ΰ²₯_ΰ²₯π) ( o=^•γ§•)oππ΄π―π°π²πππ«π ¦π π π π π π π πΈπΏπ π π π π π±π²π©πππ π π π€πππ π‘πππ²πΆπ΅πΉπ½πππ¬πΉπππ ππ°ππͺπππππ΅π π ππππππππππ ┏━┓◑﹏◐ππΌπ¦πππππππππ΅ π THE CHRONICALLY ONLINE ALGORITHIM ππ’π π π π€πππ£π ππ π‘πππ²πΆπ΅πΉπ½πππππππ¬π¬πΉπππ ππ°ππͺπππΌπ¦πππππππππ΅πΎπ πππππππππππππ»π ππππΌπ²π¨π¬ππ π ππ³π‘πΏπ«ππΈπ»πΌπππ
ΰ²₯_ΰ²₯π) ( o=^•γ§•)oππ΄π―π°π²πππ«π ¦π π π π π π π πΈπΏπ π π π π π±π²π©πππ π π π€πππ π‘πππ²πΆπ΅πΉπ½πππ¬πΉπππ ππ°ππͺπππππ΅π π ππππππππππ ┏━┓◑﹏◐ππΌπ¦πππππππππ΅ π THE CHRONICALLY ONLINE ALGORITHIM ππ’π π π π€πππ£π ππ π‘πππ²πΆπ΅πΉπ½πππππππ¬π¬πΉπππ ππ°ππͺπππΌπ¦πππππππππ΅πΎπ πππππππππππππ»π ππππΌπ²π¨π¬ππ π ππ³π‘πΏπ«ππΈπ»πΌπππ
Saturday
House & Deep Summer 2015 Mix
House & Deep Summer 2015 Mix: New Mixtape. Recorded Live.
VEGAS LOVE / As I AM
PURPLE DISCO MACHINE / Magic
SIKORA / Set It Off
PENNA / Piano of Life
GARY TUOHY / Nothing But your Fool
VEGAS LOVE / As I AM
PURPLE DISCO MACHINE / Magic
SIKORA / Set It Off
PENNA / Piano of Life
GARY TUOHY / Nothing But your Fool
Wednesday
Friday
"Crabbed Age and Youth Cannot Live Together"? | Yahoo Answers
CRABBΓD Age and Youth
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn,
Age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave,
Age like winter bare.
Youth is full of sport,
Age's breath is short; 1
Youth is nimble, Age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold,
Age is weak and cold;
Youth is wild, and Age is tame.
Age, I do abhor thee;
Youth, I do adore thee;
O, my Love, my Love is young!
Age, I do defy thee:
O, sweet shepherd, hie thee!
For methinks thou stay'st too long.
"Crabbed Age and Youth Cannot Live Together"? | Yahoo Answers
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn,
Age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave,
Age like winter bare.
Youth is full of sport,
Age's breath is short; 1
Youth is nimble, Age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold,
Age is weak and cold;
Youth is wild, and Age is tame.
Age, I do abhor thee;
Youth, I do adore thee;
O, my Love, my Love is young!
Age, I do defy thee:
O, sweet shepherd, hie thee!
For methinks thou stay'st too long.
"Crabbed Age and Youth Cannot Live Together"? | Yahoo Answers
Thursday
Tuesday
X
 |
| This is Now The Next New Start of All Things Tarot and the Star Magic and Personality Info of that Scientific System W/ Layouts, Readings, Videos, Art, Essays on Symbolism and More. W/ Exclusive "Tarot Labs" and "Elecrisoteric" work and learning. We who are all here together will explore this fantastic path as one. In Unity We Are Safe from Fear an Collectively we Evolve Together Like rungs on Jacobs Ladder. |
Monday
Sunday
Time Out of Mind
The "home" of the mind, as of all things, is the implicate order. At this
level, which is the fundamental plenum for the entire manifest universe,
there is no linear time. The implicate domain is atemporal; moments are
not strung together serially like beads on a string.
■—Larry Dossey
Recovering the Soul
As the man gazed off into space, the room he was in became ghostly and
transparent, and in its place materialized a scene from the distant past.
Suddenly he was in the courtyard of a palace, and before him was a
young woman, olive-skinned and very pretty. He could see her gold
jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, her white translucent dress,
and her black braided hair gathered regally under a high square-shaped
tiara. As he looked at her, information about her life flooded his mind.
He knew she was Egyptian, the daughter of a prince, but not a pharaoh.
She was married. Her husband was slender and wore his hair in a
multitude of small braids that fell down on both sides of his face.
The man could also fast-forward the scene, rushing through the events
of the woman's life as if they were no more than a movie. He saw that
she died in childbirth. He watched the lengthy and intricate steps of her
embalming, her funeral procession, the rituals that accom-
197
798 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVEKSE Time Out of Mind 199
panied her being placed in her sarcophagus, and when he finished, the
images faded and the room once again came back into view.
The man's name was Stefan Ossowiecki, a Russtan-bom Pole and one
of the century's most gifted clairvoyants, and the date was February
14,19S5. His vision of the past had been evoked when he handled a
fragment of a petrified human foot
Ossowiecki proved so adept at psychometrizing artifacts that he
eventually came to the attention of Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor
at the University of Warsaw and the most eminent ethnologist in Poland
at the time. Poniatowski tested Ossowiecki with a variety of flints and
other stone tools obtained from archaeological sites around the world.
Most of these Hthics, as they are called, were so nondescript that only a
trained eye could tell they had been shaped by human hands. They were
also precertified by experts so that Poniatowski knew their ages and
historical origins, information he kept carefully concealed from
Ossowiecki.
It did not matter. Again and again Ossowiecki identified the objects
correctly, describing their age, the culture that had produced them, and
the geographical locations where they had been found. On several
occasions the locations Ossowiecki cited disagreed with the information
Poniatowski had written in his notes, but Poniatowski discovered
that it was always his notes that were in error, not Ossowiecki's
information.
Ossowiecki always worked the same. He would take the object in his
hands and concentrate until the room before him, and even his own
body, became shadowy and almost nonexistent After this transition
occurred, he would find himself looking at a three-dimensional movie
of the past He could then go anywhere he wanted in the scene and see
anything he chose. While he was gazing into the past, Ossowiecki even
moved his eyes back and forth as if the things he was describing
possessed an actual physical presence before him.
He could see the vegetation, the people, and the dwellings in which
they lived. On one occasion, after handling a stone implement from the
Magdalenian culture, a Stone Age people who flourished in France
about 15,000 to 10,000
B.C, Ossowiecki told Poniatowski that Magdalenian
women had very complex hair styles. At the time this seemed
absurd, but subsequent discoveries of statues of Magdalenian women
with ornate coiffures proved Ossowiecki right
Over the course of the experiments Ossowiecki offered over one
hundred such pieces of information, details about the past that at first
seemed inaccurate, but later proved correct He said that Stone Age
peoples used oil lamps and was vindicated when excavations in
Dor-dogne, France, uncovered oils lamps of the exact size and style he
described. He made detailed drawings of the animals various peoples
hunted, the style of the huts in which they lived, and their burial
customs—assertions that were all later confirmed by archaeological
discoveries.1
Poniatowski's work with Ossowiecki is not unique. Norman Emerson,
a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and founding
vice president of the Canadian Archaeological Association, has also
investigated the use of clairvoyants in archaeological work. Emerson's
research has centered around a truck driver named George McMullen.
Like Ossowiecki, McMullen has the ability to psychometrize objects and
use them to tune into scenes from the past McMullen can also tune into
the past simply by visiting an archaeological site. Once there, he paces
back and forth until he gets his bearings. Then he begins to describe the
people and culture that once flourished at the site. On one such occasion
Emerson watched as McMullen bounded over a pateh of bare ground,
pacing out what he said was the location of an Iroquois longhouse.
Emerson marked the area with survey pegs and six months later
uncovered the ancient structure exactly where McMullen said it would
be.3
Although Emerson began as a skeptic, his work with McMullen has
made him a believer. In 1973, at an annual conference of Canada's
leading archaeologists, he stated, "It is my conviction that I have
received knowledge about archaeological artifacts and archaeological
sites from a psychic informant who relates this information to me
without any evidence of the conscious use of reasoning." He concluded
his talk by saying that he felt McMullen's demonstrations opened "a
whole new vista" in archaeology, and research into the further use of
psychics in archaeological investigations should be given "first priority."3
Indeed, retrocognition, or the ability of certain individuals to shift the
focus of their attention and literally gaze back into the past, has been
confirmed repeatedly by researchers. In a series of experiments
conducted in the 1960s, W. H. C. Tenhaeff, the director of the
Parapsy-chological Institute of the State University of Utrecht, and
Marius Valkhoff, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of
Witwaters-rand, Johannesburg, South Africa, found that the great Dutch
psychic, Gerard Croiset, could psychometrize even the smallest
fragment
200 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mbd 201
of bone and accurately describe its past.4 Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a New
York clinical psychologist, and another skeptic-turned-believer, has
conducted similar experiments with the noted American psychic, Eileen
Garrett.0 At the 1961 annua) meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, archaeologist Clarence W. Weiant revealed that he would
not have made his famous Tres Zapotes discovery, universally
considered to be one of the most important Middle American
archaeological finds ever made, were it not for the assistance of a
psychic.6
Stephan A. Schwartz, a former editorial staff member of National
Geographic magazine and a member of MITs Secretary of Defense
Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and Society, believes that
retrocognition is not only real, but will eventually precipitate a shift in
scientific reality as profound as the shifts that followed the discoveries
of Copernicus and Darwin. Schwartz feels so strongly about the subject
that he has written a comprehensive history of the partnership between
clairvoyants and archaeologists entitled The Secret Vaults of Time. "For
three-quarters of a century psychic archaeology has been a reality," says
Schwartz. "This new approach has done much to demonstrate that the
time and space framework so crucial to the Grand Material world-view
is by no means as absolute a construct as most scientists believe."7
The Past as Hologram
Such abilities suggest that the past is not lost, but still exists in some
form accessible to human perception. Our normal view of the universe
makes no allowance for such a state of affairs, but the holographic
model does. Bohm's notion that the flow of time is the product of a
constant series of unfoldings and enfoldings suggests that as the present
enfolds and becomes part of the past, it does not cease to exist, but
simply returns to the cosmic storehouse of the implicate. Or as Bohm
puts it, "The past is active in the present as a kind of implicate order."8
If, as Bohm suggests, consciousness also has its source in the implicate,
this means that the human mind and the holographic record of the
past already exist in the same domain, are, in a manner of speaking,
already neighbors. Thus, a shift in the focus of one's attention
may be all that is needed to access the past. Clairvoyants such as
McMulIen and Ossowiecki may simply be individuals who have an
innate knack for making this shift, but again, as with so many of the
other extraordinary human abilities we have looked at, the holographic
idea suggests that the talent is latent in all of us.
A metaphor for the way the past is stored in the implicate can also be
found in the hologram. If each phase of an activity, say a woman
blowing a soap bubble, is recorded as a series of successive images in a
multiple-image hologram, each image becomes as a frame in a movie. If
the hologram is a "white light" hologram—a piece of holographic film
whose image can be seen by the naked eye and does not need laser light
to become visible—when a viewer walks by the film and changes the
angle of his or her perception, he/she will see what amounts to a
three-dimensional motion picture of the woman blowing the soap bubble.
In other words, as the different images unfold and enfold, they will
seem to flow together and present an illusion of movement.
A person who is unfamiliar with holograms might mistakenly assume
that the various stages in the blowing of the soap bubble are transitory and
once perceived can never be viewed again, but this is not true. The entire
activity is always recorded in the hologram, and it is the viewer's changing
perspective that provides the illusion that it is unfolding in time. The
holographic theory suggests that the same 4 is true of our own past. Instead
of fading into oblivion, it too remains recorded in the cosmic hologram
and can always be accessed once again.
Another suggestively hologramlike feature of the retrocognitive
experience is the three-dimensionality of the scenes that are accessed.
For instance, psychic Rich, who can also psychometrize objects, says
she knows what Ossowiecki meant when he said that the images he saw
were as three-dimensional and real, even more real, than the room in
which he was sitting. "It's as if the scene takes over," says Rich. "It's
dominant, and once it starts to unfold I actually become a part of it. It's
like being in two places at once. I'm aware that I'm sitting in a room, but
I'm also in the scene."8
Similarly holographic is the nonlocal nature of the ability. Psychics
are able to access the past of a particular archaeological site both when
they are at the site and when they are many miles removed. In other
words, the record of the past does not appear to be stored at any one
location, but like the information in a hologram, it is nonlocal and can
be accessed from any point in the space-time framework. The
204 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 205
cal ruins—burial mounds, standing stones, crumbling sixth-century
fortresses, and so on—and participated in activities associated with
bygone times. Evans-Wentz interviewed witnesses who had seen fairies
that looked like men in Elizabethan dress engaging in hunts, fairies that
walked in ghostly processions to and from the remains of old forts, and
fairies that rang bells while standing in the ruins of ancient churches.
One activity of which the fairies seemed inordinately fond was waging
war. In his book The Fairy-Faitk in Celtic Countries Evans-Wentz
presents the testimony of dozens of individuals who claimed to see these
spectral conflicts, moonlit meadows thronged with men battling in
medieval armor, or desolate fens covered with soldiers in colored
uniforms. Sometimes these frays were eerily silent. Sometimes they
were full-fledged dins; and, perhaps most haunting of all, sometimes
they could only be heard but not seen.
From this, Evans-Wentz concluded that at least some of the phenomena
his witnesses were interpreting as fairies were actually some
kind of afterimage of events that had taken place in the past. "Nature
herself has a memory," he theorized. "There is some indefinable psychic
element in the earth's atmosphere upon which all human and physical
actions or phenomena are photographed or impressed. Under certain
inexplicable conditions, normal persons who are not seers may observe
Nature's mental records like pictures cast upon a screen— often like
moving pictures."14
As for why encounters with fairies were becoming less frequent, a
remark made by one of Evans-Wentz's respondents provides a clue. The
respondent was an elderly gentleman named John Davies living on the
Isle of Man, and after describing numerous sightings of the good people,
he stated, "Before education came into the island more people could see
the fairies; now very few people can see them."'5 Since "education" no
doubt included an anathema against believing in fairies, Davies's
remark suggests that it was a change in attitude that caused the
widespread retrocognitive abilities of the Manx people to atrophy. Once
again this underscores the enormous power our beliefs have in
determining which of our extraordinary potentials we manifest and
which we do not
But whether our beliefs allow us to see these hologramlike movies of
the past or cause our brains to edit them out, the evidence suggests that
they exist nonetheless. Nor are such experiences limited to Celtic
countries. There are reports of witnesses seeing phantom soldiers
dressed in ancient Hindu costumes in India.16 In Hawaii, such ghostly
displays are well known and books on the islands are filled with accounts
of individuals who have seen phantom processions of Hawaiian
warriors in feather cloaks marching along with war clubs and torches.17
Sightings of spectral armies fighting equally phantasmal battles are
even mentioned in ancient Assyrian texts.18
Occasionally historians are able to recognize the event being replayed.
At four in the morning on August 4,1951, two English women
vacationing in the seaside village of Puys, France, were awakened by
the sound of gunfire. They raced to the window but were shocked to
find that the village and the sea beyond were calm and devoid of any
activity that might account for what they were hearing. The British
Society for Psychical Research investigated and discovered that the
women's chronology of events mirrored exactly military records of a
raid the Allies had made against the Germans at Puys on August 19,
1942. The women, it seemed, had heard the sound of a slaughter that
had taken place nine years earlier.19
Although the dark intensity of such events gives them a higher profile
in the holographic landscape, we must not forget that contained within
the shimmering holographic record of the past are all the joys of the
human race as well. It is, in essence, a library of all that ever was, and
learning to tap into this dazzling and infinite treasure-trove on a more
massive and systematic scale could expand our knowledge of both
ourselves and the universe in ways we have not yet dared dream. The
day may come when we can manipulate reality like the crystal in
Bohm's analogy, causing what is real and what is invisible to shift
kaleidoscopic ally and calling up images of the past with the same ease
that we now call up a program on our computer. But even this is not all
that a more holographic understanding of time may offer.
The Holographic Future
As disconcerting as having access to the entire past is, it pales beside the
notion that the future is also accessible in the cosmic hologram. Still,
there is an enormous body of evidence that proves at least some future
events are as easy to see as past events.
This has been amply demonstrated in literally hundreds of studies. In
the 1930s J. B. and Louisa Rhine discovered that volunteers could guess
what cards would be drawn randomly from a deck with a sue-
206 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 207
cess rate that was better than chance by odds of three million to one.20 In
the 1970s Helmut Schmidt, a physicist at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle,
Washington, invented a device that enabled him to test whether people
could predict random subatomic events. In repeated tests with three
volunteers and over sixty thousand trials, he obtained results that were
one billion to one against chance.21
In his work at the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center,
Montague Uliman, along with psychologist Stanley Krippner and researcher
Charles Honorton, produced compelling evidence that accurate
precognitive information can also be obtained in dreams. In their
study, volunteers were asked to spend eight consecutive nights at the
sleep laboratory, and each night they were asked to try to dream about a
picture that would be chosen at random the next day and shown to them.
Uliman and his colleagues hoped to get one success out of eight, but
found that some subjects could score as many as five "hits" out of eight.
For example, after waking, one volunteer said that he had dreamed of
"a large concrete building" from which a "patient" was trying to escape.
The patient had a white coat on like a doctor's coat and had gotten only
l'as far as the archway." The painting chosen at random the next day
turned out to be Van Gogh's Hospital Corridor at SL Remy, a
watercolor depicting a lone patient standing at the end of a bleak and
massive hallway and quickly exiting through a door beneath an
archway.22
In their remote-viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute,
Puthoff and Targ found that, in addition to being able to psychically
describe remote locations that experimenters were visiting in the
present, test subjects could also describe locations experimenters would
be visiting in the future, before the locations had even been decided
upon. In one instance, for example, an unusually talented subject named
Hella Hammid, a photographer by vocation, was asked to describe the
spot Puthoff would be visiting one-half hour hence. She concentrated
and said she could see him entering "a black iron triangle." The triangle
was "bigger than a man/' and although she did not know precisely what
it was, she could hear a rhythmic squeaking sound occurring "about
once a second."
