The Holographic Universe (34 page)

The list goes on and on.

What is the explanation
for such findings? Krippner believes that Bohm's assertion that the mind can
access the implicate order is one explanation. Both Puthoff and Targ feel that
nonlocal quantum inter-connectedness plays a role in precognition, and Targ has
asserted that during a remote-viewing experience the mind appears to be able to
access some kind of “holographic soup,” or domain, in which all points are
infinitely interconnected not only in space, but in time as well.

Dr. David Loye, a
clinical psychologist and a former member of the Princeton and UCLA medical
school faculties, agrees. “For those pondering the puzzle of precognition, the
Pribram-Bohm holographic mind theory seems to offer the greatest hope yet for
progress toward the sought-for solution,” he states. Loye, who is currently
codirector of the Institute for Future Forecasting in northern California,
knows whereof he speaks. He has spent the last two decades investigating
precognition and the art of forecasting in general, and develops techniques to
enable people to get in touch with their own intuitive awareness of the future.

The hologramlike nature
of many precognitive experiences provides further evidence that the ability to
foresee the future is a holographic phenomenon. As with retrocognition,
psychics report that precognitive information often appears to them in the form
of three-dimensional images. Cuban-born psychic Tony Cordero says that when he
sees the future it's like watching a movie in his mind. Cordero saw one of the
first such movies when he was a child and had a vision of the Communist
takeover of Cuba. “I told my family that I saw red flags all over Cuba and they
were going to have to leave the country and that a lot of members of the family
were going to be shot,” says Cordero. “I actually saw relatives being shot. I
could smell smoke and hear the sound of gunfire. I feel like I'm in the
situation. I can hear people talking but they cannot hear or see me. It's like
traveling into time or something.”

The words psychics use
to describe their experiences are also similar to Bohm's. Garrett described
clairvoyance as “an intensely acute sensing of some aspects of life in
operation, and since at clairvoyant levels time is
undivided and whole
[italics added], one often perceives the object or event in its past, present
and/or future phases in abruptly swift successions.”

We Are All Precognitive

Bohm's assertion that
every human consciousness has its source in the implicate implies that we all
possess the ability to access the future, and this is also supported by the
evidence. Jahn and Dunne's discovery that even normal individuals do well in
precognitive remote-viewing tests is one indication of the widespread nature of
the ability. Numerous other findings, both experimental and anecdotal, provide
additional evidence. In a 1934 BBC broadcast Dame Edith Lyttelton, a member of
the politically and socially prominent Balfour family in England and the
president of the British Society for Psychical Research, invited listeners to
send in accounts of their own precognitive experiences. She was inundated with
mail, and even after eliminating the cases that did not have corroborative
evidence, she still had enough to fill a volume on the subject. Similarly,
surveys conducted by Louisa Rhine revealed that precognitions occur more
frequently than any other kind of psychic experience.

Studies also show that
precognitive visions tend to be of tragedies, with premonitions of unhappy
events outnumbering happy ones by a ratio of four to one. Presentiments of
death predominate, with accidents coming in second, and illnesses third. The
reason for this seems obvious. We are so thoroughly conditioned to believe that
perceiving the future is
not
possible, our natural precognitive
abilities have gone dormant. Like the superhuman strengths individuals display
during life-threatening emergencies, they only spill over into our conscious
minds during times of crisis—when someone near to us is about to die; when our
children or some other loved one is in danger, and so on. That our
“sophisticated” understanding of reality is responsible for our inability to
both grasp and utilize the true nature of our relationship with time is evident
in the fact that primitive cultures nearly always score better on ESP tests
than so-called civilized cultures.

Further evidence that we
have relegated our innate precognitive abilities to the hinterlands of the
unconscious can be found in the close association between premonitions and
dreams. Studies show that from 60 to 68 percent of all precognitions occur
during dreaming. We may have banished our ability to see the future from our conscious
minds, but it is still very active in the deeper strata of our psyches.

Tribal cultures are well
aware of this fact, and shamanic traditions 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 atemporal 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. Other studies have also confirmed the ESP-enhancing effects of
hypnosis. 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.

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 is 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.

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 calls these infra holographic
leaps “hololeaps” and feels that they are what provides us with our true
capacity for both insight and freedom.

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.”

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. Ingo
Swann, a gifted psychic who has produced impressive results in various studies,
including Puthoff and Targ's remote-viewing 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.

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
Union
) 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 boundaries 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.