Myswizard

Parapsychology

Parapsychology brings up a great deal of controversy as a “science” and its’ actual existence. Trying to scientifically prove much of the phenomena within this category is quite difficult at best. Scientists have proven within clinical studies using mediums, the existence of an afterlife (see “The Afterlife Experiments” under my library), as well as others who have devoted their life to these explorations. Although there are Truths within this (parapsychology) topic, there are also Falsehoods. Sorting them out could take an interminable amount of time. There are many who “claim” to have “abilities” who do not. (as they make their living off the naivete’ of their followers) One Truth is, that when one’s consciousness level has been heightened, many of these “abilities” come as a consequence of what one has become. Others are born with psychic abilities greater than the norm. I don’t know the answer as to the “why”. Perhaps at some future date I will do some of my own research using the Map of Consciousness in order to bring more light on this subject. Having experienced quite a bit of this phenomena myself, it’s become an integral part of my life, so my curiosity level isn’t very high. I know it comes from our Higher Self which is part of the Field of Consciousness. Any subject which the scientific community cannot “prove” beyond a doubt, will most likely be in the spiritual domain. This level of existence is beyond linear proof. So with that in mind, here is Wiki’s definitons of the topic. (Keep in mind Wikipedia is written by people who have opinions and ideas. Most authors thereof, are quite intelligent, but not always without bias.)…Myswizard

Parapsychology is the study of the evidence of mental awareness or influence of external objects without interaction from known physical means. Most objects of study fall within the realm of “mind-to-mind” influence (such as extra-sensory perception and telepathy), “mind-to-environment” influence (such as psychokinesis) and “environment-to-mind” (such as hauntings).

The premiere professional organization, the Parapsychological Association (PA), is a member in good standing of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). However, the scientific validity of parapsychology research is a matter of frequent dispute and criticism.

Types of parapsychology
The phenomena in question fall into two broad groups.

Extra-sensory perception (ESP) is also known as anomalous cognition, and includes telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairalience, clairgustance, clairsentience, precognition, postcognition, psychometry, and dream transference.

Anomalous operation includes psychokinesis (in the past referred to as telekinesis), out-of-body experiences, astral projection, near-death experiences, mediumship, and reincarnation.

The general term “psi phenomena” (or the somewhat older term, “psychic phenomena,” which was said to be the “psi factor” in an experiment) covers all of these categories.

Status of the field
The standing of the field of parapsychology has always been controversial within the scientific community.

As its name indicates, parapsychology is sometimes considered a sub-branch of psychology, and this has arisen historically since it involved the study of apparently mental faculties. In its modern form, parapsychology is an interdisciplinary field, which has attracted physicists, engineers, and biologists, as well as psychologists and those from other sciences. (For an argument that parapsychological phenomena may not in fact be psychological, see Peter J. King’s “Parapsychology without the ‘Para’ (or the ‘Psychology’)” (Think 3, 2003, pp 43 53).) Parapsychology often involves the use of new and untested technologies and methods such as; neurofeedback, NLP, and past life regression etc. As such, it may yet earn the right to be included as a modern and proper science.

Many people are not satisfied with the term, and have proposed alternatives, such as “psi research” (similar to the older term “psychical research”), but parapsychology is the term that has gained the greatest acceptance today.

How science views the field
In the scientific disciplines there is a belief that all claims should be treated with scientific skepticism. Mainstream science believes that after examining psi claims for over a century, there has been significant difficulty in merging the results of parapsychology studies with other fields of science. As a result, many in the scientific community think that parapsychology is not a real science, that psi phenomena do not exist, and that parapsychology is a pseudoscience. Many scientists and skeptical observers of the field believe that some parapsychologists knowingly commit fraud; that some are incompetent or misled by their own hopes or desires; and that some are naïve and therefore easily deceived by fraudulent participants; or perhaps some combination of the above. One of the most famous cases in psychology that illustrates being misled by one’s hopes is that of Clever Hans. Mr. Wilhelm von Osten did not mean to defraud anyone, but he fooled himself and large audiences nevertheless.

Parapsychologists disagree with this assessment. Many have been formally trained in science, and are familiar with the scientific method. Statistician Jessica Utts has shown in a number of papers that:

“Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.”
The precise percentage of scientists holding negative views about parapsychology is unclear, since surveys targeting this group are far less common than those targeting the general population. In his article Save Our Science: Paranormal Phenomena and Zetetics, skeptic Henri Broch complains:

“These data are based on an investigation on the belief in parasciences among Frenchmen (published in 1986). […] Contrary to what might have been thought, the level of belief in the paranormal is directly proportional to the level of education, whatever the religious persuasion may be. Those with higher scientific degrees fare slightly better, although their level of belief is superior to [greater than] the average!”
Some skeptics believe that there is a tendency for parapsychology researchers to select “good days” and discard “bad days” for the people in the test samples. But the “Theory of Runs” shows that the chance of a long run of successes (or failures) increases drastically when the periods of success or failure are selected as part of a larger sample. See: Feller, William (1968), An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, vol. I, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, p. 86. For a more recent discussion of the theory and the “arcsine law” Unfortunately, what many skeptics are not aware of, is that the criticisms raised by statisticians like Feller are out of date by many decades. That is, the prevailing experimental methodology and conventions of statistical analysis in parapsychology have not been susceptible to such critiques since the 1940s and 1950s when Feller first raised his criticisms. See the chapter called “Field Guide to Skepticism”[5]in Dean Radin’s (1997) Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” for a review of such out-to-date criticism. Radin’s book also provides a review of experimental parapsychology up to 1997 that contradicts the “party-line” that many skeptics uncritically follow without having first-hand knowledge of the research literature of the field. (See Rochus Boerner’s article “The Objectivity of Science: Seven Signs of Bogus Skepticism” for some examples of skepticism/criticisms raised without a familiarity with the research literature of a field.)

