The Holographic Universe (9 page)

The difficulty is also
another indication of how radical a revision Bohm and Pribram are trying to
make in our way of thinking. But it is not the only radical revision. Pribram's
assertion that our brains construct objects pales beside another of Bohm's
conclusions:
that toe even construct space and time.
The implications of
this view are just one of the subjects that will be examined as we explore the
effect Bohm and Pribram's ideas have had on the work of researchers in other
fields.

MIND AND BODY

If we were to look closely at an
individual human being, we would immediately notice that it is a unique
hologram unto itself; self-contained, self-generating, and self-knowledgeable.
Yet if we were to remove this being from its planetary context, we would
quickly realize that the human form is not unlike a mandala or symbolic poem,
for within its form and flow lives comprehensive information about various
physical, social, psychological, and evolutionary contexts within which it was
created.

While the traditional model of
psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical,
modern consciousness research has added new levels, realms, and dimensions and
shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole
universe and all of existence.

One area of research on
which the holographic model has had an impact is psychology. This is not
surprising, for, as Bohm has pointed out, consciousness itself provides a
perfect example of what he means by undivided and flowing movement. The ebb and
flow of our consciousness is not precisely definable but can be seen as a deeper
and more fundamental reality out of which our thoughts and ideas unfold. In
turn, these thoughts and ideas are not unlike the ripples, eddies, and
whirlpools that form in a flowing stream, and like the whirlpools in a stream
some can recur and persist in a more or less stable way, while others are
evanescent and vanish almost as quickly as they appear. The holographic idea
also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between
the consciousnesses of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples
of such linkage is embodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of a
collective unconscious. Early in his career Jung became convinced that the
dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained
symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their
personal history. Instead, such symbols more closely resembled the images and
themes of the world's great mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that
myths, dreams, hallucinations, and religious visions all spring from the same
source, a collective unconscious that is shared by all people.

One experience that led
Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a
young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his
rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun.
The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When
Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's
penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and
caused the wind to blow.

At the time Jung viewed
the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later
he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text
that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and
invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and
said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down
from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to
blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had
contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's
vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up
from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself.
Jung called such images
archetypes
and believed they were so ancient
it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking
somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.

Although Jung's concept
of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now
embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current
understanding of the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its
existence. The interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic
model, however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things
are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected.
Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or as Bohm puts it, “Deep
down the consciousness of mankind is one.”

If each of us has access
to the unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all
walking encyclopedias? Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes it is because we are only
able to tap into information in the implicate order that is directly relevant
to our memories. Anderson calls this selective process
personal resonance
and likens it to the fact that a vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or
set up a vibration in) another tuning fork
only
if the second tuning
fork possesses a similar structure, shape, and size. “Due to personal
resonance, relatively few of the almost infinite variety of ‘images’ in the
implicate holographic structure of the universe are available to an
individual's personal consciousness,” says Anderson. “Thus, when enlightened
persons glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write
out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a context
similar to that in which Einstein studied physics.”

Dreams and the
Holographic Universe

Another researcher who
believes Bohm's implicate order has applications in psychology is psychiatrist
Montague Ullman, the founder of the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical
Center in Brooklyn, New York, and a professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also in New York. Ullman's initial
interest in the holographic concept stemmed also from its suggestion that all
people are interconnected in the holographic order. He has good reason for his
interest Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he was responsible for many of the ESP
dream experiments mentioned in the introduction. Even today the ESP dream
studies conducted at Maimonides stand as some of the best empirical evidence
that, in our dreams at least, we are able to communicate with one another in
ways that cannot presently be explained,

In a typical experiment
a paid volunteer who claimed to possess no psychic ability was asked to sleep
in a room in the lab while a person in another room concentrated on a randomly
selected painting and tried to get the volunteer to dream of the image it
contained. Sometimes the results were inconclusive. But other times the
volunteers had dreams that were clearly influenced by the paintings. For
example, when the target painting was Tamayo's
Animals
, a picture
depicting two dogs flashing their teeth and howling over a pile of bones, the
test subject dreamed she was at a banquet where there was not enough meat and
everyone was warily eyeing one another as they greedily ate their allotted
portions.

