possible to someday reach into the super holographic level of

reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

 

The Adi Shakti has demonstrated and proved this scientific theory to be a

spiritual fact in the Sahasrara. The past still exists and can be retrieved for

3-D halogram viewing or revisited, whether to witness the Resurrection of Christ

or to find out how exactly did Shri Vishnu measure the Universe in three steps.

Both of these religious beliefs are true as these scenes were plucked by the Adi

Shakti from the long-forgotten past on request. That is the main reason this

essay " Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe " by Michael Talbot was

chosen.

 

Jai Shri Mataji,

 

jagbir

 

 

Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe

By Michael Talbot

 

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris, a research

team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the

most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the

evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific

journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some

who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

 

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic

particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each

other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they

are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to

know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates

Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the

speed of light. Since travelling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to

breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to

try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has

inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

 

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's

findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent

solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed

hologram. To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first

understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional

photograph made with the aid of a laser.

 

Holograms

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light

of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of

the first and the resulting interference pattern(the area where the two laser

beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like

a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film

is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original

object appears.

 

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable

characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then

illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire

image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of

film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the

original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all

the information possessed by the whole.

 

The " whole in every part " nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new

way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western

science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical

phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective

parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend

themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart some thing constructed

holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only

get smaller wholes.

 

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery.

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with

one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are

sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their

separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such

particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same

fundamental something.

 

The aquarium model

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following

illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are

unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it

contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front

and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors,

you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities.

After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images

will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fishes, you

will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding

turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you

remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that

the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is

clearly not the case.

 

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles

in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light

connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a

deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our

own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as

subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a

portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate " parts " , but facets of

a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and

indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical

reality is comprised of these " eidolons " , the universe is itself a projection, a

hologram.

 

Cosmos as a super hologram

In addition to its phantom like nature, such a universe would possess other

rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles

is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the

universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the

human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon

that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to

categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe,

all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a

seamless web.

 

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as

fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in

which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional

space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be

viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a

sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist

simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be

possible to someday reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck

out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

 

What else the super hologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for

the sake of argument, that the super hologram is the matrix that has given birth

to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic

particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy

that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It

must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of " All That Is. "

 

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden

in the super hologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume

it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the super holographic level

of reality is a " mere stage " beyond which lies " an infinity of further

development " . Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the

universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research,

Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the

holographic nature of reality.

 

The brain as a hologram

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where

memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that

rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed

throughout the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain

scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he

removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it

had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come

up with a mechanism that might explain this curious " whole in every part " nature

of memory storage.

 

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he

had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram

believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but

in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way

that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece

of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the

brain is itself a hologram.

 

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in

so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to

memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the

average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in

five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered

that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding

capacity for information storage -- simply by changing the angle at which the

two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many

different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic

centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

 

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the

enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain

functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him

what comes to mind when he says the word " zebra " , you do not have to clumsily

sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an

answer. Instead, associations like " striped " , " horselike " , and " animal native to

Africa " all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things

about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems

instantly cross-correlated with every other piece of information -- another

feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is

infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's

supreme example of across-correlated system.

 

The storage of memory is not the only neuro physiological puzzle that becomes

more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is

how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via

the senses(light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete

world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a

hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a

translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies

into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses

holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives

through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

 

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic

principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained

increasing support among neurophysiologists. Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo

Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic

phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds

without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear,

Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording

technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

 

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct " hard " reality by

relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of

experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to

a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers

have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound

frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called

" osmic frequencies " , and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a

broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the

holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and

divided up into conventional perceptions.

 

The synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is

what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness

of the world is but a secondary reality and what is " there " is actually a

holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only

selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms

them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite

simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the

material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical

beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really

" receivers " floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we

extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel

from many extracted out of the super hologram.

 

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views,

has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists

have greeted it with scepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing

group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality

science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some

mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish

the paranormal as a part of nature.

 

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many

para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the

holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually

indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely

interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the

mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and

helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular,

Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the

baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of

consciousness.

 

Regressions into the animal kingdom

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a

psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became

convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric

reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly

detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsulated in such a form, but

noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy was a patch of

colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that

although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with

a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on

the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

 

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof

encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every

species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the

man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such

experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to

be accurate.

 

Transpersonal psychology

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological

phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some

sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no

education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices

and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals

gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of

the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

 

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy

sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in

such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's

consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and

time, Grof called such manifestations " transpersonal experiences " , and in the

late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called " transpersonal

psychology " devoted entirely to their study.

 

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology

garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has

become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any

of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the

bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has

changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

 

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth

that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but

to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself,

the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have

transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

 

Consciousness creates reality

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like

biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed

out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would

no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is

consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and

everything else around us we interpret as physical.

 

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers

to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could

also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical

structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it

becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than

current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of

disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect

changes in the hologram of the body.

 

The power of visualization

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work

so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as

real as " reality " . Even visions and experiences involving " non-ordinary " reality

become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book " Gifts of Unknown

Things, " biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian

shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove

of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another

astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to

reappear, then " click " off again and on again several times in succession.

 

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such

events, experiences like this become more tenable if " hard " reality is only a

holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is " there " or " not there "

because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level

of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If

this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of

all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only

because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them

so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can

alter the fabric of reality.

 

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any

picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the

mind to the phantasmagorical events experienced by Castaneda during his

encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more

or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are

in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become

suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random

events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore

determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and

everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most

haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

 

A new reality

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or

dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has

already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is

found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the

instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between

subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at

Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings " indicate that we must be prepared

to consider radically new views of reality " .

 

Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe

By Michael Talbot

_________________

" I am the Adi Shakti (Holy Spirit/Ruh). I am the One who has come on

this Earth for the first time in this form to do this tremendous task.

"

 

Shri Adi-Shakti Devi

Adi-Shakti [615th]: Primal Power; being the First Cause. (Sri Lalita

Sahasranama)