Free The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot Page B

context, we would
quickly realize that the human form is not unlike a mandala or symbolic poem,
for within its form and flow lives comprehensive information about various
physical, social, psychological, and evolutionary contexts within which it was
created.
    —Dr. Ken Dychtwald
    In The Hologrophic Paradigm (Ken Wilber, editor)
     

3
The Holographic Model and Psychology
    While the traditional model of
psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical,
modern consciousness research has added new levels, realms, and dimensions and
shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole
universe and all of existence.
    —Stanislav Grof
    Beyond the Brain
    One area of research on
which the holographic model has had an impact is psychology. This is not
surprising, for, as Bohm has pointed out, consciousness itself provides a
perfect example of what he means by undivided and flowing movement. The ebb and
flow of our consciousness is not precisely definable but can be seen as a deeper
and more fundamental reality out of which our thoughts and ideas unfold. In
turn, these thoughts and ideas are not unlike the ripples, eddies, and
whirlpools that form in a flowing stream, and like the whirlpools in a stream
some can recur and persist in a more or less stable way, while others are
evanescent and vanish almost as quickly as they appear. The holographic idea
also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between
the consciousnesses of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples
of such linkage is embodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of a
collective unconscious. Early in his career Jung became convinced that the
dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained
symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their
personal history. Instead, such symbols more closely resembled the images and
themes of the world's great mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that
myths, dreams, hallucinations, and religious visions all spring from the same
source, a collective unconscious that is shared by all people.
    One experience that led
Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a
young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his
rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun.
The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When
Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's
penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and
caused the wind to blow.
    At the time Jung viewed
the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later
he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text
that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and
invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and
said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down
from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to
blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had
contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's
vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up
from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself.
Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient
it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking
somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.
    Although Jung's concept
of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now
embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current
understanding of the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its
existence. The interconnectedness of all things predicted by