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Part 3 ...
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 unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels
the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding
many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals
during altered states of consciousness.
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of
LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient
who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of
a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the
course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly
detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in
such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the
species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side
of its head.
What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no
prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a
zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles
colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as
triggers of sexual arousal.
The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of
his research, Grof encountered examples of patients
regressing and identifying with virtually every species on
the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped
influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered
States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently
contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be
accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only
puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also
had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective
or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no
education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian
funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other
categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive
accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of
the future, of regressions into apparent past-life
incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena
manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use
of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences
appeared to be the transcending of an individual's
consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or
limitations of space and time, Grof called such
manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late
'60s he helped found a branch of psychology called
"transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal
Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded
professionals and has become a respected branch of
psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues
were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre
psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has
changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a
continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every
other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom,
organism, and region in the vastness of space and time
itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays
into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no
longer seems so strange.
The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called
hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at
Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the
concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it
would no longer be true to say the brain produces
consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the
appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything
else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has
caused researchers to point out that medicine and our
understanding of the healing process could also be
transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent
physical structure of the body is but a holographic
projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us
is much more responsible for our health than current medical
wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of
disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which
in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as
visualization may work so well because in the holographic
domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality
become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his
book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson
discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who,
by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire
grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates
that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch
the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off
again and on again several times in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of
explaining such events, experiences like this become more
tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.
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.
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