The Holographic Universe (39 page)

These nonphysical senses
are further hampered by the constraints our own self-limiting beliefs place
upon them. A number of talented OB travelers have noted that once they became
more at home in their second body they discovered that they could “see” in all
directions at once without turning their heads. In other words, although seeing
in all directions appears to be normal during the OB state, they were so
accustomed to believing that they could see only through their eyes-even when
they were in a nonphysical hologram of their body—that this belief at first
kept them from realizing that they possessed 360-degree vision.

There is evidence that
even our physical senses have fallen victim to this censorship. Despite our
unwavering conviction that we see with our eyes, reports persist of individuals
who possess “eyeless sight,” or the ability to see with other areas of their
bodies. Recently David Eisenberg, M.D., a clinical research fellow at the
Harvard Medical School, published an account of two school-age Chinese sisters
in Beijing who can “see” well enough with the skin in their armpits to read
notes and identify colors. In Italy the neurologist Cesare Lombroso studied a
blind girl who could see with the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear.
In the 1960s the prestigious Soviet Academy of Science investigated a Russian
peasant woman named Rosa Kuleshova, who could see photographs and read
newspapers with the tips of her fingers, and pronounced her abilities genuine.
Significantly, the Soviets ruled out the possibility that Kuleshova was simply
detecting the varying amounts of stored heat different colors emanate
naturally—Kuleshova could read a black and white newspaper
even when it was
covered with a sheet of heated glass.
Kuleshova became so renowned for her
abilities that
Life
magazine eventually published an article about her.

In short, there is
evidence that we too are not limited to seeing only through our physical eyes.
This is, of course, the message inherent in my father's friend Tom's ability to
read the inscription on a watch even when it was shielded by his daughter's
stomach, and also in the remote-viewing phenomenon. One cannot help but wonder
if eyeless sight is actually just further evidence that reality is indeed
maya
,
an illusion, and our physical body, as well as all the seeming absoluteness of
its physiology, is as much a holographic construct of our perception as our
second body. Perhaps we are so deeply habituated to believing that we can see
only through our eyes that even in the physical we have shut ourselves off from
the full range of our perceptual capabilities.

Another holographic
aspect of OBEs is the blurring of the division between past and future that
sometimes occurs during such experiences. For example, Osis and Mitchell
discovered that when Dr. Alex Tanous, a well-known psychic and talented OB traveler
from Maine, flew in and attempted to describe the test objects they placed on a
table, he had a tendency to describe items that were placed there days
later!
This suggests that the realm people enter during the OB state is one of the
subtler levels of reality Bohm speaks about, a region that is closer to the
implicate and hence closer to the level of reality in which the division
between past, present, and future ceases to exist. Put another way, it appears
that instead of tuning into the frequencies that encode the present, Tanous's
mind inadvertently tuned into frequencies that contained information about the
future and converted those into a hologram of reality.

That Tanous's perception
of the room was a holographic phenomenon and not just a precognitive vision
that took place solely in his head is underscored by another fact. The day of
his schedule to produce an OBE Osis asked New York psychic Christine Whiting to
hold vigil in the room and try to describe any projector she might “see”
visiting there. Despite Whiting's ignorance of who would be flying in or when,
when Tanous made his OB visit she saw his apparition clearly and described him
as wearing brown corduroy pants and a white cotton shirt, the clothing Dr.
Tanous was wearing in Maine at the time of his attempt.

Harary has also made
occasional OB journeys into the future and agrees that the experiences are
qualitatively different from other pre-cognitive experiences. “OBEs to future
time and space differ from regular precognitive dreams in that I am definitely
‘out’ and moving through a black, dark area that ends at some lighted future
scene,” he states. When he makes an OB visit to the future he has sometimes
even seen a silhouette of his future self in the scene, and this is not all.
When the events he has witnessed eventually come to pass,
he can also sense
his time-traveling OB self in the actual scene with him.
He describes this
eerie sensation as “meeting myself ‘behind’ myself as if I were two beings,” an
experience that surely must put normal deja vus to shame.

There are also cases on
record of OB journeys into the past. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg,
himself a frequent OB traveler, describes one in his book
Legends.
The
occurrence took place while Strindberg was sitting in a wine shop, trying to
persuade a young friend not to give up his military career. To bolster his
argument Strindberg brought up a past incident involving both of them that had
taken place one evening in a tavern. As the playwright proceeded to describe
the event he suddenly “lost consciousness” only to find himself sitting in the
tavern in question and reliving the occurrence. The experience lasted only for
a few moments, and then he abruptly found himself back in his body and in the
present. The argument can also be made that the retrocognitive visions we
examined in the last chapter in which clairvoyants had the experience that they
were actually present during, and even “floating” over, the historical scenes
they were describing are also a form of OB projection into the past.

Indeed, when one reads
the voluminous literature now available on the OB phenomenon, one is repeatedly
struck at the similarities between OB travelers’ descriptions of their
experiences and characteristics we have now come to associate with a
holographic universe. In addition to describing the OB state as a place where
time and space no longer properly exist, where thought can be transformed into
hologramlike forms, and where consciousness is ultimately a pattern of
vibrations, or frequencies, Monroe notes that perception during OBEs seems
based less on “a reflection of light waves” and more on “an impression of
radiation,” an observation that suggests once again that when one enters the OB
realm one begins to enter Pribram's frequency domain. Other OB travelers have
also referred to the frequencylike quality of the Second State. For instance,
Marcel Louis Forhan, a French OB experiencer who wrote under the name of
“Yram,” spends much of his book,
Practical Astral Projection
, trying to
describe the wavelike and seemingly electromagnetic qualities of the OB realm.
Still others have commented on the sense of cosmic unity one experiences during
the state and have summarized it as a feeling that “everything is everything,”
and “I am that”

As holographic as the
OBE is, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to more direct
experience of the frequency aspects of reality. Although OBEs are only
experienced by a segment of the human race, there is another circumstance under
which we all come into closer contact with the frequency domain. That is when
we journey to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.
The rub, with all due respect to Shakespeare, is that some travelers
do
return. And the stories they tell are filled with features that smack once
again of things holographic.

