The Holographic Universe (40 page)

Most staggering of all
are those NDEs and deathbed visions involving two or more individuals. In one
case, as a female NDEer found herself moving through the tunnel and approaching
the realm of light, she saw a friend of hers coming back! As they passed, the
friend telepathically communicated to her that he had died, but was being “sent
back.” The woman, too, was eventually “sent back” and after she recovered she
discovered that her friend had suffered a cardiac arrest at approximately the
same time of her own experience.

There are numerous other
cases on record in which dying individuals knew who was waiting for them in the
world beyond before news of the person's death arrived through normal channels.

And if there is still
any doubt, yet another argument against the idea that NDEs are hallucinations
is their occurrence in patients who have fiat EEGs. Under normal circumstances
whenever a person talks, thinks, imagines, dreams, or does just about anything
else, their EEG registers an enormous amount of activity. Even hallucinations
measure on the EEG. But there are many cases in which people with flat EEGs
have had NDEs. Had their NDEs been simple hallucinations, they would have
registered on their EEGs.

In brief, when all these
facts are considered together—the widespread nature of the NDE, the absence of
demographic characteristics, the universality of the core experience, the
ability of NDEers to see and know things they have no normal sensory means of
seeing and knowing, and the occurrence of NDEs in patients who have flat
EEGs—the conclusion seems inescapable: People who have NDEs are not suffering
from hallucinations or delusional fantasies,
but are actually making visits
to an entirely different level of reality.

This is also the
conclusion reached by many NDE researchers. One such researcher is Dr. Melvin
Morse, a pediatrician in Seattle, Washington. Morse first became interested in
NDEs after treating a seven-year-old drowning victim. By the time the little
girl was resuscitated she was profoundly comatose, had fixed and dilated
pupils, no muscle reflexes, and no corneal response. In medical terms this gave
her a Glascow Coma Score of three, indicating that she was in a coma so deep
she had almost no chance of ever recovering. Despite these odds, she made a
full recovery and when Morse looked in on her for the first time after she
regained consciousness she recognized him and said that she had watched him
working on her comatose body. When Morse questioned her further she explained
that she had left her body and passed through a tunnel into heaven where she
had met “the Heavenly Father.” The Heavenly Father told her she was not really
meant to be there yet and asked if she wanted to stay or go back. At first she
said she wanted to stay, but when the Heavenly Father pointed out that that
decision meant she would not be seeing her mother again, she changed her mind
and returned to her body.

Morse was skeptical but
fascinated and from that point on set out to learn everything he could about
NDEs. At the time, he worked for an air transport service in Idaho that carried
patients to the hospital, and this afforded him the opportunity to talk with
scores of resuscitated children. Over a ten-year period he interviewed every
child survivor of cardiac arrest at the hospital, and over and over they told
him the same thing. After going unconscious they found themselves outside their
bodies, watched the doctors working on them, passed through a tunnel, and were
comforted by luminous beings.

Morse continued to be
skeptical, and in his increasingly desperate search for some logical
explanation he read everything he could find on the side effects of the drugs
his patients were taking, and explored various psychological explanations, but
nothing seemed to fit. “Then one day I read a long article in a medical journal
that tried to explain NDEs as being various tricks of the brain,” says Morse.
“By then I had studied NDEs extensively and none of the explanations that this
researcher listed made sense. It was finally clear to me that he had missed the
most obvious explanation of all—NDEs are real. He had missed the possibility
that the soul really does travel.”

Moody echoes the
sentiment and says that twenty years of research have convinced him that NDEers
have indeed ventured into another level of reality. He believes that most other
NDE researchers feel the same. “I have talked to almost every NDE researcher in
the world about his or her work. I know that most of them believe in their
hearts that NDEs are a glimpse of life after life. But as scientists and people
of medicine, they still haven't come up with ‘scientific proof’ that a part of
us goes on living after our physical being is dead. This lack of proof keeps
them from going public with their true feelings.”

As a result of his 1981
survey, even George Gallup, Jr., the president of the Gallup Poll, agrees: “A
growing number of researchers have been gathering and evaluating the accounts
of those who have had strange near-death encounters. And the preliminary
results have been highly suggestive of some sort of encounter with an
extradimensional realm of reality. Our own extensive survey is the latest in
these studies and is also uncovering some trends that point toward a super
parallel universe of some sort.”

A Holographic
Explanation of the Near-Death Experience

These are astounding
assertions. What is even more astounding is that the scientific establishment
has for the most part ignored both the conclusions of these researchers and the
vast body of evidence that compels them to make such statements. The reasons
for this are complex and varied. One is that it is currently not fashionable in
science to consider seriously any phenomenon that seems to support the idea of a
spiritual reality, and, as mentioned at the beginning of this book, beliefs are
like addictions and do not surrender their grip easily. Another reason, as
Moody mentions, is the widespread prejudice among scientists that the only
ideas that have any value or significance are those that can be proven in a
strict scientific sense. Yet another is the inability of our current scientific
understanding of reality even to begin to explain NDEs if they are real.

This last reason,
however, may not be the problem it seems. Several NDE researchers have pointed
out that the holographic model offers us a way to understand these experiences.
One such researcher is Dr. Kenneth Ring, a professor of psychology at the
University of Connecticut and one of the first NDE researchers to use
statistical analysis and standardized interviewing techniques to study the
phenomenon. In his 1980 book
Life at Death
, Ring spends considerable
time arguing in favor of a holographic explanation of the NDE. Put bluntly,
Ring believes that NDEs are also ventures into the more frequencylike aspects
of reality.

