The Holographic Universe (47 page)

In other words, what is
the final identity of these beings? Again, as with entities encountered in the
near-death realm, there are no clear-cut answers. On one end of the spectrum,
researchers such as Ring and Grosso lean toward the idea that, despite their
impingements in the world of matter, they are more psychic projection than
nonhuman intelligence. Grosso, for instance, thinks that, like Marian visions,
they are further evidence that the psyche of the human race is in a state of
unrest. As he states, “UFOs and other extraordinary phenomena are
manifestations of a disturbance in the collective unconscious of the human
species.”

On the other end of the
spectrum are those researchers who maintain that, despite their archetypal
characteristics, UFOs are more alien intelligence than psychic projection. For
example, Raschke believes that UFOs are “a holographic materialization from a
conjugate dimension of the universe” and that this interpretation “certainly
must take precedence over the psychic projection hypothesis, which flounders when
one examines thoughtfully the astounding, vivid, complex, and consistent
features of the ‘aliens’ and their ‘spaceships’ described by abductees.”

Vallee is also in this
camp: “I believe that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an
alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us
symbolically.
There is no indication that it is extraterrestrial. Instead, there is mounting
evidence that it. .. [comes from]
other dimensions beyond spacetime
;
from a
multiverse
which is all around us, and of which we have
stubbornly refused to consider in spite of the evidence available to us for
centuries.”

As for my own feelings,
I believe that probably no single explanation can account for all of the varied
aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Given the apparent vastness of the subtler
levels of reality, it is easy for me to believe that there are no doubt
countless nonphysical species in the higher vibratory realms. Although the
abundance of UFO sightings may bode against their being extraterrestrial—given
the obstacle posed by the immense interstellar distances separating the Earth
from the other stars in the galaxy—in a holographic universe, a universe in
which there may be an infinity of realities occupying the same space as our own
world, it ceases not only to be a sticking point, but may in fact be evidence
of just how unfathomably abundant with intelligent life the superhologram is.

The truth is that we
simply do not have the information necessary to assess how many nonphysical
species are sharing our own space. Although the physical cosmos may turn out to
be an ecological Sahara, the spaceless and timeless expanses of the inner
cosmos may be as rich with life as the rain forest and the coral reef. After
all, research into NDEs and shamanic experiences has so far taken us only just
inside the borders of this cloud-shrouded realm. We do not yet know how large
its continents are or how many oceans and mountain ranges it contains.

And if we are being
visited by beings who are as insubstantial and plastic in form as the bodies
OBEers find themselves in after they have exteriorized, it is not at all
surprising that they might appear in a chameleonlike multitude of shapes. In
fact, their actual appearance may be so beyond our comprehension that it may be
our own holographically organized minds that give them these shapes. Just as we
convert the beings of light encountered during NDEs into religious historical
personages, and clouds of pure information into libraries and institutions of
learning, our minds may also be sculpting the outward appearance of the UFO
phenomenon.

It is interesting to
note that if this is the case, it means that the true reality of these beings
is apparently so transmundane and strange that we have to plumb the deepest
regions of our folk memories and mythological unconscious to find the necessary
symbols to give them form. It also means that we must be exceedingly careful in
interpreting their actions. For example, the medical examinations that are the
centerpiece of so many UFO abductions may be only a
symbolic
representation of what is going on. Rather than probing our physical bodies,
these nonphysical intelligences actually may be probing some portion of us for
which we currently have no labels, perhaps the subtle anatomy of our energy
selves or even our very souls. Such are the problems one faces if the
phenomenon is indeed an omnijective manifestation of a nonhuman intelligence.

On the other hand, if it
is possible for the faith of the citizens of Knock and Zeitoun to cause
luminous images of the Virgin to coalesce into existence, for the minds of
physicists to dabble around with the reality of the neutrino, and for yogis
such as Sai Baba to materialize physical objects out of thin air, it only
stands to reason that we would also find ourselves awash with holographic
projections of our beliefs and mythologies. At least some anomalous experiences
may fall into this category.

For instance, history
tells us that Constantine and his soldiers saw an enormous flaming cross in the
sky, a phenomenon that seems to be nothing more than a psychic exteriorization
of the emotions the army responsible for nothing short of the Christianization
of the pagan world was feeling on the eve of their historic undertaking. The
well-known manifestation of the Angels of Mons, in which hundreds of World War
I British soldiers saw an immense apparition of Saint George and a squadron of
angels in the sky while fighting what was at first a losing battle at the
front, in Mons, Belgium, also appears to fall into the category of psychic
projection.

It is clear to me that
what we are calling UFO and other folkloric experiences are really a wide range
of phenomena and probably include all of the above. I have also long been of
the opinion that these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. It may be
that Constantine's flaming cross was also a manifestation of an
extradimensional intelligence. In other words, when our collective beliefs and
emotions become high-pitched enough to create a psychic projection, perhaps what
we are really doing is opening a doorway between this world and the next.
Perhaps the only time these intelligences can appear and interact with us is when
our own potent beliefs create a kind of psychic niche for them.

