The Holographic Universe (37 page)

Wambach discovered she
could also
progress
people to future lives. Indeed, her subjects’
descriptions of coming centuries were so fascinating she conducted a major
future-life-progression project in France and the United States. Unfortunately,
she passed away before completing the study, but psychologist Chet Snow, a
former colleague of Wambach's, carried on her work and recently published the
results in a book entitled
Mass Dreams of the Future.

When the reports of the
2,500 people who participated in the project were tallied, several interesting
features emerged. First, virtually all of the respondents agreed that the
population of the earth had decreased dramatically. Many did not even find
themselves in physical bodies in the various future time periods specified, and
those who did noted that the population was much smaller than it is today.

In addition, the
respondents divided up neatly into four categories, each relating a different
future. One group described a joyless and sterile future in which most people
lived in space stations, wore silvery suits, and ate synthetic food. Another,
the “New Agers,” reported living happier and more natural lives in natural
settings, in harmony with one another, and in dedication to learning and
spiritual development. Type 3, the “hi-tech urbanites,” described a bleak
mechanical future in which people lived in underground cities and cities
enclosed in domes and bubbles. Type 4 described themselves as post-disaster
survivors living in a world that had been ravaged by some global, possibly
nuclear, disaster. People in this group lived in homes ranging from urban ruins
to caves to isolated farms, wore plain handsewn clothing that was often made of
fur, and obtained much of their food by hunting.

What is the explanation?
Snow turns to the holographic model for the answer, and like Loye, believes
that such findings suggest that there are several potential futures, or
holoverses, forming in the gathering mists of fate. But like other past-life
researchers he also believes we create our own destiny, both individually and
collectively, and thus the four scenarios are really a glimpse into the various
potential futures the human race is creating for itself en masse.

Consequently, Snow
recommends that instead of building bomb shelters or moving to areas that won't
be destroyed by the “coming Earth changes” predicted by some psychics, we
should spend time believing in and visualizing a positive future. He cites the
Planetary Commission—the ad hoc collection of millions of individuals around
the world who have agreed to spend the hour of 12:00 to 1:00 P.M., Greenwich
mean time, each December thirty-first united in prayer and meditation on world
peace and healing—as a step in the right direction. “If we are continually
shaping our future physical reality by today's collective thoughts and actions,
then the time to wake up to the alternative we have created is
now,”
states Snow. “The choices between the kind of Earth represented by each of the
Types are clear. Which do we want for our grandchildren? Which do we want
perhaps to return to ourselves someday?”

CHANGING THE
PAST

The future may not be
the only thing that can be formed and reshaped by human thought. At the 1988
Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, Helmut Schmidt and
Marilyn Schlitz announced that several experiments they had conducted indicated
the mind may be able to alter the past as well. In one study Schmidt and
Schlitz used a computerized randomization process to record 1,000 different
sequences of sound. Each sequence consisted of 100 tones of varying duration,
some of them pleasing to the ear and some just bursts of noise. Because the
selection process was random, according to the laws of probability each
sequence should contain roughly 50 percent pleasing sounds and 50 percent
noise.

Cassette recordings of
the sequences were then mailed to volunteers. While listening to the
prerecorded cassettes the subjects were told to try to psychokinetically
increase the duration of the pleasing sounds and decrease the durations of the
noise. After the subjects completed the task, they notified the lab of their
attempts, and Schmidt and Schlitz then examined the original sequences. They
discovered that the recordings the subjects listened to contained significantly
longer stretches of pleasing sounds than noise. In other words, it appeared
that the subjects had psychokinetically reached back through time and had an
effect on the randomized process from which their
prerecorded
cassettes
had been made.

In another test Schmidt
and Schlitz programmed the computer to produce 100-tone sequences randomly
composed of four different notes, and subjects were instructed to try to
psychokinetically cause more high notes to appear on the tapes than low. Again
a retroactive PK effect was found. Schmidt and Schlitz also discovered that
volunteers who meditated regularly exerted a greater PK effect than
non-meditators, suggesting again that contact with the unconscious is the key
to accessing the reality-structuring portions of the psyche.

The idea that we can
psychokinetically alter events that have already occurred is an unsettling
notion, for we are so deeply programmed to believe the past is frozen as if it
were a butterfly in glass, it is difficult for us to imagine otherwise. But in
a holographic universe, a universe in which time is an illusion and reality is
no more than a mind-created image, it is a possibility to which we may have to
become accustomed.

A WALK THROUGH
THE GARDEN OF TIME

As fantastic as the
above two notions are, they are small change compared to the last category of
time anomaly that merits our attention. On August 10, 1901, two Oxford
professors, Anne Moberly, the principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and
Eleanor Jourdain, the vice principal, were walking through the garden of the
Petit Trianon at Versailles when they saw a shimmering effect pass over the
landscape in front of them, not unlike the special effects in a movie when it
changes from one scene to another. After the shimmering passed they noticed
that the landscape had changed. Suddenly the people around them were wearing
eighteenth-century costumes and wigs and were behaving in an agitated manner.
As the two women stood dumbfounded, a repulsive man with a pockmarked face
approached and urged them to change their direction. They followed him past a
line of trees to a garden where they heard strains of music floating through
the air and saw an aristocratic lady painting a watercolor.

Eventually the vision
vanished and the landscape returned to normal, but the transformation had been
so dramatic that when the women looked behind them they realized the path they
had just walked down was now blocked by an old stone wall. When they returned
to England, they searched through historical records and concluded that they
had been transported back in time to the day in which the sacking of the
Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss Guards had taken place—which accounted
for the agitated manner of the people in the garden—and that the woman in the
garden was none other than Marie Antoinette. So vivid was the experience that
the women filled a book-length manuscript about the occurrence and presented it
to the British Society for Psychical Research.

