15 
CONCLUSION, OR PERHAPS THE BEGINNING . . .
Holographic Universe
In 1970, Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, discovered that neurons of the cortex only respond to certain bands of frequencies. This reinforces the idea that the brain behaves as a holographic system and that the visual image forming in the cortex is not the object we are looking at, but a three-dimensional hologram, an artifact. If this is true, what is the original of the hologram that we perceive? What are physical bodies in reality? If the objects we see, hear, and touch become holograms inside of us, things outside of us could be the interference patterns we are projecting as three-dimensional images. Is the reality of the object called apple its apple appearance, or is it its interference configuration? Is the subjective reality of the forms how they are interpreted by our senses, or is it an interference configuration of incomprehensible forms?
The holographic interference configurations are similar to informed fields because they contain all the information, the basic code. The physical body is to the informed field like the hologram is to the interference configuration. The universe could be a complex form of waves that the senses transform into three-dimensional illusions: bodies. If this is so, Plato was right about reality, namely that we just see its shadows. The images of what seems real—sun, stars, flowers, living beings, and indeed ourselves in the mirror—are nothing other than holographic deformations of entities whose appearance is different and unknown. Our senses do not know the true face of reality.
“On one hand, the face of nature is so terrifying that we couldn’t stand it and we would be destroyed. On the other, it is so beautiful and radiant that, like the sun, we can see it only if hidden by a white veil or as a shimmering reflection in a mirror.”1 This is how Isis talks, the Great Mother, the Matrix: “I am all that has been, that is, and that will be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.”
We cannot lift the veil and know the true face of nature; all we can do is trust the senses and believe that an apple is so because it has form and characteristics. It would remain an apple also in its interference pattern, as a drop of ink exists even if it is dispersed in glycerin. The bodily aspect may temporarily disappear, but the basic code can at any time recreate it. The entity we call apple can exist in different forms; the “form made as an apple” is only one of the possibilities. The form is only the image; its essence is a broader collection of information. The senses hide a world devoid of material forms, inhabited by the basic codes and organizational patterns: the essences.
Try to think of a domain of organized frequencies. It doesn’t matter how you think of it; you are imagining an object as nonhuman eyes could see it, its basic code. Near the frequency domain that looks like an apple—I apologize to apples for making them protagonists, but they are commonly taken as an example in holography, and the apple is the symbol of knowledge—there is another domain structured differently, which the eyes see in the form of a tree. And so on.
The implicate order (that looks like disorder) is not manifested, while the explicate (that seems ordered) has a form that we can experience and understand. Consequently, the first seems like an illusion, the second like reality. But it is exactly the opposite. Sensations are mental images that look real as long as we are inside of the game of the senses, but from the outside—escaping from the cave—forms appear for what they are, illusions. Each expresses a hidden whole. Laboratory instruments record an electron because, as with the drop of ink, the whole becomes an electron in that circumstance, in agreement with Heisenberg. Even the movement would be an illusion of the eternal concealing and revealing. Nature continues to hide. David Böhm believed that the universe is the spectral representation of another parallel dimension, nonspatial and nontemporal, an immense hologram of a kind produced by a laser beam of unconceivable intensity, in short, a virtual reality.
The idea of a universe that combines two fundamental orders, implicit and explicit, is ancient and is found in many traditions. Tibetan Buddhism speaks of “empty” and “nonempty.” The Tibetan empty corresponds to Böhm’s implicate order: the birthplace of all things, which come out from it as an endless flow. It is Lucretius’s “emptiness,” the “being” of Parmenides. The Tibetan nonempty is the objective world of forms, the “nonbeing” of Parmenides and the “doxa” of Plato. The empty is real, the nonempty illusory. There is an ancient mantra in Japanese Buddhism, Shikì sokù ze-kù, ku sokù ze-shikì (“Matter as a measure of itself is empty, empty as a measure of itself is matter.”)
