The Holographic Universe (31 page)

The incident not only
revealed Dryer's skill at looking inside the human body, but also seemed to
suggest that my spleen has some sort of mentality or consciousness all of its
own. It reminded me not only of Pert's assertion that she no longer knows where
the brain leaves off and the body begins, but made me wonder if perhaps all of
the body's subcomponents—glands, bones, organs, and cells—possess their own
intelligence? If the body is truly holographic, it may be that Pert's remark is
more correct than we realize, and the consciousness of the whole is very much
contained hi all of its parts.

Internal Vision
and Shamanism

In some shamanic
cultures internal vision is one of the prerequisites for becoming a shaman.
Among the Araucanian Indians of Chile and the Argentine pampas, a newly
initiated shaman is taught to pray specifically for the faculty. This is
because the shaman's major role in Araucanian culture is to diagnose and heal
illness, for which internal vision is considered essential. Australian shamans
refer to the ability as the “strong eye,” or “seeing with the heart.” The
Jivaro Indians of the forested eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes acquire
the ability by drinking an extract of a jungle vine called
ayahuasca
, a
plant containing a hallucinogenic substance believed to bestow psychic
abilities on the imbiber. According to Michael Harner, an anthropologist at the
New School for Social Research in New York who specializes in shamanic studies,
ayakuasca
permits the Jivaro shaman “to see into the body of the patient
as though it were glass.”

Indeed, the ability to
“see” an illness—whether it involves actually looking inside the body or seeing
the malady represented as a kind of metaphorical hologram, such as a
three-dimensional image of a demonic and repulsive creature inside or near the
body—is universal in shamanic traditions. But whatever the culture in which
internal vision is reported, its implications are the same. The body is an
energy construct and ultimately may be no more substantive than the energy
field in which it is embedded.

The Energy Field
as Cosmic Blueprint

The idea that the
physical body is just one more level of density in the human energy field and
is itself a kind of hologram that has coalesced out of the interference
patterns of the aura may explain both the extraordinary healing powers of the
mind and the enormous control it has over the body in general. Because an
illness can appear in the energy field weeks and even months before it appears
in the body, many psychics believe that disease actually originates in the
energy field. This suggests that the field is in some way more primary than the
physical body and functions as a kind of blueprint from which the body gets its
structural cues. Put another way, the energy field may be the body's own
version of an implicate order.

This may explain
Achterberg's and Siegel's findings that patients are already “imaging” their
illnesses many months before the illnesses manifest in their bodies. At
present, medical science is at a loss to explain how mental imagery could
actually create an illness. But, as we have seen, ideas that are prominent in our
thoughts quickly appear as images in the energy field. If the energy field is
the blueprint that guides and molds the body, it may be that by imaging an
illness, even unconsciously, and repeatedly reinforcing its presence in the
field, we are in effect programming the body to manifest the illness.

Similarly, this same
dynamic linkage between mental images, the energy field, and the physical body
may be one of the reasons imagery and visualization can also heal the body. It
may even help explain how faith and meditation on religious images enable
stigmatists to grow nail-like fleshy protuberances from their hands. Our
current scientific understanding is at a loss to explain such a biological
capacity, but again, constant prayer and meditation may cause such images to
become so impressed in the energy field that the constant repetition of these
patterns is finally given form in the body.

One researcher who
believes it is the energy field that molds the body and not the other way
around is Richard Gerber, a Detroit physician who has spent the last twelve
years investigating the medical implications of the body's subtle energy
fields. “The etheric body is a holographic energy template that guides the
growth and development of the physical body,” says Gerber.

Gerber believes that the
distinct layers some psychics see in the aura also play a factor in the dynamic
relationship among thought, the energy field, and the physical body. Just as
the physical body is subordinate to the etheric, the etheric body is subordinate
to the astral/emotional body, the astral/emotional to the mental, and so on,
says Gerber, with each body functioning as the template for the one before it.
Thus the subtler the layer of the energy field in which an image
or
thought manifests, the greater its ability to heal and reshape the body.
“Because the mental body feeds energy into the astral/emotional body, which
then funnels down into the etheric and physical bodies, healing a person at the
mental level is stronger and produces longer lasting results than healing from
either the astral or etheric levels,” says Gerber.

Physicist Tiller agrees.
“The thoughts that one creates generate patterns at the mind level of nature.
So we see that illness, in fact, eventually becomes manifest from the altered
mind patterns through the rachet effect—first, to effects at the etheric level
and then, ultimately, at the physical level [where] we see it openly as
disease.” Tiller believes the reason illnesses often recur is that medicine
currently treats only the physical level. He feels that if doctors could treat
the energy field as well, they would bring about longer lasting cures. Until
then, many treatments “will not be permanent because we have not altered the
basic hologram at the mind and spiritual levels,” he states.

In a wide-ranging
speculation Tiller even suggests that the universe itself started as a subtle
energy field and gradually became dense and materia] through a similar rachet
effect. As he sees it, it may be that God created the universe as a divine
pattern or idea. Like the image a psychic sees floating in the human energy
field, this divine pattern functioned as a template, influencing and molding
increasingly less subtle levels of the cosmic energy field “on down the line
via a series of holograms,” until it eventually coalesced into a hologram of a
physical universe.

