"Anyway, I'm going to continue reading that chapter from The Holographic Universe. I'll connect the dots from this passage later in our intellectual adventure."
One possible answer is that our perceptions of the world may not be based solely on the information we receive through our five senses. As fantastic as this may sound, a very good case can be made for such a notion. Before explaining, I would like to relate an occurrence I witnessed in the middle 1970s. My father had hired a professional hypnotist to entertain a group of friends at his house and had invited me to attend the event. After quickly determining the hypnotic susceptibility of the various individuals present, the hypnotist chose a friend of my father’s named Tom as his subject. This was the first time Tom had ever met the hypnotist.
Tom proved to be a very good subject, and within seconds the hypnotist had him in a deep trance. He then proceeded with the usual tricks performed by stage hypnotists. He convinced Tom there was a giraffe in the room and had Tom gaping in wonder. He told Tom that a potato was really an apple and had Tom eat it with gusto. But the highlight of the evening was when he told Tom that when he came out of trance, his teenage daughter, Laura, would be completely invisible to him. Then, after having Laura stand directly in front of the chair in which Tom was sitting, the hypnotist awakened him and asked him if he could see her.
Tom looked around the room and his gaze appeared to pass right through his giggling daughter. “No,” he replied. The hypnotist asked Tom if he was certain, and again, despite Laura’s rising giggles, he answered no. Then the hypnotist went behind Laura so he was hidden from Tom’s view and pulled an object out of his pocket. He kept the object carefully concealed so that no one in the room could see it, and pressed it against the small of Laura’s back. He asked Tom to identify the object. Tom leaned forward as if staring directly through Laura’s stomach and said that it was a watch. The hypnotist nodded and asked if Tom could read the watch’s inscription. Tom squinted as if struggling to make out the writing and recited both the name of the watch’s owner (which happened to be a person unknown to any of us in the room) and the message. The hypnotist then revealed that the object was indeed a watch and passed it around the room so that everyone could see that Tom had read its inscription correctly.
When I talked to Tom afterward, he said that his daughter had been absolutely invisible to him. All he had seen was the hypnotist standing and holding a watch cupped in the palm of his hand. Had the hypnotist let him leave without telling him what was going on, he never would have known he wasn’t perceiving normal consensus reality.
[...]
Given both our deep interconnectedness and our ability to construct entirely convincing realities out of information received via this interconnectedness, such as Tom did, what would happen if two or more hypnotized individuals tried to construct the same imaginary reality? Intriguingly, this question has been answered in an experiment conducted by Charles Tart, a professor of psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California. Tart found two graduate students, Anne and Bill, who could go into deep trance and were also skilled hypnotists 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 hypnotist and subject would be strengthened by using this unusual procedure.
He was right. When they opened their eyes in this mutually hypnotized state everything looked gray. However, the grayness quickly gave way to more 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 world, swimming in the ocean and studying the growing 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 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. As he states, after “they had been talking about their experiences to each other for some time, and found they had been discussing details of the experiences they had shared for which there was no verbal stimuli on the tapes, they felt they must have actually been ‘in’ the nonworldly locales they had experienced.
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. This plasticity was evident in several of its features. Although it was three-dimensional, its space was more flexible than the space of everyday reality and sometimes took on an elasticity Anne and Bill had no words to describe. Even stranger, although they were clearly highly skilled at sculpting a shared world outside themselves, they frequently forgot to sculpt their own bodies, and existed more often than not as floating faces or heads. As Anne reports, on one occasion when Bill told her to give him her hand, “I had to kind of conjure up a hand.”
How did this experiment in mutual hypnosis end? Sadly, the idea that these spectacular visions were somehow real, perhaps even 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.
The extrasensory interconnectedness that allowed Anne and Bill to construct their shared reality might almost be viewed as a kind of field effect between them, a “reality-field” if you will. One wonders what would have happened if the hypnotist at my father’s house had put all of us into a trance? In light of the evidence above, there is every reason to believe that if our rapport were deep enough, Laura would have become invisible to us all. We would have collectively constructed a reality-field of a watch, read its inscription, and been completely convinced that what we were perceiving was real.
Michael Talbot
Zac looked at me with that expression I was only too familiar with. I'd seen it many times, reflecting off shiny objects on desks as I sat with my laptop, voraciously consuming information, drawing lines between different clues and then marveling at the wonder of the whole riddle.
"That was fun, wasn't it?" I smiled. "I'm just going to leave that idea hanging in your mind while I circle back to our model."
