Are We Spirits in the Material World?

 

Robert Lanza, MD

 Author’s note: I’m writing this in bits and pieces, which seems appropriate to the topic. Since I wrote the body of the paper, I posted a query on Facebook regarding time and entropy, and received some great responses and leads. I’ve dutifully read and considered the responses and followed up the recommendation to read Sean Carroll’s website. I did, in fact, slog through great sections of From Eternity to Here, but I confess that I felt, at times, overwhelmed by the content. I must revisit the book and read it again more carefully. Also, I checked reviews for Biocentrism and was dismayed by the sheer nastiness of many people purporting to “critique” his work. More often than not, reviewers—scientists and non-scientists alike—were unbearably nasty and disrespectful to the author. A notable exception is Richard Conn Henry’s quick overview (http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/biocentrism.pdf) where he points out factual errors in Lanza’s physics, but ends up agreeing with his major tenets. Otherwise, there was much Lanza bashing out there, boiling down to the fact that anyone who seeks to merge any kind of spirituality into the study of the universe is a complete, babbling New Age idiot enamored of bad science and bewitched by ‘woo’. Sigh. My entire website would be bashed mercilessly for the same reason. I am not a scientist, but I do have a sharp, critical mind honed by decades of reading and study, helped along by a Yale Ph.D in literature and culture. That doesn’t matter at all for those with degrees in the sciences, which apparently gives many critics license to disembowel you with sarcasm and contempt. However, if you try to do something really big—like explain the universe and its workings as related to human consciousness—you’re bound to upset people. What interests me, of course, is how all of this relates to life after death, or to the survival of consciousness unfettered from the animal, so to speak. If you will kindly bear with me as I first discuss the general implications of Lanza’s work, I will address the issue of EVPs and evidence for the afterlife right afterwards. I promise.

I tried. I really did. I’ve slogged through so many ‘popular’ books on quantum mechanics and Theories of Everything that I’ve lost count. The latest one was Dr. Robert Lanza’s Biocentrism. I have not finished the book yet, but I’m close. I’ve made it through six of the basic tenets or precepts of his theory. I thought this biocentric view—in which living things create all reality according to their perceptions and perspective–was pretty amazing, but I was troubled by the need to obliterate objective reality in favor of one entirely dependent on us. He explained why it is when you kick a tree, it hurts—it’s not because the tree has any objective reality, it’s simply a complex reaction between wave-functions of the tree that have collapsed into ‘thing that causes pain’, or something like that. I confess, it’s a little murky to me. I lay awake last night wondering how Dr. Lanza would explain why it is that a tree could fall on us and kill us, even though we never looked at it, never ‘collapsed’ it into reality or filtered it through our sensory systems.

I then wondered why it is that we all agree to such a large extent on what constitutes outside reality (assuming, as I’m afraid I still do, that such a thing exists) and to what we are referring when we use language. I suppose Dr. Lanza would say that a community of human animals agrees on illusory external realities because we all process information in a similar way: we’re built from the same ‘stuff’, so to speak. Then, just because I thought it would be fun to fret over this until 4 AM, I questioned the entire time issue. Of course, time is relative, and I do understand that on a layperson’s level. If you’re shot out into space and travel at a certain speed, you will age more slowly than your counterparts on Earth. There is even a formula to determine this. What upsets me about time is its relation to aging, to ‘entropy’, I think, if one can equate the two. We assume that as we age, time is passing; somehow, time is responsible for wrinkles and bad knees. Dr. Lanza says that the very notion of time is illusory, created by humans to make sure we can get to the office on time and function in a capitalist society (those are my words regarding the office and capitalism). Simply because we measure something does not mean that it exists in any objective sense or in any sense at all. Clocks are solely for convenience; as the author claims, we could measure the same thing by melting ice cubes or sunsets or tides.

So why, then, do we age and die as all biological things are wont to do? Dr. Lanza maintains that where we see progressive change there is really only a series of present moments that we link together and pretend form some kind of coherent trajectory from past to present to future. I think we all accept that the past and future don’t really ‘exist’ in any meaningful sense; the past lives only through memory of it (and we all know how tricky and deceptive memory is; even if we could remember everything ‘perfectly,’ we still don’t know what it is that we are remembering—certainly nothing material, nothing we can point to) and the future hasn’t happened yet, so by definition it has no objective existence either. This eternal present has always terrified me, because it rips me out of context. I think our author would say that ‘context’ is just the human animal’s way of making sense of things that aren’t there. That’s the problem. The previous statement doesn’t mean anything, yet that’s what Dr. Lanza is saying. Back to the aging and dying issue: all of humans experience this trajectory, whether or not ‘time’ exists. It seems to me that if we all share this path, always, without exception, then something ‘like’ time is happening to us. We don’t have to call it time, but we have to call it something. Here’s a quick and concise definition of entropy:

“Entropy is a measure of order and disorder. If left alone, aging systems go spontaneously from youthful, low entropy and order to old, high entropy and disorder”. (http://www.worldscibooks.com/popsci/p597.html)

So if entropy is responsible for aging and ultimately what we call ‘death’, then what is entropy’s relationship to time? If time is a human-made illusion, then what is killing us? The key word in the quote above is ‘spontaneously’. That word, by definition, indicates that a process is occurring without resorting to the passage of time. How is it that aging can occur ‘spontaneously’? If it is not a process, and doesn’t the word ‘process’ indicate something occurring over time, then what the heck is it? I’m afraid that Dr. Lanza cannot say that time is purely illusory when biological systems age and die due to a process that we call entropy. His argument against this is interesting, yet in many ways illogical.

He states that what we see as having progressed to a state of entropy is simply another snapshot in the present moment, and what we observe is change from one present moment to another present moment; it’s only our interpretation that sees a progression or superimposes a pattern or value judgment. In other words, aging is an assumption we make when faced with changes in the human organism. Those changes result from an illusory past in the first place. If time doesn’t happen, then change doesn’t either; therefore, nothing we observe is a result of a change. We don’t, however, live in the eternal present. I would argue that we can’t. Does it make sense that we could possibly understand life as one present moment after another and then death? We can’t think that way, so if that’s the way “things really are,” then what’s the point if we can’t make that conceptual leap? The Theory of Everything makes no sense if we can’t live it or even fully grasp it.

