THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE by Michael Talbot (Remastered)

[Music] [Applause] thinking aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey mishlov.

[Music] hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey mishlove today we're going to be exploring the holographic model of reality and its implications for ourselves our bodies and the world around us with me today is Michael Talbot author of several books including mysticism and the new physics beyond the quantum your past lives and most recently the holographic universe as well as three novels welcome Michael thank you Jeffrey it's a pleasure to be with you nice to be with you you know one of the things that you point out in the holographic universe is that this is a model that's been around now for a few decades right really beginning to show its power in explaining many many areas of personal experience and and science at the same time can we talk a little bit about how the model developed uh sure it was developed by two two men uh University of of London physicist named David Bowman there's a performed Protege of Einstein and a Stanford University neurophysiologist named Carl pribram and they worked independently pribram was studying memory and found that there's evidence that the brain operates holographically and bond was studying subatomic physics and found that on the subatomic level the fabric of reality seems to possess properties that are reminiscent of a hologram so if you put those two ideas together that our brain seems to be holographic and the universe is holographic it suggests that maybe it's compelling evidence that that the universe may be a kind of hologram not that it's literally a hologram but that it's a good metaphor a way of understanding the universe now when you say it's holographic what do we mean really uh that in a nutshell that reality may be more plastic and changeable like an image than a solid construct a sort of sticks in Stone's world has a couple of other implications one of which is that a hologram has an unusual property if you take a piece of photographic film that has a holographic image encoded in it that means that you cannot see the image with your naked eye you have to reconstruct the image you have to shine a laser through it so if you have an image of Rose in the film shine a laser through the rose you'll get a three-dimensional image of the rose on the other side you cut that film in half shine a laser through each piece you'll get a whole rose out of each piece which is a very unusual property and sort of boggles the imagination at first uh cut it in four you get four rows just cut an eight you get eight roses so the universe is a hologram it means as William Blake said that quite literally you can find the universe in a grain of sand that every portion of the universe contains some semblance of the whole of the whole universe that's very profound very it's I mean it's it's mind-boggling and you know one of the things that you point out in a footnote of your book that I would like to mention is that this doesn't apply for many of the kinds of holographic images that are popularly so right pendants and the like that don't require laser light right every every talk I give someone comes up and says they cut the you know the Hologram in half on their credit card and ruined it and didn't get the effect and it it only applies to those images that you cannot see with the naked eye that you have to reconstruct if you were to look at holographic film it might look like ripples on a pond unless the laser light is shined through it right if you there's no decipherable image in the film and it very much does look like ripples in a pond like when you drop Pebbles into a plant there are all sorts of little circles they're called interference patterns right the same as when you drop two pebbles in a pond and the and the ripples crisscross that is exactly what is in the film it's the crisscrossing of the laser light that's recorded on the photographic film so there's the sense about a hologram that there's two levels one is this three-dimensional image that's projected and it can look so real that you want to reach out and touch it and in the other level are these interference patterns right that that reality in a hologram is can be can manifest in two ways as a concrete image or as as this sort of indecipherable blur of energy and it an analogy to this is kind of when you're watching Johnny Carson your television set that's really His Image is encoded in two ways one is as the concrete image on the TV set one is as the blur of radio waves permeating the living room and if the universe is a hologram of some sense in some way it suggests that there may be two very drastically different levels to reality that the concrete reality we see you know when we look at these chairs and at you know the trees and the clouds and everything like that our bodies are are just one way that reality manifests and at some deep level there's another there's a level of reality where everything dissolves into a an ocean of energy that is holographically interconnected where every portion of the universe is contained in every tiny area of the universe so that implies that this notion that that we go about our everyday lives with the thinking of ourselves is separate from each other and the cup is separate from the coffee that goes in the cupboard that these Notions are are somehow what would you