PART III
SPACE AND TIME

Shamanism and similar mysterious areas of research have gained in significance because they postulate new ideas about mind and spirit. They speak of things like vastly expanding the realm of consciousness... the belief, the knowledge, and even the experience that our physical world of the senses is a mere illusion, a world of shadows, and that the three-dimensional tool we call our body serves only as a container or dwelling place for Something infinitely greater and more comprehensive than that body and which constitutes the matrix of the real life.
• Holger Kahveit

Dreamtime and Inner Space

7 - Time Out of Mind

The “home” of the mind, as of all things, is the implicate order. At this level, which is the fundamental plenum for the entire manifest universe, there is no linear time. The implicate domain is atemporal; moments are not strung together serially like beads on a string.
 - Larry Dossey

Recovering the Soul

As the man gazed off into space, the room he was in became ghostly and transparent, and in its place materialized a scene from the distant past. Suddenly he was in the courtyard of a palace, and before him was a young woman, olive-skinned and very pretty.

He could see her gold jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, her white translucent dress, and her black braided hair gathered regally under a high square-shaped tiara. As he looked at her, information about her life flooded his mind. He knew she was Egyptian, the daughter of a prince, but not a pharaoh. She was married. Her husband was slender and wore his hair in a multitude of small braids that fell down on both sides of his face.

The man could also fast-forward the scene, rushing through the events of the woman’s life as if they were no more than a movie. He saw that she died in childbirth. He watched the lengthy and intricate steps of her embalming, her funeral procession, the rituals that accompanied her being placed in her sarcophagus, and when he finished, the images faded and the room once again came back into view.

The man’s name was Stefan Ossowiecki, a Russian-born Pole and one of the century’s most gifted clairvoyants, and the date was February 14,19S5.

His vision of the past had been evoked when he handled a fragment of a petrified human foot Ossowiecki proved so adept at psychometrizing artifacts that he eventually came to the attention of Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw and the most eminent ethnologist in Poland at the time.

Poniatowski tested Ossowiecki with a variety of flints and other stone tools obtained from archaeological sites around the world. Most of these lithics, as they are called, were so nondescript that only a trained eye could tell they had been shaped by human hands. They were also pre-certified by experts so that Poniatowski knew their ages and historical origins, information he kept carefully concealed from Ossowiecki.

It did not matter. Again and again Ossowiecki identified the objects correctly, describing their age, the culture that had produced them, and the geographical locations where they had been found. On several occasions the locations Ossowiecki cited disagreed with the information Poniatowski had written in his notes, but Poniatowski discovered that it was always his notes that were in error, not Ossowiecki’s information.

Ossowiecki always worked the same. He would take the object in his hands and concentrate until the room before him, and even his own body, became shadowy and almost nonexistent After this transition occurred, he would find himself looking at a three-dimensional movie of the past He could then go anywhere he wanted in the scene and see anything he chose. While he was gazing into the past, Ossowiecki even moved his eyes back and forth as if the things he was describing possessed an actual physical presence before him.

He could see the vegetation, the people, and the dwellings in which they lived. On one occasion, after handling a stone implement from the Magdalenian culture, a Stone Age people who flourished in France about 15,000 to 10,000 B.C, Ossowiecki told Poniatowski that Magdalenian women had very complex hair styles. At the time this seemed absurd, but subsequent discoveries of statues of Magdalenian women with ornate coiffures proved Ossowiecki right.

Over the course of the experiments Ossowiecki offered over one hundred such pieces of information, details about the past that at first seemed inaccurate, but later proved correct He said that Stone Age peoples used oil lamps and was vindicated when excavations in Dor-dogne, France, uncovered oils lamps of the exact size and style he described. He made detailed drawings of the animals various peoples hunted, the style of the huts in which they lived, and their burial customs - assertions that were all later confirmed by archaeological discoveries.¹

Poniatowski’s work with Ossowiecki is not unique. Norman Emerson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and founding vice president of the Canadian Archaeological Association, has also investigated the use of clairvoyants in archaeological work. Emerson’s research has centered around a truck driver named George McMullen.

Like Ossowiecki, McMullen has the ability to psychometrize objects and use them to tune into scenes from the past McMullen can also tune into the past simply by visiting an archaeological site. Once there, he paces back and forth until he gets his bearings. Then he begins to describe the people and culture that once flourished at the site.

On one such occasion Emerson watched as McMullen bounded over a patch of bare ground, pacing out what he said was the location of an Iroquois longhouse. Emerson marked the area with survey pegs and six months later uncovered the ancient structure exactly where McMullen said it would be.³

Although Emerson began as a skeptic, his work with McMullen has made him a believer. In 1973, at an annual conference of Canada’s leading archaeologists, he stated,

“It is my conviction that I have received knowledge about archaeological artifacts and archaeological sites from a psychic informant who relates this information to me without any evidence of the conscious use of reasoning.”

He concluded his talk by saying that he felt McMullen’s demonstrations opened “a whole new vista” in archaeology, and research into the further use of psychics in archaeological investigations should be given “first priority.”³

Indeed, retro-cognition, or the ability of certain individuals to shift the focus of their attention and literally gaze back into the past, has been confirmed repeatedly by researchers. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s, W. H. C. Tenhaeff, the director of the Parapsychological Institute of the State University of Utrecht, and Marius Valkhoff, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, found that the great Dutch psychic, Gerard Croiset, could psychometrize even the smallest fragment of bone and accurately describe its past.⁴

Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a New York clinical psychologist, and another skeptic-turned-believer, has conducted similar experiments with the noted American psychic, Eileen Garrett.⁵

At the 1961 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologist Clarence W. Weiant revealed that he would not have made his famous Tres Zapotes discovery, universally considered to be one of the most important Middle American archaeological finds ever made, were it not for the assistance of a psychic.⁶

Stephan A. Schwartz, a former editorial staff member of National Geographic magazine and a member of MITs Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and Society, believes that retro-cognition is not only real, but will eventually precipitate a shift in scientific reality as profound as the shifts that followed the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin.

Schwartz feels so strongly about the subject that he has written a comprehensive history of the partnership between clairvoyants and archaeologists entitled The Secret Vaults of Time.

“For three-quarters of a century psychic archaeology has been a reality,” says Schwartz.

 

“This new approach has done much to demonstrate that the time and space framework so crucial to the Grand Material world-view is by no means as absolute a construct as most scientists believe.” ⁷

The Past as Hologram

Such abilities suggest that the past is not lost, but still exists in some form accessible to human perception.

