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The Universe as a Hologram
http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html
The Universe as a Hologram
by Michael Talbot
Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular, Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.
What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".
The Universe as a Hologram
by Michael Talbot
Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular, Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.
What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Life: A highly structured learning environment for the soul
www.divinecosmos.com
THE BASIC BOTTOM LINE
We always start by reminding ourselves that there’s only one of us here. The ‘separation’ never actually happened. The entire manifest Universe, including space, time and all dimensions, is an illusion — a dream in the mind of an Ultimate Being.
It was already over long ago, we already all won the game, and we are already all Home now. We are in a dream of space and time, and within this dream there is structure, including a finite series of experiences that we will run through at whatever speed we choose. Until we complete this curriculum we remain in the "illusion".
The essence of this Ultimate Being is Love. We are also told that Free Will, or the "First Distortion of the Law of One", is the most essential concept to grasp in terms of how to treat others with Love within the ‘illusion’ of space and time.
You cannot escape the fact that your essence is Love, and that your purpose here is to awaken to your true identity as the One Infinite Creator.
You also cannot escape the fact that as Love, you set up a system of guidelines where whatever you measure out to others will be measured back to you.
Hence, treat others with love and compassion and more of these wonderful qualities will flow into your own life naturally. Treat others with manipulation and control and you, in turn, will be manipulated and controlled by others.
GLASS CEILING
Sadly, on this planet at this time, there are many, many people who do not grasp that we live in a highly structured reality, in which there is a "Glass Ceiling."
Everything you say, everything you do, everything you think is known.
Not just by you, but by everyone above our own ‘third-density’ level.
You may be able to manipulate this reality and lie to someone here on the ground, or deceive and manipulate them in some way that appears to have worked. However, in truth you are utterly, 100-percent accountable for everything you do.
There really is no privacy — not in the sense of the higher forces who surround us and are constantly peering into our reality through the "Glass Ceiling."
This insults the ego of people who haven’t accepted Oneness to some degree, and have indulged in a false sense of privacy most of their lives. Nonetheless, this is exactly how it works in the deeper ‘Real World’ we’re all participating in, with varying levels of awareness.
MISSING OUT ON THE BIGGEST PUZZLE PIECE OF ALL
Many people are awakening to the realities within conspiracy theories at this time, and find it astonishing that the mainstream media has been lying to them for so long about so many things.
Nonetheless, they typically still fail to realize that even the full scope of ‘Truth’ about government / corporate / secret society shenanigans is nothing by comparison to the much greater hidden reality that underlies our existence.
The fact is that we are not alone. Our world is not what it seems to be at all. It is a massive school, intending to teach us to make a solid choice between love or control.
Our thoughts and actions do not occur in a void. Everything we think and everything we do pushes us in a direction — either closer to Oneness or farther away from it.
Whenever we veer from our course of Oneness, we will continually be prodded back on the path.
Think about this the next time you are tempted to lie, cheat, steal, hurt, manipulate or control someone. You may be able to do these things and "Get Away With It", but your Higher Self is taking it all in and programming future events to balance you out the very moment you perform these ‘infringements.’
Every time you judge someone, hate them, criticize them or attack them, you have just demonstrated that you do not understand the truth of Oneness and of Love. And you are accountable for the thoughts you create. They will come back around.
It’s a shame that more of my readers do not grasp this simple concept, given the level of vitriol I see in the anti-Obama flame letters. If you hate or attack anyone, for any reason, then you haven’t grasped the most basic aspect of spiritual truth there is.
I’m not affected by it — I already have forgiven you for whatever you write and know it’s not about me anyway — but these actions very much do affect you. It’s a point worth meditating about.
You will always have a place in my heart where you are seen as precious beyond measure, regardless of how you approach me. By that same token, I withdraw from confrontations, refusing to engage, and do the forgiveness / acceptance work on a higher level, apart from any direct physical communication.
THE LAW OF GRACE
According to the Cayce Readings, a "Law of Grace" is being applied here on Earth where we are not held responsible for more ‘karma’ than we can hope to make use out of and understand at any given time.
