Holographic Paradigm
The holographic paradigm is joining of two concepts that were developed independently:
The holographic paradigm is rooted in the concept that all organisms and forms are holograms embedded within a universal hologram, which physicist David Bohm [1] called the holomovement. It is an extrapolation of the optical discovery of 2-dimensional holograms by Dennis Gabor in 1947 [2]. Holography created an explosion of scientific and industrial interest starting in 1948.
Engineer Thomas Bearden describes holograms as “photographic recordings of the patterns of interference between coherent light reflected from the object of interest, and light that comes directly from the same source or is reflected by a mirror. When this photo image is illuminated from behind by cohrent light, a three-dimensional image of the object appears in space. The characteristic of a hypothetically perfect hologram is that all its content is contained in any finite part of itself (at lower resolution). Observationally and perceptually, the universe is a hologram and in each part of itself, since all of it can be detected from/in each internal particle.” [3]
In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle thinktank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm.
In Languages of the Brain (1971), Pribram [4] had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.
However, Miller, Webb and Dickson extrapolated that the holographic metaphor extends to n-dimensions and therefore constitutes a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. It suggested the human energy body or bioenergetics was more fundamental than the biochemical domain.
The "Holographic Concept of Reality" (1973) [5] was presented at the 1st Psychotronic Conference in Prague in 1973, and later published by Gordon & Breach in 1975, and again in 1979 in Psychoenergetic Systems: the Interaction of Consciousness, Energy and Matter, edited by Dr. Stanley Krippner.
Miller and Webb followed up their ground-breaking paper with "Embryonic Holography," [6] which was also presented at the Omniversal Symposium at California State College at Sonoma, hosted by Dr. Stanley Krippner, September 29, 1973. Arguably, this is the first paper to address the quantum biological properties of human beings--the first illustrations of the sources of quantum mindbody.
The premise is based in this hypothesis:
The organization of any biological system is established by a complex electrodynamic field which is, in part, determined by its atomic physiochemical components. This field, in turn, determines the behavior and orientation of these components. This dynamic is mediated through wave-based genomes wherein DNA functions as the holographic projector of the psychophysical system - a quantum biohologram.
Dropping a level of observation below quantum biochemistry and conventional biophysics, this holographic paradigm proposes that a biohologram determines the development of the human embryo; that we are a quantum bodymind with consciousness informing the whole process through the level of information. They postulated DNA as the possible holographic projector of the biohologram, patterning the three-dimensional electromagnetic standing and moving wave front that constitutes our psychophysical being -- quantum bioholography.
The Gariaev group (1994) [7] has proposed a theory of the Wave-based Genome where the DNA-wave functions as a Biocomputer. They suggest (1) that there are genetic "texts", similar to natural context-dependent texts in human language; (2) that the chromosome apparatus acts simultaneously both as a source and receiver of these genetic texts, respectively decoding and encoding them; (3) that the chromosome continuum acts like a dynamical holographic grating, which displays or transduces weak laser light and solitonic electro-acoustic fields. [8]
The distribution of the character frequency in genetic texts is fractal, so the nucleotides of DNA molecules are able to form holographic pre-images of biostructures. This process of "reading and writing" the very matter of our being manifests from the genome's associative holographic memory in conjunction with its quantum nonlocality. Rapid transmission of genetic information and gene-expression unite the organism as holistic entity embedded in the larger Whole. The system works as a biocomputer -- a wave biocomputer. [9, 10]
Gariaev reports as of 2007 that this work in Russia is being actively suppressed. [11]
References:
[1] Bohm, David (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London.
[2] Professor T.E. Allibone CBE, FRS. “THE LIFE AND WORK OF DENNIS GABBOR, HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CYBERNETICS, PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1900 – 1979”. http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:NMpfXYlo-RsJ:www.cybsoc.org/GaborAllibone.doc+dennis+gabor+holograms+book&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
[3] Beardon, Thomas (1980, 1988, 2002), Excalibur Briefing, Strawberry Hill Press, San Francisco.
[4] Pribram, Karl (1971), Languages of the Brain, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey.
[5] Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain. " Holographic Concept" was later reprinted in the hardback book Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, editor. 1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris. It was reprinted again in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 5, 1992. 93-111. Boynton Beach, FL, Tom Lyttle, Editor. Accessed 6/07: http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/chaosophy13.html
[6] Miller, R. A., Webb. B., “Embryonic Holography,” Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, Ed. Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in Lyttle's journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156. Accessed 6/07: http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/chaosophy14.html
[7] Gariaev, Peter, Boris Birshtein, Alexander Iarochenko, et al, “The DNA-wave Biocomputer.”
[8] Miller, Iona, Miller, R.A. and Burt Webb (2002), “Quantum Bioholography: A Review of the Field from 1973-2002.” Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions Vol.I, Nr. 3. Accessed 6/11/07. http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm
[9] Miller, Iona (2004) “From Helix to Hologram,” Nexus Magazine http://www.ajna.com/articles/science/from_helix_to_hologram.php
[10] Crisis in Life Sciences. The Wave Genetics Response P.P. Gariaev, M.J. Friedman, and E.A. Leonova- Gariaeva http://www.emergentmind.org/gariaev06.htm
[11] Miller, Iona (2007), private correspondence with Peter Gariaev.
- That the universe is in some sense a holographic structure — proposed by David Bohm
- That consciousness is dependent on holographic structure — proposed by Karl Pribram
The holographic paradigm is rooted in the concept that all organisms and forms are holograms embedded within a universal hologram, which physicist David Bohm [1] called the holomovement. It is an extrapolation of the optical discovery of 2-dimensional holograms by Dennis Gabor in 1947 [2]. Holography created an explosion of scientific and industrial interest starting in 1948.
Engineer Thomas Bearden describes holograms as “photographic recordings of the patterns of interference between coherent light reflected from the object of interest, and light that comes directly from the same source or is reflected by a mirror. When this photo image is illuminated from behind by cohrent light, a three-dimensional image of the object appears in space. The characteristic of a hypothetically perfect hologram is that all its content is contained in any finite part of itself (at lower resolution). Observationally and perceptually, the universe is a hologram and in each part of itself, since all of it can be detected from/in each internal particle.” [3]
In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle thinktank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm.
In Languages of the Brain (1971), Pribram [4] had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.
However, Miller, Webb and Dickson extrapolated that the holographic metaphor extends to n-dimensions and therefore constitutes a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. It suggested the human energy body or bioenergetics was more fundamental than the biochemical domain.
The "Holographic Concept of Reality" (1973) [5] was presented at the 1st Psychotronic Conference in Prague in 1973, and later published by Gordon & Breach in 1975, and again in 1979 in Psychoenergetic Systems: the Interaction of Consciousness, Energy and Matter, edited by Dr. Stanley Krippner.
Miller and Webb followed up their ground-breaking paper with "Embryonic Holography," [6] which was also presented at the Omniversal Symposium at California State College at Sonoma, hosted by Dr. Stanley Krippner, September 29, 1973. Arguably, this is the first paper to address the quantum biological properties of human beings--the first illustrations of the sources of quantum mindbody.
The premise is based in this hypothesis:
The organization of any biological system is established by a complex electrodynamic field which is, in part, determined by its atomic physiochemical components. This field, in turn, determines the behavior and orientation of these components. This dynamic is mediated through wave-based genomes wherein DNA functions as the holographic projector of the psychophysical system - a quantum biohologram.
Dropping a level of observation below quantum biochemistry and conventional biophysics, this holographic paradigm proposes that a biohologram determines the development of the human embryo; that we are a quantum bodymind with consciousness informing the whole process through the level of information. They postulated DNA as the possible holographic projector of the biohologram, patterning the three-dimensional electromagnetic standing and moving wave front that constitutes our psychophysical being -- quantum bioholography.
The Gariaev group (1994) [7] has proposed a theory of the Wave-based Genome where the DNA-wave functions as a Biocomputer. They suggest (1) that there are genetic "texts", similar to natural context-dependent texts in human language; (2) that the chromosome apparatus acts simultaneously both as a source and receiver of these genetic texts, respectively decoding and encoding them; (3) that the chromosome continuum acts like a dynamical holographic grating, which displays or transduces weak laser light and solitonic electro-acoustic fields. [8]
The distribution of the character frequency in genetic texts is fractal, so the nucleotides of DNA molecules are able to form holographic pre-images of biostructures. This process of "reading and writing" the very matter of our being manifests from the genome's associative holographic memory in conjunction with its quantum nonlocality. Rapid transmission of genetic information and gene-expression unite the organism as holistic entity embedded in the larger Whole. The system works as a biocomputer -- a wave biocomputer. [9, 10]
Gariaev reports as of 2007 that this work in Russia is being actively suppressed. [11]
References:
[1] Bohm, David (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London.
[2] Professor T.E. Allibone CBE, FRS. “THE LIFE AND WORK OF DENNIS GABBOR, HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CYBERNETICS, PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1900 – 1979”. http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:NMpfXYlo-RsJ:www.cybsoc.org/GaborAllibone.doc+dennis+gabor+holograms+book&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
[3] Beardon, Thomas (1980, 1988, 2002), Excalibur Briefing, Strawberry Hill Press, San Francisco.
[4] Pribram, Karl (1971), Languages of the Brain, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey.
[5] Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain. " Holographic Concept" was later reprinted in the hardback book Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, editor. 1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris. It was reprinted again in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 5, 1992. 93-111. Boynton Beach, FL, Tom Lyttle, Editor. Accessed 6/07: http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/chaosophy13.html
[6] Miller, R. A., Webb. B., “Embryonic Holography,” Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, Ed. Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in Lyttle's journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156. Accessed 6/07: http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/chaosophy14.html
[7] Gariaev, Peter, Boris Birshtein, Alexander Iarochenko, et al, “The DNA-wave Biocomputer.”
[8] Miller, Iona, Miller, R.A. and Burt Webb (2002), “Quantum Bioholography: A Review of the Field from 1973-2002.” Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions Vol.I, Nr. 3. Accessed 6/11/07. http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm
[9] Miller, Iona (2004) “From Helix to Hologram,” Nexus Magazine http://www.ajna.com/articles/science/from_helix_to_hologram.php
[10] Crisis in Life Sciences. The Wave Genetics Response P.P. Gariaev, M.J. Friedman, and E.A. Leonova- Gariaeva http://www.emergentmind.org/gariaev06.htm
[11] Miller, Iona (2007), private correspondence with Peter Gariaev.
Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
The Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
In Philosophy, Biophysics, Psychology, Art, Medicine
Iona Miller , O.A.K., 8/2004
“This feeling for the infinite…can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be…ultimately limited – we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
"By applying Ockham's razor to the basic epistemological question 'What is reality?' the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external reality is a 'superfluous hypothesis'" ~ Philip K Dick, in the introduction to "The Golden Man"
"There are no conditions to fulfill. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up.
Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it." ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed”…as above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superceded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine, separating mind and body. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. But it is a holistic viewpoint that doesn’t split mind from body. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner; Mishlove; Radin; Dossey; May; Stanford; Germine; Nelson; Motoyama; Sidorov; Swanson; Miller & Miller). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing.
Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities seemingly unlimited by physical constraints. Psi phenomena concern organism-environment interactions in which it appears that information or infuence has occurred that cannot be explained through current models of sensory-motor channels. They are outside current scientific concepts of time, space, and force. We have hypotheses but little idea how organism-environment and organism-organism information and influence interface and flow.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. Quantum mechanical equations of motion yield open systems and work out their consequences for the flow of information. We have tremendous empirical evidence that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics. And so are we when we seem to make “quantum leaps” in awareness.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical – essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own organic forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. QM doesn't explain gravity, but the fact that the world “ever” appears classical is just a simplification due to our inability to sense quantum states directly. There is no such thing as a classical world.
Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality as described in chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and the holographic concept..
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
Synchronicity
In 1948 psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli began talking about an acausal yet meaningful connecting principle that Jung dubbed synchronicity. Jung used over 1,400 of Pauli’s incredibly rich dreams to write his books on alchemy, a modern version of the search for godhead in matter. Pauli’s professional work validated quantum mechanics; energy appears in ‘bundles’ which appear as various subatomic particles that are manifestations of different types of fields.
The two theoreticians were on complementary vectors. They cross-fertilized one another with concepts from their respective fields, a psychophysical merger. Pauli discovered an abstract pattern hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter that determines its behavior in a noncausal way. Jung argued certain patterns are linked in nonmechanical ways forming a causeless but meaningful order mirrored in mind and matter.
Modern physics literally realized the transmutative dream of the alchemists when it learned to manipulate and exploit the atom. Transmutation is changing the number of protons in the atomic nucleus of the basic elements. Matter is now viewed as a process not a thing. Mind is a special kind of process depending on arrangements of matter. Likewise, embedded process. Metaphysically, even God is a verb as is everything else.
When Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung, he encouraged us to find “a neutral, or unitarian language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things.” Psyche and soma are indissolubly wed in nature and our nature, and must be considered in an adequate account of reality.
However, now there is no consensus in physics, so all contemporary models [Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), etc] are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. Both matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
Psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.
The presence of the observer has an effect on what is observed, both in terms of interpreting that experience (projection, archetypes, assumed truths; worldview) and literally at the physical level. This is embodied in the Uncertainty Principle, where we cannot know a particle’s position and momentum simultaneously. There is no objectivity possible as relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated.
Synchronicity explores the borderland between meaning and spacetime, where chance meets necessity, when external and internal circumstances align in meaningful coincidence. It links the observable and unknowable, the effect of the particular and specific with the universal. In this nonlocal effect, certain qualities manifest relatively simultaneously in different or proximate places. It is a parallelism that cannot be explained causally. Is it an invisible field effect linking multidimensional spaces?
Synchronistic phenomena coincide and are amplified in space and time. It manifests as psychic phenomena when the connection is psyche to psyche, including empathic psychophysical manifestations. When it is between psyche and the outside physical world it creates other phenomena such as anomalous cognition (A.C.) or psychokinesis, or perhaps lucky shopping – finding what you want!
Pauli seemed so prone to generating weird phenomena around him that Jung called it the ‘Pauli Effect.’ Machinery broke, fires started, equipment exploded or fell apart, and other strange things manifested in his presence. Powerful activations of the unconscious are associated with such effects.
Inner psychological images meet outer facts in physical knowledge. Complementary or parallel psychological and physical explanations can be argued. But Jung and Pauli agreed there is an unknowable structuring element in the collective unconscious that arranges the registering of acausal events. Synchronicity is a psychic equation: this equals that though the energy is manifested in dual relationship in the spacetime continuum. There is a constant connection through effect, not causation. What is simply is…and, it is meaningful.
Synchronicity can be metaphorical or symbolic, or quite literal. It is a structurally accurate relationship connection. Synchronicity embodies a psychophysical unity. It illumines us, reminding us of the uncanny and unknowable side of life. It is spirit in matter, an animating principle. It emerges from a level where psyche and matter originate, where religion and science originate. It takes us by surprise from out of the blue when it lacks directed intentionality.
There is a tale about the Venus de Milo which embodies very dramatic synchronicity. Before it was sold to the Louvre, the statue was in the hands of a Venetian art dealer, who found it more profitable to sell pieces of the statue to the superstitious. It was said it had the power of make women who touched it beautiful. Realizing the potential for profit, the art dealer arranged to make a plaster cast and have the original statue smashed to bits and parsed out.
When the art dealer raised his arm to give the signal to destroy the statue, his arm was severed from his body as if by an invisible sword. Simultaneously the opposite arm of the Venus de Milo was also severed. Both arms fell to the floor, one of flesh and one of stone. They fell in the form of a cross, which the workers took as a divine sign to cease their vandalism.
But when we imagine that we have intentionally conjured a desired result, our puny personalities cannot call it anything but magic and stand in awe of the Mystery. This doesn’t mean the result is caused by our will, but perhaps through a certain intuitive alignment or resonance with the flow of all that is. As in Pauli’s physics discovery, the underlying pattern of the whole dance has a profound effect on the behavior of each individual particle. Every occurrence is a unique synchronous act of creation in time.
Jung implied that the unconscious or fundamental consciousness is the animating power of all matter. He defined a psychoid realm where mind/matter melded subjective and objective into a unity. He viewed mind-matter as a continuum of the unconscious, or primordial consciousness.
Jung also postulated a transconscious or unintegratable realm of archetypal forces. There is some evidence that the groundstate of the vacuum potential or ZPE provides a model for a subquantal field effect that influences matter/energy through chaotic virtual photon fluctuation.
Quantum Biophysics and Healing
Our contemporary task is to move beyond the apparent mind/body dichotomy of western mechanistic thought. This cannot remain a mere concept but must become part of our essence, a belief lived from our very core. Living from a holistic perspective is an experiential process, a Way of life.
"Consciousness" encompasses the potentially integrated healing aspects of brain, mind, emotions, and spirit, together with physiological and environmental influences that produce unique patterns. Healing is a physical or biological form of creativity. Nonlocal healing is a synchronistic event, which takes place in the presence of intentionality to share a common field of influence.
The "consciousness of healing" may be a pattern, or patterns, that can be identified in the anomalous energies associated with sensitive persons. Anomalous energies are one highly meaningful constellation of factors. Recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, are inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse.
Selected aspects of consciousness provide more reliable experimental replication and active integration of holistic investigations into the sources and processes of healing, other associated non-local phenomena, environmental effects and biophysical interactions of body, mind, emotions and spirit.
New developments on the frontier of science start with (1) observations of phenomenological effects, (2) collection of anecdotal information, (3) organizing the data into useful patterns and relationships from the experiential data, (4) developing a subsequent taxonomy for defining discrete phenomena and their various aspects, (5) forming research protocols and designs to test hypotheses and maximize successful and reproducible results, and (6) utilizing the research results in development of individual and group healing applications and expanding knowledge about the bioenergetic aspects of healing..
It has been suggested (Dossey; Krippner; Gowan; Motoyama; Beal and Gilula, 2004) that some individuals possess unusual capabilities and processes of consciousness. They are often considered intuitive about past, present or future events, and highly sensitive to body, mind, spirit and environmental influences, in and around other persons, as well other living and non-living systems. They may be admired, imitated, ignored, feared, suppressed or judged as "handicapped" or "mentally afflicted", depending on how they use their "gifts".
Associated with an individual’s abilities, there are aspects of, (1) emotional events, both life-changing (epiphany or tragedy), and sequelae, (2) and/or an inherited component, (3) a health issue, which may also serve to influence their unusual capabilities, and, (4) an environmental influence, positive or negative.
Please note that these people, by inheritance, accident, illness, discipline, or environmental influence manifest an incredible range of sensitivity, down to quantum energy levels. Many persons involved in healing processes are hypersensitive to chemical, electromagnetic, and electrical factors, whether acquired either naturally or artificially induced.
Strong psychosomatic overtones are related to electrical and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) as well as to multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). This type of adaptation and sensitivity may be one of the characteristics important to possess or develop in the healing process.
There are many answers to "unexplained phenomena." We are developing more sensitive instruments to measure, internally and externally, the electrochemical nature of living systems and the interacting variables of the environment. Every day we watch the impossible or nonsensical become useful and applicable through technological and conceptual quantum leaps in awareness.
The complex interactions of all these energy factors (holographic, quantum, electromagnetic and chemical) that shape life processes must be considered, along with genetic, biochemical, age, gender and health processes. All of these factors must be addressed in any exploration of unusual states of consciousness whether they occur in individuals or in groups. There is comparatively very little human perspective/awareness anywhere about our long-term relationship interactions with the earth and all other living systems.
We are a product of our natural earth environment and respond to some subtle degree (and sometimes not so subtle) to the same geoelectromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric factors which affect all other living things. We can, and are, affecting the balance of nature, which in the long-term affects us. This is a true form of biological feedback.
The field of healing sources and processes requires the development of taxonomy and protocols for analyzing and exploring inherited, spontaneous, controlled and stressful patterns of consciousness, and relating these patterns to potential environmental influences.
Areas of concern, which can respond to investigation, are the recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns of brain activity (before, during, and after healing events) related to 1) the consciousness of the healer (what psychophysiological patterns are required to produce optimal and repeatable healing, 2) environmental influences supporting the healing objectives, and 3) consciousness of the subject.
When both the patient and healer are co-equals in the process and on a “level playing field,” patient safety is optimized, but so is healer safety. This type of setting also maximizes the possibilities of bioentrainment of physiological signals belonging to both patient and healer.
A level playing field also allows patient and healer to co-create the process of healing from a position of mutual empathy, respect, and trust. Such a level field is created by an environment, which maximizes those traits. Interrelated patterns of consciousness are reflected in brainwave (EEG) frequency distribution, psychophysiological states, and environmental conditions, which affect the clinical healing setting (Gilula).
Unusual states of consciousness, controlled or spontaneous may occur due to: (1) external sensory induction, sensory deprivation or sensory over-stimulation, (by environmental influences); (2) internal changes that are self-induced by body and mind disciplines, (3) ill health, (psychophysiological aspects of electrical and chemical sensitivity), accident, injury or near-death trauma, (4) inherited CNS influences, for example, familial periodic paralysis (FPP) and recurring spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), or (5) interactive combinations of the previous factors.
Research suggests that RSPK incidents tend to occur under unusual emotional stress and on days of above average geomagnetic fields, modulated by EMFs from the agent and focused by the agent onto significant other objects. Krippner and Persinger also report anomalies and amplification of psi reports associated with periods of exposure to tectonic strain.
The RSPK process is similar to the electro-acoustic effect of movement induced in the diaphragm of a loudspeaker by an electric current. But, in RSPK, the EMF energy moves through space-time without the benefit of electrical wiring, presumably because it is highly focused.
Roll brings up Puthoff’s theory that the central person affects the zero-point energy (ZPE) that fills space and thereby the gravity/inertia that usually keep things in place. If the ZPE is affected during RSPK, this may suggest that the ZPE has a consciousness component.
Meditative or yogic practices would add a dimension of personal exploration to any investigation of the zero-point energy. Recent research studies of the nature of consciousness and the relationship to "quantum holography", requires a new perspective regarding time, space and energy interactions.
