The Holographic Universe (23 page)

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.

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 interconnected-ness, 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.

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 EEG 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 all matter, and
“meaning” has an active presence in both the mental and physical worlds.

Bohm believes the
ubiquitousness 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.

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
interconnected-ness 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. Nonetheless, two days later her
bleeding became so severe that she was admitted on an emergency basis.