The Holographic Universe (26 page)

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 ease. 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. 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, 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-o'-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 everything 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 anomalons and
champagne beaches. Or as Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont
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, may be no more than will-o'-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 bilocation one better. 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.

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 egg-shaped halos or auras surrounding our
physical bodies.

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 Wind 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.
This can be quickly demonstrated with the illustration shown in figure 15.

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.