say superficial or contradicted at a deeper level uh well they're artificial definitely and Balm really stresses this and it's it's a very interesting notion because in our Western way of thinking we're so attached to the idea that when we come up with a concept like a an apple or an electron or whatever that that exists out there and we forget it's kind of like fish unaware of the water in which they swim that the conceptual pigeon holes we use words to to describe reality are phenomenon inside our head they're not out there and most of the time this is a philosophical quibble when but when you get down to quantum physics and this is one of the reasons that Bohm came up with a holographic idea it it starts to have real effects and one of those is it's been discovered that if you take two subatomic particles like electrons and in certain instances when you do something to one it will always affect the other no matter how far apart they are it's kind of like stories that you've heard of identical twins where when one is hurt the other feels the pain and the problem is is that we can find no process known to physics that explains how these could be sending a signal back and forth in fact because it would have to be faster than the speed alone instantaneous would have to be an instantaneous signal and Einstein's theory of relativity said you can't have instantaneous signals because it would mean that you could violate the time barrier and conceivably call your grandfather and tell them not to marry your grandmother and most physicists say well this would be just too troubling to to incorporate into a a rational picture of reality boam explains it in a different way which is a very interesting way and he says if you imagine that you've got an aquarium in which you have a fish swimming you have a TV camera facing the front of the aquarium one facing the side of the aquarium and you have a monitor attached to each camera and you also Imagine further that you come from a culture that's never seen aquariums never seen fish never seen monitors or cameras all you are privy to is the two images on this on these screens he says that maybe you know if you look at these two screen greens you're going to see efficient a side view of a fish in a frontal view of a fish and if you because you don't know what the deeper reality is the reality aquarium you may assume that these are two separate things and but two different fish two different fish two different objects but every time one fish moves the other is going to make a corresponding movement and you may then jump to the conclusion that somehow the one fish is signaling the other communicating the other to say hey do this instantaneously and boehm says this is what we've done with subatomic particles that we assume that an instantaneous communication is going on when that's not really what's going on at all at a deeper level a very holographic level reality every particle in the universe collapses to a sort of cosmic Unity they're not signaling each other they're like that fish where there's the level of the aquarium and so what that means talking about words is that there is no separation between electrons furthermore there's no separation between people and this has all kinds of very boggling implications one of which is that we've always tried to understand for example psychic phenomena like how how could I get information out of your head in my head as some sort of signal going back and forth but if we're organized if we live in a universe that's organized holographically you no longer have to tackle it that way it could be that I have the entire universe and every neuron every cell every atom every electron in my head and you do also so when we can access that we can access information that seems to be beyond our normal sensory reach well you know I'm very interested in psychic phenomenon and I know you've had many personal experiences and I want to touch on it but this is not a model that was developed in order to explain psychic phenomenon I think to neuropsychologists like Carl prebram the the fact that it happens to provide an explanation for psychic phenomena is almost a bit of an embarrassment that he developed the holographic model because he was trying to come to terms with memory right so let's talk about that sure program was working under a very famous neurophysiologist named Carl Lashley and it was at a time when it was believed that memory was stored in a specific spot in the brain and there was something called the proverbial grandmother cell that there was literally a cell in your brain that contained the memory of your grandmother what you knew about your grandmother and so they did a rather gruesome series of experiments for animal lovers but it came out with some very profound information they took rats and they taught them how to run mazes and then they would surgically remove various portions of the brain problem and his his mentor Carl Ashley the reasoning being that if they found a if they could remove the a portion of the brain and the rat could no longer run the maze they'd found the area of the brain where the rat's memory of the maze running ability was encoded now every time they removed a different portion of the brain they discovered that they could never remove the memory of how to run the maze they could impair the rat's ability so it might limp through the maze but they couldn't remove it and really uh you know surgeons had