by Gregg Braden
Figure 9. When something is holographic, it exists wholly within every fragment of itself, no matter how many pieces it’s divided into. This illustration helps convey the idea that no matter how finely we divide the universe—from the four parts shown above to a galaxy, a human, or an atom—each segment mirrors the whole universe, only on a smaller scale.
Just as the direct experience of starting a car’s engine is the most effective way to show how it operates, probably the best method of illustrating how a hologram works is also through an example.
Back in the 1980s, a series of bookmarks appeared on the market (which are now collector’s items) using holographic technology. Each one was made of a shiny strip of silver paper that looked like glossy aluminum foil at first glance. When the paper was held directly under a bright light and tilted back and forth, however, something happened that set these bookmarks apart from more traditional ones: Suddenly, the images in the foil looked as though they’d come to life and were hovering in the air just above the paper itself. As the bookmark was tilted one way, then another, the image remained present, three-dimensional and lifelike. I remember a number of different versions of these: the face of Jesus, the body of Mother Mary, a dolphin jumping over a pyramid, and a rosebud in full bloom.
If you have one of these bookmarks, you can do an experiment to demonstrate for yourself just how a hologram works. A word of caution here: The drawback is that your bookmark will be destroyed in the process! With this in mind, use a sharp pair of scissors to cut your beautiful, shiny bookmark into hundreds of pieces of any shape. Then, take the smallest of the fragments and cut it again into an even tinier piece. If the bookmark is truly a hologram, you’ll be able to look at your tiny speck of a bookmark under a magnifying glass and still see the entire image, only on a smaller scale. The reason why is that it exists everywhere throughout the bookmark.
Key 13: In a holographic “something,” every piece of the something mirrors the whole something.
SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE
TWIN PHOTONS
So, with a clearer understanding of what a hologram is and how it’s created, let’s revisit the University of Geneva experiment from Chapter 1. To recap: A distance of 14 miles separated twin photons. When one of them was forced to choose between two pathways at the end of its journey, the second photon always made exactly the same choice, as if it “knew” what its twin was doing. The same experiment has been repeated on different occasions, and each time the results are identical. The two particles act as if they’re still connected, even though they’re miles apart.
Conventional wisdom suggests that for this kind of connection to happen, the photons are somehow sending signals to one another. This is where a problem comes in for physicists: For a message to travel between them, it would have to be moving faster than the speed of light. But according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing can travel that quickly.
So is it possible that these particles are violating the laws of physics … or are they demonstrating something else to us? Could they be showing us something so foreign to the way we think about our world that we’re still trying to force the mystery of what we see into the comfortable familiarity of how we believe energy gets from one place to another?
What if the signal from one photon never traveled to reach the other? Is it possible that we live in a universe where the information between photons, the prayer for our loved ones, or the desire for peace in a place halfway around the world never needs to be transported anywhere to be received?
The answer is yes! This appears to be precisely the kind of universe we live in. Russell Targ, cofounder of the cognitive-sciences program at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, eloquently and beautifully describes this connection: “We live in a nonlocal world where things physically separated from one another can, nonetheless, be in instantaneous communication.”2 Targ clarifies what such a connection means, stating, “It’s not that I close my eyes and send a message to a person a thousand miles away, but rather in some sense there is no separation between my consciousness and his consciousness.”3 The reason why the signals didn’t have to travel between photons is because they were already there—they never left from anywhere and were never carried to another location in the conventional sense.
By definition, every place in a hologram is a reflection of every other. And a property that exists anywhere within it also exists everywhere else. So in the nonlocal hologram of our universe, the underlying energy that links all things instantly connects them as well. Spiritual teachers generally agree with scientists on this view of reality. As Ervin Laszlo, the founder of systems philosophy, describes, “Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a ‘sacred dance’ with an underlying field.”4
This seems to be precisely what the ancient Avata Saka Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism is describing as the “wonderful net” of energy that connects all things in the cosmos. If the universe is nonlocal and holographic, not only does this net link everything together, each point within it also reflects all others. The Sutra begins by stating that at one time in the distant past, this net was “hung” so that “it stretches out infinitely in all directions” as the universe itself.
In addition to being the universe, the net contains it and gives it holographic qualities. The ancient Sutra describes an infinite number of jewels throughout the net that serve as cosmic eyes. Thus, all things are visible to all other things. In what may well be the oldest known description of a hologram discovered so far, the Sutra then reveals the power of each jewel to create change throughout the entire net: “Each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.”5 According to the translation of the Sutra I’ve referenced, this net “symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.”6
What a beautiful description of the subtle yet powerful principle that nature uses to survive, grow, and evolve. In a holographic universe, where each piece already has the whole world mirrored on a smaller scale, all things are already everywhere. The holographic principle promises that everything we need to survive and grow is always with us, everywhere, all the time . . . from the simplicity of a single blade of grass to the complexity of our bodies.
