CHAPTER ONE

 

There are two things I have come to believe implicitly about the world we live in. One is that nothing occurring in it is independent of any other thing; the other is that nothing that occurs is entirely random and prey to change.

Allan Combs and Mark Holland

Synchronicity

 

I invite you to come with me and mind-walk into the fields of science, mythology, psychology, and neuroscience. Meander with me, like on a country path, through some radical forests of ideas. We will occasionally stop by a sparkling brook to absorb a whiff of intoxicating elixirs as they bubble up and out of the well-springs of universal consciousness-a consciousness we are still struggling to understand.

To develop a metaphor, it is necessary to turn to the physical sciences, especially holographic science. Those of you who have visited Disney and gone through the Haunted Mansion have experienced holograms at their finest. Holograms appear on greeting cards, Halloween costumes, book jackets, key chains, business cards, coffee mugs, and wherever else one wants a three-dimensional image.

One of the many things that make holography possible is what is called interference. Interference is the crisscrossing pattern that occurs when two or more waves ripple through each other, not unlike the waves of water. If you drop a stone in a still pond, you will notice two sets of waves that expand and pass through one another. It is this complex arrangement of crests and troughs that result from such collisions that are called an interface pattern.

A hologram is an interface, and it is produced when a laser light is split into two separate forms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first beam is bounced off the object (the tomato in the illustration) to be photographed. The second beam is allowed to collide with the reflected light of the first. The resulting interface pattern is then recorded on the holographic film.

If you look at the film, the image will look nothing like the tomato that had been photographed-it would look like the concentric rings that formed when a stone is dropped in a pond. The magic takes place when another laser beam is shone through the film-a three-dimensional image of the original object (the tomato) reappears. This is only one aspect of the holographic marvel. If you cut the film in half and then quarters, each piece will produce a complete image of the tomato. In other words, each fragment contains all the information recorded in the whole. Keep a clear understanding of this in mind because it becomes important in our understanding of the Jungian archetypes and the transition to spirit guides.

Some scientific circles believe this is how our human memories are distributed in the brain as opposed to being localized. For instance, the pineal gland is believed to have a relationship to that distribution. Evidence continues to mount showing vision functioning holographically as well. Holography offers an explanation of how our brains can store so much information.

 

 

Physicist John Von Neumann has calculated that over the course of a human's lifespan, a human brain stores 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information. That's 280 quintillions.

Dr. Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University drew the following inferences about the brain's capacity to store information: "The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to space in an iPad or USB flash drive.

Yet, neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially, increasing the brain's memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage." [1]

 

Holograms, likewise, have a fantastic capacity to store information. Using the holographic approach, a one-inch piece of film can contain the information of 50 Bibles. Being suggested here is the notion that our brains function as holograms and like the hologram, each piece or part of the brain contains the whole image.

The brain with its vast capacity for storing information, functioning as a hologram, then may very well create its own images or pictures. And if, as it is being suggested, all parts of the hologram can create an image and that all parts are related to the whole image as a single entity, we may find that what the ancient mystics have been saying is true-reality is Maya-an illusion. And further, what was out there was really a vast resonating symphony of wave forms transformed into the world as we know it only after it entered our senses. Perhaps the philosopher Immanuel Kant was right after all when he claimed the only way we know is through experience and that is what constitutes reality.

Physicist David Bohm claims everything is part of a continuum-everything is a seamless extension of everything else. Bohm believes that our nearly universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore this very dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems

scientifically, politically, economically, socially, and psychologically. He does not stop there. He believes that our continued fragmentation of the world not only doesn't work, but it may lead to our extinction.

A classic example of fragmentation is all that encompasses religion. Here's the kicker: Bohm believes that life and intelligence are present not only in all matter, but in energy, space, time, and what we individually abstract out of it. We mistakenly view such an abstraction as separate things. Original people from around the world have long viewed the world as alive. His concept is not unlike that of Mana, [2]

which the natives of the Malaysian Archipelago believed. Actually, this is not unlike the early belief in we now call Animism.

This means we are a part and sum of all that has gone on before, and we are interconnected. Advances in DNA analysis strongly support this concept. Not only are we genetically interconnected, but we also contain within our biological entities all knowledge that has existed. Even this notion is not new. Ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates believed that we had more than one soul during our lifetime and that each new soul contained the knowledge of the preceding one. To reproduce this knowledge all one has to do is to ask the right questions. He demonstrated this with an uneducated slave boy. By asking him questions, Socrates showed that the boy knew basic mathematical principles.

The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that occur between consciousnesses of two or more individuals. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung provides helpful insights here. Jung was convinced dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and artwork often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of his patients' personal histories. He found that such symbols more closely resembled the images and themes of the world's great mythologies and religions. He concluded dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, myths, and religious visions all sprang from the same source

-a collective unconscious that is shared by all human beings.

