The Holographic Universe (44 page)

Most Bohmian of all are
Sri Aurobindo's remarks about wholeness and fragmentation. According to Sri
Aurobindo, one of the most important things one learns in “the great and
luminous kingdoms of the Spirit,” is that all separateness is an illusion, and
all things are ultimately interconnected and whole. Again and again in his
writings he stressed this fact, and held that it was only as one descended from
the higher vibrational levels of reality to the lower that a “progressive law
of fragmentation” took over. We fragment things because we exist at a lower
vibration of consciousness and reality, says Sri Aurobindo, and it is our
propensity for fragmentation that keeps us from experiencing the intensity of
consciousness, joy, love, and delight for existence that are the norm in these
higher and more subtle realms.

Just as Bohm believes
that it is not possible for disorder to exist in a universe that is ultimately
unbroken and whole, Sri Aurobindo believed the same was true of consciousness.
If a single point of the universe were totally unconscious, the whole universe
would be totally unconscious, he said, and if we perceive a pebble at the side
of the road or a grain of sand under our fingernail to be lifeless and dead,
our perception is again illusory and brought on only by our somnambulistic
inurement with fragmentation.

Like Bohm, Sri
Aurobindo's epiphanic understanding of wholeness also made him aware of the
ultimate relativity of all truths and the arbitrariness of trying to divide the
seamless holomovement up into “things.” So convinced was he that any attempt to
reduce the universe into absolute facts and unchangeable doctrine only led to
distortion that he was even against religion, and all his life emphasized that
the true spirituality came not from any organization or priesthood, but from
the spiritual universe within:

We must not only cut
asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare of
the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of
the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall
in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the
lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to
proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from
soul-state to soul-state. . . . Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths
we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable
who refuses to limit itself to any form or expression.

But if the cosmos is
ultimately ineffable, a farrago of multicolored vibrations, what are all the
forms we perceive? What is physical reality? It is, said Sri Aurobindo, just “a
mass of stable light.”

Survival in
Infinity

The picture of reality
reported by NDEers is remarkably self-consistent and is corroborated by the
testimony of many of the world's most talented mystics as well. Even more
astonishing is that as breathtaking and foreign as these subtler levels of
reality are to those of us who reside in the world's more “advanced” cultures,
they are mundane and familiar territories to so-called primitive peoples.

For example, Dr. E.
Nandisvara Nayake Thero, an anthropologist who has lived with and studied a
community of aborigines in Australia, points out that the aboriginal concept of
the “dreamtime,” a realm that Australian shamans visit by entering a profound
trance, is almost identical to the afterlife planes of existence described in
Western sources. It is the realm where human spirits go after death, and once
there a shaman can converse with the dead and instantly access all knowledge.
It is also a dimension in which time, space, and the other boundaries of
earthly life cease to exist and one must learn to deal with infinity. Because
of this, Australian shamans often refer to the afterlife as “survival in
infinity.”

Holger Kalweit, a German
ethnopsychologist with degrees in both psychology and cultural anthropology,
goes Thero one better. An expert on shamanism who is also active in near-death
research, Kalweit points out that virtually
all
of the world's shamanic
traditions contain descriptions of this vast and extradimensional realm,
replete with references to the life review, higher spiritual beings who teach
and guide, food conjured up out of thought, and indescribably beautiful
meadows, forests, and mountains. Indeed, not only is the ability to travel into
the afterlife realm the most universal requirement for being a shaman, but NDEs
are often the very catalyst that thrusts an individual into the role. For
instance, the Oglala Sioux, the Seneca, the Siberian Yakut, the South American
Guajiro, the Zulu, the Kenyan Kikuyu, the Korean Mu dang, the Indonesian
Mentawai Islanders, and the Caribou Eskimo—all have traditions of individuals
who became shamans after a life-threatening illness propelled them headlong
into the afterlife realm.

However, unlike Western
NDEers for whom such experiences are disorientingly new, these shamanic
explorers appear to have a far vaster knowledge of the geography of these
subtler realms and are often able to return to them again and again. Why?
Kalweit believes it is because such experiences are a daily reality for such
cultures. Whereas our society suppresses any thoughts or mention of death and
dying, and has devalued the mystical by defining reality strictly in terms of
the material, tribal peoples still have day-to-day contact with the psychic
nature of reality. Thus, they have a better understanding of the rules that
govern these inner realms, says Kalweit, and are much more skilled at
navigating their territories.

That these inner regions
have been well traveled by shamanic peoples is evidenced by an experience
anthropologist Michael Harner had among the Conibo Indians of the Peruvian
Amazon. In 1960 the American Museum of Natural History sent Harner on a
year-long expedition to study the Conibo, and while there he asked the
Amazonian natives to tell him about their religious beliefs. They told him that
if he really wished to learn, he had to take a shamanic sacred drink made from
a hallucinogenic plant known as
ayahuasca
, the “soul vine.” He agreed
and after drinking the bitter concoction had an out-of-body experience in which
he traveled a level of reality populated by what appeared to be the gods and
devils of the Conibo's mythology. He saw demons with grinning crocodilian
heads. He watched as an “energy-essence” rose up out of his chest and floated
toward a dragon-headed ship manned by Egyptian-style figures with blue-jay
heads; and he felt what he thought was the slow, advancing numbness of his own
death.