Wagner and Monnet conducted a survey of 1100 college professors in 1979 and found that 34% of psychologists, 55% of natural scientists, 66% of other social scientists, and 77% of professors in the humanities believe that ESP is either an established fact or likely possibility. (Zetetic Scholar 5, 1979) Andrew Greeley, a sociologist from the University of Arizona, studied surveys on belief in ESP from from 1978 through 1987, and studied the mental health of believers in ESP. The surveys he studied showed that from 1978 through 1987, the number of American adults who reported psychic experiences rose from 58% to 67%. He also tested the psychological well-being of people reporting mystical experiences with the “Affect Balance Scale” and found that people reporting mystical experiences received top scores. Greeley summarized his findings by writing,

People who’ve tasted the paranormal, whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement.
The Parapsychological Association is an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). There are chairs, centers, or research units concerned with parapsychology in whole or in part at many universities around the world, as well as independent laboratories involved in parapsychology. For example, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit in the School of Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistic Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, the Parapsychology Unit of the Psychology Department at Liverpool Hope University, the Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology Unit at Liverpool John Moores University, the Center for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at University College Northampton, the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge University , and the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene of Frieburg University, among others. Links to other research organizations, university units, periodicals is available under the “Psi Info” section of the website of the Parapsychology Foundation. Many members of these units, while not considered to be skeptics per se, investigate the phenomena of the field from the point of view of conventional hypotheses, that is, looking at psychological correlates of reports of experiences, “successful” performances in laboratory tests, as well as looking for evidentially-supported extensions to current knowledge in physics, physiology, neuropsychology and other disciplines. The bulk of the refinements to the methodological repertoire of the field of parapsychology — both in terms of experimental method and in terms of statistical and other evaluative techniques — have come from this segment of the community, that is, from the so-called “proponents”.

A few parapsychologists are skeptics, for example Chris French and his colleagues at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in London, and Richard Wiseman and his colleagues at the Perrott-Warrick Research Unit in the Psychology Department of the University of Hertfordshire, both of which units include individuals who are members of the Parapsychological Association. These researchers do not approach the field with a belief in the paranormal, but are rather interested in the purely psychological aspects of those who report paranormal experiences, along with the study of the psychology of deception, hallucination, etc. These researchers also have provided their own guidelines and input to other parapsychologists for the design of experiments and how to properly test those who claim psychic abilities. While some of these guidelines have been useful, many have suffered from a naive understanding of scientific practice in general and in parapsychology in particular, from a distorted view of the methodology actually in use in the field, and the unfortunate habit of some skeptics to make sweeping statements about the applicability of counter-hypotheses to lines of research without actually investigating the appropriateness of those counter-hypotheses to the details at hand. (See, for example a mostly-positive review of one of these guidelines written by skeptics.)

The most important point that both proponents and skeptics raise is the need to be critical of the theory, methods, and conclusions of any one who investigates or comments on parapsychology as a science, no matter what point of view they represent. In order to be an objective professional, one must have a first-hand knowledge of the vast past and present published scientific literature in the field, primary and scholarly sources of its age whenever possible, and — even more important — have first-hand experience as an experimenter or investigator and a respect for the art of conjuring and its masters. The hands-on approach is essential to scientific progress in the field, whether one approaches it from a “paranormalist” or a “conventional theorist” point of view. Selective and historically uninformed armchair cheerleading and armchair skepticism are equally useless in all fields of inquiry and science.

Interpretation of the evidence
Many scientists hold that the entire body of evidence to date is of poor quality and not properly controlled; in their view, the entire field of parapsychology has produced no results whatsoever. Frequently, however, those who hold this view have not had any contact with the published literature of the field such as that which can be found in the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, or in the proceedings of the annual convention of the Parapsychological Association. Instead, they have relied on the analyses made by members of the skeptical community who, wrongly, assume that all parapsychological experiments suffer from flaws and therefore no parapsychological experiment may be considered evidential even in the weak sense of the term. Working psi researchers welcome criticisms that are based on knowledge of the peer-reviewed, published literature of the field. Criticism and blanket statements based on hearsay are not productive and not encouraged in any area of science.

Other scientists hold that there is a small amount of data from properly controlled experiments that can be trusted for a small number of psi phenomena. They hold that this evidence is not definitive, but suggestive enough to warrant further research.

Other scientists, who are familiar with the published literature of the field of parapsychology, believe that a great deal of evidence has been collected, which, if it addressed more conventional phenomena, would be sufficient to provide proof.