Ring bases his
conclusion on the numerous suggestively holographic aspects of the NDE. One is
the tendency of experiences to describe the world beyond as a realm composed of
“light,” “higher vibrations,” or “frequencies.” Some NDEers even refer to the
celestial music that often accompanies such experiences as more “a combination
of vibrations” than actual sounds—observations that Ring believes are evidence
that the act of dying involves a shift of consciousness away from the ordinary
world of appearances and into a more holographic reality of pure frequency.
NDEers also frequently say that the realm is suffused with a light more
brilliant than any they have ever seen on earth, but one that, despite its
unfathomable intensity, does not hurt the eyes, characterizations that Ring
feels are further evidence of the frequency aspects of the hereafter.

Another feature Ring
finds undeniably holographic is NDEers’ descriptions of time and space in the afterlife
realm. One of the most commonly reported characteristics of the world beyond is
that it is a dimension in which time and space cease to exist. “I found myself
in a space, in a period of time, I would say, where all space and time was
negated,” says one NDEer clumsily. “It
has
to be out of time and space.
It
must
be, because ... it can't be put
into
a time thing,” says
another. Given that time and space are collapsed and location has no meaning in
the frequency domain, this is precisely what we would expect to find if NDEs
take place in a holographic state of consciousness, says Ring.

If the near-death realm
is even more frequencylike than our own level of reality, why does it appear to
have any structure at all? Given that both OBEs and NDEs offer ample evidence
that the mind can exist independently of the brain, Ring believes it is not too
farfetched to assume that it, too, functions holographically. Thus, when the
mind is in the “higher” frequencies of the near-death dimension, it continues
to do what it does best, translate those frequencies into a world of
appearances. Or as Ring puts it, “I believe that this is a realm that is
created by
interacting thought structures.
These structures or
‘thought-forms’ combine to form patterns, just as interference waves form
patterns on a holographic plate. And just as the holographic image appears to
be fully real when illuminated by a laser beam, so the images produced by
interacting thought-forms appear to be real.”

Ring is not alone in his
speculations. In the keynote address for the 1989 meeting of the International
Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), Dr. Elizabeth W. Fenske, a clinical
psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia, announced that she, too,
believes that NDEs are journeys into a holographic realm of higher frequencies.
She agrees with Ring's hypothesis that the landscapes, flowers, physical
structures, and so forth, of the afterlife dimension are fashioned out of
interacting (or interfering) thought patterns. “I think we've come to the point
in NDE research where it's difficult to make a distinction between thought and
light In the near-death experience thought seems to be light,” she observes.

Heaven as
Hologram

In addition to those
mentioned by Ring and Fenske, the NDE has numerous other features that are
markedly holographic. Like OBEers, after NDEers have detached from the physical
they find themselves in one of two forms, either as a disembodied cloud of
energy, or as a hologramlike body sculpted by thought When the latter is the
case, the mind-created nature of the body is often surprisingly obvious to the
NDEer. For example, one near-death survivor says that when he first emerged
from his body he looked “something like a jellyfish” and fell lightly to the
floor like a soap bubble. Then he quickly expanded into a ghostly
three-dimensional image of a naked man. However, the presence of two women in
the room embarrassed him and to his surprise, this feeling caused him suddenly
to become clothed (the women, however, never offered any indication that they
were able to see any of this).

That our innermost
feelings and desires are responsible for creating the form we assume in the
afterlife dimension is evident in the experiences of other NDEers. People who
are confined in wheelchairs in their physical existence find themselves in
healthy bodies that can run and dance. Amputees invariably have their limbs
back. The elderly often inhabit youthful bodies, and even stranger, children
frequently see themselves as adults, a fact that may reflect every child's
fantasy to be a grown-up, or more profoundly, may be a symbolic indication that
in our souls some of us are much older than we realize.

These hologramlike
bodies can be remarkably detailed. In the incident involving the man who became
embarrassed at his own nakedness, for example, the clothing he materialized for
himself was so meticulously wrought that he could even make out the seams in
the material! Similarly, another man who studied his hands while in the ND
state said they were “composed of light with tiny structures in them” and when
he looked closely he could even see “the delicate whorls of his fingerprints
and tubes of light up his arms.”

Some of Whitton's
research is also relevant to this issue. Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized
patients and regressed them to the between-life state, they too reported all
the classic features of the NDE, passage through a tunnel, encounters with
deceased relatives and/or “guides,” entrance into a splendorous light-filled
realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with luminous
beings, and a life review. In fact, according to Whitton's subjects the main
purpose of the lite review was to refresh their memories so they could more
mindfully plan their next life, a process in which the beings of light gently
ana noncoercively assisted.

Like Ring, after
studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton concluded that the shapes and
structures one perceives in the afterlife dimension are thought-forms created
by the mind. “Rene Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,’ is
never more pertinent than in the between-life state,” says Whitton. “There is
no experience of existence without thought.”

This was especially true
when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state.
Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. “One man
described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an
endless cloud, undifferentiated,” he observes. “But as soon as he started to
think, he became himself” (a state of affairs that is oddly reminiscent of the
subjects in Tart's mutual hypnosis experiment who discovered they didn't have
hands unless they
thought
them into existence). At first the bodies
Whitton's subjects assumed resembled the persons they had been in their last
life. But as their experience in the between-life state continued, they
gradually became a kind of hologramlike composite of all of their past lives.
This composite identity even had a name separate from any of the names they had
used in their physical incarnations, although none of his subjects was able to
pronounce it using their physical vocal cords.