Our normal view of the universe makes no allowance for such a state of affairs, but the holographic model does. Bohm’s notion that the flow of time is the product of a constant series of unfoldings and enfoldings suggests that as the present enfolds and becomes part of the past, it does not cease to exist, but simply returns to the cosmic storehouse of the implicate.

Or as Bohm puts it,

“The past is active in the present as a kind of implicate order.”⁸

If, as Bohm suggests, consciousness also has its source in the implicate, this means that the human mind and the holographic record of the past already exist in the same domain, are, in a manner of speaking, already neighbors.

Thus, a shift in the focus of one’s attention may be all that is needed to access the past. Clairvoyants such as McMulIen and Ossowiecki may simply be individuals who have an innate knack for making this shift, but again, as with so many of the other extraordinary human abilities we have looked at, the holographic idea suggests that the talent is latent in all of us.

A metaphor for the way the past is stored in the implicate can also be found in the hologram. If each phase of an activity, say a woman blowing a soap bubble, is recorded as a series of successive images in a multiple-image hologram, each image becomes as a frame in a movie.

If the hologram is a “white light” hologram - a piece of holographic film whose image can be seen by the naked eye and does not need laser light to become visible - when a viewer walks by the film and changes the angle of his or her perception, he/she will see what amounts to a three-dimensional motion picture of the woman blowing the soap bubble. In other words, as the different images unfold and enfold, they will seem to flow together and present an illusion of movement.

A person who is unfamiliar with holograms might mistakenly assume that the various stages in the blowing of the soap bubble are transitory and once perceived can never be viewed again, but this is not true. The entire activity is always recorded in the hologram, and it is the viewer’s changing perspective that provides the illusion that it is unfolding in time. The holographic theory suggests that the same 4 is true of our own past. Instead of fading into oblivion, it too remains recorded in the cosmic hologram and can always be accessed once again.

Another suggestively hologram-like feature of the retrocognitive experience is the three-dimensionality of the scenes that are accessed.

For instance, psychic Rich, who can also psychometrize objects, says she knows what Ossowiecki meant when he said that the images he saw were as three-dimensional and real, even more real, than the room in which he was sitting.

“It’s as if the scene takes over,” says Rich. “It’s dominant, and once it starts to unfold I actually become a part of it. It’s like being in two places at once. I’m aware that I’m sitting in a room, but I’m also in the scene.”⁹

Similarly holographic is the nonlocal nature of the ability.

Psychics are able to access the past of a particular archaeological site both when they are at the site and when they are many miles removed. In other words, the record of the past does not appear to be stored at any one location, but like the information in a hologram, it is nonlocal and can be accessed from any point in the space-time framework.

The cal ruins - burial mounds, standing stones, crumbling sixth-century fortresses, and so on - and participated in activities associated with bygone times. Evans-Wentz interviewed witnesses who had seen fairies that looked like men in Elizabethan dress engaging in hunts, fairies that walked in ghostly processions to and from the remains of old forts, and fairies that rang bells while standing in the ruins of ancient churches.

One activity of which the fairies seemed inordinately fond was waging war. In his book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Evans-Wentz presents the testimony of dozens of individuals who claimed to see these spectral conflicts, moonlit meadows thronged with men battling in medieval armor, or desolate fens covered with soldiers in colored uniforms. Sometimes these frays were eerily silent. Sometimes they were full-fledged dins; and, perhaps most haunting of all, sometimes they could only be heard but not seen.

From this, Evans-Wentz concluded that at least some of the phenomena his witnesses were interpreting as fairies were actually some kind of afterimage of events that had taken place in the past.

“Nature herself has a memory,” he theorized.

 

“There is some indefinable psychic element in the earth’s atmosphere upon which all human and physical actions or phenomena are photographed or impressed. Under certain inexplicable conditions, normal persons who are not seers may observe Nature’s mental records like pictures cast upon a screen -  often like moving pictures.”¹⁴

As for why encounters with fairies were becoming less frequent, a remark made by one of Evans-Wentz’s respondents provides a clue. The respondent was an elderly gentleman named John Davies living on the Isle of Man, and after describing numerous sightings of the good people, he stated,

“Before education came into the island more people could see the fairies; now very few people can see them.”¹⁵

Since “education” no doubt included an anathema against believing in fairies, Davies’s remark suggests that it was a change in attitude that caused the widespread retrocognitive abilities of the Manx people to atrophy.

Once again this underscores the enormous power our beliefs have in determining which of our extraordinary potentials we manifest and which we do not

But whether our beliefs allow us to see these hologram-like movies of the past or cause our brains to edit them out, the evidence suggests that they exist nonetheless. Nor are such experiences limited to Celtic countries. There are reports of witnesses seeing phantom soldiers dressed in ancient Hindu costumes in India.16 In Hawaii, such ghostly

displays are well known and books on the islands are filled with accounts of individuals who have seen phantom processions of Hawaiian warriors in feather cloaks marching along with war clubs and torches.¹⁷ Sightings of spectral armies fighting equally phantasmal battles are even mentioned in ancient Assyrian texts.¹⁸

Occasionally historians are able to recognize the event being replayed. At four in the morning on August 4,1951, two English women vacationing in the seaside village of Puys, France, were awakened by the sound of gunfire. They raced to the window but were shocked to find that the village and the sea beyond were calm and devoid of any activity that might account for what they were hearing.

The British Society for Psychical Research investigated and discovered that the women’s chronology of events mirrored exactly military records of a raid the Allies had made against the Germans at Puys on August 19, 1942. The women, it seemed, had heard the sound of a slaughter that had taken place nine years earlier.¹⁹

Although the dark intensity of such events gives them a higher profile in the holographic landscape, we must not forget that contained within the shimmering holographic record of the past are all the joys of the human race as well. It is, in essence, a library of all that ever was, and learning to tap into this dazzling and infinite treasure-trove on a more massive and systematic scale could expand our knowledge of both ourselves and the universe in ways we have not yet dared dream.

The day may come when we can manipulate reality like the crystal in Bohm’s analogy, causing what is real and what is invisible to shift kaleidoscopic ally and calling up images of the past with the same ease that we now call up a program on our computer.

But even this is not all that a more holographic understanding of time may offer.

The Holographic Future

As disconcerting as having access to the entire past is, it pales beside the notion that the future is also accessible in the cosmic hologram. Still, there is an enormous body of evidence that proves at least some future events are as easy to see as past events.