known this for a while doctors have known this for a while because when people have head injuries they don't forget half of the alphabet or half of their family or half of a novel they read they have Global memory impairment where their entire memory may be hazy but memories don't seem to be stored in our heads in the same way that books are stored on a Shelf and it wasn't until the 60s when program encountered the holographic model that says that the hole is contained in every part that he said aha this may be what's going on in the brain specifically because a hologram is made out of interference patterns the Hologram that you see you know that we talked about earlier is made out of the interference pattern laser light but it can be made out of the interference patterns of any kind of energy electromagnetic energy electricity uh x-rays even and so private said since our synapses are constantly giving off electrical impulses these are like proverbial pebbles dropping into the sort of electromagnetic pool of our brain they're sending out ripples that are constantly crisscrossing and he believes that's what the brain hologram that's what how we think and how we remember is through that hologram inside the head it would uh apply in another sense too because if if you take a hologram image and cut it in half or in quarters or intense each time you reduce it in size the image becomes fuzzier and fuzzier even though the whole image is there Just the Way memory would seem to be and it becomes fuzzier when you you have Porsches the brain removed yeah right in pribram then also notice that the same principle applied for visual information processing well yes it's very interesting he did not make the discovery but he came upon the research done by other res other investigators and that is another very interesting thing uh as you know Mother Nature uses all kinds of mathematical languages that when we go to understand physical phenomena we generally find that there's some sort of mathematical underpinning to whatever the phenomena is there are uncountable mathematical languages it turns out that the mathematical language involved in the making of the Hologram is a system of mathematics and developed by a French man named Fourier they're called Fourier transforms well it also turns out that our brain uses Fourier transforms to translate visual information this is a very unusual State of Affairs it's kind of like discovering Eskimos speaking Spanish you know it's not proof that the brain is a hologram but it's it's suggestive that the brain is a hologram and it turns out in fact all of our senses appear to rely on sort of Fourier transforms that they all seem to use the same mathematics so again here's evidence that the brain uses the same mathematics to decipher the sensory world as are involved in the making of a hologram which is as I say not proof but compelling evidence that something is going on well what this seems to suggest is a new way of looking at Consciousness itself very much so yeah um it's and it's an interesting thing I I have to say that I differ a little with pribram because pribram thinks that the brain you know as I said that it's the electrical interference patterns of the brain that is a brain hologram I'm kind of a Mystic because you know at a young age I had an out-of-body experience where I left my body and it became quite apparent to me while I was having this experience that I was thinking but my brain was back in my body which I could see in my bed I knew it wasn't just a dream because I floated out over uh the ground outside my family's house and I saw a book uh on lying on the ground and it was a book by the French short story writer uh Gita Mo Paso and the next day a neighbor said by the way Michael I lost a library book by Guida Mo peso have you seen it and I thought well I floated over it last I didn't tell the neighbor that but there there was the book and I I was always very I'm still very scientifically oriented I want to understand the world in scientific terms but it was really the first time that I sort of had to confront you know the difference between my spiritual beliefs that we can survive you know our bodily death and this deeply held belief scientific belief of mind that it's the brain that's doing the thinking and I realized it was I had a kind of epiphany where I thought I it isn't the brain that's doing the thinking so I I am not entirely certain that that it's just the electromagnetic interference patterns that is the brain hologram because those obviously would perish when the brain perishes I think there might be some Southern level some subtler energy that we haven't discovered with our technology that's involved in this also well balm's model is irrelevant and interesting at this point because he's not dealing with the universe as a hologram made out of electromagnetic interference patterns he's looking at Quantum wave potentials which is right in a much deeper level and I must say I've heard from discuss it much the same way their Quantum wave Potentials in the brain itself which is is a much more deeply embedded level of energy and matter than than the electromagnetic level right uh bone it's it's a funny thing in science um uh the great physicist uh Herman Bondi said called it the lure of completeness that that we tend when we find some sort of outermost perimeter to what we can measure we assume there's nothing Beyond it and I I refer to it it's kind of