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8 - Traveling in the
Superhologram
Access to holographic reality
becomes experientially available when one’s consciousness is
freed from its dependence on the physical body. So long as
one remains tied to the body and its sensory modalities,
holographic reality at best can only be an intellectual
construct. When one [is freed from the body] one experiences
it directly. That is why mystics speak about their visions
with such certitude and conviction, while those who haven’t
experienced this realm for themselves are left feeling
skeptical or even indifferent.
• Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.
Life at Death
Time is not the only thing that is
illusory in a holographic universe. Space, too, must be viewed as a
product of our mode of perception. This is even more difficult to
comprehend than the idea that time is a construct, for when it comes
to trying to conceptualize “spacelessness” there are no easy
analogies, no images of amoeboid universes or crystallizing futures,
to fall back on. We are so conditioned to think in terms of space as
an absolute that it is hard for us even to begin to imagine what it
would be like to exist in a realm in which space did not exist.
Nonetheless, there is evidence that we
are ultimately no more bound by space than we are by time.
One powerful indication that this is so can be found in out-of-body
phenomena, experiences in which an individual’s conscious awareness
appears to detach itself from the physical body and travel to some
other location. Out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, have been reported
throughout history by individuals from all walks of life.
Aldous Huxley, Goethe, D. H. Lawrence,
August Strindberg, and Jack London all reported having OBEs.
They were known to the Egyptians, the
North American Indians, the Chinese, the Greek philosophers, the
medieval alchemists, the Oceanic peoples, the Hindus, the Hebrews,
and the Moslems. In a cross-cultural study of 44 non-Western
societies, Dean Shiels found that only three did not hold a belief
in OBEs.1
In a similar study anthropologist Erika
Bourguignon looked at 488 world societies—or roughly 57 percent of
all known societies—and found that 437 of them, or 89 percent, had
at least some tradition regarding OBEs.2
Even today studies indicate that OBEs are still widespread. The late
Dr. Robert Crookall, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen and
an amateur parapsychologist, investigated enough cases to fill nine
books on the subject. In the 1960s Celia Green, the director of the
Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford, polled 115 students
at Southampton University and found that 19 percent admitted to
having an OBE. When 380 Oxford students were similarly questioned,
34 percent answered in the affirmative.3
In a survey of 902 adults Haralds-son
found that 8 percent had experienced being out of their bodies at
least once in their life. And a 1980 survey conducted by Dr. Harvey
Irwin at the University of New England in Australia revealed that 20
percent of 177 students had experienced an 0BE.4
When averaged, these figures indicate
that roughly one out of every five people will have an OBE at some
point in his or her life. Other studies suggest the incidence may be
closer to one in ten, but the fact remains: OBEs are far more common
than most people realize.
The typical OBE is usually spontaneous and occurs most often during
sleep, meditation, anesthesia, illness, and instances of traumatic
pain (although they can occur under other circumstances as well).
Suddenly a person experiences the vivid sensation that his mind has
separated from his body. Frequently he finds himself floating over
his body and discovers he can travel or fly to other locations. What
is it like to find oneself free from the physical and staring down
at one’s own body?
In a 1980 study of 339 cases of
out-of-body travel, Dr. Glen Gabbard of the Menninger Foundation in
Topeka, Dr. Stuart Twemlow of the Topeka Veterans’ Administration
Medical Center, and Dr. powler Jones of the University of Kansas
Medical Center found that a whopping 85 percent described the
experience as pleasant and over half of them said it was joyful.6
I know the feeling. I had a spontaneous OBE as a teenager, and after
recovering from the shock of finding myself floating over my body
and staring down at myself asleep in bed, I had an indescribably
exhilarating time flying through walls and soaring over the
treetops. During the course of my bodiless journey I even stumbled
across a library book a neighbor had lost and was able to tell her
where the book was located the next day. I describe this experience
in detail in Beyond the Quantum.
It is of no small significance that Gabbard, Twemlow, and Jones also
studied the psychological profile of OBEers and found that they were
psychologically normal and were on the whole extremely well
adjusted. At the 1980 meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association they presented their conclusions and told their
colleagues that reassurances that OBEs are common occurrences and
referring the patient to books on the subject may be “more
therapeutic” than psychiatric treatment.
They even hinted that patients might
gain more relief by talking to a yogi than to a psychiatrist!
7
Such facts notwithstanding, no amount of statistical findings are as
convincing as actual accounts of such experiences. For example,
Kimberiy Clark, a hospital social worker in Seattle, Washington, did
not take OBEs seriously until she encountered a coronary patient
named Maria. Several days after being admitted to the hospital Maria
had a cardiac arrest and was quickly revived. Clark visited her
later that afternoon expecting to find her anxious over the fact
that her heart had stopped. As she had expected, Maria was agitated,
but not for the reason she had anticipated.
Maria told Clark that she had experienced something very strange.
After her heart had stopped she suddenly found herself looking down
from the ceiling and watching the doctors and the nurses working on
her. Then something over the emergency room driveway distracted her
and as soon as she “thought herself there, she was there.
Next Maria “thought her way” up to the
third floor of the building and found herself “eyeball to shoelace”
with a tennis shoe. It was an old shoe and she noticed that the
little toe had worn a hole through the fabric.
She also noticed several other details,
such as the fact that the lace was stuck under the heel. After Maria
finished her account she begged Clark to please go to the ledge and
see if there was a shoe there so that she could confirm whether her
experience was real or not
Skeptical but intrigued, Clark went outside and looked up at the
ledge, but saw nothing. She went up to the third floor and began
going in and out of patients’ rooms looking through windows so
narrow she had to press her face against the glass just to see the
ledge at all. Finally, she found a room where she pressed her face
against the glass and looked down and saw the tennis shoe. Still,
from her vantage point she could not tell if the little toe had worn
a place in the shoe or if any of the other details Maria had
described were correct.
It wasn’t until she retrieved the shoe
that she confirmed Maria’s various observations.
“The only way she would have had
such a perspective was if she had been floating right outside
and at very close range to the tennis shoe,” states Clark, who
has since become a believer in OBEs. “It was very concrete
evidence for me.”8
Experiencing an OBE during cardiac
arrest is relatively common, so common that Michael B. Sabom, a
cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University and a
staff physician at the Atlanta Veterans’ Administration Medical
Center, got tired of hearing his patients recount such “fantasies”
and decided to settle the matter once and for all.
Sabom selected two groups of patients,
one composed of 32 seasoned cardiac patients who had reported OBEs
during their heart attacks, and one made up of 25 seasoned cardiac
patients who had never experienced an OBE. He then interviewed the
patients, asking the OBEers to describe their own resuscitation as
they had witnessed it from the out-of-body state, and asking the
nonexperiencers to describe what they imagined must have transpired
during their resuscitation.
Of the nonexperiencers, 20 made major mistakes when they described
their resuscitations, 3 gave correct but general descriptions, and 2
had no idea at all what had taken place.
Among the experiencers, 26 gave correct
but general descriptions, 6 gave highly detailed and accurate
descriptions of their own resuscitation, and 1 gave a blow-by-blow
accounting so accurate that Sabom was stunned. The results inspired
him to delve even deeper into the phenomenon, and like Clark, he has
now become an ardent believer and lectures widely on the subject.