Another concept from the
new physics may be relevant here. After acknowledging that consciousness is the
agent that allows a subatomic particle such as an electron to pop into
existence, we should not therefore jump to the conclusion that we are the sole
agents in this creative process, cautions University of Texas physicist John
Wheeler. We are creating subatomic particles and hence the entire universe,
says Wheeler, but they are also creating us. Each creates the other in what he
calls a “self-reference cosmology.” Seen in this light, UFO entities may very
well be archetypes from the collective unconscious of the human race, but we
may also be archetypes in their collective unconscious. We may be as much a
part of their deep psychic processes as they are of ours. Strieber has also
echoed this point and says that the universe of the beings who abducted him and
our own are “spinning each other together” in an act of cosmic communion.

The spectrum of events
we are lumping into the broad category of UFO encounters may also include
phenomena with which we are not even yet familiar. For instance, researchers
who believe the phenomenon is some kind of psychic projection invariably assume
that it is a projection of the collective human mind. However, as we have seen
in this book, in a holographic universe we can no longer view consciousness as
confined solely to the brain. The fact that Carol Dryer was able to communicate
with my spleen and tell me that it was upset because I had yelled at it
indicates that other organs in our body also possess their own unique forms of
mentality. Psychoneuroimmunologists say the same about the cells in our immune
system, and according to Bohm and other physicists, even subatomic particles
possess this trait. As outlandish as it sounds, some aspects of UFOs and
related phenomena may be projections of these collective mentalities. Certain
features of Michael Harner's encounter with the dragonlike beings certainly suggest
that he was confronting a kind of visual manifestation of the intelligence of
the DNA molecule. In this same vein Strieber has suggested the possibility that
UFO beings are what “the force of evolution looks like when it's applied to a
conscious mind.” We must remain open to all of these possibilities. In a
universe that is conscious right down to its very depths, animals, plants, even
matter itself may all be participating in the creation of these phenomena.

One thing that we do
know is that in a holographic universe, a universe in which separateness ceases
to exist and the innermost processes of the psyche can spill over and become as
much a part of the objective landscape as the flowers and the trees, reality
itself becomes little more than a mass shared dream. In the higher dimensions
of existence, these dreamlike aspects become even more apparent, and indeed
numerous traditions have commented on this fact. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
repeatedly stresses the dreamlike nature of the afterlife realm, and this is
also, of course, why the Australian aborigines refer to it as the dreamtime.
Once we accept this notion, that reality at all levels is omnijective and has
the same ontological status as a dream, the question becomes, Whose dream is
it?

Of the religious and
mythological traditions that address this question, most give the same answer,
It is the dream of a single divine intelligence, of God. The Hindu Vedas and
yogic texts assert again and again that the universe is God's dream. In
Christianity the sentiment is summed up in the oft repeated saying, we are all
thoughts in the mind of God, or as the poet Keats put it, we are all part of
God's “long immortal dream.”

But are we being dreamed
by a single divine intelligence, by God, or are we being dreamed by the
collective consciousness of all things— by all the electrons, Z particles,
butterflies, neutron stars, sea cucumbers, human and nonhuman intelligences in
the universe? Here again we collide headlong into the bars of our own
conceptual limitations, for in a holographic universe this question is
meaningless. We cannot ask if the part is creating the whole, or the whole is
creating the part because
the part is the whole.
So whether we call the
collective consciousness of all things “God,” or simply “the consciousness of
all things,” it doesn't change the situation. The universe is sustained by an
act of such stupendous and ineffable creativity that it simply cannot be
reduced to such terms. Again it is a self-reference cosmology. Or as the
Kalahari Bushmen so eloquently put it, “The dream is dreaming itself.”

Only human beings have come to a
point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains and
they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or
their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of
them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the
road to nowhere—a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth
so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the
end, waiting to swallow them up. It's a quick comfortable superhighway, but I
know where it leads to. I've seen it. I've been there in my vision and it makes
me shudder to think about it.

Where does the
holographic model go from here? Before examining the possible answers, we might
want to see where the question has been before. In this book I have referred to
the holographic concept as a new theory, and this is true in the sense that it
is the first time it has been presented in a scientific context. But as we have
seen, several aspects of this theory have already been foreshadowed in various
ancient traditions. They are not the only such foreshadowings, which is
intriguing, for it suggests that others have also found reason to view the
universe as holographic, or at least to intuit its holographic qualities.

For example, Bohm's idea
that the universe can be viewed as the compound of two basic orders, the
implicate and the explicate, can be found in many other traditions. The Tibetan
Buddhists call these two aspects the void and nonvoid. The nonvoid is the
reality of visible objects. The void, like the implicate order, is the
birthplace of all things in the universe, which pour out of it in a “boundless
flux.” However, only the void is real and all forms in the objective world are
illusory, existing merely because of the unceasing flux between the two orders.

In turn, the void is
described as “subtle,” “indivisible,” and “free from distinguishing
characteristics.” Because it is seamless totality it cannot be described in
words. Properly speaking, even the nonvoid cannot be described in words because
it, too, is a totality in which consciousness and matter and all other things
are indissoluble and whole. Herein lies a paradox, for despite its illusory
nature the nonvoid still contains “an infinitely vast complex of universes.”
And yet its indivisible aspects are always present. As the Tibet scholar John
BIofeld states, “In a universe thus composed, everything interpenetrates, and
is interpenetrated by, everything else; as with the void, so with the non-void
— the part is the whole.”