The Holographic Universe (38 page)

I know the feeling. I
had a spontaneous OBE as a teenager, and after recovering from the shock of
finding myself floating over my body and staring down at myself asleep in bed,
I had an indescribably exhilarating time flying through walls and soaring over
the treetops. During the course of my bodiless journey I even stumbled across a
library book a neighbor had lost and was able to tell her where the book was
located the next day. I describe this experience in detail in
Beyond the
Quantum.

It is of no small
significance that Gabbard, Twemlow, and Jones also studied the psychological
profile of OBEers and found that they were psychologically normal and were on
the whole extremely well adjusted. At the 1980 meeting of the American
Psychiatric Association they presented their conclusions and told their
colleagues that reassurances that OBEs are common occurrences and referring the
patient to books on the subject may be “more therapeutic” than psychiatric
treatment. They even hinted that patients might gain more relief by talking to
a yogi than to a psychiatrist!

Such facts
notwithstanding, no amount of statistical findings are as convincing as actual
accounts of such experiences. For example, Kimberly Clark, a hospital social
worker in Seattle, Washington, did not take OBEs seriously until she
encountered a coronary patient named Maria. Several days after being admitted
to the hospital Maria had a cardiac arrest and was quickly revived. Clark
visited her later that afternoon expecting to find her anxious over the fact
that her heart had stopped. As she had expected, Maria was agitated, but not
for the reason she had anticipated.

Maria told Clark that
she had experienced something very strange. After her heart had stopped she
suddenly found herself looking down from the ceiling and watching the doctors
and the nurses working on her. Then something over the emergency room driveway
distracted her and as soon as she “thought herself there, she
was
there.
Next Maria “thought her way” up to the third floor of the building and found
herself “eyeball to shoelace” with a tennis shoe. It was an old shoe and she
noticed that the little toe had worn a hole through the fabric. She also
noticed several other details, such as the fact that the lace was stuck under
the heel. After Maria finished her account she begged Clark to please go to the
ledge and see if there was a shoe there so that she could confirm whether her
experience was real or not.

Skeptical but intrigued,
Clark went outside and looked up at the ledge, but saw nothing. She went up to
the third floor and began going in and out of patients’ rooms looking through
windows so narrow she had to press her face against the glass just to see the
ledge at all. Finally, she found a room where she pressed her face against the
glass and looked down and saw the tennis shoe. Still, from her vantage point
she could not tell if the little toe had worn a place in the shoe or if any of
the other details Maria had described were correct. It wasn't until she
retrieved the shoe that she confirmed Maria's various observations. “The only
way she would have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right
outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe,” states Clark, who has
since become a believer in OBEs. “It was very concrete evidence for me.”

Experiencing an OBE
during cardiac arrest is relatively common, so common that Michael B. Sabom, a
cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University and a staff
physician at the Atlanta Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, got tired of
hearing his patients recount such “fantasies” and decided to settle the matter
once and for all. Sabom selected two groups of patients, one composed of 32
seasoned cardiac patients who had reported OBEs during their heart attacks, and
one made up of 25 seasoned cardiac patients who had never experienced an OBE.
He then interviewed the patients, asking the OBEers to describe their own
resuscitation as they had witnessed it from the out-of-body state, and asking
the nonexperiencers to describe what they imagined must have transpired during
their resuscitation.

Of the nonexperiencers,
20 made major mistakes when they described their resuscitations, 3 gave correct
but general descriptions, and 2 had no idea at all what had taken place. Among
the experiencers, 26 gave correct but general descriptions, 6 gave highly
detailed and accurate descriptions of their own resuscitation, and 1 gave a
blow-by-blow accounting so accurate that Sabom was stunned. The results
inspired him to delve even deeper into the phenomenon, and like Clark, he has
now become an ardent believer and lectures widely on the subject. There appears
“to be no plausible explanation for the accuracy of these observations
involving the usual physical senses,” he says. “The out-of-body hypothesis
simply seems to fit best with the data at hand.”

Although the OBEs
experienced by such patients are spontaneous, some people have mastered the
ability well enough to leave their body at will. One of the most famous of
these individuals is a former radio and television executive named Robert
Monroe. When Monroe had his first OBE in the late 1950s he thought he was going
crazy and immediately sought medical treatment The doctors he consulted found
nothing wrong, but he continued to have his strange experiences and continued
to be greatly disturbed by them. Finally, after learning from a psychologist
friend that Indian yogis reported leaving their bodies all the time, he began
to accept his uninvited talent. “I had two options,” Monroe recalls. “One was
sedation for the rest of my life; the other was to learn something about this
state so I could control it.”

From that day forward
Monroe began keeping a written journal of his experiences, carefully
documenting everything he learned about the out-of-body state. He discovered he
could pass through solid objects and travel great distances in the twinkling of
an eye simply by “thinking” himself there. He found that other people were
seldom aware of his presence, although the friends whom he traveled to see
while in this “second state” quickly became believers when he accurately
described their dress and activity at the time of his out-of-body visit. He
also discovered that he was not alone in his pursuit and occasionally bumped
into other disembodied travelers. Thus far he has catalogued his experiences in
two fascinating books.
Journeys Out of the Body
and
Far Journeys.