Criticisms of parapsychological research
Anecdotal evidence, characteristic of most of parapsychology, is inherently unreliable. Anecdotes may have natural, non-anomalous explanations such as random coincidence, fraud, imagination, or auto-suggestion.
If an experiment is not controlled to prevent fraud, then the results may not be trusted. This is especially so given the fact that many people who claimed to possess psi abilities were later proven to be frauds.
Parapsychology experiments are usually poorly designed. They often lack proper controls, allowing paths of intentional or unintentional information leakage through normal means, etc.
Parapsychology experiments are rarely replicated with positive results at independent laboratories.
Positive results in psi experiments are so statistically insignificant as to be negligible, i.e. indistinguishable from chance. For example, parapsychology may have a “file drawer” problem where a large percentage of negative results are never published, making positive results appear more significant than they actually are.
Currently inexplicable positive results of apparently sound experiments do not prove the existence of psi phenomena, i.e., normal explanations may yet be found. Concluding inexplicability from lack of existing explanation constitutes the well-known fallacy Argument from Ignorance.
Psi phenomena cannot be accepted as explanation of positive results until there is a widely acceptable theory of how they operate.
Parapsychologists may prefer and write selective history. The whole story may be avoided.
Parapsychology spends too much time simply trying to show that certain phenomena occur, and too little time trying to explain them — yet it is explanation that constitutes the heart of scientific enquiry, and wider, scientific acceptance of parapsychological phenomena would come only with the provision of explanation. (See King (2003) cited above.)

Responses from parapsychologists to criticisms
The hard evidence for psi phenomena today is founded on repeatable experiments and not anecdotal evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is considered valid in law and many other fields. The validity of anecdotal evidence does not depend upon the opinion of those listening to it.
There is no such thing as a completely foolproof experiment in any field of science, and it is unreasonable to hold parapsychology to a higher standard of epistemology than the other sciences. Fraud and incompetence in parapsychology is addressed in the same way it is addressed in any other field of science: repeating experiments at multiple independent laboratories; publishing methods and results in order to receive critical feedback and design better protocols, etc.
Experimental protocols have been continually improved over time, sometimes with the direct assistance of noted skeptics. Meta-analyses show that the significance of the positive results have not declined over time, but instead have remained fairly constant.
There are certain phenomena which have been replicated with odds against chance far beyond that required for acceptance in any other science. Meta-analyses show that these cannot be accounted for by any file drawer problem.
Anomalous phenomena do not disappear for lack of a theory. There have been many instances in the history of science where the observation of an anomalous phenomenon came before an explanatory theory, and some commonly accepted non-psi phenomena today still lack a perfectly satisfactory, undisputed theory. For instance, in the past, those who sighted meteors falling to the earth were dismissed as madmen or false prophets.
Theories abound in parapsychology for aspects of psi phenomena, though there is not any one that is comprehensive and widely accepted within parapsychology.
It is not necessary to be a licensed psychiatrist or acquainted with clinical psychology to test the validity of psi. The field of parapsychology overlaps many disciplines, including physics and biology, and often physicists, engineers and others trained in the hard sciences, in conjunction with stage magicians and other experts in deception, are in a better position to design experiments for certain types of phenomena than are psychiatrists or psychologists.
The opinion of parapsychologists regarding the overall evaluation of the body of evidence to date is divided. As noted above, some parapsychologists are skeptic and do not believe that there is anything observed so far which cannot ultimately be explained within the existing framework of known science. Probably a majority of parapsychologists believe in the likelihood, or at least the possibility, of actual psi phenomena, though there is a range of attitudes toward the evidence.

Regarding the evidence, the rule of the thumb of the skeptical community is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since skeptics may consider paranormal claims extraordinary, they may think that the evidence needs to be better than what normally would be required. However, this puts the responsibility for investigating seemingly paranormal phenomena squarely on the shoulders of proponents and “internal” skeptics. Not only is research conducted by “external” critics and skeptics useful to the field as a whole, but it also imparts a kind of craft knowledge to critics and skeptics that makes their criticism and counter-hypotheses more productive and more useful. Further many of the counter-hypotheses proposed by skeptics are so unparsimonious as to be extraordinary claims as well, and in that case, those counter-hypothesis, also require extraordinary evidence. Sadly, given the Zeitgeist in science today which treats even the study of seemingly paranormal phenomena as taboo, the extraordinary/unparsimonious claims of the skeptics are accepted uncritically, without investigation. See an article by the late sociologist and skeptic Marcello Truzzi which is relevant to this topic.

Most people use this approach to evidence in everyday life. For instance, if the news reports that the president of the USA has just arrived in South Korea for a state visit, most people will take this at face value. The news is considered a fairly reliable source of information, and the president visiting a country such as South Korea is not an extraordinary claim. However, if the same news broadcast later mentioned that a 92-year-old man has improved the world record time on the marathon by half an hour, many reasonable people would require more evidence, even despite the assumed reliability of the source, since the claim is extraordinary. This analogy might be flawed, however. In the case of the 92 year old man, we have positive evidence gained from a lifetime of experience and the reassurance of physiologists that this feat is indeed extraordinary (i.e., improbable). When it comes to parapsychology, however, some would argue we have no positive evidence that it is improbable, only our own cultural bias and a subjective sense that Psionic powers are extraordinary. Hence, some would argue, it is not the sort of extraordinary claim which necessarily needs more evidence than a mundane claim.

