The Holographic Universe (43 page)

In fact, several Swedenborg
scholars have commented on the many-parallels between some of Swedenborg's
concepts and Bohm and Pribram's theory. One such scholar is Dr. George F. Dole,
a professor of theology at the Swedenborg School of Religion in Newton,
Massachusetts. Dole, who holds degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, notes
that one of the most basic tenets of Swedenborg's thinking is that our universe
is constantly created and sustained by two wavelike flows, one from heaven and
one coming from our own soul or spirit. “If we put these images together, the
resemblance to the hologram is striking,” says Dole. “We are constituted by the
intersection of two flows—one direct from the divine, and one indirect, from
the divine via our environment. We can view ourselves as interference patterns,
because the inflow is a wave phenomenon, and we are where the waves meet.”

Swedenborg also believed
that, despite its ghostlike and ephemeral qualities, heaven is actually a more
fundamental level of reality than our own physical world. It is, he said, the
archetypal source from which all earthly forms originate, and to which all
forms return, a concept not too dissimilar from Bohm's idea of the implicate
and explicate orders. In addition, he too believed that the afterlife realm and
physical reality are different in degree but not in kind, and that the material
world is just a frozen version of the thought-built reality of heaven. The
matter that comprises both heaven and earth “flows in by stages” from the
Divine, said Swedenborg, and “at each new stage it becomes more general and
therefore coarser and hazier, and it becomes slower, and therefore more viscous
and colder.”

Swedenborg filled almost
twenty volumes with his experiences, and on his deathbed was asked if there was
anything he wanted to recant. He earnestly replied: “Everything that I have
written is as true as you now behold me. I might have said much more had it
been permitted to me. After death you will see all, and then we shall have much
to say to each other on the subject.”

The Land of
Nonwhere

Swedenborg is not the
only individual in history who possessed the ability to make out-of-body
journeys to the subtler levels of reality. The twelfth-century Persian Sufis
also employed deep trancelike meditation to visit the “land where spirits
dwell.” And again, the parallels between their reports and the body of evidence
that has accrued in this chapter are striking. They claimed that in this other
realm one possesses a “subtle body” and relies on senses that are not always
associated with “specific organs” in that body. They asserted that it is a
dimension populated by many spiritual teachers, or imams, and sometimes called
it “the country of the hidden Imam.”

They held that it is a
world created solely out of the subtle matter of
alam almithal
, or
thought. Even space itself, including “nearness,” “distances,” and “far-off”
places, was created by thought. But this did not mean that the country of the
hidden Imam was unreal, a world constituted out of sheer nothingness. Nor was
it a landscape created by only one mind. Rather it was a plane of existence
created
by the imagination of many people
, and yet one that still had its own
corporeality and dimension, its own forests, mountains, and even cities. The
Sufis devoted a good deal of their writings to the clarification of this point.
So alien is this idea to many Western thinkers that the late Henry Corbin, a
professor of Islamic Religion at the Sorbonne in Paris and a leading authority
in Iranian-Islamic thought, coined the term
imaginal
to describe it,
meaning a world that is created by imagination but is ontologically no less
real than physical reality. “The reason I absolutely had to find another
expression was that, for a good many years, my profession required me to
interpret Arabic and Persian texts, whose meaning I would undoubtedly have
betrayed had I simply contented myself with the term
imaginary,”
stated
Corbin.

Because of the imaginal
nature of the afterlife realm, the Sufis concluded that
imagination itself
is a faculty of perception
, an idea that offers new light on why Whitton's
subject materialized a hand only after he started thinking, and why visualizing
images has such a potent effect on the health and physical structure of our
bodies. It also contributed to the Sufis’ belief that one could use
visualization, a process they called “creative prayer,” to alter and reshape
the very fabric of one's destiny.

In a notion that
parallels Bohm's implicate and explicate orders, the Sufis believed that,
despite its phantasmal qualities, the afterlife realm is the generative matrix
that gives birth to the entire physical universe. All things in physical
reality arise from this spiritual reality, said the Sufis. However, even the
most learned among them found this strange, that by meditating and venturing
deep into the psyche one arrived in an inner world that “turns out to envelop,
surround, or contain that which at first was outer and visible.”

This realization is, of
course, just another reference to the nonlocal and holographic qualities of
reality. Each of us contains the whole of heaven. More than that, each of us
contains the location of heaven. Or as the Sufis put it, instead of having to
search for spiritual reality “in the where,” the “where” is
in
us.
Indeed, in discussing the nonlocal aspects of the afterlife realm, a
twelfth-century Persian mystic named Sohrawardi said that the country of the
hidden Imam might better be called
Na-Koja-Abad
, “the land of nonwhere.”

Admittedly this idea is
not new. It is the same sentiment expressed in the statement “the kingdom of
heaven is within.” What
is
new is the idea that such notions are
actually references to the nonlocal aspects of the subtler levels of reality.
Again, it is suggested that when a person has an OBE they might not actually
travel anywhere. They might be merely altering the always illusory hologram of
reality so that they have the experience of traveling somewhere. In a
holographic universe not only is consciousness already everywhere, it too is
nonwhere.

The idea that the
afterlife realm lies deep in the nonlocal expanse of the psyche has been
alluded to by some NDEers. As one seven-year-old boy put it, “Death is like
walking into your mind.” Bohm offers a similarly nonlocal view of what happens
during our transition from this life to the next: “At the present, our whole
thought process is telling us that we have to keep our attention here. You
can't cross the street, for example, if you don't. But consciousness is always
in the unlimited depth which is beyond space and time, in the subtler levels of
the implicate order. Therefore, if you went deeply enough into the actual
present, then maybe there's no difference between this moment and the next. The
idea would be that in the death experience you would get into that. Contact
with eternity is in the present moment, but it is mediated by thought. It is a
matter of attention.”

