http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/peterr/hologram/objectivereality.html (To see this site, one of many that post this article, clear your address bar, then copy and paste this link in it, then hit "GO". Or Just google "The Universe as a Hologram")
The Universe as a Hologram
By Michael Talbot
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".
|