This has been amply demonstrated in literally hundreds of studies. In the 1930s J. B. and Louisa Rhine discovered that volunteers could guess what cards would be drawn randomly from a deck with a success rate that was better than chance by odds of three million to one.²⁰

In the 1970s Helmut Schmidt, a physicist at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, Washington, invented a device that enabled him to test whether people could predict random subatomic events. In repeated tests with three volunteers and over sixty thousand trials, he obtained results that were one billion to one against chance.²¹

In his work at the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center, Montague Uliman, along with psychologist Stanley Krippner and researcher Charles Honorton, produced compelling evidence that accurate precognitive information can also be obtained in dreams. In their study, volunteers were asked to spend eight consecutive nights at the sleep laboratory, and each night they were asked to try to dream about a picture that would be chosen at random the next day and shown to them. Uliman and his colleagues hoped to get one success out of eight, but found that some subjects could score as many as five “hits” out of eight.

For example, after waking, one volunteer said that he had dreamed of “a large concrete building” from which a “patient” was trying to escape. The patient had a white coat on like a doctor’s coat and had gotten only l’as far as the archway.”

The painting chosen at random the next day turned out to be Van Gogh’s Hospital Corridor at SL Remy, a watercolor depicting a lone patient standing at the end of a bleak and massive hallway and quickly exiting through a door beneath an archway.²²

In their remote-viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, Puthoff and Targ found that, in addition to being able to psychically describe remote locations that experimenters were visiting in the present, test subjects could also describe locations experimenters would be visiting in the future, before the locations had even been decided upon. In one instance, for example, an unusually talented subject named Hella Hammid, a photographer by vocation, was asked to describe the spot Puthoff would be visiting one-half hour hence. She concentrated and said she could see him entering “a black iron triangle.”

The triangle was “bigger than a man" and although she did not know precisely what it was, she could hear a rhythmic squeaking sound occurring “about once a second.”

Ten minutes before she did this, Puthoff had set out on a half-hour drive in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto areas. At the end of the half hour, and well after Hammid had recorded her perception of the black iron triangle, Puthoff took out ten sealed envelopes containing ten different target locations. Using a random number generator, he chose one at random.

Inside was the address of a small park about six miles from the laboratory. He drove to the park, and when he got there he found a children’s swing - the black iron triangle - and walked into its midst. When he sat down in the swing it squeaked rhythmically as it swung back and forth.²³

Puthoff and Targ’s precognitive remote-viewing findings have been duplicated by numerous laboratories around the world, including Jahn and Dunne’s research facility at Princeton. Indeed, in 334 formal trials Jahn and Dunne found that volunteers were able to come up with accurate precognitive information 62 percent of the time.²⁴

Even more dramatic are the results of the so-called “chair tests,” a famous series of experiments devised by Croiset. First, the experimenter would randomly select a chair from the seating plan for an upcoming public event in a large hall or auditorium. The hall could be located in any city in the world and only events that did not have reserved seating qualified. Then, without telling Croiset the name or location of the hall, or the nature of the event, the experimenter would ask the Dutch psychic to describe who would be sitting in the seat during the evening in question.

Over the course of a twenty-five-year period, numerous investigators in both Europe and America put Croiset through the rigors of the chair test and found that he was almost always capable of giving an accurate and detailed description of the person who would be sitting in the chair, including describing their gender, facial features, dress, occupation, and even incidents from their past.

For instance, on January 6, 1969, in a study conducted by Dr. Jule Eisenbud, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical School, Croiset was told that a chair had been chosen for an event that would take place on January 23,1969.

Croiset, who was in Utrecht, Holland, at the time, told Eisenbud that the person who would sit in the chair would be a man five feet nine inches in height who brushed his black hair straight back, had a gold tooth in his lower jaw, a scar on his big toe, who worked in both science and industry, and sometimes got his lab coat stained by a greenish chemical.

On January 23,1969, the man who sat down in the chair, which was in an auditorium in Denver, Colorado, fit Croiset’s description in every way but one.

He was not five feet nine, but five feet nine and three-quarters.²⁵

The list goes on and on.
 

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...almost universally stress how important dreaming is in divining the future.

Even our most ancient writings pay homage to the premonitory power of dreams, as is evidenced in the biblical account of Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat and seven lean cows. The antiquity of such traditions indicates that the tendency of premonitions to occur in dreams is due to more than just our current skeptical attitude toward precognition.

The proximity the unconscious mind has to the atemporal realm of the implicate may also play a role. Because our dreaming self is deeper in the psyche than our conscious self - and thus closer to the primal ocean in which past, present, and future become one - it may be easier for it to access information about the future.

Whatever the reason, it should come as no surprise that other methods for accessing the unconscious can also produce precognitive information. For example, in the 1960s Karlis Osis and hypnotist J. Fahler found that hypnotized subjects scored significantly higher on precognition tests than non-hypnotized subjects.³⁸ Other studies have also confirmed the ESP-enhancing effects of hypnosis.³⁷

However, no amount of dry statistical data has the impact of an example from real life. In his book The Future Is Now: The Significance of Precognition, Arthur Osborn records the results of a hypnosis-precognition experiment involving the French actress Irene Muza.

After being hypnotized and asked if she could see her future, Muza replied,

“My career will be short: I dare not say what my end will be: it will be terrible.”

Startled, the experimenters decided not to tell Muza what she had reported and gave her a posthypnotic suggestion to forget everything she had said. When she awakened from her trance she had no memory of what she had predicted for herself. Even if she had known, it would not have caused the type of death she suffered. A few months later her hairdresser accidentally spilled some mineral spirits on a lighted stove, causing Muza’s hair and clothing to be set on fire.

Within seconds she was engulfed in flames and died in a hospital a few hours later.³⁸

Hololeaps of Faith

The events that befell Irene Muza raise an important question.

If Muza had known about the fate she had predicted for herself, would she have been able to avoid it? Put another way, is the future frozen and completely predetermined, or can it be changed? At first blush, the existence of precognitive phenomena seems to indicate that the former is the case, but this would be a very disturbing state of affairs.

If the future is a hologram whose every detail is already fixed, it means that we have no free will. We are all just puppets of destiny moving mindlessly through a script that has already been written.

