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February 24, 1991
REALITY.ASC
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This file courtesy of Double Helix BBS at 212 865 7043.
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THE UNIVERSE AS A HOLOGRAM
DOES OBJECTIVE REALITY EXIST, OR IS THE UNIVERSE A PHANTASM?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of
Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what
may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th
century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact,
unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you
probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some
who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances
subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating
them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion
miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is
doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's
long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the
speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is
tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has
caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to
explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer
even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example,
believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not
exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a
phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must
first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-
dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.
To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first
bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is
bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting
interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle)
is captured on film.
Page 1
When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl
of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is
illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the
original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only
remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is
cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be
found to contain the entire image of the rose.
Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of
film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of
the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a
hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with
an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For
most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that
the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or
an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.
A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not
lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something
constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it
is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding
Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles
are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the
distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort
of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness
is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such
particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions
of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers
the following illustration.
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you
are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it
and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed
at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.
As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume
that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After
all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the
images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch
the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a
certain relationship between them.
When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but
corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces
toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the
situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly
not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the
subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.
Page 2
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection
between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a
deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex
dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he
adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from
one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.
Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper
and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and
indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything
in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe
is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would
possess other rather startling features. If the apparent
separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a
deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely
interconnected.
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected
to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims,
every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.
Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human
nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the
various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of
necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer
be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break
down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything
else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish
on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of
this deeper order.
At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which
the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This
suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to
someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck
out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question.
Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the
matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the
very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or
will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is
possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blu<6C> whales to gamma
rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That
Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else
might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that
we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts
it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage"
beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the
universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain
research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become
Page 3
persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.
Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how
and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous
studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific
location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain
scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's
brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to
perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only
problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that
might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory
storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography
and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been
looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons,
or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses
that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of
laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of
film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram
believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so
many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the
human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of
10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or
roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their
other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for
information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two
lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record
many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated
that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion
bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we
need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more
understandable if the brain functions according to holographic
principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind
when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back<63>
through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an
answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and
"animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.
Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking
process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-
correlated with every other piece of information--another feature
intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is
infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps
nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle
that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model
of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the
avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light
Page 4
frequecies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world
of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram
does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a
translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of
frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also
comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically
convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the
inner world of our perceptions.
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses
holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory,
in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended
the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled
by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without
moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear,
Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this
ability.
Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic
sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations
with an almost uncanny realism.
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct
"hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also
received a good deal of experimental support.
It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a
much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.
Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual
systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell
is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and
that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of
frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the
holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted
out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic
model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with
Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a
secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur
of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only
selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically
transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective
reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the
East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and
although we may think we are physical beings moving through a
physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea
of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify
into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of
the superhologram.
Page 5
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm
and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm,
and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has
galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe
it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at
thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries
that have never before been explainable by science and even
establish the paranormal as a part of nature.
Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted
that many para-psychological phenomena become much more
understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually
indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is
infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of
the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can
travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at
a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved
puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic
paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling
phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of
consciousness.
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of
LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who
suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female
of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her
hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of
what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that
the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of
colored scales on the side of its head.
What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no
prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist
later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on
the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual
arousal.
The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of
his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and
identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree
(research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in
the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such
experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which
turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling
psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who
appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious.
Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed
descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu
mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave
persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive
glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life
incarnations.
Page 6
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena
manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of
drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to
be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the
usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof
called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the
late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called
"transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal
Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded
professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for
years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a
mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they
were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the
holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a
continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other
mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and
region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is
able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have
transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called
hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia
Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of
reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to
say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness
that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and
everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has
caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding
of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic
paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a
holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each
of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical
wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease
may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect
changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as
visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of
thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality
become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book
"Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his
encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a
ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly
vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another
astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the
trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times
in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of
explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if
"hard" reality is only a holographic projection.
Page 7
Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what
we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of
the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely
interconnected.
If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the
holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as
Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our
minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic
universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the
fabric of reality.
What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to
draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from
bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric
events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui
brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less
miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we
are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become
suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out,
even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic
principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful
coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would
have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events
would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes
accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but
it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the
thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the
holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the
instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth
between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil
Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings
"indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views
of reality".
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Vangard notes...
This is one of the most fascinating files we have seen since it
seems to offer a hypothesis which "synthesizes" a multitude of
phenomena including that generally classed as "paranormal."
Related files on KeelyNet are the complete MIND series and
VEDA1.
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If you have comments or other information relating to such topics
as this paper covers, please upload to KeelyNet or send to the
Vangard Sciences address as listed on the first page.
Thank you for your consideration, interest and support.
Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson
Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet
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If we can be of service, you may contact
Jerry at (214) 324-8741 or Ron at (214) 242-9346
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