The Holographic Universe (33 page)

It is interesting to
note that many retro cognitive individuals can also see the human energy field.
When he was a child Ossowiecki's mother gave him eye drops in an attempt to get
rid of the bands of color he told her he saw around people, and McMullen also
can diagnose a person's health by looking at their field. This suggests that
retro cognition may be linked to the ability to se the subtler and more
vibratory aspects of reality. Put another way, the past may be just one more
thing that is encoded in Pribram frequency domain, a portion of the cosmic
interference patterns that most of us edit out and only a few tune into and
convert into hologram like images. “Maybe in the holographic state - in the
frequency domain - four thousand years ago is tomorrow” says Pribram.

Phantoms from
the Past

The idea that the past
is holographically recorded in the cosmic airwaves and can occasionally be
plucked out by the human mind and converted into holograms may also explain at
least some hauntings. Many ghostly apparitions appear to be little more than
holograms three-dimensional recordings of some person or scene from the past.
For example, one theory about ghosts is that they are the soul or spirit of the
deceased individual, but not all ghosts are human. There are numerous cases on
record of individuals seeing phantoms of inanimate objects as well, a fact that
belies the idea that apparitions are discarnate souls.
Phantasms of the
Living,
a massive two-volumes set of the well-documented reports of
hauntings and other paranormal phenomena compiled by the Society for Psychical
Research in London, offers many such examples. For instance, in one case a
British military officer and his family watched as a spectral horse-drawn
carriage pulled upon their lawn and stopped. So real was the ghostly carriage
that the officer's son walked up to it and saw what appeared to be a female
figure inside, the image vanished before he could obtain a better look, and
left no horse or wheel tracks.

How common are such
experiences? We do not know, but we do know, that in the United States and
England several studies have shown that from 10 to 17 percent of the general
population have seen such an apparition, indicating hat such phenomena may be
far more common than most of us suspect.

The notion that some
events leave stronger imprints in the holographic record than others is also
supported by the tendency of hauntings to occur at locations where some
terrible act of violence or other unusually powerful emotional occurrence has
taken place. The literature is filled with apparitions appearing at the sites
of murders, military battles, and the kinds of mayhem this suggests that in
addition to images and sounds, the emotions being felt during an event are also
recorded in the cosmic hologram again it appears that that it is the emotional
intensity of such events that makes them more prominent in the holographic
record, and that allows normal individuals to unwittingly tap into them.

And again, many of these
hauntings appear to be less the product of unhappy earthbound spirits, and more
just accidental glimpses into the holographic record of the past. This too is
supported by the literature on the subject. For example, in 1907, and at the
prompting of t poet William Butler Yeats, a UCLA anthropologist and religious
scholar named W.Y. Evans-Wentz embarked on a two year journey through Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany to interview people who had allegedly
encountered fairies and other supernatural beings. Evans-Wentz undertook the
project because Yeats told him that, as twentieth-century values replaced the
old beliefs, encounters with fairies were becoming less frequent and needed to
be documented before the tradition was lost completely.

As Evans-Wentz went from
village to village interviewing the usually elder stalwarts of the faith he
discovered that not all of the fairies people encountered in the glens and
moon-dappled meadows were small. Some were tall and looked like normal human
being except they were luminous and translucent and had the curious habit of
wearing the clothing of earlier historical periods.

Moreover these “fairies”
often appeared in or around archaeological 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-Faith, 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.”

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.” 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. 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. Sightings of
spectral armies fighting equally phantasmal battles are even mentioned in
ancient Assyrian texts.

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.

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
kaleidoscopically 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 success rate that was better than chance by odds of three
million to one. 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.

In his work at the Dream
Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center, Montague Ullman, 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.
Ullman 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 “as far as the archway.” The painting
chosen at random the next day turned out to be Van Gogh's
Hospital Corridor
at St 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.

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 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.

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.

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 chosen 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.