The Holographic Universe (19 page)

The second message is
that elements that go into the making of these neural holograms are many and
subtle. They include the images upon which we meditate, our hopes and fears,
the attitudes of our doctors, our unconscious prejudices, our individual and
cultural beliefs, and our faith in things both spiritual and technological.
More than just facts, these are important clues, signposts that point toward
those things that we must become aware of and acquire mastery over if we are to
learn how to unleash and manipulate these talents. There are, no doubt, other
factors involved, other influences that shape and circumscribe these abilities,
for one thing should now be obvious. In a holographic universe, a universe in
which a slight change in attitude can mean the difference between life and
death, in which things are so subtly interconnected that a dream can call forth
the inexplicable appearance of a scarab beetle, and the factors responsible for
an illness can also evoke a certain pattern in the lines and whorls of the
hand, we have reason to suspect that each effect has multitudinous causes. Each
linkage is the starting point of a dozen more, for in the words of Walt
Whitman, “A vast similitude interlocks all.”

Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature,
but in opposition to what we know of Nature.

—St. Augustine

Every year in September
and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral
of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small via! containing a
brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St.
Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305.
According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected
some of his blood as a relic. No
one
knows precisely what happened after
that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth
century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral.

The miracle is that
twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance
changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the
liquid is real blood. In 1902 a group of scientists from the University of
Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light
through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary
containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be
cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never
been thoroughly studied.

But there is further
evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally
throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the
miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to
liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of
Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the
eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in
1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the
election of a communist city government in Naples, respectively.

Is the liquefaction of
San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it
seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws. Is the liquefaction
caused by San Gennaro himself? My own feeling is that its more likely cause is
the intense devotion and belief of the people witnessing the miracle. I say
this because nearly all of the miracles performed by saints and wonder-workers
of the world's great religions have also been duplicated by psychics. This
suggests that, as with stigmata, miracles are produced by forces lying deep in
the human mind, forces that are latent in all of us. Herbert Thurston, the
priest who wrote
The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism
, himself was aware
of this similarity and was reluctant to attribute any miracle to a truly
supernatural cause (as opposed to a psychic or paranormal cause). Another piece
of evidence supportive of this idea is that many stigmatists, including Padre
Pio and Therese Neumann, were also renowned for their psychic abilities.

One psychic ability that
appears to play a role in miracles is psychokinesis or PK. Since the miracle of
San Gennaro involves a physical alteration of matter, PK is certainly a likely
suspect. Rogo believes PK is also responsible for some of the more dramatic
aspects of stigmata. He feels that it is well within the normal biological
capabilities of the body to cause small blood vessels under the skin to break
and produce superficial bleeding, but only PK can account for the rapid
appearance of large wounds. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but
PK is clearly a factor in some of the phenomena that accompany stigmata. When
blood flowed from the wounds in Therese Neumann's feet, it always flowed toward
her toes—exactly as it would have flowed from Christ's wounds when he was on
the cross—regardless of how her feet were positioned. This meant that when she
was sitting upright in bed, the blood actually flowed
upward and counter to
the force of
gravity.
This was observed by numerous witnesses,
including many U.S. servicemen stationed in Germany after the war who visited
Neumann to witness her miraculous abilities. Gravity-defying flows of blood
have been reported in other cases of stigmata as well.

Such events leave us
agog because our current worldview does not provide us with a context with
which to understand PK. Bohm believes viewing the universe as a holomovement
does provide us with a context. To explain what he means he asks us to consider
the following situation. Imagine you are walking down a street late one night
and a shadow suddenly looms up out of nowhere. Your first thought might be that
the shadow is an assailant and you are in danger. The information contained in
this thought will in turn give rise to a range of imagined activities, such as
running, being hurt, and fighting. The presence of these imagined activities in
your mind, however, is
not
a purely “mental” process, for they are
inseparable from a host of related biological processes, such as excitation of
nerves, rapid heart beat, release of adrenaline and other hormones, tensing of
the muscles, and so on. Conversely, if your first thought is that the shadow is
just a shadow, a different set of mental and biological responses will follow.
Moreover, a little reflection will reveal that we react both mentally and
biologically to everything we experience.

According to Bohm, the
important point to be gleaned from this is that consciousness is not the only
thing that can respond to
meaning.
The body can also respond, and this
reveals that meaning is simultaneously both mental and physical in nature. This
is odd, for we normally think of meaning as something that can only have an
active effect on subjective reality, on the thoughts inside our heads, not
something that can engender a response in the physical world of things and
objects. Meaning “can thus serve as the link or ‘bridge’ between these two
sides of reality,” Bohm states. “This link is indivisible in the sense that
information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the ‘mental’ side, is
at the same time a neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity, which
is clearly what is meant by this thought on the ‘material’ side.”

