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
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.
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.
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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