The Near-Death
Experience

By now, nearly everyone
has heard of near-death experiences, or NDEs, incidents in which individuals
are declared clinically “dead,” are resuscitated, and report that during the
experience they left their physical body and visited what appeared to be the
realm of the afterlife. In our own culture NDEs first came to prominence in
1975 when Raymond A. Moody, Jr., a psychiatrist who also has a Ph.D. in
philosophy, published his best-selling investigation of the subject,
Life
after Life.
Shortly thereafter Elisabeth Kubler-Ross revealed that she had
simultaneously conducted similar research and had duplicated Moody's findings.
Indeed, as more and more researchers began to document the phenomenon it became
increasingly clear that NDEs were not only incredibly widespread—a 1981 Gallup
poll found that eight million adult Americans had experienced an NDE, or
roughly one person in twenty—but provided the most compelling evidence to date
for survival after death.

Like OBEs, NDEs appear
to be a universal phenomenon. They are described at length in both the
eighth-century Tibetan Book of the Dead and the 2,500-year-old Egyptian Book of
the Dead. In Book X of
The Republic
Plato gives a detailed account of a
Greek soldier named Er, who came alive just seconds before his funeral pyre was
to be lit and said that he had left his body and went through a “passageway” to
the land of the dead. The Venerable Bede gives a similar account in his eighth-century
work
A History of the English Church and People
, and, in fact, in her
recent book
Otherworld Journeys
Carol Zaleski, a lecturer on the study
of religion at Harvard, points out that medieval literature is filled with
accounts of NDEs.

NDEers also have no
unique demographic characteristics. Various studies have shown that there is no
relationship between NDEs and a person's age, sex, marital status, race,
religion and/or spiritual beliefs, social class, educational level, income,
frequency of church attendance, size of home community, or area of residence.
NDEs, like lightning, can strike anyone at any time. The devoutly religious are
no more likely to have an NDE than nonbelievers.

One of the most
interesting aspects of the ND phenomenon is the consistency one finds from
experience to experience. A summary of a typical NDE is as follows:

A man is dying and
suddenly finds himself floating above his body and watching what is going on.
Within moments he travels at great speed through a darkness or a tunnel. He
enters a realm of dazzling light and is warmly met by recently deceased friends
and relatives. Frequently he hears indescribably beautiful music and sees
sights—rolling meadows, flower-filled valleys, and sparkling streams—more
lovely than anything he has seen on earth. In this light-filled world he feels
no pain or fear and is pervaded with an overwhelming feeling of joy, love, and
peace. He meets a “being (and or beings) of light” who emanates a feeling of
enormous compassion, and is prompted by the being(s) to experience a “life
review,” a panoramic replay of his life. He becomes so enraptured by his
experience of this greater reality that he desires nothing more than to stay.
However, the being tells him that it is not his time yet and persuades him to
return to his earthly life and reenter his physical body.

It should be noted this
is only a general description and not all NDEs contain all of the elements
described. Some may lack some of the above-mentioned features, and others may
contain additional ingredients. The symbolic trappings of the experiences can
also vary. For example, although NDEers in Western cultures tend to enter the
realm of the afterlife by passing through a tunnel, experiencers from other
cultures might walk down a road or pass over a body of water to arrive in the
world beyond.

Nevertheless, there is
an astonishing degree of agreement among the NDEs reported by various cultures
throughout history. For instance, the life review, a feature that crops up
again and again in modern-day NDEs, is also described in the Tibetan Book of
the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in Plato's account of what Er
experienced during his sojourn in the hereafter, and in the 2,000-year-old
yogic writings of the Indian sage Patanjali. The cross-cultural similarities
between NDEs has also been confirmed in formal study. In 1977, Osis and
Haraldsson compared nearly nine hundred deathbed visions reported by patients
to doctors and other medical personnel in both India and the United States and
found that although there were various cultural differences—for example,
Americans tended to view the being of light as a Christian religious personage
and Indians perceived it to be a Hindu one—the “core” of the experience was
substantially the same and resembled the NDEs described by Moody and
Kubler-Ross.

Although the orthodox
view of NDEs is that they are just hallucinations, there is substantial
evidence that this is not the case. As with OBEs, when NDEers are out-of-body,
they are able to report details they have no normal sensory means of knowing.
For example, Moody reports a case in which a woman left her body during
surgery, floated into the waiting room, and saw that her daughter was wearing
mismatched plaids. As it turned out, the maid had dressed the little girl so
hastily she had not noticed the error and was astounded when the mother, who
did not physically see the little girl that day, commented on the fact. In
another case, after leaving her body, a female NDEer went to the hospital lobby
and overheard her brother-in-law tell a friend that it looked like he was going
to have to cancel a business trip and instead be one of his sister-in-law's
pallbearers. After the woman recovered, she reprimanded her astonished
brother-in-law for writing her off so quickly.

And these are not even
the most extraordinary examples of sensory awareness in the ND out-of-body
state. NDE researchers have found that even patients who are blind, and have
had no light perception for years, can see and accurately describe what is going
on around them when they have left their bodies during an NDE. Kubler-Ross has
encountered several such individuals and has interviewed them at length to
determine their accuracy. ‘To our amazement, they were able to describe the
color and design of clothing and jewelry the people present wore,” she states.