I have to finish the entire book before I get to the implications of Dr. Lanza’s theory. If life creates consciousness and consciousness creates the universe and everything in it, we are certainly all-powerful. Maybe he is about to say that we are eternal, since nothing that is out of time can possibly cease to exist. OK, so I will take that to mean that my consciousness is boundless and not in any way bound by change (an illusion created by time). However, I know that I will age and die, as evidenced by everything around me succumbing to entropy. So I’m back to square one. My death means something to me, as it does to those who love me. Of course, if Dr. Lanza says that Kirsten will ALWAYS exist, the question is HOW will she always exist? All that which limits my consciousness—including my body, my perceptions, and my brain—is what I know as real. One might TELL me that what I know as real actually isn’t, but that doesn’t change anything for me. You can say that my iced-cream is an illusion that I brought into existence, but in any case, it tastes the same whether it is an external reality or a consciousness-created reality.

The following quote is from Sean Carroll’s web site:

“The first mystery of the arrow of time is that it’s nowhere to be found in the fundamental laws of physics. Those laws work perfectly well if we run processes backwards in time. (More rigorously, for every allowed process there exists a time-reversed process that is also allowed, obtained by switching parity and exchanging particles for antiparticles — the CPT Theorem.) Nevertheless, the macroscopic world we observe is full of irreversible processes. The puzzle is to reconcile microscopic reversibility with macroscopic irreversibility.”

Therein lays the issue, the knot: what happens on a microscopic level—including, of course, the quantum level—is apparently NOT occurring on the macroscopic level. Photons can behave in bizarre, contradictory and fantastic ways, but that doesn’t mean anything in our large, material world is doing anything remotely like it. Our ‘big’ world seems to function according to the classical laws of physics. There are two possibilities here: we have a fundamental contradiction which can only be resolved when someone—probably a physicist—finds the missing link (something like the debunked notion of the aether) that explains everything (the GUT: Grand Unifying Theory), OR the world on the macroscopic level DOES contain all of the contradictions of the quantum level upon which its existence rests, and we simply haven’t devised the correct experiments to illustrate this correlate. Again from Sean Carroll’s web site:

“Is there any way the arrow of time can be explained dynamically?

I can think of two ways. One is to impose a boundary condition that enforces one end of time to be low-entropy, whether by fiat or via some higher principle; this is the strategy of Roger Penrose’s Weyl Curvature Hypothesis, and arguably that of most flavors of quantum cosmology. The other is to show that reversibilty is violated spontaneously — even if the laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, the relevant solutions to those laws might not be. However, if there exists a maximal entropy (thermal equilibrium) state, and the universe is eternal, it’s hard to see why we aren’t in such an equilibrium state — and that would be static, not constantly evolving. This is why I personally believe that there is no such equilibrium state, and that the universe evolves because it can always evolve. The trick of course, is to implement such a strategy in a well-founded theoretical framework, one in which the particular way in which the universe evolves is by creating regions of post-Big-Bang space-time such as the one in which we find ourselves.”

 So, if the universe were static and eternal, time would be an illusion that we clearly create from a biocentric position. If, however, the universe is constantly evolving, we certainly do need time to account for that. Of course, Lanza would say that the universe is only evolving because we “evolve” it through our perceptions. I think he goes too far, actually. It’s an interesting idea that he presents, but it makes much more sense that the internal/external worlds are in relationship to each other, not that one precludes the other:

“To say that time is not well understood is one thing, but to assert that time is therefore an illusion seems unfounded to me. When forced to summarize his conclusion, he (page 111) backtracks from the bolder statements and writes only that: “Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.” I could add that time is real because mind and change are real.” http://darwiniana.com/2010/02/12/biocentrism-review/

I’m inclined to agree with the author of this quote. We perceive changes in the universe and the passage of time through our ‘animal sense perception,’ but that doesn’t mean that time and change are non-existent properties or phenomena. We need the notion of time for classical physics and we don’t, really (from what I am able to glean) for quantum physics, but again—time appears to be a hypothetical concept in every area of cosmology, necessary but not ‘proven’. Time may not exist, but entropy does, and I feel entropy as growing older and facing biological death. My experience of time leads me to believe that I (and all other living things) am in a constant state of evolution and flux. What might stand apart from that? Consciousness. It is entirely possible that what is in the constant evolutionary state is the material world, not the quantum world. If my consciousness arises from a quantum field, if awareness itself functions according to the rules of the sub-atomic realm, then consciousness is not bound by time and would, theoretically, continue on indefinitely.

Critics would accuse me of bringing ‘dualism’ back into the discussion as an excuse to save the notion of a soul. However, I’ve never understood why dualism is such a dirty word for scientists. If we can have a material and a quantum world that function according to different paradigms, then why is it not possible that the ‘human animal’ functions in two entirely different ways as well? Why could we not be both ‘material’ and ‘quantum’? Yes, I realize that no one has proven that consciousness emerges from a quantum field; however, it seems the best explanation that we have right now. Now we can engage in Part Two of this grand discussion, which involves the data that paranormal researchers bring back from their investigations. Yes, I realize that many scientists will stop reading right here and forever turn their backs on soulbank (if they would even look at it to begin with) and everything herein contained, but . . . we DO come back with tantalizing data that is not explained by normal means. I can say that with authority after years of painstakingly sorting through audio, video, ITC sessions and so on. I think that the hypothesis that consciousness occupies the quantum space might explain EVPs and all the other anomalies we bring home and puzzle over.

