The Holographic Universe (42 page)

Life Plans and
Parallel Time Tracks

Like Whitton, NDE
researchers have also uncovered evidence that our lives are planned beforehand,
at least to some extent, and we each play a role in the creation of this plan.
This is apparent in several aspects of the experience. Frequently after
arriving in the world of light, NDEers are told that “it is not their time
yet.” As Ring points out, this remark clearly implies the existence of some
kind of “life plan.” It is also clear that NDEers play a role in the
formulation of these destinies, for they are often given the
choice
whether
to return or stay. There are even instances of NDEers being told that it
is
their time and still being allowed to return. Moody cites a case in which a man
started to cry when he realized he was dead because he was afraid his wife
wouldn't be able to raise their nephew without him. On hearing this the being
told him that since he wasn't asking for himself he would be allowed to return.
In another case a woman argued that she hadn't danced enough yet. Her remark
caused the being of light to give a hearty laugh and she, too, was given
permission to return to physical life.

That our future is at
least partially sketched out is also evident in a phenomenon Ring calls the
“personal flashforward.” On occasion, during the vision of knowledge, NDEers
are shown glimpses of their own future. In one particularly striking case a
child NDEer was told various specifics about his future, including the fact
that he would be married at age twenty-eight and would have two children. He
was even shown his adult self and his future children sitting in a room of the
house he would eventually be living in, and as he gazed at the room he noticed
something very strange on the wall, something that his mind could not grasp.
Decades later and after each of these predictions had come to pass, he found
himself in the very scene he had witnessed as a child and realized that the
strange object on the wall was a “forced-air heater,” a kind of heater that had
not yet been invented at the time of his NDE.

In another equally
astonishing persona! flashforward a female NDEer was shown a photograph of
Moody, told his full name, and told that when the time was right she would tell
him about her experience. The year was 1971 and Moody had not yet published
Life
after Life
, so his name and picture meant nothing to the woman. However,
the time became “right” four years later when Moody and his family unwittingly
moved to the very street on which the woman lived. That Halloween Moody's son
was out trick-or-treating and knocked on the woman's door. After hearing the
boy's name, the woman told him to tell his father she had to talk to him, and
when Moody obliged she related her remarkable story.

Some NDEs even support
Loye's proposal that several holographic parallel universes, or time tracks,
exist. On occasion NDEers are shown personal flashforwards and told that the
future they have witnessed will come to pass
only if they continue on their
current path.
In one unique instance an NDEer was shown a completely
different history of the earth, a history that would have developed if “certain
events” had not taken place around the time of the Greek philosopher and
mathematician Pythagoras three thousand years ago. The vision revealed that if
these events, the precise nature of which the woman does not disclose, had
failed to take place, we would now be living in a world of peace and harmony
marked “by the absence of religious wars and of a Christ figure.” Such
experiences suggest that the laws of time and space operative in a holographic
universe may be very strange indeed.

Even NDEers who do not
experience direct evidence of the role they play in their own destiny often
come back with a firm understanding of the holographic interconnectedness of
all things. As a sixty-two-year-old businessman who had an NDE during a cardiac
arrest puts it, “One thing I learned was that we are all part of one big,
living universe. If we think we can hurt another person or another living thing
without hurting ourselves we are sadly mistaken. I look at a forest or a flower
or a bird now, and say, “That is me, part of me.’ We are connected with all
things and if we send love along those connections, then we are happy.”

You Can Eat but
You Don't Have To

The holographic and
mind-created aspects of the near-death dimension are apparent in myriad other
ways. In describing the hereafter one child said that food appeared whenever
she wished for it, but there was no need to eat, an observation that
underscores once again the illusory and hologramlike nature of afterlife
reality. Even the symbolic language of the psyche is given “objective” form.
For example, one of Whitton's subjects said that when he was introduced to a
woman who was going to figure prominently in his next life, instead of
appearing as a human she appeared as a shape that was half-rose, half-cobra.
After being directed to figure out the meaning of the symbolism, he realized
that he and the woman had been in love with one another in two other lifetimes.
However, she had also twice been responsible for his death. Thus, instead of
manifesting as a human, the loving and sinister elements of her character
caused her to appear in a hologramlike form that better symbolized these two
dramatically polar qualities.

Whitton's subject is not
alone in his experience. Hazrat Inayat Khan said that when he entered a
mystical state and traveled to “divine realities,” the beings he encountered
also occasionally appeared in half-human, half-animal forms. Like Whitton's
subject, Khan discerned that these transfigurations were symbolic, and when a
being appeared as part animal it was because the animal symbolized some quality
the being possessed. For example, a being that had great strength might appear
with the head of a lion, or a being that was unusually smart and crafty might
have some of the features of a fox. Khan theorized that this is why ancient
cultures, such as the Egyptian, pictured the gods that rule the afterlife realm
as having animal heads.

The propensity
near-death reality has for molding itself into hologramlike shapes that mirror
the thoughts, desires, and symbols that populate our minds explains why
Westerners tend to perceive the beings of light as Christian religious figures,
why Indians perceive them as Hindu saints and deities, and so on. The
plasticity of the ND realm suggests that such outward appearances may be no
more or less real than the food wished into existence by the little girl
mentioned above, the woman who appeared as an amalgam of a cobra and a rose,
and the spectral clothing conjured into existence by the NDEer who was
embarrassed at his own nakedness. This same plasticity explains the other
cultural differences one finds in near-death experiences, such as why some
NDEers reach the hereafter by traveling through a tunnel, some by crossing a
bridge, some by going over a body of water, and some simply by walking down a
road. Again it appears that in a reality created solely out of interacting
thought structures, even the landscape itself is sculpted by the ideas and
expectations of the experiencer.

