XBK Chat (unofficial archive) A former meeting place for past members of Brahma Kumaris    FAQ   Search   Memberlist   Usergroups   Profile   You have no new messages   Log out   UFOs Goto page 1, 2  Next          XBK Chat Forum Index -> Any and Everything View previous topic :: View next topic   Author Message Atma Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 98 Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 9:02 pm    Post subject: UFOs There is no doubt in my mind that we are not alone in the universe. Reports of UFOs, crop circles and abductions are worldwide. They cut across cultures. Even in India, these things are being seen and reported. It seems that even the word "universe" is inadequate to describe the totality of reality. "Multiverse" is more apt, since we are faced with the distinct possibility of intelligent life existing in different dimensions. This may be one of the reasons UFOs suddenly "blink out".....as if they are going in and out of our physical dimension. The modern day "string theory" school of physics also supports the multiverse possibility. Another explanation for UFOs 'blinking out' is that they have first class shielding technology which can render them invisible to the human eye, if those who control them so wish. Interestingly, even Shiv Baba has said in a murli (which I read with my own eyes): "Many people see flying saucers". Note it well: Not "many people believe they see", or "hallucinate and see", or "think they see". "Many people see flying saucers". In other words, these things are real. But what are they, where do they come from, who controls them and what is their purpose for visiting the earth? Recently, the Mexican army released photos of several "invisible" UFOs surrounding a plane. They were detected by the use of infra red cameras. Do you know that Brahma Baba used to refer to a senior brother as "flying saucer"? That brother is Dada Brij Mohan, Editor of the BK publication "Purity". So, even in the BK movement, there is an awareness of this phenomena in certain circles. But people don't talk about it. The great yogi Paramahansa Yogananda said in his autobiography that there are many many inhabited planets, in the physical universe and also in other dimensions. As it was said in the movie "Contact" (starring Jodie Foster) if we (man) are alone in the universe "its an awful waste of space." Here is the URL for an Indian website on the subject of UFOs: http://www.ufoindia.org/ And what are your thoughts on this subject? kyra Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 66 Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 10:06 pm    Post subject: there are definetly other things out there in space! bkry Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 113 Location: Malaysia Posted: Wed May 26, 2004 7:18 am    Post subject: Sometimes when we see something that had happened in the past or the future, it will look like as if it was really happening at that time. For example, when I was a little girl, I was quietly sitting and contemplating on something when I saw a scene happening before me. Then, a weird thing happened, the very same scene repeated again. I began questioning my corporeal family members who were involved in the scene and it turned out that they had only done it at that moment of time (during the second time). I began to analyse the first scene and began to realise that it must be a scene of something that was about to happen. It can be said to be a vision because even though I, the soul, have moved forward in time and witnesses it, the corporeal body is still in the same old world. Similarly, the UFOs which people had been seeing may have been a scene of the past or the future. Sometimes, the vision can just consist of one's memory of what they are seeing in respect of the flying saucer and not all the rest of the corporeal surroundings. Such a thing can happen when seeing the flying aircraft had left a great impact on the soul. The surrounding had not left a great impact but the flying saucer had. So the vision of the flying saucer is seen while one is in the current surroundings. _________________ God's angel. BK Pari Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 7:53 am    Post subject: indeed bkry, it's a holographic universe but most notions about ufo's are wrong anyway and can be explained easily - certainly in countries like india where people are mostly uneducated about natural phenomena Atma Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 98 Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:20 am    Post subject: Get with the program bro. UFOs are real. Some may be non physical, or interdimensional, but they are real. Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:49 am    Post subject: hehe, talk about founded claims ... there is not one shred of evidence in your post. I did do my homework. Firstly, if you were to see this from the point of view of a holographic universe, there is no distinction between 'real' or not - it's irrelevant. Secondly, I do think that some sightings are holographic remnants. Only, there origin is not alien IMO (for several reasons) and it is likely to be government related ... (btw, you talk about string theory, something that is hardly understood by anyone, in fact, there is no one out there who claims to grasp the meaning of it all ... what's more, it's still theoritical abstract maths that has yet to proof itself physically ) Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:51 am    Post subject: *edit* (why is there no edit option anyway?) i mistyped a sentence: "Secondly, I do think that NOT ALL sightings are holographic remnants" Atma Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 98 Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 10:06 am    Post subject: Read Timothy Good's book "Above top secret"....then come back and tell me that there is no eveidence. Use "preview"...then you won't need to edit. Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 10:38 am    Post subject: you have to read what I say you tell me "to get with the program" without offering any evidence whatsoever (only general stuff that everyone has heard of) then you jump to conclusions about brahma baba and "inner circles" then you direct me to a book ... that's just not right (my point not being that there is no evidence, but that your post is unfounded.) btw, one little sentence taken from a murli without any context ... I could easily intepret it as 'people are crazy, they see anything' (now, don't start attacking me on this, I'm just drawing your attention on this with an example ) Atma Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 98 Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:21 am    Post subject: Kevin wrote: btw, one little sentence taken from a murli without any context Kevin my friend, be assured that I am not attacking you. My post was stated as opinion. It was not freighted with the need to provide reams of "evidence". The quote from the murli may be a sentence but it is very clear and unambiguous. As for Brahma Baba, he said what he said. The words he used were "flying saucer"....same as Shiv Baba. No room for interpretation there. Can you "prove" the holographic universe? At some point, after reveiwing the data, we have to got with our gut instincts. Anyway, glad to see that you don't rule out that the evidence may be there. A mind is like an umbrella. It works best when it is open Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:53 am    Post subject: Quote: My post was stated as opinion. It was not freighted with the need to provide reams of "evidence". of course, but in the way you formulate your statement, you make it very clear that no other options are possible for you - so, where is your umbrella? Quote: The quote from the murli may be a sentence but it is very clear and unambiguous. well, maybe it is, I don't know Quote: As for Brahma Baba, he said what he said. The words he used were "flying saucer".... yeah, but what did he meant by using that nick? you don't know .. you suppose btw, I have never experienced UFO's etc. to be a taboo subject within BKs of course you have those who prefer not to go into details about ANYTHING, but many people like to talk about these subjects, and we all have different opinions Quote: No room for interpretation there. hehe, that's a bold claim Quote: Can you "prove" the holographic universe? no of course not, gut feeling as you say it's a view where all the elements seem to fit in perfectly - it's a philosophy, a framework - not a theory in the exact sense of the word and it helps to interpret the new theories of physics in a worthwhile way (btw, the theory comes from two men: physician David Bohm, and brain specialist karl Pribram - both came to a holographic interpretation of respectively their own fields - combine the two and you get an overall view) Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:55 am    Post subject: that ought to be 'physicist' of course ... what a counter-intuitive language Guest Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 12:18 pm    Post subject: http://twm.co.nz/pribram.htm this is good thing to read, an interview with pribram (i copy it here, because it reads better here than on the original site with the black-white) Quote: THE HOLOGRAPHIC BRAIN With KARL PRIBRAM, Ph.D. THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is the mind-brain relationship, and my guest is Dr. Karl Pribram, professor of neuropsychology at Stanford University, in the Department of Psychology and in the medical school. Dr. Pribram is the author of Languages of the Brain and hundreds of articles about the mind-brain relationship. In fact I would say fairly that Dr. Pribram is probably one of the most influential scholars alive today in probing the mysteries of the mind-brain relationship. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, many academic psychologists -- and perhaps you have some sympathy for this point of view -- over the years have taken a perspective which laymen tend to laugh at, at times. They claim that the mind doesn't exist. I wonder if you can explain that perspective -- talk about what we mean, or what you mean, by the mind. PRIBRAM: Well, I don't like the term the mind, because it reifies -- that means it makes a thing of -- something that's a process. We pay attention, we see, we hear. Those are all mental processes, mental activities. But there isn't a thing called the mind. There might be something you want to call yourself, but the mind sort of makes something concrete out of something that's very multifaceted. MISHLOVE: Yet somehow when I'm aware of myself being aware, I think, "Well, that's my mind that does that." PRIBRAM: That does that; that your mind does it. I'd have to think about that. MISHLOVE: You're very well known in psychology and in neuropsychology as the developer of the holographic or holonomic model of the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how it relates to the mind -- or rather, to the mind-body process? I have to be on my toes with you today. PRIBRAM: Yes. The holonomic brain theory is based on some insights that Dennis Gabor had. He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize for his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he suggested that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron microscopes we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought maybe instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get the interference patterns. Now what is an interference pattern? When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter. But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur, that blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus it. MISHLOVE: Contained in the blur is the actual image. PRIBRAM: That's right. But you don't see it as such. So one of the main principles of holonomic brain theory, which gets us into quantum mechanics also, is that there is a relationship here between what we ordinarily experience, and some other process or some other order, which David Bohm calls the implicate, or enfolded, order, in which things are all distributed or spread -- in fact the mathematical formulations are often called spread functions -- that spread this out. MISHLOVE: Now what you're talking about here is the deep structure of the universe, in a way. Beneath the subatomic level of matter itself are these quantum wave functions, so to speak, and they form interference patterns. Would I be wrong in saying it would be like dropping two stones in a pond, the way the ripples overlap? Is that like an interference pattern? PRIBRAM: That's certainly the way interference patterns work, yes. MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting that at that very deep level of reality, something is operating in the brain itself. PRIBRAM: Well, no. In a way, that's possible, but that's not where the situation is at the moment. All we know is that the mathematical descriptions that we make of, let's say, single-cell processes, and the branches from the single cells, and how they interact with each other -- not only anatomically, but actually functional interactions -- that when we map those, we get a description that is very similar to the description of quantum events. MISHLOVE: When you take into account that there are billions of these single cells operating in the brain. PRIBRAM: That's right. And the connections between them, so there are even more; there are trillions of connections between them. They operate on the basic principles that have been found to also operate at the quantum level. Actually, it was the other way around. The mathematics that Gabor used, he borrowed from Heisenberg and Hilbert. Hilbert developed them first in mathematics, and then Heisenberg used them in quantum mechanics, and Gabor used them in psychophysics, and we've used it in modeling how brain networks work. MISHLOVE: So in other words, in the brain,when we look at the electrical impulses traveling through the neurons, and the patterns as these billions of neurons interact, you would say that that is analogous, I suppose, or isomorphic to the processes that are going on at the deeper quantum level. PRIBRAM: Yes. But we don't know that it's a deeper quantum level in the brain. MISHLOVE: That may or may not be the case. PRIBRAM: Analogous isn't quite the right word; they obey the same rules. It's not just an analogy, because the work that described these came independently. An analogy would be that you take the quantum ideas, and see how they fit to the data we have on the brain. That's not the way it happened. We got the brain data first, and then we see, look, it fits the same mathematics. So the people who were gathering these data, including myself, weren't out to look for an analogous process. I think it's a very important point, because otherwise you could be biased, and there are lots of different models that fit how the brain works. But this is more based on how the brain was found to work, independent of these conceptions. MISHLOVE: Independent of any model. PRIBRAM: Yes, essentially independent of any model. MISHLOVE: So you've got a mathematical structure that parallels the mathematical structures of quantum physics. Now what does that tell us about the mind? PRIBRAM: What it tells me is that the problems that have been faced in quantum mechanics for the whole century -- well, since the twenties -- MISHLOVE: Many paradoxes. PRIBRAM: And very many paradoxes -- that those paradoxes also apply at the psychophysical level and at the neuronal level, and therefore we have to face the same sets of problems. At the same time, I think what David Bohm is doing is showing that some of the classical conceptions which were thought not to