Ten minutes before she did this, Puthoff had set out on a half-hour
drive in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto areas. At the end of the half hour,
and well after Hammid had recorded her perception of the black iron
triangle, Puthoff took out ten sealed envelopes containing ten
different target locations. Using a random number generator, he chose
one at random. Inside was the address of a small park about six miles
from the laboratory. He drove to the park, and when he got there he one at random. Inside was the address of a small park about six miles
from the laboratory. He drove to the park, and when he got there he
found a children's swing—the black iron triangle—and walked into its
midst. When he sat down in the swing it squeaked rhythmically as it
swung back and forth.23
Puthoff and Targ's precognitive remote-viewing findings have been
duplicated by numerous laboratories around the world, including Jahn
and Dunne's research facility at Princeton. Indeed, in 334 formal trials
Jahn and Dunne found that volunteers were able to come up with
accurate precognitive information 62 percent of the time.24
Even more dramatic are the results of the so-called "chair tests," a
famous series of experiments devised by Croiset. First, the experimenter
would randomly select a chair from the seating plan for an
upcoming public event in a large hall or auditorium. The hall could be
located in any city in the world and only events that did not have
reserved seating qualified. Then, without telling Croiset the name or
location of the hall, or the nature of the event, the experimenter would
ask the Dutch psychic to describe who would be sitting in the seat
during the evening in question.
Over the course of a twenty-five-year period, numerous investigators
in both Europe and America put Croiset through the rigors of the chair
test and found that he was almost always capable of giving an accurate
and detailed description of the person who would be sitting in the chair,
including describing their gender, facial features, dress, occupation, and
even incidents from their past.
For instance, on January 6, 1969, in a study conducted by Dr. Jule
Eisenbud, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado
Medical School, Croiset was told that a chair had been ehosen for an
event that would take place on January 23,1969. Croiset, who was in
Utrecht, Holland, at the time, told Eisenbud that the person who would
sit in the chair would be a man five feet nine inches in height who
brushed his black hair straight back, had a gold tooth in his lower jaw, a
scar on his big toe, who worked in both science and industry, and
sometimes got his lab coat stained by a greenish chemical. On January
23,1969, the man who sat down in the chair, which was in an auditorium
in Denver, Colorado, fit Croiset's description in every way but one. He
was not five feet nine, but five feet nine and three-quarters.25
The list goes on and on.
210 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mtnd 211
almost universally stress how important dreaming is in divining the
future. Even our most ancient writings pay homage to the premonitory
power of dreams, as is evidenced in the biblical account of Pharaoh's
dream of seven fat and seven lean cows. The antiquity of such traditions
indicates that the tendency of premonitions to occur in dreams is due to
more than just our current skeptical attitude toward precognition. The
proximity the unconscious mind has to the atem-poral realm of the
implicate may also play a role. Because our dreaming self is deeper in
the psyche than our conscious self—and thus closer to the primal ocean
in which past, present, and future become one—it may be easier for it to
access information about the future.
Whatever the reason, it should come as no surprise that other methods
for accessing the unconscious can also produce precognitive information.
For example, in the 1960s Karlis Osis and hypnotist J. Fahler found that
hypnotized subjects scored significantly higher on precognition tests
than nonhypnotized subjects.38 Other studies have also confirmed the
ESP-enhancing effects of hypnosis.37 However, no amount of dry
statistical data has the impact of an example from real life. In his book
The Future Is Now: The Significance of Precognition, Arthur Osborn
records the results of a hypnosis-precognition experiment involving the
French actress Irene Muza. After being hypnotized and asked if she
could see her future, Muza replied, "My career will be short: I dare not
say what my end will be: it will be terrible."
Startled, the experimenters decided not to tell Muza what she had
reported and gave her a posthypnotic suggestion to forget everything
she had said. When she awakened from her trance she had no memory
of what she had predicted for herself. Even if she had known, it would
not have caused the type of death she suffered. A few months later her
hairdresser accidentally spilled some mineral spirits on a lighted stove,
causing Muza's hair and clothing to be set on fire. Within seconds she
was engulfed in flames and died in a hospital a few hours later.38
Hololeaps of Faith
The events that befell Irene Muza raise an important question. If Muza
had known about the fate she had predicted for herself, would
she have been able to avoid it? Put another way, is the future frozen and
completely predetermined, or can it be changed? At first blush, the
existence of precognitive phenomena seems to indicate that the former
jg the case, but this would be a very disturbing state of affairs. If the
future is a hologram whose every detail is already fixed, it means that
we have no free will. We are all just puppets of destiny moving mindlessly
through a script that has already been written.
Fortunately the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that this is not the
case. The literature is filled with examples of people who were able to
use their precognitive glimpses of the future to avoid disasters,
instances in which individuals correctly foresaw the crash of a plane
and avoided death by not getting on, or had a vision of their children
being drowned in a flood and moved them out of harm's way just in the
nick of time. There are nineteen documented cases of people who had
precognitive glimpses of the sinking of the Titanic—some were
experienced by passengers who paid attention to their premonitions and
survived, some were experienced by passengers who ignored their
forebodings and drowned, and some were experienced by individuals
who were not in either of these two categories.39
Such incidents strongly suggest that the future is not set, but is plastic
and can be changed. But this view also brings with it a problem. If the
future is still in a state of flux, what is Croiset tapping into when he
describes the individual who will sit down in a particular chair
seventeen days hence? How can the future both exist and not exist?
Loye provides a possible answer. He believes that reality is a giant
hologram, and in it the past, present, and future are indeed fixed, at least
up to a point The rub is that it is not the only hologram. There are many
such holographic entities floating in the timeless and spaceless waters
of the implicate, jostling and swimming around one another like so
many amoebas. "Such holographic entities could also be visualized as
parallel worlds, parallel universes," says Loye.
Thus, the future of any given holographic universe is predetermined,
and when a person has a precognitive glimpse of the future, they are
tuning into the future of that particular hologram only. But like amoebas,
these holograms also occasionally swallow and engulf each other,
melding and bifurcating like the protoplasmic globs of energy that they
really are. Sometimes these jostlings jolt us and are responsible for the
premonitions that from time to time engulf us. And when we act upon a
premonition and appear to alter the future, what We are really doing is
leaping from one hologram to another. Loye
212 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 213
calls these intra holographic leaps "hololeaps" and feels that they are
what provides us with our true capacity for both insight and freedom.40
Bohm sums up the same situation in a slightly different manner.
"When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or
ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely
something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making
that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future
because they altered it. Therefore I think it's more plausible to say that,
if these phenomena exist, there's an anticipation of the future in the
implicate order in the present. As they used to say, coming events cast
their shadows in the present Their shadows are being cast deep in the
implicate order.""1
Bohm's and Loye's descriptions seem to be two different ways of
trying to express the same thing—a view of the future as a hologram that
is substantive enough for us to perceive it, but malleable enough to be
susceptible to change. Others have used still different words to sum up
what appears to be the same basic thought. Cordero describes the future
as a hurricane that is beginning to form and gather momentum,
becoming more concrete and unavoidable as it approaches.42 Ingo Swann,
a gifted psychic who has produced impressive results in various studies,
including Puthoff and Targ's remote-vie wing research, speaks of the
future as composed of "crystallizing possibilities.'"" The Hawaiian
kahunas, widely esteemed for their precognitive powers, also speak of
the future as fluid, but in the process of "crystallizing," and believe that
great world events are crystallized furthest in advance, as are the most
important events in a person's life, such as marriage, accidents, and
death.44
The numerous premonitions that are now known to have preceded
both the Kennedy assassination and the Civil War (even George Washington
had a precognitive vision of a future civil war somehow involving
"Africa," the issue that all men are "brethren," and the word Union4'')
seem to corroborate this kahuna belief.
Loye's notion that there are many separate holographic futures and
we choose which events are going to manifest and which are not by
leaping from one hologram to another carries with it another implication.
Choosing one holographic future over another is essentially the
same as creating the future. As we have seen, there is a good deal of
evidence suggesting that consciousness plays a significant role in
creating the here and now. But if the mind can stray beyond the
poundaries of the present and occasionally stalk the misty landscape of
the future, do we have a hand in creating future events as well? Put
another way, are the vagaries of life truly random, or do we play a role in
literally sculpting our own destiny? Remarkably, there is some
intriguing evidence that the latter may be the case.
The Shadowy Stuff of the Soul
Dr. Joel Whitton, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto
Medical School, has also used hypnosis to study what people
unconsciously know about themselves. However, instead of asking
them about their future, Whitton, who is an expert in clinical hypnosis
and also holds a degree in neurobiology, asks them about their past, their
distant past to be exact. For the last several decades Whitton has quietly
and without fanfare been gathering evidence suggestive of
reincarnation.
Reincarnation is a difficult subject, for so much silliness has been
presented about it that many people dismiss it out of hand. Most do not
realize that in addition to (and one might even say in spite of) the
sensational claims of celebrities and the stories of reincarnated
Cleopatras that garner most of the media attention, there is a good deal
of serious research being done on reincarnation. In the last several
decades a small but growing number of highly credentialed researchers
has compiled an impressive body of evidence on the subject Whitton is
one of these researchers.
The evidence does not prove that reincarnation exists, nor is it the
intention of this book to make such an argument. In fact, it is difficult to
imagine what might constitute perfect proof of reincarnation. Rather,
the findings that will be touched upon here are offered only as intriguing
possibilities and because they are relevant to our current discussion.
Thus, they deserve our open-minded consideration.
The main thrust of Whitton's hypnosis research is based on a simple
and startling fact. When individuals are hypnotized, they often remember
what appear to be memories of previous existences. Studies
nave shown that over 90 percent of all hypnotizable individuals are able
to recall these apparent memories.46 The phenomenon is widely
^cognized, even by skeptics. For example, the psychiatry textbook
Trauma, Trance and Transformation warns fledgling hypnothera-
214 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 215
pists not to be surprised if such memories surface spontaneously in their
hypnotized patients. The author of the text rejects the idea of rebirth but
does note that such memories can have remarkable healing
potential nonetheless."7
The meaning of this phenomenon is, of course, hotly debated. Many
researchers argue that such memories are fantasies or fabrications of the
unconscious mind, and there is no doubt that this is sometimes the case,
especially if the hypnotic session or "regression" is conducted by an
unskilled hypnotist who does not know the proper questioning
techniques required to safeguard against eliciting fantasies. But there
are also numerous cases on record in which individuals have, under the
guidance of skilled professionals, produced memories that do not appear
to be fantasies. The evidence assembled by Whitton falls into this
category.
