14

Quantum Psychology

The “Nonlocal” Brain

The idea that the brain functions on some kind of internal holographic principle was first suggested by a Stanford University neurophysiologist named Karl Pribram. Pribram was initially concerned with memory, how it works, and how the brain manages to store it. At the time he began his research, well over fifty years ago, it was thought that memories were localized inside the brain in the form of imprints known as engrams, chemical codices thought to be housed within specialized brain cells or biomolecules.

Up to the present, engrams remain only hypothetical entities: none have been identified or located, and Pribram began to doubt their very existence during his 1940s work with the neurophysiologist Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Laboratory of Biology in Florida. At that time Lashley was experimenting with rats trained to perform various tasks, like finding their way through a maze. He attempted to cut out the region of the rats’ brains in which the memory of their learned skills was thought to be encoded, but he found that no matter what section of the brain he surgically removed, the rats still retained their memories. Even if their motor functions were chronically affected, they still managed to negotiate the mazes successfully and find their way to the larder.

From these findings, Pribram concluded that memories were not localized in specific areas, but were somehow distributed throughout the entire brain. He puzzled over this for many years, wondering how the brain could store memories intact throughout its whole structure. So the construction of the first hologram had a great impact on him, because it seemed that the process of holography, which results in an image of the whole existing in every part of the film, provided a plausible explanation of the nonlocal nature of memory.

Further experimental evidence in support of Pribram’s ideas resulted from the work of Paul Pietsch, a biologist researching at the University of Indiana. Pietsch’s work involved somewhat macabre experiments, primarily on salamanders. He found that he could extract a salamander’s brain without killing it, leaving the creature in a torpid state; when he replaced the brain, the salamander’s physical functioning quickly returned to normal. In a subsequent series of several hundred operations, he systematically chopped and removed different parts of the hapless creatures’ brains, shuffling the right and left hemispheres, turning them upside down, back to front, even mincing them. But when he replaced what was left, he was astonished to find that their behavior always returned to near normal.

Skeptical at first of Pribram’s claim that memories are not focused on specific brain sites, Pietsch ultimately concluded that this must be so, otherwise a minced brain would surely result in a correspondingly uncoordinated series of equally “minced” motor functions. The fact that this clearly was not the case led Pietsch to the opinion that Pribram was right after all: that the holographic model currently provides the best explanation for such an otherwise inexplicable property of the brain.

Pribram found further evidence to support this theory in another of Karl Lashley’s discoveries, made during his experiments with rats, which indicated that vision might also be holographic. Lashley found that even after major surgical plundering, the nerve complexes controlling vision could still function normally. As much as 90 percent of the visual cortex could be extracted, yet the rats persistently retained their visual powers. It was subsequently discovered that the same was the case with a cat’s optic nerve, 98 percent of which could be severed without seriously affecting its vision.

Previously it had been assumed that there was an exact correspondence between the images seen by the eye and the resultant pattern of electrical activity taking place in the visual cortex: that is, if you looked at a certain physical shape, the same image would be projected onto the surface of the cortex, like a photographic imprint. To find out if this was the case, Pribram conducted a series of experiments to locate and measure the electrochemical reactions in the brains of monkeys as they carried out a number of visually centered activities. He could find no identifiable pattern in the distribution of electrical activity, so it was evident that the visual cortex was not operating on a one-to-one basis with the image it recorded. This fact, together with the strange ability to continue functioning relatively normally even after drastic surgical excision, led Pribram to conclude that vision, like memory, is distributed evenly throughout the brain, which processes visual information using some kind of internal holographic principle. This would explain why even a small segment of the visual cortex is still able to construct everything the eye sees. As Michael Talbot points out in The Holographic Universe, the interference patterns on a piece of holographic film bear no discernible relationship to the images encoded on it. If the visual cortex were similarly functioning holographically, this could account for the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the image seen and the pattern of electrical impulses activated on the surface of the brain.

Pribram believes that the brain could be using wave patterns to create these internal “holograms.” Active brain cells (neurons) radiate electrical impulses from the multiple ends of their branchlike antennae, which expand outward like ripples in a pond. Electricity is in essence a wavelike phenomenon; therefore, as the impulses spread throughout the brain, they must be creating an overall web of interpenetrating waves and interference patterns. In Pribram’s view, it is this wavelike interconnectedness that gives the brain its holographic properties.