As we understand the power of our infinitely connected hologram, it becomes clear that nothing is hidden and there are no secrets—these things are by-products of our sense of separateness. While it may look as though we’re disconnected from one another and the rest of the world, that detachment doesn’t exist on the plane where the hologram originates: within the Divine Matrix. On this level of unity, there really can be no such things as “here” and “there.”
Now we can answer the “why” of the mysteries in our experiments from the first part of this book. When the U.S. Army performed the experiments on the donor and his cells, the DNA acted as if it were still connected to the person having the emotions. Even when the donor and his DNA were separated by distances of up to 350 miles, the results were the same, and the mystery remained, because our conventional explanations for why DNA would respond to its owner’s emotions are invalid.
Most people would assume that some energy was being shared in this experiment. When we think of energy, we typically imagine it being generated in one place and then somehow transmitted or conveyed to another. Just as the image on our TV set or our favorite music on the radio is the result of energy being broadcast from point A to point B, we would expect some kind of force to travel from the donor to his DNA. For a transfer to happen, however, it takes time to get from one location to the next. While this interval might not be much, maybe just a nanosecond, some amount of time must pass for a conventional energy to move from one point to another.
The key in the experiment, however, was that an atomic clock (accurate to one second in one million years) showed that no such time elapsed. The effect was simultaneous
because no exchange was necessary. On the quantum level, the donor and the DNA were both part of the same pattern, and the information from either one was already present with the other: They were already connected. The energy from the donor’s emotions never traveled anywhere, because it was already everywhere.
Any change that we wish to see in our world—from healing and safety for our loved ones to peace in the Middle East or any of the 60-plus nations now engaged in armed conflict—doesn’t have to be sent from our hearts and minds to the places where it’s needed. It’s not necessary to “send” anything anywhere. Once our prayers are inside of us, they’re already everywhere.
Key 14: The universally connected hologram of consciousness promises that the instant we create our good wishes and prayers, they are already received at their destination.
The implications of this principle are vast and deep. To really know what it means in our lives, however, we need to examine the last piece of how the hologram works: the power to create change within it. If everything is really connected and already everywhere all the time, then what happens when we change something in one part of the hologram? Once again, the answer may surprise you.
A CHANGE ANYWHERE MEANS A
CHANGE EVERYWHERE
In the movie Contact, there are scenes that flash back to the childhood of the lead character and show the influence that her father had in her life before his sudden death. Offering his support for the ambitious way she approached her goals, he often commented that the great things in his daughter’s future would be accomplished in small steps.
Not only is this great advice for all parents to pass along to their children, it appears to be precisely the way the hologram of consciousness and life works. When we make a little change here and another one there, suddenly everything seems to change. In fact, a small alteration in one place can permanently shift an entire paradigm.
Visionary and philosopher Ervin Laszlo describes the reason why this is so: “All that happens in one place happens also in other places; all that happened at one time happens also at times after that. Nothing is ‘local,’ limited to where and when it is happening.”7 As the great spiritual teachers such as Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa demonstrated so eloquently, the nonlocal holographic principle is an immense force—a “David” to the “Goliath” of change in the quantum world.
Just as a hologram contains the original image in all of its many parts, any change made to just one of those segments becomes reflected everywhere throughout the pattern. What a powerful relationship! A single change in one place can make a difference everywhere! Perhaps the best example of how little modifications can affect an entire system can be seen in something that we’re all familiar with: the DNA of our bodies.
Watching any movie based on modern crime-scene investigation, we learn quickly that the identity of the perpetrator can be detected from traces of him or her left at the place where the crime was committed. If the investigators can identify any part of a person’s body or anything that comes from it—from a splatter of blood or a broken strand of hair to stains of semen or even torn fingernails—then they can identify someone. And it makes no difference where in the body the DNA comes from because of the holographic principle—all parts mirror the whole. Each piece of DNA exactly resembles the others (barring mutations).
It’s estimated that the average human has between 50 and 100 trillion cells in his or her body. Each of those cells holds 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain an individual’s DNA (life code). When we do the math, this means that people carry somewhere between 2,300 trillion and 4,600 trillion copies of DNA in their bodies. Just imagine how long it would take to make a change in someone’s DNA if we attempted to update each copy, one cell at a time. But when DNA does modify the blueprint of a species, it doesn’t have to do so in a linear fashion, one strand at time. Because of the holographic principle, when the DNA is altered, that change is reflected throughout the whole.