To conduct his research, Whitton gathered together a core group of
roughly thirty people. These included individuals from all walks of life,
from truck drivers to computer scientists, some of whom believed in
reincarnation and some of whom did not. He then hypnotized them
individually and spent literally thousands of hours recording everything
they had to say about their alleged previous existences.
Even in its broad strokes the information was fascinating. One
striking aspect was the degree of agreement between the subjects'
experiences. All reported numerous past lives, some as many as twenty
to twenty-five, although a practical limit was reached when Whitton
regressed them to what he calls their "caveman existences," when one
lifetime became indistinguishable from the next.48 All reported that
gender was not specific to the soul, and many had lived at least one life
as the opposite sex. And all reported that the purpose of life was to
evolve and learn, and that multiple existences facilitated this process.
Whitton also found evidence that strongly suggested the experiences
were actual past lives. One unusual feature was the ability the memories
had to explain a wide range of seemingly unrelated events and
experiences in the subjects' current lives. For example, one man, a
psychologist born and raised in Canada, had possessed an inexplicable
British accent as a child. He also had an irrational fear of breaking his
leg, a phobia of air travel, a terrible nail-biting problem, an obsessive
fascination with torture, and as a teenager had had a brief and enigmatic
vision of being in a room with a Nazi officer, shortly after operating the
pedals of a car during a driving test. Under hypnosis the
jdan recalled being a British pilot during World War II. While on a
mission over Germany his plane was hit by a shower of bullets, one 0f
which penetrated the fuselage and broke his leg. This in turn caused pirn
to lose control of the plane's foot pedals, forcing him to crash-land. jle
was subsequently captured by the Nazis, tortured for information py
having his nails pulled out, and died a short time later.48
Many of the subjects also experienced profound psychological and
physical healings as a result of the traumatic past-life memories they
unearthed, and gave uncannily accurate historical details about the
times in which they had lived. Some even spoke languages unknown to
them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a
thirty-seven-year-old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linguistic
authorities later identified as Old Norse.50 After being regressed to an
ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery,
Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified
as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct
Mesopotamian tongue that nourished between A.D. 226 and 651.S1
But Whitton's most remarkable discovery came when he regressed
subjects to the interim between lives, a dazzling, light-filled realm in
which there was "no such thing as time or space as we know it."52
According to his subjects, part of the purpose of this realm was to allow
them to plan their next life, to literally sketch out the important events
and circumstances that would befall them in the future. But this process
was not simply some fairy-tale exercise in wish fulfillment. Whitton
found that when individuals were in the between-life realm, they entered
an unusual state of consciousness in which they were acutely self-aware
and had a heightened moral and ethical sense. In addition, they no
longer possessed the ability to rationalize away any of their faults and
misdeeds, and saw themselves with total honesty. To distinguish it from
our normal everyday consciousness, Whitton calls this intensely
conscientious state of mind "metacon-aciousness."
Thus, when subjects planned their next life, they did so with a sense
Qf moral obligation. They would choose to be reborn with people whom
they had wronged in a previous life so they would have the opportunity
to make amends for their actions. They planned pleasant encounters
with "soul mates," individuals with whom they had built a loving and
mutually beneficial relationship over many lifetimes; and they
scheduled "accidental" events to fulfill still other lessons and pur-
216 THE HOLOGRAPHIC CNIVERRE Time Out of Mind 217
poses. One man said that as he planned his next life he visualized "a sort
of clockwork instrument into which you could insert certain parts in
order for specific consequences to follow,"68
These consequences were not always pleasant. After being regressed
to a metaconscious state, a woman who had been raped when she was
thirty-seven revealed that she had actually planned the event before she
had come into this incarnation. As she explained, it had been necessary
for her to experience a tragedy at that age in order to force her to change
her "entire soul complexion" and thus break through to a deeper and
more positive understanding of the meaning of life.5
"
1 Another subject,
a man afflicted with a serious and life-threatening kidney disease,
disclosed that he had chosen the illness to punish himself for a past-life
transgression. However, he also revealed that dying from the kidney
disease was not part of his script, and before he had come into this life
he had also arranged to encounter someone or something that would
help him remember this fact and hence enable him to heal both his guilt
and his body. True to his word, after he started his sessions with Whitton
he experienced a near-miraculous complete recovery.ss
Not all of Whitton's subjects were so eager to learn about the future
their metaconscious selves had laid out for them. Several censored their
own memories and asked Whitton to please give them posthypnotic
instructions not to remember anything that they had said during trance.
As they explained, they did not want to be tempted to tamper with the
script their metaconscious selves had written for them.5*
This is an astounding idea. Is it possible that our unconscious mind is
not only aware of the rough outline of our destiny, but actually steers us
toward its fulfillment? Whitton's research is not the only evidence that
this may be the case. In a statistical study of 28 serious U.S. railroad
accidents, parapsychoiogist William Cox found that significantly fewer
people took trains on accident days than on the same day in previous
weeks/'7
Cox's finding suggests that we all may be constantly unconsciously
precognizing the future and making decisions based on that information:
some of us opting to avoid mishap, and perhaps some—iike the woman
who chose to experience a personal tragedy and the man who elected to
endure a kidney disease—choosing to experience negative situations to
fulfill other unconscious designs and purposes. "Carefully or
haphazardly, we choose our earthly circumstances," says Whitton. "The
message of metaconsciousness is that the life situation
0f every human being is neither random nor inappropriate. Seen objectively
from the interlife, every human experience is simply another
lesson in the cosmic classroom."58
It is important to note that the existence of such unconscious agendas
does not mean that our lives are rigidly predestined and all fates
unavoidable. The fact that many of Whitton's subjects asked not to
remember what they said under hypnosis implies again that the future is
only roughly outlined and still subject to change.
Whitton is not the only reincarnation researcher who has uncovered
evidence that our unconscious has more of a hand in our lives than we
may realize. Another is Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at
the University of Virginia Medical School. Instead of using hypnosis
Stevenson interviews young children who have spontaneously remembered
apparent previous existences. He has spent more than thirty
years in this pursuit and has collected and analyzed thousands of cases
from all over the globe.
According to Stevenson, spontaneous past-life recall is
relatively-common among children, so common that the number of
cases that seem worth considering far exceeds his staff's ability to
investigate them. Generally children are between the ages of two and
four when they start talking about their "other life," and frequently they
remember dozens of particulars, including their name, the names of
family members and friends, where they lived, what their house looked
like, what they did for a living, how they died, and even obscure
information such as where they hid money before they died and, in
cases involving murder, sometimes even who killed them.89
Indeed, frequently their memories are so detailed Stevenson is able to
track down the identity of their previous personality and verify virtually
everything they have said. He has even taken children to the area in
which their past incarnation lived, and watched as they navigated
effortlessly through strange neighborhoods and correctly identified their
former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends.
Like Whitton, Stevenson has gathered an enormous amount of data
suggestive of reincarnation, and to date has published six volumes on
his findings.60 And like Whitton, he also has found evidence that the
unconscious plays a far greater role in our makeup and destiny than we
have hitherto suspected.
He has corroborated Whitton's finding that we are frequently reborn
with individuals we have known in previous existences, and that the
guiding force behind our choices is often affection or a sense of
21S THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 219
guilt or indebtedness.61 He agrees that personal responsibility, not
chance, is the arbiter of our fate. He has found that although a person's
material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the next, their
moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same.
Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be
drawn to criminal behavior again; people who were generous and kind
continue to be generous and kind, and so on. From this Stevenson
concludes that it is not the outward trappings of life that matter, but the
inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and "inner growths" of the personality,
that appear to be most important
Most significant of all, he found no compelling evidence of "retributive
karma," or any indication that we are cosmically punished for our
sins. "There is then—if we judge by the evidence of the cases—no
external judge of our conduct and no being who shifts us from life to life
according to our deserts. If this world is (in Keats's phrase) 'a vale of
soul-making,' we are the makers of our own souls," states Stevenson.62
Stevenson has also uncovered a phenomenon that did not turn up in
Whitton's study, a discovery that provides even more dramatic evidence
of the power the unconscious mind has to sculpt and influence our life
circumstances. He has found that a person's previous incarnation can
apparently affect the very shape and structure of their current physical
body. He has discovered, for example, that Burmese children who
remember previous lives as British or American Air Force pilots shot
down over Burma during World War II all have fairer hair and
complexions than their siblings.63
He has also found instances in which distinctive facial features, foot
deformities, and other characteristics have carried over from one life to
the next.64 Most numerous among these are physical injuries carrying
over as scars or birthmarks. In one case, a boy who remembered being
murdered in his former life by having his throat slit still had a long
reddish mark resembling a scar across his neck.65 In another, a boy who
remembered committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in his
past incarnation still had two scarlike birthmarks that lined up perfectly
along the bullet's trajectory, one where the bullet had entered and one
where it had exited.6* And in another, a boy had a birthmark resembling
a surgical scar complete with a line of red marks resembling stitch
wounds, in the exact location where his previous personality had had
surgery.67
In fact, Stevenson has gathered hundreds of such cases and is currently
compiling a four-volume study of the phenomenon. In some of the cases he has even been able to obtain hospital and/or autopsy reports of the deceased personality and show that such injuries not only occurred, but were in the exact location of the present birthmark 0r deformity. He feels that such marks not only provide some of the strongest evidence in favor of reincarnation, but also suggest the existence of some kind of intermediate nonphysical body that functions as a carrier of these attributes between one life and the next He states, "It seems to me that the imprint of wounds on the previous personality must be carried between lives on some kind of an extended body which in turn acts as a template for the production on a new physical body of birthmarks and deformities that correspond to the wounds on the body of the previous personality.,?SB Stevenson's theorized "template body" echoes Tiller's assertion that the human energy field is a holographic template that guides the form and structure of the physical body. Put another way, it is a kind of three-dimensional blueprint around which the physical body forms. Similarly, his findings regarding birthmarks add further support to the idea that we are at heart just images, holographic constructs, created by thought. Stevenson has also noted that although his research suggests that we are the creators of our own lives and, to a certain extent, our own bodies, our participation in this process is so passive as to be almost involuntary. Deep strata of the psyche appear to be involved in these choices, strata that are much more in touch with the implicate. Or as,-Stevenson puts it, "Levels of mental activity far deeper than those that regulate the digestion of our supper in our stomach [and] our ordinary breathing must govern these processes."G9 As unorthodox as many of Stevenson's conclusions are, his reputation as a careful and thorough investigator has gained him respect in some unlikely quarters. His findings have been published in such dis- tinguished scientific periodicals as the American Journal ofPsyckia-irV, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. And in a review of one of his works the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association stated that he has "painstakingly and unemotionally collected a ^tailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is oimcult to understand on any other grounds. ... He has placed on 'Word a large amount of data that cannot be ignored."70
220 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 221
Thought as Builder
As with so many of the "discoveries" we have looked at, the idea that
some deeply unconscious and even spiritual part of us can reach across
the boundaries of time and is responsible for our destiny can also be
found in many shamanic traditions and other sources. According to the
Batak people of Indonesia, everything a person experiences is determined
by his or her soul, or tondi, which reincarnates from one body to
the next and is a medium capable of reproducing not only the behavior,
but the physical attributes of the person's former self.71 The Ojibway
Indians also believed a person's Me is scripted by an invisible spirit or
soul and is laid out in a manner that promotes growth and development.
If a person dies without completing all the lessons they need to learn,
their spirit body returns and is reborn in another physical body.73
The kahunas call this invisible aspect the aumakua, or "high self."
Like Whitton's metaconsciousness, it is the unconscious portion of a
person that can see the parts of the future that are crystallized, or "set." It
is also the part of us that is responsible for creating our destiny, but it is
not alone in this process. Like many of the researchers mentioned in this
book, the kahunas believed that thoughts are things and are composed of
a subtle energetic substance they called kino mea, or "shadowy body
stuff." Hence, our hopes, fears, plans, worries, guilts, dreams, and
imaginings do not vanish after leaving our mind, but are turned into
thought forms, and these, too, become some of the rough strands from
which the high self weaves our future.
Most people are not in charge of their own thoughts, said the kahunas,
and constantly bombard their high self with an uncontrolled and
contradictory mixture of plans, wishes, and fears. This confuses the high
self and is why most people's lives appear to be equally haphazard and
uncontrolled. Powerful kahunas who were in open communication with
their high selves were said to be able to help a person remake his or her
future. Similarly, it was considered extremely important that people take
time out at frequent intervals to think about their lives and visualize in
concrete terms what they wished to happen to themselves. By doing this
the kahunas asserted that people can more consciously control the
events that befall them and make their own future.Ta
In an idea that is reminiscent of Tiller and Stevenson's notion of a
subtle intermediary body, the kahunas believed this shadowy body stuff
also forms a template upon which the physical body is molded. Again it
was said that kahunas who were in extraordinary attunement vrith their
high self could sculpt and reform the shadowy body stuff, and hence the
physical body, of another person and this was how miraculous healings
were effected.74 This view also provides an interesting parallel to some
of our own conclusions as to why thoughts and images have such a
powerful impact on health.
The tantric mystics of Tibet referred to the "stuff" of thoughts as tsal
and held that every mental action produced waves of this mysterious
energy. They believed the entire universe is a product of the mind and is
created and animated by the collective tsal of all beings. Most people
are unaware that they possess this power, said the Tantrists, because the
average human mind functions "like a small puddle isolated from the
great ocean." Only great yogis skilled at contacting the deeper levels of
the mind were said to be able consciously to utilize such forces, and one
of the things they did to achieve this goal was to visualize repeatedly the
desired creation. Tibetan tantric texts are filled with visualization
exercises, or "sadhanas," designed for such purposes, and monks of
some sects, such as the Kargyupa, would spend as long as seven years in
complete solitude, in a cave or a sealed room, perfecting their
visualization abilities.75
The twelfth-century Persian Sufis also stressed the importance of
visualization in altering and reshaping one's destiny, and called the
subtle matter of thought alam almithal. Like many clairvoyants,
they believed that human beings possess a subtle body controlled by
chakralike energy centers. They also held that reality is divided into
a series of subtler planes of being, or Hadarat, and that the plane of
being directly adjacent to this one was a kind of template reality in
which the alam almithal of one's thoughts formed into idea-images,
which in turn eventually determined the course of one's life. The Sufis
also added a twist of their own. They felt the heart chakra, or himma,
was the agent responsible for this process, and that control of the
heart chakra was therefore a prerequisite for controlling one's des
tiny.76 -,
Edgar Cayce also spoke of thoughts as tangible things, a finer form
°f matter and, when he was in trance, repeatedly told his clients that
their thoughts created their destiny and that "thought is the builder." n has view, the thinking process is like a spider constantly spinning,
222 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 223
constantly adding to its web. Every moment of our lives we are creating
the images and patterns that give our future energy and shape, said
Cayce.TT
Paramahansa Yogananda advised people to visualize the future they
desired for themselves and charge it with the "energy of concentration."
As he put it, "Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and
willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or
visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material
realm."78
Indeed, such ideas can be found in a wide range of disparate sources.
"We are what we think," said the Buddha. "All that we are arises with
our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."79 "As a man acts,
so does he become. As a man's desire is, so is his destiny," states the
Hindu pre-Christian Erihadaranyaka Upani-shad.
w "All things in the
world of Nature are not controlled by Fate for the soul has a principle of
its own," said the fourth-century Greek
philosopher lamblicbus.81 "Ask and it will be given you------ If ye have
faith, nothing shall be impossible unto you," states the Bible.82 And,
"The destiny of a person is connected with those things he himself
creates and does," wrote Rabbi Steinsaltz in the kabbalistic
Thirteen-Petaied Rose.8
*
An Indication of Something Deeper
Even today the idea that our thoughts create our destiny is still very
much in the air. It is the subject of best-selling self-help books such as
Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization and Louise L. Hay's You Can
Heal Your Life. Hay, who says she cured herself of cancer by changing
her mental patterning, gives hugely successful workshops on her
techniques. It is the main philosophy inherent in many popular
"channeled" works such as A Course in Miracles and Jane Roberts's
Seth books.
It is also being embraced by some eminent psychologists. Jean
Houston, a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology
and current Director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona,
New York, discusses the idea at length in her book The Possible Human.
Houston also gives a variety of visualization exercises in the work and
even calls one "Orchestrating the Brain and Entering the Holoverse.""4
Ir
Another book that draws heavily on the holographic mode) to support
the idea that we can use visualization to reshape our future is Mary
Orser and Richard A. Zarro's Changing Your Destiny. In addition, Zarro
is the founder of Futureshaping Technologies, a company that gives
seminars on "futureshaping" techniques to businesses, and numbers
both Panasonic and the International Banking and Credit Association
among its clients.*5
Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon
and a longtime explorer of inner as well as outer space, has taken a
similar tack. In 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a
California-based organization devoted to researching such powers of
the mind. The institute is still going strong, and current projects include
a massive study of the mind's role in miraculous healings and
spontaneous remissions, and a study of the role consciousness plays in
creating a positive global future. "We create our own reality because
our inner emotional—our subconscious—reality draws us into those
situations from which we learn," states Mitchell. "We experience it as
strange things happening to us [and] we meet the people in our lives that
we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very
deep metaphysical and subconscious level."8*
Is the current popularity of the idea that we create our own destiny'
just a fad, or is its presence in so many different cultures and times an
indication of something much deeper, a sign that it is something all
human beings intuitively know is true? At present this question remains
unanswered, but in a holographic universe—a universe in which the
mind participates with reality and in which the innermost stuff of our
psyches can register as synchronicities in the objective world—the
notion that we are also the sculptors of our own fate is not so farfetched.
It even seems probable.
Three Last Pieces of Evidence
Before concluding, three last pieces of evidence deserve to be looked at. Although not conclusive, each offers a peek at still other timef&nscending
abilities consciousness may possess in a holographic universe.
224 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind 225
MASS DREAMS OF THE FUTURE
Another past-life researcher who turned up evidence suggestive that
the mind has a hand in creating one's destiny was the late San
Francisco-based psychologist Dr. Helen Wambach. Wambach's ap-
_ s. proach was to hypnotize groups of people in small workshops, regress
them to specified time periods, and ask them a predetermined list of
questions about their sex, clothing style, occupation, utensils used to
eating, and so on. Over the course of her twenty-nine-year investigation
of the past-life phenomenon, she hypnotized literally thousands of
individuals and amassed some impressive findings.