Now, according to Bohm, the observer and the observed—the holographic mind and the holographic universe—should in no way be considered as separate entities, but more as interacting coordinates of the self-same “holomovement.” This in turn implies that some kind of connecting principle exists between the two, and the terms that are now most frequently used to account for this possible function are: vibrations, resonance, waves, and interference patterns—all words, in fact, that are used to describe events in the nonlocal world of the quantum physicist. It is for this reason, and not because it is fashionable, that I use the term quantum to describe the kind of psychology that might be involved in connecting with the greater whole. And as we have noted, this nonlocal reality is strikingly similar to the world described by Gurdjieff, a greater sphere in which everything is seen as being inter-connected through the “holographic” mechanism of inner octaves. This is also, as I suggested in earlier chapters, the “eternal” world—the Duat—of the ancient Egyptians, who regarded the phenomenon of light, the prime mover in the nonlocal, quantum world, as sacred, as an octave of resonance, each note of which is composed within as an octave, giving sixty-four interpenetrating “notes.” Clearly, therefore, this notion of interpenetrating vibrations, intrinsic to the world of the quantum physicist, is one of the oldest testaments on Earth.

Bohm was obviously not what we might call a run-of-the-mill physicist. To begin with, practically alone among his peers, he was quite prepared to tackle the prickly subject of psychokinesis, “mind over matter,” a proposition that has been a complete anathema to most scientists ever since Newton discovered what were long considered to be inviolable laws, the fundamental physical laws of motion and gravitation. Basically Bohm believed that psychokinesis might result directly from the essential common feature of both consciousness and the fundamental wave/particles of matter: an underlying “awareness” of certain information relating to the world at large. Like you, electrons and photons have the ability to respond to meaning, or to make positive use of external data. Bohm likened the process in the microworld to that of a ship on automatic pilot, where the radarlike wave function of the electron, for example, provides the particle aspect—the “ship”—with information about its environment. The implication is that the frequencies at which the “radar” works can be tuned into by the mind; that, in effect, the mental processes of one or more people could possibly be focused on frequencies of resonance that are in concert with the generative vibrations controlling material systems. By their very nature, such processes would involve forces other than those currently known to physics. They would arise as a result of what Michael Talbot calls a nonlocal resonance of meanings, a kind of interdimensional alchemical dialogue between mind and matter—something like the nonlocal alchemy taking place between correlated photons, or electrons in plasmas, but possibly involving resonances of a much higher or finer frequency. Therefore, in order to accommodate psychokinesis and perhaps other inexplicable phenomena such as telepathy, precognition, and so on, “ordinary” nonlocality must be superseded by what Talbot calls a “super non-locality”¹—which in Hindu terms might be described as the unknowable process operating in the hidden world of the Great Mediator Vishnu, described as the sphere of “endless time.” This would be Bohm’s “ultra-implicate” sphere, our sixth dimension.

We noted previously that Gurdjieff regarded the processes involved in psychokinesis in much the same way, that is, as the result of a mutually interacting resonance between mind and matter. But he was much more explicit than Bohm, for not only does he provide us with a mechanism for such interaction (the inner octave), by the very nature of the octave itself he further presents an entirely cohesive worldview expressed in terms of exact musical symmetries and proportions. And, according to Gurdjieff, these same symmetries and proportions are present in man because the individual is, in effect, a “miniature universe,” what Bohm might call a holographic imprint of the deeper, ultra-implicate reality. Gurdjieff, however, then qualified this comparison by stating that a complete parallel between man and the world can only be drawn if we take man in the full sense of the word: “that is, a man whose inherent powers are fully developed. An undeveloped man, a man who has not completed the course of his evolution, cannot be taken as a complete picture or plan of the universe—he is an unfinished world.”²

In quantum terms we might say that such an individual has not yet acquired a nonlocal condition of “optimum psychological resonance” and so is unable to project psychokinesis influences out into the hierarchy of dimensions at a high enough or deep enough level. “Height” and “depth” are each seen in this context as properties of the greater, nonlocal reality, in the sense that the higher or finer vibrations—the inner octaves described by Gurdjieff and embodied in the Magic Square of Egyptian and Greek metaphysics—penetrate deep into the heart of everything.