There appears,
“to be no plausible explanation for
the accuracy of these observations involving the usual physical
senses,” he says- “The out-of-body hypothesis simply seems to
fit best with the data at hand.”9
Although the OBEs experienced by such
patients are spontaneous, some people have mastered the ability well
enough to leave their body at will- One of the most famous of these
individuals is a former radio and television executive named
Robert Monroe. When Monroe had his first OBE in the late 1950s
he thought he was going crazy and immediately sought medical
treatment. The doctors he consulted found nothing wrong, but he
continued to have his strange experiences and continued to be
greatly disturbed by them.
Finally, after learning from a
psychologist friend that Indian yogis reported leaving their bodies
all the time, he began to accept his uninvited talent.
“I had two options,” Monroe recalls.
“One was sedation for the rest of my life; the other was to
learn something about this state so I could control it.”10
From that day forward Monroe began
keeping a written journal of his experiences, carefully documenting
everything he learned about the out-of-body state.
He discovered he could pass through
solid objects and travel great distances in the twinkling of an eye
simply by “thinking” himself there. He found that other people were
seldom aware of his presence, although the friends whom he traveled
to see while in this “second state” quickly became believers when he
accurately described their dress and activity at the time of his
out-of-body visit. He also discovered that he was not alone in his
pursuit and occasionally bumped into other disembodied travelers.
Thus far he has catalogued his
experiences in two fascinating books, Journeys Out of the Body
and Far Journeys.
OBEs have also been documented in the lab. In one experiment,
parapsychologist Charles Tart was able to get a skilled OBEer he
identifies only as Miss Z to identify correctly a five-digit number
written on a piece of paper that could only be reached if she were
floating in the out-of-body state.13
In a series of experiments conducted at
the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, Karlis
Osis and psychologist Janet Lee Mitchell found several
gifted subjects who were able to “fly in” from various locations
around the country and correctly describe a wide range of target
images, including objects placed on a table, colored geometric
patterns placed on a free-floating shelf near the ceiling, and
optical illusions that could only be seen when an observer peered
through a small window in a special device.14
Dr. Robert Morris, the director of
research at the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham,
North Carolina, has even used animals to detect out-of-body
visitations.
In one experiment, for instance, Morris
found that a kitten belonging to a talented out-of-body subject
named Keith Harary consistently stopped meowing and started
purring whenever Harary was invisibly present.15
OBEs as a Holographic Phenomenon
Considered as a whole the evidence seems unequivocal. Although we
are taught that we “think” with our brains, this is not always true.
Under the right circumstances our consciousness—the thinking,
perceiving part of us—can detach from the physical body and exist
just about anywhere it wants to. Our current scientific
understanding cannot account for this phenomenon, but it becomes
much more tractable in terms of the holographic idea.
Remember that in a holographic universe, location is itself an
illusion. Just as an image of an apple has no specific location on a
piece of holographic film, in a universe that is organized
holographically things and objects also possess no definite
location; everything is ultimately nonlocal, including
consciousness. Thus, although our consciousness appears to be
localized in our heads, under certain conditions it can just as
easily appear to be localized in the upper corner of the room,
hovering over a grassy lawn, or floating eyeball-to-shoelace with a
tennis shoe on the third-floor ledge of a building.
If the idea of a nonlocal consciousness seems difficult to grasp, a
useful analogy can once again be found in dreaming. Imagine that you
are dreaming you are attending a crowded art exhibit. As you wander
among the people and gaze at the artworks, your consciousness
appears to be localized in the head of the person you are in the
dream.
But where is your consciousness really?
A quick analysis will reveal that it is
actually in everything in the dream, in the other people attending
the exhibit, in the artworks, even in the very space of the dream.
In a dream, location is also an illusion because everything— people,
objects, space, consciousness, and so on—is unfolding out of the
deeper and more fundamental reality of the dreamer.
Another strikingly holographic feature of the OBE is the plasticity
of the form a person assumes once they are out of the body. After
detaching from the physical, OBEers sometimes find themselves in a
ghostlike body that is an exact replica of their biological body.
This caused some researchers in the past to postulate that human
beings possess a “phantom double” not unlike the doppelganger of
literature.
However, recent findings have exposed problems with this assumption.
Although some OBEers describe this
phantom double as naked, others find themselves in bodies that are
fully clothed. This suggests that the phantom double is not a
permanent energy replica of the biological body, but is instead a
kind of hologram that can assume many shapes. This notion is borne
out by the fact that phantom doubles are not the only forms people
find themselves in during OBEs. There are numerous reports where
people have also perceived themselves as balls of light, shapeless
clouds of energy, and even no discernible form at all.
There is even evidence that the form a person assumes during an OBE
is a direct consequence of their beliefs and expectations. For
example, in his 1961 book The Mystical Life, mathematician J. H. M.
Whiteman revealed that he experienced at least two OBEs a month
during most of his adult life and recorded over two thousand such
incidents. He also disclosed that he always felt like a woman
trapped in a man’s body, and during separation this sometimes
resulted in his finding himself in female form.
Whiteman experienced various other forms
as well during his OB adventures, including children’s bodies, and
concluded that beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, were the
determining factors in the form this second body assumed.14
Monroe agrees and asserts that it is our “thought habits” that
create our OB forms. Because we are so habituated to being in a
body, we have a tendency to reproduce the same form in the OB state.
Similarly, he believes it is the
discomfort most people feel when they are naked that causes OBEers
to unconsciously sculpt clothing for themselves when they assume a
human form.
“I suspect that one may modify the
Second Body into whatever form is desired,” says Monroe.15
What is our true form, if any, when we
are in the disembodied state? Monroe has found that once we drop all
such disguises, we are at heart a “vibrational pattern [comprised]
of many interacting and resonating frequencies.”16
This finding is also remarkably
suggestive that something holographic is going on and offers further
evidence that we—like all things in a holographic universe—are
ultimately a frequency phenomenon which our mind converts into
various holographic forms. It also adds credence to Hunt’s
conclusion that our consciousness is contained, not in the brain,
but in a plasmic holographic energy field that both permeates and
surrounds the physical body.
The form we assume while in the OB state is not the only thing that
displays this holographic plasticity. Despite the accuracy of the
observations made by talented OB travelers during their disembodied
jaunts, researchers have long been troubled by some of the glaring
inaccuracies that crop up as well. For instance, the title of the
lost library book I stumbled across during my own OBE looked bright
green while I was in a disembodied state.
But after I was back in my physical body
and returned to retrieve the book I saw that the lettering was
actually black. The literature is filled with accounts of similar
discrepancies, instances in which OB travelers accurately described
a distant room full of people, save that they added an extra person
or perceived a couch where there was really a table.
In terms of the holographic idea, one explanation may be that such
OB travelers have not yet fully developed the ability to convert the
frequencies they perceive while in a disembodied state into a
completely accurate holographic representation of consensus reality.
In other words, since OBEers appear to be relying on a completely
new set of senses, these senses may still be wobbly and not yet
proficient at the art of converting the frequency domain into a
seemingly objective construct of reality.
These nonphysica! senses are further hampered by the constraints our
own self-limiting beliefs place upon them.
A number of talented OB travelers have
noted that once they became more at home in their second body they
discovered that they could “see” in all directions at once without
turning their heads. In other words, although seeing in all
directions appears to be normal during the OB state, they were so
accustomed to believing that they could see only through their
eyes-even when they were in a nonphysical hologram of their
body—that this belief at first kept them from realizing that they
possessed 360-degree vision.
