The Holographic Universe (48 page)

The Tibetans prefigured
some of Pribram's thinking as well. According to Milarepa, an eleventh-century
Tibetan yogin and the most renowned of the Tibetan Buddhist saints, the reason
we are unable to perceive the void directly is because our unconscious mind
(or, as Milarepa puts it, our “inner consciousness”) is far too “conditioned”
in its perceptions. This conditioning not only keeps us from seeing what he
calls “the border between mind and matter,” or what we would call the frequency
domain, but also causes us to form a body for ourselves when we are in the
between-life state and no longer have a body. “In the invisible realm of the
heavens . .. the illusory mind is the great culprit,” writes Milarepa, who
counseled his disciples to practice “perfect seeing and contemplation” in order
to realize this “Ultimate Reality.”

Zen Buddhists also
recognize the ultimate indivisibility of reality, and indeed the main objective
of Zen is to learn how to perceive this wholeness. In their book
Games Zen
Masters Play
, and in words that could have been lifted right from one of
Bohm's papers, Robert Sohl and Audrey Carr state, “To confuse the indivisible
nature of reality with the conceptual pigeonholes of language is the basic
ignorance from which Zen seeks to free us. The ultimate answers to existence
are not to be found in intellectual concepts and philosophies, however
sophisticated, but rather in a level of direct nonconceptual experience [of
reality].”

The Hindus call the
implicate level of reality Brahman. Brahman is formless but is the birthplace
of all forms in visible reality, which appear out of it and then enfold back
into it in endless flux. Like Bohm, who says that the implicate order can just
as easily be called spirit, the Hindus sometimes personify this level of
reality and say that it is composed of pure consciousness. Thus, consciousness
is not only a subtler form of matter, but it is more fundamental than matter;
and in the Hindu cosmogony it is matter that has emerged from consciousness,
and not the other way around. Or as the Vedas put it, the physical world is
brought into being through both the “veiling” and “projecting” powers of
consciousness.

Because the material
universe is only a second-generation reality, a creation of veiled
consciousness, the Hindus say that it is transitory and unreal, or
maya.
As the Svetasvatara Upanishad states, “One should know that Nature is illusion
(maya)
,
and that Brahman is the illusion maker. This whole world is pervaded with
beings that are parts of him.” Similarly, the Kena Upanishad says that Brahman
is an uncanny something “which changes its form every moment from human shape
to a blade of grass.”

Because everything
unfolds out of the irreducible totality of Brahman, the world is also a
seamless whole, say the Hindus, and it is again
maya
that keeps us from
realizing there is ultimately no such thing as separateness. “
Maya
severs the united consciousness so that the object is seen as other than the
self and then as split up into the multitudinous objects in the universe,” says
the Vedic scholar Sir John Woodroffe. “And there is such objectivity as long as
[humanity's] consciousness is veiled or contracted. But in the ultimate basis
of experience the divergence has gone, for in it lie, in undifferentiated mass,
experiencer, experience, and the experienced.”

This same concept can be
found in Judaic thought. According to Kabbalistic tradition “the entire
creation is an illusory projection of the transcendental aspects of God,” says
Leo Schaya, a Swiss expert on the Kabbalah. However, despite its illusory
nature, it is not complete nothingness, “for every reflection of reality, even
remote, broken up and transient, necessarily possesses something of its cause.”
The idea that the creation set into motion by the God of Genesis is an illusion
is reflected even in the Hebrew language, for as the Zohar, a
thirteenth-century Kabbalistic commentary on the Torah and the most famous of
the esoteric Judaic texts, notes, the verb
baro
, “to create,” implies
the idea of “creating an illusion.”

There are many
holographic concepts in shamanistic thinking as well. The Hawaiian kahunas say
that everything in the universe is infinitely interconnected and that this
interconnectivity can almost be thought of as a web. The shaman, recognizing
the interconnectedness of all things, sees himself at the center of this web
and thus capable of affecting every other part of the universe (it is
interesting to note that the concept of
maya
is also frequently likened
to a web in Hindu thought).

Like Bohm, who says that
consciousness always has its source in the implicate, the aborigines believe
that the true source of the mind is in the transcendent reality of the
dreamtime. Normal people do not realize this and believe that their
consciousness is in their bodies. However, shamans know this is not true, and
that is why they are able to make contact with the subtler levels of reality.

The Dogon people of the
Sudan also believe that the physical world is the product of a deeper and more
fundamental level of reality and is perpetually flowing out of and then
streaming back into this more primary aspect of existence. As one Dogon elder
described it, “To draw up and then return what one had drawn—that is the life
of the world.”

In fact, the
implicate/explicate idea can be found in virtually all shamanic traditions.
States Douglas Sharon in his book
Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman's
Story:
“Probably the central concept of shamanism, wherever in the world it
is found, is the notion that underlying all the visible forms in the world,
animate and inanimate, there exists a vital essence from which they emerge and
by which they are nurtured. Ultimately everything returns to this ineffable,
mysterious, impersonal unknown.”

The Candle and
the Laser

Certainly one of the
most fascinating properties of a piece of holographic film is the nonlocal way
an image is distributed in its surface. As we have seen, Bohm believes the
universe itself is also organized in this manner and employs a thought
experiment involving a fish and two television monitors to explain why he believes
the universe is similarly nonlocal. Numerous ancient thinkers also appear to
have recognized, or at least intuited, this aspect of reality. The
twelfth-century Sufis summed it up by saying simply that “the macrocosm is the
microcosm,” a kind of earlier version of Blake's notion of seeing the world in
a grain of sand. The Greek philosophers Anaximenes of Miletus, Pythagoras,
Heraclitus, and Plato; the ancient Gnostics; the pre-Christian Jewish
philosopher Philo Judaeus; and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides—all
embraced the macrocosm-microcosm idea.

