Theos-Talk Archives (November 2003 Message tt00143)

This material on the Universe as a Hologram is most valuable to understanding how Theosophical teachings have anticipated modern ideas in physics. In my own writings on these subjects, I review Bohm, Aspect, Pribram, Grof, and others, but then relate this whole holographic paradigm to Blavatsky's teachings. See www.zeropoint.ca, Book 2 of the Within-Without from Zero Points series. My writings are considerably further developed beyond the materials presented below, (as are the writings of Leon Maurer). I would like to outline some ideas relating the holographic paradigm to Blavatsky's work to illustrate not only that she anticipated the paradigm, but further, that her teachings allow a far deeper understanding of these issues. 

Most importantly, the holographic paradigm is a necessary consequence of Blavatsky's "fundamental dogam of occultism" which is the fundamental Unity of life. She states "There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole finite Cosmos." (p.277) There are various statements of this principle throughout The Secret Doctrine: 

"The first and Fundamental dogma of Occultism is Universal Unity (or Homogeneity) ... (p. 39)

"If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying, and that all the rest-as in the world of phenomena-are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations of that One, from Cosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super-human down to human and sub-human beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence-then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered. (p. 75)


"... no manifested thing can be thought of except as a part of a larger whole: the total aggregate being the One manifested Universe that issues from the unmanifest or Absolute (p. 86)


"The radical unity of the ultimate essence of each constituent part of compounds in Nature is the one fundamental law in Occult Science. (p.28)

"The fundamental law, the central point from which all emerged, around and toward which all gravitates, and upon which is hung the philosophy of the rest, is the One homogeneous divine Substance-Principle, the one radical cause. ... it is latent in every atom in the Universe, and is the Universe itself. (p.273)

Blavatsky clearly anticipated the fundamental unity of creation, which was Bohm's conclusion in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), and she is clearly talking abouty a "non-local reality" underlying manifest existence. 

There were two major mistakes made in how the holographic paradigm was developed in modern psychology, especially in the work of Pribram. Although Pribram regards the brain as operating holographically, he does not believe that there is any "laser beam in the brain"-that is, any source of coherent inner light, equivalent to the point source laser light used to produce holographs. In an Omni interview, Pribram explains:
Omni: I'm a little puzzled by one thing. When I first read about the holographic brain, I thought of it as a metaphor. Then I began to think you meant it as an actual model. Which is correct? Pribram: Both. First it was a metaphor. Then ... a model developed, because the mathematics fitted the data gathered in several laboratories around the world. There are no laser beams in the brain. I'm simply saying that the brain performs certain operations, which can be described by Gabor's mathematics, to code, decode, and recode sensory input. (1982)

Despite its revolutionary account of the dynamics and mechanisms of the brain, Dr. Pribram's theory remains, in essence, an "under the hat theory" of consciousness and mind. He assumed that the holographs are produced solely by the brain's physiological mechanisms and processes, and that there is no coherent point source of inner light to illuminate the holographs of experience. 

In the Secret Doctrine, the Monad is established within the mystical dimensions of the Heart, not the Head, and the whole human being has to be considered as a holographic system, not simply "the brain." Modern pseudo-scientists assume that the brain produces consciousness, although no-one knows where it is produced, or what it is. In contrast, Blavatsky portrays a zero point source established within the Heart as the basis for the human hologram, as in fact, all cosmoses have such zero-point foundations. Blavatsky states: " ... 'material points without extension' (zero-points) are ... the materials out of which the 'Gods' and other invisible powers clothe themselves in bodies ... ." 

Blavatsky anticipated the idea in modern science that the Universe emerged from a singularity condition, but her framework also encourages us to apply the same understanding to the microcosm as to the macrocosm. The Monad, in modern terms, is essentially a singularity established in seven dimensional hyperspace. This is the foundation for holographic consciousness, which is not simply "in the brain." Further, the Monad is a point source of supernal light, a light source, as is necessary for the production of a hologram. By contrast, Pribram states "there are no laser beams in the head," (which is untrue anyway, as there is also a zero point foundation for the theatre of consciousness within the Mind--see Len's writings). The modern holographic paradigm does not have a "light source" which is what is provided by a spiritual and metaphysical understanding of human consciousness. There is a whole inner circulation of light, within-without from higher dimensions, through zero point sources.

There were fundamental mistakes made in the modern holographic paradigm which are clearly suggested by Blavatsky, whose work is far beyond modern concepts, even Bohm. 

One last point: Bohm states that ultimately everything is a derivation of one underlying "holomovement," equivalent to what Len describes as the "spinergy." However, Blavatsky has a more complicated understanding of the "theological triunity" composed of -- THAT, the Seven skined Eternal Parent Space, and the Ceaseless Breath (the fundamental holomovement or spinergy). 



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <MarieMAJ41@aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 2:53 PM
Subject: Theos-World The Universe As A Hologram


> 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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