One criticism leveled against reincarnation is that people only seeivi to
remember past lives as famous or historical personages. Wambach,
however, found that more than 90 percent of her subjects recalled past
lives as peasants, laborers, farmers, and primitive food gatherers. Less
than 10 percent remembered incarnations as aristocrats, and none
remembered being anyone famous, a finding that argues against the
notion that past-life memories are fantasies."7 Her subjects were also
extraordinarily accurate when it came to historical details, even obscure
ones. For instance, when people remembered lives in the 1700s, they
described using a three-pronged fork to eat their evening meals, but
after 1790 they described most forks as having four prongs, an
observation that correctly reflects the historical evolution of the fork.
Subjects were equally accurate when it came to describing clothing and
footwear, types of foods eaten, et cetera.88
Wambach discovered she could also progress people to future lives.
Indeed, her subjects' descriptions of coming centuries were so fascinating
she conducted a major future-life-progression project in France
and the United States. Unfortunately, she passed away before completing
the study, but psychologist Chet Snow, a former colleague of
Wambach's, carried on her work and recently published the results in a
book entitled Mass Dreams of the Future.
When the reports of the 2,500 people who participated in the project
were tallied, several interesting features emerged. First, virtually all of
the respondents agreed that the population of the earth had decreased
dramatically. Many did not even find themselves in physical bodies in
the various future time periods specified, and those who did noted that
the population was much smaller than it is today.
In addition, the respondents divided up neatly into four categories,
each relating a different future. One group described a joyless and
sterile future in which most people lived in space stations, wore silvery
suits, and ate synthetic food. Another, the "New Agers," reported living
happier and more natural lives in natural settings, in harmony nitb one
another, and in dedication to learning and spiritual development. Type 3,
the "hi-tech urbanites," described a bleak mechanical future in which
people lived in underground cities and cities enclosed in domes and
bubbles. Type 4 described themselves as post-disaster survivors living
in a world that had been ravaged by some global, possibly nuclear,
disaster. People in this group lived in homes ranging from urban ruins to
caves to isolated farms, wore plain handsewn clothing that was often
made of fur, and obtained much of their food by hunting.
"What is the explanation? Snow turns to the holographic model for the
answer, and like Loye, believes that such findings suggest that there are
several potential futures, or holoverses, forming in the gathering mists
of fate. But like other past-iife researchers he also believes we create our
own destiny, both individually and collectively, and thus the four
scenarios are really a glimpse into the various potential futures the
human race is creating for itself en masse.
Consequently, Snow recommends that instead of building bomb
shelters or moving to areas that won't be destroyed by the "coming Earth
changes" predicted by some psychics, we should spend time believing
in and visualizing a positive future. He cites the Planetary
Commission—the ad hoc collection of millions of individuals around
the world who have agreed to spend the hour of 12:00 to 1:00 P.M.,
Greenwich mean time, each December thirty-first united in prayer and
meditation on world peace and healing—as a step in the right direction.
"If we are continually shaping our future physical reality by today's
collective thoughts and actions, then the time to wake up to the
alternative we have created is now," states Snow. "The choices between
the kind of Earth represented by each of the Types are clear. Which do
we want for our grandchildren? Which do we want perhaps to return to
ourselves someday?""9
CHANGING THE PAST
The future may not be the only thing that can be formed and reshaped
by human thought. At the 1988 Annual Convention of the
Parapsychologieal Association, Helmut Schmidt and Marilyn Schlitz
announced that several experiments they had conducted indicated the
226 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Time Out of Mind _____________ 227
mind may be able to alter the past as well. In one study Schmidt and
Schlitz used a computerized randomization process to record 1,000
different sequences of sound. Each sequence consisted of 100 tones of
varying duration, some of them pleasing to the ear and some just bursts
of noise. Because the selection process was random, according to the
laws of probability each sequence should contain roughly 50 percent
pleasing sounds and 50 percent noise.
Cassette recordings of the sequences were then mailed to volunteers.
While listening to the prerecorded cassettes the subjects were told to try
to psychokinetically increase the duration of the pleasing sounds and
decrease the durations of the noise. After the subjects completed the
task, they notified the lab of their attempts, and Schmidt and Schlitz then
examined the original sequences. They discovered that the recordings
the subjects listened to contained significantly longer stretches of
pleasing sounds than noise. In other words, it appeared that the subjects
had psychokinetically reached back through time and had an effect on
the randomized process from which their prerecorded cassettes had
been made.
In another test Schmidt and Schlitz programmed the computer to
produce 100-tone sequences randomly composed of four different notes,
and subjects were instructed to try to psychokinetically cause more high
notes to appear on the tapes than low. Again a retroactive PK effect was
found. Schmidt and Schlitz also discovered that volunteers who
meditated regularly exerted a greater PK effect than non-meditators,
suggesting again that contact with the unconscious is the key to
accessing the reality-structuring portions of the psyche.90
The idea that we can psychokinetically alter events that have already
occurred is an unsettling notion, for we are so deeply programmed to
believe the past is frozen as if it were a butterfly in glass, it is difficult
for us to imagine otherwise. But in a holographic universe, a universe in
which time is an illusion and reality is no more than a mind-created
image, it is a possibility to which we may have to become accustomed.
A WALK THROUGH THE GARDEN OF TIME
As fantastic as the above two notions are, they are small change
compared to the last category of time anomaly that merits our attention.
On August 10, 1901, two Oxford professors, Anne Moberly, the
principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain, the vice
principal, were walking through the garden of the Petit Trianon at
Versailles when they saw a shimmering effect pass over the landscape
in front of them, not unlike the special effects in a movie when it
changes from one scene to another. After the shimmering passed they
noticed that the landscape had changed. Suddenly the people around
them were wearing eighteenth-century costumes and wigs and were
oehaving in an agitated manner. As the two women stood dumbfounded,
a repulsive man with a pockmarked face approached and urged them to
change their direction. They followed him past a line of trees to a
garden where they heard strains of music floating through the air and
saw an aristocratic lady painting a watercolor.
Eventually the vision vanished and the landscape returned to normal,
but the transformation had been so dramatic that when the women
looked behind them they realized the path they had just walked down
was now blocked by an old stone wall. When they returned to England,
they searched through historical records and concluded that they had
been transported back in time to the day in which the sacking of the
Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss Guards had taken place—which
accounted for the agitated manner of the people in the garden—and that
the woman in the garden was none other than Marie Antoinette. So
vivid was the experience that the women filled a book-length
manuscript about the occurrence and presented it to the British Society
for Psychical Research.91
What makes Moberly and Jourdain's experience so significant is that
they did not simply have a retrocognitive vision of the past, but actually
walked back into the past, meeting people and wandering around in the
Tuileries garden as it was more than one hundred years earlier. Moberly
and Jourdain's experience is difficult to accept as real, hut given that it
provided them with no obvious benefit, and most certainly put their
academic reputations at risk, one is hard pressed to imagine what would
motivate them to make up such a story.
And it is not the only such occurrence at the Tuileries to be reported
to the British Society for Psychical Research. In May 1955, a London
solicitor and his wife also encountered several eighteenth-century
figures in the garden. And on another occasion, the staff of an embassy
whose offices overlook Versailles claims to have watched the garden
revert back to an earlier period of history as well.92 Here in the United
States parapsychologist Gardner Murphy, a former president of both
the American Psychological Association and the American Society for
"sychical Research, investigated a similar case in which a woman
228 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
identified only by the name Buterbaugh looked out the window of her
office at Nebraska Wesleyan University and saw the campus as it was
fifty years earlier. Gone were the bustling streets and the sorority houses,
and in their place was an open field and a sprinkling of trees, their leaves
aflutter in the breeze of a summer long since passed.*3
Is the boundary between the present and the past so flimsy that we can,
under the right circumstances, stroll back into the past with the same
ease that we can stroll through a garden? At present we simply do not
know, but in a world that is comprised less of solid objects traveling in
space and time, and more of ghostly holograms of energy sustained by
processes that are at least partially connected to human consciousness,
such events may not be as impossible as they appear.
And if this seems disturbing—this idea that our minds and even our
bodies are far less bound by the strictures of time than we have
previously imagined—we should remember that the idea the Earth is
round once proved equally frightening to a humanity convinced that it
was flat. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that we are still
children when it comes to understanding the true nature of time. And
like all children poised on the threshold of adulthood, we should put
aside our fears and come to terms with the way the world really is. For in
a holographic universe, a universe in which all things are just ghostly
coruscations of energy, more than just our understanding of time must
change. There are still other shimmerings to cross our landscape, still
deeper depths to plumb.
8
Traveling in the
Superhologram
Access to holographic reality becomes experientiafiy available when
one's consciousness is freed from its dependence on the physical body.
So long as one remains tied to the body and its sensory modalities,
holographic reality at best can only be an intellectual construct. When
one [is freed from the body] one experiences it directly. That is why
mystics speak about their visions with such certitude and conviction,
while those who haven't experienced this realm for themselves are left
feeling skeptical or even indifferent.
—Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.
Life at Death
Time is not the only thing that is illusory in a holographic universe.
Space, too, must be viewed as a product of our mode of perception. This
is even more difficult to comprehend than the idea that time is a
construct, for when it comes to trying to conceptualize "spacelessness"
there are no easy analogies, no images of amoeboid universes or
crystallizing futures, to fall back on. We are so conditioned to think in
terms of space as an absolute that it is hard for us even to begin to
imagine what it would be like to exist in a realm in which space did
229
230 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Traveling in the Superhologram _____________________231
not exist. Nonetheless, there is evidence that we are ultimately no more
bound by space than we are by time.