Some parapsychologists agree with critics that the field has not yet reached the degree of consistent repeatability of experimental results needed for general consensus. John Beloff, in his book Parapsychology: A Concise History, notes the evanescent – some have said the apparently evasive – nature of psychic phenomena over time, and that the range of phenomena observable in a given era seems to be culturally dependent.

For example, in earlier times, psychic research studied physical phenomena demonstrated by spiritualist mediums that, according to the reports passed down to us in the literature, far surpassed anything that any of today’s “psychics” can demonstrate. Skeptics consider this more evidence of the non-existence of psi phenomena. Frequently this particular claim is the result of the proponent community having cut itself off, because of political pressures of conforming to the scientific Zeitgeist, from the community of modern mediums and psychics who operate today. Whether or not the phenomena being exhibited by modern day mediums can provide proof of traditional notions of spirituality or can be attributed to the operation of mundane psychological processes is mostly an open question, due to the lack of research. So it is possible that physical phenomena is being exhibited today, but to what cause the effects may be attributed is an open question, even among parapsychologists.

Yet many people, such as Beloff, cannot easily dismiss the entirety of all the positive accounts – so many of which came from the experts of their day (including scientists and conjurers), many of whom began as noted skeptics – and so believe that continued research in the field is justified.

Other parapsychologists, such as Dean Radin and supporters such as statistician Jessica Utts, take the stance that the existence of certain psi phenomena has been reasonably well established in recent times through repeatable experiments that have been replicated dozens to hundreds of times at labs around the world.

They refer to meta-analyses of psi experiments that conclude that the odds against chance (null hypothesis) of experimental results far exceeds that commonly required to establish results in other fields, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

Indeed, many parapsychologists have moved on from proof-oriented research, intended primarily to verify the existence of psi phenomena, to “process-oriented” research, intended to explore the parameters and characteristics of psi phenomena. Time will tell whether these results prove to be evanescent as well. Unfortunately, what complicates the “time will tell” hope that many skeptics and proponents have is the lack of funds available for research from either the conventional or the “paranormalist” perspectives, and the negative impact on career advancement that an interest in these phenomena — even from a skeptical point of view — can have.

Early Scientific American challenge
The offering of prizes for demonstrations is not new to the field. Circa 1924, Scientific American magazine offered a $5000 prize to anyone who could produce any “visible psychic manifestation.” Medium Mina Crandon, known in the literature as “Margery,” made a bid and was tested by a committee set up by the editorial staff. Her performance was such that the committee members were split, four negative to one positive in their opinions. The magazine published the mixed report in its November 1924 issue, no prize was awarded, and the competition was declared closed the following year. In the early 1900s, the then well-known stage magician Howard Thurston, who had earlier studied to be a medical missionary, was impressed by the mysterious table lifting demonstrations of medium Eusapia Palladino. He advertised in the New York Times his offer of $1000 to charity in the name of any fellow conjuror who could duplicate this feat. He had no takers. In 1910 Eusapia Palladino publicily acknowledged she used tricks to an American reporter. Today many methods of table lifting and other seance secrets are well known to master conjurors, but kept secret as demanded by their art.

Other objections to parapsychology
There are a variety of other objections to parapsychology as well.

Psi Phenomena as a Violation of the Laws of Physics or Nature
Some critics claim that the existence of psi phenomena would violate “the known laws of physics”, and some of these critics believe that this is reason enough that such phenomena should not be studied. Parapsychologists respond that “laws of nature” are simply summaries of existing scientific knowledge and do get revised from time to time during the course of scientific progress, in addition they are not so well understood that with them one could confidently predict the non existence of Psi ( Consider quantum mechanics). If the existence of psi phenomenon were ever proved, explaining how they work might require revising or extending the known laws of physics. Precognition, for example, would challenge commonly held notions about causality and the unidirectional nature of time. However, these commonly held notions are often not physical laws, and are already being challenged by modern physical theories, quite apart from psi phenomena. Skeptics and parapsychologists alike generally agree that, as per Occam’s Razor, simple explanations should be preferred for any resulting theories of psi. Some parapsychologists are critical of skeptics’ frequently-uninvestigated claims about fraud, or the application of conventional hypotheses specifically because these claims are unparsimonious. Conventional explanations, many parapsychologists believe, should also conform to Occam’s Razor. Then there are others, both skeptics and proponents, who agree that even in mainstream science nature itself is frequently unparsimonious.

Parapsychology as Taboo
Some believe that paranormal phenomena should not be studied, either because they are forbidden by their religious orientation, or because they believe that to do so opens the investigators to some sort of “spiritual attack”. Parapsychology is also seen as a taboo subject in science and the academy and individuals who show an interest in studying seemingly psychic phenomena, even from a skeptical point of view, often find themselves losing or being pushed out of employment, or denied funding. Anthropologist of science, David J. Hess, has written on this topic.