Influenced by perception, we cannot understand the empty. In Hinduism, the implicate order is Brahman, which is devoid of form, yet is the creative source of every visible form, the origin from which they arise and evolve. Böhm writes that the implicate order could be called spirit. Hinduism would call it consciousness. Once again it is clear that matter emerges from consciousness. Plato also affirms it in the myth of the cave. Empedocles likens the universe to a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, while Leibniz sees the nonlocal organization of the world (apparently aware of Buddhist knowledge) and considers the universe to consist of fundamental entities—the monads—each containing a reflection of the entire universe (holographic concept). It was Leibniz who gave the keys to the integral calculus that centuries later allowed Gabor to invent the hologram. Everything returns.
Heraclitus said, “It is wise to agree that all is one.” With no stable forms, the elementary particles are transitory aspects of a hidden order, whose complexity escapes us. Once their cycle is exhausted, they are not destroyed; they go back into the implicit order from which they came. We can say with Aristotle that they go back to being particles with potential. Pannaria would say that from the world stage, they return to the backstage of pure matter, and Böhm, from the explicate to the implicate order.
So you see, in the implicate order of a quantum are all the aspects—wave or particle—that can manifest, depending on the interaction of the observer. It is absurd to consider the universe as divided in parts, when they are only transitory and illusory aspects of a unique reality. The particles are fantastic images of an uninterrupted holographic movement.
Different points of view produce different representations. Seen from above, this page is a sheet of rectangular paper, a large area in space, but if we examine it at a 90° angle and focus our eyes on the edge of the sheet, the page disappears and we see a thin line, like an evanescent blade. In the illusory world, we live according to points of view, none of which can describe bodies in their entirety, only parts of them. The truth cannot be divided, dissected, or categorized because it lacks material forms; we can only classify illusions, and science is limited to describing patterns of fictions. An atom is a probabilistic aspect of the vast sea that continuously exchanges atoms between stage and backstage, removing and replacing them with such speed that we cannot notice it. The universe is a single fabric whose parts are only appearance. A particle “is” only when we observe it and translate it into an image: this is the “curse” by which the senses present us with a distorted reality, but unfortunately this is the program. The truth beyond the senses is unknowable. Deus absconditus, “hidden God” (as Thomas Aquinas put it) is behind all forms, hidden by the illusions of Maya.
The world is therefore a construct of our brain; an interpretation of frequencies coming from other dimensions; it is virtual. It seems as if it is made of atoms, but it is reduced to fluctuating and elusive areas of probability. The physicist Nick Herbert defined it as a “radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.” Whenever we try to look at it, the quantum phenomenon appears to stop and to change back into ordinary reality.2 It is impossible to know the real in its true form, because we can receive and process it only as our abilities allow. Herbert argues that “anything we touch turns into matter,” since it is the only way our senses can translate the meaning of reality. Through the senses we can never know the reality that is always hiding. “Nature loves to hide,” Heraclitus wrote.
Niels Bohr remarked that if subatomic particles exist only in the presence of an observer, it makes no sense to speak of their properties before they are observed. One who disagreed was Einstein. He couldn’t really accept that particles could communicate in an instantaneous way, because he thought that nothing can travel at a higher speed than light, otherwise the time barrier would be crashed and everything would be stranded in impracticable paradoxes.
If particles are not small bricks but waves, the universe is a texture of frequencies, and what looks like matter is an interference network. For us, the real apple is that which ripens on the tree, and the fake one is the hologram, but only because it feels empty to the touch, and our parameters are calibrated on solidity. Otherwise, the world would be revealed as we have never seen it before. Matter, living beings, and things are different from how we perceive them, but Nature has provided ways for us to translate reality via the senses as images of apples, people, oceans, mountains, sunsets, and so on, more enjoyable than incomprehensible holographic patterns!