apply at the quantum level, really do apply at the quantum level. Now, I'm interpreting Bohm; I'm not sure he would want to agree to my interpretation of what he's doing. But to me that seems to be what is going on. So that the schism between levels -- between the quantum level, the submicroscopic almost, subatomic level and what goes on there, and the classical, so-called uncertainty principle and all of that -- that all applies all the way along; but you've got to be very careful in -- how should I put it? You've got to apply it to the actual data, and not just sort of run it over. MISHLOVE: To the average layman, why would they be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in their everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of life? PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical thing -- that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature. MISHLOVE: Some sense of relationship to the larger cosmos, to the world about us. PRIBRAM: And that part has this implicate order. It has the explicate order, too -- you know, the ordinary space-time order. MISHLOVE: I want to stop for a second, because you're using Bohm's term implicate order, and we haven't really quite defined that. PRIBRAM: It's the holographic. You described it very well, with the pebbles. It's a set of relationships which -- MISHLOVE: It's a fuzzy picture. PRIBRAM: Well, yes, and you can talk about it in terms of waves, or you can talk about it in terms of mathematical matrices which have vectors in them, and so on. You can have continuous vectors, or you can have continuous matrices. You can have all kinds of relationships between. When you look at a photographic plate that has a hologram on it, you can either look at some of the swirls in there, or you can look at the individual grains of silver. So there are lots of kinds of mathematics, but they all fit together, whether it be Schroedinger's equation, which is a wave equation, or Heisenberg's more matrix kind. These are not relevant to the ordinary person, but I just want to say it here, because otherwise we get stuck in the wave, as if it were all waves, and that's too simple. MISHLOVE: But what you're saying, if I can try and simplify it, is that there's a level of reality at which things are what they appear to be. I look at you and I see a body and a face. That would be the explicate level, where things are what they appear to be. Then there's an implicate level, which is just as real, but if you were to look at it, it doesn't look at all like the other. PRIBRAM: We experience it entirely differently -- as a spiritual aspect of our being. This implicate order is also a potential order; we're not in it most of the time. We had for years this whole idea of the human potential, and I think that's what we're talking about. MISHLOVE: Human potential may be embodied somehow in the implicate structure. PRIBRAM: That's very nice, yes. Good way to say it. MISHLOVE: Prior to the development of quantum physics and the holonomic model of the brain, people based their notion of who they were and how their minds worked more on the Newtonian classical models of physics, and perhaps in some sense, if they bought into those models, would tend to deny their spiritual experiences, or not really feel connected with that part of themselves. Would you say so? PRIBRAM: Very definitely, and that recalls something that De Tocqueville said. After writing his histories, he said, "Maybe I've been interpreting it the wrong way, because I've been doing it in terms of classical mechanics, with cause-and-effect relationships. But when the human being acts, this is not a cause; this is a challenge." MISHLOVE: He wrote the books on capitalism and democracy. PRIBRAM: Democracy in America, and all. When we act it's a challenge, and that's very much a quantum-type, holographic, implicate-order type idea. Rather than having causality -- MISHLOVE: It's moving towards a goal. PRIBRAM: No, it isn't. It's a challenge, it's different. Moving toward a goal would still be causal. See, we don't even have a good language to talk about all this. It's a challenge. The whole system can reorganize on the basis of this challenge, and you never find out where the cause is. When we were talking earlier, you said, "Where does the will start?" Well, it's a challenge. The whole system does it. There isn't a start and a midst and so on, because time and space are enfolded, and therefore there's no causality. MISHLOVE: It's all just emerging. PRIBRAM: It's emerging, and you can challenge the system, and it will respond in an unpredictable way. MISHLOVE: You know, I must say I'm a little bit surprised, because you described yourself earlier to me as a positivist of sorts, and a behaviorist, and in a way the language that you're using seems very much like the language of the Buddhists, who talk about no self, and just process. PRIBRAM: No thing. One of the chapters I wrote once was "The Non-sense of No-thing," -- the nonsense of nothing. But it's nonsensory, because senses are lenses, and as David Bohm has said so well, if you take the lenses away you've got a hologram. Lenses tend to reify, to objectify and articulate particles. Take the lenses away and you've got this distributed. MISHLOVE: So