One powerful indication that this is so can be found in out-of-body
phenomena, experiences in which an individual's conscious awareness
appears to detach itself from the physical body and travel to some other
location. Out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, have been reported
throughout history by individuals from all walks of life. Aldous Huxley,
Goethe, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, and Jack London a]]
reported having OBEs. They were known to the Egyptians, the North
American Indians, the Chinese, the Greek philosophers, the medieval
alchemists, the Oceanic peoples, the Hindus, the Hebrews, and the
Moslems. In a cross-cultural study of 44 non-Western societies, Dean
Shiels found that only three did not hold a belief in OBEs.1 In a similar
study anthropologist Erika Bourguignon looked at 488 world societies—or
roughly 57 percent of all known societies—and found that 437
of them, or 89 percent, had at least some tradition regarding OBEs.2
Even today studies indicate that OBEs are still widespread. The late
Dr. Robert Crookall, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen and an
amateur parapsychologist, investigated enough cases to fill nine books
on the subject. In the 1960s Celia Green, the director of the Institute of
Psychophysical Research in Oxford, polled 115 students at Southampton
University and found that 19 percent admitted to having an
OBE. When 380 Oxford students were similarly questioned, 34 percent
answered in the affirmative.3 In a survey of 902 adults Haralds-son
found that 8 percent had experienced being out of their bodies at least
once in their life." And a 1980 survey conducted by Dr. Harvey Irwin at
the University of New England in Australia revealed that 20 percent of
177 students had experienced an 0BE.ft When averaged, these figures
indicate that roughly one out of every five people will have an OBE at
some point in his or her life. Other studies suggest the incidence may be
closer to one in ten, but the fact remains: OBEs are far more common
than most people realize.
The typical OBE is usually spontaneous and occurs most often during
sleep, meditation, anesthesia, illness, and instances of traumatic pain
(although they can occur under other circumstances as well). Suddenly
a person experiences the vivid sensation that his mind has separated
from his body. Frequently he finds himself floating over his body and
discovers he can travel or fly to other locations. What is it like to find
oneself free from the physical and staring down at one's own body? In a
1980 study of 339 cases of out-of-body travel, Dr. Glen
Gabbard of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Dr. Stuart Twemlow
0f the Topeka Veterans' Administration Medical Center, and Dr. powler
Jones of the University of Kansas Medical Center found that a
whopping 85 percent described the experience as pleasant and over half
of them said it was joyful.6
I know the feeling. I had a spontaneous OBE as a teenager, and after
recovering from the shock of finding myself floating over my body and
staring down at myself asleep in bed, I had an indescribably
exhilarating time flying through walls and soaring over the treetops.
During the course of my bodiless journey I even stumbled across a
library book a neighbor had lost and was able to tell her where the book
was located the next day. I describe this experience in detail in Beyond
the Quantum.
It is of no small significance that Gabbard, Twemlow, and Jones also
studied the psychological profile of OBEers and found that they were
psychologically normal and were on the whole extremely well adjusted.
At the 1980 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association they
presented their conclusions and told their colleagues that reassurances
that OBEs are common occurrences and referring the patient to books
on the subject may be "more therapeutic" than psychiatric treatment.
They even hinted that patients might gain more relief by talking to a
yogi than to a psychiatrist!7
Such facts notwithstanding, no amount of statistical findings are as
convincing as actual accounts of such experiences. For example,
Kimberiy Clark, a hospital social worker in Seattle, Washington, did
not take OBEs seriously until she encountered a coronary patient
named Maria. Several days after being admitted to the hospital Maria
had a cardiac arrest and was quickly revived. Clark visited her later that
afternoon expecting to find her anxious over the fact that her heart had
stopped. As she had expected, Maria was agitated, but not for the
reason she had anticipated.
Maria told Clark that she had experienced something very strange.
After her heart had stopped she suddenly found herself looking down
from the ceiling and watching the doctors and the nurses working on
her. Then something over the emergency room driveway distracted her
and as soon as she "thought herself there, she was there. Next Maria
"thought her way" up to the third floor of the building and found herself
"eyeball to shoelace" with a tennis shoe. It was an old shoe and she
noticed that the little toe had worn a hole through the fabric. She also
noticed several other details, such as the fact that the
232 _______________ THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Traveling in the Stiperboloiapram
lace was stuck under the heel. After Maria finished her account she
begged Clark to please go to the ledge and see if there was a shoe there
so that she could confirm whether her experience was real or not
Skeptical but intrigued, Clark went outside and looked up at the ledge,
but saw nothing. She went up to the third floor and began going in and
out of patients' rooms looking through windows so narrow she had to
press her face against the glass just to see the ledge at all. Finally, she
found a room where she pressed her face against the glass and looked
down and saw the tennis shoe. Still, from her vantage point she could not
tell if the little toe had worn a place in the shoe or if any of the other
details Maria had described were correct. It wasn't until she retrieved the
shoe that she confirmed Maria's various observations. "The only way she
would have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right
outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe," states Clark, who has
since become a believer in OBEs. "It was very concrete evidence for
me."8
Experiencing an OBE during cardiac arrest is relatively common, so
common that Michael B. Sabom, a cardiologist and professor of medicine
at Emory University and a staff physician at the Atlanta Veterans'
Administration Medical Center, got tired of hearing his patients recount
such "fantasies" and decided to settle the matter once and for all. Sabom
selected two groups of patients, one composed of 32 seasoned cardiac
patients who had reported OBEs during their heart attacks, and one
made up of 25 seasoned cardiac patients who had never experienced an
OBE. He then interviewed the patients, asking the OBEers to describe
their own resuscitation as they had witnessed it from the out-of-body
state, and asking the nonexperiencers to describe what they imagined
must have transpired during their resuscitation.
Of the nonexperiencers, 20 made major mistakes when they described
their resuscitations, 3 gave correct but general descriptions, and 2 had no
idea at all what had taken place. Among the experiencers, 26 gave correct
but general descriptions, 6 gave highly detailed and accurate
descriptions of their own resuscitation, and 1 gave a blow-by-blow
accounting so accurate that Sabom was stunned. The results inspired him
to delve even deeper into the phenomenon, and like Clark, he has now
become an ardent believer and lectures widely on the subject. There
appears "to be no plausible explanation for the accuracy of these
observations involving the usual physical senses," he
says- "The out-of-body hypothesis simply seems to fit best with the data
at hand."9
Although the OBEs experienced by such patients are spontaneous,
some people have mastered the ability well enough to leave their body at
will- One of the most famous of these individuals is a former radio and
television executive named Robert Monroe. When Monroe had his first
OBE in the late 1950s he thought he was going crazy and immediately
sought medical treatment. The doctors he consulted found nothing
wrong, but he continued to have his strange experiences and continued
to be greatly disturbed by them. Finally, after learning from a
psychologist friend that Indian yogis reported leaving their bodies all
the time, he began to accept his uninvited talent. "I had two options,"
Monroe recalls. "One was sedation for the rest of my life; the other was
to learn something about this state so I could control it."10
From that day forward Monroe began keeping a written journal of his
experiences, carefully documenting everything he learned about the
out-of-body state. He discovered he could pass through solid objects and
travel great distances in the twinkling of an eye simply by "thinking"
himseif there. He found that other people were seldom aware of his
presence, although the friends whom he traveled to see while in this
"second state" quickly became believers when he accurately described
their dress and activity at the time of his out-of-body visit. He also
discovered that he was not alone in his pursuit and occasionally bumped
into other disembodied travelers. Thus far he has catalogued his
experiences in two fascinating books, Journeys Out of the Body and Far
Journeys.
OBEs have also been documented in the lab. In one experiment,
parapsychologist Charles Tart was able to gei a skilled OBEer he
identifies only as Miss Z to identify correctly a five-digit number written
on a piece of paper that could only be reached if she were floating in
the out-of-body state.13 In a series of experiments conducted at the
American Society for Psychical Research in New York, Karlis Osis and
psychologist Janet Lee Mitchell found several gifted subjects who were
able to "fly in" from various locations around the country and correctly
describe a wide range of target images, including objects placed on a
table, colored geometric patterns placed on a free-floating shelf near the
ceiling, and optical illusions that could only be seen when an observer
peered through a small window in a special device. u Dr. Robert Morris,
the director of research at the Psychical Research
23* _________________THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Traveling in the Superholograrn __________________ 235
Foundation in Durham, North Carolina, has even used animals to detect
out-of-body visitations. In one experiment, for instance, Morris found
that a kitten belonging to a talented out-of-body subject named Keith
Harary consistently stopped meowing and started purring whenever
Harary was invisibly present.15
OBEs as a Holographic Phenomenon
Considered as a whole the evidence seems unequivocal. Although we
are taught that we "think" with our brains, this is not always true. Under
the right circumstances our consciousness—the thinking, perceiving
part of us—can detach from the physical body and exist just about
anywhere it wants to. Our current scientific understanding cannot
account for this phenomenon, but it becomes much more tractable in
terms of the holographic idea,
^ Remember that in a holographic universe, location is itself an illusion.
Just as an image of an apple has no specific location on a piece of
holographic film, in a universe that is organized holographically things
and objects also possess no definite location; everything is ultimately
nonlocal, including consciousness. Thus, although our consciousness
appears to be localized in our heads, under certain conditions it can just
as easily appear to be localized in the upper corner of the room,
hovering over a grassy lawn, or floating eyeball-to-shoelace with a
tennis shoe on the third-floor ledge of a building.
If the idea of a nonlocal consciousness seems difficult to grasp, a
useful analogy can once again be found in dreaming. Imagine that you
are dreaming you are attending a crowded art exhibit. As you wander
among the people and gaze at the artworks, your consciousness appears
to be localized in the head of the person you are in the dream. But where
is your consciousness really? A quick analysis will reveal that it is
actually in everything in the dream, in the other people attending the
exhibit, in the artworks, even in the very space of the dream. In a dream,
location is also an illusion because everything— people, objects, space,
consciousness, and so on—is unfolding out of the deeper and more
fundamental reality of the dreamer.