After a shamanic vision
of the subtler levels of reality the semimythical ancient Egyptian prophet
Hermes Trismegistus employed a slightly different phrasing and said that one of
the main keys to knowledge was the understanding that “the without is like the
within of things; the small is like the large.” The medieval alchemists, for
whom Hermes Trismegistus became a kind of patron saint, distilled the sentiment
into the motto “As above, so below.” In talking about the same
macrocosm-equals-microcosm idea the Hindu Visvasara Tantra uses somewhat cruder
terms and states simply, “What is here is elsewhere.”

The Oglala Sioux
medicine man Black Elk put an even more nonlocal twist on the same concept.
While standing on Harney Peak in the Black Hills he witnessed a “great vision”
during which he “saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for
I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the
shape of all shapes as they must live together as one being.” One of the most
profound understandings he came away with after this encounter with the
ineffable was that Harney Peak was the center of the world. However, this
distinction was not limited to Harney Peak, for as Black Elk put it, “Anywhere
is the center of the world.” Over twenty-five centuries earlier the Greek
philosopher Empedocles brushed up against the same sacred otherness and wrote
that “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”

Not content with mere
words, some ancient thinkers resorted to even more elaborate analogies in their
attempt to communicate the holographic properties of reality. To this end the
author of the Hindu Avatamsaka Sutra likened the universe to a legendary network
of pearls said to hang over the palace of the god Indra and “so arranged that
if you look at one [pearl], you see all the others reflect in it” As the author
of the Sutra explained, “In the same way, each object in the world is not
merely itself, but involves every other object and, in fact,
is
everything else.”

Fa-Tsang, the
seventh-century founder of the Hua-yen school of Buddhist thought, employed a
remarkably similar analogy when trying to communicate the ultimate
interconnectedness and interpenetra-tion of all things. Fa-Tsang, who held that
the whole cosmos was implicit in each of its parts (and who also believed that
every point in the cosmos was its center), likened the universe to a
multidimensional network of jewels, each one reflecting all others ad
infinitum.

When the empress Wu
announced that she did not understand what Fa-Tsang meant by this image and
asked him for further clarification, Fa-Tsang suspended a candle in the middle
of a room full of mirrors. This, he told the empress Wu, represented the
relationship of the One to the many. Then he took a polished crystal and placed
it in the center of the room so that it reflected everything around it. This,
he said, showed the relationship of the many to the One. However, like Bohm,
who stresses that the universe is not simply a hologram but a holo-movement,
Fa-Tsang stressed that his model was static and did not reflect the dynamism
and constant movement of the cosmic interrelat-edness among all things in the
universe.

In short, long before
the invention of the hologram, numerous thinkers had already glimpsed the
nonlocal organization of the universe and had arrived at their own unique ways
to express this insight. It is worth noting that these attempts, crude as they
may seem to those of us who are more technologically sophisticated, may have
been far more important than we realize. For instance, it appears that the
seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher Leibniz was familiar
with the Hua-yen school of Buddhist thought. Some have argued that this was why
he proposed that the universe is constituted out of fundamental entities he
called “monads,” each of which contains a reflection of the whole universe.
What is significant is that Leibniz also gave the world integral calculus, and
it was integral calculus that enabled Dennis Gabor to invent the hologram.

The Future of
the Holographic Idea

And so an ancient idea,
an idea that seems to find at least some expression in virtually all of the
world's philosophical and metaphysical traditions, comes full circle. But if
these ancient understandings can lead to the invention of the hologram, and the
invention of the hologram can lead to Bohra and Pribram's formulation of the
holographic model, to what new advances and discoveries might the holographic
model lead? Already there are more possibilities on the horizon.

HOLOPHONIC SOUND

Drawing on Pribram's
holographic model of the brain, Argentinian physiologist Hugo Zuccarelli
recently developed a new recording technique that allows one to create what
amounts to holograms made out of sound instead of light. Zuccarelli bases his
technique on the curious fact that the human ears actually emit sound.
Realizing that these naturally occurring sounds were the audio equivalent of
the “reference laser” used to recreate a holographic image, he used them as the
basis for a revolutionary new recording technique that reproduces sounds that
are even more realistic and three-dimensional than those produced through the
stereo process. He calls this new kind of sound “holophonic sound.”

After listening to one
of Zuccarelli's holophonic recordings, a reporter for the
Times
of
London wrote recently, “I stole a look at the reassuring numbers on my watch to
make sure where I was. People approached from behind me where I knew there was
only wall.... By the end of seven minutes I was getting the impression of
figures, the embodiment of the voices on the tape. It is a multidimensional
‘picture’ created by sound.”

Because Zuccarelli's
technique is based on the brain's own holographic way of processing sound, it
appears to be as successful at fooling the ear as light holograms are at
fooling the eyes. As a result, listeners often move their feet when they hear a
recording of someone walking in front of them, and move their heads when they
hear what sounds like a match being lit too near to their face (some reportedly
even smell the match). Remarkably, because a holophonic recording has nothing
to do with conventional stereophonic sound, it maintains its eerie three-dimensionality
even when one listens to it through only one side of a headphone. The
holographic principles involved also appear to explain why people who are deaf
in one ear can still locate the source of a sound without moving their heads.

A number of major recording
artists, including Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, and Vangelis, have approached
Zuccarelli about his process, but because of patent considerations he has not
yet disclosed the information necessary for a full understanding of his
technique.
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