The Holographic Universe (41 page)

What do NDEers look like
when they have not constructed a hologramlike body for themselves? Many say
that they were not aware of any form and were simply “themselves” or “their
mind.” Others have more specific impressions and describe themselves as “a
cloud of colors,” “a mist,” “an energy pattern,” or “an energy field,” terms
that again suggest that we are all ultimately just frequency phenomena,
patterns of some unknown vibratory energy enfolded in the greater matrix of the
frequency domain. Some NDEers assert that in addition to being composed of
colored frequencies of light, we are also constituted out of sound. “I realized
that each person and thing has its own musical tone range as well as its own
color range,” says an Arizona housewife who had an NDE during childbirth. “If
you can imagine yourself effortlessly moving in and out among prismatic rays of
light and hearing each person's musical notes join and harmonize with your own
when you touch or pass them, you would have some idea of the unseen world.” The
woman, who encountered many individuals in the afterlife realm who manifested
only as clouds of colors and sound, believes the mellifluous tones each soul
emanates are what people are describing when they say they hear beautiful music
in the ND dimension.

Like Monroe, some NDEers
report being able to see in all directions at once while in the disembodied
state. After wondering what he looked like, one man said he suddenly found
himself staring at his own back. Robert Sullivan, an amateur NDE researcher
from Pennsylvania who specializes in NDEs by soldiers during combat,
interviewed a World War II veteran who temporarily retained this ability even
after he returned to his physical body. “He experienced
three-hundred-sixty-degree vision while running away from a German machine-gun
nest,” says Sullivan. “Not only could he see ahead as he ran, but he could see
the gunners trying to draw a bead on him from behind.”

Instantaneous
Knowledge

Another part of the NDE
that possesses many holographic features is the life review. Ring refers to it
as “a holographic phenomenon par excellence.” Grof and Joan Halifax, a Harvard
medical anthropologist and the coauthor (with Grof) of
The Human Encounter
with Death
, have also commented on the life review's holographic aspects.
According to several NDE researchers, including Moody, even many NDEers
themselves use the term “holographic” when describing the experience.

The reason for this
characterization is obvious as soon as one begins to read accounts of the life
review. Again and again NDEers use the same adjectives to describe it,
referring to it as an incredibly vivid, wrap-around, three-dimensional replay
of their entire life. “It's like climbing right inside a movie of your life,”
says one NDEer. “Every moment from every year of your life is played back in
complete sensory detail. Total, total recall. And it all happens in an instant.”
“The whole thing was really odd. I was there; I was actually seeing these
flashbacks; I was actually walking through them, and it was so fast. Yet, it
was slow enough that I could take it all in,” says another.

During this
instantaneous and panoramic remembrance NDEers reexperience all the emotions,
the joys and the sorrows, that accompanied all of the events in their life.
More than that, they feel all of the emotions of the people with whom they have
interacted as well. They feel the happiness of all the individuals to whom
they've been kind. If they have committed a hurtful act, they become acutely
aware of the pain their victim felt as a result of their thoughtlessness. And
no event seems too trivial to be exempt. While reliving a moment in her childhood,
one woman suddenly experienced all the loss and powerlessness her sister had
felt after she (then a child) snatched a toy away from her sister.

Whitton has uncovered
evidence that thoughtless acts are not the only things that cause individuals
remorse during the life review. Under hypnosis his subjects reported that
failed dreams and aspirations—things they had hoped to accomplish during their
life but had not—also caused them pangs of sadness.

Thoughts, too, are
replayed with exacting fidelity during the life review. Reveries, faces
glimpsed once but remembered for years, things that made one laugh, the joy one
felt when gazing at a particular painting, childish worries, and long forgotten
daydreams—all flit through one's mind in a second. As one NDEer summarizes,
“Not even your thoughts are lost. . . . Every thought was there.”

And so, the life review
is holographic not only in its three-dimensionality, but in the amazing
capacity for information storage the process displays. It is also holographic
in a third way. Like the kabbalistic “aleph,” a mythical point in space and
time that contains all other points in space and time, it is a moment that
contains all other moments. Even the ability to perceive the life review seems
holographic in that it is a faculty capable of experiencing something that is
paradoxically at once both incredibly rapid and yet slow enough to witness in
detail. As an NDEer in 1821 put it, it is the ability to “simultaneously
comprehend the whole and every part.”

In fact, the life review
bares a marked resemblance to the afterlife judgment scenes described in the
sacred texts of many of the world's great religions, from the Egyptian to the
Judeo-Christian, but with one crucial difference. Like Whitton's subjects,
NDEers universally report that they are
never judged by the beings of light
,
but feel only love and acceptance in their presence.
The only judgment that
ever takes place is self-judgment and arises solely out of the NDEer's own
feelings of guilt and repentance.
Occasionally the beings do assert
themselves, but instead of behaving in an authoritarian manner, they act as
guides and counselors whose only purpose is to teach.

This total lack of
cosmic judgment and/or any divine system of punishment and reward has been and
continues to be one of the most controversial aspects of the NDE among
religious groups, but it is one of the most oft reported features of the
experience. What is the explanation? Moody believes it is as simple as it is
polemic. We live in a universe that is far more benevolent than we realize.

That is not to say that
anything goes during the life review. Like Whitton's hypnotic subjects, after
arriving in the realm of light NDEers appear to enter a state of heightened or
metaconsciousness awareness and become lucidly honest in their
self-reflections.

It also does not mean
that the beings of light prescribe no values. In NDE after NDE they stress two
things. One is the importance of love. Over and over they repeat this message,
that we must learn to replace anger with love, learn to love more, learn to
forgive and love everyone unconditionally, and learn that we in turn
are
loved. This appears to be the only moral criterion the beings use. Even sexual
activity ceases to possess the moral stigma we humans are so fond of attaching
to it. One of Whitton's subjects reported that after living several withdrawn
and depressed incarnations he was urged to plan a life as an amorous and
sexually active female in order to add balance to the overall development of
his soul. It appears that in the minds of the beings of light, compassion is
the barometer of grace, and time and time again when NDEers wonder if some act
they committed was right or wrong, the beings counter their inquiries only with
a question: Did you do it out of love? Was the motivation love?

That is why we have been
placed here on the earth, say the beings, to learn that love is the key. They
acknowledge that it is a difficult undertaking, but intimate that it is crucial
to both our biological and spiritual existence in ways that we have perhaps not
even begun to fathom. Even children return from the near-death realm with this message
firmly impressed in their thoughts. States one little boy who after being hit
by a car was guided into the world beyond by two people in “very white” robes:
“What I learned there is that the most important thing is loving while you are
alive.”

The second thing the
beings emphasize is knowledge. Frequently NDEers comment that the beings seemed
pleased whenever an incident involving knowledge or learning flickered by
during their life review. Some are openly counseled to embark on a quest for
knowledge after they return to their physical bodies, especially knowledge
related to self-growth or that enhances one's ability to help other people.
Others are prodded with statements such as “learning is a continuous process
and goes on even after death” and “knowledge is one of the few things you will
be able to take with you after you have died.”

The preeminence of
knowledge in the afterlife dimension is apparent in another way. Some NDEers
discovered that in the presence of the light they suddenly had direct access to
all
knowledge. This access manifested in several ways. Sometimes it came
in response to inquiries. One man said that all he had to do was ask a
question, such as what would it be like to be an insect, and instantly the
experience was his. Another NDEer described it by saying, “You can think of a
question . . . and
immediately
know the answer to it. As simple as that.
And it can be any question whatsoever. It can be on a subject that you don't
know anything about, that you are not in the proper position even to understand
and the light will give you the instantaneous correct answer and make you
understand it.”

Some NDEers report that
they didn't even have to ask questions in order to access this infinite library
of information. Following their life review they just suddenly knew everything,
all the knowledge there was to know from the beginning of time to the end.
Others came into contact with this knowledge after the being of light made some
specific gesture, such as wave its hand. Still others said that instead of
acquiring the knowledge, they
remembered
it, but forgot most of what
they recalled as soon as they returned to their physical bodies (an amnesia
that seems to be universal among NDEers who are privy to such visions).
Whatever the case, it appears that once we are in the world beyond, it is no
longer necessary to enter an altered state of consciousness in order to have
access to the transpersonal and infinitely interconnected informational realm
experienced by Grof's patients.

In addition to being
holographic in all the ways already mentioned, this vision of total knowledge
has another holographic characteristic. NDEers often say that during the vision
the information arrives in “chunks” that register instantaneously in one's
thoughts. In other words, rather than being strung out in a linear fashion like
words in a sentence or scenes in a movie, all the facts, details, images, and
pieces of information burst into one's awareness in an instant. One NDEer
referred to these bursts of information as “bundles of thought” Monroe, who has
also experienced such instantaneous explosions of information while in the OB
state, calls them “thought balls.”

Indeed, anyone who
possesses any appreciable psychic ability is familiar with this experience, for
this is the form in which one receives psychic information as well. For
instance, sometimes when I meet a stranger (and on occasion even when I just
hear a person's name), a thought ball of information about that person will
instantly flash into my awareness. This thought ball can include important
facts about the person's psychological and emotional makeup, their health, and
even scenes from their past. I find that I am especially prone to getting
thought balls about people who are in some kind of crisis. For example,
recently I met a woman and instantly knew she was contemplating suicide. I also
knew some of the reasons why. As I always do in such situations, I started
talking to her and cautiously maneuvered the conversation to things psychic.
After finding out that she was receptive to the subject, I confronted her with
what I knew and got her to talk about her problems. I got her to promise to seek
some kind of professional counseling instead of the darker option she was
considering.

Receiving information in
this manner is similar to the way one becomes aware of information while
dreaming. Virtually everyone has had a dream in which they find themselves in a
situation and suddenly know all kinds of things about it without being told.
For instance, you might dream you are at a party and as soon as you are there
you know who it is being given for and why. Similarly, everyone has had a
detailed idea or inspiration dawn upon them in a flash. Such experiences are
lesser versions of the thought ball effect.

Interestingly, because
these bursts of psychic information arrive in nonlinear chunks, it sometimes
takes me several moments to translate them into words. Like the psychological
gestalts experienced by individuals during transpersonal experiences, they are
holographic in the sense that they are instantaneous “wholes” our time-oriented
minds must struggle with for a moment in order to unravel and convert into a
serial arrangement of parts.

What form does the
knowledge contained in the thought balls experienced during NDEs take?
According to NDEers all forms of communication are used, sounds, moving
hologramlike images, even telepathy—a fact that Ring believes demonstrates once
again that the hereafter is “a world of existence where thought is king.”

The thoughtful reader
may immediately wonder why the quest for learning is so important during life
if we have access to all knowledge after we die? When asked this question
NDEers replied that they weren't certain, but felt strongly that it had
something to do with the purpose of life and the ability of each individual to
reach out and help others.