The Holographic Universe (25 page)

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 Yoga-nanda (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. 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. 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 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 Aim'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. 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 Wacson 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.

What Does It Ail
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 the 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. 1 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.