But the most dramatic
experience he had during his spirit journey was an encounter with a group of
winged, dragonlike beings that emerged from his spine. After they had crawled
out of his body, they “projected” a visual scene in front of him in which they
showed him what they said was the “true” history of the earth. Through a kind
of “thought language” they explained that they were responsible for both the
origin and evolution of all life on the planet. Indeed, they resided not only
in human beings, but in all life, and had created the multitude of living forms
that populates the earth to provide themselves with a hiding place from some
undisclosed enemy in outer space (Harner notes that although the beings were
almost like DNA, at the time, 1961, he knew nothing of DNA).

After this concatenation
of visions was over, Harner sought out a blind Conibo shaman noted for his
paranormal talents to talk to him about the experience. The shaman, who had
made many excursions into the spirit world, nodded occasionally as Harner
related the events that had befallen him, but when he told the old man about
the dragonlike beings and their claim that they were the true masters of the
earth, the shaman smiled with amusement. “Oh, they're always saying that. But
they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness,” he corrected.

“I was stunned,” says
Harner. “What I had experienced was already familiar to this barefoot, blind
shaman. Known to him from his own explorations of the same hidden world into
which I had ventured.” However, this was not the only shock Harner received. He
also recounted his experience to two Christian missionaries who lived nearby,
and was intrigued when they too seemed to know what he was talking about. After
he finished they told him that some of his descriptions were virtually
identical to certain passages in the Book of Revelation, passages that Harner,
an atheist, had never read. So it seems that the old Conibo shaman perhaps was
not the only individual to have traveled the same ground Harner later and more
falteringly covered. Some of the visions and “trips to heaven” described by Old
and New Testament prophets may also have been shamanic journeys into the inner
realm.

Is it possible that what
we have been viewing as quaint folklore and charming but naive mythology are
actually sophisticated accounts of the cartography of the subtler levels of
reality? Kalweit for one believes the answer is an emphatic yes, “In light of
the revolutionary findings of recent research into the nature of dying and
death, we can no longer look upon tribal religions and their ideas about the
World of the Dead as limited conceptions,” he says. “[Rather] the shaman should
be considered as a most up-to-date and knowledgeable psychologist.”

An Undeniable
Spiritual Radiance

One last piece of
evidence of the reality of the NDE is the transformative effect it has on those
who experience it. Researchers have discovered that NDEers are almost always
profoundly changed by their journey to the beyond. They become happier, more
optimistic, more easygoing, and less concerned with material possessions. Most
striking of all, their capacity to love expands enormously. Aloof husbands
suddenly become warm and affectionate, workaholics start relaxing and devoting
time to their families, and introverts become extroverts. These changes are
often so dramatic that people who know the NDEer frequently remark that he or
she has become an entirely different person. There are even cases on record of
criminals completely reforming their ways, and fire-and-brimstone preachers
replacing their message of damnation with one of unconditional love and
compassion.

NDEers also become much
more spiritually oriented. They return not only firmly convinced of the
immortality of the human soul, but also with a deep and abiding sense that the
universe is compassionate and intelligent, and this loving presence is always
with them. However, this awareness does not necessarily result in their
becoming more religious. Like Sri Aurobindo, many NDEers stress the importance
of the distinction between religion and spirituality, and assert that it is the
latter that has blossomed into greater fullness in their lives, not the former.
Indeed, studies show that following their experience, NDEers display an
increased openness to ideas outside their own religious background, such as
reincarnation and Eastern religions.

This widening of
interests frequently extends to other areas as well. For instance, NDEers often
develop a marked fascination for the types of subjects discussed in this book,
in particular psychic phenomena and the new physics. One NDEer investigated by
Ring, for example, was a driver of heavy equipment who displayed no interest in
books or academic pursuits prior to his experience. However, during his NDE he
had a vision of total knowledge, and although he was unable to recall the content
of the vision after he recovered, various physics’ terms started popping into
his head. One morning not long after his experience he blurted out the word
quantum.
Later he announced cryptically, “Max Planck—you'll be hearing about him in the
near future,” and as time continued to pass, fragments of equations and
mathematical symbols began to surface in his thoughts.

Neither he nor his wife
knew what the word
quantum
meant, or who Max Planck (widely viewed as
the founding father of quantum physics) was until the man went to a library and
looked the words up. But after discovering that he was not talking gibberish,
he started to read voraciously, not only books on physics, but also on
parapsychology, metaphysics, and higher consciousness; and he even enrolled in
college as a physics major. The man's wife wrote a letter to Ring trying to
describe her husband's transformation:

Many times he says a
word he has never heard before in our reality—it might be a foreign word of a
different language—but learns ... it in relationship to the “light” theory. ...
He talks about things faster than the speed of light and it's hard for me to
understand. . . . When [he] picks up a book on physics he already knows the
answer and seems to feel more. . . .

The man also started
developing various psychic abilities after his experience, which is not
uncommon among NDEers. In 1982 Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University
of Michigan and IANDS's director of research, gave sixty-nine NDEers a
questionnaire designed to study this issue, and he found that there was an
increase in virtually all of the psychic and psi-related phenomena he assessed.
Phyllis Atwater, an Idaho housewife who became an NDE researcher following her
own transformative NDE, has interviewed dozens of NDEers and has obtained
similar findings. “Telepathy and healing gifts are common,” she states. “So is
‘remembering’ the future. Time and space stop, and you live in a future
sequence in detail. Then, when the event occurs, you recognize it.”

Moody believes that the
profound and positive identity changes such individuals undergo is the most
compelling evidence that NDEs are actually journeys into some spiritual level
of reality. Ring agrees. “[At the core of the NDE] we find an absolute and
undeniable spiritual radiance,” he says. “This spiritual core is so awesome and
overwhelming that the person is at once and forever thrust into an entirely new
mode of being.”