STAY TUNED.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D

Week Twelve at the Old State Hospital; Week One at the Adult Care Facility

Last weekend, someone I loved decided to commit himself to a psychiatric ward in the Valley. It doesn’t matter who this person is, or even what brought him to make the decision he did. What matters is that he is improving and coming to an understanding of what led him to the hospital.

I was in a very strange position last week. I taught at an old mental institution, and then I headed over to visit my friend at a ‘new’ mental care facility. I was surrounded at all times with either the shadow of mental illness or the live version. There were many emotions coursing through me; my confusion and pain kicked off my own nemesis, anxiety and panic. This experience was part of a life lesson for me, a way to humanize and personalize mental illness so that I would no longer fear it, or find it morbidly fascinating.

It is extraordinarily difficult to define “illness”; if you try to kill yourself or you’re hearing voices, we can all ‘reasonably’ assume that you need to be hospitalized. That means that your freedom is abolished, since your freedom was too much to handle and allowed you to spiral into negative behaviors or facilitate a chemical glitch. There are no phones, no pens, no computers, no television, no contact with the outside world with the exception of visiting hours, and nothing is allowed that you could possibly injure yourself with, including—believe it or not—stuffed animals. No balloons, because you might strangle yourself with the strings; no notebooks, because you could turn the metal spiral into a weapon.

I watched everyone in there very carefully. I was allowed to participate in group therapy. I pushed aside my own pain, so that I could understand how we define mental illness and what it means to the person who is suffering. No matter what I thought I knew about the issue, it turns out I knew not nearly enough. First of all, people who hear voices, those diagnosed ‘bipolar,’ and those who experience paranoia or hallucinations are not all that different from the rest of us, no matter how much I always wanted to distance myself from the truly ‘crazy’. It was a shock to engage people in conversation that had a scary diagnosis (from my point of view) such as schizophrenia (and here I am only assuming that one would receive that diagnosis if one heard voices; I’m actually not sure how many other ‘mental disorders’ feature this as a symptom). They were, for the most part, entirely rational and able to discuss their disease. Suddenly, I got it: there is ‘you’, and there is this ‘disease’, and they are not the same. The illness afflicts you, but is NOT you. Once I understood that, mental illness became akin to any other chronic problem that you have to manage with medication and therapy. I wasn’t afraid of the people in that unit who had the ‘scariest’ diagnoses. They were, simply, people trying to recover.

Then there were people who received diagnoses that might or might not be clearly related to an illness requiring a variety of medications. In the case of my friend, I highly doubted the diagnosis he received. It seemed to misrepresent what was happening; it was a diagnosis of a psychiatrist who didn’t really know this person the way I did. I can only explain this by example: I have battled anxiety disorders my entire life. Sometimes I have to contend with debilitating panic attacks, but that’s only when I’m at my worst. If the anxiety goes on too long, I will become depressed. Do I consider myself ill? Do I need to be medicated? This is where the question becomes extraordinarily complex. I honestly don’t know the answer. At my worst, I tried medications that my therapists would push on me relentlessly, because it was always easier to push pills rather than disentangle a complicated and confusing pattern of thinking that led to painful physical and emotional symptoms.

Did the medication solve the problem? In my case, it never did. Although there was some relief from the worst of the physical symptoms, I never felt that the real issues that triggered my anxiety were ever sufficiently addressed. Disordered thinking creates illness, and until you learn how to guide your thoughts in a rational direction, you will not recover. Some people argue that you can’t guide your thoughts or control your moods until your brain chemistry is under control, and I have no argument there. The truth is, NO ONE KNOWS how much of mental illness is biological and how much is cognitive. I almost walked out in frustration from a group session where we could “ask a psychiatrist” any question we wanted. He couldn’t answer our most important questions. He simply didn’t know. Where does that leave concerned friends and family? If the ‘experts’ are at a loss, how are we supposed to keep our loved ones safe and healthy?

On this site, I have attempted to address questions that are very difficult to answer. In this case, I know that cutting-edge science is studying how changes in our thinking and perception actually alter brain chemistry and even structures. Good therapy can evince physical changes in the brain, as does exercise, certain supplements and maintaining healthy relationships. There is such an intimate relationship between our behavior and our brain chemistry that it might simply be impossible to decide what’s ‘chemical’ and what’s ‘cognitive’ when looking for causes of mental illness. There is a spectrum, though; schizophrenia is closer to a medical condition than a mood disorder, and requires the right drugs. Anxiety and panic do not always require medication.

Anxiety and panic disorder (and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and phobias, etc.) are clinical diagnoses. Do I like the fact that I was diagnosed with a ‘disorder’? Absolutely not.  I understand my ‘disorder’ as being human, female and living in Los Angeles in 2012. My life, my circumstances and my history have all contributed to the fact that my friend’s hospitalization has kicked off panic attacks in restaurants and at 5:00 AM, when I so desperately need to sleep. Will I recover my equilibrium? I absolutely will, because I know what I need to do; I know what this “illness” requires of me, and I have a plan ready. That is exactly what they taught my friend to do during his stay in the hospital.

Those who were locked up for months and years at Camarillo State Hospital weren’t all that different from me. I am more saddened and distressed than I ever used to be at the thought that the patients were often treated with drugs only designed to keep them from expressing their pain or creating more work for the staff. In different circumstances, my friend would have found himself committed there and drugged into a stupor. My anxiety disorder might have landed me there, too, and I would have been treated in a similar fashion: knocked out and kept quiet. Thank God that modern psychiatry has evolved to the point that it has. A stay at the hospital for mental/emotional disorders now is nothing like it was then. The issue now is the exact opposite of what it was back in the Camarillo years: so that insurance companies can save money, you might find yourself back out in the world far more quickly than you should be. There is no time to completely recover.

One thing, however, is exactly the same. No one likes to discuss mental illness in the open. There is still a terrible stigma attached to it. We can talk endlessly about our diabetes, our high blood pressure, even our cancers. Why can’t we discuss what happens to our brains? Managing a mood disorder is no different from managing any other medical issue; we are afraid because it hits too close to home. We all have, to varying degrees, emotional and cognitive imbalances. Some of us get sick, others don’t; but we all have the potential to lose control of our fears or find ourselves unable to express our pain. To be human is to be, to some degree, mentally ill. It’s only the severity of the illness that determines how much intervention we require.