Fortunately the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that this is not the case. The literature is filled with examples of people who were able to use their precognitive glimpses of the future to avoid disasters, instances in which individuals correctly foresaw the crash of a plane and avoided death by not getting on, or had a vision of their children being drowned in a flood and moved them out of harm’s way just in the nick of time.

There are nineteen documented cases of people who had precognitive glimpses of the sinking of the Titanic - some were experienced by passengers who paid attention to their premonitions and survived, some were experienced by passengers who ignored their forebodings and drowned, and some were experienced by individuals who were not in either of these two categories.³⁹

Such incidents strongly suggest that the future is not set, but is plastic and can be changed. But this view also brings with it a problem. If the future is still in a state of flux, what is Croiset tapping into when he describes the individual who will sit down in a particular chair seventeen days hence? How can the future both exist and not exist?

Loye provides a possible answer. He believes that reality is a giant hologram, and in it the past, present, and future are indeed fixed, at least up to a point The rub is that it is not the only hologram.

There are many such holographic entities floating in the timeless and spaceless waters of the implicate, jostling and swimming around one another like so many amoebas.

“Such holographic entities could also be visualized as parallel worlds, parallel universes,” says Loye.

Thus, the future of any given holographic universe is predetermined, and when a person has a precognitive glimpse of the future, they are tuning into the future of that particular hologram only.

But like amoebas, these holograms also occasionally swallow and engulf each other, melding and bifurcating like the protoplasmic globs of energy that they really are.

Sometimes these jostlings jolt us and are responsible for the premonitions that from time to time engulf us. And when we act upon a premonition and appear to alter the future, what We are really doing is leaping from one hologram to another. Loye calls these intra holographic leaps “hololeaps” and feels that they are what provides us with our true capacity for both insight and freedom.⁴⁰

Bohm sums up the same situation in a slightly different manner.

“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it.

 

Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say that, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present. As they used to say, coming events cast their shadows in the present Their shadows are being cast deep in the implicate order.”⁴¹

Bohm’s and Loye’s descriptions seem to be two different ways of trying to express the same thing - a view of the future as a hologram that is substantive enough for us to perceive it, but malleable enough to be susceptible to change.

Others have used still different words to sum up what appears to be the same basic thought. Cordero describes the future as a hurricane that is beginning to form and gather momentum, becoming more concrete and unavoidable as it approaches.⁴²

Ingo Swann, a gifted psychic who has produced impressive results in various studies, including Puthoff and Targ’s remote-vie wing research, speaks of the future as composed of “crystallizing possibilities.”⁴³ The Hawaiian kahunas, widely esteemed for their precognitive powers, also speak of the future as fluid, but in the process of “crystallizing,” and believe that great world events are crystallized furthest in advance, as are the most important events in a person’s life, such as marriage, accidents, and death.⁴⁴

The numerous premonitions that are now known to have preceded both the Kennedy assassination and the Civil War (even George Washington had a precognitive vision of a future civil war somehow involving “Africa,” the issue that all men are “brethren,” and the word Union⁴⁵) seem to corroborate this kahuna belief.

Loye’s notion that there are many separate holographic futures and we choose which events are going to manifest and which are not by leaping from one hologram to another carries with it another implication. Choosing one holographic future over another is essentially the same as creating the future. As we have seen, there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that consciousness plays a significant role in creating the here and now.

But if the mind can stray beyond the boundaries of the present and occasionally stalk the misty landscape of the future, do we have a hand in creating future events as well? Put another way, are the vagaries of life truly random, or do we play a role in literally sculpting our own destiny?

Remarkably, there is some intriguing evidence that the latter may be the case.

The Shadowy Stuff of the Soul

Dr. Joel Whitton, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto Medical School, has also used hypnosis to study what people unconsciously know about themselves.

However, instead of asking them about their future, Whitton, who is an expert in clinical hypnosis and also holds a degree in neurobiology, asks them about their past, their distant past to be exact. For the last several decades Whitton has quietly and without fanfare been gathering evidence suggestive of reincarnation.

Reincarnation is a difficult subject, for so much silliness has been presented about it that many people dismiss it out of hand. Most do not realize that in addition to (and one might even say in spite of) the sensational claims of celebrities and the stories of reincarnated Cleopatras that garner most of the media attention, there is a good deal of serious research being done on reincarnation.

In the last several decades a small but growing number of highly credentialed researchers has compiled an impressive body of evidence on the subject Whitton is one of these researchers.

The evidence does not prove that reincarnation exists, nor is it the intention of this book to make such an argument. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what might constitute perfect proof of reincarnation. Rather, the findings that will be touched upon here are offered only as intriguing possibilities and because they are relevant to our current discussion. Thus, they deserve our open-minded consideration.

The main thrust of Whitton’s hypnosis research is based on a simple and startling fact. When individuals are hypnotized, they often remember what appear to be memories of previous existences. Studies nave shown that over 90 percent of all hypnotizable individuals are able to recall these apparent memories.⁴⁶ The phenomenon is widely recognized, even by skeptics.

For example, the psychiatry textbook Trauma, Trance and Transformation warns fledgling hypnotherapists not to be surprised if such memories surface spontaneously in their hypnotized patients. The author of the text rejects the idea of rebirth but does note that such memories can have remarkable healing
potential nonetheless.⁴⁷

The meaning of this phenomenon is, of course, hotly debated. Many researchers argue that such memories are fantasies or fabrications of the unconscious mind, and there is no doubt that this is sometimes the case, especially if the hypnotic session or “regression” is conducted by an unskilled hypnotist who does not know the proper questioning techniques required to safeguard against eliciting fantasies.

But there are also numerous cases on record in which individuals have, under the guidance of skilled professionals, produced memories that do not appear to be fantasies. The evidence assembled by Whitton falls into this category.

To conduct his research, Whitton gathered together a core group of roughly thirty people. These included individuals from all walks of life, from truck drivers to computer scientists, some of whom believed in reincarnation and some of whom did not. He then hypnotized them individually and spent literally thousands of hours recording everything they had to say about their alleged previous existences.

Even in its broad strokes the information was fascinating. One striking aspect was the degree of agreement between the subjects’ experiences. All reported numerous past lives, some as many as twenty to twenty-five, although a practical limit was reached when Whitton regressed them to what he calls their “caveman existences,” when one lifetime became indistinguishable from the next.⁴⁸

All reported that gender was not specific to the soul, and many had lived at least one life as the opposite sex. And all reported that the purpose of life was to evolve and learn, and that multiple existences facilitated this process.

