The Holographic Universe (13 page)

If there is no division
between the mental and physical worlds, these same qualities are also true of
objective reality. According to Peat, this does not mean the material universe
is an illusion, because both the implicate and the explicate play a role in
creating reality. Nor does it mean that individuality is lost, any more than
the image of a rose is lost once it is recorded in a piece of holographic film.
It simply means that we are again like vortices in a river, unique but
inseparable from the flow of nature. Or as Peat puts it, “the self lives on but
as one aspect of the more subtle movement that involves the order of the whole
of consciousness.”

And so we have come full
circle, from the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective
reality—the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's
religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars—to
the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its warp and
weft the innermost processes of consciousness. Such is the nature of the deep
connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe. In the
next chapter we will explore how this connectivity, as well as other aspects of
the holographic idea, affect our current understanding of health.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. . . .

A sixty-one-year-old man
we'll call Prank was diagnosed as having an almost always fatal form of throat
cancer and told he had less than a 5 percent chance of surviving. His weight
had dropped from 130 to 98 pounds. He was extremely weak, could barely swallow
his own saliva, and was having trouble breathing. Indeed, his doctors had
debated whether to give him radiation therapy at all, because there was a
distinct possibility the treatment would only add to his discomfort without
significantly increasing his chances for survival. They decided to proceed
anyway.

Then, to Frank's great
good fortune, Dr. 0. Carl Simonton, a radiation oncologist and medical director
of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Dallas, Texas, was asked to
participate in his treatment Simonton suggested that Prank himself could
influence the course of his own disease. Simonton then taught Frank a number of
relaxation and mental-imagery techniques he and his colleagues had developed.
From that point on, three times a day, Frank pictured the radiation he received
as consisting of millions of tiny bullets of energy bombarding his cells. He
also visualised his cancer cells as weaker and more confused than his normal
cells, and thus unable to repair the damage they suffered. Then he visualized
his body's white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, coming in,
swarming over the dead and dying cancer cells, and carrying them to his liver
and kidneys to be flushed out of his body.

The results were
dramatic and far exceeded what usually happened in such cases when patients
were treated solely with radiation. The radiation treatments worked like magic.
Prank experienced almost none of the negative side effects—damage to skin and
mucous membranes—that normally accompanied such therapy. He regained his lost
weight and his strength, and in a mere two months all signs of his cancer had
vanished. Simonton believes Prank's remarkable recovery was due in large part
to his daily regimen of visualization exercises.

In a follow-up study,
Simonton and his colleagues taught their mental-imagery techniques to 159
patients with cancers considered medically incurable. The expected survival
time for such a patient is twelve months. Four years later 63 of the patients
were still alive. Of those, 14 showed no evidence of disease, the cancers were
regressing in 12, and in 17 the disease was stable. The average survival time
of the group as a whole was 24.4 months, over twice as long as the national
norm.

Simonton has since
conducted a number of similar studies, all with positive results. Despite such
promising findings, his work is still considered controversial. For instance,
critics argue that the individuals who participate in Simonton's studies are
not “average” patients. Many of them have sought Simonton out for the express
purpose of learning his techniques, and this shows that they already have an
extraordinary fighting spirit. Nonetheless, many researchers find Simonton's
results compelling enough to support his work, and Simonton himself has set up
the Simonton Cancer Center, a successful research and treatment facility in
Pacific Palisades, California, devoted to teaching imagery techniques to
patients who are fighting various illnesses. The therapeutic use of imagery has
also captured the imagination of the public, and a recent survey revealed that
it was the fourth most frequently used alternative treatment for cancer.

How is it that an image
formed in the mind can have an effect on something as formidable as an
incurable cancer? Not surprisingly the holographic theory of the brain can be
used to explain this phenomenon as well. Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg,
director of research and rehabilitation science at the University of Texas
Health Science Center in Dallas, Texas, and one of the scientists who helped
develop the imagery techniques Simonton uses, believes it is the holographic
imaging capabilities of the brain that provide the key.

As has been noted, all
experiences are ultimately just neurophysiological processes taking place in
the brain. According to the holographic model the reason we experience some
things, such as emotions, as internal realities and others, such as the songs
of birds and the barking of dogs, as external realities is because that is
where the brain localizes them when it creates the internal hologram that we
experience as reality. However, as we have also seen, the brain cannot always
distinguish between what is “out there” and what it believes to be “out there,”
and that is why amputees sometimes have phantom limb sensations. Put another
way, in a brain that operates holographically, the remembered image of a thing
can have as much impact on the senses as the thing itself.

It can also have an
equally powerful effect on the body's physiology, a state of affairs that has
been experienced firsthand by anyone who has ever felt their heart race after
imagining hugging a loved one. Or anyone who has ever felt their palms grow
sweaty after conjuring up the memory of some unusually frightening experience.
At first glance the fact that the body cannot always distinguish between an
imagined event and a real one may seem strange, but when one takes the
holographic model into account—a model that asserts that
all
experiences, whether real or imagined, are reduced to the same common language
of holographically organized wave forms—the situation becomes much less
puzzling. Or as Achterberg puts it, “When images are regarded in the
holographic manner, their omnipotent influence on physical function logically
follows. The image, the behavior, and the physiological concomitants are a
unified aspect of the same phenomenon.”