There is evidence that even our physical
senses have fallen victim to this censorship. Despite our unwavering
conviction that we see with our eyes, reports persist of individuals
who possess “eyeless sight,” or the ability to see with other areas
of their bodies. Recently David Eisenberg, M.D., a clinical
research fellow at the Harvard Medical School, published an account
of two school-age Chinese sisters in Beijing who can “see” well
enough with the skin in their armpits to read notes and identify
colors.17
In Italy the neurologist Cesare
Lombroso studied a blind girl who could see with the tip of her
nose and the lobe of her left ear.18
In the 1960s the prestigious Soviet Academy 0f Science investigated
a Russian peasant woman named Rosa Kuleshova, who could see
photographs and read newspapers with the tips of her fingers, and
pronounced her abilities genuine. Significantly, the Soviets ruled
out the possibility that Kuleshova was simply detecting the varying
amounts of stored heat different colors emanate naturally—Kuleshova
could read a black and white newspaper even when it was covered with
a sheet of heated glass.19
Kuleshova became so renowned for her
abilities that Life magazine eventually published an article about
her.20
In short, there is evidence that we too are not limited to seeing
only through our physical eyes. This is, of course, the message
inherent in my father’s friend Tom’s ability to read the inscription
on a watch even when it was shielded by his daughter’s stomach, and
also in the remote-viewing phenomenon.
One cannot help but wonder if eyeless
sight is actually just further evidence that reality is indeed maya,
an illusion, and our physical body, as well as al! the seeming
absoluteness of its physiology, is as much a holographic construct
of our perception as our second body. Perhaps we are so deeply
habituated to believing that we can see only through our eyes that
even in the physical we have shut ourselves off from the full range
of our perceptual capabilities.
Another holographic aspect of OBEs is the blurring of the division
between past and future that sometimes occurs during such
experiences. For example, Osis and Mitchell discovered that when Dr.
Alex Tanous, a well-known psychic and talented OB traveler
from Maine, flew in and attempted to describe the test objects they
placed on a table, he had a tendency to describe items that were
placed there days later.’21
This suggests that the realm people
enter during the OB state is one of the subtler levels of reality
Bohm speaks about, a region that is closer to the implicate and
hence closer to the level of reality in which the division between
past, present, and future ceases to exist. Put another way, it
appears that instead of tuning into the frequencies that encode the
present, Tanous’s mind inadvertently tuned into frequencies that
contained information about the future and converted those into a
hologram of reality.
That Tanous’s perception of the room was a holographic phenomenon
and not just a precognitive vision that took place solely in his
head ,s underscored by another fact. The day of his schedule to
produce an OBE Osis asked New York psychic Christine Whiting to hold
vigil in the room and try to describe any projector she might “see”
visiting there.
Despite Whiting’s ignorance of who would
be flying in or when, when Tanous made his OB visit she saw his
apparition clearly and described him as wearing brown corduroy pants
and a white cotton shirt, the clothing Dr. Tanous was wearing in
Maine at the time of his attempt.22
Harary has also made occasional OB journeys into the future and
agrees that the experiences are qualitatively different from other
pre-cognitive experiences.
“OBEs to future time and space
differ from regular precognitive dreams in that I am definitely
‘out’ and moving through a black, dark area that ends at some
lighted future scene,” he states.
When he makes an OB visit to the future
he has sometimes even seen a silhouette of his future self in the
scene, and this is not all. When the events he has witnessed
eventually come to pass, he can also sense his time-traveling OB
self in the actual scene with him. He describes this eerie sensation
as “meeting myself ‘behind’ myself as if I were two beings,” an
experience that surely must put normal deja vus to shame.23
There are also cases on record of OB journeys into the past. The
Swedish playwright August Strindberg, himself a frequent OB
traveler, describes one in his book Legends. The occurrence took
place while Strindberg was sitting in a wine shop, trying to
persuade a young friend not to give up his military career. To
bolster his argument Strindberg brought up a past incident involving
both of them that had taken place one evening in a tavern.
As the playwright proceeded to describe
the event he suddenly “lost consciousness” only to find himself
sitting in the tavern in question and reliving the occurrence. The
experience lasted only for a few moments, and then he abruptly found
himself back in his body and in the present.24
The argument can also be made that the
retrocognitive visions we examined in the last chapter in which
clairvoyants had the experience that they were actually present
during, and even “floating” over, the historical scenes they were
describing are also a form of OB projection into the past.
Indeed, when one reads the voluminous literature now available on
the OB phenomenon, one is repeatedly struck at the similarities
between OB travelers’ descriptions of their experiences and
characteristics we have now come to associate with a holographic
universe. In addition to describing the OB state as a place where
time and space Bo longer properly exist, where thought can be
transformed into hologram-like forms, and where consciousness is
ultimately a pattern of vibrations, or frequencies, Monroe notes
that perception during OBEs seems based less on “a reflection of
light waves” and more on “an impression of radiation,” an
observation that suggests once again that when one enters the OB
realm one begins to enter Pribram’s frequency domain.25
Other OB travelers have also referred to
the frequency-like quality of the Second State.
For instance, Marcel Louis Forhan,
a French OB experiencer who wrote under the name of “Yram,” spends
much of his book, Practical Astral Projection, trying to describe
the wavelike and seemingly electromagnetic qualities of the OB
realm. Still others have commented on the sense of cosmic unity one
experiences during the state and have summarized it as a feeling
that “everything is everything,” and “I am that”
26
As holographic as the OBE is, it is only the tip of the iceberg when
it comes to more direct experience of the frequency aspects of
reality. Although OBEs are only experienced by a segment of the
human race, there is another circumstance under which we all come
into closer contact with the frequency domain. That is when we
journey to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler
returns.
The rub, with all due respect to
Shakespeare, is that some travelers do return. And the stories they
tell are filled with features that smack once again of tilings
holographic.
The Near-Death Experience
By now, nearly everyone has heard of near-death experiences, or NDEs,
incidents in which individuals are declared clinically “dead,” are
resuscitated, and report that during the experience they left their
physical body and visited what appeared to be the realm of the
afterlife. In our own culture NDEs first came to prominence in 1975
when Raymond A. Moody, Jr., a psychiatrist who also
has a Ph.D. in philosophy, published his best-selling investigation
of the subject, Life after Life.
Shortly thereafter Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
revealed that she had simultaneously conducted similar research and
had duplicated Moody’s findings. Indeed, as more and more
researchers began to document the phenomenon it became increasingly
clear that NDEs were not only incredibly widespread—a 1981 Gallup
poll found that eight million adult Americans had experienced an NDE,
or roughly one person in twenty—but provided the most compelling
evidence to date for survival after death.
Like OBEs, NDEs appear to be a universal phenomenon. They are
described at length in both the eighth-century
Tibetan Book of the Dead and the
2,500-year-oid Egyptian Book of the Dead.
In Book X of The Republic Plato gives a
detailed account of a Greek soldier named Er, who came alive just
seconds before his funeral pyre was to be lit and said that he had
left his body and went through a “passageway” to the land of the
dead.
The Venerable Bede gives a similar
account in his eighth-century work A History of the English Church
and People, and, in fact, in her recent book Otherworld Journeys
Carol Zaleski, a lecturer on the study of religion at
Harvard, points out that medieval literature is filled with accounts
of NDEs.
NDEers also have no unique demographic characteristics. Various
studies have shown that there is no relationship between NDEs and a
person’s age, sex, marital status, race, religion and/or spiritual
beliefs, social class, educational level, income, frequency of
church attendance, size of home community, or area of residence.
NDEs, like lightning, can strike anyone at any time. The devoutly
religious are no more likely to have an NDE than nonbelievers.
One of the most interesting aspects of the ND phenomenon is the
consistency one finds from experience to experience.
A summary of a typical NDE is as
follows:
A man is dying and suddenly finds
himself floating above his body and watching what is going on.
Within moments he travels at great speed through a darkness or a
tunnel. He enters a realm of dazzling light and is warmly met by
recently deceased friends and relatives. Frequently he hears
indescribably beautiful music and sees sights—rolling meadows,
flower-filled valleys, and sparkling streams—more lovely than
anything he has seen on earth. In this light-filled world he
feels no pain or fear and is pervaded with an overwhelming
feeling of joy, love, and peace.
He meets a “being (and or beings) of
light” who emanates a feeling of enormous compassion, and is
prompted by the being(s) to experience a “life review,” a
panoramic replay of his life. He becomes so enraptured by his
experience of this greater reality that he desires nothing more
than to stay. However, the being tells him that it is not his
time yet and persuades him to return to his earthly life and
reenter his physical body.
It should be noted this is only a
general description and not all NDEs contain all of the elements
described. Some may lack some of the above-mentioned features, and
others may contain additional ingredients. The symbolic trappings of
the experiences can also vary. For example, although NDEers in
Western cultures tend to enter the realm of the afterlife by passing
through a tunnel, experiences from other cultures might walk down a
road or pass over a body of water to arrive in the world beyond.
Nevertheless, there is an astonishing degree of agreement among the
NDEs reported by various cultures throughout history. For instance,
the life review, a feature that crops up again and again in
modem-day NDEs, is also described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in Plato’s account of what Er
experienced during his sojourn in the hereafter, and in the
2,000-year-old yogic writings of the Indian sage Patanjali.
The cross-cultural similarities between
NDEs has also been confirmed in formal study.
In 1977, Osis and Haraldsson
compared nearly nine hundred deathbed visions reported by patients
to doctors and other medical personnel in both India and the United
States and found that although there were various cultural
differences—for example, Americans tended to view the being of light
as a Christian religious personage and Indians perceived it to be a
Hindu one—the “core” of the experience was substantially the same
and resembled the NDEs described by Moody and Kubler-Ross.27
Although the orthodox view of NDEs is that they are just
hallucinations, there is substantial evidence that this is not the
case. As with OBEs, when NDEers are out-of-body, they are able to
report details they have no normal sensory means of knowing. For
example, Moody reports a case in which a woman left her body during
surgery, floated into the waiting room, and saw that her daughter
was wearing mismatched plaids. As it turned out, the maid had
dressed the little girl so hastily she had not noticed the error and
was astounded when the mother, who did not physically see the little
girl that day, commented on the fact.28
In another case, after leaving her body,
a female NDEer went to the hospital lobby and overheard her
brother-in-law tell a friend that it looked like he was going to
have to cancel a business trip and instead be one of his
sister-in-law’s pallbearers. After the woman recovered, she
reprimanded her astonished brother-in-law for writing her off so
quickly.29
And these are not even the most extraordinary examples of sensory
awareness in the ND out-of-body state. NDE researchers have found
that even patients who are blind, and have had no light perception
for years, can see and accurately describe what is going on around
them when they have left their bodies during an NDE. Kubler-Ross
has encountered several such individuals and has interviewed them at
length to determine their accuracy. ‘To our amazement, they were
able to describe the color and design of clothing and jewelry the
people present wore,” she states.30
Most staggering of all are those NDEs and deathbed visions involving
two or more individuals. In one case, as a female NDEer found
herself moving through the tunnel and approaching the realm of
light, she saw a friend of hers coming back! As they passed, the
friend telepathically communicated to her that he had died, but was
being “sent back.” The woman, too, was eventually “sent back” and
after she recovered she discovered that her friend had suffered a
cardiac arrest at approximately the same time of her own experience.31
There are numerous other cases on record in which dying individuals
knew who was waiting for them in the world beyond before news of the
person’s death arrived through normal channels.32
And if there is still any doubt, yet another argument against the
idea that NDEs are hallucinations is their occurrence in patients
who have flat EEGs. Under normal circumstances whenever a person
talks, thinks, imagines, dreams, or does just about anything else,
their EEG registers an enormous amount of activity. Even
hallucinations measure on the EEG. But there are many eases in which
people with flat EEGs have had NDEs. Had their NDEs been simple
hallucinations, they would have registered on their EEGs.
In brief, when all these facts are considered together—the
widespread nature of the NDE, the absence of demographic
characteristics, the universality of the core experience, the
ability of NDEers to see and know things they have no normal sensory
means of seeing and knowing, and the occurrence of NDEs in patients
who have flat EEGs—the conclusion seems inescapable: People who have
NDEs are not suffering from hallucinations or delusional fantasies,
but are actually making visits to an entirely different level of
reality.
This is also the conclusion reached by many NDE researchers. One
such researcher is Dr. Melvin Morse, a pediatrician in Seattle,
Washington. Morse first became interested in NDEs after treating a
seven-year-old drowning victim. By the time the little girl was
resuscitated she was profoundly comatose, had fixed and dilated
pupils, no muscle reflexes, and no cornea) response. In medical
terms this gave her a Glascow Coma Score of three, indicating that
she was in a coma so deep she had almost no chance of ever
recovering.
Despite these odds, she made a full
recovery and when Morse looked in on her for the first time after
she regained consciousness she recognized him and said that she had
watched him working on her comatose body. When Morse questioned her
further she explained that she had left her body and passed through
a tunnel into heaven where she had met “the Heavenly Father.”
The Heavenly Father told her she
was not really meant to be there yet and asked if she wanted to stay
or go back. At first she said she wanted to stay, but when the
Heavenly Father pointed out that that decision meant she would not
be seeing her mother again, she changed her mind and returned to her
body.
Morse was skeptical but fascinated and from that point on set out to
learn everything he could about NDEs. At the time, he worked for an
air transport service in Idaho that carried patients to the
hospital, and this afforded him the opportunity to talk with scores
of resuscitated children. Over a ten-year period he interviewed
every child survivor of cardiac arrest at the hospital, and over and
over they told him the same thing. After going unconscious they
found themselves outside their bodies, watched the doctors working
on them, passed through a tunnel, and were comforted by luminous
beings.
Morse continued to be skeptical, and in his increasingly desperate
search for some logical explanation he read everything he could find
on the side effects of the drugs his patients were taking, and
explored various psychological explanations, but nothing seemed to
fit.
“Then one day I read a long article
in a medical journal that tried to explain NDEs as being various
tricks of the brain,” says Morse. “By then I had studied NDEs
extensively and none of the explanations that this researcher
listed made sense. It was finally clear to me that he had missed
the most obvious explanation of all—NDEs are real. He had missed
the possibility that the soul really does travel.”33
Moody echoes the sentiment and says that
twenty years of research have convinced him that NDEers have indeed
ventured into another level of reality. He believes that most other
NDE researchers feel the same.
“I have talked to almost every NDE
researcher in the world about his or her work. I know that most
of them believe in their hearts that NDEs are a glimpse of life
after life. But as scientists and people of medicine, they still
haven’t come up with ‘scientific proof that a part of us goes on
living after our physical being is dead. This lack of proof
keeps them from going public with their true feelings.”34
As a result of his 1981 survey, even
George Gallup, Jr., the president of the Gallup Poll,
agrees:
“A growing number of researchers
have been gathering and evaluating the accounts of those who
have had strange near-death encounters. And the preliminary
results have been highly suggestive of some sort of encounter
with an extradimensional realm of reality. Our own extensive
survey is the latest in these studies and is also uncovering
some trends that point toward a super parallel universe of some
sort.”35
A Holographic Explanation of the
Near-Death Experience
These are astounding assertions. What is even more astounding is
that the scientific establishment has for the most part ignored both
the conclusions of these researchers and the vast body of evidence
that compels them to make such statements. The reasons for this are
complex and varied.
One is that it is currently not
fashionable in science to consider seriously any phenomenon that
seems to support the idea of a spiritual reality, and, as mentioned
at the beginning of this book, beliefs are like addictions and do
not surrender their grip easily.
Another reason, as Moody mentions, is
the widespread prejudice among scientists that the only ideas that
have any value or significance are those that can be proven in a
strict scientific sense. Yet another is the inability of our current
scientific understanding of reality even to begin to explain NDEs if
they are real.
This last reason, however, may not be the problem it seems. Several
NDE researchers have pointed out that the holographic model offers
us a way to understand these experiences. One such researcher is Dr.
Kenneth Ring, a professor of psychology at the University of
Connecticut and one of the first NDE researchers to use statistical
analysis and standardized interviewing techniques to study the
phenomenon. In his 1980 book Life at Death, Ring spends considerable
time arguing in favor of a holographic explanation of the NDE.
Put bluntly, Ring believes that NDEs are
also ventures into the more frequency-like aspects of reality.
Ring bases his conclusion on the numerous suggestively holographic
aspects of the NDE. One is the tendency of experiences to describe
the world beyond as a realm composed of “light,” “higher
vibrations,” or “frequencies.” Some NDEers even refer to the
celestial music that often accompanies such experiences as more “a
combination of vibrations” than actual sounds—observations that Ring
believes are evidence that the act of dying involves a shift of
consciousness away from the ordinary world of appearances and into a
more holographic reality of pure frequency.
NDEers also frequently say that the
realm is suffused with a light more brilliant than any they have
ever seen on earth, but one that, despite its unfathomable
intensity, does not hurt the eyes, characterizations that Ring feels
are further evidence of the frequency aspects of the hereafter.
Another feature Ring finds undeniably holographic is NDEers’
descriptions of time and space in the afterlife realm.
One of the most commonly reported
characteristics of the world beyond is that it is a dimension in
which time and space cease to exist.
“I found myself in a space, in a
period of time, I would say, where all space and time was
negated,” says one NDEer clumsily.36
“It has to be out of time and space.
It must be, because ... it can’t be put into a time thing,” says
another.37
Given that time and space are collapsed
and location has no meaning in the frequency domain, this is
precisely what we would expect to find if NDEs take place in a
holographic state of consciousness, says Ring.
If the near-death realm is even more frequency-like than our own
level of reality, why does it appear to have any structure at all?
Given that both OBEs and NDEs offer
ample evidence that the mind can exist independently of the brain,
Ring believes it is not too farfetched to assume that it, too,
functions holographically. Thus, when the mind is in the “higher”
frequencies of the near-death dimension, it continues to do what it
does best, translate those frequencies into a world of appearances.
Or as Ring puts it,
“I believe that this is a realm that
is created by interacting thought structures. These structures
or ‘thought-forms’ combine to form patterns, just as
interference waves form patterns on a holographic plate. And
just as the holographic image appears to be fully real when
illuminated by a laser beam, so the images produced by
interacting thought-forms appear to be real.”38
Ring is not alone in his speculations.
In the keynote address for the 1989 meeting of the International
Association for Near-Death Studies UANDS), Dr. Elizabeth W.
Fenske, a clinical psychologist in private practice in
Philadelphia, announced that she too believes that NDEs are journeys
into a holographic realm of higher frequencies.
She agrees with Ring’s hypothesis that
the landscapes, fleers, physical structures and so forth, of the
afterlife dimension are fashioned out of interacting (or
interfering) thought patterns.
“I think we’ve come to the point in
NDE research which is difficult to make a distinction between
fought and light In the near-death experience thought seems to
be light,” she observes.39
Heaven as Hologram
In addition to those mentioned by Ring
and Fenske, the NDE has numerous other features that are markedly
holographic. Like OBEers, after NDEers have detached from the
physical they find themselves in one of two forms, either as a
disembodied cloud of energy, or as a hologram-like body sculpted by
thought When the latter is the case, the mind-created nature of the
body is often surprisingly obvious to the NDEer. For example, one
near-death survivor says that when he first emerged from his body he
looked "something like a jellyfish" and fell lightly to the floor
like a soap bubble.
Then he quickly expanded into a ghostly
three-dimensional image of a naked man. However, the presence of two
women in the room embarrassed him and to his surprise, this feeling
caused him suddenly to become clothed (the women, however, never
offered any indication that they were able to see any of this).40
That our innermost feelings and desires are responsible for creating
the form we assume in the afterlife dimension is evident in the
experiences of other NDEers. People who are confined in wheelchairs
in their physical existence find themselves in healthy bodies that
can run and dance. Amputees invariably have their limbs back. The
elderly often inhabit youthful bodies, and even stranger, children
frequently see themselves as adults, a fact that may reflect every
child's fantasy to be a grown-up, or more profoundly, may be a
symbolic indication that in our souls some of us are much older than
we realize.
These hologramlike bodies can be remarkably detailed. In the
incident involving the man who became embarrassed at his own
nakedness, for example, the clothing he materialized for himself was
so meticulously wrought that he could even make out the seams in the
material! 41
Similarly, another man who studied his
hands while in the ND state said they were “composed of light with
tiny structures in them” and when he looked closely he could even
see “the delicate whorls of his fingerprints and tubes of light up
his arms.”42
Some of Whitton’s research is also relevant to this issue.
Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized patients and regressed them to
the between-life state, they too reported all the classic features
of the NDE, passage through a tunnel, encounters with deceased
relatives and/or “guides,” entrance into a splendorous light-filled
realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with
luminous beings, and a life review.
In fact, according to Whitton’s subjects
the main purpose of the life review was to refresh their memories so
they could more mindfully plan their next life, a process in which
the beings of light gently and non-coercively assisted.
Like Ring, after studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton
concluded that the shapes and structures one perceives in the
afterlife dimension are thought-forms created by the mind.
“Rene Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘I
think, therefore I am,’ is never more pertinent than in the
between-life state,” says Whitton. “There is no experience of
existence without thought.”43
This was especially true when it came to
the form Whitton’s patients assumed in the between-life state.
Several said they didn’t even have a body unless they were thinking.
“One man described it by saying that
if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless
cloud, undifferentiated,” he observes. “But as soon as he
started to think, he became himself"44
(a state of affairs that is oddly reminiscent of the subjects in
Tart’s mutual hypnosis experiment who discovered they didn’t
have hands unless they thought them into existence).
At first the bodies Whitton’s subjects
assumed resembled the persons they had been in their last life. But
as their experience in the between-life state continued, they
gradually became a kind of hologram-like composite of all of their
past lives.45
This composite identity even had a name
separate from any of the names they had used in their physical
incarnations, although none of his subjects was able to pronounce it
using their physical vocal cords.46
What do NDEers look like when they have not constructed a hologram
like body for themselves?