Parapsychology as a Danger to Society
Some believe that parapsychology should not be pursued because it somehow represents a danger to society. As is stated in the Y2000 NSF report Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding: Belief in the Paranormal or Pseudoscience[19]:
“Concerns have been raised, especially in the science community, about widespread belief in paranormal phenomena. Scientists (and others) have observed that people who believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena may have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. Their beliefs may indicate an absence of critical thinking skills necessary not only for informed decision making in the voting booth and in other civic venues (for example, jury duty), but also for making wise choices needed for day-to-day living.”
Even “insiders” in the parapsychological community worry about the possible harm that naive belief in paranormal phenomena can have on individuals, on culture and on societies. A great deal of effort has been put into the notion of developing expertise in dealing with reported experiences both in a clinical sense, and as a topic of investigation. Unfortunately organized skepticism and the “taboo” that exists against serious research on such phenomena has impeded the ability of many researchers — both skeptics and proponents — from doing the kinds of research that would allow evidence-based therapeutic interventions.

Although under the heading ‘paranormal phenomena’ the report lists topics such as astrology, UFOs, and the Loch Ness Monster, it also lumps in belief in ESP and, by implication, most parapsychology.

Parapsychology as a Waste of Resources
Some believe that parapsychology should not be funded because it is a waste of resources that would be better spent on other activities. Some of these critics feel so strongly about this that they engage in activism to try to prevent or remove funding from psi research. Psychic detectives may waste valuable police resources. One of the negative — and probably unintended — consequences of this point of view is that while 10% of the world’s population or over 400 million individuals on the planet, may experience what they believe are psychic phenomena, and may suffer in their daily lives from psychological problems caused by their experiences, few scientists on the planet are able to find the resources to really investigate the phenomena, and therefore very little real knowledge exists that can be used to help these experiencers. While even most parapsychologists would agree there are more urgent problems to solve, having no research address these reported experiences does a grave disservice to people everywhere.

Trivia
German psychiatrist Hans Berger originally invented the electroencephalograph (EEG) in 1929 as a tool to study whether telepathy might be explained by brain waves.
The first and only Ph.D. in Parapsychology awarded by the University of California, Berkeley was to Dr Jeffrey Mishlove in 1980. Subsequently some activists unsuccessfully lobbied the Berkeley administration to revoke the degree. Reportedly, as many as 46 people in the UK have doctorates in parapsychology. However, this is a myth. In fact, with the exception of Dr. Mishlove, mentioned above, the so-called “46 people in the UK” have doctorates in other disciplines, principally in psychology, but completed doctoral thesis work which included or were devoted to research projects in parapsychology. Such individuals are also expected to be competent in the disciplines in which they received their degrees. Examples of these individuals include: Dr. Susan Blackmore, Dr. Richard Broughton, Dr. Deborah Delanoy, Dr. Serena-Roney Dougall, Dr. Chris Roe, Dr. Simon Sherwood, Dr. Christine Simmonds, Dr. Matthew Smith, Dr. Carl Williams, Dr. Richard Wiseman, among others.
Patent #5830064, “Apparatus and method for distinguishing events which collectively exceed chance expectations and thereby controlling an output,” was granted by the US Patent Office on Nov 3rd, 1998 to inventors including several researchers from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) center. The patent in no way relies on the existence of psi phenomena, but in the description the inventors do suggest that “One application of the present invention is the investigation of anomalous interaction between an operator and random physical systems, whether by serious scientists or curious members of the public who would like to conduct experiments on their own.”
Through out the history of the investigations of physical mediums there seems to be no record of simply applying wet paint to a medium’s hands and feet to assure control and eliminate fraud.
Joseph B. Rhine began examining psychic abilities after hearing, and being deeply impressed, by a lecture given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, about the scientific reality of having established contact with the dead.

Famous parapsychologists
Rais Amrohvi
Khwaja Shamsuddin Azeemi
Hans Bender
Susan Blackmore
William Crookes
Max Dessoir
Gustave Geley
John Hasted - author and creator of the shyness effect, unwatched children could bend eating utensils with their minds
Charles Honorton
Robert G. Jahn
William James - founding father of American Psychology
Brian Josephson - Nobel Prize in Physics, 1973
Oliver Lodge
William McDougall
Jeffrey Mishlove
Edgar Mitchell
Gardner Murphy
Frederick W. H. Myers
Julian Ochorowicz
Harry Price
Andrija Puharich
Harold E. Puthoff
Dean Radin - Author of The Conscious Universe, which examines the scientific evidence in parapsychology.
Jim D. Ray
Carl Reichenbach
Joseph B. Rhine
Charles Robert Richet
Carl Sargent
Helmut Schmidt
Albert von Schrenck-Notzing
Gary Schwartz-Has stated he has scientific proof of established contact with the dead
Stephan Schwartz
Henry Sidgwick
Ian Stevenson
Ingo Swann
Wilhelm Heinrich Carl Tenhaeff
Mark Twain
G. N. M. Tyrrell
Alfred Russel Wallace
Doug Davis-Wrote the theory of deja-vue explanation

Other names who have contributed to this field
The following are famous primarily for fields other than parapsychology but still had important working interests in the field:

Hans Eysenck
Alister Hardy
Carl Jung
Arthur Koestler
Rupert Sheldrake

Claimed psychics
Sylvia Browne — received the Pigasus award, Category #4 for 2004 for claiming to “see” in July, 2004 that Osama Bin Laden was dead, predicting in 2003 that Saddam Hussein would be found dead by year’s end, and other triumphs. Sylvia won in category #2 in 2003.
Kuda Bux firewalker, famous for being able to see with his eyes covered by coins, tape, dough, gauze, etc.
Edgar Cayce — claimed to be a psychic healer in the first half of the 20th century and to have lived a past life in Atlantis
Miss Cleo
Mina Crandon “Margery” — last noted physical medium in the USA and widely thought to be fraudulent
Gerard Croiset
Derren_Brown
Natasha Demkina — The girl with x-ray eyes
Jeane Dixon — made wide and vague predictions, claimed she had a Divine gift.
William and Horatio Eddy — 19th Century Vermont psychics. Their spirit cabinet performances were very similar to that of the famous Davenport Brothers. This tradition is carried on by the team of Glenn Falkenstein and Frances Willard.
Tom Rannachan — Scottish “Psychic Medium” who claims to talk with the dead & receive accurate premonitions.
John Edward — Host of TV show “Crossing Over” in which he claimed to communicate with the dead.
Leslie Flint
Uri Geller — Israeli telekinetic, famous for bending handled spoons in television shows. Traveled the world with his confederates, who sometimes posed as news reporters. He was deported from Israel, his home country.
Stuart Harary probably means Keith Harary, OBEr
Daniel Dunglas Home — most famous physical medium of the 19th century (See Other Links: Crookes 1871)
Jim Jones — claimed to perform healings. He was the leader of the Peoples Temple that committed mass suicide in 1978
Joseph McMoneagle Former US Army intelligence officer, currently a corporate remote viewer
Wolf Messing
David Morehouse Government remote viewer
Dr. Mysterian
Stefan Ossowiecki (Ossovietski?) — read things in sealed envelopes
Ted Owens — claimed to have the ability in predicting and controlling weather, earthquakes, and volcanoes through psychokinesis
Eusapia Palladino— accused of using her foot to levitate table and other deceptions by conjurers in hiding who watched her methods at close hand. (Rinn, 1950)
Leonore Piper
Pat Price, government remote viewer
Sathya Sai Baba, Indian guru; materialization of small objects
JoJo Savard
S. G. Soal
Ingo Swann, involved in the formation of the remote viewing procedure.
Alex Tannous
James Van Praagh
Rev. B. Anne Gehman
Miroslaw Magola may adhere objects to his body

Critics of parapsychology
Derren_Brown (Has a detailed TV show ,debunking people’s beliefs.)
Susan Blackmore — Stopped lecturing and abandoned parapsychology altogether, because she could no longer endure the near fanatic and rude behavior of both believers and non-believers.
Milbourne Christopher — Noted Conjuring Historian and Master Conjuror, his works are frequently overlooked.
Martin Gardner-Noted rationalist, puzzlist, science writer, and Master Conjuror
Ray Hyman- Conjuror and noted research psychologist
James Randi-Master Conjuror and author
Ehrich Weiss (Harry Houdini)-Master Conjuror and author
Penn and Teller

Psychic investigations
Remote viewing (includes Stargate project)
Global Consciousness Project

References
^ Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding: Belief in the Paranormal or Pseudoscience, National Science Foundation, 2000.
Parapsychology, by Khwaja Shamsuddin Azeemi, Al-Kitaab Publication, 1985.
The Conscious Universe, by Dean Radin, Harper Collins, 1997, ISBN 0062515020.
Parapsychology: A Concise History, by John Beloff, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, ISBN 0312096119.
Parapsychology: The Controversial Science, by Richard S. Broughton , Ballantine Books, 1991, ISBN 0345356381.
Our Sixth Sense, by Charles Richet, Rider & Co., 1937, First English Edition
ESP,Seers & Psychics : What the Occult Really Is , by Milbourne Christopher,Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1970, ISBN 0690268157
The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research, by Ray Hyman, Prometheus Books, 1989, ISBN 0879755040.
Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology, ed. Antony Flew, Prometheus Books, 1987, ISBN 0-87975-385-4
Sixty Years of Psychical Research : Houdini and I Among the Spirits, by Joseph Rinn, Truth Seeker, 1950
Roots of Consciousness, Jeffrey Mishlove, 2 editions

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Parapsychology”.

The Universe as a Hologram
Author unknown
Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. 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.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment. 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 addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. 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 electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

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”. Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious “whole in every part” nature of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage–simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word “zebra”, you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like “striped”, “horselike”, and “animal native to Africa” all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information–another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature’s supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct “hard” reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called “osmic frequencies”, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For 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, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate. Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations “transpersonal experiences”, and in the late ’60s he helped found a branch of psychology called “transpersonal psychology” devoted entirely to their study. Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain — as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as “reality”. Even visions and experiences involving “non-ordinary” reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book “Gifts of Unknown Things,” biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if “hard” reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen 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. Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality”.