For me, the most important aspect of “Gurdjieff’s system” (he would never claim it as his own) is the way the individual’s place in the cosmic scheme of things is so clearly defined. It seems that we all have a place in this worldview. In our case, this “place” is presently the planet of our origins. Significantly, however, Gurdjieff’s system also provides us all with a purpose in life, one that offers a way of striking out into deepest space and enhancing the very presence of the planet on which we were born. Our raison d’être, he said, is to evolve, to develop and expand our consciousness to the degrees of resonance at which it can encompass these higher dimensions, way beyond the scale of planet Earth and the solar system, and even the galaxy. Of course, as I have suggested several times, the fact that this system is based, like DNA and the genetic code, on musical principles and symmetries means that this kind of “spiritual” growth—the development of human consciousness from the scale of its origins up to a greater scale above—is, like all creative processes, fundamentally an organic mode of evolution.

Gurdjieff said that ordinary “socialized” human beings are little more than complex machines, automata, living under the forty-eight orders of laws governing life on Earth (world order 48 in the “ray of creation”), constantly reacting, mostly involuntarily, to external stimuli. The laws and forces governing each of the worlds in the ray of creation, he said, are entirely mechanical, manifesting and interacting strictly according to the law of triple creation. So the evolution of the human psyche, or the development of what yogis and mystics call “cosmic consciousness,” is seen here as a metaphysical journey up through the higher worlds and dimensions, at each stage of which the individual frees him or herself from a certain and definite number of the prevailing laws and forces of the particular world order in which they exist. For example, according to Gurdjieff, we on Earth are separated from the “Absolute,” or the ultimate scale, by forty-eight mechanical laws. If we could free ourselves from one half of these laws we would be one stage nearer to the Absolute scale of existence and subject only to the twenty-four laws governing the next world order—the overall planetary sphere. Again, freeing ourselves from half of these laws would gain us access to the next world, the sphere of the sun or the solar system, where we would be subject to only twelve mechanical laws—and so on, with six laws controlling the world of “all suns,” that is all solar helices, and three laws, three fundamental forces, controlling the greater world of the galactic helix.

This familiar description of the natural process of transcendental evolution embodies the essence of Gurdjieff’s system of self-development, which was designed specifically to assist his students in systematically freeing themselves from these mechanical laws. No “miracle,” he said (by which he meant psychokinesis, telepathy, and so forth) occurs as a result of the violation of these laws; a miracle can only be a manifestation of the laws and forces of a higher world.

Obviously the scientific community in general is opposed to the idea that the mind can engage in paranormal activities: it requires evidence that is measurable in some way. Shamans, yogis, mystics, and teachers of esoteric wisdom, however, do not. They appear to “measure” things, phenomena, experiences in a very different way from the modern scientist; that is, they assess and comprehend nature not only logically, with their minds, but holistically, that is with their whole being.

Ouspensky recognized the difficulty in observing the paranormal by purely scientific means after a period during which he experienced a number of telepathic encounters with Gurdjieff. These occurred during and after a field trip to Finland with Gurdjieff and a small group of his students a short time before the Bolshevik uprising. Just prior to this, Ouspensky had been taking part in a series of rigorous mental exercises and short but intensive fasts, which induced in him an unusually excited and nervous state.

One evening Gurdjieff called Ouspensky and two others to sit with him in a small room of the country house in which they were staying. Gurdjieff proceeded to show them some physical movements and postures, after which he gave them a brief talk on certain matters recently under discussion. It was at this point that Ouspensky had an experience he would never forget.

It all started with him beginning to hear Gurdjieff’s thoughts. He said that Gurdjieff was talking to those present in the normal way, when suddenly he noticed that among the words Gurdjieff was saying were separate “thoughts” that were intended for him alone: “After a while I heard his voice inside me as if it were in the chest near the heart. He put a definite question to me. I looked at him; he was sitting and smiling. His question provoked in me a very strong emotion. But I answered him in the affirmative.”³

To the obvious astonishment of the other two present, this intermittent “conversation” lasted for about half an hour, with Gurdjieff posing questions silently and Ouspensky replying in his natural voice. The substance of this dialogue Ouspensky declines to detail, but it seems that the questions posed by Gurdjieff were very difficult and sometimes of an extremely personal nature. Eventually Ouspensky became so agitated and disturbed by the proceedings that he hurried out of the room and escaped into the surrounding forest to try to gather his thoughts.