I will never view Camarillo in the same light. It used to be, “oh, those poor patients.” They were “other”, “not me”; now, after sharing my friend’s pain and holding him as he cried, after watching myself dissolve into fear, I realize that the patient in Camarillo was simply us, in more unfortunate circumstances.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D./PHW

The Last Veteran

I am proud to work at Pierce College, and even more proud of those students who make it through college with tremendous challenges and impediments in their path. We were told at the beginning of the year to watch out for the returning vets from Afghanistan–they were a group at considerable risk of dropping out. I listened to the warnings, but I didn’t think I would have any trouble; after all, I have developed some skill assisting and mentoring the student at risk.

I was not, however, successful this semester. A returning veteran took one of my classes this year. He was quiet and reserved, always choosing to sit in the back of the classroom. He struggled with writing and grammar, but that is nothing unusual in our courses. He didn’t like to be called on to answer questions, and sometimes would refuse to answer even the simplest of queries. He didn’t like participating in group work, and he never volunteered to read anything aloud. I was careful with him; I had thanked him for his service the first week, as did others. If he didn’t want to talk in class, then so be it. I wasn’t going to push him.

Every semester since 2005, I have had one lone vet in at least one of my classes. In all that time, only two stayed until the end. One student stands out in particular. She not only had returned from Iraq, but she was seven months pregnant and taking my five-unit Spanish 2 course. This is a very difficult, time-intensive class. Not only did she finish the class, she received the highest grade and was a constant inspiration to others. She led the whole class by example and made us a team, as I imagined she might have done in the war. I was so proud of her, and I told her so. She was, in so many ways, a role model for me. I never complained about anything in my life knowing that she was demonstrating, every single day, a kind of fortitude and courage that I could only hope to emulate.

The other student who made it through was jumpy, nervous, unhappy and easily distracted. It was through much patience, effort and accommodation that he managed a “B”, which was a victory for us both. The damage was evident, but he had enough of himself intact that he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. He wanted to make it, and he did.

Not even tremendous effort or an iron will can save some of my students from leaving after week three or four. I remember one student who jumped every time a pencil hit the floor, his eyes darting around the room searching for exits. Another vet sat by the door, his body tense, ready to race outside as soon as he thought I might ask him to do anything. Others simply hid quietly in the back, disappearing without notice.

That’s what happened this semester. I didn’t try hard enough to keep my student vet, who was gone so fast that I was barely able to register his presence. I wasn’t sure what to do; he didn’t want any attention, yet attention is what he so desperately needed. I could feel the damage in him, the inability to string sentences together, the difficulty following what we were saying (and no, this was not due to language barriers; the same happened in Spanish and English), and the constant distraction and inability to sit still and listen. His nerves were firing at 100% at every moment. He was the last in and the first out.

I was at a loss. Everything about him required action on my part, yet he was an adult who did not want attention, help or even a sympathetic ear; and so, the cycle continues. The damage under the surface is vast and perhaps irreparable; I know that I need to intervene quickly now, seek out the appropriate assistance on campus and start the process the second I find out that a student of mine is returning from war. I always thank them for their service, but that is not enough. I want them to be able to thank me for mine, as well, when the sixteen weeks are over and they are moving on to another, happier moment in their lives.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

Week Seven at the Mental Hospital

Week Seven. At the end of week seven, actually. Next week I am more than halfway finished with this unique, and often difficult, semester.

Today Cam is not oozing strangeness or throwing off energy. It’s very quiet, as if nothing ever happened here of interest over the last 72 years. I can’t explain that. Why is today tranquil, but yesterday was crazy? There was SCREAMING in the unit behind the police station, from within an abandoned unit. Right before I heard those cries of anguish, a white mist came streaming from the doorway, dissipating as it rose. Kimberly and I had spent a couple of hours in the Archives here, watching a documentary about how wonderful Cam was, and how much everyone loved it here. Maybe there is some truth to that; the reality of this place is very, very complex.

In any case, I have something of a love/hate relationship with this place. It repels and attracts in equal measure. Today seems like every other day, anywhere in Southern California: it’s windy and clear, about 73 degrees, no hint of trouble on the horizon. The past seems as tame as the present and as uneventful as the future. It’s all simply, completely calm. Of course, it may not be that way tomorrow, or even when I leave my classroom at 4:00. Who or what makes such decisions is beyond me. For now, I will enjoy the fact that nothing is happening and see what might show up tomorrow.

Remembering Camarillo State Hospital

Recently, I was offerred the opportunity to teach at a campus that was
once–not all that long ago–a state hospital for the mentally ill.
Even though most people would assume, knowing me, that my primary
motivation was to lurk about the hallways in search of echoes of the
past, in fact it wasn’t. Give me a couple of paragraphs to explain
this, so that the rest makes sense.

There comes a time in one’s professional life where everything appears
to be on “repeat,” and one must, if one is to continue transforming
and progressing as a teacher and a person, shake everything up and
start over. I found myself last semester in a state of agitation and
upset, angry that I was in the position of explaining, over and over
and over again, what the subjunctive was, how to use it, when to use
it, and so on. As I ranted and raved over the finer points of the
“pluscuamperfecto,” I understood, finally, what it felt like to be
“burned out.” I had arrived. I didn’t want to be in my classroom, and
I didn’t want to continue to explain concepts that no one seemed to
understand; worst of all, I didn’t care to figure out why they didn’t
understand. It was a very difficult realization for me. The fact was,
the students didn’t understand because grammar was a foreign concept
in any language, Spanish or English. Our students don’t receive the
same education that they used to; no one is teaching the structure and
organization of language itself, so of course they didn’t understand.
They tend to write as they speak, and speak in the same register of
unstudied informality. So, it was a great pleasure to speak to the
Chair of Spanish at a real university who liberated me from teaching
grammar and instead gave me two classes where I could actually teach
language: functional, real, changing, elusive and flexible LANGUAGE.
In the last five weeks, I have been challenged to re-think how we
learn any language and to what purposes we use it to express our inner
states. It has been difficult for me, but at the same time, exactly
what I needed as a professional. As I work through Chapter 1, debating
the meaning of “cutre,” “cursi” and “guay”, I am back in touch with
living language instead of abstract grammar.