Considered together, Bohm and Pribram’s theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world: Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond both space and time: The brain is a hologram folded in a holographic universe. For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is “out there” is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world. How is the brain (which itself is composed of frequencies of matter) able to take something as insubstantial as a blur of frequencies and make it seem solid to the touch? “The kind of mathematical process that Bekesy simulated with his vibrators is basic to how our brains construct our image of a world out there,” Pribram states. In other words, the smoothness of a piece of fine china and the feel of beach sand beneath our feet are really just elaborate versions of the phantom limb syndrome.

According to Pribram this does not mean there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? “Both are real to me,” says Pribram, “or, if you want to say, neither of them are real.”

This state of affairs is not limited to china cups. We, too, have two very different aspects to our reality. We can view ourselves as physical bodies moving through space. Or we can view ourselves an a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the cosmic hologram. Bohm believes this second point of view might even be the more correct, for to think of ourselves as a holographic mind/brain looking at a holographic universe is again an abstraction, an attempt to separate two things that ultimately cannot be separated.

Do not be troubled if this is difficult to grasp. It is relatively easy to understand the idea of holism in something that is external to us, like an apple in a hologram. What makes it difficult is that in this case we an not looking at the hologram. We are part of the hologram.

The difficulty is also another indication of how radical a revision Bohm and Pribram are trying to make in our way of thinking. But it is not the only radical revision. Pribram’s assertion that our brains construct objects pales beside another of Bohm’s conclusions: that we even construct space and time. The implications of this view are just one of the subjects that will be examined as we explore the effect Bohm and Pribram’s ideas have had on the work of other fields.

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things

As soon as Bohm began to reflect on the hologram he saw that it too provided a new way of understanding order. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disordered to the naked eye. Both possess orders that are hidden or enfolded in much the same way that the order in a plasma is enfolded in the seemingly random behavior of each of its electrons. But this was not the only insight the hologram provided.

The more Bohm thought about it the more convinced he became that the universe actually employed holographic principles in its operations, was itself a kind of giant, flowing hologram, and this realization allowed him to crystallize all of his various insights into a sweeping and cohesive whole. He published his first papers on his holographic view of the universe in the early 1970s, and in 1980 he presented a mature distillation of his thoughts in a book entitled _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_. In it he did more than just link his myriad ideas together. He transfigured them into a new way of looking at reality that was as breathtaking as it was radical.

Enfolded Orders and Unfolded Realities

One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of projection, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this deeper level of reality the Implicate (which means “enfolded”) order, and he refers to our own level of existence as the explicate, or unfolded, order.

He uses these terms because he sees the manifestation of all forms in the universe as the result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings between these two orders. For example, Bohm believes an electron is not one thing but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space. When an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron’s ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerine, at that particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.

Put another way, electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order from which it sprang. A piece of holographic film and the image it generates are also an example of an implicate and explicate order. The film is an implicate order because the image encoded in its interference patterns is a hidden totality enfolded throughout the whole. The hologram projected from the film is an explicate order because it represents the unfolded and perceptible version of the image.

The constant and flowing exchange between the two orders explains how particles, such as the electron in the positronium atom, can shapeshift from one kind of particle to another. Such shiftings can be viewed as one particle, say an electron, enfolding back into the implicate order while another, a photon, unfolds and takes its place. It also explains how a quantum can manifest as either a particle or a wave. According to Bohm, both aspects are always enfolded in a quantum’s ensemble, but the way an observer interacts with the ensemble determines which aspect unfolds and which remains hidden. As such, the role an observer plays in determining the form a quantum takes may be no more mysterious than the fact that the way a jeweller manipulates a gem determines which of its facets become visible and which do not. Because the term hologram usually refers to an image that is static and does not convey the dynamic and ever active nature of the incalculable enfoldings and unfoldings that moment by moment create our universe, Bohm prefers to describe the universe not as a hologram, but as a holomovement.”

The existence of a deeper and holographically organized order also explains why reality becomes nonlocal at the subquantum level. As we have seen, when something is organized holographically, all semblance of location breaks down. Saying that every part of a piece of holographic film contains all the information possessed by the whole is really just another way of saying that the information is distributed nonlocally. Hence, if the universe is organized according to holographic principles, it, too, would be expected to have nonlocal properties.

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things

Most mind-boggling of all are Bohm’s fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of “parts,” as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out of which they flow. An electron is not an “elementary particle.” It is Just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet.

This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other.

Take a moment to consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet. you are not merely made of the same things. You are the same thing. One thing. Unbroken. One enormous something that has extended its uncountable arms and appendages into all the apparent objects, atoms, restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos.

Bohm cautions that this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between “things” is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into “things” is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement “things,” he prefers to call them “relatively independent subtotalities.”

Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE_ by Michael Talbot

Consciousness as a More Subtle Form of Matter

In addition to explaining why quantum physicists find so many examples of interconnectedness when they plumb the depths of matter, Bohm’s holographic universe explains many other puzzles. One is the effect consciousness seems to have on the subatomic world. As we have seen, Bohm rejects the idea that particles don’t exist until they are observed. But he is not in principle against trying to bring consciousness and physics together. He simply feels that most physicists go about it the wrong way, by once again trying to fragment reality and saying that one separate thing, consciousness, interacts with another separate thing, a subatomic particle.

Because all such things are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer is the observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results, the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory. In fact, Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things. As Bohm puts it, “The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with the electron.”