Another strikingly holographic feature of the OBE is the plasticity of
the form a person assumes once they are out of the body. After
detaching from the physical, OBEers sometimes find themselves in a
ghostlike body that is an exact replica of their biological body. This
caused some researchers in the past to postulate that human beings
possess a "phantom double" not unlike the doppelganger of literature.
However, recent findings have exposed problems with this assumption.
Although some OBEers describe this phantom double as naked,
others find themselves in bodies that are fully clothed. This suggests
that the phantom double is not a permanent energy replica of the
biological body, but is instead a kind of hologram that can assume
many shapes. This notion is borne out by the fact that phantom doubles
are not the only forms people find themselves in during OBEs. There
are numerous reports where people have also perceived themselves as
balls of light, shapeless clouds of energy, and even no discernible form
at all.
There is even evidence that the form a person assumes during an
OBE is a direct consequence of their beliefs and expectations. For
example, in his 1961 book The Mystical Life, mathematician J. H. M.
Whiteman revealed that he experienced at least two OBEs a month
during most of his adult life and recorded over two thousand such
incidents. He also disclosed that he always felt like a woman trapped in
a man's body, and during separation this sometimes resulted in his
finding himself in female form. Whiteman experienced various other
forms as well during his OB adventures, including children's bodies,
and concluded that beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, were the
determining factors in the form this second body assumed.lA
Monroe agrees and asserts that it is our "thought habits" that create
our OB forms. Because we are so habituated to being in a body, we have
a tendency to reproduce the same form in the OB state. Similarly, he
believes it is the discomfort most people feel when they are naked that
causes OBEers to unconsciously sculpt clothing for themselves when
they assume a human form. "I suspect that one may modify the Second
Body into whatever form is desired," says Monroe.16
What is our true form, if any, when we are in the disembodied state?
Monroe has found that once we drop all such disguises, we are at heart a
"vibrational pattern [comprised] of many interacting and resonating
frequencies."1G This finding is also remarkably suggestive that something
holographic is going on and offers further evidence that we—like
all things in a holographic universe—are ultimately a frequency phenomenon
which our mind converts into various holographic forms. It
also adds credence to Hunt's conclusion that our consciousness is
236 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Traveling in the Superhologram _____________________ 237
contained, not in the brain, but in a plasmic holographic energy field
that both permeates and surrounds the physical body.
The form we assume while in the OB state is not the only thing that
displays this holographic plasticity. Despite the accuracy of the observations
made by talented OB travelers during their disembodied jaunts,
researchers have long been troubled by some of the glaring inaccuracies
that crop up as well. For instance, the title of the lost library book I
stumbled across during my own OBE looked bright green while I was in
a disembodied state. But after I was back in my physical body and
returned to retrieve the book I saw that the lettering was actually black.
The literature is filled with accounts of similar discrepancies, instances
in which OB travelers accurately described a distant room full of people,
save that they added an extra person or perceived a couch where there
was reaily a table.
In terms of the holographic idea, one explanation may be that such
OB travelers have not yet fully developed the ability to convert the
frequencies they perceive while in a disembodied state into a completely
accurate holographic representation of consensus reality. In
other words, since OBEers appear to be relying on a completely new set
of senses, these senses may still be wobbly and not yet proficient at the
art of converting the frequency domain into a seemingly objective
construct of reality.
These nonphysica! senses are further hampered by the constraints our
own self-limiting beliefs place upon them. A number of talented OB
travelers have noted that once they became more at home in their
second body they discovered that they could "see" in all directions at
once without turning their heads. In other words, although seeing in all
directions appears to be normal during the OB state, they were so
accustomed to believing that they could see only through their
eyes-even when they were in a nonphysical hologram of their
body—that this belief at first kept them from realizing that they
possessed 360-degree vision.
There is evidence that even our physical senses have fallen victim to
this censorship. Despite our unwavering conviction that we see with our
eyes, reports persist of individuals who possess "eyeless sight," or the
ability to see with other areas of their bodies. Recently David Eisenberg,
M.D., a clinical research fellow at the Harvard Medical School,
published an account of two school-age Chinese sisters in Beijing who
can "see" well enough with the skin in their armpits to read notes and
identify colors.17 In Italy the neurologist Cesare Lombroso
studied a blind girl who could see with the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear.1* In the 1960s the prestigious Soviet Academy 0f Science investigated a Russian peasant woman named Rosa Kule-shova, who could see photographs and read newspapers with the tips of her fingers, and pronounced her abilities genuine. Significantly, the Soviets ruled out the possibility that Kuleshova was simply detecting the varying amounts of stored heat different colors emanate natu- rally—Kuleshova could read a black and white newspaper even when it was covered with a sheet of heated glass.I9 Kuleshova became so renowned for her abilities that Life magazine eventually published an article about her.20 In short, there is evidence that we too are not limited to seeing only through our physical eyes. This is, of course, the message inherent in my father's friend Tom's ability to read the inscription on a watch even when it was shielded by his daughter's stomach, and also in the re- mote-viewing phenomenon. One cannot help but wonder if eyeless sight is actually just further evidence that reality is indeed maya, an illusion, and our physical body, as well as al! the seeming absoluteness of its physiology, is as much a holographic construct of our perception as our second body. Perhaps we are so deeply habituated to believing that we can see only through our eyes that even in the physical we have shut ourselves off from the full range of our perceptual capabilities. Another holographic aspect of OBEs is the blurring of the division between past and future that sometimes occurs during such experiences. For example, Osis and Mitchell discovered that when Dr. Alex Tanous, a well-known psychic and talented OB traveler from Maine, flew in and attempted to describe the test objects they placed on a table, he had a tendency to describe items that were placed there days later.'21 This suggests that the realm people enter during the OB state is one of the subtler levels of reality Bohm speaks about, a region that is closer to the implicate and hence closer to the level of reality in which the division between past, present, and future ceases to exist. Put another way, it appears that instead of tuning into the frequencies that encode the present, Tanous's mind inadvertently tuned into frequencies that contained information about the future and converted those into a hologram of reality. That Tanous's perception of the room was a holographic phenomenon and not just a precognitive vision that took place solely in his head ,s underscored by another fact. The day of his schedule to produce an
238 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE Traveling in the Superhologram_____________ 239
OBE Osis asked New York psychic Christine Whiting to hold vigil in
the room and try to describe any projector she might "see" visiting there.
Despite Whiting's ignorance of who would be flying in or when, when
Tanous made his OB visit she saw his apparition clearly and described
him as wearing brown corduroy pants and a white cotton shirt, the
clothing Dr. Tanous was wearing in Maine at the time of his attempt.22
Harary has also made occasional OB journeys into the future and
agrees that the experiences are qualitatively different from other
pre-cognitive experiences. "OBEs to future time and space differ from
regular precognitive dreams in that I am definitely 'out' and moving
through a black, dark area that ends at some lighted future scene," he
states. When he makes an OB visit to the future he has sometimes even
seen a silhouette of his future self in the scene, and this is not all. When
the events he has witnessed eventually come to pass, he can also sense
his time-traveling OB self in the actual scene with him. He describes this
eerie sensation as "meeting myself 'behind' myself as if I were two
beings," an experience that surely must put normal deja vus to shame.23
There are also cases on record of OB journeys into the past. The
Swedish playwright August Strindberg, himself a frequent OB traveler,
describes one in his book Legends. The occurrence took place while
Strindberg was sitting in a wine shop, trying to persuade a young friend
not to give up his military career. To bolster his argument Strindberg
brought up a past incident involving both of them that had taken place
one evening in a tavern. As the playwright proceeded to describe the
event he suddenly "lost consciousness" only to find himself sitting in the
tavern in question and reliving the occurrence. The experience lasted
only for a few moments, and then he abruptly found himself back in his
body and in the present.24 The argument can also be made that the
retrocognitive visions we examined in the last chapter in which
clairvoyants had the experience that they were actually present during,
and even "floating" over, the historical scenes they were describing are
also a form of OB projection into the past.
Indeed, when one reads the voluminous literature now available on
the OB phenomenon, one is repeatedly struck at the similarities between
OB travelers' descriptions of their experiences and characteristics we
have now come to associate with a holographic universe. In
addition to describing the OB state as a place where time and space Bo
longer properly exist, where thought can be transformed into hologramlike
forms, and where consciousness is ultimately a pattern of
vibrations, or frequencies, Monroe notes that perception during OBEs
seems based less on "a reflection of light waves" and more on "an
impression of radiation," an observation that suggests once again that
when one enters the OB realm one begins to enter Pribram's frequency
domain.25 Other OB travelers have also referred to the frequencylike
quality of the Second State. For instance, Marcel Louis Forhan, a
French OB experiencer who wrote under the name of "Yram," spends
much of his book, Practical Astral Projection, trying to describe the
wavelike and seemingly electromagnetic qualities of the OB realm. Still
others have commented on the sense of cosmic unity one experiences
during the state and have summarized it as a feeling that "everything is
everything," and "I am that"26
As holographic as the OBE is, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it
comes to more direct experience of the frequency aspects of reality.
Although OBEs are only experienced by a segment of the human race,
there is another circumstance under which we all come into closer
contact with the frequency domain. That is when we journey to that
undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. The rub,
with all due respect to Shakespeare, is that some travelers do return.
And the stories they tell are filled with features that smack once again of
tilings holographic.