The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot

January 10, 2009

This is a book recommended to me by Vern Woolf. What is alive for me is the general notion that the world and reality is not what it seems. This is something I've felt deeply for much of my life. It has led me into many significant paths, including spiritual journeys, and a life of much curiosity. It is a book grounded in science, yet readable for the non-scientist. It is a mind-shifting read, for me, to include deep wonderings (disturbing and compelling) about what is really real.

The book is available here.

A few general ideas that have my attention:

- The universe itself is a kind of giant hologram...projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.
- The holographic model helps to make sense of a wide range of phenomena including telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness, psychokinesis. It also offers alternative explanation about the vastness of memory, recall and forgetting ability, associative memory, photographic memory, and transference of learned skills
- Since Western science has devoted several centuries to not believing in the paranormal, it is not going to surrender its additiction lightly.

A quote that in intriguing:

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." T. H. Huxley

A story:

Early studies by Pribram were about where memories are stored in the brain. Research in the 30s and 40s indicated memories were stored in specific areas of the brain. However, later research contradicted this. Rats trained to find their way through a maze had parts of their brains removed, even drastic and varied sections, but could still find their way through the maze. The conclusion was that memory was distributed throughout the brain. The implication is that the whole is contained in all of the parts, or is available in all of the parts.

Questions:

If holographic films are created by the interference, the intersection of several frequencies, what does this mean for social technologies? I suspect that as we create formats for interaction, for our individual frequencies to show up in general or around specific issues, the whole of the experience becomes available in any of the participants. This has so many implications for sustainable change in large systems that I am just beginning to find words for. Worth noting that "interference" in this is a good thing. It creates the holograph.

In short:

Wow! What a helpful way to see into more of the whole of experience. My intuition tells me this is spot on. A holographic description helps me to have a bit of an anchor in the letting go of the known. A kind of meta framing for a very different world, much different than what I have told myself that it is. And encouragement to continue to see and feel and work with the resonance of people, groups, ideas, places, times.