Similarly, he believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. Even a rock is in some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in all of matter, but in “energy,” “space,” “time,” “the fabric of the entire universe,” and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and mistakenly view as separate things.

The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
The Energy of a Trillion Atomic Bombs in Every Cubic Centimeter of Space

If our universe is only a pale shadow of a deeper order, what else lies hidden, enfolded in the warp and weft of our reality? Bohm has a suggestion. According to our current understanding of physics, every region of space is awash with different kinds of fields composed of waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least some energy. When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe!

Some physicists refuse to take this calculation seriously and believe it must somehow be in error. Bohm thinks this infinite ocean of energy does exist and tells us at least a little about the vast and hidden nature of the implicate order. He feels most physicists ignore the existence of this enormous ocean of energy because, like fish who are unaware of the water in which they swim, they have been taught to focus primarily on objects embedded in the ocean, on matter. Bohm’s view that space is as real and rich with process as the matter that moves through it reaches full maturity in his ideas about the implicate sea of energy. Matter does not exist independently from the sea, from so called empty space. It is a part of space. To explain what he means, Bohm offers the following analogy: A crystal cooled to absolute zero will allow a stream of electrons to pass through it without scattering them. If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the crystal will lose their transparency, so to speak, and begin to scatter electrons. From an electron’s point of view such flaws would appear as pieces of “matter” floating in a sea of nothingness, but this is not really the ease. The nothingness and the pieces of matter do not exist independently from one another. They are both part of the same
fabric, the deeper order of the crystal.

Bohm believes the same is true at our own level of existence. Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small “pattern of excitation” in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. “This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation,” states Bohm. In other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not even a major production of this vaster something but is only a passing shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things.

This infinite sea of energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order. Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix, to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies. And even this is not all it may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to believe the implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed of orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development.

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE _Michael Talbot

“We have to begin to view the Universe as ultimately constituted not of matter and energy, but of pure information!” - Michael Talbot

Meaning is Simultaneously Both Mental and Physical

Our current worldview does not provide us with a context with which to understand PK (psychokinesis ). Bohm believes viewing the universe as a holomovement does provide us with a context. To explain what he means he asks us to consider the following situation. Imagine you are walking down a street late one night and a shadow suddenly looms up out of nowhere. Your first thought might be that the shadow is all assailant and you are in danger. The information contained in this thought will in turn give rise to a range of imagined activities, such as running, being hurt, and fighting. The presence of these imagined activities in your mind, however, is not a purely “mental” process, for they are inseparable from a host of related biological processes, such as excitation of nerves, rapid heart beat, release of adrenaline and other hormones, tensing of the muscles, and so on. Conversely, if your first thought is that the shadow is just a shadow, a different set of mental and biological responses will follow. Moreover, a little reflection will reveal that we react both mentally and biologically to everything we experience.

According to Bohm, the important point to be gleaned from this is that consciousness is not the only thing that can respond to meaning. The body can also respond, and this reveals that meaning is simultaneously both mental and physical in nature. This is odd, for we normally think of meaning as something that can only have an active effect on Subjective reality, on the thoughts inside our heads, not something that can engender a response in the physical world of things and objects. Meaning can thus serve as the link or ‘bridge’ between these two sides of reality,” Bohm states. “This link is indivisible in the sense that information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the ‘mental’ side, is at the same time a neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity, which is clearly what is meant by this thought on the ‘material’ side.”

Bohm feels that examples of objectively active meaning can be found in other physical processes. One is the functioning of a computer chip. A computer chip contains information, and the meaning of the information is active in the sense that it determines how electrical currents flow through the computer. Another is the behavior of subatomic particles. The orthodox view in physics is that quantum waves act mechanically on a particle, controlling its movement in much the same way that the waves of the ocean might control a Ping-Pong ball floating on its surface. But Bohm does not feel that this view can explain, for example, the coordinateddance of electrons in a plasma any more than the wave motion of water could explain a similarly well-choreographed movement of Ping-Pong balls if such a movement were discovered on the ocean’s surface. He believes the relationship between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a radar wave pushes a ship. Rather, it provides the electron with information about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own.

In other words, Bohm believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity, a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, Structureless point. The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all Subatomic particles, indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only of consciousness but of all matter. It is this intrinsic commonality, says Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK. He states, “On this basis, psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were focused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding the basic processes of the material systems in which this psychokinesis was to be brought about.”

It is important to note that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is, a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics. Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal “resonance of meanings,” or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle of polarization which we saw in chapter 2 (for technical reasons Bohm believes mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of “super”nonlocality”, would offer such an explanation).

Extract from:
THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE_ by Michael Talbot

In Part Two of _The Holographic Universe_, “Mind and Body,” Michael Talbot discusses the psychological aspects of the holographic model. According to Bohm, “In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.” (p. 60) The holographic theory, according to the author, can explain many psychological phenomena. Some of these include psychic phenomena, the ability to see “auras”, psychosis, the power of the mind to heal using visualization techniques, effects of placebos on healing, lucid dreaming and altered states of consciousness. The power of the mind is awesome and remains untapped. The author believes that by understanding the holographic model we can learn to access these powers. “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.”