Key 15: Through the hologram of consciousness, a little change in our lives is mirrored everywhere in our world.
Figure 10. In a hologram, every part of “something” reflects every other part, and change is mirrored throughout the whole. Even if we divide the universe into four smaller fragments, for example, every piece is a mirror of the entire universe. A change in one place (indicated by the lightened section) is reflected in every mirror.
You’re probably asking yourself, Why is this important in my life? While this is an obvious question, the answer may be less so. The subtle power of the hologram is that it offers us the leverage to make a tremendous change on a large scale by altering a pattern in only one place. Understanding the holographic principle is important because it appears to describe precisely the way we work.
From the DNA of our bodies to the atomic structure of the world around us to how memory and consciousness work, we appear to be holograms of a greater existence that we’re only beginning to understand.
HOLOGRAPHIC BRAINS IN
AHOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
I remember watching a documentary in the 1970s on the human brain in which surgeons were preparing to relieve pressure deep within the tissue of a man’s brain caused by the trauma of an accident. While he was wide-awake and conscious, portions of his exposed brain were stimulated with electrical probes to see what part of the body those segments were related to. When an electrode was touched to one place, for example, the patient would “see” a burst of color, and that location would be noted as a visual center.
Aside from the bizarre experience of seeing a living brain exposed to the bright lights of the operating room, what made this particular film so interesting was the way the man’s brain was working. When certain sites were electrically stimulated and produced his experience of seeing color, for example, those places didn’t seem to correspond to the ones that are traditionally associated with vision. It was as if portions of his brain had somehow learned to “see” in a way that we would normally expect to find in another part of the brain.
The revolutionary work of neuroscientist Karl Pribram has also found that cerebral functions are more global than was once postulated. Prior to Pribram’s work, it was believed that our brains work like amazing biological computers that store particular kinds of information in precise places. In this mechanical model of memory, there was a one-to-one correspondence between certain types of memory and the locations where they were stored. The problem was that localized memory wasn’t what was found in laboratory experiments.
In much the same way that the documentary showed places in the man’s brain that “knew” the function of other areas, experiments demonstrated that animals retained memories and continued their lives even though the parts of their brains that were believed to hold these functions were removed. In other words, it appeared that there wasn’t a direct correspondence between the memories and a physical place in the brain. It was obvious that the mechanical view of brains and memory wasn’t the answer—something else strange and wonderful must be happening.
In the early 1970s, Pribram pioneered a powerful new model to explain the evidence from the experiments. He began to think of the brain and memories within it as working like holograms. One of the keys that confirmed Pribram was on the right track was the laboratory validation of the way we mentally process information. He drew upon earlier research to test his hypothesis. In the 1940s, scientist Dennis Gabor used a complex set of equations known as Fourier transforms (named after their discoverer, Joseph Fourier) to create the first holograms, work for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1971. Pribram guessed that if the brain does in fact work like a hologram, distributing information throughout its soft circuits, then it should process information the same way Fourier’s equations do.
Knowing that the brain’s cells create electrical waves, Pribram was able test the patterns from the circuits using the Fourier transforms. Sure enough, his theory was accurate—the experiments proved that our brains process information in a way that’s
equivalent to the equations of a hologram.
Pribram clarified his model of the brain through a simple metaphor of holograms within holograms. In an interview, he stated, “The holograms within the visual system are … patch holograms.”8 These are smaller portions of a larger image. “The total image is composed much as it is in an insect eye that has hundreds of little lenses instead of one single big lens… . You get the total pattern all woven together as a unified piece by the time you experience it.”9
Interestingly, while Pribram and David Bohm (whose ideas were discussed in the Introduction) began their work independently, both were using the same explanation to describe the results of their experiments. They were each applying the holographic model to make sense of life. Bohm, as a quantum physicist, was looking at the universe as a hologram. Pribram, as a neuroscientist, was studying the brain as a holographic processor, with our minds performing holographic processes. When the two theories are combined, what results is nothing less than a paradigm-shattering possibility.
That possibility suggests that we are part of a much greater system of many realities, within realities, within other realities. In this system, our world could be considered a shadow or a projection of events that are happening in a deeper, underlying reality. What we see as our universe is really us—our individual and collective minds—transforming the possibilities of the deeper realms into physical reality. This radically new way of viewing ourselves and the universe gives nothing less than direct access to every possibility that we could ever wish (or pray) for, dream, or imagine.