Since soulbank is not a site dedicated to the finer points of
language instruction, I will now attempt to convey what it’s like to
teach at a place that once incarcerated thousands of mentally ill
patients. I have always wondered how it would feel to be on the inside
of a place with such a powerful and emotional history. I am currently
teaching in the Bell Tower, where I have an office and spend many
hours a day. I wander from Bell Tower East to Bell Tower West, a
sprawling complex of hallways and floors divided into sections and
subsections. Every day I enter through Bell Tower East and make the
trek to my office, located in the heart of the building. I have one
class on the ground floor and another on the second floor, overlooking
the lush courtyard. I can see the balcony of the old Medical
Director’s apartment from that second floor hallway. It has not yet
been renovated, and it exists as a quiet testament to the past,
abandoned and empty. The old hospital influences everything that
happens in those hallways and classrooms, and I am often uncomfortable
there. I feel the oppression some days more than others; but everyday,
there is the looming feel of suppressed emotion in every corner of
that massive building. Not only has the university failed to erase the
past, it seems to have revived it.

Due to the fact that these buildings are of historical interest, the
arquitects were restricted as far as changes to the original structure
and layout of the Bell Tower complex. Therefore, it doesn’t look very
different than it did in the 1940s and 1950s, which seems to be the
last time the building was renovated. As I walk down an endlessly long
hallway, there are harsh florescent lights illuminating the path as
there were 50 years ago. On several occasions, I have experienced what
I can only understand as a time slip in that area. Once, a lone figure
struggling with a walker dragged himself down the Bell Tower hallway
as I watched from the double doors at the end. I felt in that moment
that I had lost my connection to the present moment; the two of us had
been cast backwards to a time when he was a patient and I was staff.
He disappeared around a hallway, and my attempts to locate him failed.
I don’t know if he was really there or not.

When the sun sets, the students disappear and the building takes on a
life of its own. I was on the cell phone to a dear friend of mine in
the little office I share with three other teachers. During the
conversation, we both heard a “whooshing” sound, like someone exhaling
into the phone. I assumed it was my friend’s child, and she assumed
someone was in the office with me. Of course, neither was the case. As
we spoke, the temperature dropped by what felt like 20 degrees. At
that moment, a student knocked at the door, I ended my conversation,
and she walked in. I watched her reaction upon entering the room. She
looked around, shivered, and asked why it was so cold. “What’s going
on in here?” were her exact words. That’s what is so fascinating about
this place: everyone–almost everyone–knows that something is living
and interacting with them on a daily basis, but there is no language
to explain it or make sense of it. We fall back on hackneyed terms
like “haunted,” which don’t explain the complexity and strangeness of
the experience we all share there.

Few employees discuss the past openly, at least not the professors and
staff; however, like a death in the family or a scandal everyone is
attempting to keep quiet, it floats in the air like a fog, permeating
our senses. Sometimes, someone will break the code of silence: “You
know that this place used to be an old mental hospital,” a colleague
states. “Yes, I’ve heard that,” I respond, careful to keep my
responses to a minimum. While I was giving a presentation to the
faculty, there were loud, disruptive bangs emanating from every corner
of the room we were in. There were the sound of feet running back and
forth on the upper balcony. People looked around, laughing, nervously
remarking that our room was haunted. “It’s the construction,” stated
the Chair, but a check of the outside showed no human activity. Later,
I sat in a dark hallway waiting for a chance to speak to a colleague,
and the banging in the walls started, very loudly and with that same
communicative intent that always unnerved me before. The welcoming
committee, I thought.

What fascinates me is how faculty and staff talk about the place in
which we all work. The Bell Tower and the other buildings on campus
are referred to almost as living beings, waiting quietly for
renovations that will probably never come; university officials have
authorized new buildings to go up over the cost of rehabbing the old,
abandoned wings of the hospital. “No one wants to teach here at night;
this place is different after the sun goes down. Everyone runs back to
their dorms or apartments because the old mental hospital takes over,”
states a colleague. She right, of course; I see this for myself. My
class is finished at 4:00, but of course I don’t run home. I want to
see for myself what happens as the shadows lengthen and the campus
empties. There is a palpable sense of sadness and depression, but also
of mystery. As the south side of campus, home to the infamous Unit 26,
darkens in the dying light, I am almost physically incapable of
standing watch. The campus is ringed by abandoned buildings, the
administration only managing to reform and rehab units in the center.
The empty wings stretch out like an endless prison, trapping us on the
inside or expelling us to the street, but never inviting us to
experience them directly; there is always an implicit rejection of our
curiousity.

I wander around, taking pictures with my phone, attempting to capture
something of the strangeness of the place, but it’s impossible. You
have to sit with those buildings as the air cools and the light fades,
if you can manage it. The glass is broken, the weeds have taken over,
the smell of mold, damp, dust and some sharp, unidentifyable chemical
wafts from the windows. Sometimes, a door will open for no apparent
reason by unit 87; it’s behind an iron gate, and you watch that door,
wondering how something so heavy and latched can simply drift open.
The message is always the same: I want you to come in, but I want also
want you to leave. The contradictory nature of this message feels like
madness.