Whitton also found evidence that strongly suggested the experiences were actual past lives. One unusual feature was the ability the memories had to explain a wide range of seemingly unrelated events and experiences in the subjects’ current lives. For example, one man, a psychologist born and raised in Canada, had possessed an inexplicable British accent as a child.

He also had an irrational fear of breaking his leg, a phobia of air travel, a terrible nail-biting problem, an obsessive fascination with torture, and as a teenager had had a brief and enigmatic vision of being in a room with a Nazi officer, shortly after operating the pedals of a car during a driving test.

Under hypnosis the man recalled being a British pilot during World War II. While on a mission over Germany his plane was hit by a shower of bullets, one 0f which penetrated the fuselage and broke his leg. This in turn caused him to lose control of the plane’s foot pedals, forcing him to crash-land. He was subsequently captured by the Nazis, tortured for information by having his nails pulled out, and died a short time later.⁴⁹

Many of the subjects also experienced profound psychological and physical healings as a result of the traumatic past-life memories they unearthed, and gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in which they had lived. Some even spoke languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a thirty-seven-year-old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linguistic authorities later identified as Old Norse.⁵⁰

After being regressed to an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery, Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct Mesopotamian tongue that nourished between A.D. 226 and 651.⁵¹

But Whitton’s most remarkable discovery came when he regressed subjects to the interim between lives, a dazzling, light-filled realm in which there was “no such thing as time or space as we know it.”⁵²

According to his subjects, part of the purpose of this realm was to allow them to plan their next life, to literally sketch out the important events and circumstances that would befall them in the future. But this process was not simply some fairy-tale exercise in wish fulfillment. Whitton found that when individuals were in the between-life realm, they entered an unusual state of consciousness in which they were acutely self-aware and had a heightened moral and ethical sense.

In addition, they no longer possessed the ability to rationalize away any of their faults and misdeeds, and saw themselves with total honesty. To distinguish it from our normal everyday consciousness, Whitton calls this intensely conscientious state of mind “metaconciousness.”

Thus, when subjects planned their next life, they did so with a sense of moral obligation. They would choose to be reborn with people whom they had wronged in a previous life so they would have the opportunity to make amends for their actions. They planned pleasant encounters with “soul mates,” individuals with whom they had built a loving and mutually beneficial relationship over many lifetimes; and they scheduled “accidental” events to fulfill still other lessons and purposes.

One man said that as he planned his next life he visualized “a sort of clockwork instrument into which you could insert certain parts in order for specific consequences to follow,”⁵³

These consequences were not always pleasant. After being regressed to a metaconscious state, a woman who had been raped when she was thirty-seven revealed that she had actually planned the event before she had come into this incarnation. As she explained, it had been necessary for her to experience a tragedy at that age in order to force her to change her “entire soul complexion” and thus break through to a deeper and more positive understanding of the meaning of life.⁵⁴

Another subject, a man afflicted with a serious and life-threatening kidney disease, disclosed that he had chosen the illness to punish himself for a past-life transgression.

However, he also revealed that dying from the kidney disease was not part of his script, and before he had come into this life he had also arranged to encounter someone or something that would help him remember this fact and hence enable him to heal both his guilt and his body. True to his word, after he started his sessions with Whitton he experienced a near-miraculous complete recovery.⁵⁵

Not all of Whitton’s subjects were so eager to learn about the future their metaconscious selves had laid out for them. Several censored their own memories and asked Whitton to please give them posthypnotic instructions not to remember anything that they had said during trance. As they explained, they did not want to be tempted to tamper with the script their metaconscious selves had written for them.⁵⁶

This is an astounding idea. Is it possible that our unconscious mind is not only aware of the rough outline of our destiny, but actually steers us toward its fulfillment? Whitton’s research is not the only evidence that this may be the case. In a statistical study of 28 serious U.S. railroad accidents, parapsychologist William Cox found that significantly fewer people took trains on accident days than on the same day in previous weeks.⁵⁷

Cox’s finding suggests that we all may be constantly unconsciously precognizing the future and making decisions based on that information: some of us opting to avoid mishap, and perhaps some-like the woman who chose to experience a personal tragedy and the man who elected to endure a kidney disease - choosing to experience negative situations to fulfill other unconscious designs and purposes.

“Carefully or haphazardly, we choose our earthly circumstances,” says Whitton.

 

“The message of metaconsciousness is that the life situation of every human being is neither random nor inappropriate. Seen objectively from the interlife, every human experience is simply another lesson in the cosmic classroom.”⁵⁸

It is important to note that the existence of such unconscious agendas does not mean that our lives are rigidly predestined and all fates unavoidable.

The fact that many of Whitton’s subjects asked not to remember what they said under hypnosis implies again that the future is only roughly outlined and still subject to change.

Whitton is not the only reincarnation researcher who has uncovered evidence that our unconscious has more of a hand in our lives than we may realize. Another is Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School. Instead of using hypnosis Stevenson interviews young children who have spontaneously remembered apparent previous existences.

He has spent more than thirty years in this pursuit and has collected and analyzed thousands of cases from all over the globe.

According to Stevenson, spontaneous past-life recall is relatively-common among children, so common that the number of cases that seem worth considering far exceeds his staff’s ability to investigate them.

Generally children are between the ages of two and four when they start talking about their “other life,” and frequently they remember dozens of particulars, including their name, the names of family members and friends, where they lived, what their house looked like, what they did for a living, how they died, and even obscure information such as where they hid money before they died and, in cases involving murder, sometimes even who killed them.⁵⁹

Indeed, frequently their memories are so detailed Stevenson is able to track down the identity of their previous personality and verify virtually everything they have said. He has even taken children to the area in which their past incarnation lived, and watched as they navigated effortlessly through strange neighborhoods and correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends.

Like Whitton, Stevenson has gathered an enormous amount of data suggestive of reincarnation, and to date has published six volumes on his findings.⁶⁰ And like Whitton, he also has found evidence that the unconscious plays a far greater role in our makeup and destiny than we have hitherto suspected.

He has corroborated Whitton’s finding that we are frequently reborn with individuals we have known in previous existences, and that the guiding force behind our choices is often affection or a sense of guilt or indebtedness.⁶¹

He agrees that personal responsibility, not chance, is the arbiter of our fate. He has found that although a person’s material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the next, their moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same. Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be drawn to criminal behavior again; people who were generous and kind continue to be generous and kind, and so on. From this Stevenson concludes that it is not the outward trappings of life that matter, but the inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and “inner growths” of the personality, that appear to be most important

Most significant of all, he found no compelling evidence of “retributive karma,” or any indication that we are cosmically punished for our sins.