When he returned to the house it was dark. Unaware that Gurdjieff and the others were having supper on the veranda and thinking everyone had retired for the evening, he went to bed. But then, after a while, he began to feel a strange excitement and his pulse began to beat forcibly. At this point he once again heard Gurdjieff’s voice inside his chest. This time, however, he was able to reply to the question mentally and it seems that Gurdjieff “heard” and responded.

Much to Ouspensky’s obvious discomfort, this extraordinary state of affairs continued for several days. Eventually the group traveled back from Finland to St. Petersburg and then met at the main railway station to see Gurdjieff off on a train bound for Moscow. Ouspensky then reports, “But the miraculous was still far from ended. There were new and very strange phenomena again late in the evening of that day and I “conversed” with him while seeing him in the compartment of the train going to Moscow.”⁴

You can make of this what you will. Ouspensky, as he reports in his book, experienced other unusual states of awareness at this time, some of which, as he himself admits, he may have imagined. But when speaking of these extremely lucid telepathic encounters with Gurdjieff, his account is quite precise and unequivocal. As far as Ouspensky was concerned, he was communicating with Gurdjieff through an entirely different and much more efficient mode of transmission than ordinary vocal means.

So, if telepathy is a reality, how does it work? The answer currently on offer is, of course, “waves and interference patterns,” though of a kind far removed from the wavelike form of subatomic quanta, of interactive electrons, packets of light, and all the other subatomic paraphernalia currently haunting the nonlocal world of local scientists.

The problem, as Ouspensky saw it, is that “metaphysical” phenomena cannot be investigated by ordinary methods:

It is a complete absurdity to think that it is possible to study phenomena of a higher order like “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” foreseeing the future, mediumistic phenomena and so on, in the same way as electrical, chemical, or meteorological phenomena are studied. There is something in phenomena of a higher order which requires a particular emotional state for their observation and study. And this excludes any possibility of “properly conducted” laboratory experiments and observations.⁵

As we shall see, the reference here to the emotional state of the investigator has a significant place in Gurdjieff’s interpretation of the theory of transcendental evolution. The point to note here is that the paranormal aspects of the human psyche described above were considered by Ouspensky, a scholarly and rather stoic Russian intellectual, as phenomena deserving of study, that is he believed them to exist.

Probably very few of us living in the modern world will ever experience or witness real paranormal happenings. But of course, we all inhabit a predominantly secular, “socialized” environment controlled outwardly by legislation and underpinned by an economic substructure whose material demands upon us leave little time for voyages “into the mystic.” This does not mean, of course, that the mystic is simply a figment of mankind’s collective imagination. In fact, as Michael Talbot points out in his book The Holographic Universe, the evidence for paranormal psychic abilities as manifested through thousands of individuals in history is too compelling not be taken seriously. The number of serious researchers who believe that the holographic model can explain virtually all such phenomena is growing steadily.

The psychiatric researcher Dr. Stanislav Grof, for example, who spent several years studying the effects of LSD on thousands of volunteers, believes that the essential features of “transpersonal experiences” (“trips”), such as the sensation that there are no boundaries, no separate, unconnected elements, no distinction between parts and the whole, are all details one would observe in a holographic universe. He also thinks that the enfolded nature of space and time in the implicate realm is responsible for the feeling of timelessness experienced by so many of his volunteers. Unusual states of consciousness, he believes, can penetrate through to the implicate, enfolded order of things and modify phenomena in the physical world—the “images”—by “influencing their generative matrix.”⁶ Grof is saying, in effect, that the mind, as well as being capable of moving objects through psychokinesis, may also, under the right circumstances, be capable of influencing the source of these phenomenal images—what Talbot calls the “cosmic motion picture projector”—and so remodel the material world into any desired shape or form.

LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—was discovered quite by accident in the late 1950s in Switzerland, synthesized from a fungus that forms on rye grain. Its effects on the human psyche were subsequently realized and explored extensively by the psychedelic generation of the 1960s.