There are so many thousands of ways in which we inadvertently infringe upon the free will of others — say by buying ultra-cheap ‘sweat-shop’ products essentially built by the modern Asian equivalent of slaves — that if we were fully accountable for every infringement, we would all be suffering miserably and no one would learn anything.
Therefore, the Law of Grace is a sliding scale where you do not experience any greater ‘karma’ than you can be expected to learn from.
The problem here is that once you become fully educated as to the realities you live in, and the metaphysical truths that the Universe is formed from, the Law of Grace increasingly falls away, and you become totally accountable.
In this world, with how many people are ‘asleep’ and how easily they can hurt you, that is a very, very difficult place to be.
I have been living this way for many, many years now, having begun advanced spiritual studies into hypnosis and ESP at age 7, and gaining the complete Law of One philosophical perspective in 1996. Hence I am far more accountable, for far smaller things, than most other people would be.
The stakes rise even higher when you are out there giving spiritual teachings to groups of people who have found your work. If any of your actions do not align with your teachings, the karmic feedback is swift, intense and relentless.
Again, the key is not to get angry or frustrated, but to see it as a blessing. Each experience is a gift that can lead to your full awakening if pursued to its greatest extent.
INITIATION: ‘CATALYST’ IN SPIRIT, MIND AND BODY
Initiation is probably the least-understood aspect of spiritual truth and philosophy for most people who are in the process of awakening… and initiation comes through ‘catalyst,’ either of spirit, mind or body.
The Law of One series defines ‘catalyst’ as anything that promotes our spiritual evolution back into Oneness. In many cases these are jarring events, as this is what we need to wake up.
We like to think of spiritual growth as this happy, loving, wonderful process. We feel we’ve been suffering and we want to end that suffering. We may initially be attracted into spirituality as almost another form of addiction — just have a drink and your problems melt away.
It doesn’t work that way at all. You can read books, listen to radio shows, watch documentaries and ‘spread the word’ about what you see to be the truth all day long — but if you neglect the love that is present in this moment, and do not adequately share it with yourself and others, you will be shaken.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH: THE HARDEST… AND THE MOST REWARDING
Even in high school, I was telling people that "Spiritual growth is the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. It is also the most rewarding."
Back in the 80s, a pot-smoking friend of mine stole a fairly expensive item from someone, and almost immediately wrecked his car. He did not ‘gain’ anything — his loss from the car wreck was greater than what he ‘gained’ from stealing someone else’s property.
To me this was so obvious I was astonished when he refused to see a correlation between the events.
I watched more and more people suffering the effects of ‘karma’ and not even daring to imagine that these events were in any way related to things they had already said, done or even just thought. Nonetheless, the more you awaken to this reality, the more obvious it becomes when it happens to everyone else.
Again, the Law of One term for ‘karma’ is catalyst — and it comes in a sequential process. It starts in the spirit, and if that doesn’t work it spills over into the mind. If that doesn’t work it spills over into the body.
The reason why I’m writing all this is I just went through some very intense ‘body catalyst’ and am sharing the fruits of what I learned.
SPIRITUAL CATALYST
The first level of catalyst is spiritual. The questioner in the Law of One series never examined this very much, but it is clear that a great deal of spiritual catalyst occurs in the form of dream initiations.
Let’s say you have a major problem that has occurred in the past. It could be anything — think of any major problem you’ve been through, or that may be causing you distress even recently.
Though you cannot see it while stuck in linear time, there is a potential that this problem could happen again. Your Higher Self may see that you could be ready to let go of this problem for good.
You will then experience the same problem in a dream. If you successfully deal with it in the dream, i.e. in the ‘spirit,’ then you have signaled to your Higher Self that the problem need not repeat in your physical life. You have now learned the lesson, and you’re free to move to the next level.
EXAMPLE: FORGIVING AN ABUSIVE PARENT WITHIN THE ‘SPIRIT’
As one example, say the problem is that you have not fully forgiven and accepted an abusive parent. You may have a dream where a monstrous character, with exaggerated qualities like those of your parent, is chasing you.
If you have done the work and have forgiven your parent, you may realize the monster in your dream has no power over you. There is no reason to fear as you turn and face the very thing that seems to have been so terrifying and impossible to deal with in the past.
