An article in the February 2023 issue of Scientific American alerted me to the 25th anniversary of the Holographic Universe principle. Along with many people who don’t read scientific journals, I became aware of this concept from Michael Talbot’s book from 1991, The Holographic Universe. Talbot’s work re-emerged in 2020 when I found a copy of his previous work, Your Past Lives - A Reincarnation Handbook (1987.)
These books greatly aided in expanding my concept of Time, and I devoted a chapter in my upcoming Past Life Journeying book to the unpacking of his contribution. My February 2023 desert “drive-about” seems to have opened another door into Talbot’s work and influence. This started with Anil Ananthaswamy’s article on the 25th anniversary of the Holographic Universe concept.
Next, I heard Talbot’s name mentioned in the January 23, 2023 episode of Rob Kristofferson’s Our Strange Skies podcast. Episode 137: The History of Alien Abductions, Part 7: Whitley Strieber, Part 2 dealt with Whitley’s lesser known post-Communion publications,Transformation: The Breakthrough and Breakthrough: The Next Step. Apparently Whitley was in communication with Michael Talbot while those books were being written, and while Talbot was dealing with the illness that would take his life in 1992. I found a copy of Breakthrough through Abe’s Books and it’s on its way.
Next, a trip to Las Vegas Books delivered a copy of Talbot’s 1981 Mysticism and the New Physics. I have been looking for a copy of this for my now growing Talbot collection since this, along with his 1987 Beyond the Quantum, are out of print and not available in the Kindle format.
Then a search for Talbot’s name guided me to a reminiscence from Toby Johnson, another author who knew Talbot from that 90s time period, and a link to an article apparently written by Talbot, The Universe as a Hologram, which summarizes the Holographic principle. These are my notes from that article:
Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something…
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.
Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram…
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.
This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is.” Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development”…
…if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm…
Thanks to the “greater forces at work” for bringing Talbot’s work back into my awareness.
This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
I am proposing Past Life Journeying IS that “proper tool” to “pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.” And maybe the not yet discovered Future?
