The Holographic Universe (45 page)

NDE researchers are not
the only individuals who are beginning to accept the existence of this dimension
and the spiritual component of the human race. Nobelist Brian Josephson,
himself a longtime meditator, is also convinced that there are subtler levels
of reality, levels that can be accessed through meditation and where, quite
possibly, one travels after death.

At a 1985 symposium on
the possibility of life beyond biological death held at Georgetown University
and convened by U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell, physicist Paul Davies expressed a
similar openness. “We are all agreed that, at least insofar as human beings are
concerned, mind is a product of matter, or put more accurately, mind finds
expression through matter (specifically our brains). The lesson of the quantum
is that matter can only achieve concrete, well-defined existence in conjunction
with mind. Clearly, if mind is
pattern
rather than
substance
,
then it is capable of many different representations.”

Even
psychoneuroimmunologist Candace Pert, another participant at the symposium, was
receptive to the idea. “I think it is important to realize that information is
stored in the brain, and it is conceivable to me that this information could
transform itself into some other realm. Where does the information go after the
destruction of the molecules (the mass) that compose it? Matter can neither be
created nor destroyed, and perhaps biological information flow cannot just
disappear at death and must be transformed into another realm,” she says.

Is it possible that what
Bohm has called the implicate level of reality is actually the realm of the
spirit, the source of the spiritual radiance that has transfigured the mystics
of all ages? Bohm himself does not dismiss the idea. The implicate domain
“could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness,” he states with
typical matter-of-fact-ness. “The separation of the two—matter and spirit—is an
abstraction. The ground is always one.”

Who Are the
Beings of Light?

Because most of the
above remarks were made by physicists and not theologians, one cannot help but
wonder if perhaps the interest in new physics displayed by Ring's NDEer is an
indication of something deeper. If, as Bohm suggests, physics is beginning to
make inroads in areas that were once exclusively the province of the mystic, is
it possible that these encroachments have already been anticipated by the
beings who inhabit the near-death realm? Is that why NDEers are given an
insatiable hunger for such knowledge? Are they, and by proxy the rest of the
human race, being prepared for some coming confluence between science and the
spiritual?

We will explore this
possibility a little later. First, another question must be asked. If the
existence of this higher dimension is no longer at issue, then what are its
parameters? More specifically, who are the beings that inhabit it, and what is
their society, dare one say their civilization, really like?

These are, of course,
difficult questions to answer. When Whitton tried to find out the identity of
the beings who counseled people in the between-life state, he found the answer
elusive. “The impression my subjects gave—the ones who could answer the
question—was that these were entities who had completed their cycle of
incarnations here,” he says.

After hundreds of
journeys into the inner realm, and after interviewing dozens of other talented
fellow OBEers on the matter, Monroe has also come up empty-handed. “Whatever
they may be, [these beings] have the ability to radiate a warmth of
friendliness that evokes complete trust,” he observes. “Perceiving our thoughts
is absurdly easy for [them].” And “the entire history of humankind and earth is
available to them in the most minute detail.” But Monroe, too, confesses
ignorance when it comes to the ultimate identity of these nonphysical entities,
save that their first order of business appears to be “totally solicitous as to
the well-being of the human beings with whom they are associated.”

Not
much
more can
be said about the civilizations of these subtle realms, save that individuals
who are privileged enough to visit them universally report seeing many vast and
celestially beautiful cities there. NDEers, yogic adepts, and
ayahuasca-asixig
shamans—all describe these mysterious metropolises with remarkable consistency.
The twelfth-century Sufis were so familiar with them that they even gave
several of them names.

The most notable feature
of these great cities is that they are brilliantly luminous. They are also
frequently described as foreign in architecture, and so sublimely beautiful
that, like all of the other features of these implicate dimensions, words fail to
convey their grandeur. In describing one such city Swedenborg said that it was
a place “of staggering architectural design, so beautiful that you would say
this is the home and the source of the art itself.”

People who visit these
cities also frequently assert that they have an unusual number of schools and
other buildings associated with the pursuit of knowledge. Most of Whitton's
subjects recalled spending at least some time hard at work in vast halls of
learning equipped with libraries and seminar rooms while in the between-life
state. Many NDEers also report being shown “schools,” “libraries,” and
“institutions of higher learning” during their experiences. And one can even
find references to great cities devoted to learning and reachable only by journeying
into “the hidden depths of the mind” in eleventh-century Tibetan texts. Edwin
Bernbaum, a Sanskrit scholar at the University of California at Berkeley,
believes that James Hilton's novel
Lost Horizon
, in which he created the
fictional community of Shangri-La, was actually inspired by one of these
Tibetan legends.
^*

The only problem is that
in an imaginal realm such descriptions don't mean very much. One can never be
sure whether the spectacular architectural structures NDEers encounter are
realities or just allegorical phantasms. For instance, both Moody and Ring have
reported cases in which NDEers said that the buildings of higher learning they
visited were not just devoted to knowledge, but were literally
built out of
knowledge. This curious choice of words suggests that perhaps visits to these
edifices are actually encounters with something so beyond human
conception—perhaps a dynamic living cloud of pure knowledge, or what
information becomes, as Pert puts it, after it has been
transformed into
another realm
—that translating it into a hologram of a building or library
is the only way the human mind can process it.