like the the you know in ancient times when we only knew a certain portion of the world uh people always seem to say Beyond the Edge of the map there be monsters that there was nothing there and the same thing is going on in physics that we have with our technology reached down to a certain level in in reality and it's a common Prejudice among many physicists that beyond that level there's not nothing exists there be monsters there there's just a void and it's it's an interesting thing that that we as I say we have to have this lure of completeness we have to feel that our knowledge of the universe is all that exists in the universe Bowman I think is very wisely is one of the few physicist who comes out and kind of says the emperor has no clothes says what rational basis to it's just Prejudice that we assume nothing exists Beyond this level of reality and he feels that there are all kinds of of domains of reality Beyond this level this microscopic level and he theorizes that there may be Untold uncountable subtle subtler energies in these levels the quantum potential is one it's a theorized theorized field that has not been measured or discovered with science but bone feels there's there's evidence to posit its existence and it's now rather well accepted I understand it among Quantum physicists I I wouldn't say that I no it's it's pretty controversial and the reason it's controversial is because the standard explanation of quantum physics has bought has decided that this lure of completeness that there's nothing Beyond yeah you know the Danish physicist Niels Bohr was one of the founder of quantum physics basically said there's you you get it down to a certain level of reality and Things become blurry and you can't know anymore and boom takes a very different route which at this point is very uh sort of looked down upon by a lot of physicists because most have been schooled in the the way of Boris thinking yes and boom the quantum potential is not looked upon kindly by most visits I would say well I don't think we want to get into too technical a discussion of quantum physics at the moment but I I do think it's important to bring up the uncertainty principle because it it in a way it's where physics comes full circle and and as I understand it physics are saying well there may be all kinds of stuff but we'll never know it because we interact with it anytime we attempt to look at particles Beyond a certain level the very Act of observation changes things and and that brings us to a point where we realize that the distinction between subject and object breaks down right but they but physicists get very funny about it they get kind of schizophrenic because they they'll openly admit that subject and object breaks down there but they say that somehow this has no effect in the real world this does not translate from the microscopic level to our level although there is a sort of creeping evidence in the scientific world that it does translate into our level um one obvious example I think that it translates into our level is that helium cannot be frozen solid it's you can freeze hydrogen solid you freeze you know carbon dioxide solid but helium for helium the the uh to go to become its atoms to to align in a solid form would violate the uncertainty principle and nature doesn't seem to allow that so you can't no matter how cold helium gets it remains a liquid that to me if you you can have a beaker full of liquid helium and that exists at our level of existence and it's it's a sort of manifestation of uh the uncertainty principle and it's where it's sort of slipped over into our world there are other things uh going on right now that where there's a device called the squid which is a sort of electrical coil in which it looks like we may be able to demonstrate that the current if you say which direction is the current going in the coil it's going both directions at once which is kind of an impossibility but to simultaneously do that that it that too is a Quantum phenomena that these two realities are overlapping so I think we will cross that barrier well I I must admit Michael I'm not sure that I totally grasp the implications of those examples but the examples I would like to focus on that do seem more relevant are the ones that suggest the enormous ability of the mind to affect systems in the body uh the placebo effect the work with the healing and visualization • well this this gets away from Bowman into problem but it's equally interesting with equally profound implications pribram as I said says that we're thinking with Holograms inside our head and that out there exists something that's more akin to the radio waves in the room from which TV gets the image so in essence we're kind of conscious TV sets and what we think is reality when we look out here is really just the image on the TV set inside our mind but doesn't exist out there and prybrum says this is why there's all kinds of evidence that we seem to respond to respond more to the models of reality in our head than out there on in the holographic Universe I give an example of a psychologist who did a study where he took soldiers and marched them all the same distance but he told some they marched like you marched them all 30 my or 20 miles but told suddenly March 10 something March 20 something March 30. but they all March the same distance at the end he took physiological readings and discovered that they were that they're physiologically they