Holography Internalized

Well, I finished reading The Holographic Universe. I thought I got his point from the first half of the book, but reading on I got a lot more out of it. More than I ever thought possible from a book, actually.

Talbot presents a lot of evidence that sheds light on many, many mystical and spiritual questions I've had about myself and the universe. The book has certainly changed my perspectives on things, and cemented an outlook on life that I'd been pondering for sometime. I highly recommend it.

What was so amazing and odd about reading The Holographic Universe was that I seemed to "know" the concepts already and they fit directly into my framework of reality but with better definition and detail.

I've become more and more certain it's because the concepts presented by Talbot are not only correct and intuitive, but part of a human metaconsciousness that we can all access, and that I have been unknowingly learning from for some time now.

Where to begin the explanation, though? I've already explained what a hologram is, and how I have a strange intuitive sense of what happens when we die that I am certain is correct but can't explain why I'm so certain apart from the fact that it just seems right to me.

To be blunt, it's because now I am more certain that I represent the reincarnation of a very old and potent soul that is far along the path of Enlightenment. It is my destiny to gather experiences in this lifetime that will move my soul close to Nirvana. I could fail, I do have doubts, but regardless this newfound connection to the universe will allow this lifetime to make great leaps toward understanding and loving.

I'm not just crazy, I've been coming to this decision for a long time, and I needed Talbot's connections to give myself faith in what I thought, because it goes against my beloved science.

Yes, science, my constant companion, you are the saltine to the magnificent feast that is the universe. As you can attest from my previous rusings, there are several aspects of science that I have issues with: dark matter, missing proton spin, all that stuff. Bringing the scientific method to bear on the secondary evidence that I could gather rarely led me to the same conclusions as mainstream science, and the researchers would often note the same paradoxes that I noted, but write them off to be solved as someone else’s life work.

What I had been thinking was that even though modern science has been ignoring glaring paradoxes in its findings, many of those have been smoothed out over time, as would the things that bothered me. I also noticed that this was because scientists often found out that many distinct phenomena were often the same phenomena.

For the simplest example, take the sky. For a long time we thought it was this whole different realm of existence, heaven. Then we realized that the close parts were more like our own world, even if the sun was the special aspect of existence. Then we found out that there are quite a few suns, but only ours appeared to sustain life. Now we’re thinking that pretty much any sun can sustain life. You can see where I'm going with this, paradigm shift by paradigm shift.

Scientific paradigms, while useful because they provide context and consensus when working together, are also dangerous because they influence the findings one can come up with, and therefore influence the perception of reality. As a result, many phenomena are ignored or grouped into "anomalous" because they don't fit the context of the paradigm.

This has severely damaged our investigation of the human mind and how to best understand its mechanisms. We are looking for a set of physical laws that govern mind. Not to say there are none, but according to the standard model, the mind is made up of nothing more than floating particles, and the average particle does not seem to think very much and definitely doesn't put out an EKG, so what's the deal with our molecules? Why are they so special?

Sure, the molecules in our brains and bodies are very rare and complex, the result of billions of near collisions and lucky hits perpetutated by the sun's radiation and at the expense of the other molecules on and in the planet. And we can map the components of the brain that interact with the body and pass outside information to and from the mind, but we don't know what mind is, how to create it, recover it, even explain why it does what it does, just how.

Up until now, I thought that it was due to self-preservation, that mind exists as an evolutionary advantage and protects itself by its nature. But then I thought of the molecules, the only physical "evidence" of mind. There had to be more, mind wasn't just molecules. It didn’t seem right that this consciousness was an emergent property of electrical fields, unless consciousness could form from electrical fields elsewhere but the human brain.

That was a hard one for me to take as fact, that the mind wasn't just molecules. It goes against my degree in Cell and Developmental Biology, for one thing. I learned in excruciating detail what we knew about the chemical basis for mind, how certain chemicals in certain places created fields and potientials that were set up to perpetuate, to create an ongoing fire of electrical activity that was thought. For some time I took it as fact that the individual bits of experience that I perceive everyday that blend into a seamless whole like so many grains of color in the film that is my existence were being experienced by nothing more than a mushy gray substance.

I really had to convince myself of that, kept coming back to it in my head and reviewing what I knew about thought and scanning new articles for new theories, but nothing more than the brain ever materialized as the seat of the mind. I knew that wasn't correct. Not because it was impossible for a set of molecules to be arranged in such a manner as to move, look and act like a human, or even because I had some intuition that I had a soul. While I knew that the material that made up some parts of my mind was the same dead material that I observed in the real world, I could prove that by taking a “dead” psychoactive chemical that affected my living mind profoundly. Even though all available evidence pointed to the mind being nothing more than the brain, even direct experience with physical phenomena that affect my very ability to have a thought, I still felt that my consciouness was receiving signals from the physical world and was not part of it.

A few months ago I had a revelation on that, if the dead material outside myself could not constitute my living mind, then one of two things must be true:
1) I am composed of dead material and live in a cold, indifferent universe
or
2) The material outside myself is not dead, and is in fact much like my living mind.
I decided that 2) must be true because if the physical world were in fact a giant organism with thoughts too out-of-sync with me to understand, then my consciousness could indeed be just molecules, if molecules were merely waiting to be a part of consciousness.

Enter Talbot's book. At the time I had recently decided that the universe was made up of a giant vibration of God's love, as per my Gaia scenario, with the whole thing being here to teach consciousness and understanding. The Holographic Universe takes that as fact, and runs with it.

Abandon all thoughts, ye who enter here. The realm of understanding the Holographic Universe cannot be entered with preconceptions.

The universe that I have grown up in is a hologram, the matrix, a veil of illusion. Not to say that it isn't real or important, but it's the least real and the least important of all reality. On this level of reality, the ego and the intellect exist. All conscious thought is based on illusion, if you're not thinking, you don't exist, everyone knows that.

The next level up from this universe that most humans can perceive is the spiritual, which acts through our ideas of love and hate. Our capacity to experience love and hate is an inkling of the forces that are at work in the universe driving consciousness to seek out other consciousness.

Intuition, "gut feelings", these are all aspects of the spiritual level, information that comes to you through means other than your intellect things you just know or just understand, like to stay away from your own feces or that any being screaming in pain is a bad thing. This level is connected to all humans and to your past lives, the sources of this knowledge.

The levels beyond the spritual are largely inaccessible to humans, and can be lumped together as the soul. The soul works through the will. The soul is only perceived by most people a few times in their lives, and usually as a prevailing force to achieve your destiny, whatever that may be. The soul and how it guides one through life is will, or destiny.

Anyway, the good part is that the self is composed of interfering wave patterns emanating from the souls of all creatures, not unlike a hologram. Reality is ours, we have created it.

So my theories were correct, just incomplete. Not only is universe living, but it is consciousness. That part of myself that I knew was separate from the physical and experiencing signals is my spirit and soul, where my portion of influence over existence comes from.

More as I continue Talbot's work...

Currently Reading- Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion by Stewart Eliott Guthrie