Many say that they were not aware of any
form and were simply “themselves” or “their mind.” Others have more
specific impressions and describe themselves as “a cloud of colors,”
“a mist,” “an energy pattern,” or “an energy field,” terms that
again suggest that we are all ultimately just frequency phenomena,
patterns of some unknown vibratory energy enfolded in the greater
matrix of the frequency domain.
Some NDEers assert that in addition to
being composed of colored frequencies of light, we are also
constituted out of sound.
“I realized that each person and
thing has its own musical tone range as well as its own color
range,” says an Arizona housewife who had an NDE during
childbirth, “If you can imagine yourself effortlessly moving in
and out among prismatic rays of light and hearing each person’s
musical notes join and harmonize with your own when you touch or
pass them, you would have some idea of the unseen world.”
The woman, who encountered many
individuals in the afterlife realm who manifested only as clouds of
colors and sound, believes the mellifluous tones each soul emanates
are what people are describing when they say they hear beautiful
music in the ND dimension.47
Like Monroe, some NDEers report being
able to see in all directions at once while in the disembodied
state. After wondering what he looked like, one man said he suddenly
found himself staring at his own back.48
Robert Sullivan, an amateur NDE
researcher from Pennsylvania who specializes in NDEs by soldiers
during combat, interviewed a World War II veteran who temporarily
retained this ability even after he returned to his physical body.
“He experienced
three-hundred-sixty-degree vision while running away from a
German machine-gun nest,” says Sullivan. “Not only could he see
ahead as he ran, but he could see the gunners trying to draw a
bead on him from behind.” 49
Instantaneous Knowledge
Another part of the NDE that possesses many holographic features is
the life review. Ring refers to it as “a holographic phenomenon par
excellence.” Grof and Joan Halifax, a Harvard medical anthropologist
and the coauthor (with Grof) of The Human Encounter with Death.,
have also commented on the life review’s holographic aspects.
According to several NDE researchers,
including Moody, even many NDEers themselves use the term
“holographic” when describing the experience.50
The reason for this characterization is obvious as soon as one
begins to read accounts of the life review.
Again and again NDEers use the same
adjectives to describe it, referring to it as an incredibly vivid,
wrap-around, three-dimensional replay of their entire life.
“It’s like climbing right inside a
movie of your life,” says one NDEer.
“Every moment from every year of
your life is played back in complete sensory detail. Total,
total recall. And it all happens in an instant”51
“The whole thing was really odd. I
was there; I was actually seeing these flashbacks; I was
actually walking through them, and it was so fast Yet, it was
slow enough that I could take it all in,” says another.52
During this instantaneous and panoramic
remembrance NDEers reexperience al! the emotions, the joys and the
sorrows, that accompanied all of the events in their life. More than
that, they feel all of the emotions of the people with whom they
have interacted as well. They feel the happiness of all the
individuals to whom they’ve been kind. If they have committed a
hurtful act, they become acutely aware of the pain their victim felt
as a result of their thoughtlessness.
And no event seems too trivial to be
exempt While reliving a moment in her child hood, one woman suddenly
experienced all the loss and powerlessness her sister had felt after
she (then a child) snatched a toy away from her sister.
Whitton has uncovered evidence that thoughtless acts are not the
only things that cause individuals remorse during the life review.
Under hypnosis his subjects reported that failed dreams and
aspirations—things they had hoped to accomplish during their life
but had not—also caused them pangs of sadness-Thoughts, too, are
replayed with exacting fidelity during the life review.
Reveries, faces glimpsed once but
remembered for years, things that made one laugh, the joy one felt
when gazing at a particular painting, childish worries, and long
forgotten daydreams—all flit through one’s mind in a second.
As one NDEer summarizes,
“Not even your thoughts are lost . .
. Every thought was there.”53
And so, the life review is holographic
not only in its three-dimensionality, but in the amazing capacity
for information storage the process displays. It is also holographic
in a third way. Like the kabbalistic “aleph,” a mythical point in
space and time that contains all other points in space and time, it
is a moment that contains all other moments. Even the ability to
perceive the life review seems holographic in that it is a faculty
capable of experiencing something that is paradoxically at once both
incredibly rapid and yet slow enough to witness in detail.
As an NDEer in 1821 put it, it is the
ability to “simultaneously comprehend the whole and every part.”54
In fact, the life review bares a marked resemblance to the afterlife
judgment scenes described in the sacred texts of many of the world’s
great religions, from the Egyptian to the Judeo-Christian, but with
one crucial difference. Like Whitton’s subjects, NDEers universally
report that they are never judged by the beings of light, but feel
only love and acceptance in their presence. The only judgment that
ever takes place is self-judgment and arises solely out of the
NDEer’s own feelings of guilt and repentance. Occasionally the
beings do assert themselves, but instead of behaving in an
authoritarian manner, they act as guides and counselors whose only
purpose is to teach.
This total lack of cosmic judgment and/or any divine system of
punishment and reward has been and continues to be one of the most
controversial aspects of the NDE among religious groups, but it is
one of the most oft reported features of the experience. What is the
explanation? Moody believes it is as simple as it is polemic. We
live in a universe that is far more benevolent than we realize.
That is not to say that anything goes during the life review. Like
Whitton’s hypnotic subjects, after arriving in the realm of light
NDEers appear to enter a state of heightened or meta-consciousness
awareness and become lucidly honest in their self-reflections.
It also does not mean that the beings of light prescribe no values.
In NDE after NDE they stress two things. One is the importance of
love. Over and over they repeat this message, that we must learn to
replace anger with love, learn to love more, learn to forgive and
love everyone unconditionally, and learn that we in turn are loved.
This appears to be the only moral criterion the beings use. Even
sexual activity ceases to possess the moral stigma we humans are so
fond of attaching to it.
One of Whitton’s subjects reported that
after living several withdrawn and depressed incarnations he was
urged to plan a life as an amorous and sexually active female in
order to add balance to the overall development of his soul.55
It appears that in the minds of the beings of light, compassion is
the barometer of grace, and time and time again when NDEers wonder
if some act they committed was right or wrong, the beings counter
their inquiries only with a question:
Did you do it out of love? Was the
motivation love?
That is why we have been placed here on the earth, say the beings,
to learn that love is the key. They acknowledge that it is a
difficult undertaking, but intimate that it is crucial to both our
biological and spiritual existence in ways that we have perhaps not
even begun to fathom. Even children return from the near-death realm
with this message firmly impressed in their thoughts.
States one little boy who after being
hit by a car was guided into the world beyond by two people in “very
white” robes:
“What I learned there is that the
most important thing is loving while you are alive.”56
The second thing the beings emphasize is
knowledge. Frequently NDEers comment that the beings seemed pleased
whenever an incident involving knowledge or learning flickered by
during their life review. Some are openly counseled to embark on a
quest for knowledge after they return to their physical bodies,
especially knowledge related to self-growth or that enhances one’s
ability to help other people.
Others are prodded with statements such
as,
“learning is a continuous process
and goes on even after death” and “knowledge is one of the few
things you will be able to take with you after you have died.”