responded not to the actual mileage that they had marched but to what they had been told the model of reality that they assumed they had the reality in their heads and in medicine people have used this this application the holographic idea that we respond to the model of reality say this may be why we respond more to um to to the placebos to fake drugs there's a very famous example of a fellow who had a lymphatic cancer tumor is the size of oranges all throughout his body his doctor basically thought he had about three days left to live the fellow heard about a new drug called creebiosin and said you've got to give this to me and the doctor said well frankly you know I don't think you have long to live in this drug take several weeks to take effect the man implored him and the doctor gave in sort of as an act pity he gave the man cree biosin and three days later the man's tumors melded as the doctor put it like snowballs in a hot stove completely gone out of his body faster than the strongest radiation treatment could have melded them away man is up around walking around his hospital room resumes his normal life seems to be completely cancer-free several months down the line he reads an article saying Cree biosin isn't that effective boom boom boom all his tumors come back he's back in the hospital the doctor starts to realize that maybe it wasn't the drug that cured the man but the man's belief so he lies to the man and he says those articles are wrong creebiosin is effective in fact I've got an even more potent version of it he injects just salt water into the man's veins again the man's tumors melt away he resumes his normal life unfortunately many months down the line he reads final studies on crebos and saying it's completely ineffective boom boom boom Miss tumors come back and he dies but the the bottom line is somehow this man had the ability to access some deep level of healing caught himself it wasn't the drug because salt water worked just as well as this alleged drug and so again here's an instance where he responded to the model of reality in his head this deep belief that this drug would heal him even though he wasn't even receiving the drug at a certain point in his treatment and his body responded in kind and that to me is the most exciting aspect of the holographic idea and there are countless examples of it there's a study of a new chemotherapy in England where they took a group of cancer patients half the patients they gave the drug half their patients they gave a placebo a fake no one knew who was receiving the real drug or not they told all the patients this is a very toxic drug may cause you to lose your hair thirty percent of the people receiving just the fake lost their hair and when I first heard this I immediately thought oh my gosh about every donut that I'd ever eat in my life and thought Oh this is really bad for me that I'm I may be responding to the model of reality more than than you know the nutritional aspects of the donut well I think the stories of this kind have been known to scientists hundreds hundreds of years but they've kind of been dismissed because scientists haven't had a good way to look at the possibility that Consciousness can affect physical systems that we think of Consciousness as an epiphenomenon right but if if one considers that there are standing ways interference patterns and in the brain holographic images it gives Consciousness a I hate to use the term mechanism because I don't think that's quite the right term but it gives people a model in which they can begin to appreciate in more the role of Consciousness that's true and it also can be applied in another way because if if the universe is organized holographically we've always believed you know that there is no connection between the brain and the body and of course I mean for most of the history of Medical Science in the west and the past couple of decades we're starting to say there's a connection we're asserting out certain Pathways uh you know the neuropeptides systems that sort of thing but if the holographic model is correct there are so many interconnections between the brain and the body there ceases to be a division so it becomes you almost a moot point to say what is the pathway how is the brain connected to the body because there's no difference just like there's no difference between those two electrodes well and and to take it a step further is you do one might say there's no solid clear-cut distinction between ourselves and the rest of the whole universe I mean this has profound implications for Spiritual experiences of which you've had quite a number and perhaps in the time remaining we should touch on more of those uh yeah very much so I as I said I've always been very interested in signs but I also grew up in a very with a lot of very unusual experiences not the least of which is that I grew up in a house or the Poltergeist haunting so I had all kinds of examples of psychokinesis of objects moving about on their own when I was growing up and I it really was a strange uh in the sense that for me it was normal and I had to learn that it was abnormal and rather pain painful learning and as I grew up and my friends would find it very strange that these things would occur and one of the things that boehm says because boom addresses the topic of psychokinesis is again we don't you know we may be mistaken to try to approach psychokinesis by saying what energy is leaving the brain to move the object because well as balm says there's no division it's like Kinesis means mind over matter right moving the objects was just the power of thought alone that we are as connected to that object as as borderless we're Continuum with the object as the patterns in a carpet so for us to move the object maybe vom says just an act of resonance of realizing that there's no division between it and can we talk for a moment about the issue of life after death or spiritual experiences of other realities yeah that's one of the areas you had mentioned earlier that one of the exciting things about the holographic idea is that people have taken this and explored all different Realms um you know that some have used it to say this is how acupuncture works because it turns out that they're little micro acupuncture systems where you can find the entire body in the acupuncture points of the ear recapitulated right in the area right so we've talked about the placebo effect • some have said that the holographic idea applies to near-death experiences one of these individuals is Kenneth ring who is at the University of Connecticut studies near-death experiences and it's interesting because in report after report of people who have been declared clinically dead you know go to some apparent other level of reality and then come back they refer to this other level of reality with terms like frequency and energy and even hologram that it's a plastic a more plastic level of reality where thought seems to create things instantly there are instances of people having near-death experiences where they think they're hungry and instantly food appears or perhaps an even better example and people find themselves out of their body there are cases where people look down and see that they're in a naked body and they go oh my gosh I'm naked instantly they have clothing on now we don't assume that clothing has a soul you know that has a spirit that survives so somehow it appears that the mind can sort of pull out of this ocean frequency a hologram of clothing and this is what Ken ring says is that we're entering deeper into the Hologram when we have near-death experiences when we when we leave our bodies so there's so many different areas that have kind of been at the the fringes of our understanding that we can now begin to look at with with new eyes Michael Talbot it's been a pleasure to to have you with me and for those of you watching you may be interested in knowing that this discussion will be part of a thinking aloud inner work videotape available along with an additional hour of discussion going deeper into these questions with Michael Talbot Michael thanks so much for being with me my pleasure Jeffrey and thank you for being with us [Music] thank you

this is Jeffrey mishlove back again with Michael Talbot Michael now might be a good opportunity to talk in Greater depth about some of your own personal experiences I think maybe building on what you have discussed earlier regarding your childhood experiences with poltergeists and let's discuss for you personally how the holographic model has helped you to understand these things okay well it's interesting I people I was asked recently when did you really start writing the holographic universe and I started writing it years before I heard of the holographic model because the model of reality that's in the book that is implied by the holographic idea is the model of reality that I had arrived at because of my experiences I'd had a lot of of first-hand encounters with the plasticity of reality a recent one is a good example of just how extraordinary some of the these plastic events have been I have a little Jade Buddha on my desk that my mother gave me and it is set in gold and she came to visit and I think it's significant that this was a time in my life I was going through a rather rough period And basically in need of having some reassurance that Miracles are possible in the universe and when she saw the Jade Buddha sitting on my desk she said oh I remember giving you this and she picked it up and we stood I stood by her as we watched it and as we looked down at the Buddha there was a little explosion of red light and a sphere of red light expanded out from the Buddha and after it was gone a red stone had appeared in the Buddhist head and I don't know if it was a ruby or a rhinestone I've been kind of afraid to have it tested I don't know I would respond if it had been a miraculous rhinestone appearance but um my mother sort of who's always been kind of like Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched when it comes to these things kind of giggled nervously and said Gee I don't remember that stone being in the Buddhist head before and I said but Mom didn't you just notice something really amazing and she said well looked like a there was an explosion of red light and a sphere of red light expanded away from the Buddha and um I said well yeah that's what I saw and she said well that can't be that can't be and my sister was visiting and it actually worn the Buddha on a pendant and so I said well that's she she had told me that my sister Warner and I said well let's call her in and see if she remembers it being there because even Ivory experienced these things you still have this sort of gnawing skepticism go gosh this can't be can reality really be this plastic and I so I said to my mother now don't tell her that the stone materialized that's in front of our eyes