Theos-Talk Archives (December 2007 Message tt00029)

Thank you, Cass,

That was excellent. And I have to say, Aspect and Bohm's theories brought to 
mind Jane Roberts' Seth's teachings.

Best,
Scribe

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cass Silva" <silva_cass@yahoo.com>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 7:34 PM
Subject: Re: Theos-World Lenny asks; What's new in scientific philosophy 
that could straighten out everyone's mind?


Hi Leon,
A few questions for you.
Cheers
Cass
TWM



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.

Cass:  What is confusing for the simple minded like me, is that Joe Average 
sees matter as solid.  I see the rocks in my garden as being solid. Stubbing 
my toe on the rock proves this to me.

Presumably then we are talking about a reality unbeknowns to our senses 
which is the cause for its solidity?  Underlying my rock, which I see, as 
solid, is a reality that it unavailable to my senses, and is this state a 
reality that enables one rock to know what the other rock is doing, or is it 
more the atoms making up the one rock stay in equilibrium in order for a 
rock to remain a rock?


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.
Cass:  In response to the bold type.  So Holygrams prove, even at this 
deeper level of reality, that particles we can see or measure, co-exist with 
a fundamental something, we cannot measure or see?

Cass: In theosophical terms are we saying that this fundamental ¡something¢ 
is the manifestation of ¡will¢ or ¡desire¢ of Paratbrahman? And if so, then 
this fundamental something, is god a solid? (relatively speaking in that 
energy may also be calculated or factored in?) and at some point in our 
future we will comprehend this?

If I am on the right track then god in manifestation shows itself to us 
through the cracks, so to speak. This also suggests that this concentration 
of will and desire cannot be maintained eternally, hence the need for 
pralaya?

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.

Cass: This analogy doesn¢t work for my feeble mindedness, as I put it down 
to smoke and mirrors because of the need to use two separate cameras.

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.

Cass:  What is doing the projection?

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.

Cass: The interconnectedness relies on the projector, take away the 
projector or projection and all falls away. No? Perhaps I have just proved 
the existence of god! Haha

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.

Cass: Doesn¢t Gardner call Time and Space,  extensions of matter, although 
this also suggested to me ¡location¢.

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."

Cass:  Isn¢t this Plato¢s idea?  All that was, is and will be already 
exists.  Exists as a continuum as what was, when it was, in fact was  ¡is¢ 
and what will be when it will be, will also be ¡is¢.  Am I to go to Advaita 
and say that there is no ¡yesterday¢ no ¡tomorrow¢ only ¡now¢?  For me this 
is difficult as I cannot reconcile it with evolving from a mindless being 
into a mindful being without the extensions of time.

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.
Cass:  I thought that memory was stored in every organ and that all our 
brain did was to act as the hard drive?

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).

Cass: If the brain is a hologram, then the higher self must be the 
projector? No?

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.

Cass: This also requires that whatever thoughts and desires caused the 
disease are reflected upon and the personality, when cleansed of its 
ignorant thinking, is reflected in the etheric or hologram? No.

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.

Cass:  HPB says that Apollonius did not become invisible but acted upon the 
will of the group, so they believed he became invisible.  Although this 
doesn¢t explain how he appeared in another location some miles away. 
Perhaps it has something to do with his astral body.
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".


BACK








----- Original Message ----
From: Leon Maurer <leonmaurer@aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 9:55:22 AM
Subject: Theos-World Lenny asks; What's new in scientific philosophy that 
could straighten out everyone's mind?

Want to know what is going on at the cutting edges of the New
Scientific Paradigm now coming around the bend -- which will soon
verify Theosophical metaphysics along with my ABC field model that
explains it all geometrically and electrodynamically?

Check out the following reference index of relevant articles and
authors. Be selective. See the *real* world from different Points
of view. Find out who and what we really are, and how we are all
interconnected. Have fun.

http://twm.co. nz/ind3.html

For starters, read:

http://twm.co. nz/hologram. html And follow all the links

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