Jung relates one experience he had with one of his patients in 1906. A young man was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. As the story goes, one day Jung found the young man standing at a window, staring up at the sun. His head was moving from side to side. When Jung asked him what he was doing, the young man replied he was looking at the sun's penis and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. Several years later, Jung came across a translation of a 2,000 year-old Persian religious text which detailed several rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. One indicated if a person looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when it moved from side to side, the wind blew.

Furthermore, Jung believes these archetypes were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man or woman lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds. How can that possibly be? An explanation of interconnectedness of all things is predicted by the holographic model. In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, as David Bohm suggests, then it is not unreasonable to have all consciousnesses interconnected. Bohm puts it this way: "Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one." [3]

This meandering country path we are on becomes even more intoxicating when we read what physicist Fred Alan Wolf says. In 1987, before the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams, Wolf delivered a speech in which he asserted the holographic model helps explain lucid dreams, a type of dream in which the dreamer maintains a full awaking consciousness and is aware that they are dreaming. Wolf reminds us that a piece of the holographic film actually generates two images, a virtual image that appears to be in the space behind the film, and the real image that comes into focus in the space in front of the film. The light waves that compose a virtual image seem to be diverging from an apparent focus or source. This, according to Wolf and others, is an illusion. The real image of a hologram is formed by light waves that are coming to a focus, and this is not an illusion. The virtual image of a hologram has no more extension in space than does an image in a mirror. The real image does possess extension in space. Wolf believes that all dreams are internal holograms and that the brain has the ability to generate real images, and that is exactly what we do when we are in a lucid dream or are journeying to another parallel universe.

We just jumped into a fast moving river running along our country path. A gushing river full of eddies, deep holes, shallow pools is more like it.

Wolf then postulates lucid dreams are actually visits to parallel universes. These are smaller holograms within the larger and more inclusive cosmic hologram.

Dr. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University states there are existing parallel universes and in one of them, for example, Richard Nixon is resigning from the presidency of the United States. If Davies is correct, then I suggest Jung's archetypes, these spirit guides or teachers, then, may actually be visits from parallel universes. Is it, for this reason, they are often in the figures of goddesses and gods of bygone millennia? Is this why we see them as ghostly beings and animals? We just made a sharp turn in our gushing river and have plunged into a whirlpool. Take a moment and catch your breath.

Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist and one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of exploring healing and gaining insights into the human psyche, arrives at some conclusions that pale the idea that we are able to access images from the collective unconscious, or visit parallel universes. Grof believes the enfolded nature of space and time in the holographic model explains why transpersonal experiences are not bound by the usual spatial or temporal limitations.

Accordingly, Grof believes the composite nature of archetypal images can be modeled by the holographic idea. Holography makes it possible to build up a sequence of exposures. These composite images represent an exquisite model of a certain type of transpersonal experiences, such as the archetypal images of the cosmic man, woman, mother, martyr, or kore. Grof believes there is a deep link between holographic processes, and the way archetypes are produced. Both he and his wife, Christina, have developed a simple technique for inducing what they call holotropic or non-ordinary states of consciousness. The Grofs call their technique holotropic therapy.

A second Jungian concept of interest here, is his idea of synchronicity-coincidences that are so unusual and meaningful that they can hardly be attributed to chance alone. Each of you has experienced synchronicity at some point in your lives; for example, you have learned a new and different word, and a few hours later you hear it on the radio or television, and then you see it in something you are reading. Jung was convinced such synchronicities were not chance occurrences but were related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Jung's problem is this: How an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or events in the physical world. For him, there had to be some new principle unknown to science. He called this the Acasusal connecting principle.

Nonlocal connections have been established, and those have given Jung's ideas further credence. Again, Paul Davies states, "These nonlocal effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection, more precisely a correlation, between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden." In other words, these experiences are not based on our normal notions of cause and effect. They are acausal.

F. David Peat, another well-known physicist, also believes the Jungian-type synchronicities are real. He further believes synchronicities reveal the absence of division between the physical world and our inner psychological reality.

Consequently, when we experience a synchronicity, we are really experiencing the human mind operating, at least for that moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of the mind and matter into creativity itself-into the deeper and more fundamental order-the unbroken wholeness of our own unconscious mind.

If then, there is not a division between the mental and physical worlds; these same qualities are also true of objective reality. David Bohm claims the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then is it not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity.

Take a deep breath. Whew! What does all of this mean? It means from the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective reality-the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars-this discovery that the material universe can also contain with its warp and weft the innermost processes of consciousness-that such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe.