Posted by Michael Talbot states in the first chapter of his ground-breaking 1991 book The Holographic Universe that he hopes that the ideas and information contained in the book will change the way we look at the world. An open mind is essential. The information revealed in the book challenges existing belief systems. We need to re-think what ‘reality’ is, and how the world actually functions.
The problem, as Zia Haider Rahman said in his 2014 novel In the Light of What We Know, is that:
Listening to people is hard because we run the risk of having to change the way we see the world.
These blog notes on the book are longer than normal (3,000 words) due to the exceptionally important nature of Talbot’s information, which goes to the heart of the puzzle of our existence. When we understand the holographic nature of our world, even death is actually rather different from what most people think it is, as will be revealed later in the notes.
The notes summarise Talbot’s findings, and how the holographic principles outlined by Talbot are integral to our lives, notwithstanding that most people have almost no knowledge or understanding of this, even three and a half decades on from the book’s publication.
Our holographic world and the CIA’s Hemi-Sync Gateway Report:
We live in a hologram? Hard to believe, but no less a body then the ultra-powerful and influential CIA (USA’s Central Intelligence Agency) has noted that we live in a holographic world. This finding was reported in the CIA’s 1983 report on Robert Munroe’s Hemi-Sync Gateway Program where a US Dept of Defence assessor stated that we exist within a hologram. The report states that the universe is, in and of itself, one gigantic hologram of unbelievable complexity.
The Hologram:
To explain the nature of a hologram would take a book in itself, but the quintessential feature of a hologram is the creation of an illusion that things are located where they are not. We ought to know about this as it is exactly what our brain does.
When we look at a person, the image of the person is really on the surface of our retinas. Yet we do not perceive the person as being on our retinas. We perceive them as being in the “world-out-there”. Or when we stub our toe, the pain is not really in our toe. It is actually a neurophysiological process taking place somewhere in our brains.
It is the holographic nature of our brains that takes the multitude of neurophysiological processes that manifest as our “experience”, all of which are internal, and fool us into thinking that some are internal and some are located beyond the confines of our brains.
The Matrix:
Once we understand about holograms, it is easier to understand what mystics have been saying for centuries, which is that reality is an illusion, and what is out there is really a vast resonating symphony of wave forms, a “frequency domain” that is transformed into the world we know it only after it enters our senses.
This frequency domain has been referred to as “the matrix” in more recent times since Talbot wrote his book, but it is simply mathematics in the end. That was known as long ago as the eighteenth century when Jean Fourier developed a mathematical way of converting any pattern, no matter how complex, into a language of simple waves, and then converting these wave forms back into their original pattern.
This system was then used by Dennis Gabor in the late 40s to develop the hologram.
Quantum Physics:
To understand the holographic model, some understanding of quantum physics is required. This is because, like the hologram, nothing is really solid, as is revealed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics. This is summarised below. It’s not as difficult as it seems at first glance.
The starting point of quantum physics is that sub-atomic phenomena are the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made. If we break matter down into smaller and smaller pieces we eventually reach the point where those pieces – electrons, protons and so on – no longer possess the trait of objects. These ‘particles’ literally possess no dimension.
Furthermore, these particles, such as electrons, can manifest as either a particle or a wave. Light, gamma rays, radio waves, x-rays, which are all ‘waves’, can also change from waves to particles and back again. All sub-atomic phenomena (which make up the world we live in) are known as quanta. Quanta is the plural of quantum. One electron is a quantum. Several electrons are a group of quanta.
The only time quanta ever manifest as particles (matter) is when we are looking at them. Otherwise, they are waves. If sub-atomic particles only ever come into existence in the presence of an observer, then it is meaningless to speak of a particle’s properties and characteristics as existing before they are observed.
Thus, the particles cannot be thought of as independent things. They are indivisible. This means all matter is interconnected. This also means that at the sub-quantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operates, location does not exist.
All points in space are equal to all other points in space, and it is meaningless to speak of anything being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property “nonlocality”.
Sub-atomic particles are therefore not separate from one another and moving through the void of space, but are part of an unbroken web of space.
The physicist David Bohm stated that the conclusion of all this information is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image.
The Implicate and Explicate Orders:
Reality has two levels, an implicate order, and an explicate order. The implicate order is a hidden or “enfolded” order, and the explicate order is an unfolded or visible order. Bohm explained this in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
A piece of holographic film and the image it generates are good examples of the 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 (visible) version of the image.
The Holographic Application to Everyday Life:
From a practical point of view, however, how do we fit the application of holograms into our everyday lives?
It is hard for most people to understand that the apparent solidity of the world is only a small part of what is available to our perception. But once the holographic concepts are applied to our lives, we can look at our world from a different perspective, and many mysteries have answers.
