The Holographic Universe (32 page)

Dryer has also noticed
that the energy field responds before a person consciously registers a
response. As a consequence, instead of trying to judge her client's reactions
by watching their facial expressions, she keeps her eyes closed and watches how
their energy fields react. “As I speak I can see the colors change in their
energy field. I can see how they feel about what I'm saying without having to
ask them. For instance, if their field becomes foggy I know they're not
understanding what I'm telling them,” she states.

If the mind is not in
the brain, but in the energy field that permeates both the brain and the
physical body, this may explain why psychics such as Dryer see so much of the
content of a person's psyche in the field. It may also explain how my spleen,
an organ not normally associated with thought, managed to have its own
rudimentary form of intelligence. Indeed, if the mind is in the field, it suggests
that our awareness, the thinking, feeling part of ourselves, may not even be
confined to the physical body, and as we will see, there is considerable
evidence to support this idea as well.

But first we must turn
our attention to another issue. The solidity of the body is not the only thing
that is illusory in a holographic universe. As we have seen, Bohm believes that
even time itself is not absolute, but unfolds out of the implicate order. This
suggests that the linear division of time into past, present, and future is
also just another construct of the mind. In the next chapter we will examine
the evidence that supports this idea as well as the ramifications this view has
for our lives in the here and now.

SPACE AND TIME

Shamanism and similar mysterious
areas of research have gained in significance because they postulate new ideas
about mind and spirit. They speak of things like vastly expanding the realm of
consciousness . . . the belief, the knowledge, and even the experience that our
physical world of the senses is a mere illusion, a world of shadows, and that
the three-dimensional tool we call our body serves only as a container or
dwelling place for Something infinitely greater and more comprehensive than that
body and which constitutes the matrix of the real life.

The “home” of the mind, as of all
things, is the implicate order. At this level, which is the fundamental plenum
for the entire manifest universe, there is no linear time. The implicate domain
is atemporal; moments are not strung together serially like beads on a string.

As the man gazed off
into space, the room he was in became ghostly and transparent, and in its place
materialized a scene from the distant past. Suddenly he was in the courtyard of
a palace, and before him was a young woman, olive-skinned and very pretty. He
could see her gold jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, her white
translucent dress, and her black braided hair gathered regally under a high
square-shaped tiara. As he looked at her, information about her life flooded
his mind. He knew she was Egyptian, the daughter of a prince, but not a
pharaoh. She was married. Her husband was slender and wore his hair in a
multitude of small braids that fell down on both sides of his face.

The man could also
fast-forward the scene, rushing through the events of the woman's life as if
they were no more than a movie. He saw that she died in childbirth. He watched
the lengthy and intricate steps of her embalming, her funeral procession, the
rituals that accompanied her being placed in her sarcophagus, and when he
finished, the images faded and the room once again came back into view.

The man's name was
Stefan Ossowiecki, a Russian-born Pole and one of the century's most gifted
clairvoyants, and the date was February 14,19S5. His vision of the past had
been evoked when he handled a fragment of a petrified human foot

Ossowiecki proved so
adept at psychometrizing artifacts that he eventually came to the attention of
Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw and the most
eminent ethnologist in Poland at the time. Poniatowski tested Ossowiecki with a
variety of flints and other stone tools obtained from archaeological sites
around the world. Most of these
lithics
, as they are called, were so
nondescript that only a trained eye could tell they had been shaped by human
hands. They were also precertified by experts so that Poniatowski knew their
ages and historical origins, information he kept carefully concealed from
Ossowiecki.

ft did not matter. Again
and again Ossowiecki identified the objects correctly, describing their age,
the culture that had produced them, and the geographical locations where they
had been found. On several occasions the locations Ossowiecki cited disagreed
with the information Poniatowski had written in his notes, but Poniatowski
discovered that it was always his notes that were in error, not Ossowiecki's
information.

Ossowiecki always worked
the same. He would take the object in his hands and concentrate until the room
before him, and even his own body, became shadowy and almost nonexistent. After
this transition occurred, he would find himself looking at a three-dimensional
movie of the past He could then go anywhere he wanted in the scene and see
anything he chose. While he was gazing into the past, Ossowiecki even moved his
eyes back and forth as if the things he was describing possessed an actual physical
presence before him.

He could see the
vegetation, the people, and the dwellings in which they lived. On one occasion,
after handling a stone implement from the Magdalenian culture, a Stone Age
people who flourished in France about 15,000 to 10,000 b.c, Ossowiecki told
Poniatowski that Magdalenian women had very complex hair styles. At the time
this seemed absurd, but subsequent discoveries of statues of Magdalenian women
with ornate coiffures proved Ossowiecki right

Over the course of the
experiments Ossowiecki offered over one hundred such pieces of information,
details about the past that at first seemed inaccurate, but later proved
correct He said that Stone Age peoples used oil lamps and was vindicated when
excavations in Dordogne, France, uncovered oils lamps of the exact size and
style he described. He made detailed drawings of the animals various peoples
hunted, the style of the huts in which they lived, and their burial
customs—assertions that were all later confirmed by archaeological discoveries.

Poniatowski's work with
Ossowiecki is not unique. Norman Emerson, a professor of anthropology at the
University of Toronto and founding vice president of the Canadian
Archaeological Association, has also investigated the use of clairvoyants in
archaeological work. Emerson's research has centered around a truck driver
named George McMullen. Like Ossowiecki, McMullen has the ability to
psychometrize objects and use them to tune into scenes from the past. McMullen
can also tune into the past simply by visiting an archaeological site. Once
there, he paces back and forth until he gets his bearings. Then he begins to
describe the people and culture that once flourished at the site. On one such
occasion Emerson watched as McMullen bounded over a patch of bare ground,
pacing out what he said was the location of an Iroquois longhouse. Emerson
marked the area with survey pegs and six months later uncovered the ancient
structure exactly where McMullen said it would be.