The preeminence of knowledge in the
afterlife dimension is apparent in another way. Some NDEers
discovered that in the presence of the light they suddenly had
direct access to all knowledge. This access manifested in several
ways. Sometimes it came in response to inquiries. One man said that
all he had to do was ask a question, such as what would it be like
to be an insect, and instantly the experience was his.57
Another NDEer described it by saying,
“You can think of a question... and
immediately know the answer to it. As simple as that. And it can
be any question whatsoever. It can be on a subject that you
don’t know anything about, that you are not in the proper
position even to understand and the light will give you the
instantaneous correct answer and make you understand it.”58
Some NDEers report that they didn’t even
have to ask questions in order to access this infinite library of
information. Following their life review they just suddenly knew
everything, all the knowledge there was to know from the beginning
of time to the end. Others came into contact with this knowledge
after the being of light made some specific gesture, such as wave
its hand. Still others said that instead of acquiring the knowledge,
they remembered it, but forgot most of what they recalled as soon as
they returned to their physical bodies (an amnesia that seems to be
universal among NDEers who are privy to such visions).59
Whatever the case, it appears that once
we are in the world beyond, it is no longer necessary to enter an
altered state of consciousness in order to have access to the
transpersonal and infinitely interconnected informational realm
experienced by Grof's patients.
In addition to being holographic in all
the ways already mentioned, this vision of total knowledge has
another holographic characteristic. NDEers often say that during the
vision the information arrives in “chunks” that register
instantaneously in one’s thoughts. In other words, rather than being
strung out in a linear fashion like words in a sentence or scenes in
a movie, all the facts, details, images, and pieces of information
burst into one’s awareness in an instant. One NDEer referred to
these bursts of information as “bundles of thought”60
Monroe, who has also experienced such
instantaneous explosions of information while in the OB state, calls
them “thought balls.”61
Indeed, anyone who possesses any appreciable psychic ability is
familiar with this experience, for this is the form in which one
receives psychic information as well. For instance, sometimes when I
meet a stranger (and on occasion even when I just hear a person’s
name), a thought ball of information about that person will
instantly flash into my awareness. This thought ball can include
important facts about the person’s psychological and emotional
makeup, their health, and even scenes from their past. I find that I
am especially prone to getting thought balls about people who are in
some kind of crisis.
For example, recently I met a woman and
instantly knew she was contemplating suicide. I also knew some of
the reasons why. As I always do in such situations, I started
talking to her and cautiously maneuvered the conversation to things
psychic. After finding out that she was receptive to the subject, I
confronted her with what I knew and got her to talk about her
problems. I got her to promise to seek some kind of professional
counseling instead of the darker option she was considering.
Receiving information in this manner is similar to the way one
becomes aware of information while dreaming. Virtually everyone has
had a dream in which they find themselves in a situation and
suddenly know all kinds of things about it without being told. For
instance, you might dream you are at a party and as soon as you are
there you know who it is being given for and why. Similarly,
everyone has had a detailed idea or inspiration dawn upon them in a
flash. Such experiences are lesser versions of the thought ball
effect.
Interestingly, because these bursts of psychic information arrive in
nonlinear chunks, it sometimes takes me several moments to translate
them into words. Like the psychological gestalts experienced by
individuals during transpersonal experiences, they are holographic
in the sense that they are instantaneous “wholes” our time-oriented
minds must struggle with for a moment in order to unravel and
convert into a serial arrangement of parts.
What form does the knowledge contained in the thought balls
experienced during NDEs take? According to NDEers all forms of
communication are used, sounds, moving hologram-like images, even
telepathy—a fact that Ring believes demonstrates once again that the
hereafter is “a world of existence where thought is king.”62
The thoughtful reader may immediately wonder why the quest for
learning is so important during life if we have access to all
knowledge after we die? When asked this question NDEers replied that
they weren’t certain, but felt strongly that it had something to do
with the purpose of life and the ability of each individual to reach
out and help others.
Life Plans and Parallel Time Tracks
Like Whitton, NDE researchers have also uncovered evidence that our
lives are planned beforehand, at least to some extent, and we each
play a role in the creation of this plan. This is apparent in
several aspects of the experience. Frequently after arriving in the
world of light, NDEers are told that “it is not their time yet.” As
Ring points out, this remark clearly implies the existence of some
kind of “life plan.”63
It is also clear that NDEers play a role
in the formulation of these destinies, for they are often given the
choice whether to return or stay. There are even instances of NDEers
being told that it is their time and still being allowed to return.
Moody cites a case in which a man started to cry when he realized he
was dead because he was afraid his wife wouldn’t be able to raise
their nephew without him. On hearing this the being told him that
since he wasn’t asking for himself he would be allowed to return.64
In another case a woman argued that she
hadn’t danced enough yet. Her remark caused the being of light to
give a hearty laugh and she, too, was given permission to return to
physical life.65
That our future is at least partially sketched out is also evident
in a phenomenon Ring calls the “personal flash-forward.” On
occasion, during the vision of knowledge, NDEers are shown glimpses
of their own future. In one particularly striking case a child NDEer
was told various specifics about his future, including the fact that
he would be married at age twenty-eight and would have two children.
He was even shown his adult self and his future children sitting in
a room of the house he would eventually be living in, and as he
gazed at the room he noticed something very strange on the wall,
something that his mind could not grasp.
Decades later and after each of these
predictions had come to pass, he found himself in the very scene he
had witnessed as a child and realized that the strange object on the
wall was a “forced-air heater,” a kind of heater that had not yet
been invented at the time of his NDE.66
In another equally astonishing personal flash-forward a female NDEer
was shown a photograph of Moody, told his full name, and told that
when the time was right she would tell him about her experience. The
year was 1971 and Moody had not yet published Life after Life, so
his name and picture meant nothing to the woman. However, the time
became “right” four years later when Moody and his family
unwittingly moved to the very street on which the woman lived.
That Halloween Moody’s son was out
trick-or-treating and knocked on the woman’s door. After hearing the
boy’s name, the woman told him to tell his father she had to talk to
him, and when Moody obliged she related her remarkable story.67
Some NDEs even support Loye’s proposal that several holographic
parallel universes, or time tracks, exist. On occasion NDEers are
shown personal flash-forwards and told that the future they have
witnessed will come to pass only if they continue on their current
path. In one unique instance an NTDEer was shown a completely
different history of the earth, a history that would have developed
if “certain events” had not taken place around the time of the Greek
philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras three thousand years ago.
The vision revealed that if these
events, the precise nature of which the woman does not disclose, had
failed to take place, we would now be living in a world of peace and
harmony marked “by the absence of religious wars and of a Christ
figure.”68 Such experiences suggest
that the laws of time and space operative in a holographic universe
may be very strange indeed.
Even NDEers who do not experience direct evidence of the role they
play in their own destiny often come back with a firm understanding
of the holographic interconnectedness of all things.