In class, there is an exercise we always do to help the students
practice narratation in the past. There are three questions, of which
they pick one: 1. Describe a situation where you lost control of your
emotions. How did you feel? How did you regain control? What was the
effect on the other person? 2. Describe a situation where you received
information that changed your life. What did you learn? How did it
change everything? 3. Describe a situation where you felt real fear.
What happened? How did you resolve the situation? They almost always
pick number three. The students at this university almost unanimously
chose to talk about the campus and their dorm rooms as the setting for
their frightening stories. Keep in mind that I have revealed nothing
of my interest in the history of the old mental hospital. I have said
nothing regarding ghosts or paranormal phenomena. As far as they are
concerned, I’m just another Spanish teacher. Here are some of their
stories:

“I was sitting on the steps of one of the old, abandoned units. There
is an iron gate, and behind that, a landing with a heavy, locked
wooden door. That door is always bolted. I saw that it was bolted as I
sat down; I pay attention to things like that. I opened my book to
study a little bit while I was waiting for a friend. I heard something
creak behind me. I turned around, and that massive, heavy, latched
door was wide open. There was no one inside. There was no way it could
have opened on its own. I ran away so fast that I left my book on the
steps.” In fact, I can corroborate her story. I know this door to
which she refers. It was closed and bolted one day, and a few minutes
later, as I circled the building, it was wide open. There was, of
course, no one there.

Another story: “I was in my dorm room, Skyping with a friend. She kept
asking me who was there with me. I told her no one, that I was alone.
‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s someone behind you’. She could see the figure
of a man behind me, but when I turned around, there was no one there.”

“I was alone in my room. I turned off the lamp by my bed and went to
sleep. When I woke up the next morning, the lamp was across the room
and plugged in to another outlet. This happens all the time. Things
move around my room. I have no idea why this happens.”

“We were standing just outside the Bell Tower when we saw the shadow
of a tall man in the doorway. We were thinking that someone was
listening to us, because the shadow didn’t move. Finally, we went to
see who was there, and there was no one anywhere near that doorway.
This happens a lot here–there are dark shadows in doorways and
hallways, and no one is ever there.”

Other stories concern someone in one of the Bell Tower women’s
restrooms who shuffles and makes noise, but is not actually there. I
was able to experience this myself. It was after 4:00, that strange
time on campus when the students scatter and the buildings begin their
evening replay of past events. I walked into the fabled women’s
restroom and heard someone in one of the stalls, shuffling, pulling at
the toilet paper roll, sniffling–in short, making sure I knew she was
there–and because I had heard the stories, I had to check. All the
stalls were empty. I was the only one in there. I try to make some
sense of what happens in the Bell Tower and environs, but it’s
difficult to do. This is phenomena far beyond our paltry
‘investigator’ categories of residual vs. intelligent haunt. The
entire place seems intelligent, responsive, aware on some level. There
are no descriptors to make this clear. There is now a decade of
stories regarding this campus.

What most impresses me, however, are not the rather fantastic stories
of the spinning man in the parking lot or the woman by the entrance to
the Bell Tower who asks for directions and then disappears; no, what
most impresses me is the fact that so many people can feel this place.
They report nausea, headaches, feelings of depression and gloom, a
sense that they have to leave where they are and find another place to
hang out. You can see this on campus; the students do not linger in
the hallways of the Bell Tower the way I have seen countless other
students do so on other campuses. There is a palpable sense of needing
to escape certain areas; if I stay too long in my little office or sit
too long in one of those endless hallways, I will start to feel it:
that beginning of a headache in the back of my head, that sense of
being watched and weighted down by something I can’t name or
understand. Every day that I am there, you will see me flee to the
safety of the patio by the Student Union. I work there until I am able
to re-enter the building. But always, there is that nagging feeling
that you are pulled in two directions: towards the mystery and the
strangeness, and away from it. My mind pulls me into the Bell Tower
because I am fascinated by it, by the seepage of history and emotion
into the heart of this campus; I am repelled by something more basic,
an instinct for self-preservation that kicks in at a certain point and
doesn’t allow me to linger too long in a place that is defined by
instability, insanity and confusion.

I can’t help but think how the turmoil of adolscence and young
adulthood mixes with the chaos of the old State Hospital, creating an
emotional stew so potent that it brings back the living and the dead
to re-enact, re-interpret and re-conceptualize the distant past. This
is where the language teacher is at a loss for words. My professional
life has always focused on expression, on the precision of language to
interpret inner states and comprehend the external world. That is my
job; take a ‘foreign’ language and de-mystify it, make it
comprehensible, bend it to the will of the student so that it becomes
a tool for their self-understanding. I always believed that everything
we experience can be expressed, if we only could find the proper
phrases, sentences, syntax and grammar. It’s the conceit of every
language teacher: learn the right words, in the right order, in the
proper mood, with the correct punctuation and accentuation, and you
will have understood the world and the world will understand you;
however . . .

Camarillo State Hospital erases all that hubris as soon as you step
from the outside courtyard into the hallway and are assaulted by
lonliness, doubt and discomfort. You don’t know why you feel that way.
You don’t know how to explain it. There is no grammar for expressing
what we call ghosts, no terminology that makes sense of it. It’s
beyond language, beyond words, beyond the skill of the professor to
create order from a feeling. At five o’clock, the students are gone
and you are alone in an endless cage of walls and bars, lost in a
labyrinth that others experienced decades ago, staring endlessly out
the windows that allowed no thought of freedom. You feel your own
tears for reasons that are hidden from you, as if you were remembering
something terrible that could not have possibly happened to you; and
yet, somehow, some way, it’s as if you were there from the beginning,
remembering scenes from a life that you never lived.

Now, you think, it’s time to go home.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

What is a Ghost? Look in the Mirror

¿Qué es un fantasma?
- Un evento terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez, un instante de dolor, quizá; algo muerto que parece por momentos vivo aún, un sentimiento, suspendido en el tiempo, como una fotografía borrosa, como un insecto atrapado en ámbar.
Un fantasma, eso soy yo. (“El espinazo del diablo”, 2001)

What is a ghost?