Intelligent and
Coordinated Images of Light

The idea that the
subtler levels of reality can be accessed through a shift in consciousness
alone is also one of the main premises of the yogic tradition. Many yogic
practices are designed specifically to teach individuals how to make such
journeys. And once again, the individuals who succeed in these ventures
describe what is by now a familiar landscape. One such individual was Sri
Yukteswar Giri, a little known but widely respected Hindu holy man who died in
Puri, India, in 1936. Evans-Wentz, who met Sri Yukteswar in the 1920s,
described him as a man of “pleasing presence and high character” fully “worthy of
the veneration that his followers accorded him.”

Sri Yukteswar appears to
have been especially gifted at passing back and forth between this world and
the next and described the afterlife dimension as a world composed of “various
subtle vibrations of light and color” and “hundreds of times larger than the
material cosmos.” He also said that it was infinitely more beautiful than our
own realm of existence, and abounded with “opal lakes, bright seas, and rainbow
rivers.” Because it is more “vibrant with God's creative light” its weather is
always pleasant, and its only climatic manifestations are occasional falls of
“luminous white snow and rain of many-colored lights.”

Individuals who live in
this wondrous realm can materialize any body they want and can “see” with any
area of their body they wish. They can also materialize any fruit or other food
they desire, although they “are almost freed from any necessity of eating” and
“feast only on the ambrosia of eternally new knowledge.”

They communicate through
a telepathic series of “light pictures,” rejoice at “the immortality of
friendship,” realize “the indestructibility of love,” feel keen pain “if any
mistake is made in conduct or perception of truth,” and when they are
confronted with the multitude of relatives, fathers, mothers, wives, husbands,
and friends acquired during their “different incarnations on earth,” they are
at a loss as to whom to love especially and thus learn to give “a divine and
equal love to all.”

What is the
quintessential nature of our reality once we take up residence in this luminous
land? To this question, Sri Yukteswar gave an answer that was as simple as it
was holographic. In this realm where eating and even breathing are unnecessary,
where a single thought can materialize a “whole garden of fragrant flowers,”
and all bodily injuries are “healed at once by mere willing,” we are, quite
simply, “intelligent and coordinated images of light.”

More References
to Light

Sri Yukteswar is not the
only yogic teacher to use such hologramlike terms when describing the subtler
levels of reality. Another is Sri Aurobindo Ghose, a thinker, political
activist, and mystic whom Indians revere alongside Gandhi. Born in 1872 to an
upper-class Indian family, Sri Aurobindo was educated in England, where he
quickly developed the reputation as a kind of prodigy. He was fluent not only
in English, Hindi, Russian, German, and French, but also in ancient Sanskrit.
He could read a case of books a day (as a youth he read all of the many and
voluminous sacred books of India) and repeat verbatim every word on every page
that he read. His powers of concentration were legendary, and it was said that
he could sit studying in the same posture all night long, oblivious even to the
incessant bites of the mosquitoes.

Like Gandhi, Sri
Aurobindo was active in the nationalist movement in India and spent time in
prison for sedition. However, despite all his intellectual and humanitarian
passion, he remained an atheist until one day when he saw a wandering yogi
instantaneously heal his brother of a life-threatening illness. From that point
on Sri Aurobindo devoted his life to the yogic disciplines and, like Sri
Yukteswar, through meditation he eventually learned to become, in his own
words, “an explorer of the planes of consciousness.”

It was not an easy task
for Sri Aurobindo, and one of the most intractable obstacles he had to overcome
to accomplish his goal was to learn how to silence the endless chatter of words
and thoughts that flow unceasingly through the normal human mind. Anyone who
has ever tried to empty his or her mind of
all
thought for even a moment
or two knows how daunting an undertaking this is. But it is also a necessary
one, for the yogic texts are quite explicit on this point. To plumb the subtler
and more implicate regions of the psyche does indeed require a Bohmian shift of
attention. Or as Sri Aurobindo put it, to discover the “new country within us”
we must first learn how “to leave the old one behind.”

It took Sri Aurobindo
years to learn how to silence his mind and travel inward, but once he succeeded
he discovered the same vast territory encountered by all of the other Marco
Polos of the spirit that we have looked at—a realm beyond space and time,
composed of a “multicolored infinity of vibrations” and peopled by nonphysical
beings so far in advance of human consciousness that they make us look like
children. These beings can take on any form at will, said Sri Aurobindo, the
same being appearing to a Christian as a Christian saint and to an Indian as a
Hindu one, although he stressed that their purpose is not to deceive, but
merely to make themselves more accessible “to a particular consciousness.”

According to Sri
Aurobindo, in their truest form these beings appear as “pure vibration.” In his
two-volume work,
On Yoga
, he even likens their ability to appear as
either a form or a vibration, to the wave-particle duality discovered by
“modern science.” Sri Aurobindo also noted that in this luminous realm one is
no longer restricted to taking in information in a “point-by-point” manner, but
can absorb it “in great masses,” and in a single glance perceive “large
extensions of space and time.”

In fact, quite a number
of Sri Aurobindo's assertions are indistinguishable from many of Bohm's and
Pribram's conclusions. He said that most human beings possess a “mental screen”
that keeps us from seeing beyond “the veil of matter,” but when one learns to
peer beyond this veil one finds that everything is comprised of “different
intensities of luminous vibrations.” He asserted that consciousness is also
composed of different vibrations and believed that all matter is to some degree
conscious. Like Bohm, he even asserted that psychokinesis is a direct result of
the fact that all matter is to some degree conscious. If matter were not
conscious, no yogi could move an object with his mind because there would be no
possibility of contact between the yogi and the object, Sri Aurobindo says.