Meanings, Maps and Territories Part Three

Don't like this reality? Get your own! Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, among many others in both the research of physics and parapsychology have noted how deeply connected we are to each other. A person in a completely different room can register a reaction to a person in another room who is given an electic shock on a polygraph. Light flashed in the eyes of a test subject will also register in the ECG (electroencephalograph) chart of another test subject isolated in a different room. A plethysmograph, which measures the blood volume in a person's finger, which in turn is a great indicator of a person's autonomic nervous system functioning can also be helpful in these types of experiments. For instance, when a "sender"in another room reads the name of someone they know off a list of names mostly unknown to them. On pages 143-144 of Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, he talks about an experiment conducted by Charles Tart, a professor of psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California. Professor Tart (with the help of Profs Slattern and Ho-sorry another lousy joke) wondered what would happen if two people were put into a deep trance and were able to communicate. He thought of this when he began to realize how much scientific research was showing how interconnected our world is.

And-what if these two people had extremely good visualization skills? "Tart found two graduate students, Anne and Bill, who could go into deep trance and were also skilled hynotists in their own right. He had Anne hypnotize Bill and after he was hypnotized, he had Bill hypnotize her in return. Tart's reasoning was that the already powerful rapport that exists between the hypnotist and the subject would be strengthened by using this unusual procedure. He was right. When they opened their eyes in this mutually hypnotic state everything looked gray. However, the grayness quickly gave way to vivid colors and glowing lights, and in a few moments they found themselves on a beach of unearthly beauty. The sand sparkled like diamonds, the sea was filled with enormous frothing bubbles and glistened like champagne, and the shoreline was dotted with translucent crystalline rocks pulsing with internal light. Although Tart could not see what Anne and Bill were seeing, from the way they were talking he quickly realized they were experiencing the same hallucinated reality."

" Of course, this was immediately obvious to Anne and Bill and they set about to explore their newfound worlds, swimming in the ocean and studying the glowing crystalline rocks. Unfortunately for Tart they also stopped talking, or at least they stopped talking from Tart's perspective. When he questioned them about their silence they told him that in their shared dreamworld they were talking, a phenomenon Tart feels involved some kind of paranormal communication between the two. In session after session Anne and Bill continued to construct various realities, and all were as real, available to the five senses, and dimensionally realized, as anything they experienced in their normal waking state. In fact, Tart resolved that the worlds Anne and Bill visited were actually more real than the pale, lunar version of reality with which most of us must be content...Anne and Bill's ocean world is the perfect example of a holographic reality-a three-dimensional construct created out of interconnectedness, sustained by the flow of consciousness, and ultimately as plastic as the thought processes that engendered it."

The realities created by Anne and Bill were more flexible and flowing than our "normal" spacetime. Soemtimes Anne and Bill would forget to "make" their own bodies in these realities and often times appeared to each other as floating faces or heads! On one occasion Bill asked Anne to give him her hand and she reported, "I had to kind of conjure up a hand." Finally from Talbot's book: "How did this experiment in mutual hypnosis end? Sadly the idea that these spectacular visions were somehow real, perhaps more real than everyday reality, so frightened both Anne and Bill that they became increasingly nervous about what they were doing. They eventually stopped their explorations, and one of them, Bill, even gave up hypnosis entirely."

I hope anyone reading this enjoyed yet another exploration of some of the subjects in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe. I do hope to be online tomorrow and hope everyone is about to-or is having-a beautiful weekend!