Bohm uses his idea of
the implicate order, the deeper and nonlocal level of existence from which our
entire universe springs, to echo the sentiment; “Every action starts from an intention
in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form; it
already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it
out And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place in that
way from the subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until
it manifests in the explicate.” In other words, in the implicate order, as in
the brain itself, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable, and
it should therefore come as no surprise to us that images in the mind can
ultimately manifest as realities in the physical body.

Achterberg found that
the physiological effects produced through the use of imagery are not only
powerful, but can also be extremely specific. For example, the term
white
blood cell
actually refers to a number of different kinds of cell. In one
study, Achterberg decided to see if she could train individuals to increase the
number of only one particular type of white blood cell in their body. To do
this she taught one group of college students how to image a cell known as a
neutrophil, the major constituent of the white blood cell population. She
trained a second group to image T-cells, a more specialized kind of white blood
cell. At the end of the study the group that learned the neutrophil imagery had
a significant increase in the number of neutrophils in their body, but no
change in the number of T-cells. The group that learned to image T-cells had a
significant increase in the number of that kind of cell, but the number of
neutrophils in their body remained the same.

Achterberg says that
belief is also critical to a person's health. As she points out, virtually
everyone who has had contact with the medical world knows at least one story of
a patient who was sent home to die, but because they “believed” otherwise, they
astounded their doctors by completely recovering. In her fascinating book
Imagery
in Healing
she describes several of her own encounters with such cases. In
one, a woman was comatose on admission, paralyzed, and diagnosed with a massive
brain tumor. She underwent surgery to “debulk” her tumor (remove as much as is
safely possible), but because she was considered close to death, she was sent
home without receiving either radiation or chemotherapy.

Instead of promptly
dying, the woman became stronger by the day. As her biofeedback therapist,
Achterberg was able to monitor the woman's progress, and by the end of sixteen
months the woman showed no evidence of cancer. Why? Although the woman was
intelligent in a worldly sense, she was only moderately educated and did not
really know the meaning of the word
tumor
—or the death sentence it
imparted. Hence, she did not believe she was going to die and overcame her
cancer with the same confidence and determination she'd used to overcome every
other illness in her life, says Achterberg. When Achterberg saw her last, the
woman no longer had any traces of paralysis, had thrown away her leg braces and
her cane, and had even been out dancing a couple of times.

Achterberg backs up her
claim by noting that the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed
individuals who cannot comprehend the death sentence society attaches to the
cancer also have a significant lower cancer rate. Over a four year period in
Texas, only about 4 percent of the deaths in these two groups were from cancer
compared to the state norm which was 15 to 18 percent. Intriguingly, there was
not one recorded case of leukemia between the years 1925 and 1978 in these two
groups. Studies have reported similar results in the United States as a whole,
as well as in various other countries including England, Greece, and Romania.

Because of these and
other findings Achterberg thinks that a person with an illness, even a common
cold, should recruit as many “neural holograms” of health as possible, in the
form of beliefs, images of well-being and harmony, and images of specific
immune functions being activated. She feels we must also exorcise any beliefs
and images that have negative consequences for our health, and realize that our
body holograms are more than just pictures. They contain a host of other kinds
of information including intellectual understandings and interpretations,
prejudices both conscious and unconscious, fears, hopes, worriers and so on.

Achterberg's
recommendation that we rid ourselves of negative images is well taken, for
there is evidence that imagery can cause illness as well as cure it, in
Love,
Medicine and Miracles,
Bernie Siegel says she often encounters instances
where the mental pictures patients use to describe themselves or their lives
seem to play a role in the creation of their conditions, examples include a
mastectomy patient who told him she “needed to get something off her chest”. A
patient with multiple myeloma in his backbone who said he “was always
considered spineless”; and a man with carcinoma of the larynx whose father
punished him as child by constantly squeezing his throat and telling him to
“shut up!”

Sometimes the
relationship between the image and the illness is so striking it is difficult
to understand why it is not apparent to the individual involved, as in the case
of a psycho therapist who had emergency surgery to remove several feet of dead
intestine and then told Siegel, “I’m glad you’re my surgeon. I have been
undergoing teaching analysis. I couldn’t handle all the shit that was coming
up, or digest the crap in my life.” Incidents such as these have convinced
Siegel that nearly all diseases originate at least to some degree in the mind
but he does not think this makes them psychosomatic or unreal. He prefers to
say they are
soma-significant,
a term coined by Bohm to sum up better
the relationship, and derived from the Greek word
soma
meaning “body”.
That all diseases might have their origin in the mind does not disturb Siegel.
He sees it rather as a sign of tremendous hope, an indicator that if one ha the
power to create sickness, one also has the power to create wellness.

The connection between
image and illness is so potent, imagery can even be used to predict a patient's
prospects for survival. In another landmark experiment, Simonton, his wife,
psychologist Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, Achterberg, and psychologist G.Frank
Lawlis performed a battery of blood tests on 126 patients with advanced cancer.