Although Emerson began
as a skeptic, his work with McMullen has made him a believer. In 1973, at an
annual conference of Canada's leading archaeologists, he stated, “It is my
conviction that I have received knowledge about archaeological artifacts and
archaeological sites from a psychic informant who relates this information to
me without any evidence of the conscious use of reasoning.” He concluded his
talk by saying that he felt McMullen's demonstrations opened “a whole new
vista” in archaeology, and research into the further use of psychics in archaeological
investigations should be given “first priority.”

Indeed,
retrocognition
,
or the ability of certain individuals to shift the focus of their attention and
literally gaze back into the past, has been confirmed repeatedly by
researchers. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s, W. H. C.
Tenhaeff, the director of the Parapsychological Institute of the State
University of Utrecht, and Marius Valkhoff, dean of the faculty of arts at the
University of Witwatersfand, Johannesburg, South Africa, found that the great
Dutch psychic, Gerard Croiset could psychometrize even the smallest fragment of
bone and accurately describe its past. Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a New York clinical
psychologist, and another skeptic-turned-believer, has conducted similar experiments
with the noted American psychic, Eileen Garrett. At the 1961 annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association, archaeologist Clarence W. Weiant
revealed that he would not have made his famous Tres Zapotes discovery,
universally considered to be one of the most important Middle American
archaeological finds ever made, were it not for the assistance of a psychic.

Stephan A. Schwartz, a
former editorial staff member of
National Geographic
magazine and a
member of MIT's Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation,
Technology, and Society, believes that retrocognition is not only real, but
will eventually precipitate a shift in scientific reality as profound as the
shifts that followed the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin. Schwartz feels
so strongly about the subject that he has written a comprehensive history of
the partnership between clairvoyants and archaeologists entitled
The Secret
Vaults of Time.
“For three-quarters of a century psychic archaeology has
been a reality,” says Schwartz. “This new approach has done much to demonstrate
that the time and space framework so crucial to the Grand Material world-view
is by no means as absolute a construct as most scientists believe.”

The Past as
Hologram

Such abilities suggest
that the past is not lost, but still exists in some form accessible to human
perception. Our normal view of the universe makes no allowance for such a state
of affairs, but the holographic model does. Bohm's notion that the flow of time
is the product of a constant series of unfoldings and enfoldings suggests that
as the present enfolds and becomes part of the past, it does not cease to
exist, but simply returns to the cosmic storehouse of the implicate. Or as Bohm
puts it, “The past is active in the present as a kind of implicate order.”

If, as Bohm suggests,
consciousness also has its source in the implicate, this means that the human
mind and the holographic record of the past already exist in the same domain,
are, in a manner of speaking, already neighbors. Thus, a shift in the focus of
one's attention may be all that is needed to access the past. Clairvoyants such
as McMullen and Ossowiecki may simply be individuals who have an innate knack
for making this shift, but again, as with so many of the other extraordinary
human abilities we have looked at, the holographic idea suggests that the
talent is latent in all of us.

A metaphor for the way
the past is stored in the implicate can also be found in the hologram. If each
phase of an activity, say a woman blowing a soap bubble, is recorded as a
series of successive images in a multiple-image hologram, each image becomes as
a frame in a movie. If the hologram is a “white light” hologram—a piece of
holographic film whose image can be seen by the naked eye and does not need
laser light to become visible—when a viewer walks by the film and changes the
angle of his or her perception, he/she will see what amounts to a
three-dimensional motion picture of the woman blowing the soap bubble. In other
words, as the different images unfold and enfold, they will seem to flow
together and present an illusion of movement.

A person who is
unfamiliar with holograms might mistakenly assume that the various stages in
the blowing of the soap bubble are transitory and once perceived can never be
viewed again, but this is not true. The entire activity is always recorded in
the hologram, and it is the viewer's changing perspective that provides the
illusion that it is unfolding in time. The holographic theory suggests that the
same -is true of our own past. Instead of fading into oblivion, it too remains
recorded in the cosmic hologram and can always be accessed once again.

Another suggestively
hologramlike feature of the retrocognitive experience is the
three-dimensionality of the scenes that are accessed. For instance, psychic
Rich, who can also psychometrize objects, says she knows what Ossowiecki meant
when he said that the images he saw were as three-dimensional and real, even
more real, than the room in which he was sitting. “It's as if the scene takes
over,” says Rich. “It's dominant, and once it starts to unfold I actually
become a part of it. It's like being in two places at once. I'm aware that I'm
sitting in a room, but I'm also in the scene.”

Similarly holographic is
the nonlocal nature of the ability. Psychics are able to access the past of a
particular archaeological site both when they are at the site and when they are
many miles removed. In other words, the record of the past does not appear to
be stored at any one location, but like the information in a hologram, it is
nonlocal and can be accessed from any point in the space-time framework. The non-local
aspect of the phenomenon is further underscored by the fact that some psychics
don’t even to resort to psychometry in order to tune into the past. The famous
Kentuckian clairvoyant Edgar Cayce could tap into the past simply by lying down
on a couch in his house and entering a sleeplike state. He dictated volumes on
the history of the human race and was often startlingly accurate. For example,
he pinpointed the location and described the historical role of the essence
community at Qumran eleven years before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
(in the caves above Qumran) confirmed his prouncements.