The World as a Virtual Reality
In conclusion, the world is not as it appears, even if this is the only way to understand it: we see it as human beings. Reality is adapted to the sensory system of our species that builds its own world image. It will never be the truth. The Italian physicist Giuliana Conforto writes, “Image is the interface between form and information. . . . The field is everlasting omnipresence: it is the cause, internal and external, of every physical body.”3
The sensations capture only parts, and they distort those to adapt them to the sensory receptors; so the senses are deceitful and different depending on the species and the individual. Nobody perceives the reality of others, as it is transformed “to suit the senses,” to become our reality. For example, in the program that has been given to us at birth it says that contact with water gives “a sense of wet,” the vicinity of fire produces a “sense of heat,” and a brick wall is impenetrable. They seem absolute, but then we meet he who can walk through walls or walk on fire, she who can wound herself without bleeding or feeling pain, and then our codified system is in crisis.
With the senses we are used to doing what we want: we cancel, invent, deform. How can we trust anything? How can research be objective when it is based on the senses that are very limited and subjective? Reality is a complex system of frequencies that the neuronal networks translate into feelings and internal images. It is subjective and virtual. Hermes Trismegistus writes, “The universe is nothing but a mental creation of everything, because in reality everything is mind.” And Berkeley, “Matter does not exist, it is only an idea.”
The superstrings theorists understand the universe as a great symphony in which every element vibrates and plays. We can add, in complete compliance with classical chemistry, that every particle of matter has its own mode of vibration that leaves its “fingerprint” in the universe. The discovery of TFF guides us to explore a parallel world, of which the world of senses is only a mirror and projection, with different space and time.
Someone said this with simple words, not as a physicist but as a sorcerer. Don Juan explains to Carlos Castaneda that reality has an explicit order, illusory, and an implicit one, real and very powerful. He calls the first order tonal and the hidden one nagual. The world visions of a Yaqui sorcerer and of a quantum physicist such as Böhm are very similar. “We are not solid beings. We are without limits,” teaches Don Juan, as if he were talking about the hologram. The tonal is the organizer of the world, the “description that we have learned to visualize and take for granted,”4 and it composes the laws by which we perceive the world, and it is “all that we think the world is made of.”
Castaneda is talking about virtual reality when he makes Don Juan say, “The tonal of your time calls for you to maintain that everything dealing with your feelings and thoughts takes place within yourself. The sorcerers’ tonal says the opposite, everything is outside.”5
While the tonal starts at birth and ends with death, the nagual never finishes. They are different times, autonomous worlds. Under the guidance of the sorcerers, Castaneda reaches the perception and finally finds the real beyond the virtual:
It was a crucial moment, where I found myself neither in one place nor another, but in both, as an observer who accesses two scenes simultaneously. I had the incredible feeling to be able to, in that moment, go both paths. It was enough for me that I perceived them from the subject point of view.6
The lesson of Don Juan is that the world we think we see is only a description of the world. When we are convinced we are deciding, our decision has already been taken by the nagual. Deciding is nothing but submission.
Don Juan and don Genaro taught the author that for every one of us exists that double, which we mentioned several times during our journey, and that Castaneda meets. Here is the dialogue between the author and the two sorcerers.
“Is the other like the self?”
“The other is the self,” answered Don Juan.
“What’s the other made of?” I asked Don Juan, after minutes of indecision.
“There is no way of knowing that,” he said.
“Is it real or just an illusion?”
”Would it be possible then to say that it is made of flesh and blood?” I asked.
“No. It would not be possible,” don Genaro answered.
“But if it is as real as I am . . .”
“As real as you?” Don Juan and don Genaro interjected in unison. . . .
“Obviously the double can perform acts,” I said.
“Obviously!” he replied.
“But can the double act in behalf of the self?”
“It is the self, damn it!”7
What appears to be our double, the basic code, is our true identity. The world is virtual: it exists, but not in this form. The sorcerers teach that every feeling is illusory, and we are inside a “bubble” from the moment of birth. Is the secret of virtual reality in the bubble? “At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us in. That bubble is our perception. We live inside that bubble all of our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection.”8
We could open another chapter on the physics of the virtual worlds, but time and space are against us, at least for now. A pause is needed. The journey is not finished. It has just begun; we have just set foot on the other side of things, and we can already see worlds and dimensions to explore. But this will be the subject of yet another journey.