part of our mind-brain process functions as a lens, then. PRIBRAM: Well, certainly the senses do, right. MISHLOVE: What about the other functions of the mind -- memory, learning? PRIBRAM: The what? MISHLOVE: You caught me again. It's such a habit. PRIBRAM: Other mental functions. It's easy to say it without reifying it, especially if you want to be holistic about this. In answer to your previous question -- just a second if I may interrupt -- you said I'm a positivist. You know, the hard-nosed kind of scientist, in my experience, which was the stimulus-response scientists, became very soft after awhile. That was the hardest, hard-nosed kind of science, and the cognitive, which was soft, became the hard-nosed one. And I'm quite sure that the kind of definitions I'm giving are just as hard as anything that ever was in stimulus-response psychology. MISHLOVE: In other words, at some point it will come to be seen that if you talk about spiritual experiences -- if you refer to Buddhists and mystical concepts -- that can be taken in terms of very hard core. PRIBRAM: Well, it's up to scientists to do this. It doesn't come automatically. MISHLOVE: Very rigorous. PRIBRAM: Well, you don't want to get into rigor mortis, but yes. You see, the beauty of science is that it's basically based on sharing. Now, the more carefully and clearly I can define something -- and the reason we want to quantify is not because we're interested in quantities, but because then you can communicate and share much more clearly than if you can't have quantities. So all of science is based on the notion of sharing, and we need to define things. If some Buddhist tells me, "I've just had a high experience," or "I've just seen the light," and I don't know what the hell he's talking about, then I can't share that. But if he gets me to have the same experience, that begins to be science. And if I can make definitions so I can describe to you what is going on -- let's say the pineal is secreting some substance that makes you suddenly flash, or something of that kind -- then we have some way of sharing this experience, which goes deeper than when we're sort of just stunned by somebody saying, "Yes, I've seen the light." I mean, that may be just metaphorical, or it may actually be that they did produce a reaction akin to stimulation of the visual system. And so on and so forth. MISHLOVE: You're raising many issues here. I don't want to get too off track, though. PRIBRAM: Well, my point is simply that this business of what's soft and what's hard keeps changing. MISHLOVE: That's a very important point. PRIBRAM: My prediction is that the kind of thing we're dealing with here will be seen as as solid and as scientific. In the twenty-first century we'll look back at some of the fuzzy stuff that was done in the name of behaviorism. MISHLOVE: Many neuroscientists today -- it's almost axiomatic, when they talk about the mind, which they sometimes do -- they say the mind is sort of located in the brain. I gather that that way of putting it is totally discordant with your own view of things. PRIBRAM: Yes. There are lots of different ways of phrasing this. One is that mental phenomena are emergent properties of how the brain works, and so it's almost like the brain is secreting vision and mind and all that. But maybe a better way of talking about it would be to say that mental phenomena arise through the interaction between brain and body and the environment and -- this is what Karl Popper says -- that whole interactive thing produces an emergent, which we call mind and spirit, and so on. I think that's a better way than just thinking of the brain secreting it. MISHLOVE: Now how does this model relate to human potential? If I want to cultivate my various potentialities, my skills, reach into the implicate order and make some of it more explicate, do you have notions about that, for learning, for human development? PRIBRAM: Well, you said it yourself just now. You reach into the implicate order. You allow yourself -- Freud called it regression in the service of the ego, primary process kinds of things, which are more holonomic, more holographic-like. Yes, I think that's the general way that I would say that this is different. The other is imitation, and the kind of thing where we have role models and we take care of ourselves, model ourselves on someone -- the kind of thing you do in sports, you watch a videotape or something. MISHLOVE: Would you say creativity works the same way? PRIBRAM: Well, creativity works the same way in the following sense: that we allow ourselves to get -- let's just be very crude here -- into this wave form, you know, in a distributed system. And this then allows the fluctuations that take place there to create new forms, which in space-time we can't really do too well. I mean, things are already formed. But if we get back into this potential, of distributed, implicate-type order, then these fluctuations have a chance to reorganize this way, or to organize new foci of activity. MISHLOVE: And these would take the shape of mental images in our mind? PRIBRAM: By the time they get to be mental images, it's already pretty well set into space-time form. MISHLOVE: What is a mental image, in space-time? How would you describe that, as a