“There is then - if we judge by the evidence of the cases - no external judge of our conduct and no being who shifts us from life to life according to our deserts. If this world is (in Keats’s phrase) ‘a vale of soul-making,’ we are the makers of our own souls,” states Stevenson.⁶²

Stevenson has also uncovered a phenomenon that did not turn up in Whitton’s study, a discovery that provides even more dramatic evidence of the power the unconscious mind has to sculpt and influence our life circumstances.

He has found that a person’s previous incarnation can apparently affect the very shape and structure of their current physical body. He has discovered, for example, that Burmese children who remember previous lives as British or American Air Force pilots shot down over Burma during World War II all have fairer hair and complexions than their siblings.⁶³

He has also found instances in which distinctive facial features, foot deformities, and other characteristics have carried over from one life to the next.⁶⁴ Most numerous among these are physical injuries carrying over as scars or birthmarks. In one case, a boy who remembered being murdered in his former life by having his throat slit still had a long reddish mark resembling a scar across his neck.⁶⁵

In another, a boy who remembered committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in his past incarnation still had two scarlike birthmarks that lined up perfectly along the bullet’s trajectory, one where the bullet had entered and one where it had exited.⁶⁶

And in another, a boy had a birthmark resembling a surgical scar complete with a line of red marks resembling stitch wounds, in the exact location where his previous personality had had surgery.⁶⁷

In fact, Stevenson has gathered hundreds of such cases and is currently compiling a four-volume study of the phenomenon. In some of the cases he has even been able to obtain hospital and/or autopsy reports of the deceased personality and show that such injuries not only occurred, but were in the exact location of the present birthmark of deformity.

He feels that such marks not only provide some of the strongest evidence in favor of reincarnation, but also suggest the existence of some kind of intermediate nonphysical body that functions as a carrier of these attributes between one life and the next

He states,

“It seems to me that the imprint of wounds on the previous personality must be carried between lives on some kind of an extended body which in turn acts as a template for the production on a new physical body of birthmarks and deformities that correspond to the wounds on the body of the previous personality." ⁶⁸

Stevenson’s theorized “template body” echoes Tiller’s assertion that the human energy field is a holographic template that guides the form and structure of the physical body.

Put another way, it is a kind of three-dimensional blueprint around which the physical body forms. Similarly, his findings regarding birthmarks add further support to the idea that we are at heart just images, holographic constructs, created by thought.

Stevenson has also noted that although his research suggests that we are the creators of our own lives and, to a certain extent, our own bodies, our participation in this process is so passive as to be almost involuntary. Deep strata of the psyche appear to be involved in these choices, strata that are much more in touch with the implicate.

Or as Stevenson puts it,

“Levels of mental activity far deeper than those that regulate the digestion of our supper in our stomach [and] our ordinary breathing must govern these processes.”⁶⁹

As unorthodox as many of Stevenson’s conclusions are, his reputation as a careful and thorough investigator has gained him respect in some unlikely quarters.

His findings have been published in such distinguished scientific periodicals as the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

And in a review of one of his works the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association stated that he has,

“painstakingly and unemotionally collected a tailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on any other grounds. ... He has placed on ‘Word a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”⁷⁰

Thought as Builder

As with so many of the “discoveries” we have looked at, the idea that some deeply unconscious and even spiritual part of us can reach across the boundaries of time and is responsible for our destiny can also be found in many shamanic traditions and other sources.

According to the Batak people of Indonesia, everything a person experiences is determined by his or her soul, or tondi, which reincarnates from one body to the next and is a medium capable of reproducing not only the behavior, but the physical attributes of the person’s former self.⁷¹

The Ojibway Indians also believed a person’s life is scripted by an invisible spirit or soul and is laid out in a manner that promotes growth and development. If a person dies without completing all the lessons they need to learn, their spirit body returns and is reborn in another physical body.⁷²

The kahunas call this invisible aspect the aumakua, or “high self.”

Like Whitton’s metaconsciousness, it is the unconscious portion of a person that can see the parts of the future that are crystallized, or “set.” It is also the part of us that is responsible for creating our destiny, but it is not alone in this process. Like many of the researchers mentioned in this book, the kahunas believed that thoughts are things and are composed of a subtle energetic substance they called kino mea, or “shadowy body stuff.”

Hence, our hopes, fears, plans, worries, guilts, dreams, and imaginings do not vanish after leaving our mind, but are turned into thought forms, and these, too, become some of the rough strands from which the high self weaves our future.

Most people are not in charge of their own thoughts, said the kahunas, and constantly bombard their high self with an uncontrolled and contradictory mixture of plans, wishes, and fears. This confuses the high self and is why most people’s lives appear to be equally haphazard and uncontrolled. Powerful kahunas who were in open communication with their high selves were said to be able to help a person remake his or her future.

Similarly, it was considered extremely important that people take time out at frequent intervals to think about their lives and visualize in concrete terms what they wished to happen to themselves. By doing this the kahunas asserted that people can more consciously control the events that befall them and make their own future.⁷³

In an idea that is reminiscent of Tiller and Stevenson’s notion of a subtle intermediary body, the kahunas believed this shadowy body stuff also forms a template upon which the physical body is molded. Again it was said that kahunas who were in extraordinary attunement with their high self could sculpt and reform the shadowy body stuff, and hence the physical body, of another person and this was how miraculous healings were effected.⁷⁴ This view also provides an interesting parallel to some of our own conclusions as to why thoughts and images have such a powerful impact on health.

The tantric mystics of Tibet referred to the “stuff” of thoughts as tsal and held that every mental action produced waves of this mysterious energy. They believed the entire universe is a product of the mind and is created and animated by the collective tsal of all beings. Most people are unaware that they possess this power, said the Tantrists, because the average human mind functions “like a small puddle isolated from the great ocean.”

Only great yogis skilled at contacting the deeper levels of the mind were said to be able consciously to utilize such forces, and one of the things they did to achieve this goal was to visualize repeatedly the desired creation.

