Re: Art of Divination

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continued...........
Editor's note: Look at Samuel Avery's ideas about The Dimensional Strucutre of Consciousness to describe how we "receivers" create the five dimensional world we seem to live in
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."
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