A striking new picture of "reality"

In spirituality, there are many points of view offering meaningful explanations of “reality” to the common man. Some of these explanations cross over into the realm of science, as science itself has had to cross over into spirituality whenever it has tried to expand its boundaries.

The truth of the matter seems to be that, there is a connection; but no one knows for sure when, where, why or how it happens. In an article going back almost ten years, “Science & Spirituality: Bridging The Gap”, Shahriar Shahriari presents a lucid discussion on this subject, bringing together science, the supernatural, and spirituality.

Mr Shahriari’s point of view is based on the theory of “the holographic nature of reality”, which really is the result of the combined work done by London physicist David Bohm and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram. Apparently, after much scientific investigation, both Bohm and Pribram have arrived at the conclusion that the universe is more like a hologram, where every part (of the hologram) contains all the information processed by the whole. They feel “the whole contained in every part” nature of the hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organisation and order. In fact, this understanding may help us solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science – and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

In a fascinating (but somewhat lengthy) article, “Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe”, Michael Talbot narrates the story of Bohm and Pribram: “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.”

Connecting the holographic theory to spirituality, Mr Talbot explains, “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 transmorgify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the super hologram.”

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm’s and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm.