Theos-Talk Archives (November 2003 Message tt00112)

 http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html

The Universe as a Hologram 
Author unknown

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. 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. 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 blue 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 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 through some 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 
every 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 frequencies, 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 the 
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 smellisin 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. 

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 
unsolvedpuzzles in psychology. 

In particular, Stanislav 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. 

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 paradigm 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 describes 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. 
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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