Bohm feels that examples
of objectively active meaning can be found in other physical processes. One is
the functioning of a computer chip. A computer chip contains information, and
the meaning of the information is active in the sense that it determines how
electrical currents flow through the computer. Another is the behavior of
subatomic particles. The orthodox view in physics is that quantum waves act
mechanically on a particle, controlling its movement in much the same way that
the waves of the ocean might control a Ping-Pong ball floating on its surface.
But Bohm does not feel that this view can explain, for example, the coordinated
dance of electrons in a plasma any more than the wave motion of water could
explain a similarly well-choreographed movement of Ping-Pong balls if such a
movement were discovered on the ocean's surface. He believes the relationship
between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided
by radar waves. A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a
radar wave pushes a ship. Rather, it provides the electron with
information
about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own.

In other words, Bohm
believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity,
a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, structureless
point. The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all subatomic particles,
indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only
of consciousness but of all matter. It is this intrinsic commonality, says
Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK. He states, “On this basis,
psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were
focused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding the basic processes
of the material systems in which this psychokinesis was to be brought about.”

It is important to note
that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is,
a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics.
Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal “resonance of meanings,”
or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal
interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle
of polarization which we saw in chapter 2 (for technical reasons Bohm believes
mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a
deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of “super” nonlocality, would offer such an
explanation).

The Gremlin in
the Machine

Another researcher whose
ideas about PK are similar to Bohm's, but who has taken them one step further,
is Robert G. Jahn, a professor of aerospace sciences and dean emeritus of the
School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. Jahn's
involvement in the study of PK happened quite by accident. A former consultant
for both NASA and the Department of Defense, his original field of interest was
deep space propulsion. In fact, he is the author of
Physics of Electric
Propulsion
, the leading textbook in the field, and didn't even believe in
the paranormal when a student first approached him and asked him to oversee a
PK experiment she wanted to do as an independent study project. Jahn
reluctantly agreed, and the results were so provocative they inspired him to
found the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab in 1979. Since
then PEAR researchers have not only produced compelling evidence of the
existence of PK, but have gathered more data on the subject than anyone else in
the country.

In one series of
experiments Jahn and his associate, clinical psychologist Brenda Dunne,
employed a device called a random event generator, or REG. By relying on an
unpredictable natural process such as radioactive decay, a REG is able to
produce a string of random binary numbers. Such a string might look something
like this: 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1. In other words, a REG is a
kind of automatic coin-flipper capable of producing an enormous number of coin
flips in a very short time. As everyone knows, if you flip a perfectly weighted
coin 1,000 times, the odds are you will get a 50/50 split between heads and
tails. In reality, out of any 1,000 such flips, the split may vary a little in
one direction or the other, but the greater the number of flips, the closer to
50/50 the split will become.

What Jahn and Dunne did
was have volunteers sit in front of the REG and concentrate on having it
produce an abnormally large number of either heads or tails. Over the course of
literally hundreds of thousands of trials they discovered that, through
concentration alone, the volunteers did indeed have a small but statistically
significant effect on the REG's output. They discovered two other things as
well. The ability to produce PK effects was not limited to a few gifted
individuals but was present in the majority of volunteers they tested. This
suggests that most of us possess some degree of PK. They also discovered that
different volunteers produced different and consistently distinctive results,
results that were so idiosyncratic that Jahn and Dunne started calling them
“signatures.”

In another series of
experiments Jahn and Dunne employed a pinball-like device that allows 9,000
three-quarter-inch marbles to circulate around 330 nylon pegs and distribute
themselves into 19 collecting bins at the bottom. The device is contained in a
shallow vertical frame ten feet high and six feet wide with a clear glass front
so that volunteers can see the marbles as they fall and collect in the bins.
Normally, more balls fall in the center bins than in the outer ones, and the
overall distribution looks like a bell-shaped curve.

As with the REG, Jahn
and Dunne had volunteers sit in front of the machine and try to make more balls
land in the outer bins than in the center ones. Again, over the course of a
large number of runs, the operators were able to create a small but measurable shift
in where the balls landed. In the REG experiments the volunteers only exerted a
PK effect on microscopic processes, the decay of a radioactive substance, but
the pinball experiments revealed that test subjects could use PK to influence
objects in the everyday world as well. What's more, the “signatures” of
individuals who had participated in the REG experiments surfaced again in the
pinball experiments, suggesting that the PK abilities of any given individual
remain the same from experiment to experiment, but vary from individual to
individual just as other talents vary. Jahn and Dunne state, “While small
segments of these results might reasonably be discounted as falling too close
to chance behavior to justify revision of prevailing scientific tenets, taken
in concert the entire ensemble establishes an incontrovertible aberration of
substantial proportions.”