The same is true of the
beings one encounters in the subtler dimensions. We can never know from their
appearance alone what they really are. For example, George Russell, a
well-known turn-of-the-century Irish seer and an extraordinarily talented
OBEer, encountered many “beings of light” during what he called his journeys
into the “inner world.” When asked once during an interview to describe what
these beings looked like he stated:

The first of these I saw
I remember very clearly, and the manner of its appearance: there was at first a
dazale of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure
with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and
throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed
the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair,
which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared
flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards
in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of
extraordinary lightness, joyousness, or ecstasy.

On the other hand,
Monroe asserts that once he has been in the presence of one of these
nonphysical entities for a while, it discards its appearance and he perceives
nothing, although he continues to sense “the radiation that is the entity.”
Again the question can be asked, When a journeyer to the inner dimensions
encounters a being of light, is that being a reality or just an allegorical
phantasm? The answer is, of course, that it is a bit of both, for in a
holographic universe
all
appearances are illusions, hologramlike images
constructed by the interaction of the consciousness present, but illusions
based, as Pribram says, on
something
that is there. Such are the
dilemmas one faces in a universe that appears to us in explicate form but
always has its source in something ineffable, in the implicate.

We can take heart in the
fact that the hologramlike images our minds construct in the afterlife realm
appear to bear at least some relationship to the
something
that is there.
When we encounter a disembodied cloud of pure knowledge, we convert it into a
school or library. When an NDEer meets a woman with whom he has had a love/hate
relationship, he sees her as half rose, half cobra, a symbol that still conveys
the quintessence of her character; and when travelers in the subtler realms
encounter helpful, nonphysical consciousnesses, they see them as luminous and
angelic beings.

As for the ultimate
identity of these beings, we can deduce from their behavior that they are
older, wiser, and possess some deep and loving connection to the human species,
but beyond this the question remains unanswered as to whether they are gods,
angels, the souls of human beings who have finished reincarnating, or something
that is altogether beyond human comprehension. To speculate further would be
presumptuous in that it would not only be tackling a question that thousands of
years of human history have failed to resolve, but would also ignore Sri
Aurobindo's warning against turning spiritual understandings into religious
ones. As science gathers more evidence, the answer will most assuredly become
clearer, but until then, the question of who and what these beings are remains
open.

The Omnijective
Universe

The hereafter is not the
only realm in which we can encounter hologramlike apparitions sculptured by our
beliefs. It appears that on occasion we can even have such experiences at our
own level of existence. For example, philosopher Michael Grosso believes that
miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary may also be hologramlike projections
created by the collective beliefs of the human race. One “Marian” vision that
is especially holographic in flavor is the well-known appearance of the Virgin
in Knock, Ireland, in 1879. On that occasion fourteen people saw three glowing
and eerily motionless figures consisting of Mary, Joseph, and St John the
Evangelist (identified because he closely resembled a statue of the saint in a
nearby village) standing in a meadow next to the local church. These
brilliantly luminous figures were so real that when witnesses approached, they
could even read the lettering on a book St. John was holding. But when one of
the women present tried to embrace the Virgin, her arms closed on empty air.
“The figures appeared so full and lifelike I could not understand why my hands
could not feel what was so plain and distinct to my sight,” the woman later
wrote.

Another impressively
holographic Marian vision is the equally famous appearance of the Virgin in
Zeitoun, Egypt. The sightings began in 1968 when two Moslem automobile
mechanics saw a luminous apparition of Mary standing on the ledge of the
central dome of a Coptic church in the poor Cairo suburb. For the next three
years glowing three-dimensional images of Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child
appeared weekly over the church, sometimes hovering in midair for as long as
six hours.

Unlike the figures at
Knock, the Zeitoun apparitions moved about and waved at the crowds of people
who regularly gathered to see them. However, they too had many holographic
aspects. Their appearance was always heralded by a brilliant flash of light.
Like holograms shifting from their frequency aspects and slowly coming into
focus, they were at first amorphous and slowly coalesced into human shape. They
were often accompanied by doves “formed of pure light” that soared for great
distances over the crowd, but never flapped their wings. Most telling of all,
after three years of manifestations and as interest in the phenomenon started
to wane, the Zeitoun figures also waned, becoming hazier and hazier until, in
their last several appearances, they were little more than clouds of luminous
fog. Nonetheless, during their peak, the figures were seen by literally
hundreds of thousands of witnesses and were extensively photographed. “I've
interviewed quite a number of these people, and when you hear them talk about
what they saw you can't get rid of the feeling that they're describing some
sort of holographic projection,” says Grosso.

In his thought-provoking
book
The Final Choice
, Grosso says that after studying the evidence he
is convinced that such visions are not appearances of the historical Mary, but
are actually psychic holographic projections created by the collective
unconscious. Interestingly, not all of the Marian apparitions are silent. Some,
like the manifestations at Fatima and Lourdes, speak, and when they do their
message is invariably a warning of impending apocalypse if we mortals do not
mend our ways. Grosso interprets this as evidence that the human collective
unconscious is deeply disturbed by the violent impact modern science has had on
human life and on the ecology of the earth. Our collective dreams are, in
essence, warning us of the possibility of our own self-destruction.