neuroscientist? PRIBRAM: Well, let's see. I've got my image of your face right now, and I also have an image of a person sitting in a chair over there, and a big eye looking at me in front, a television eye, with my eyes closed. That's mental imagery. MISHLOVE: You wouldn't try and tie that to resonant neural patterns? PRIBRAM: Oh sure, I'll be happy to do that. There are two kinds of mechanism -- I mean, you can sort of divide things up into twos and threes and so on. But if you divide neural activity, you can divide it into propagative nerve impulses on the one hand, and then these slow potentials -- hyperpolarizations, steep polarizations -- that don't go anywhere. And they form this holographic-like pattern, and it's those that I feel -- and I have some evidence to support this -- are what we experience as images. MISHLOVE: Would these sort of be like standing waves in the mind? Am I reaching too far here? PRIBRAM: You said it -- "in the mind" -- again. The waves aren't in the mind. MISHLOVE: Standing waves in the brain. PRIBRAM: In the brain. They could be thought of that way. Again, I use the matrix analogy as well, just so we don't get too far into the waves. But sure, some kind of standing wave forms that are there temporarily. Sometimes they last longer, and sometimes they are very brief and we are not even aware of them. But the longer they last -- Sherrington had this idea, and he said there seems to be a reciprocal relationship between reflex and mind; the more reflex the less mental, and vice versa. MISHLOVE: OK. That relates somehow to free will also, I gather. PRIBRAM: Well, there we get into a different set of problems, now. Sure, to some extent if you get into your potential mode, then new things can happen. But usually free will is conceived of in terms of how many constraints are operating, and we have in statistics a notion of degrees of freedom. I think our will essentially is constrained, more or less. We have so many degrees of freedom, and the more degrees of freedom we have, the more we feel free, and we have freedom of choice. MISHLOVE: What can we say, in wrapping the program up, given all these aspects of the mind-brain system that you've described, how does that relate to, say, the ultimate or the farther reaches of human potential? PRIBRAM: Well, I think in the twenty-first century we're going to be able to do an awful lot that we weren't able to do up to now, simply because science will be admitted to the spiritual aspects of mankind, and vice versa -- what has been segregated for at least three hundred years, since Galileo, where the spiritual aspects, in Western culture at least, have been sort of relegated over here. People have split this, you know. We build buildings, and we do surgery, and do all of these things. Then we have a spiritual aspect to ourselves; we go do that somewhere else. Whereas now I think these things will come together, and it will be perfectly all right for what we today call "faith healers" to come and help with reduction of pain and to ease all kinds of things. So it'll be a different world. I wouldn't even be surprised if preventative therapies could be instituted, that deal with controls of ourselves, so we aren't as prone to get cancers and so on. MISHLOVE: That's very optimistic. Well, Karl Pribram, it's been a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much. and here: http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html#Karl%20Pribram Quote: The Universe as a Hologram Author unknown (attributed to Michael Talbot apparently) 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". [ bkry Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 113 Location: Malaysia Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:53 pm    Post subject: Quote: Many neuroscientists today -- it's almost axiomatic, when they talk about the mind, which they sometimes do -- they say the mind is sort of located in the brain. Well, Baba has told us that the mind is part of the soul. This soul is using the brain. The soul's place in the center of the forehead may be in the brain.[/quote] _________________ God's angel. BK Pari bkry Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 113 Location: Malaysia Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 10:00 pm    Post subject: Quote: There are lots of different ways of phrasing this. One is that mental phenomena are emergent properties of how the brain works, and so it's almost like the brain is secreting vision and mind and all that. But maybe a better way of talking about it would be to say that mental phenomena arise through the interaction between brain and body and the environment and -- this is what Karl Popper says -- that whole interactive thing produces an emergent, which we call mind and spirit, and so on. I think that's a better way than just thinking of the brain secreting it. Quote: Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. The hologram theory can explain how the soul can create visions. Gyan tells us that Maya can also give visions. We are advised to discern the truth from that which is false. This is not an easy task. BKs always go back to the murlis to keep to the truthful path. _________________ God's angel. 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