As a sixty-two-year-old businessman who
had an NDE during a cardiac arrest puts it,
“One thing I learned was that we are
all part of one big, living universe. If we think we can hurt
another person or another living thing without hurting ourselves
we are sadly mistaken. I look at a forest or a flower or a bird
now, and say, ‘That is me, part of me.’ We are connected with
all things and if we send love along those connections, then we
are happy.”69
You Can Eat but You Don’t Have To
The holographic and mind-created aspects of the near-death dimension
are apparent in myriad other ways. In describing the hereafter one
child said that food appeared whenever she wished for it, but there
was no need to eat, an observation that underscores once again the
illusory and hologram-like nature of afterlife reality.70
Even the symbolic language of the psyche
is given “objective” form. For example, one of Whitton’s subjects
said that when he was introduced to a woman who was going to figure
prominently in his next life, instead of appearing as a human she
appeared as a shape that was half-rose, half-cobra. After being
directed to figure out the meaning of the symbolism, he realized
that he and the woman had been in love with one another in two other
lifetimes. However, she had also twice been responsible for his
death. Thus, instead of manifesting as a human, the loving and
sinister elements of her character caused her to appear in a
hologram-like form that better symbolized these two dramatically
polar qualities.71
Whitton’s subject is not alone in his experience. Hazrat Inayat Khan
said that when he entered a mystical state and traveled to “divine
realities,” the beings he encountered also occasionally appeared in
half-human, half-animal forms. Like Whitton’s subject, Khan
discerned that these transfigurations were symbolic, and when a
being appeared as part animal it was because the animal symbolized
some quality the being possessed.
For example, a being that had great
strength might appear with the head of a lion, or a being that was
unusually smart and crafty might have some of the features of a fox.
Khan theorized that this is why ancient cultures, such as the
Egyptian, pictured the gods that rule the afterlife realm as having
animal heads.72
The propensity near-death reality has for molding itself into
hologram-like shapes that mirror the thoughts, desires, and symbols
that populate our minds explains why Westerners tend to perceive the
beings of light as Christian religious figures, why Indians perceive
them as Hindu saints and deities, and so on. The plasticity of the
ND realm suggests that such outward appearances may be no more or
less real than the food wished into existence by the little girl
mentioned above, the woman who appeared as an amalgam of a cobra and
a rose, and the spectral clothing conjured into existence by the
NDEer who was embarrassed at his own nakedness.
This same plasticity explains the other
cultural differences one finds in near-death experiences, such as
why some NDEers reach the hereafter by traveling through a tunnel,
some by crossing a bridge, some by going over a body of water, and
some simply by walking down a road. Again it appears that in a
reality created solely out of interacting thought structures, even
the landscape itself is sculpted by the ideas and expectations of
the experiencer.
At this juncture an important point needs to be made. As startling
and foreign as the near-death realm seems, the evidence presented in
this book reveals that our own level of existence may not be all
that different. As we have seen, we too can access all information,
it is just a little more difficult for us. We too can occasionally
have personal flash-forwards and come face-to-face with the
phantasmal nature of time and space. And we too can sculpt and
reshape our bodies, and sometimes even our reality, according to our
beliefs, it just takes us a little more time and effort.
Indeed, Sai Baba’s abilities suggest
that we can even materialize food simply by wishing for it, and
Therese Neumann’s inedia offers evidence that eating may
ultimately be as unnecessary for us as it is for individuals in the
near-death realm.
In fact, it appears that this reality and the next are different in
degree, but not in kind. Both are hologram-like constructs,
realities that are established, as Jahn and Dunne put it, only by
the interaction of consciousness with its environment. Put another
way, our reality appears to be a more frozen version of the
afterlife dimension. It takes a little more time for our beliefs to
re-sculpt our bodies into things like nail-like stigmata and for the
symbolic language of our psyches to manifest externally as
synchronizes.
But manifest they do, in a slow and
inexorable river, a river whose persistent presence teaches us that
we live in a universe we are only just beginning to understand.
Information about the Near-Death Realm
from Other Sources
One does not have to be in a life-threatening crisis to visit the
afterlife dimension. There is evidence that the ND realm can also be
reached during OBEs. In his writings, Monroe describes several
visits to levels of reality in which he encountered deceased
friends.73 An even more
skilled out-of-body visitor to the land of the dead was Swedish
mystic Swedenborg.
Born in 1688, Swedenborg was the
Leonardo da Vinci of his era. In his early years he studied science.
He was the leading mathematician in Sweden, spoke nine languages,
was an engraver, a politician, an astronomer, and a businessman,
built watches and microscopes as a hobby, wrote books on metallurgy,
color theory, commerce, economics, physics, chemistry, mining, and
anatomy, and invented prototypes for the airplane and the submarine.
Throughout all of this he also meditated regularly, and when he
reached middle age, developed the ability to enter deep trances
during which he left his body and visited what appeared to him to be
heaven and conversed with “angels” and “spirits.”
That Swedenborg was experiencing
something profound during these journeys, there can be no doubt. He
became so famous for this ability that the queen of Sweden asked him
to find out why her deceased brother had neglected to respond to a
letter she had sent him before his death. Swedenborg promised to
consult the deceased and the next day returned with a message which
the queen confessed contained information only she and her dead
brother knew.
Swedenborg performed this service
several times for various individuals who sought his help, and on
another occasion told a widow where to find a secret compartment in
her deceased husband’s desk in which she found some desperately
needed documents. So well known was this latter incident that it
inspired the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to write an entire
book on Swedenborg entitled Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
But the most amazing thing about Swedenborg’s accounts of the
afterlife realm is how closely they mirror the descriptions offered
by modern-day NDEers. For example, Swedenborg talks about passing
through a dark tunnel, being met by welcoming spirits, landscapes
more beautiful than any on earth and one where time and space no
longer exist, a dazzling light that emitted a feeling of love,
appearing before beings of light, and being enveloped by an
all-encompassing peace and serenity.74
He also says that he was allowed to
observe firsthand the arrival of the newly deceased in heaven, and
watch as they were subjected to the life review, a process he called
“the opening of the Book of Lives.”
He acknowledged that during the process
a person witnessed “everything they had ever been or done,” but
added a unique twist According to Swedenborg, the information that
arose during the opening of the Book of Lives was recorded in the
nervous system of the person’s spiritual body. Thus, in order to
evoke the life review an “angel” had to examine the individual’s
entire body “beginning with the fingers of each hand, and proceeding
through the whole.”75
Swedenborg also refers to the holographic thought balls the angels
use to communicate and says that they are no different from the
portrayals he could see in the “wave-substance” that surrounded a
person. Like most NDEers he describes these telepathic bursts of
knowledge as a picture language so dense with information that each
image contains a thousand ideas. A communicated series of these
portrayals can also be quite lengthy and “last up to several hours,
in such a sequential arrangement that one can only marvel.”76
But even here Swedenborg added a fascinating twist. In addition to
using portrayals, angels also employ a speech that contains concepts
that are beyond human understanding. In fact, the main reason they
use portrayals is because it is the only way they can make even a
pale version of their thoughts and ideas comprehensible to human
beings.77
Swedenborg’s experiences even
corroborate some of the less commonly reported elements of the NDE.
He noted that in the spirit world one no longer needs to eat food,
but added that information takes its place as a source of
nourishment.78
He said that when spirits and angels
talked, their thoughts were constantly coalescing into three
dimensional symbolic images, especially animals. For example, he
said that when angels talked about love and affection “beautiful
animals are presented, such as lambs— When however the angels are
talking about evil affections, this is portrayed by hideous, fierce,
and useless animals, like tigers, bears, wolves, scorpions, snakes,
and mice.”79
Although it is not a feature reported by
modern NDEers, Swedenborg said that he was astonished to find that
in heaven there are also spirits from other planets, an astounding
assertion for a man who was born over three hundred years ago!
80
Most intriguing of all are those remarks
by Swedenborg that seem to refer to reality’s holographic qualities.
For instance, he said that although human beings appear to be
separate from one another, we are all connected in a cosmic unity.
Moreover, each of us is a heaven in miniature, and every person,
indeed the entire physical universe, is a microcosm of the greater
divine reality.
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