If this is true, it
suggests that the human body is holographic in another way, for each of us
truly would be a universe in miniature. Furthermore, if our thoughts can cause
ghostly holographic images to form, not only in our own energy fields, but in
the subtle energetic levels of reality itself, it may help explain how the
human mind is able to effect some of the miracles we examined in the previous
chapter. It may even explain synchronicities, or how processes and images from
the innermost depths of our psyche manage to take form in external reality.
Again, it may be that our thoughts are constantly affecting the subtle
energetic levels of the holographic universe, but only emotionally powerful
thoughts, such as the ones that accompany moments of crisis and
transformation—the kind of events that seem to engender synchronicities—are
potent enough to manifest as a series of coincidences in physical reality.

A Participatory
Reality

Of course, these
processes are not contingent on the subtle energy fields of the universe being
stratified into rigidly defined layers. They could also work even if the subtle
fields of the universe are a smooth continuum. In fact, given how sensitive these
subtle fields are to our thoughts, we must be very careful when trying to form
set ideas about their organization and structure. What we believe about them
may in fact help mold and create their structure.

This is perhaps why
psychics disagree about whether the human energy field is divided into layers.
Psychics who believe in clearly defined layers may actually be causing the
energy field to form itself into layers. The individual whose energy field is
being observed may also participate in this process. Brennan is very frank
about this and notes that the more one of her clients understands the
difference between the layers, the clearer and more distinct the layers of
their energy field become. She admits that the structure she sees in the energy
field is thus but one system, and others have come up with other systems. For
example, the authors of the tantras, a collection of Hindu yogic texts written
during the fourth through sixth centuries A.D., perceived only three layers in
the energy field.

There is evidence that
the structures clairvoyants inadvertently create in the energy field can be
remarkably long-lived. For centuries the ancient Hindus believed that each
chakra also had a Sanskrit letter written in its center. Japanese researcher
Hiroshi Motoyama, a clinical psychologist who has successfully developed a
technique for measuring the electrical presence of the chakras, says that he
first became interested in the chakras because his mother, a simple woman with
natural clairvoyant gifts, could see them clearly. However, for years she was
puzzled because she could see what looked like an inverted sailboat in her
heart chakra. It wasn't until Motoyama began his own investigations that he
discovered what his mother was seeing was the Sanskrit letter
yam
, the
letter the ancient Hindus perceived in the heart chakra. Some psychics, such as
Dryer, say that they also see Sanskrit letters in the chakras. Others do not.
The only explanation appears to be that psychics who see the letters are
actually tuning into holographic structures long ago imposed on the energy
field by the beliefs of the ancient Hindus.

At first glance this
notion may seem strange, but it does have a precedent. As we have seen, one of
the basic tenets of quantum physics is that we are not discovering reality, but
participating in its creation. It may be that as we probe deeper into the
levels of reality beyond the atom, the levels where the subtle energies of the
human aura appear to lie, the participatory nature of reality becomes even more
pronounced. Thus we must be extremely cautious about saying that we have
discovered a particular structure or pattern in the human energy field, when we
may have actually created what we have found.

Mind and the
Human Energy Field

It is significant that
an examination of the human energy field leads one to precisely the same
conclusion Pribram made after discovering that the brain converts sensory
import into a language of frequencies. That is, that we have two realities: one
in which our bodies appear to be concrete and possess a precise location in
space and time; and one in which our very being appears to exist primarily as a
shimmering cloud of energy whose ultimate location in space is somewhat
ambiguous. This realization brings with it some profound questions. One is,
what becomes of mind? We have been taught that our mind is a product of our
brain, but if the brain and the physical body are just holograms, the densest
part of an increasingly subtle continuum of energy fields, what does this say
about the mind? Human energy field research provides an answer.

Recently a discovery
made by neurophysiologists Benjamin Libet and Bertram Feinstein at Mount Zion
Hospital in San Francisco has been causing a stir in the scientific community.
Libet and Feinstein measured the time it took for a touch stimulus on a
patient's skin to reach the brain as an electrical signal. The patient was also
asked to push a button when he or she became aware of being touched. Libet and
Feinstein found that the brain registered the stimulus in 0.0001 of a second
after it occurred, and the patient pressed the button 0.1 of a second after the
stimulus was applied.

But, remarkably, the
patient didn't report being consciously aware of either the stimulus or
pressing the button
for almost 0.5 second.
This meant that the decision
to respond was being made by the patient's unconscious mind. The patient's
awareness of the action was the slow man in the race. Even more disturbing,
none of the patients Libet and Feinstein tested were aware that their
unconscious minds had already caused them to push the button before they had
consciously decided to do so. Somehow their brains were creating the comforting
delusion that they had consciously controlled the action even though they had
not. This has caused some researchers to wonder if free will is an illusion.
Later studies have shown that one and a half seconds before we “decide” to move
one of our muscles, such as lift a finger, our brain has already started to
generate the signals necessary to accomplish the movement. Again, who is making
the decision, the conscious mind or the unconscious mind?

Hunt does such findings
one better. She has discovered that the human energy field responds to stimuli
even before the brain does. She has taken EMG readings of the energy field and
EEG readings of the brain simultaneously and discovered that when she makes a
loud sound or flashes a bright light, the EMG of the energy field registers the
stimulus before it ever shows up on the EEG. What does it mean? “I think we
have way overrated the brain as the active ingredient in the relationship of a
human to the world,” says Hunt. “It's just a real good computer. But the
aspects of the mind that have to do with creativity, imagination, spirituality,
and all those things, I don't see them in the brain at all. The mind's not in
the brain. It's in that darn field.”