At this juncture an
important point needs to be made. As startling and foreign as the near-death
realm seems, the evidence presented in this book reveals that our own level of
existence may not be all that different. As we have seen, we too can access all
information, it is just a little more difficult for us. We too can occasionally
have personal flashforwards and come face-to-face with the phantasmal nature of
time and space. And we too can sculpt and reshape our bodies, and sometimes
even our reality, according to our beliefs, it just takes us a little more time
and effort. Indeed, Sai Baba's abilities suggest that we can even materialize
food simply by wishing for it, and Therese Neumann's inedia offers evidence
that eating may ultimately be as unnecessary for us as it is for individuals in
the near-death realm.

In fact, it appears that
this reality and the next are different in degree, but not in kind. Both are
hologramlike constructs, realities that are established, as Jahn and Dunne put
it, only by the interaction of consciousness with its environment. Put another
way, our reality appears to be a more frozen version of the afterlife
dimension. It takes a little more time for our beliefs to resculpt our bodies
into things like nail-like stigmata and for the symbolic language of our
psyches to manifest externally as synchronicities. But manifest they do, in a
slow and inexorable river, a river whose persistent presence teaches us that we
live in a universe we are only just beginning to understand.

Information
about the Near-Death Realm from Other Sources

One does not have to be
in a life-threatening crisis to visit the afterlife dimension. There is
evidence that the ND realm can also be reached during OBEs. In his writings,
Monroe describes several visits to levels of reality in which he encountered
deceased friends. An even more skilled out-of-body visitor to the land of the
dead was Swedish mystic Swedenborg. Born in 1688, Swedenborg was the Leonardo
da Vinci of his era. In his early years he studied science. He was the leading
mathematician in Sweden, spoke nine languages, was an engraver, a politician,
an astronomer, and a businessman, built watches and microscopes as a hobby,
wrote books on metallurgy, color theory, commerce, economics, physics,
chemistry, mining, and anatomy, and invented prototypes for the airplane and
the submarine.

Throughout all of this
he also meditated regularly, and when he reached middle age, developed the
ability to enter deep trances during which he left his body and visited what
appeared to him to be heaven and conversed with “angels” and “spirits.” That
Swedenborg was experiencing something profound during these journeys, there can
be no doubt. He became so famous for this ability that the queen of Sweden
asked him to find out why her deceased brother had neglected to respond to a
letter she had sent him before his death. Swedenborg promised to consult the
deceased and the next day returned with a message which the queen confessed
contained information only she and her dead brother knew. Swedenborg performed
this service several times for various individuals who sought his help, and on
another occasion told a widow where to find a secret compartment in her
deceased husband's desk in which she found some desperately needed documents.
So well known was this latter incident that it inspired the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant to write an entire book on Swedenborg entitled
Dreams of a
Spirit-Seer.

But the most amazing
thing about Swedenborg's accounts of the afterlife realm is how closely they mirror
the descriptions offered by modern-day NDEers. For example, Swedenborg talks
about passing through a dark tunnel, being met by welcoming spirits, landscapes
more beautiful than any on earth and one where time and space no longer exist,
a dazzling light that emitted a feeling of love, appearing before beings of
light, and being enveloped by an all-encompassing peace and serenity. He also
says that he was allowed to observe firsthand the arrival of the newly deceased
in heaven, and watch as they were subjected to the life review, a process he
called “the opening of the Book of Lives.” He acknowledged that during the
process a person witnessed “everything they had ever been or done,” but added a
unique twist According to Swedenborg, the information that arose during the
opening of the Book of Lives was recorded in the nervous system of the person's
spiritual body. Thus, in order to evoke the life review an “angel” had to
examine the individual's entire body “beginning with the fingers of each hand,
and proceeding through the whole.”

Swedenborg also refers
to the holographic thought balls the angels use to communicate and says that
they are no different from the portrayals he could see in the “wave-substance”
that surrounded a person. Like most NDEers he describes these telepathic bursts
of knowledge as a picture language so dense with information that each image
contains a thousand ideas. A communicated series of these portrayals can also
be quite lengthy and “last up to several hours, in such a sequential arrangement
that one can only marvel.”

But even here Swedenborg
added a fascinating twist In addition to using portrayals, angels also employ a
speech that contains concepts that are beyond human understanding. In fact, the
main reason they use portrayals is because it is the only way they can make
even a pale version of their thoughts and ideas comprehensible to human beings.

Swedenborg's experiences
even corroborate some of the less commonly reported elements of the NDE. He
noted that in the spirit world one no longer needs to eat food, but added that
information takes its place as a source of nourishment. He said that when
spirits and angels talked, their thoughts were constantly coalescing into
three-dimensional symbolic images, especially animals. For example, he said
that when angels talked about love and affection “beautiful animals are
presented, such as lambs. . . . When however the angels are talking about evil
affections, this is portrayed by hideous, fierce, and useless animals, like
tigers, bears, wolves, scorpions, snakes, and mice.” Although it is not a
feature reported by modern NDEers, Swedenborg said that he was astonished to
find that in heaven there are also spirits from other planets, an astounding
assertion for a man who was born over three hundred years ago!

Most intriguing of all
are those remarks by Swedenborg that seem to refer to reality's holographic
qualities. For instance, he said that although human beings appear to be
separate from one another, we are all connected in a cosmic unity. Moreover,
each of us is a heaven in miniature, and every person, indeed the entire
physical universe, is a microcosm of the greater divine reality. As we have
seen, he also believed that underlying visible reality was a wave-substance.