What makes Moberly and
Jourdain's experience so significant is that they did not simply have a
retrocognitive vision of the past, but actually
walked back into the past
,
meeting people and wandering around in the Tuileries garden as it was more than
one hundred years earlier. Moberly and Jourdain's experience is difficult to
accept as real, but given that it provided them with no obvious benefit, and
most certainly put their academic reputations at risk, one is hard pressed to
imagine what would motivate them to make up such a story.

And it is not the only
such occurrence at the Tuileries to be reported to the British Society for
Psychical Research. In May 1955, a London solicitor and his wife also
encountered several eighteenth-century figures in the garden. And on another
occasion, the staff of an embassy whose offices overlook Versailles claims to
have watched the garden revert back to an earlier period of history as well.
Here in the United States parapsychologist Gardner Murphy, a former president of
both the American Psychological Association and the American Society for
Psychical Research, investigated a similar case in which a woman identified
only by the name Buterbaugh looked out the window of her office at Nebraska
Wesleyan University and saw the campus as it was fifty years earlier. Gone were
the bustling streets and the sorority houses, and in their place was an open
field and a sprinkling of trees, their leaves aflutter in the breeze of a
summer long since passed.

Is the boundary between
the present and the past so flimsy that we can, under the right circumstances,
stroll back into the past with the same ease that we can stroll through a
garden? At present we simply do not know, but in a world that is comprised less
of solid objects traveling in space and time, and more of ghostly holograms of
energy sustained by processes that are at least partially connected to human
consciousness, such events may not be as impossible as they appear.

And if this seems
disturbing—this idea that our minds and even our bodies are far less bound by
the strictures of time than we have previously imagined—we should remember that
the idea the Earth is round once proved equally frightening to a humanity
convinced that it was flat. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests
that we are still children when it comes to understanding the true nature of
time. And like all children poised on the threshold of adulthood, we should put
aside our fears and come to terms with the way the world really is. For in a
holographic universe, a universe in which all things are just ghostly
coruscations of energy, more than just our understanding of time must change.
There are still other shimmerings to cross our landscape, still deeper depths
to plumb.

Access to holographic reality
becomes
experientially
available when one's consciousness is freed from
its dependence on the physical body. So long as one remains tied to the body
and its sensory modalities, holographic reality
at best
can only be an
intellectual construct. When one [is freed from the body] one experiences it
directly. That is why mystics speak about their visions with such certitude and
conviction, while those who haven't experienced this realm for themselves are
left feeling skeptical or even indifferent.

Time is not the only
thing that is illusory in a holographic universe. Space, too, must be viewed as
a product of our mode of perception. This is even more difficult to comprehend
than the idea that time is a construct, for when it comes to trying to
conceptualize “spacelessness” there are no easy analogies, no images of
amoeboid universes or crystallizing futures, to fall back on. We are so
conditioned to think in terms of space as an absolute that it is hard for us
even to begin to imagine what it would be like to exist in a realm in which
space did not exist. Nonetheless, there is evidence that we are ultimately no
more bound by space than we are by time.

One powerful indication
that this is so can be found in out-of-body phenomena, experiences in which an
individual's conscious awareness appears to detach itself from the physical
body and travel to some other location. Out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, have
been reported throughout history by individuals from all walks of life. Aldous
Huxley, Goethe, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, and Jack London all reported
having OBEs. They were known to the Egyptians, the North American Indians, the
Chinese, the Greek philosophers, the medieval alchemists, the Oceanic peoples,
the Hindus, the Hebrews, and the Moslems. In a cross-cultural study of 44
non-Western societies, Dean Shiels found that only three did
not
hold a
belief in OBEs. In a similar study anthropologist Erika Bourguignon looked at
488 world societies—or roughly 57 percent of all known societies—and found that
437 of them, or 89 percent, had at least some tradition regarding OBEs.

Even today studies
indicate that OBEs are still widespread. The late Dr. Robert Crookall, a
geologist at the University of Aberdeen and an amateur parapsychologist,
investigated enough cases to fill nine books on the subject. In the 1960s Celia
Green, the director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford,
polled 115 students at Southampton University and found that 19 percent
admitted to having an OBE. When 380 Oxford students were similarly questioned,
34 percent answered in the affirmative. In a survey of 902 adults Haraldsson
found that 8 percent had experienced being out of their bodies at least once in
their life. And a 1980 survey conducted by Dr. Harvey Irwin at the University
of New England in Australia revealed that 20 percent of 177 students had
experienced an OBE. When averaged, these figures indicate that roughly one out
of every five people will have an OBE at some point in his or her life. Other
studies suggest the incidence may be closer to one in ten, but the fact
remains: OBEs are far more common than most people realize.

The typical OBE is
usually spontaneous and occurs most often during sleep, meditation, anesthesia,
illness, and instances of traumatic pain (although they can occur under other
circumstances as well). Suddenly a person experiences the vivid sensation that
his mind has separated from his body. Frequently he finds himself floating over
his body and discovers he can travel or fly to other locations. What is it like
to find oneself free from the physical and staring down at one's own body? In a
1980 study of 339 cases of out-of-body travel, Dr. Glen Gabbard of the
Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Dr. Stuart Twemlow of the Topeka Veterans’
Administration Medical Center, and Dr. Fowler Jones of the University of Kansas
Medical Center found that a whopping 85 percent described the experience as
pleasant and over half of them said it was joyful.