Death and Dreams:
Starting with something as basic as life and death, the famous psychologist Dr Kenneth Ring has proposed that near-death experiences, and death itself, are really nothing more than the shifting of a person’s consciousness from one level of the hologram of reality to another more holographic reality of pure frequency. And physicist Fred Alan Wolf believes dreams are actually visits to parallel realities on other-dimensional levels of existence within a hologram. They are just smaller holograms within the larger and more inclusive cosmic hologram.
The feeling that boundaries are illusory, the lack of distinction between part and whole, the interconnectedness of all things, and the fact that dreams are not bound by the usual spatial or temporal limitations, are all qualities one would expect to find in a holographic universe.
Healing:
Healing our body through use of the mind rather than drugs taps into holography. Visualisation (imagery) and belief can cure terminal illness very effectively. Placebos and hypnosis are often used to cure patients. This is because the mind/body cannot distinguish between an imagined reality and a real one. By bypassing the doubts and scepticism of our conscious minds, and focusing on changing the more powerful force of our unconscious beliefs, we can access the healing force within us. This is because the body is holographic.
Talbot’s book is packed with examples of holographic healing, but perhaps one of the best ones related to the use of hypnotherapy to move the mind past our perceptions of the world that we receive through our five senses.
Hypnotherapy:
Talbot related the story of a hypnotherapy session he witnessed. The hypnotist stated to the subject that when he came out of his trance, his teenage daughter would be completely invisible to him.
The hypnotist then awakened the subject and asked if he could see his daughter (who was standing in front of him). The subject answered “no” after looking around the room, so the hypnotist went behind the daughter and pulled an object out of his pocket. He kept the object concealed so that no one in the roomful of people could see what he was holding, and pressed it against the small of the daughter’s back. He then asked the subject to identify the object. The subject leaned forward, staring directly through the daughter’s stomach, and stated that it was a watch. The hypnotist nodded and asked if he could read the inscription on the watch. The hypnotised subject read out the make of the watch and the message clearly and correctly. Afterwards, the subject said his daughter had been completely invisible to him.
Telepathy:
Obviously the subject’s perception of the watch was not based on information he was receiving through his five senses. So where was he getting this information from? It would appear to have come telepathically through the hypnotist’s mind. This has been tested in many ways, including the experiments in what has been called “remote viewing” at the Stanford Research Institute by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, and the work of the Soviet physiologist Leonid Vasiliev who wrote a book on this form of body experimentation in his book Experiments in Distant Influence (1976).
Interconnection:
As Talbot concluded, we are deeply interconnected exactly as would fit the holographic model. If we use our intuition and instinct, or empathy qualities, we can often sense the problems or pain of others, or tap into the information field when needed.
Given both our deep interconnectedness (even if we don’t realise or accept this) and our ability to construct entirely convincing realities out of information received via this interconnectedness, what would happen if two hypnotised individuals tried to construct the same imaginary reality?
Plasticity and the Non-Real ‘Real’ World:
Charles Tart answered this question in an experiment conducted at the University of California. Two hypnotists, who were graduate students of the University, carried out an extraordinary experiment which goes to the heart of the false reality we live in. The first hypnotist hypnotised the other, and then, under hypnosis, the second hypnotist hypnotised the first. It transpired that they had both entered the same hallucinated reality under hypnosis. The two subjects of course realised this.
What they realised is that they had actually been ‘in’ the non-worldly locales they had experienced. The world they entered was a perfect example of a holographic reality – a three-dimensional construct created out of interconnectedness, sustained by a flow of consciousness, and ultimately as plastic as the thought processes that engendered it. This plasticity was evident in several of the features. Although it was three-dimensional, its space was more flexible than the space of everyday reality and sometimes took on an elasticity.
These visions were as real as their non-hypnotised world. They discovered that there is in fact little difference between our normal waking consciousness and the world they created in their dream-like state.
Is normal waking consciousness a kind of hypnosis, just another reality field but perhaps operating at a denser frequency? One thing is sure: reality is not what we think or what it seems.
Reality Creation and Materialisation:
Our brain is a hologram, and as Paramahansa Yogananda stated in his Autobiography of a Yogi (1973), “the world is nothing but an objectivised dream, and whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely instantly comes to pass”.
Like the yogi Sathya Sai Baba, Yogananda could materialise objects out of nowhere. Had they discovered a way to tap into the enormous sea of cosmic energy that Bohm says fills every centimetre of empty space?
What they had in fact done was they had learnt to use their holographic mind and body.
Our world is essentially a huge “holodeck” as was depicted in Star Trek: Next Generation where, if we know how, we can call up any reality that is desired. Reality is just a construct of consciousness, and as Carlos Castaneda has said: “we are boundless, and the world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is just a description created to help us, but we forget that description is only a description, and we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime”.
Our eyes only see what our brain tells us:
Talbot realised that the eye/brain is not a faithful camera, but tinkers with the world before it gives it to us. Neurophysiologists have long been aware that the visual information we receive via our optic nerves does not travel directly into our visual cortex, but is first filtered through other areas of the brain. Visual information entering our brains is edited and modified by our temporal lobes before it is passed on to our visual cortices.
It seems that less than 50% of what we “see” is actually based on information entering our eyes. The rest is simply our own ‘visualisation’ of what we think the world looks like. As Talbot says, the eyes may be visual organs but it is the brain that sees. We also have a blind spot in our vision. The question therefore is: if we are seeing less than half of what is ‘out there’, what is out there that we are not seeing?
Everything is pre-planned and we can see the past and future:
Finally we come to the most interesting feature of our existence in a holographic world. Once we access our unconscious mind, we can discover our life path and that our lives are in fact pre-planned.
David Bohm asserts that the mind can access the implicate (hidden) order of things, and Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ take the view that nonlocal quantum interconnectedness (holographic features) are integral to precognition, clairvoyance and future forecasting. We have been so thoroughly conditioned to believe that perceiving the future is not possible, that our precognitive abilities have gone dormant.
But many studies have shown that humans possess this ability. An example is the incredible case of the French actress Irene Musa, who under hypnosis was able to reveal precisely how and when she would die (not long after the session). This was recorded in Arthur Osborn’s book The Future is Now: The Significance of Precognition. The information was so precise that she was given a posthypnotic suggestion to forget everything she had said. She died in a fire a few months later.
If the future is a hologram whose every detail is already fixed, are we just puppets of destiny with no free will, operating to an already-written script? Can we change the future? Can the future exist and not exist?
The Princeton psychologist Dr David Loye believes that reality is a giant hologram, with past, present and future fixed, but it is not the only hologram.
We can change our future by leaping from one hologram to another, through utilising our consciousness to create a new reality.
This is a somewhat simplified version of a large section of the book, but most people’s futures are fixed as they are not in control of their own thoughts. To change a set reality, we need to stand back and think about our lives and visualise in concrete terms what we wish to happen in our lives, and then action it.
The holographic model can then materialise it.
The films The Jacket (2006) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) are excellent examples of moving across holographic models through time. Both films use the device of moving consciousness in and out of different realities. The Thirteenth Floor is based on Daniel Galouye’s important short book Simulacron-3.
Out of Body Experiences (OBEs) and Near-Death Experiences (NDEs):
Returning to Robert Munroe, who was referenced at the start of these notes, although Munroe was a successful businessman, he is best known for his out-of-body experiences, which he documented in three extremely important books, Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Far Journeys (1985), and Ultimate Journey (1994), together with his ground-breaking brain hemispheric synchronisation work (Hemi-Sync).
Munroe was able to view our ‘true form’ when we are separated from our body (our disembodied state). Munroe was a natural out-of-body practitioner, and he said that once we drop our bodily image, the container we wear for a lifetime, we are essentially a “vibrational pattern comprised of many interacting and resonating frequencies”. Energy patterns, in other words, once the bodily appearance fades.
We are ultimately a frequency phenomenon which our mind converts into various holographic forms. Our consciousness is contained, not in the brain, but in a plasmic holographic energy field that both permeates and surrounds the physical body. This information aligns with information given by (amongst others) Carlos Castaneda, Barbara Brennan, the theosophists, spiritual healers, and the assemblage point information, which is that we have an energy body surrounding the physical body. Talbot discusses our non-physical ‘layers’ in depth.
OBEs and NDEs operate in higher frequency realms where time, space and location are collapsed, and where the realm is created by interacting thought structures. As Kenneth Ring says, these structures or ‘thought-forms’ combine to form patterns, just as interference waves form patterns on a holographic plate. So just as in the lower frequency physical world, the mind still translates the high frequencies into appearances. Thought is king. Just as the holographic image appears to be fully real when illuminated by a laser beam, so the image produced by interacting thought-forms appears to be real too.
The ‘life review’ that some near-death experiencers undergo has been described as a vivid, wrap-around, three-dimensional replay of a life, like would occur in a regressive hypnosis session. This is entirely holographic, where huge information storage also exists for recall.
Going Back to Me
The ‘inner world’ journey has been documented by many, from the Tibetans, Gnostics, the theosophists, writers like Swedenborg and Dante, to the Sufis.
Death, the Sufis said, was like going into ourselves, where heaven is located. We are holographic bodies and minds, and we have heaven located in us. The Sufis said, instead of having to search for spiritual reality in the “where”, the “where” is in us.
Death is simply walking into our mind. Just make sure the mind is clean and pure at that time. The ultimate reality expounded by the holographic model is that – assuming we don’t allow ourselves to be diverted or weighed down on exit – we are “going back to me” on death.
1 August 2025
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