Several decades prior to this, Ouspensky was also undergoing some very interesting “transpersonal experiences” of his own, induced by some other form of mind-altering agent, possibly nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas.” In the context of our investigation into the nonlocal world of the quantum psychologist, his recollections of those experiences are highly significant. This is what he has to say about these experiences in his book A New Model of the Universe: “The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point, but how in fact to describe anything in these conditions—that question I could not answer.”⁷

Clearly this description is very similar to the observations made by Grof’s volunteers, of a nonlocal world in which there are no boundaries, no distinctions between parts and the whole, and everything is wholly visible from any point of reference.

As Ouspensky discovered, the problem with short cuts like psychedelic excursions is that they are very intense and sometimes traumatic— so much so that the unprepared mind is often incapable of remembering even the essence of its experience, let alone competently recording it. Ouspensky himself said that during these states of altered awareness he found it impossible to finish a simple sentence because, between words, so many relevant and interconnected impressions came to him that he simply couldn’t keep track of events in the normal way: “. . . and these new and unexpected experiences came upon me and flashed by so quickly, that I could not find words, could not find forms of speech, could not find concepts, which would enable me to remember what had occurred even for myself, still less to convey it to anyone else.”⁸

Obviously these kinds of chemically induced perceptions of different realities are of limited value. They are stolen glimpses, so to speak, taken for the most part by people whose mental powers are not sufficiently developed and whose understanding is consequently limited. Possibly this is why subjects under the influence of psychedelics are invariably rendered speechless, unable to describe even a small part of their experience. Indeed, being unprepared, many people have been shocked and even frightened by the things they have seen. Doubtless, for every hippie who can still remember his or her “transpersonal experiences,” there will be several that cannot remember, or don’t want to.

Another interesting description of the wider reality, one that again encompasses the kind of nonlocal dimension we are investigating here, is provided by Paramhansa Yogananda in his earlier-mentioned book Autobiography of a Yogi (1946). Unlike Ouspensky, Yogananda probably experienced these perceptions not as a result of the use of psychedelic agents, but rather through a heightened state of awareness induced by extensive yogic exercises—in breathing, posture, meditation, and so on. In the chapter entitled “The Law of Miracles,” Yogananda discusses in some detail his observations concerning the phenomenon of light and its place in the cosmic scheme of things. The passage quoted here, as one can see, is remarkably prophetic and actually reads, in detail if not in style, like a page from Michael Talbot’s book:

Motion pictures, with their lifelike images, illustrate many truths concerning creation. The Cosmic Director has written His own plays and has summoned the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity He sends His beams of light through the films of successive ages, and pictures are thrown on the backdrop of space.⁹

Remember that this particular “holographic” metaphor appeared in print decades before the hologram was ever dreamed of. He continues:

Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only a combination of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are nought but figures in a cosmic motion picture. Temporarily true to man’s five sense perceptions, the transitory scenes are cast on the screen of human consciousness by the infinite creative beam. A cinema audience may look up and see that all screen images are appearing through the instrumentality of one imageless beam of light. The colorful universal drama is similarly issuing from the single white light of a Cosmic Source. With inconceivable ingenuity God is staging “super-colossal” entertainment for His children, making them actors as well as audience in His planetary theatre.¹⁰

Like Bohm, the Yogi sees the psyche of the observer as an integral part of the entire “cosmic motion picture.” As Yogananda himself saw it, we are all of us legitimate members of the cast of actors in this universal pageant, performing images, cast onto the “backdrop of space,” acting out plays within a play, as real and as unreal as the images on a cinema screen.

Significantly, we are here reminded of the Hindu belief that the mechanism that facilitates this great cosmic spectacle is in fact light itself—the “single white light of a Cosmic Source.” As we noted previously, this is emphasized in the principal annual festival of the Hindus, known as Diwali—the festival of light. Yogananda said that Indian holy men, people who “know themselves,” are able to “travel” at the speed of light and utilize the “creative light rays” to bring into visibility any physical manifestation. The “law of miracles,” he said, is operable by any man who has realized that the essence of creation is light. This, he asserted, was the secret of psychokinesis, telepathy, and so on, powers that manifest as a result of tuning in the vibrations of the mind with the vibrations of light. Presumably such a meeting of forces would create a whole new web of interference patterns (inner octaves) and with it a whole new range of phenomena.