–A terrible event, condemned to repeat itself again and again; an instant of pain, perhaps; something dead that seems at times alive again, a feeling, suspended in time, like a blurry photograph, like an insect trapped in amber. A ghost–that is what I am. (“The Devil’s Backbone”, 2001)

A ghost: a hologram extending outward in time and space from the Implicate Order; a consciousness emerging from the Spiritual into the material. There is much more to say, so please be patient; I will continue to define the ghost, but there is some background information you will need to understand what a discarnate entity truly is. For the moment, allow me to introduce Michael Talbot (unless you read the previous post, in which case you already know who he is):

Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe (1992) has become a classic in popular science. Although Talbot was a “science writer” and not an actual, practicing scientist, he understands his subject on a deep level. He bases his theories on the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, who both—independently of each other, in different fields—came to espouse holographic models of the universe and our perception of reality. As Talbot states, “. . . there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it. . . are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

Of course, I jump on the “level of reality beyond our own” and want to know, exactly, what that is; and, because of the way I think, I have to ask that question first. Talbot doesn’t really venture an answer to that question until the end of the book. Clearly, however, we have seen this line of thought before: Plato’s cave, dualism in philosophy, structuralism in language and almost every religion on the planet. The idea that the reality that we perceive is either a copy, an imitation, or a hologram of a deeper, “authentic” reality is an ancient idea receiving new attention from writers on science (mostly quantum physics), medicine, psychology and a smattering of other social sciences. I admire the cross-disciplinary approach to something as fundamental as the nature of reality; however, I remain unsure about the conclusions.

What I don’t think that I understand very well is how the latest revelations into consciousness affecting the material world translate into a “deeper order” of reality. The placebo effect, the psi effect, mind-body healing, evidence for reincarnation, the relationship between the observer and the observed that skews the results of experiments in quantum physics: all of these documented and well-studied realities of human consciousness lead one to believe that we are creating—or at least, participating actively—in the creation of the “real”, of ourselves, our identities, our futures and the fate of everything around us. The fact that consciousness itself seems to be everywhere and does not appear to vanish upon the death of the material body leads me to unsettling conclusions: if my body is simply an expression of my consciousness, how will I—or anyone—be able to understand myself after death as a separate, yet intimately connected, spirit in/of the universe? It all seems so vague, so transcendental, so . . . religious.  Am I a living hologram embedded in a deeper reality? Am I a spirit in a body? Am I pure consciousness expressing itself in one particular incarnation, preparing itself for the next? Am I a soul? Is my body simply a receiver of the frequencies that express it? Is material reality an illusion? Is form so mutable and transient that there is no point identifying with it at all? To all the above, apparently, the answer is “yes”.

Now, of course, the left brain sneers and spits on the ground at this point (if half a brain could spit), exclaiming that all of the above is the wishful thinking or the cultural repression of the spiritual elite, seeking to distract us from a miserable material reality whose pre-eminence can be defined and explained by a word like “cancer” (and here, I am thinking of Talbot himself) or “heart failure.” Try explaining all of this to someone who is dying, and see what happens. The material is everything to someone who has lost control of the disease process; it’s nice that some people can heal themselves through guided imagery, but what about all of those in the world that fail in that effort and die anyway? Are those people spiritual failures? How did Talbot come to understand his disease? Was he at peace with the fate of his material body? Could his own imminent demise have inspired, in part, this last book that he wrote?

Michael Talbot died in 1992 at the age of 38 from leukemia, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic which took away many of his friends; he therefore was well acquainted with death and the reality of loss. Talbot’s book—and others I have read in a similar vein—does not deny death or the fact of dissolution of the material body and all forms of matter surrounding us, far from it; cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, accidents, etc. may have death as the outcome. In any case, none of us materially survive this physical existence. For Talbot and others, it’s not about when or how you shed your material shell, it’s about the nature of consciousness itself and how it not only survives your body, it is not a function of that body. It does not originate in the “material” at all, but is only expressed by it. We have presented (on prior soulbank posts) the evidence for such an assertion, (near-death experiences, children’s past lives, past-life regression, mediumship, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, shamanism, and more) but what IS new here is the idea that EVERYTHING is a holographic projection: your body, your cancer, your cat, your right hand, your rose bush, your brain, the pile of leaves in your yard, your yard, the dirt, the worms; all material reality.

This goes back to particles traveling beyond the speed of light, to the reality that on the most fundamental level of creation particles are interconnected so that what happens to one immediately affects the other. If we had no evidence that this process happens on a larger scale, perhaps we would have to scale down our expectations; however, we have an abundance of data indicating that this actually does occur. Here is Talbot summarizing one of Karl Pribram’s main findings regarding the holographic nature of the brain:

“The question that began to bother him was, If the picture of reality in our brains is not a picture at all but a hologram, what is it a hologram of? The dilemma posed by this question is analogous to taking a Polaroid picture of a group of people sitting around a table and, after the picture develops, finding that, instead of people, there are only blurry clouds of interference patterns positioned around the table. In both cases one could rightfully ask, Which is the true reality, the seemingly objective world experienced by the observer/photographer or the blur of interference patterns recorded by the camera/brain?” (31)

This issue led Pribram to David Bohm, who posited that the entire universe was holographic in nature. There is an “implicate” order of things, a kind of matrix where everything is “enfolded,” and an “explicate” order of reality where material forms emerge (“unfold”) into the world as we perceive it. An electron, for example, is not a separate, discreet “thing” that we are observing, but part of the implicate order that emerges when we call it into being and submerges again into the implicate when we cease to create it through observation. Thus, “when an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron’s ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerin, at that particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.” (47) So: how we interact with the electron determines where, when and how it “unfolds” from the implicate order. If the universe is ordered holographically (all parts contain the whole), concepts such as ‘location’ and ‘time’ are useless. Talbot employs the metaphor of a fountain’s geysers as not separate from the water out of which they flow. He also states that electrons—all sub-atomic particles—are not “particles” at all, but “just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement”. (48)

If you’re head isn’t swimming by now, then you don’t grasp the bizarre reality flip that has occurred here. There are no “parts”, no fragments, no separate individuals, no discreet material objects; therefore, whenever we categorize, make distinctions, engage in binary thinking (‘sick’, ‘well’, ‘alive’, ‘dead’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, etc.) we are lost in the false images that the material world makes us believe through the trickery of our perceptions. Cancer, then, is an unfolding of a process that is not differentiated from ‘non’ cancer, or more accurately, ‘cancer’ does not exist as a category in the implicate order. The material world is constantly in flux and not based in any kind of ‘ultimate’ reality.Can we control the material, physical world?  It may be a “holographic” reality, but for most of us, it’s the only reality we know. What I can’t fathom is how we might move past the material world to Ultimate Reality. Is it a matter of belief? Of faith? Can we change the hologram? Can we shift our consciousness to a parallel universe, occupy an alternate space? The suggestion offered is that through prayer, mediation, and the practice of separating the consciousness from the body, we can indeed alter the material reality which we only appear to occupy. Again, we are back to the spiritual tenents of many religions, most of which advocate the above practices as a way to understand and contemplate the Divine.

Now, finally, we have the explanation for what a “ghost” is. Like the sub-atomic particles that manifest when observed, a ghost appears when our consciousness interacts with it. A ghost is an intact consciousness that “unfolds” from the implicate order, when we call upon it to do so, whether consciously or unconsciously. Something “binds” a ghost to the material world, and that is will: either the will of the immaterial spirit or our will to see it or experience it, but more probably a combination of both. A ‘ghost’ might wish to manifest in the material world because it has yet to see his connection with the implicate order, and is therefore willing and able to separate from it. Once a ghost ‘unfolds’ in our world, it has become separate, disconnected from its source. That may explain the sadness and confusion of the ghost: it has irrevocably ‘forgotten’ the Spritual Order from whence all matter derives. Talbot refers to ‘habits’ that create rules and laws, even the laws of physics, and the following could certainly be applied to ‘ghosts’:

“. . . the ability of consciousness to shift from one entire reality to another suggests that the usually inviolate rule that fire burns human flesh may only be one program in the cosmic computer, but a program that has been repeated so often it has become one of nature’s habits. As has been mentioned, according to the holographic idea, matter is also a kind of habit and is constantly born anew out of the implicate, just as the shape of a fountain is created anew out of the constant flow of water that gives it form. Peat humorously refers to the repetitious nature of this process as one of the universe’s neurosis. ‘When you have a neurosis you tend to repeat the same pattern in your life, or do the same action, as if there’s a memory build up and the thing is stuck with that,’ he says. ‘I tend to think things like chairs and tables are like that also. They’re a sort of material neurosis, a repetition. But there is something subtler going on, a constant enfolding and unfolding. In this sense chairs and tables are just habits in this flux, but the flux is the reality, even if we tend only to see the habit.’ ” (137)

A consciousness stuck in repeat is indeed victim of a habit; the habit of occupying material space. We are used to the idea of a spirit repeating itself in the material world as defining the problem of the ghost (at least, paranormal researchers are), but the idea that all material reality is stuck in a repetition is a bit harder to grasp or accept. If the reality we perceive is stuck in the same ‘habit’ of appearing as solid when it is truly part of the larger ‘flux’, then we are no different from the ghost: living humans and spirit humans are simply variations in the frequency patterns that constitute perception. The distinction “living” and “not living” doesn’t apply here, either. The only difference between ghosts and “us” is simply this: we have different frequency patterns. We are just variations in an energy theme. The material and spiritual all come from the same implicate order, and ultimately there is no difference between us. Once a ghost takes material form, he is no longer any different from us; our desire and will to interact with him or her creates the communication and defines the experience.

Time, chronology, is a complete illusion in the holographic universe. There exist several holograms in the implicate order (or, if you prefer, “spiritual” order, for I do not see the difference) that contain various outcomes for one’s destiny in the material. This can also be understood as parallel universes or other dimensions. The past, present and future are all contained in and expressed by the spiritual, or implicate, order. Or, if you prefer, there are infinite worlds with infinite outcomes for all of us. Some come into being, others do not, some morph into each other, some create a rift where we can see the future or experience the past as present; a great deal of what we call “psychic phenomena” can be understood this way. Clairvoyance may simply be the ability to see into another hologram, where everything that is going to happen has already happened. The ghost, of course, is out of time; it could well be that what we consider the ghost is really the living consciousness of a material human from a side dimension to ours, or an inhabitant of a different hologram who escaped it through a rift or shift in the fabric of time/space, or a spiritual being from a higher order that we only see in the brief moments when we are confronted by the Uncanny. Words, indeed, fail me. Words, of course, fragment reality into artificial and unreal representations of lived reality. Writing cannot convey the spiritual order in any meaningful way, but perhaps can—at the very least—give one the conceptual framework from which to formulate one’s own theories, or arrive at one’s own epiphany.

But you don’t need to rely on epiphanies. Read the book. Then read more books. You will see that in all the ways we study reality, there is one common theme: reality, as you understand it, is infinitely bigger, more complex and contains more possibilities for consciousness than you can imagine; but try, try anyway. The next time you see a ghost, you can say, with all certainty:

A ghost. That is what I am.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

The Universe and Reality as Hologram: An Explanation of Paranormal Events?

Dear reader: I reproduce below, in its entirety, an article by Michael Talbot that summarizes recent thinking into the nature of reality itself. It is based on the work of theoretical physicists, psychologists and scientists working in various fields. Do you care about such things as ghosts, spirits, survival of consciousness and the possibilities for reincarnation? Does it matter that science is on the track of providing us a model of reality that accommodates such experiences and validates them as real? (or, as real as anything gets in the holographic model) If this topic fascinates you, then I IMPLORE you to read the article below. Soon, I will provide my own commentary and insights into what this could all mean for paranormal investigators. I anxiously await your feedback.

Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

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 bluü 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 ome 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 evey 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.

Creation – Holographic Universe
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”.

http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

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