All that we are and all that we know begins in space; the part contains the whole

Recently, I was looking through a window screen and refocused my eyes to see the screen itself, the grid pattern with thousands of tiny, same-size boxes or holes. Defocusing again so the background became sharp, I became aware of brightness differences in sections of the screen and that led me to see the screen as analogous to pixels on the screens of electronic devices. A step further and my thoughts turned to the hologram, where any portion of a holographic plate contains the whole image. 

To make a hologram, an object, for instance a rose, is illuminated with the light of a laser beam. Another laser beam is then bounced off its reflected light, creating an interference pattern in the area where the beams combine. The pattern is then photographed on film. When it’s developed, the image looks like swirls of light and dark lines—a typical interference pattern. But when the film is lit by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the rose appears. If the hologram is cut in half and illuminated by a laser, both halves will contain the entire image of the rose. No matter how many cuts are made, each piece of film will contain a smaller but intact version of the whole object. What’s significant about a hologram is that every “part” contains all the information about the “whole.” 

In his landmark book The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality, Michael Talbot says the hologram accounts for seemingly mystical occurrences including out-of-body experiences, quantum strangeness, telepathy and miraculous healing. In the forward to his latest edition of his book Lynne McTaggart, a long-term researcher into mind-science phenomena relating to healing, says his conclusions “continue to be proven true by today’s most advanced physics, cosmology and string theory.” 

We are of a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected. — Michael Talbot, Science writer

In 1982, experimenting with lasers to produce 3D images—holograms—French physicist Alain Aspect found that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons can instantaneously communicate with each other whether they’re 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.  The problem for physicists was that it violated Einstein’s tenant that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Nonetheless, University of London physicist David Bohm worked out (mathematically) comprehensive theories of reality by considering the universe to be a “gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.” He argued that subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them and this is not because they’re sending a mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. At the quantum level of reality, “particles” (more properly energy packets) are not individual entities, but extensions of the same fundamental something. Today, physicists are talking about that “something” as a “unified field” or “quantum vacuum.” We know it as space. It shows that, below the level of the reality we experience, everything in the universe is interconnected, parts of a whole. 

At this momentous time, we are coming to recognize that everything we call physical reality is expressed as a cosmic hologram, and that each of us is a holographic microcosm. There is no real separation between cosmos and consciousness, and that the appearance of separation is merely the perspective from which consciousness in the cosmos views its own projection. — Jude Currivan, British cosmologist, author The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation

It’s the part-whole relationship that took my mind on this journey from window screen to pixels and then the hologram. The screen has holes or spaces between the wires; pixels hare virtual spaces that contain potentials, and at the atomic level holograms consist of “fields,” empty space with infinite potential. I find it intriguing and beautiful that matter emerges from pure potential. Like the pixel that can be made brighter or darker with variations in color that can harmonize or contrast with their neighbors to produce a whole image, I can select from the field of potentials—universal consciousness, the whole—to become and express the best possible version of myself.  

If consciousness is the universal whole and we are the experiencing parts or members, our connection isn’t just with each other. It’s with all that is.   

The universe presents itself to us as a system composed of parts-within-wholes, of systems within systems, organized through time and evolution as interdependent levels of complexity. Each part, including you and me, is integral to the whole; and, in some holographic sense, each part is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm. Each part contains within itself the seed or template of the whole. — Christian De Quincey, American philosopher, author of Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness through Relationship.

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