This is a profound healing, as in its fullest form you see the monster as a part of yourself that is in a lot of pain and really doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
You then embrace and forgive this character, which often by now is nothing more than a child, and there is a burst of white light, often ending in you waking up in tears. Congratulations — you’ve just had the ultimate example of processing catalyst in the spirit.
However, if you go through the dream and you keep on running away from the problem, then it’s time for your catalyst to spill over into the mind.
Remember: "In Forgiveness Lies the Stoppage of the Wheel of Karma."
Everything flows from forgiveness. It is the central ingredient that can end all suffering in the manifest world.
The point at which your progress stops can be measured as the point at which your forgiveness stops.
CATALYST OF THE MIND
Catalyst unprocessed by the spirit — i.e. through dreams we have that can be challenging, like running from an attacker and remaining terrified as it repeats over and over again — spill over into the mind. We then become consciously aware there is a problem, and it plagues our mind.
Going back to our example, as just one of many different possibilities, at this point we now attract someone into our lives who is the physical embodiment of the monster chasing us in the dream that we kept running from.
The person we now attract into our lives will have qualities that are quite similar to the abusive parent who first traumatized us. Now we have an opportunity to forgive this person, this projection of our original abuser, and learn to respect ourselves enough not to participate with people who treat us this way.
If we do not deal with catalyst in the mind — i.e. if we are unable to forgive this person in our lives who is offering us the same judgment, unfair treatment, condemnation, scorn and ridicule that we felt as a child, and ultimately direct against ourselves — then this catalyst spills over into the body.
This is where initiation can truly become dangerous, from a physical perspective. Nonetheless, on a higher level we take on and accept this danger because of how important it is that we awaken, or at the very least remain within a state of spiritual balance.
CATALYST OF THE BODY
‘Physical Catalyst’ involves physical damage — either to the body itself, through internal illness or external injury, or to personal property — everything from accidentally dropping that glass or plate you liked all the way up to totaling a car or having your house burn down.
The intended effect of this ‘catalyst’ is the same as spiritual or mental catalyst. It is intended to give you insight, to wake you up, to jar you out of toxic emotions and back into love and forgiveness.
The difference here is that you’re now seeing destructive force unleashed upon your own body or upon the physical things that your body identifies with.
Unfortunately, we have been widely conditioned in movies and the like to not think of body catalyst as karmic in nature. ‘Bad Things’ just happen to people without there being any reason.
We recoil in horror when "Bad Things" happen to children, not realizing that in many cases future incarnations are required to balance karma out that we created in a prior life time.
And let us be clear that we do have a Higher Self, it does have a very real spiritual agenda for us, and if we stray far enough off the path of what we came here to do in this life, it is perfectly willing to end an incarnation and pull us out, hoping to recalibrate our next lifetime so as to generate faster learning and better results.
NO JUDGMENT
If you are already dealing with body catalyst, there is absolutely no reason to judge yourself as having done anything wrong. There is no ‘wrong’ — there is only love and free will, and when you infringe on free will, you will have experiences that can restore you to perfect balance.
Those experiences, in order to be properly processed and utilized, involve forgiving and accepting yourself and others. That’s what everything keeps coming down to. Even in college, long before I’d pieced it all together, I was telling my friend Angelica "Self-acceptance is the bulls-eye" we’re all shooting for on the spiritual path.
Your Higher Self never sees you in any other form than with unimaginable love. Catalyst is precisely measured and never exceeds the exact amount deemed to be useful to nudge you back into love, acceptance and forgiveness. And the more love you create, the more comes back to you… by equally mystical and miraculous processes.
Beings in higher dimensions are not detached and emotionless at all. In fact, they understand us far more than we could ever believe, and have exquisitely intricate sensitivity to every little nuance of the spiritual path that comes our way.
You cannot imagine a being more understanding, more compassionate, and more insightful, as they almost never occur on Earth due to the personality distortions we all face here. Nonetheless, it is to that same level of acceptance and understanding that we are all being pushed.
And with that said, let’s explore my own physical catalyst that I just passed through, as it was quite intense....
