The Holographic Universe (12 page)

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-projectorlike 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. 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. (IncidentaDy, 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. 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.”

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 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.