E51 Bonus - Reality
I am going to miss this little sideline. Stories do not end, of course, but they have to stop somewhere. There are many mysteries in life, so I leave you with some thoughts on one of them, in case you have nothing better to do than read it.
Athena had spoken with Sarah. ‘By the way I read your article on holograms, pretty good.’
It was Sarah who was taken aback this time, and slightly embarrassed, ‘thank you,’ she had to bring it back to mind with an effort, ‘it was commissioned some time ago by a popular science magazine so it is not what I would call scholarly, but it generated some interesting discussion and, as a poor student at the time, I needed the money.’
‘You described some theoretical research that was quite revolutionary, and actually quite accurate. Unfortunately for the proponents, Dr. Sheldrake’s ‘dogmas’ have resulted in the ideas being somewhat suppressed or ridiculed, whereas they could have led you somewhere very interesting – a little like Socrates, who was also suppressed and ridiculed despite articulating some remarkable truths at the time. Galileo suffered the same fate. It seems to be the norm within humanity to ridicule those with something genuinely meaningful to say.’
Sarah’s article was written in 1990, here is what she said:
Does objective reality[1] exist?
In the year 1982 a remarkable event took place, largely unnoticed. 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, or even the 21st 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 - eventually.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with one another, regardless of the distance separating them, it does not 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 discovery suggests that objective reality may not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
How does a hologram work?
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. What we refer to as a hologram, is like a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the subject of the photograph 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 comingle) 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. Take a hologram of a rose and cut it in half and then illuminate it by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. 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 organisation 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. lf 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 may be 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 visualise 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 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. lf 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.
The interconnected nature of the Universe
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’[2] or apparitions, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. ln addition to its phantom like nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. lf the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe may be infinitely interconnected.
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain may be connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. From this vantage point, everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorise and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
ln 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 may be a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools, ii might even be possible to someday reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long forgotten past.
What else the super hologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the super hologram 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 warehouse of ‘all that there is’.
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing (yet) what else might lie hidden in the super hologram he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or, as he puts it, perhaps the super holographic level of reality is a ‘mere stage’ beyond which lies ‘an infinity of further development’.
The Holographic Mind
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the Universe may be a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research. Stanford 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 and beyond it.
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 not able 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.
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 itself is a hologram that extends beyond its apparent physical confines.
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 memorise 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 Encyclopedia Britannica.)
Imagine what that number would be if your lifetime was essentially unlimited, like the Grace, who remember everything.
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 – the same as was suggested above for the human brain.
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 find the answer. Instead, associations like ‘striped’, ‘horse-like’, 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 many pieces of information seem instantly cross related with other pieces of information – another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, the mind 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 sense (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 lens, a translating device able to convert and 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.
Holographic evidence
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained an 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 head, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can be shown to explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holographic 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.
Article in The New Inquiry about sense of smell.
Humans have around 350 types of receptors on 40 million neurons, which in combination allow us to distinguish more than a trillion different odours. Despite this incredible power of olfaction, the human sense of smell is often neglected, considered a holdover from our animal past or a source of unseemly sensations. It doesn’t help that odours are often literally beneath us; the evolutionary argument goes that when early humans started walking upright, our nose got farther away from the smells on the ground, decreasing the relative importance of olfaction for getting around. Evidence contradicting this story came from a 2006 study that recruited undergraduate students to get on all fours and track the scent of chocolate oil dripped on grass. They were remarkably good at it, showing that our ‘bad’ sense of smell isn’t biologically determined—it’s just that we’re out of practice.
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 separate 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, a kind of superficial illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too may be more a sensory illusion than objective reality. We may actually be ‘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 super hologram.
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The Holographic Paradigm
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 galvanised 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 invisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. With this model 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 distant point, and to understand a number of other unsolved puzzles in psychology.
In particular, psychiatric researcher Dr 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 use 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 encapsulated in such a form, but noted that the sexually arousing portion of the male of the species’ anatomy was a patch of coloured 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, coloured 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 encounters patients regressing and identifying with every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings that helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie ‘Altered States[3]’), 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 and 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 pre-cognitive 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 that 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 ‘trans-personal experiences’, and in the late ‘60s he helped found a branch of psychology called trans-personal 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.
Connecting Hard Science with the Holographic Paradigm
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 the consciousness that 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 can ultimately be as real as ‘reality’. Even visions and experiences involving ‘non-ordinary’ reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his intriguing book, ‘In a holographic universe’ there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. In ‘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 human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely connected.
Limitless Implications
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 may be but 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 Carlos Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo Don Juan Matus, 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 make 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 Birkbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings ‘indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality’.
Sarah had written this article in an attempt to capture an idea that was certainly observable, if not understood. She received her meager payment that was to her a windfall at the time and moved on. Her article had drawn together some amazing findings that seem to have been suppressed. Now, nearly forty years later an extra terrestrial is pointing out the magic she had unveiled.
For some reason this article seems to have disappeared from www – nothing sinister I hope.
Do you subscribe to conspiracy theories?
No, but I am certain many things occur that do not reach the ‘sweaty masses’.
Sweaty masses? A curious term.
Something the young man dreamt up.
Might have known.
Article on holograms in Daily Mail
The holographic paradigm—and, for that matter, the entire movement to integrate physics and mysticism—has lost a lot of steam over the last decade or so. Karl Pribram’s theories never found widespread acceptance; David Bohm died in 1992 without convincing many physicists of his views; and most of the prominent advocates of the model have moved on to other interests. Was all that deliberate?
Some would say that the reason for this is that the views and ideas did not sit well with the ‘powers that be’[4], who, for a very long time, have had very effective ways of suppressing or ridiculing ideas and people they perceived as a threat to their hard earned power and the status quo.
It’s not that the theory is any less interesting or plausible than it ever was, but there’s just not a whole lot one can do with the notion, especially when mainstream science treats it as a joke. Supposing the universe really were something like a hologram, what would that mean in a practical sense? And how could it ever be proved or disproved? It is certainly fascinating to ponder a unified theory that explains the mysteries of physics, time, space, consciousness, and mysticism[5]. But just as you can’t build muscles by studying exercise, you probably won’t master the workings of the intricate order just by reading about it.
These words opened this strange odyssey. Quote. ‘The mission of LinkedIn is simple: connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.’ The words and bold are from Linkedin, not myself. But how do you make someone more productive and successful? There are obviously many, many attributes that could contribute to that. I propose to look at a couple that I consider critical. Imagination and creativity.
I hope, to some degree at least, that this has been achieved.
Thank you. Auf wiedersehn. Carpe Diem
I hope we meet again somewhere.
Fin
[1] Objective reality is the collection of things that we are sure exist independently of us. Every person is able, in principle, to verify every aspect of objective reality. Anything that cannot be verified in this way is not part of objective reality.
[2] Apparition, phantom, ghost – word originating in ancient Greek literature
[3] 1980 Ken Russell movie
[4] PTB – a strange and often sinister reference to those who seek to control what happens on this planet.
[5] A constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions and experiences aimed at human transformation – we probably need a new, less controversial word for all this.