Continues at http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=431&Itemid=70
THE BASIC BOTTOM LINE
We always start by reminding ourselves that there’s only one of us here. The ‘separation’ never actually happened. The entire manifest Universe, including space, time and all dimensions, is an illusion — a dream in the mind of an Ultimate Being.
It was already over long ago, we already all won the game, and we are already all Home now. We are in a dream of space and time, and within this dream there is structure, including a finite series of experiences that we will run through at whatever speed we choose. Until we complete this curriculum we remain in the "illusion".
The essence of this Ultimate Being is Love. We are also told that Free Will, or the "First Distortion of the Law of One", is the most essential concept to grasp in terms of how to treat others with Love within the ‘illusion’ of space and time.
You cannot escape the fact that your essence is Love, and that your purpose here is to awaken to your true identity as the One Infinite Creator.
You also cannot escape the fact that as Love, you set up a system of guidelines where whatever you measure out to others will be measured back to you.
Hence, treat others with love and compassion and more of these wonderful qualities will flow into your own life naturally. Treat others with manipulation and control and you, in turn, will be manipulated and controlled by others.
GLASS CEILING
Sadly, on this planet at this time, there are many, many people who do not grasp that we live in a highly structured reality, in which there is a "Glass Ceiling."
Everything you say, everything you do, everything you think is known.
Not just by you, but by everyone above our own ‘third-density’ level.
You may be able to manipulate this reality and lie to someone here on the ground, or deceive and manipulate them in some way that appears to have worked. However, in truth you are utterly, 100-percent accountable for everything you do.
There really is no privacy — not in the sense of the higher forces who surround us and are constantly peering into our reality through the "Glass Ceiling."
This insults the ego of people who haven’t accepted Oneness to some degree, and have indulged in a false sense of privacy most of their lives. Nonetheless, this is exactly how it works in the deeper ‘Real World’ we’re all participating in, with varying levels of awareness.
MISSING OUT ON THE BIGGEST PUZZLE PIECE OF ALL
Many people are awakening to the realities within conspiracy theories at this time, and find it astonishing that the mainstream media has been lying to them for so long about so many things.
Nonetheless, they typically still fail to realize that even the full scope of ‘Truth’ about government / corporate / secret society shenanigans is nothing by comparison to the much greater hidden reality that underlies our existence.
The fact is that we are not alone. Our world is not what it seems to be at all. It is a massive school, intending to teach us to make a solid choice between love or control.
Our thoughts and actions do not occur in a void. Everything we think and everything we do pushes us in a direction — either closer to Oneness or farther away from it.
Whenever we veer from our course of Oneness, we will continually be prodded back on the path.
Think about this the next time you are tempted to lie, cheat, steal, hurt, manipulate or control someone. You may be able to do these things and "Get Away With It", but your Higher Self is taking it all in and programming future events to balance you out the very moment you perform these ‘infringements.’
Every time you judge someone, hate them, criticize them or attack them, you have just demonstrated that you do not understand the truth of Oneness and of Love. And you are accountable for the thoughts you create. They will come back around.
It’s a shame that more of my readers do not grasp this simple concept, given the level of vitriol I see in the anti-Obama flame letters. If you hate or attack anyone, for any reason, then you haven’t grasped the most basic aspect of spiritual truth there is.
I’m not affected by it — I already have forgiven you for whatever you write and know it’s not about me anyway — but these actions very much do affect you. It’s a point worth meditating about.
You will always have a place in my heart where you are seen as precious beyond measure, regardless of how you approach me. By that same token, I withdraw from confrontations, refusing to engage, and do the forgiveness / acceptance work on a higher level, apart from any direct physical communication.
THE LAW OF GRACE
According to the Cayce Readings, a "Law of Grace" is being applied here on Earth where we are not held responsible for more ‘karma’ than we can hope to make use out of and understand at any given time.
There are so many thousands of ways in which we inadvertently infringe upon the free will of others — say by buying ultra-cheap ‘sweat-shop’ products essentially built by the modern Asian equivalent of slaves — that if we were fully accountable for every infringement, we would all be suffering miserably and no one would learn anything.
Therefore, the Law of Grace is a sliding scale where you do not experience any greater ‘karma’ than you can be expected to learn from.
The problem here is that once you become fully educated as to the realities you live in, and the metaphysical truths that the Universe is formed from, the Law of Grace increasingly falls away, and you become totally accountable.
In this world, with how many people are ‘asleep’ and how easily they can hurt you, that is a very, very difficult place to be.
I have been living this way for many, many years now, having begun advanced spiritual studies into hypnosis and ESP at age 7, and gaining the complete Law of One philosophical perspective in 1996. Hence I am far more accountable, for far smaller things, than most other people would be.
The stakes rise even higher when you are out there giving spiritual teachings to groups of people who have found your work. If any of your actions do not align with your teachings, the karmic feedback is swift, intense and relentless.
Again, the key is not to get angry or frustrated, but to see it as a blessing. Each experience is a gift that can lead to your full awakening if pursued to its greatest extent.
INITIATION: ‘CATALYST’ IN SPIRIT, MIND AND BODY
Initiation is probably the least-understood aspect of spiritual truth and philosophy for most people who are in the process of awakening… and initiation comes through ‘catalyst,’ either of spirit, mind or body.
The Law of One series defines ‘catalyst’ as anything that promotes our spiritual evolution back into Oneness. In many cases these are jarring events, as this is what we need to wake up.
We like to think of spiritual growth as this happy, loving, wonderful process. We feel we’ve been suffering and we want to end that suffering. We may initially be attracted into spirituality as almost another form of addiction — just have a drink and your problems melt away.
It doesn’t work that way at all. You can read books, listen to radio shows, watch documentaries and ‘spread the word’ about what you see to be the truth all day long — but if you neglect the love that is present in this moment, and do not adequately share it with yourself and others, you will be shaken.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH: THE HARDEST… AND THE MOST REWARDING
Even in high school, I was telling people that "Spiritual growth is the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. It is also the most rewarding."
Back in the 80s, a pot-smoking friend of mine stole a fairly expensive item from someone, and almost immediately wrecked his car. He did not ‘gain’ anything — his loss from the car wreck was greater than what he ‘gained’ from stealing someone else’s property.
To me this was so obvious I was astonished when he refused to see a correlation between the events.
I watched more and more people suffering the effects of ‘karma’ and not even daring to imagine that these events were in any way related to things they had already said, done or even just thought. Nonetheless, the more you awaken to this reality, the more obvious it becomes when it happens to everyone else.
Again, the Law of One term for ‘karma’ is catalyst — and it comes in a sequential process. It starts in the spirit, and if that doesn’t work it spills over into the mind. If that doesn’t work it spills over into the body.
The reason why I’m writing all this is I just went through some very intense ‘body catalyst’ and am sharing the fruits of what I learned.
SPIRITUAL CATALYST
The first level of catalyst is spiritual. The questioner in the Law of One series never examined this very much, but it is clear that a great deal of spiritual catalyst occurs in the form of dream initiations.
Let’s say you have a major problem that has occurred in the past. It could be anything — think of any major problem you’ve been through, or that may be causing you distress even recently.
Though you cannot see it while stuck in linear time, there is a potential that this problem could happen again. Your Higher Self may see that you could be ready to let go of this problem for good.
You will then experience the same problem in a dream. If you successfully deal with it in the dream, i.e. in the ‘spirit,’ then you have signaled to your Higher Self that the problem need not repeat in your physical life. You have now learned the lesson, and you’re free to move to the next level.
EXAMPLE: FORGIVING AN ABUSIVE PARENT WITHIN THE ‘SPIRIT’
As one example, say the problem is that you have not fully forgiven and accepted an abusive parent. You may have a dream where a monstrous character, with exaggerated qualities like those of your parent, is chasing you.
If you have done the work and have forgiven your parent, you may realize the monster in your dream has no power over you. There is no reason to fear as you turn and face the very thing that seems to have been so terrifying and impossible to deal with in the past.
This is a profound healing, as in its fullest form you see the monster as a part of yourself that is in a lot of pain and really doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
You then embrace and forgive this character, which often by now is nothing more than a child, and there is a burst of white light, often ending in you waking up in tears. Congratulations — you’ve just had the ultimate example of processing catalyst in the spirit.
However, if you go through the dream and you keep on running away from the problem, then it’s time for your catalyst to spill over into the mind.
Remember: "In Forgiveness Lies the Stoppage of the Wheel of Karma."
Everything flows from forgiveness. It is the central ingredient that can end all suffering in the manifest world.
The point at which your progress stops can be measured as the point at which your forgiveness stops.
CATALYST OF THE MIND
Catalyst unprocessed by the spirit — i.e. through dreams we have that can be challenging, like running from an attacker and remaining terrified as it repeats over and over again — spill over into the mind. We then become consciously aware there is a problem, and it plagues our mind.
Going back to our example, as just one of many different possibilities, at this point we now attract someone into our lives who is the physical embodiment of the monster chasing us in the dream that we kept running from.
The person we now attract into our lives will have qualities that are quite similar to the abusive parent who first traumatized us. Now we have an opportunity to forgive this person, this projection of our original abuser, and learn to respect ourselves enough not to participate with people who treat us this way.
If we do not deal with catalyst in the mind — i.e. if we are unable to forgive this person in our lives who is offering us the same judgment, unfair treatment, condemnation, scorn and ridicule that we felt as a child, and ultimately direct against ourselves — then this catalyst spills over into the body.
This is where initiation can truly become dangerous, from a physical perspective. Nonetheless, on a higher level we take on and accept this danger because of how important it is that we awaken, or at the very least remain within a state of spiritual balance.
CATALYST OF THE BODY
‘Physical Catalyst’ involves physical damage — either to the body itself, through internal illness or external injury, or to personal property — everything from accidentally dropping that glass or plate you liked all the way up to totaling a car or having your house burn down.
The intended effect of this ‘catalyst’ is the same as spiritual or mental catalyst. It is intended to give you insight, to wake you up, to jar you out of toxic emotions and back into love and forgiveness.
The difference here is that you’re now seeing destructive force unleashed upon your own body or upon the physical things that your body identifies with.
Unfortunately, we have been widely conditioned in movies and the like to not think of body catalyst as karmic in nature. ‘Bad Things’ just happen to people without there being any reason.
We recoil in horror when "Bad Things" happen to children, not realizing that in many cases future incarnations are required to balance karma out that we created in a prior life time.
And let us be clear that we do have a Higher Self, it does have a very real spiritual agenda for us, and if we stray far enough off the path of what we came here to do in this life, it is perfectly willing to end an incarnation and pull us out, hoping to recalibrate our next lifetime so as to generate faster learning and better results.
NO JUDGMENT
If you are already dealing with body catalyst, there is absolutely no reason to judge yourself as having done anything wrong. There is no ‘wrong’ — there is only love and free will, and when you infringe on free will, you will have experiences that can restore you to perfect balance.
Those experiences, in order to be properly processed and utilized, involve forgiving and accepting yourself and others. That’s what everything keeps coming down to. Even in college, long before I’d pieced it all together, I was telling my friend Angelica "Self-acceptance is the bulls-eye" we’re all shooting for on the spiritual path.
Your Higher Self never sees you in any other form than with unimaginable love. Catalyst is precisely measured and never exceeds the exact amount deemed to be useful to nudge you back into love, acceptance and forgiveness. And the more love you create, the more comes back to you… by equally mystical and miraculous processes.
Beings in higher dimensions are not detached and emotionless at all. In fact, they understand us far more than we could ever believe, and have exquisitely intricate sensitivity to every little nuance of the spiritual path that comes our way.
You cannot imagine a being more understanding, more compassionate, and more insightful, as they almost never occur on Earth due to the personality distortions we all face here. Nonetheless, it is to that same level of acceptance and understanding that we are all being pushed.
And with that said, let’s explore my own physical catalyst that I just passed through, as it was quite intense....
Continues at http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=431&Itemid=70
Sunday, March 1, 2009
DMT and the Pineal Gland
Human beings have known of the psychedelic effects of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) millennia before the discovery of the molecule itself. The indigenous people of South and Central America have created various DMT containing snuffs and mixtures, and the more notable ayahuasca brew (Strassman 33).
Ayahuasca combines a DMT containing plant with an enzyme inhibitor which allows the DMT to be taken orally. In contemporary Western culture, extracted crystalline DMT is smoked for a short mystical trip through the veil of time and space.
DMT is no rarity of nature. In fact, it has been found in the bodies of all mammals in which scientists have searched for its presence. DMT is present in an enormous number of plants from every ecosystem. DMT has been found in human urine and blood, and many speculate, based on precursors and enzymes among other reasons, that DMT has an endogenous connection with the brains pineal gland. (Strassman 38)
The pineal gland, or third eye, is an unpaired brain organ shaped like a pine cone. Its location is the direct center of the brain, right above the brow center, or the crown chakra. The spiritual significance of the pineal gland spans throughout world religious tradition, as pointed out in David Wilcock’s ‘The 2012 Enigma’ documentary. As Wilcock points out, even today people of the Hindu faith wear the pottu on their forehead, indicating the pineal gland.
Many speculate the pineal is allowed to excrete DMT based on the theory of resonance. Just as certain sound frequencies can shatter glass, certain “‘sacred’ words, chants, visual images and mental exercise” can generate specific fields, causing the brain to vibrate and pulse at certain frequencies (Strassman 76). The change of consciousness is best illustrated by the “receiver of reality” brain model. Working with this model, Strassman compares the brain to a TV receiver, which can turn to different channels of consciousness, such as those induced by DMT (Strassman 311).
The effects of consumed DMT are remarkable. Joe Rogan articulates a typical DMT experience: “Literally, you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like you feel you’re in another dimension, you’re in another dimension. There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronies order through the air all around you in three dimensional space. It’s like they’re arteries, but there isn’t blood pumping through them, there’s light, pulsating light with no boundaries. And there’s an alien communicating with me who looks sort of like a Tai Buddha, except he’s entirely made of energy and there’s no outline to him. He’s concentrating and telling me not to give into astonishment, relax and try and experience this.”
After inducing and recording 60 clinical DMT sessions, Dr. Rick Strassman breaks the experiences into 3 different, yet overlapping categories. Joe Rogan’s would be considered an “invisible world” session, where users report “freestanding autonomous realities” coexisting with our own, often inhabited by aware and interactive alien beings. “Personal” sessions were psychologically oriented and “yield deeper awareness and acceptance of personal issues.” Lastly are the “transpersonal” sessions, including mystical and near death experiences, which go “beyond the individual’s historical life experience.” (Strassman 55)
Author Graham Hancock hypothesizes that the discovery of psychoactive substances by human beings some 40,000 years ago would have “exploded like incendiary bombs in the dull, somnolent, utilitarian minds of the anatomically modern but behaviorally archaic humans… demolishing rigid mental structures… jumpstarting the intellectual and cultural evolution of our species” (228).
Hancock also notes the statistical evidence that a small percentage, 1-2% of the human population, has the ability to spontaneous fall into trance and mystical states without the aid of “psychoactive plants or the physical methods of trance induction such as rhythmic dancing or drumming” (229). The weight of such experiences would have had little influence on society, just as their medieval and modern counterparts did, fairies and alien abduction phenomenon respectively (Hancock 229). Ergo, although some humans were having such experiences for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, it wasn’t until these experiences went mainstream in the form of ingested and smoked plants that the profound shift in consciousness occurred. It is important to note that these mystical states of consciousness can be achieved by anyone entirely without the aid of psychedelics, through meditation, trance, and other means such as shamanic ecstasy.
Psychedelic substances are among the most natural substances on earth, nearly molecularly identical to our brains natural neural transmitters, and in the case of DMT – endogenous to the human body. Yet, governments around the world criminalize and run propaganda campaigns against these substances, placing shackles on the human mind. Isn’t the exploration of one’s own consciousness an inalienable human right? I believe the study of DMT and other psychedelics will lead to many answers regarding human evolution, consciousness, and life itself. To quote Joe Rogan once more, “Life is a massive fucking mystery, and there’s really only a few different ways to crack below the surface of that mystery, and the best way is psychedelics.”
By c0sm0nautt
Saturday, January 24, 2009
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