Tibetan tantric texts are filled with visualization exercises, or “sadhanas,” designed for such purposes, and monks of some sects, such as the Kargyupa, would spend as long as seven years in complete solitude, in a cave or a sealed room, perfecting their visualization abilities.⁷⁵

The twelfth-century Persian Sufis also stressed the importance of visualization in altering and reshaping one’s destiny, and called the subtle matter of thought alam almithal. Like many clairvoyants, they believed that human beings possess a subtle body controlled by chakra-like energy centers.

They also held that reality is divided into a series of subtler planes of being, or Hadarat, and that the plane of being directly adjacent to this one was a kind of template reality in which the alam almithal of one’s thoughts formed into idea-images, which in turn eventually determined the course of one’s life. The Sufis also added a twist of their own.

They felt the heart chakra, or himma, was the agent responsible for this process, and that control of the heart chakra was therefore a prerequisite for controlling one’s des tiny.⁷⁶

Edgar Cayce also spoke of thoughts as tangible things, a finer form of matter and, when he was in trance, repeatedly told his clients that their thoughts created their destiny and that “thought is the builder.”

n has view, the thinking process is like a spider constantly spinning, constantly adding to its web. Every moment of our lives we are creating the images and patterns that give our future energy and shape, said Cayce.⁷⁷

Paramahansa Yogananda advised people to visualize the future they desired for themselves and charge it with the “energy of concentration.”

As he put it,

“Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material realm.”⁷⁸

Indeed, such ideas can be found in a wide range of disparate sources.

“We are what we think,” said the Buddha. “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”⁷⁹

 

“As a man acts, so does he become. As a man’s desire is, so is his destiny,” states the Hindu pre-Christian Erihadaranyaka Upani-shad.⁸⁰

 

“All things in the world of Nature are not controlled by Fate for the soul has a principle of its own,” said the fourth-century Greek philosopher lamblicbus.⁸¹

 

“Ask and it will be given you If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible unto you,” states the Bible.⁸²

 

And, “The destiny of a person is connected with those things he himself creates and does,” wrote Rabbi Steinsaltz in the kabbalistic Thirteen-Petaled Rose.⁸³

An Indication of Something Deeper

Even today the idea that our thoughts create our destiny is still very much in the air.

It is the subject of best-selling self-help books such as Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization and Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. Hay, who says she cured herself of cancer by changing her mental patterning, gives hugely successful workshops on her techniques. It is the main philosophy inherent in many popular “channeled” works such as A Course in Miracles and Jane Roberts’s Seth books.

It is also being embraced by some eminent psychologists. Jean Houston, a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and current Director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, discusses the idea at length in her book The Possible Human. Houston also gives a variety of visualization exercises in the work and even calls one “Orchestrating the Brain and Entering the Holoverse.”⁸⁴

Another book that draws heavily on the holographic mode) to support the idea that we can use visualization to reshape our future is Mary Orser and Richard A. Zarro’s Changing Your Destiny.

In addition, Zarro is the founder of Future-shaping Technologies, a company that gives seminars on “futureshaping” techniques to businesses, and numbers both Panasonic and the International Banking and Credit Association among its clients.⁸⁵

Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon and a longtime explorer of inner as well as outer space, has taken a similar tack. In 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a California-based organization devoted to researching such powers of the mind.

The institute is still going strong, and current projects include a massive study of the mind’s role in miraculous healings and spontaneous remissions, and a study of the role consciousness plays in creating a positive global future.

 “We create our own reality because our inner emotional - our subconscious - reality draws us into those situations from which we learn,” states Mitchell. “We experience it as strange things happening to us [and] we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level.”⁸⁶

Is the current popularity of the idea that we create our own destiny’ just a fad, or is its presence in so many different cultures and times an indication of something much deeper, a sign that it is something all human beings intuitively know is true?

At present this question remains unanswered, but in a holographic universe - a universe in which the mind participates with reality and in which the innermost stuff of our psyches can register as synchronicities in the objective world - the notion that we are also the sculptors of our own fate is not so farfetched. It even seems probable.

Three Last Pieces of Evidence

Before concluding, three last pieces of evidence deserve to be looked at. Although not conclusive, each offers a peek at still other time-transcending abilities consciousness may possess in a holographic universe.
 

Mass Drean of The Future
Another past-life researcher who turned up evidence suggestive that the mind has a hand in creating one’s destiny was the late San Francisco-based psychologist Dr. Helen Wambach.

Wambach’s approach was to hypnotize groups of people in small workshops, regress them to specified time periods, and ask them a predetermined list of questions about their sex, clothing style, occupation, utensils used to eating, and so on. Over the course of her twenty-nine-year investigation of the past-life phenomenon, she hypnotized literally thousands of individuals and amassed some impressive findings.

One criticism leveled against reincarnation is that people only seem to remember past lives as famous or historical personages. Wambach, however, found that more than 90 percent of her subjects recalled past lives as peasants, laborers, farmers, and primitive food gatherers. Less than 10 percent remembered incarnations as aristocrats, and none remembered being anyone famous, a finding that argues against the notion that past-life memories are fantasies.⁸⁷

Her subjects were also extraordinarily accurate when it came to historical details, even obscure ones. For instance, when people remembered lives in the 1700s, they described using a three-pronged fork to eat their evening meals, but after 1790 they described most forks as having four prongs, an observation that correctly reflects the historical evolution of the fork. Subjects were equally accurate when it came to describing clothing and footwear, types of foods eaten, et cetera.⁸⁸
 

Wambach discovered she could also progress people to future lives. Indeed, her subjects’ descriptions of coming centuries were so fascinating she conducted a major future-life-progression project in France and the United States. Unfortunately, she passed away before completing the study, but psychologist Chet Snow, a former colleague of Wambach’s, carried on her work and recently published the results in a book entitled Mass Dreams of the Future.

When the reports of the 2,500 people who participated in the project were tallied, several interesting features emerged. First, virtually all of the respondents agreed that the population of the earth had decreased dramatically. Many did not even find themselves in physical bodies in the various future time periods specified, and those who did noted that the population was much smaller than it is today.

In addition, the respondents divided up neatly into four categories, each relating a different future. One group described a joyless and sterile future in which most people lived in space stations, wore silvery suits, and ate synthetic food. Another, the “New Agers,” reported living happier and more natural lives in natural settings, in harmony with one another, and in dedication to learning and spiritual development.

Type 3, the “hi-tech urbanites,” described a bleak mechanical future in which people lived in underground cities and cities enclosed in domes and bubbles. Type 4 described themselves as post-disaster survivors living in a world that had been ravaged by some global, possibly nuclear, disaster. People in this group lived in homes ranging from urban ruins to caves to isolated farms, wore plain hand-sewn clothing that was often made of fur, and obtained much of their food by hunting.