Persons who exhibit strong allergic responses, who are often chemically and/or electrically sensitive, may inadvertently affect tape recorders, computers, lights, TVs and other sensitive electronic equipment during their reactive episodes. This is strongly reminiscent of the “Pauli Effect.” Robert Morris has reported that some individuals are affecting electronic equipment when they are in an intense or traumatized emotional state. Effects on magnetometers, electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic field detectors have been noted from persons who claim non-local energy projection abilities.
Pathological sensitivities can be either inherited or accidentally acquired. Spontaneous, non-local events may occasionally occur around FPP or EHS-afflicted individuals. The events seem causally related to RSPK, and include lights going on and off (usually solar-activated types), computers crashing, individual components burning up, and other similar effects on sensitive solid-state electronic devices. Stressful events that may be psychophysiological or environmental seem to help initiate both FPP and ESH reactions, with RSPK occurring sometimes as a side-effect.
New methodologies and taxonomies may provide more consistent replication, control, amplification, and exploration of the subtle energies associated with healing and other states of consciousness. In the efforts to understand the interrelated patterns of body, brain, emotions, mind and environment involved in healing processes, we may describe some sources of healing within the blend of consciousness and quantum cosmology.
What's New with My Subject? Nonlocal Creative Source AHA!!! All true creativity springs from the unknown, from a deep wellspring of flowing forth. Creativity involves a sense of discovery and epiphany, of realization as well as shaping of media. Musicians often speak of an uncanny ESP that takes them to new heights of creativity developed among players. The same deep knowing develops among fellow artists in other media as well.
If we follow some natural laws we can become more effective creators. You cannot create your life, per se, but through adopting certain attitudes and exercising certain principles you can enhance your life experiences one creative act at a time. We saw this in considering the emergence of a special form of creativity -- healing.
An open Way facilitates creativity, opens the creative space, limits resistance, increases flow. We can learn through shaping, rather than through thinking, doing, feeling, undertaking, experiencing, or being. It is different from cognitive learning, behavioral learning, emotional learning, action learning, experiential learning and ontological learning.
Most of our learning systems are cognitive, about thinking and writing, rather than shaping and making. Artificer learning (Wildman and Miller, 2003) is learning by shaping. Shaping with a clear telos or intentionality allows fluidity in the process of formation to suit the particular situation, optimizes the flow state (Csikszentmihalyi).
We can increase our effectiveness as creators by the following (Fritz):
Charisma is energy which flows from the heart. Charisma can be created when the speaker’s feelings are transferred in their purest form to the listener. Raw feelings convey the passion of pure energy. If your reservoir of pure feelings is full you can transfer that to your audience via sound and rhythm, and animation of the whole body that conveys emotional energy to the audience. Let it come bursting forth from the soul like a work of art.
Feel the passion; feel the fervor; feel the feelings no matter how you intend to express them. Let it flow forth like song. Make your arguments with a variety of colors and strokes, and know when to stop! Embrace and cherish your feelings as you and they express themselves. Feel the spectrum of pain and joy evoking the most exquisite affirmation of life (Spence).
Truth is a revelation of what we already know but haven’t heard in words before. In truth we discover what we already know but haven’t confronted. Truth as a judgment is the product of our experience. In our belief systems, truth is what we accept of our history, what we accept as truth. We choose truth, which is revealed in direct proportion to our abilitiy to discard all we were previously told is true – presumptions, assumed truths, limited self image.
Neurologist Ramachandran has summarized 10 artistic universals which constitute10% of the content of art to 90% of the endless cultural variations represented by art history. This 10% represents the visual primitives of human perception that we respond to emotionally and aesthetically: neuroaesthetics. In addition to other sensory modalities, thirty visual centers are linked to the emotional part of the brain. They please our neural circuits and mesmerize us. They include:
We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots.
‘Know brow’ art, as a movement toward more and more fully immersive multidimensional experiences, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople.
We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes. There is a bliss that comes from within us that energizes, even enflames the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform ourselves and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).
Discussion Quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity have superceded both the pre-scientific and mechanistic worldviews. The new paradigm is an organic model – Nature’s Way of spontaneous self-organization, self-assembly, regeneration, and transmutation of energy/matter.
Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos – the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings – we are both/and psychobiological.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the Demiurgic field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a “Eureka” moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution.
Art and artfulness embody the imagination expressed as a living form. An expressive form manifests human feelings and values, a concept of life (exoteric) and inward reality (esoteric) – the logic of consciousness itself. Other examples are sudden illumination, aesthetic appreciation, opening to nature (nature-mystic experience), simple recognition to dramatic realization, or awe.
An experience, innovation, discovery or realization always has aesthetic appeal. It contains mythological, metaphorical and epistemological dimensions. When we have a creative, therapeutic or transformative experience, it involves a degree of ‘what it is like’ to be shaped, to apprehend this given, to undergo this process or happening.
Chaos theory shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution. This increases our adaptability helping us evolve. At supercritical junctions (crises, crossroads, bifurcations) we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. It’s not a case of ‘we are the world’; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
Beauty is a state of consciousness described in Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy as related to self-actualization. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with creativity, healing, genius and bliss states or unitive experience. The bottom-up creative dynamic runs from personality to Self, to Demiurgic Field.
Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realities. Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness, healing, and creativity. Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe govern human creativity and learning.
Conclusions There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. There is a dynamic creative boundary of infinite reiteration, creating order from disorder, in chaos theory. This cosmos is, indeed, greater than the Whole SUM of its parts.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. How does that work? It seems to violate Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. But under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons can instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them, whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Wormholes and tunneling aside, how does every point in space connect to every other point in the Universe? In a Holographic Universe, even Time and Space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals, because concepts such as location break down in a universe, where nothing is truly separate. The apparently concrete world is a multidimensional projection.
Experimental findings by Aspect (1982) seem to imply that objective reality does not really exist. Despite its apparent solidity, the quintessence of the universe is a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. While this hologram implies an objective reality, it is not directly perceivable. This is where the essence of the “mystery” lies. It is the inherently non-observable and therefore metaphysical part of objective reality.
A hologram suggests that some things in the universe do not lend themselves to this empirical approach. If we try to deconstruct something constructed holographically, we only get smaller wholes. In this sense, the part contains the whole. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.
The reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. At some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
Quantum mechanics determined the primacy of the inseparable whole. Holism is intrinsic to any quantum theory for biology. Descriptions of isolated systems are permissible only under experimental conditions. Holistic properties imply fundamental interconnectedness within the organism, between organisms, and with the environment.
The vacuum potential appears to be much more than a metaphor. It is the most fundamental phenomenon we are currently capable of perceiving. It provides us with a new paradigm for our very existence – one that recognizes wholeness, connectedness, integration, and participation in the universal scheme. Every ‘thing’ – from concepts to objects --including the universal waveform originates from the fertile and “whole sum” womb of spacetime. This is also the domain of nonlocal mind.
Most scientists will tell you that wavefunctions, universal or otherwise, do not really exist, except on paper. But it may be that wavefunctions really exist and are akin to the mind of God. If the wavefunction is consciousness and our personal wavefunction is connected with it in a constrained or limited fashion, too much information appears as noise. But the connection suggests a relationship between intelligence and spacetime.
In a holographic universe even random events must be revisioned as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry and meaning within the whole.
Nonlocal events, like synchronistic events are apparently 1) unmediated, requiring no go-between signal; 2) unmitigated, with no diminishing of effect with distance; 3) immediate, apparently outside of time and space as we commonly understand them. In this acausal process, consciousness is fundamental, not derivative and unexplainable in terms of anything more basic.
However, it is unlikely we will ever be able to demonstrate that consciousness is a logically necessary accompaniment to any material process, however complex. But we can show that emprical processes of a certain kind and complexity appear to have it. It may even be an intrinsic “quality” of matter, like mass, or maybe more closely related to the foundational nature of “information.”
Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems. It can operate beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment. Coherence or resonance may be expressed as compassion, empathy, love, unity, oneness, and connectedness. Consciousness affects or informs human and nonhuman or inanimate forms alike.
But it is not simply a matter of philosophically or conceptually embracing a new paradigm that can change ourselves or the arc of our stewardship of the planet Earth. We can rhapsodize in a self-congratulatory way all we want about holism, the web of life and our place in the cosmos.
But to change things we have to change ourselves, be willing to trasform utterly in our essence and impliment what we have learned about the deep nature of reality. Simply mastering QM and complexity theory won’t help us evolve morally, emotionally or spiritually. We have to tranform our inner consciousness to truly embrace global consciousness as our legacy.
“The ecological crises – or Gaia’s main problem is not pollution, toxic dumping, or ozone, depletion,…but that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness…by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia. The primary cure for the ecological crisis is not learning that Gaia is a Web of Life, however true that may be, but learning a way to foster these many arduous waves of interior growth, none of which have been addressed in most of the new-paradigm approaches.” (Wilber, 2000)
Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all. Still none of us has any idea how anything material could be conscious, so we must simply stand in that Mystery. We share its essential nature; it is the cosmos within us. We are that.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick.
REFERENCES
Beal, James and Gilula, Marshall (2004). “Anomalous Psychophysiological and Environmental Mechanisms Affecting Patient Safety and Healing.” Fourteenth Annual ISSSEEM Conference, 6/24-6/30/2004, Colorado Springs, CO.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Dossey, Larry (1999). Reinventing Medicine: Beyond the Mind-Body to New Era of Healing. Harper San Francisco.
Fritz, Robert (1991). Creating. New York: Fawcett Columbine.
Gowan, John Curtis (1975). Trance, Art and Creativity. privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, New York. Krippner, Stanley and Ullman, Montague (1973). Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP. New York: Macmillon Publishing Co.
Meier, C.A. (1992 – 2001). Atom and Archetype: the Pauli/Jung Letters. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Miller, Iona (2003). “The Emergent Healing Paradigm”. Chaosophy 2003. Grants Pass, Oregon: O.A.K.
Miller, Iona (2004a). “Hunting the Future in ‘Know Brow’ Art and Ars Electronica”.
Miller, Iona and Wildman, Paul (2004b). “The Demiurgic Field: Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation, and Creativity.” Chaosophy 2004, O.A.K.
Miller, Iona (2004c). “The Whole SUM Infinity: Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics”. Chaosophy 2004, O.A.K.
Miller, Iona and Miller, Richard Alan (2003). “New Millennium Psi Research”. Future Science. Grants Pass: O.A.K.
Mishlove, Jeffrey (1975-1993). The Roots of Consciousness. Tulsa: Council Oaks Books.
Spence, Gerry (1995). How to Argue and Win Every Time. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Swanson, Claude (2003). The Synchronized Universe. Tucson, Arizona: Poseidia Press.
Wilber, Ken (2000). Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhalla.
A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
In Philosophy, Biophysics, Psychology, Art, Medicine
Iona Miller , O.A.K., 8/2004
“This feeling for the infinite…can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be…ultimately limited – we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
"By applying Ockham's razor to the basic epistemological question 'What is reality?' the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external reality is a 'superfluous hypothesis'" ~ Philip K Dick, in the introduction to "The Golden Man"
"There are no conditions to fulfill. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up.
Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it." ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed”…as above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superceded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine, separating mind and body. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. But it is a holistic viewpoint that doesn’t split mind from body. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner; Mishlove; Radin; Dossey; May; Stanford; Germine; Nelson; Motoyama; Sidorov; Swanson; Miller & Miller). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing.
Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities seemingly unlimited by physical constraints. Psi phenomena concern organism-environment interactions in which it appears that information or infuence has occurred that cannot be explained through current models of sensory-motor channels. They are outside current scientific concepts of time, space, and force. We have hypotheses but little idea how organism-environment and organism-organism information and influence interface and flow.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. Quantum mechanical equations of motion yield open systems and work out their consequences for the flow of information. We have tremendous empirical evidence that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics. And so are we when we seem to make “quantum leaps” in awareness.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical – essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own organic forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. QM doesn't explain gravity, but the fact that the world “ever” appears classical is just a simplification due to our inability to sense quantum states directly. There is no such thing as a classical world.
Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality as described in chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and the holographic concept..
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
Synchronicity
In 1948 psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli began talking about an acausal yet meaningful connecting principle that Jung dubbed synchronicity. Jung used over 1,400 of Pauli’s incredibly rich dreams to write his books on alchemy, a modern version of the search for godhead in matter. Pauli’s professional work validated quantum mechanics; energy appears in ‘bundles’ which appear as various subatomic particles that are manifestations of different types of fields.
The two theoreticians were on complementary vectors. They cross-fertilized one another with concepts from their respective fields, a psychophysical merger. Pauli discovered an abstract pattern hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter that determines its behavior in a noncausal way. Jung argued certain patterns are linked in nonmechanical ways forming a causeless but meaningful order mirrored in mind and matter.
Modern physics literally realized the transmutative dream of the alchemists when it learned to manipulate and exploit the atom. Transmutation is changing the number of protons in the atomic nucleus of the basic elements. Matter is now viewed as a process not a thing. Mind is a special kind of process depending on arrangements of matter. Likewise, embedded process. Metaphysically, even God is a verb as is everything else.
When Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung, he encouraged us to find “a neutral, or unitarian language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things.” Psyche and soma are indissolubly wed in nature and our nature, and must be considered in an adequate account of reality.
However, now there is no consensus in physics, so all contemporary models [Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), etc] are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. Both matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
Psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.
The presence of the observer has an effect on what is observed, both in terms of interpreting that experience (projection, archetypes, assumed truths; worldview) and literally at the physical level. This is embodied in the Uncertainty Principle, where we cannot know a particle’s position and momentum simultaneously. There is no objectivity possible as relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated.
Synchronicity explores the borderland between meaning and spacetime, where chance meets necessity, when external and internal circumstances align in meaningful coincidence. It links the observable and unknowable, the effect of the particular and specific with the universal. In this nonlocal effect, certain qualities manifest relatively simultaneously in different or proximate places. It is a parallelism that cannot be explained causally. Is it an invisible field effect linking multidimensional spaces?
Synchronistic phenomena coincide and are amplified in space and time. It manifests as psychic phenomena when the connection is psyche to psyche, including empathic psychophysical manifestations. When it is between psyche and the outside physical world it creates other phenomena such as anomalous cognition (A.C.) or psychokinesis, or perhaps lucky shopping – finding what you want!
Pauli seemed so prone to generating weird phenomena around him that Jung called it the ‘Pauli Effect.’ Machinery broke, fires started, equipment exploded or fell apart, and other strange things manifested in his presence. Powerful activations of the unconscious are associated with such effects.
Inner psychological images meet outer facts in physical knowledge. Complementary or parallel psychological and physical explanations can be argued. But Jung and Pauli agreed there is an unknowable structuring element in the collective unconscious that arranges the registering of acausal events. Synchronicity is a psychic equation: this equals that though the energy is manifested in dual relationship in the spacetime continuum. There is a constant connection through effect, not causation. What is simply is…and, it is meaningful.
Synchronicity can be metaphorical or symbolic, or quite literal. It is a structurally accurate relationship connection. Synchronicity embodies a psychophysical unity. It illumines us, reminding us of the uncanny and unknowable side of life. It is spirit in matter, an animating principle. It emerges from a level where psyche and matter originate, where religion and science originate. It takes us by surprise from out of the blue when it lacks directed intentionality.
There is a tale about the Venus de Milo which embodies very dramatic synchronicity. Before it was sold to the Louvre, the statue was in the hands of a Venetian art dealer, who found it more profitable to sell pieces of the statue to the superstitious. It was said it had the power of make women who touched it beautiful. Realizing the potential for profit, the art dealer arranged to make a plaster cast and have the original statue smashed to bits and parsed out.
When the art dealer raised his arm to give the signal to destroy the statue, his arm was severed from his body as if by an invisible sword. Simultaneously the opposite arm of the Venus de Milo was also severed. Both arms fell to the floor, one of flesh and one of stone. They fell in the form of a cross, which the workers took as a divine sign to cease their vandalism.
But when we imagine that we have intentionally conjured a desired result, our puny personalities cannot call it anything but magic and stand in awe of the Mystery. This doesn’t mean the result is caused by our will, but perhaps through a certain intuitive alignment or resonance with the flow of all that is. As in Pauli’s physics discovery, the underlying pattern of the whole dance has a profound effect on the behavior of each individual particle. Every occurrence is a unique synchronous act of creation in time.
Jung implied that the unconscious or fundamental consciousness is the animating power of all matter. He defined a psychoid realm where mind/matter melded subjective and objective into a unity. He viewed mind-matter as a continuum of the unconscious, or primordial consciousness.
Jung also postulated a transconscious or unintegratable realm of archetypal forces. There is some evidence that the groundstate of the vacuum potential or ZPE provides a model for a subquantal field effect that influences matter/energy through chaotic virtual photon fluctuation.
Quantum Biophysics and Healing
Our contemporary task is to move beyond the apparent mind/body dichotomy of western mechanistic thought. This cannot remain a mere concept but must become part of our essence, a belief lived from our very core. Living from a holistic perspective is an experiential process, a Way of life.
"Consciousness" encompasses the potentially integrated healing aspects of brain, mind, emotions, and spirit, together with physiological and environmental influences that produce unique patterns. Healing is a physical or biological form of creativity. Nonlocal healing is a synchronistic event, which takes place in the presence of intentionality to share a common field of influence.
The "consciousness of healing" may be a pattern, or patterns, that can be identified in the anomalous energies associated with sensitive persons. Anomalous energies are one highly meaningful constellation of factors. Recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, are inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse.
Selected aspects of consciousness provide more reliable experimental replication and active integration of holistic investigations into the sources and processes of healing, other associated non-local phenomena, environmental effects and biophysical interactions of body, mind, emotions and spirit.
New developments on the frontier of science start with (1) observations of phenomenological effects, (2) collection of anecdotal information, (3) organizing the data into useful patterns and relationships from the experiential data, (4) developing a subsequent taxonomy for defining discrete phenomena and their various aspects, (5) forming research protocols and designs to test hypotheses and maximize successful and reproducible results, and (6) utilizing the research results in development of individual and group healing applications and expanding knowledge about the bioenergetic aspects of healing..
It has been suggested (Dossey; Krippner; Gowan; Motoyama; Beal and Gilula, 2004) that some individuals possess unusual capabilities and processes of consciousness. They are often considered intuitive about past, present or future events, and highly sensitive to body, mind, spirit and environmental influences, in and around other persons, as well other living and non-living systems. They may be admired, imitated, ignored, feared, suppressed or judged as "handicapped" or "mentally afflicted", depending on how they use their "gifts".
Associated with an individual’s abilities, there are aspects of, (1) emotional events, both life-changing (epiphany or tragedy), and sequelae, (2) and/or an inherited component, (3) a health issue, which may also serve to influence their unusual capabilities, and, (4) an environmental influence, positive or negative.
Please note that these people, by inheritance, accident, illness, discipline, or environmental influence manifest an incredible range of sensitivity, down to quantum energy levels. Many persons involved in healing processes are hypersensitive to chemical, electromagnetic, and electrical factors, whether acquired either naturally or artificially induced.
Strong psychosomatic overtones are related to electrical and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) as well as to multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). This type of adaptation and sensitivity may be one of the characteristics important to possess or develop in the healing process.
There are many answers to "unexplained phenomena." We are developing more sensitive instruments to measure, internally and externally, the electrochemical nature of living systems and the interacting variables of the environment. Every day we watch the impossible or nonsensical become useful and applicable through technological and conceptual quantum leaps in awareness.
The complex interactions of all these energy factors (holographic, quantum, electromagnetic and chemical) that shape life processes must be considered, along with genetic, biochemical, age, gender and health processes. All of these factors must be addressed in any exploration of unusual states of consciousness whether they occur in individuals or in groups. There is comparatively very little human perspective/awareness anywhere about our long-term relationship interactions with the earth and all other living systems.
We are a product of our natural earth environment and respond to some subtle degree (and sometimes not so subtle) to the same geoelectromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric factors which affect all other living things. We can, and are, affecting the balance of nature, which in the long-term affects us. This is a true form of biological feedback.
The field of healing sources and processes requires the development of taxonomy and protocols for analyzing and exploring inherited, spontaneous, controlled and stressful patterns of consciousness, and relating these patterns to potential environmental influences.
Areas of concern, which can respond to investigation, are the recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns of brain activity (before, during, and after healing events) related to 1) the consciousness of the healer (what psychophysiological patterns are required to produce optimal and repeatable healing, 2) environmental influences supporting the healing objectives, and 3) consciousness of the subject.
When both the patient and healer are co-equals in the process and on a “level playing field,” patient safety is optimized, but so is healer safety. This type of setting also maximizes the possibilities of bioentrainment of physiological signals belonging to both patient and healer.
A level playing field also allows patient and healer to co-create the process of healing from a position of mutual empathy, respect, and trust. Such a level field is created by an environment, which maximizes those traits. Interrelated patterns of consciousness are reflected in brainwave (EEG) frequency distribution, psychophysiological states, and environmental conditions, which affect the clinical healing setting (Gilula).
Unusual states of consciousness, controlled or spontaneous may occur due to: (1) external sensory induction, sensory deprivation or sensory over-stimulation, (by environmental influences); (2) internal changes that are self-induced by body and mind disciplines, (3) ill health, (psychophysiological aspects of electrical and chemical sensitivity), accident, injury or near-death trauma, (4) inherited CNS influences, for example, familial periodic paralysis (FPP) and recurring spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), or (5) interactive combinations of the previous factors.
Research suggests that RSPK incidents tend to occur under unusual emotional stress and on days of above average geomagnetic fields, modulated by EMFs from the agent and focused by the agent onto significant other objects. Krippner and Persinger also report anomalies and amplification of psi reports associated with periods of exposure to tectonic strain.
The RSPK process is similar to the electro-acoustic effect of movement induced in the diaphragm of a loudspeaker by an electric current. But, in RSPK, the EMF energy moves through space-time without the benefit of electrical wiring, presumably because it is highly focused.
Roll brings up Puthoff’s theory that the central person affects the zero-point energy (ZPE) that fills space and thereby the gravity/inertia that usually keep things in place. If the ZPE is affected during RSPK, this may suggest that the ZPE has a consciousness component.
Meditative or yogic practices would add a dimension of personal exploration to any investigation of the zero-point energy. Recent research studies of the nature of consciousness and the relationship to "quantum holography", requires a new perspective regarding time, space and energy interactions.
Persons who exhibit strong allergic responses, who are often chemically and/or electrically sensitive, may inadvertently affect tape recorders, computers, lights, TVs and other sensitive electronic equipment during their reactive episodes. This is strongly reminiscent of the “Pauli Effect.” Robert Morris has reported that some individuals are affecting electronic equipment when they are in an intense or traumatized emotional state. Effects on magnetometers, electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic field detectors have been noted from persons who claim non-local energy projection abilities.
Pathological sensitivities can be either inherited or accidentally acquired. Spontaneous, non-local events may occasionally occur around FPP or EHS-afflicted individuals. The events seem causally related to RSPK, and include lights going on and off (usually solar-activated types), computers crashing, individual components burning up, and other similar effects on sensitive solid-state electronic devices. Stressful events that may be psychophysiological or environmental seem to help initiate both FPP and ESH reactions, with RSPK occurring sometimes as a side-effect.
New methodologies and taxonomies may provide more consistent replication, control, amplification, and exploration of the subtle energies associated with healing and other states of consciousness. In the efforts to understand the interrelated patterns of body, brain, emotions, mind and environment involved in healing processes, we may describe some sources of healing within the blend of consciousness and quantum cosmology.
What's New with My Subject? Nonlocal Creative Source AHA!!! All true creativity springs from the unknown, from a deep wellspring of flowing forth. Creativity involves a sense of discovery and epiphany, of realization as well as shaping of media. Musicians often speak of an uncanny ESP that takes them to new heights of creativity developed among players. The same deep knowing develops among fellow artists in other media as well.
If we follow some natural laws we can become more effective creators. You cannot create your life, per se, but through adopting certain attitudes and exercising certain principles you can enhance your life experiences one creative act at a time. We saw this in considering the emergence of a special form of creativity -- healing.
An open Way facilitates creativity, opens the creative space, limits resistance, increases flow. We can learn through shaping, rather than through thinking, doing, feeling, undertaking, experiencing, or being. It is different from cognitive learning, behavioral learning, emotional learning, action learning, experiential learning and ontological learning.
Most of our learning systems are cognitive, about thinking and writing, rather than shaping and making. Artificer learning (Wildman and Miller, 2003) is learning by shaping. Shaping with a clear telos or intentionality allows fluidity in the process of formation to suit the particular situation, optimizes the flow state (Csikszentmihalyi).
We can increase our effectiveness as creators by the following (Fritz):
- Allowing our driving force to be desire, loving the creation enough to bring it into being;
- Recognizing that when we master the creative process, the unusual becomes usual;
- Realizing form is not a formula, which can actually work against the creative process;
- Being process-oriented, focusing on how to create, rather than results or goal oriented;
- Knowing what you don’t or can’t know and refraining from speculation that distorts reality;
- Remaining a learner, rather than performer with a fixed level of capacity;
- Working with an attitude of choice, rather than obligation to manipulate or motivate yourself;
- Stretching toward the new and unfamiliar and consolidating by repetition;
- Maintaining some separation for engagement and relationship between creator and creation;
- Focusing on the creation, not yourself, from a first-person to third-person orientation away from your identity to the actual creation and reality;
- Idealism can set you up for ideal-reality conflict which is irrelevant to creation or your ability to create it;
- A specific prescribed worldview is less important than the ability to live flexibly within many universes;
- Creative process deals with relative not absolute truth;
- Consider your life a blessing to bring into being creations you simply want but don’t need;
- Make individual creations in your life to shape it through deep involvement;
- Practice objectively observing current reality and how to close the gap toward your vision;
- Simple plans help develop effectiveness and efficiency;
- The more you create, the more you can create;
- Deadlines help you focus your creative process;
- Always have a place to go in the open-ended creative process.
Charisma is energy which flows from the heart. Charisma can be created when the speaker’s feelings are transferred in their purest form to the listener. Raw feelings convey the passion of pure energy. If your reservoir of pure feelings is full you can transfer that to your audience via sound and rhythm, and animation of the whole body that conveys emotional energy to the audience. Let it come bursting forth from the soul like a work of art.
Feel the passion; feel the fervor; feel the feelings no matter how you intend to express them. Let it flow forth like song. Make your arguments with a variety of colors and strokes, and know when to stop! Embrace and cherish your feelings as you and they express themselves. Feel the spectrum of pain and joy evoking the most exquisite affirmation of life (Spence).
Truth is a revelation of what we already know but haven’t heard in words before. In truth we discover what we already know but haven’t confronted. Truth as a judgment is the product of our experience. In our belief systems, truth is what we accept of our history, what we accept as truth. We choose truth, which is revealed in direct proportion to our abilitiy to discard all we were previously told is true – presumptions, assumed truths, limited self image.
Neurologist Ramachandran has summarized 10 artistic universals which constitute10% of the content of art to 90% of the endless cultural variations represented by art history. This 10% represents the visual primitives of human perception that we respond to emotionally and aesthetically: neuroaesthetics. In addition to other sensory modalities, thirty visual centers are linked to the emotional part of the brain. They please our neural circuits and mesmerize us. They include:
- Peak shift (amplification of traits; ultranormal stimuli, or charicature)
- Grouping (Aha! arousal vision evolved to discover objects and defeat camoflage)
- Contrast (visual peekaboo; the act of searching is pleasing)
- Isolation (understatement; less is more; attentional focus)
- Perception problem solving
- Symmetry
- Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint (novelty-seeking)
- Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
- Balance
- Metaphor (layers of meaning)
We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots.
‘Know brow’ art, as a movement toward more and more fully immersive multidimensional experiences, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople.
We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes. There is a bliss that comes from within us that energizes, even enflames the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform ourselves and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).
Discussion Quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity have superceded both the pre-scientific and mechanistic worldviews. The new paradigm is an organic model – Nature’s Way of spontaneous self-organization, self-assembly, regeneration, and transmutation of energy/matter.
Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos – the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings – we are both/and psychobiological.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the Demiurgic field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a “Eureka” moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution.
Art and artfulness embody the imagination expressed as a living form. An expressive form manifests human feelings and values, a concept of life (exoteric) and inward reality (esoteric) – the logic of consciousness itself. Other examples are sudden illumination, aesthetic appreciation, opening to nature (nature-mystic experience), simple recognition to dramatic realization, or awe.
An experience, innovation, discovery or realization always has aesthetic appeal. It contains mythological, metaphorical and epistemological dimensions. When we have a creative, therapeutic or transformative experience, it involves a degree of ‘what it is like’ to be shaped, to apprehend this given, to undergo this process or happening.
Chaos theory shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution. This increases our adaptability helping us evolve. At supercritical junctions (crises, crossroads, bifurcations) we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. It’s not a case of ‘we are the world’; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
Beauty is a state of consciousness described in Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy as related to self-actualization. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with creativity, healing, genius and bliss states or unitive experience. The bottom-up creative dynamic runs from personality to Self, to Demiurgic Field.
Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realities. Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness, healing, and creativity. Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe govern human creativity and learning.
Conclusions There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. There is a dynamic creative boundary of infinite reiteration, creating order from disorder, in chaos theory. This cosmos is, indeed, greater than the Whole SUM of its parts.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. How does that work? It seems to violate Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. But under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons can instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them, whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Wormholes and tunneling aside, how does every point in space connect to every other point in the Universe? In a Holographic Universe, even Time and Space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals, because concepts such as location break down in a universe, where nothing is truly separate. The apparently concrete world is a multidimensional projection.
Experimental findings by Aspect (1982) seem to imply that objective reality does not really exist. Despite its apparent solidity, the quintessence of the universe is a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. While this hologram implies an objective reality, it is not directly perceivable. This is where the essence of the “mystery” lies. It is the inherently non-observable and therefore metaphysical part of objective reality.
A hologram suggests that some things in the universe do not lend themselves to this empirical approach. If we try to deconstruct something constructed holographically, we only get smaller wholes. In this sense, the part contains the whole. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.
The reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. At some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
Quantum mechanics determined the primacy of the inseparable whole. Holism is intrinsic to any quantum theory for biology. Descriptions of isolated systems are permissible only under experimental conditions. Holistic properties imply fundamental interconnectedness within the organism, between organisms, and with the environment.
The vacuum potential appears to be much more than a metaphor. It is the most fundamental phenomenon we are currently capable of perceiving. It provides us with a new paradigm for our very existence – one that recognizes wholeness, connectedness, integration, and participation in the universal scheme. Every ‘thing’ – from concepts to objects --including the universal waveform originates from the fertile and “whole sum” womb of spacetime. This is also the domain of nonlocal mind.
Most scientists will tell you that wavefunctions, universal or otherwise, do not really exist, except on paper. But it may be that wavefunctions really exist and are akin to the mind of God. If the wavefunction is consciousness and our personal wavefunction is connected with it in a constrained or limited fashion, too much information appears as noise. But the connection suggests a relationship between intelligence and spacetime.
In a holographic universe even random events must be revisioned as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry and meaning within the whole.
Nonlocal events, like synchronistic events are apparently 1) unmediated, requiring no go-between signal; 2) unmitigated, with no diminishing of effect with distance; 3) immediate, apparently outside of time and space as we commonly understand them. In this acausal process, consciousness is fundamental, not derivative and unexplainable in terms of anything more basic.
However, it is unlikely we will ever be able to demonstrate that consciousness is a logically necessary accompaniment to any material process, however complex. But we can show that emprical processes of a certain kind and complexity appear to have it. It may even be an intrinsic “quality” of matter, like mass, or maybe more closely related to the foundational nature of “information.”
Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems. It can operate beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment. Coherence or resonance may be expressed as compassion, empathy, love, unity, oneness, and connectedness. Consciousness affects or informs human and nonhuman or inanimate forms alike.
But it is not simply a matter of philosophically or conceptually embracing a new paradigm that can change ourselves or the arc of our stewardship of the planet Earth. We can rhapsodize in a self-congratulatory way all we want about holism, the web of life and our place in the cosmos.
But to change things we have to change ourselves, be willing to trasform utterly in our essence and impliment what we have learned about the deep nature of reality. Simply mastering QM and complexity theory won’t help us evolve morally, emotionally or spiritually. We have to tranform our inner consciousness to truly embrace global consciousness as our legacy.
“The ecological crises – or Gaia’s main problem is not pollution, toxic dumping, or ozone, depletion,…but that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness…by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia. The primary cure for the ecological crisis is not learning that Gaia is a Web of Life, however true that may be, but learning a way to foster these many arduous waves of interior growth, none of which have been addressed in most of the new-paradigm approaches.” (Wilber, 2000)
Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all. Still none of us has any idea how anything material could be conscious, so we must simply stand in that Mystery. We share its essential nature; it is the cosmos within us. We are that.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick.
REFERENCES
Beal, James and Gilula, Marshall (2004). “Anomalous Psychophysiological and Environmental Mechanisms Affecting Patient Safety and Healing.” Fourteenth Annual ISSSEEM Conference, 6/24-6/30/2004, Colorado Springs, CO.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Dossey, Larry (1999). Reinventing Medicine: Beyond the Mind-Body to New Era of Healing. Harper San Francisco.
Fritz, Robert (1991). Creating. New York: Fawcett Columbine.
Gowan, John Curtis (1975). Trance, Art and Creativity. privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, New York. Krippner, Stanley and Ullman, Montague (1973). Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP. New York: Macmillon Publishing Co.
Meier, C.A. (1992 – 2001). Atom and Archetype: the Pauli/Jung Letters. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Miller, Iona (2003). “The Emergent Healing Paradigm”. Chaosophy 2003. Grants Pass, Oregon: O.A.K.
Miller, Iona (2004a). “Hunting the Future in ‘Know Brow’ Art and Ars Electronica”.
Miller, Iona and Wildman, Paul (2004b). “The Demiurgic Field: Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation, and Creativity.” Chaosophy 2004, O.A.K.
Miller, Iona (2004c). “The Whole SUM Infinity: Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics”. Chaosophy 2004, O.A.K.
Miller, Iona and Miller, Richard Alan (2003). “New Millennium Psi Research”. Future Science. Grants Pass: O.A.K.
Mishlove, Jeffrey (1975-1993). The Roots of Consciousness. Tulsa: Council Oaks Books.
Spence, Gerry (1995). How to Argue and Win Every Time. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Swanson, Claude (2003). The Synchronized Universe. Tucson, Arizona: Poseidia Press.
Wilber, Ken (2000). Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhalla.
THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM AND CCP
Explication, Ego Death, and Emptiness
by Iona Miller, ©1993
ABSTRACT: David Bohm suggests psychological "atom-smashing" as a way of radically destructuring the ego, opening it to wider experience of the undivided whole. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information (explication). The stream of images in CCP functions analogously to the unfolding of the stream of consciousness and the enfolding and de-structuring of the ego (ego death). Consciousness and matter share the same essence; their difference is one of degree of subtlety or density. "Emptiness" is an integral aspect of mind/matter. Chaos theory links all these elements as aspects of the archetypal healing process, which is facilitated by CCP.
Consciousness is basically in the implicate order as all matter is, and therefore, it's not that consciousness is one thing and matter is another, but rather consciousness is a material process and consciousness is itself in the implicate order, as is all matter, and that consciousness manifests in some explicate order as does matter in general. --David Bohm, "
The Enfolding, Unfolding Universe"
Psychological death occurs when consciousness keeps step with the ever-moving and self-renewing present, allowing no part of itself to become caught or fixated as residual energy. It is residual energy that furnishes the framework for what will become the thinker, who consists of undigested experience, memory, habit-patterns, identification, desire, aversion, projection and image-making. This is not a purely personal process but the energy of aeons of such processes sclerosed through time, persisting on both personal and collective levels. Ego-death dismantles this superstructure... --Renee Weber, THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM< T
HE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM AND CCP
The popularization of the Holographic Paradigm as conceived by physicist David Bohm and neurologist Karl Pribram began in the 1970s, and carried into the '80s with the publication of Bohm's WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER. Its evolution in scientific and philosophical thought was followed by ReVision Journal, and summarized by Ken Wilber in the classic of New Science literature, THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM AND OTHER PARADOXES (1982).
The following is a synopsis of those dialogues on the holographic paradigm which are germane to the Creative Consciousness Process. This paper draws heavily from the cited works with the intent of providing an illumination of key factors in the phenomenology of dreamhealing. When these discussions took place, chaos theory had not been developed into the interdisciplinary model it is now. Consequently, its metaphors were not available.
We will attempt to interpolate and insinuate chaos theory, and its relationship to the Creative Consciousness Process into the discussion. Rather than tying CCP to chaos theory, (one of the surest routes to theoretical oblivion), we hope to amplify understanding of the archetypal healing process. CCP was not developed from chaos theory, but amplifies the phenomenology of the process as a scientific "myth" which helps us grasp its complex order.
The gist of the holographic theory is that: "Our brains mathematically construct 'concrete' reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe."
Pribram postulates a neural hologram, made by the interaction of waves in the cortex, which in turn is based on a hologram of much shorter wavelengths formed by the wave interactions on the sub-atomic level. Thus, we have a hologram within a hologram, and the interrelatedness of the two somehow gives rise to the sensory images. There is a more fundamental reality which is an invisible flux that is not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things" only energetic events.
The holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and also of that which forms therein. Bohm speaks of "the source" as beyond both implicate (enfolded) and explicate (unfolded) realms. We can imagine Source as the coherent Light which illuminates and objectifies the implicate realm. In a more recent commentary, Fred Alan Wolf (1991) comments on the possible roots of "shamanic physics" and the holographic concept in relation to two shamanic notions: visionary or mythic reality, and the sense of universal connection.
In brief, according to the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, these invisible quantum waves of probability originate in the present, in the past, and inthe future. For any event to manifest, these waves coming from the future and the present or from the past and the present must interfere with each other in the present. The pattern of that interference then creates matter and energy as we perceive them. Somehow shamans were able to see to either the past or the future source of those waves. In this manner they were able to construct visions that had mythic proportions and appeared to them as archetypes in the Jungian sense.
Speaking of the shaman's sense of a meaningful relationship between any two events, he draws an analogy between the shamanic "spider's web" or web of life and Bohm's holographic universe. Perhaps the hologram and the spider web are the same thing seen from different cultural viewpoints. A web is made of vibrating threads. A hologram is made from light waves, vibrations of energy...Bohm calls the hologram the implicate order. This order is normally invisible but yet contains all of the possible phenomena that can be experienced. When an experience occurs, the order is changed. This new order he calls the explicate order. Thus what is explicate is what is observed. In CCP, we might see the "web" as the deep context of emergent imagery, connected and sensitive to all energy events in the vast implicate ocean of energy potential. However, the "implicate sea" is not the infinite ground of mysticism, but is perhaps its physical analog. From the psychological perspective, we have spoken of this "holographic blur" as "The Unborn Dream."
Following imagery down to its most fundamental depths leads to a perception of a destructured phenomenal field. Ken Wilber cautions us not to jump on the mystical bandwagon which confuses the implicate order as the Source, the Tao, or even the mystic void. While the implicate reveals the holoarchy of the material level, this is as far as it goes--except as an analogy. The implicate is not transcendental to matter, but underlies it, as a coherent unity--it is still matter. It is analogous to "ecology" on the biological level. Wilber states that, "the problem is that the quantum potential is merely tremendously huge in size or dimensions; it is not radically dimensionless, or infinite in the metaphysical sense. And you simply cannot equate huge in size, potential or actual, with that which is without size, or prior to any dimensions, high or low, subtle or gross, implicate or explicate."
To "worship" nature or mistake the immanence of wholeness in matter as the Ultimate Reality does not account for transcendent realities--it mistakes the creation for the creator. This is pantheism, reification of matter, animism. Arguably, pantheism is a confusion of two radically different domains--matter and spirit, according to Wilber's vision of the "perennial philosophy." THIS DOMAIN IS NEVERTHELESS PRECISELY THE PROVINCE OF SHAMANISM.
Shamanism deals with the mind inside nature, which is the realm of spirits, if not Spirit. It emerges from the spiritual perception of matter/consciousness as One World. It cleaves to archetypal Feminine divinity, emphasizes immanence, promotes non-linear, diffuse, imaginal, or "matriarchal consciousness" (Neumann), "anima consciousness" (Hillman). In contrast, "patriarchal" philosophy and religion emphasizes hierarchy, linearity, structure, and transcendence. Its aescetic orientation puts it at odds with the natural, sensual world. Shamans and saints enter the spiritual world with different worldviews. T
he holy man uses meditation to "die daily," by withdrawing attention from the senses entirely, and aiming to still the thought process and the constant flow of imagery. It is a via negativa, which transcends the realm of imagination. The shaman is also familiar with death through his own NDE, and entering the realm of the dead, the realm of the ancestors, regularly. Most shamans are not saints and therefore they usually do not seek transcendence of this imaginal realm.
Laughlin, et al draw a distinction between the shaman and mature contemplative: One cross-culturally common resolution to the constraints imposed by the empirical ego upon the epistemic process has been the shamanic principle. The shaman learns to transcend empirical ego constraints by altering his ego state, allowing him to immerse himself and participate in a broader, more destructured phenomenal field. Yet even this solution produces its own state-specificity that is subject to bias due to (1) ego-distortion during the descent stage of the journey, and (2) the ideological origins of interpretation imposed upon the experience and subsequent to the descent. The mature contemplative, on the other hand, offers another solution to the problem of state-specificity; he is trained to maintain a detached intentional field (or watcher) that observes the process of reduction during transformations of state and thus maintains a relative objectivity about his own phenomenal processing.
The authors suggest combining both models as compliments and checks on excessive bias in each to provide the most auspicious climate for development of the epistemic process. It may be a mistake to assume shamanism is a spiritually primitive perspective: rather it is primal, fundamental. Shamanism, like psychology, is pragmatic in its approach to the person. Its orientation toward myth, healing, and vital service to the community has been the reason its presence is almost universally accepted by local religious authority, according to anthropologist Inge-Ruth Heinze.
Religion tolerates shamanism within the fabric of community because their domains don't conflict. Shamanism generally makes no claims for transcendental mystical illumination as it appears in the "perennial philosophy." It is, however, spiritual as well as functional. Shamanic consciousness journeys are structured largely by the worldview of the practitioner. What they believe is possible greatly influences what manifests. They work within the belief systems of participants to open chinks or gaps in their respective worldviews.
This so-called "crack between the worlds" widens into an irrational abyss as the sense of other realities suddenly enlarges. Through simple contact and entrainment of consciousness, the participant is immediately engaged in an enlarged Reality. Important analogies emerge for CCP in linking the nature of physical reality with descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness journeys. We are neither trying to make any journeys conform to a "holographic concept," nor questing after the implicate order, nor trying to explain the appearance and meaning of this material in the context of CCP. We simply observe its appearance in the journeys.
These analogies are hermeneutic interpretations of the metanarratives of CCP. They are the metaphors we "see" by; "how we know what we know." They are useful models to accompany the training journeys of dreamhealing apprentices. As such, they may function as useful orientations for the guide, but are irrelevant to the journey itself. The participants should not be bothered with them, as it will "interpret" their unique experience in a reductive way. Who wants to hear that their experience of being inexorably sucked into a terrifying bottomless pit is just another typical experience of the violent void of the derepressing unconscious?
Remember, the psyche unfolds just what each participant needs for healing in a nonrational way we could never guess or make up. This process is initiated when we deliberately "observe" the stream of consciousness in a therapeutic context. The importance lies in the experience; meaning is inherent within it, embodied as a gestalt. We have simply observed that the consciousness journeys and holographic theory are analogous in many ways and may shed light on one another. The same patterns appear over and over in the journeys. In either case, a fundamental state-of-the-art understanding of the nature of (theoretical/mythical) physical reality is a useful foundation for consciousness exploration.
Consciousness may be viewed as a phenomenon from the quantum level, the organization of neurons, etc. or from a "top down" systems theory approach. Science involves both theories and experimentation. The analogy sheds some light on the theoretical nature of certain experiential states. CCP is not only an empirical orientation of "mind observing matter" but also a phenomenology of "mind observing mind," and sometimes "mind observing spirit." Of course, it is understood that "observation" is participatory and transformative.
When the images unfold and change, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are automatically modified. We can recycle our consciousness by feeding it back into itself, viewing itself from a panoply of infinite relative perspectives. These recursive identifications lead to mode-melding of discrete levels of observation. The entire spectrum of experiential states (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) becomes potentially available for unfoldment through observation/participation.
Such experiences as mind-as-inert-matter, "mind inside nature" (observing natural processes from the internal perspective) may emerge. Or mind-as-spirit may travel to or entrain with other minds in psychic exchange, etc. All radical perspectives of spirit and matter are potentially available. Chaotic dynamics governs finite explication as the imagery of the stream of consciousness. Identification with unfolding processes of creation and destruction leads to experiences such as planetary consciousness, and glimpses of cosmic consciousness. Because the guide helps the participant toward these destructured states, they are emergent not stabilized states of consciousness, such as those found in spiritual disciplines.
For untrained participants, the states are not necessarily "repeatable at will" as are those of skilled meditators. One of the signs of the mature shaman is the ability to both enter and exit "shamanic consciousness" at will, (Achterberg, 1985). All of the transforms are self in search of Self through immersion within the flow. Nonordinary or altered states of consciousness are fundamental to the process. They impact the body directly through imagery. There are infinite possibilities for explicating implicate consciousness as images. However, each individual embodies a gestalt of "probabilities"; because of "sensitivity" explication of certain patterns is more likely based on initial conditions at conception and birth and the complex effects of subsequent psychophysical trauma, which pattern primal self image. In the therapeutic context, both guide and participant co-consciously entrain in the unfolding process of destruction/creation and healing.
Though both are immersed in the process, the guide maintains a bifurcation of consciousness which allows an overview of the process, which by necessity is consistent with the guide's working metatheory or worldview. Theory is also a "way of seeing," alerting us as to what to look for in the experiment. Theories are science's versions of mythic reality. A practical psychological theory can be corrected through experiment, through practice.
Without the matrix of theory, the data flies by incomprehensibly, unnoticed for its deeper importance. It becomes essentially invisible. Participants in the consciousness journeys report states which are analogous to these scientific models of wholeness, unfolding, and void states, which are superficially (or semantically) analogous to profound mystical states. Within this context, there are a great variety of nonordinary states of consciousness leading toward a sense of healing, of wholeness. The journey may even involve a state of global "illumination" of the cortex, as multiple neural systems are entrained and repatterned by the whole. But this does not mean that participants in chaotic consciousness are experiencing the highest mystical illuminations. It is more analogous to Self Realization than God Realization.
We could compare four aspects of the nonrepresentational voids as the 1). "Dead" Void: physical void (implicate order, frequency domain; QM's dynamic void; interstellar space); 2). the Emotional Void of the derepressing unconscious, with its empty trances and transitive moments between explicate states; 3). the mental or Existential Void, the imaginal realm, with its bliss states, ecstasies, and inspirations; and, 4). the spiritual or Mystic Void of objectless contemplation, transcendental unified state. In some mystical schools even this state is the not the Ultimate.
They represent progressively deeper phases of implication within a Reality which supercedes explication in any form. In consciousness journeys, participants may become experientially aware of the deeper implicate order and respond with oceanic feelings, mystical awe, and psychosomatic phenomena. Bohm refers to meaningful symptoms as "somasignificance" and "signasomatic" to describe the patterns of flow between that aspect of the world that is more material and that which is more mind-like. In experiential psychotherapy, the body (our physical matter) does not symbolize the unconscious; it is the unconscious: the "wilderness" of body and world.
Wilber notes that, There is a world of difference between the pre-temporal consciousness, which has no space and no time, and trans-temporal consciousness, which moves beyond space and time while still embracing it...This in no way proves that the holographic blur is not a transcendent state; it demonstrates that one cannot judge so on the basis of language correlations.
What physics has found is actually a unified interaction of material shadows; it discovered that various physical particulars are interrelated processes--but interrelated shadows aren't the Light. As for the implicate order, we saw it was actually a huge energy dimension; it wasn't radically dimensionless or metaphysically infinite. In the human realm, we might regard the differential equation relating stress and momentum to something like an implicate order (for example, the stress gradient of the vacuum), which often unfolds in the beautiful intricacy of a strange attractor. The attractor is the explicate order, a complex manifold of vortices of nonlinear information explication.
INFORMATION THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Both the analytic and holographic models are based on a set of holistic assumptions. Information theory is a theoretical structure capable of integrating both of them as complimentary. In information theory, "information" is defined in terms of its relational aspect; information itself is a holistic concept. In the analytic model information results from the selection of a particular outcome from a set of possibilities. In the holographic model information results from an analog mechanism that allows two states to interact with each other. A general theory of consciousness may be based on holistic assumptions and can utilize information theory.
Consciousness is information -- consciousness-in-forming -- the process of unfolding. The intensity of consciousness at any level is a function of the amount of information at that level (Battista, 1978). All of the potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns that constantly bombard us. Through destructuring in meditation or process therapy, one quiets the brain becoming sympathetically in tune with (entrained to) this universal frequency pattern. When this occurs, the encoded information about the universe becomes holographically decoded, and the individual experiences a state of unitive consciousness with the entire universe. Much of the transformative work in CCP takes place at the threshold between the manifest and nonmanifest.
As imagery unfolds deeper and deeper levels of psyche, it becomes more primal, less structured, until perceptions of forms and patterns dissolve entirely in chaotic consciousness. Thus, CCP is a self-deconditioning process, leading toward experience of the process of awareness itself, leading to a meaningful void. When the new order emerges creatively, it is literally "displayed" or unfolded, made manifest. That display instantly communicates the information it embodies in imagination.
The image is an immediate guide to activity and its dynamic display is also feedback which recycles and patterns the whole system. Mystics are attuned to the inner display of consciousness, much deeper within the implicate order. Bohm notices that, "every thought forms a display in what I call the imaginal world, in terms of the feeling, the image, the idea, the excitement, the muscular tension, which are associated with the thought." He also has said that "when the content of thought is totality, it is carrying out a dance: making a display which is fundamentally its own deep inner nature, the whole of itself. In that process it becomes totally involved, and therefore it becomes in a way a work of art which is displaying its inner principle rather than anything superficial...Metaphysical thought has a drive inherent in it to go further, to the point of being without an external content."
Bohm suggests that we transform as eternity unfolds in us, but that eternity may also transform, as it returns to itself enriched by our participation. Bohm contends that the nonmanifest frequency realm is n-dimensional and atemporal, inconceivable to 3-dimensional thought. Bohm likens n-dimensional space to phase space, (ref. polyphasic consciousness). He asserts that only when the individual has dissolved the 3-dimensional self consisting of gross matter, can the ground of our being flow through us unobstructedly. He extends this notion to psychology, urging us to dissolve the "thinker" as the highest priority the seeker for truth can undertake. He advocates a kind of "psychological atom-smashing," in which countless illusory egoic clusters (analogous to spasms that reduce the flow within the whole) are dissolved.
Knowledge consists in this theory of the process of tuning in on the manifestation (phenomenon) of the nonmanifest in order to make it accessible, through a state of consciousness which lies outside the barriers of the finite senses. Bohm maintains that this capacity exists in the universe, not in us strictly speaking. However, "the challenge for the individual locus of consciousness is to provide the condition that allows the universal force to flow through it without hindrance. The result is not knowledge, in the Kantian sense, but direct nondualistic awareness..." Its precondition is emptiness, as Bohm repeatedly insists, which entails a suspension of the Kantian categories and of 3-dimensional space-time. Such emptiness brings about the cessation of consciousness as the knower and transforms us into an instrument receptively allowing the noumenal intelligence to operate through us, irradiating our daily lives and those of others.
ENFOLDING EGO AND UNFOLDING REBIRTH
Bohm, influenced by Krishnamurti, advocates the death of the 3-dimensional thinker by slowing down and ultimately stilling the shape-shifter's dance. Rebirth is within the n-dimensional domain of consciousness. Renee Weber says that, "such an event would usher in the dynamic state Bohm refers to, in which creation and dissolution and creation would flow through us simultaneously, like quanta of energy born and borne away in the split micro-second, ever welling up afresh without being arrested, clutched at, or sullied...a self-conscious universe realizing itself to be integrally whole and interconnected."
We can conjecture that the process works in reverse: i.e. by following waves of imagery back toward their source in the nonmanifest, we enfold and unfold forms which are open to our perception. As the ego is enfolded, it is engulfed once again in the process of ego death, which transforms into blissful fusion with the whole, leading to the unfolding of rebirth imagery. The fundamental movement is one of folding and unfolding, penetrating and interpenetrating. What we do in n-dimensions is related to what we can observe in three dimensions. Those things are connected which have very nearly the same degree of implication, however far they may be spread across space and time. 3n-dimensional reality is another domain of order which creates a broader context. There are complex parallel orders, not just one sequential order, with many criss-crossing and interpenetrating orders.
This is the manifold of the chaotic strange attractors. Time might very well exist multidimensionally moving in many directions simultaneously. Bohm calls the dynamic expression of the universe the holomovement, the ground of what is manifest. But any form of movement can constitute a hologram, movements known or unknown. The unfolding of the dynamic stream of images through psychic life constitutes such movement. The Creative Consciousness Process expresses as physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual reality.
Bohm implies that the flux can be arrested, coming to balance for the time being, coming to relative closure, "like the vortex which closes on itself, though it's always moving." Bohm cautions that, "thought will now take the words, 'the nonmanifest' and form the idea of the nonmanifest; and therefore, thought thinks the manifest plus the nonmanifest together make up the whole, and that this whole thought is now a step beyond thought...But, in fact, it isn't. This nonmanifest that thought imagines is still the manifest, by definition, because to imagine is also a form of thought. It's a form of thought; it's the manifestation of thought." He goes on to point out that thought will imagine it has captured the whole. "Obviously, the nonmanifest that we talk about is a relative nonmanifest. It is still a thing, although a subtle thing." Such is the territory of CCP.
Thought cannot grasp it, and this is not the aim of the consciousness journeys. It is however true that when consciousness moves into the abyss, it moves beyond the threshold of conceptualization and manifestation of forms, physical and imaginal. This is the realm of spirit--that which does not have obvious structural form and which nevertheless moves something else. Bohm interestingly implicates thought as the source of disorder. Its very nature is form. Transcending it, or destructuring it, reveals the nonmanifest, universal consciousness of mankind. This implies that in psychology we've been addressing problems in the wrong domain; CCP helps us move to their nonmanifest source, rather than simply addressing the symptomatic problems.
EMPTINESS
The dream guides or consciousness guides empty themselves, still themselves, before conducting the journey.
Bohm supports this notion in general as opening another dimension of experience, the wholeness within our own experience. There is one reality, but this reality has multiple dimensions, multiple levels, and multiple aspects. We go from the explicate to the implicate, then to a deeper multidimensional level, thence to some vast ocean outside of space as we ordinarily experience it... Consciousness has to become commensurate with that different space in order to discover it. Consciousness, in fact, has to change its very state.
To make this emptiness a reality in the consciousness of man, as Krishnamurti was saying, conscious-ness would empty itself of all these ripples. When the mind is full of all these ripples and little movements, they scatter the energy, as it were, and it looks as if they are all there is. The plenum which consciousness is is not seen, or is not able to operate. If we say consciousness is the manifest content, it is the non-manifest movement beneath, and it is something far beyond that, and the point is by ending these ripples in the manifest and the nonmanifest, ending these ripples in the manifest and the germs in the nonmanifest which create them, then we have an emptiness which makes consciousness somehow a vehicle or an instrument for the operation of this totality--of intelligence, compassion, truth. But if consciousness is full of all this content which then begins to keep itself going, self-generated, it becomes just chaos, (Bohm).
Elsewhere he says, "we've got to leave thought behind, and come to this emptiness of this manifest thought altogether and of the conditioning of the nonmanifest mind by the seeds of manifest thought. In other words, meditation actually transforms the mind. It transforms consciousness."
ENFOLDING AND UNFOLDING
Bohm's notion of "explication" is probably the most relevant aspect of his theory to CCP. It concerns direct reference and the process of unfolding, which of course relate to the unfolding of images from the nonmanifest into the image-object domain in the context of the journeys. John Welwood discusses this aspect in "The Holographic Paradigm and the Structure of Experience," rooting it in the framework of Gendlin's work on 'focusing.' CCP has analogous steps to Gendlin's "direct reference" or "framing". It is another way of speaking of the identification of the problem, a sense of the dis-ease. The "felt implicite" is the entire psychophysical response during the whole journey, amplified and run through a variety of scenarios in the "theater of the mind."
Explication of the journey's images culminates in actualization, grounding, integration of the potential expressed in the imagery/experience. Gendlin (1964) has outlined a series of experiential steps for making the implicit explicit, for bringing the holographic blur into focus. If you ask yourself, or rather ask of your felt sense, "What is the main quality of my relation to my father?" you have created a frame or lens to focus the felt sense further. How does this work? Perhaps a word will now arise (e.g., "heavy"), or you may feel a bodily change (e.g., a flutter in the stomach, a sigh), or a certain image may appear that expresses this feel of your father.
Gendlin calls this framing of the implicit direct reference: "a use of words to set off, separate out...some aspect of experience which can thereby be called 'this' or 'that' experience, or 'an' experience (1973). Applying a frame to the implicit is somewhat analogous to deblurring a blurred photograph by highlighting the major contours or spatial frequencies, so that particular shapes can emerge from the blur. In photography, this can be done through a Fourier transform, one of the mathematical formulas for the convolution and deconvolution of certain types of holograms.
Thus the felt implicit, as the way the organism holistically feels patterns of relationship, is analoguos to the way in which a Fourier transform encodes spatial frequencies into a hologram. Explicating the implicit is like a re-transformation or deblurring of the transform back into a recognizable form. The first step of explication, direct reference, allows a pattern to emerge from the blur. Our descriptions of experience do not "read off" what is there, but are rather further transformations of it;" "to delineate the situations involves simplifying and further organizing what is already very complexly patterned (Gendlin, 1972). Gendlin (1964) has described these explication transformations as a "focusing" process that opens up the implicit and "carries it forward," thus making concrete differences in the way we live.
The first two steps in focusing blurry feelings are direct reference and unfolding. Unfolding may occur when we take whatever has emerged from direct reference and refer it back to the felt implicit. Thus a feedback loop of unfolding and enfolding is initiated in the therapeutic process. A directly felt effect is one way of transforming the implicit and allowing it to unfold, either gradually or in a sudden "opening up." The unfolding itself clarifies and changes stuck patterns, hidden associations and meanings (interference patterns) that have been enfolded in the implcit, and that have exerted a compulsive effect on behavior.
Interestingly, this way of listening to the implicit and letting it unfold without imposing preconceived forms on it, which is so effective in therapy, is precisely the same process that Bohm (1973) recommends to physicists for discovering a new order amid the present chaos of data in the field." Once the implicit has opened up--whether in therapy or in evolving a new theory in physics--it is never quite the same again. Once you have unfolded the problem in your relationship to your father, that relationship (and your life) is never quite the same. The zig-zag dialectic between transformative explication (which need not be verbal) and felt meaning changes or "carries forward" experiencing, resulting not only in therapeutic progress or personality change, but also in creative discoveries of all kinds. Let us define intuition as direct access to the implicit, which operates by scanning a holographic-type blur with a diffuse attention that does not impose preconceived notion... Specific intuitions usually come to us as diffuse wholes, which we may have difficulty explicating at first or providing reasons for. We simply "know" something through contacting our diffuse felt sense of the situation. Our depth of attunement to implicate orders seems to range through a continuum from everyday intuition to profound mystical insight. Mystical experience seems to be a more total form of this holistic vision that sees through one's particular situation to the whole of the life process, the implicate order of the universe itself. For some people working with the felt implicit in a therapeutic way is a first step in unlocking their deeper connectedness with all of life.
Welwood describes "empty moments in the stream of consciousness" as "transitive tracts." They appear as pauses or split-second transitional moments during which one scans a whole felt meaning complex. We see this in the consciousness journeys as pauses between shape-shifting transforms--the empty spaces in metamorphosis. Perhaps they are microstates of chaotic consciousness which pattern each and every imaginal transform with the dynamic imprint of the whole. This emptiness is the unmanifest made manifest as emptiness--the unconscious as the implicate order of experience, rather than a set of autonomous or explicit "contents." What is unconscious are holistic patternings, which may be explicated in many different ways and at many different levels of the organism/environment interrelationship.
DREAMS, VISIONS, AND THE DREAMTIME
Personal limitations prevent us from experiencing universal consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, our attention is limited to only a few of the nearly infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate phenomenal field, which are theoretically available to individual personal consciousness.
The phenomenon of resonance is implicated in this process. We resonate with those images which create and define our unique reality. In nonordinary reality, such as dreams and consciousness journeys, momentary fissures in our constructed reality allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature. During dreams, we can access the unending flow of wisdom, the flow of nature. Ullman postulates that "the implicate order represents in a sense an infinite information source, perhaps it is the origin of this greater fund of knowledge. Perhaps dreams are a bridge between the perceptual and nonmanifest orders and represent a natural transformation of the implicate into the explicate."
Dreams therefore appear to pattern our lives holistically (top-down) instead of arising from the primitive substratum of consciousness (bottom-up). Commenting on his notion of parallel universes and dreams, Fred Alan Wolf points out that a piece of holographic film actually generates two images, a virtual image that appears to be in the space behind the film, and a real image that comes into focus in the space in front of the film. Light waves composing the virtual image diverge from the apparent focus or source. Focusing in empty air, it is invisible unless revealed by dust or smoke passing through it.
Wolf believes that all dreams are internal holograms, and ordinary dreams are less vivid than lucid dreams because they are virtual images. The lucid dreamer views the dream from within, bathed in the scene where the waves focus, creating a virtual reality "out there." Further, Wolf postulates that lucid dreams (and perhaps all dreams) are actually visits to parallel universes. They are just smaller holograms within the larger and more inclusive cosmic hologram. "I call it parallel universe awareness because I believe that parallel universes arise as other images in the hologram," Wolf states, in Talbot's THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE.
Based on his studies of nonordinary consciousness, Grof tends to agree that the avenues of exploration available to our psyches via holographic interconnectedness are virtually endless. He thinks that the almost endless capacity for holograms to store and retrieve information accounts for the containment of enormous amounts of personal information in vision, fantasies, and other "psychological gestalts."
Grof believes that the tendency of the visionary experience to emerge as countless images unfolding in rapid sequence is related to the holographic nature of the process. This is why a single image may contain information about general attitudes, self-esteem, parental issues, and relationships, all at once. Each small part of the scene can contain the entire constellation of information.
Grof's work has shown that the hidden holographic order surfaces nearly every time one experiences a nonordinary state of consciousness. Jean Achterberg's work (1985) on imagery in healing led her to conclude that, "When images are regarded in the holographic manner, their omnipotent influence on physical function logically follows. The image, the behavior, and the physiological concomitants are a unified aspect of the same phenomenon."
Creativity is necessary for the healing of the body. Bohm has as much as said that in the implicate order, as in the brain itself, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable, and it should therefore come as no surprise to us that images in the mind can ultimately manifest as realities in the physical body. We react both mentally and biologically to everything we experience. The link is indivisible as 'mental' events always have a neurophysiological, chemical and physical substratum. Cleaving to the material basis of the phenomenon--the earthy part--we reunite with our alienated bodies, our primal sensuality. It is only through inclusion of the body in process--body as unconscious, consciousness in our bodies--that we can open to the mythic realm of the Dreamtime. I
n THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE, Talbot compares Bohm's idea of implicate and explicate order with the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the void and nonvoid. The nonvoid is the reality of visible objects. The void, like the implicate order, is the birthplace of all things in the universe, which pour out of it in a "boundless flux." However, only the void is real and all forms in the objective world are illusory, existing merely because of the unceasing flux between the two orders. In turn, the void is described as "subtle," "indivisible," and "free from distinguishing characteristics." Because it is seamless totality it cannot be described in words. Properly speaking, even the nonvoid cannot be described in words because it, too, is a totality in which consciousness and matter and all other things are indissoluble and whole. Herein lies a paradox, for despite its illusory nature the nonvoid still contains an infinitely vast complex of universes. Its indivisible aspects are always present as universal interpenetration, cosmic conscious-ness. We are unable to perceive the void directly because our unconscious mind is far too conditioned in its perception. Conditioning prevents us from seeing the destructured frequency domain. Following natural process, this is precisely the conditioning--the vortices and eddies in our essence--that CCP ever-so-gently deconstructs. What is left is that destructured phenomenal field which is reached after a dizzying, bewildering journey into the nethermost depths of the psyche. The guide beckons the journeyer on into that realm, past the fear and the pain, deeper and deeper. The guide's global perspective resonates with, entrains, and opens the participant to letting go of outworn patterns and rigidities. The old patterns break up as flow is restored. Resting in the void allows for instantaneous repatterning by the whole. Unfolding of the process leads to integration, entrainment of systems in the service of evolution, adaptation.
REFERENCES
"Physics, Mysticism, and the New Holographic Paradigm: A Critical Appraisal", Ken Wilber in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM.
"Reflections on the New Age Paradigm: A Conversation with Ken Wilber in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM.
"The Enfolding-Unfolding Universe: A Conversation with David Bohm," Renee Weber in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM, Ken Wilber, Ed.; Shambhala, Boulder and New York, 1982.
"The Holographic Paradigm and the Structure of Experience" John Welwood, in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM.
"The Physicist and the Mystic--Is a dialogue between them possible? A Conversation with David Bohm, Renee Weber in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM.
"The Holographic Model, Holistic Paradigm, Information Theory and Consciousness," John R. Battista, M.D. in THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM.
Achterberg, Jean, IMAGERY IN HEALING: Shamanism in Modern Medicine, Shambhala, Boston, 1985. Talbot, Michael, THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE, Harper Collins, New York, 1991.
Wolf, Fred Alan, THE EAGLE'S QUEST, Simon & Shuster: New York, 1991.