In another experiment
the target picture was Chagall's
Paris from a Window
, a brightly colored
painting depicting a man looking out a window at the Paris skyline. The
painting also contained several other unusual features, including a cat with a
human face, several small figures of men flying through the air, and a chair
covered with flowers. Over the course of several nights the test subject
dreamed repeatedly about things French, French architecture, a French
policeman's hat, and a man in French attire gazing at various “layers” of a
French village. Some of the images in these dreams also appeared to be specific
references to the painting's vibrant colors and unusual features, such as the
image of a group of bees flying around flowers, and a brightly colored Mardi
Gras-type celebration in which the people were wearing costumes and masks.

Although Ullman believes
such findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness Bohm
is talking about, he feels that an even more profound example of holographic
wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming. That is the ability of
our dreaming selves often to be far wiser than we ourselves are in our waking
state. For instance, Ullman says that in his psychoanalytic practice he could
have a patient who seemed completely unenlightened when he was awake—mean,
selfish, arrogant, exploitative, and manipulative; a person who had fragmented
and dehumanized all of his interpersonal relationships. But no matter how
spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or her own
shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly and contain
metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into a state of greater
self-awareness.

Moreover, such dreams
were not one-time occurrences. During the course of his practice Ullman noticed
that when one of his patients failed to recognize or accept some truth about
himself, that truth would surface again and again in his dreams, in different
metaphorical guises and linked with different related experiences from his
past, but always in an apparent attempt to offer him new opportunities to come
to terms with the truth.

Because a man can ignore
the counsel of his dreams and still live to be a hundred, Ullman believes this
self-monitoring process is striving for more than just the welfare of the
individual. He believes that nature is concerned with the survival of the
species. He also agrees with Bohm on the importance of wholeness and feels that
dreams are nature's way of trying to counteract our seemingly unending
compulsion to fragment the world. “An individual can disconnect from all that's
cooperative, meaningful, and loving and still survive, but nations don't have
that luxury. Unless we learn how to overcome all the ways we've fragmented the
human race, nationally, religiously, economically, or whatever, we are going to
continue to find ourselves in a position where we can accidentally destroy the
whole picture,” says Ullman. “The only way we can do that is to look at how we
fragment our existence as individuals. Dreams reflect our individual
experience, but I think that's because there's a greater underlying need to
preserve the species, to maintain species-connectedness.”

What is the source of
the unending flow of wisdom that bubbles up in our dreams? Ullman admits that
he doesn't know, but he offers a suggestion. Given that the implicate order
represents in a sense an infinite information source, perhaps it is the origin
of this greater fund of knowledge. Perhaps dreams are a bridge between the
perceptual and nonmanifest orders and represent a “natural transformation of
the implicate into the explicate.” If Ullman is correct in this supposition it
stands the traditional psychoanalytic view of dreams on its ear, for instead of
dream content being something that ascends into consciousness from a primitive
substratum of the personality, quite the opposite would be true.

Psychosis and
the Implicate Order

Ullman believes that
some aspects of psychosis can also be explained by the holographic idea. Both
Bohm and Pribram have noted that the experiences mystics have reported
throughout the ages—such as feelings of cosmic oneness with the universe, a
sense of unity with all life, and so forth—sound very much like descriptions of
the implicate order. They suggest that perhaps mystics are somehow able to peer
beyond ordinary explicate reality and glimpse its deeper, more holographic
qualities. Ullman believes that psychotics are also able to experience certain
aspects of the holographic level of reality. But because they are unable to
order their experiences rationally, these glimpses are only tragic parodies of
the ones reported by mystics.

For example,
schizophrenics often report oceanic feelings of oneness with the universe, but
in a magic, delusional way. They describe feeling a loss of boundaries between
themselves and others, a belief that leads them to think their thoughts are no
longer private. They believe they are able to read the thoughts of others. And
instead of viewing people, objects, and concepts as individual things, they
often view them as members of larger and larger subclasses, a tendency that
seems to be a way of expressing the holographic quality of the reality in which
they find themselves.

Ullman believes that
schizophrenics try to convey their sense of unbroken wholeness in the way they
view space and time. Studies have shown that schizophrenics often treat the
converse of any relation as identical to the relation. For instance, according
to the schizophrenic's way of thinking, saying that “event A follows event B”
is the same as saying “event B follows event A.” The idea of one event
following another in any kind of time sequence is meaningless, for all points
in time are viewed equal. The same is true of spatial relations. If a man's
head is above his shoulders, then his shoulders are also above his head. Like
the image in a piece of holographic film, things no longer have precise
locations, and spatial relationships cease to have meaning.