What is the explanation?

Snow turns to the holographic model for the answer, and like Loye, believes that such findings suggest that there are several potential futures, or holoverses, forming in the gathering mists of fate. But like other past-life researchers he also believes we create our own destiny, both individually and collectively, and thus the four scenarios are really a glimpse into the various potential futures the human race is creating for itself en masse.

Consequently, Snow recommends that instead of building bomb shelters or moving to areas that won’t be destroyed by the “coming Earth changes” predicted by some psychics, we should spend time believing in and visualizing a positive future.

He cites the Planetary Commission - the ad hoc collection of millions of individuals around the world who have agreed to spend the hour of 12:00 to 1:00 P.M., Greenwich mean time, each December thirty-first united in prayer and meditation on world peace and healing - as a step in the right direction.

“If we are continually shaping our future physical reality by today’s collective thoughts and actions, then the time to wake up to the alternative we have created is now,” states Snow. “The choices between the kind of Earth represented by each of the Types are clear. Which do we want for our grandchildren? Which do we want perhaps to return to ourselves someday?”⁸⁹

Changing the Past

The future may not be the only thing that can be formed and reshaped by human thought.

At the 1988 Annual Convention of the Parapsychology Association, Helmut Schmidt and Marilyn Schlitz announced that several experiments they had conducted indicated the mind may be able to alter the past as well. In one study Schmidt and Schlitz used a computerized randomization process to record 1,000 different sequences of sound.

Each sequence consisted of 100 tones of varying duration, some of them pleasing to the ear and some just bursts of noise. Because the selection process was random, according to the laws of probability each sequence should contain roughly 50 percent pleasing sounds and 50 percent noise.

Cassette recordings of the sequences were then mailed to volunteers. While listening to the prerecorded cassettes the subjects were told to try to psychokinetically increase the duration of the pleasing sounds and decrease the durations of the noise. After the subjects completed the task, they notified the lab of their attempts, and Schmidt and Schlitz then examined the original sequences.

They discovered that the recordings the subjects listened to contained significantly longer stretches of pleasing sounds than noise. In other words, it appeared that the subjects had psychokinetically reached back through time and had an effect on the randomized process from which their prerecorded cassettes had been made.

In another test Schmidt and Schlitz programmed the computer to produce 100-tone sequences randomly composed of four different notes, and subjects were instructed to try to psychokinetically cause more high notes to appear on the tapes than low. Again a retroactive PK effect was found. Schmidt and Schlitz also discovered that volunteers who meditated regularly exerted a greater PK effect than non-meditators, suggesting again that contact with the unconscious is the key to accessing the reality-structuring portions of the psyche.⁹⁰

The idea that we can psychokinetically alter events that have already occurred is an unsettling notion, for we are so deeply programmed to believe the past is frozen as if it were a butterfly in glass, it is difficult for us to imagine otherwise.

But in a holographic universe, a universe in which time is an illusion and reality is no more than a mind-created image, it is a possibility to which we may have to become accustomed.

A Walk through the Garden of Time

As fantastic as the above two notions are, they are small change compared to the last category of time anomaly that merits our attention.

On August 10, 1901, two Oxford professors, Anne Moberly, the principal of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain, the vice principal, were walking through the garden of the Petit Trianon at Versailles when they saw a shimmering effect pass over the landscape in front of them, not unlike the special effects in a movie when it changes from one scene to another.

After the shimmering passed they noticed that the landscape had changed. Suddenly the people around them were wearing eighteenth-century costumes and wigs and were behaving in an agitated manner. As the two women stood dumbfounded, a repulsive man with a pockmarked face approached and urged them to change their direction. They followed him past a line of trees to a garden where they heard strains of music floating through the air and saw an aristocratic lady painting a watercolor.

Eventually the vision vanished and the landscape returned to normal, but the transformation had been so dramatic that when the women looked behind them they realized the path they had just walked down was now blocked by an old stone wall.

When they returned to England, they searched through historical records and concluded that they had been transported back in time to the day in which the sacking of the Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss Guards had taken place - which accounted for the agitated manner of the people in the garden - and that the woman in the garden was none other than Marie Antoinette.

So vivid was the experience that the women filled a book-length manuscript about the occurrence and presented it to the British Society for Psychical Research.⁹¹

What makes Moberly and Jourdain’s experience so significant is that they did not simply have a retrocognitive vision of the past, but actually walked back into the past, meeting people and wandering around in the Tuileries garden as it was more than one hundred years earlier. Moberly and Jourdain’s experience is difficult to accept as real, hut given that it provided them with no obvious benefit, and most certainly put their academic reputations at risk, one is hard pressed to imagine what would motivate them to make up such a story.

And it is not the only such occurrence at the Tuileries to be reported to the British Society for Psychical Research. In May 1955, a London solicitor and his wife also encountered several eighteenth-century figures in the garden. And on another occasion, the staff of an embassy whose offices overlook Versailles claims to have watched the garden revert back to an earlier period of history as well.⁹²

Here in the United States parapsychologist Gardner Murphy, a former president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Society for “sychical Research, investigated a similar case in which a woman identified only by the name Buterbaugh looked out the window of her office at Nebraska Wesleyan University and saw the campus as it was fifty years earlier.

Gone were the bustling streets and the sorority houses, and in their place was an open field and a sprinkling of trees, their leaves aflutter in the breeze of a summer long since passed.⁹³

Is the boundary between the present and the past so flimsy that we can, under the right circumstances, stroll back into the past with the same ease that we can stroll through a garden? At present we simply do not know, but in a world that is comprised less of solid objects traveling in space and time, and more of ghostly holograms of energy sustained by processes that are at least partially connected to human consciousness, such events may not be as impossible as they appear.

And if this seems disturbing - this idea that our minds and even our bodies are far less bound by the strictures of time than we have previously imagined - we should remember that the idea the Earth is round once proved equally frightening to a humanity convinced that it was flat.

The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that we are still children when it comes to understanding the true nature of time. And like all children poised on the threshold of adulthood, we should put aside our fears and come to terms with the way the world really is. For in a holographic universe, a universe in which all things are just ghostly coruscations of energy, more than just our understanding of time must change.

There are still other shimmerings to cross our landscape, still deeper depths to plumb.

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