OBEs have also been
documented in the lab. In one experiment, parapsychologist Charles Tart was
able to gei a skilled OBEer he identifies only as Miss Z to identify correctly
a five-digit number written on a piece of paper that could only be reached if
she were floating in the out-of-body state. In a series of experiments
conducted at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, Karlis
Osis and psychologist Janet Lee Mitchell found several gifted subjects who were
able to “fly in” from various locations around the country and correctly
describe a wide range of target images, including objects placed on a table,
colored geometric patterns placed on a free-floating shelf near the ceiling,
and optical illusions that could only be seen when an observer peered through a
small window in a special device. Dr. Robert Morris, the director of research
at the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, North Carolina, has even used
animals to detect out-of-body visitations. In one experiment, for instance,
Morris found that a kitten belonging to a talented out-of-body subject named
Keith Harary consistently stopped meowing and started purring whenever Harary
was invisibly present.

OBEs as a
Holographic Phenomenon

Considered as a whole
the evidence seems unequivocal. Although we are taught that we “think” with our
brains, this is not always true. Under the right circumstances our
consciousness—the thinking, perceiving part of us—can detach from the physical
body and exist just about anywhere it wants to. Our current scientific
understanding cannot account for this phenomenon, but it becomes much more
tractable in terms of the holographic idea.

Remember that in a
holographic universe, location is itself an illusion. Just as an image of an
apple has no specific location on a piece of holographic film, in a universe
that is organized holographically things and objects also possess no definite
location; everything is ultimately nonlocal, including consciousness. Thus,
although our consciousness appears to be localized in our heads, under certain
conditions it can just as easily appear to be localized in the upper corner of
the room, hovering over a grassy lawn, or floating eyeball-to-shoelace with a
tennis shoe on the third-floor ledge of a building.

If the idea of a
nonlocal consciousness seems difficult to grasp, a useful analogy can once
again be found in dreaming. Imagine that you are dreaming you are attending a
crowded art exhibit. As you wander among the people and gaze at the artworks,
your consciousness appears to be localized in the head of the person you are in
the dream. But where is your consciousness really? A quick analysis will reveal
that it is actually in everything in the dream, in the other people attending
the exhibit, in the artworks, even in the very space of the dream. In a dream,
location is also an illusion because everything— people, objects, space,
consciousness, and so on—is unfolding out of the deeper and more fundamental
reality of the dreamer.

Another strikingly
holographic feature of the OBE is the plasticity of the form a person assumes
once they are out of the body. After detaching from the physical, OBEers
sometimes find themselves in a ghostlike body that is an exact replica of their
biological body. This caused some researchers in the past to postulate that
human beings possess a “phantom double” not unlike the doppelganger of
literature.

However, recent findings
have exposed problems with this assumption. Although some OBEers describe this
phantom double as naked, others find themselves in bodies that are fully
clothed. This suggests that the phantom double is not a permanent energy
replica of the biological body, but is instead a kind of hologram that can
assume many shapes. This notion is borne out by the fact that phantom doubles
are not the only forms people find themselves in during OBEs. There are
numerous reports where people have also perceived themselves as balls of light,
shapeless clouds of energy, and even no discernible form at all.

There is even evidence
that the form a person assumes during an OBE is a direct consequence of their
beliefs and expectations. For example, in his 1961 book
The Mystical Life
,
mathematician J. H. M. Whiteman revealed that he experienced at least two OBEs
a month during most of his adult life and recorded over two thousand such
incidents. He also disclosed that he always felt like a woman trapped in a
man's body, and during separation this sometimes resulted in his finding
himself in female form. Whiteman experienced various other forms as well during
his OB adventures, including children's bodies, and concluded that beliefs,
both conscious and unconscious, were the determining factors in the form this
second body assumed.

Monroe agrees and
asserts that it is our “thought habits” that create our OB forms. Because we
are so habituated to being in a body, we have a tendency to reproduce the same
form in the OB state. Similarly, he believes it is the discomfort most people
feel when they are naked that causes OBEers to unconsciously sculpt clothing
for themselves when they assume a human form. “I suspect that one may modify
the Second Body into whatever form is desired,” says Monroe.

What is our true form,
if any, when we are in the disembodied state? Monroe has found that once we
drop all such disguises, we are at heart a “vibrational pattern [comprised] of
many interacting and resonating frequencies.” This finding is also remarkably
suggestive that something holographic is going on and offers further evidence
that we—like all things in a holographic universe—are ultimately a frequency
phenomenon which our mind converts into various holographic forms. It also adds
credence to Hunt's conclusion that our consciousness is contained, not in the
brain, but in a plasmic holographic energy field that both permeates and
surrounds the physical body.

The form we assume while
in the OB state is not the only thing that displays this holographic plasticity.
Despite the accuracy of the observations made by talented OB travelers during
their disembodied jaunts, researchers have long been troubled by some of the
glaring inaccuracies that crop up as well. For instance, the title of the lost
library book I stumbled across during my own OBE looked bright green while I
was in a disembodied state. But after I was back in my physical body and
returned to retrieve the book I saw that the lettering was actually black. The
literature is filled with accounts of similar discrepancies, instances in which
OB travelers accurately described a distant room full of people, save that they
added an extra person or perceived a couch where there was really a table.

In terms of the
holographic idea, one explanation may be that such OB travelers have not yet
fully developed the ability to convert the frequencies they perceive while in a
disembodied state into a completely accurate holographic representation of
consensus reality. In other words, since OBEers appear to be relying on a completely
new set of senses, these senses may still be wobbly and not yet proficient at
the art of converting the frequency domain into a seemingly objective construct
of reality.