right right let's see if she just notices it on her own and my mother bless her heart when when my sister comes in she goes okay okay I won't tell her but the moment she came in the door she goes Pam the stone just appeared out of nowhere and this boot his head so we didn't have you know a sort of straight scientific approach to it but that's just one example there have been many I talked about the Poltergeist I I grew up having all sorts of precognitive visions of the future which at a very early age taught me that time wasn't as linear as as we thought and uh things that that we don't even have sort of scientific pigeonholes to put in like a UFO encounter that encounters with occasionally with with beings that appear to be Spirits I'm not quite sure what they are but but beings that aren't uh physical beings and uh things that that were just part of the natural warp and weft of my life have always been and as I say it really came as a shock to me to discover that other people didn't know reality was plastic and that's why the holographic idea excited me so well now let's talk about it a little more because I think conventionally people who have these experiences search in our culture for an explanation and explanations are not readily forthcoming from mainstream institutions or you could buy into a religious Viewpoint and think of Angels or you might go to Folklore and talk about the little people or you might draw on theosophy or occult Traditions but what what added insights do you get out of viewing these things in terms of a holographic model that you don't get from some of these other perspectives well there are two implications or two added insights one is that you know the the science that we all learned in high school science class does not allow us to understand these things the holographic idea is really the first sort of scientifically couched idea that says here's how these things might be possible but there's another I kind of think an even more profound implication of the holographic idea and that this gets back into this notion that bones says that if everything is a Continuum and infinitely interconnected all of our ideas all the words we use to describe the world are artificial or sort of just come out of our own belief systems and not and don't exist out there and that's something that's had a deep effect on my thinking because it means when I've had these experiences I don't jump as I said that appear to be Spirits I say this because I've had for example had a few years back had an encounter with the spirits of several wolves that appeared that I could see through their bodies I mean or several wolves appeared in my apartment I could see through them they were there for about 10 minutes and this this was an experience that I might easily go well these are ghosts these are power animals these are demons but I I hold my my judgment open I don't I don't know what they are but I know that these things are possible I think it's important not to jump to conclusions because we may miss the larger picture most people might think I'm going crazy uh well I don't anymore I mean I never seriously thought I was going crazy because I'm very emotionally healthy mentally healthy and these things have never have always been positive in my life have always assisted me and I've always been a good thing helped me survive and those people who don't know I there were many years when I didn't tell people I had these experiences and no one thought I was crazy and you know they might have had I told them the experiences but the rest of my life has always been you know I'm a very sort of ordinary person except for those things and I think you know that craziness is if you have an experience of an of a non-ordinary reality that's not evidence of craziness craziness is if you have some sort of pathological problem something that's that's destructive to your health or well-being and I've never had that but I think it might be a bit glossing over from what you've told me already Michael just to say that say your Poltergeist experiences were 100 positive uh well that's true because nothing I mean again we're putting our own intellectual pigeon holes over it I there were negative aspects of the Poltergeist could you would you mind telling the whole story sure um this the Poltergeist I always thought the Poltergeist started when I was five years old and it started raining gravel down on the roof of my family's home at night and at the time we didn't think this was paranormal no one knew what was going on we lived I grew up in Michigan we lived in a very rural area in the midst of the woods my father would go out with a shotgun because he thought someone must be doing it and he could never find any evidence that someone was doing it he shoot the gun off into the into the air and the morning he'd go up and sweep several shovelfuls of gravel off the roof and and then things became very definitely paranormal when this whatever this manifestation was went into the house it would one of its favorite things to do was to throw the vacuum cleaner around you didn't always see it most often you didn't my mother if she were vacuuming and turned the vacuum cleaner off and left it one part of the room and would leave the room you'd hear it clash and go back to the room and be in the opposite side of the room uh occasionally you would see things I'd uh saw in one occasion of glass all of a sudden just came swooping through the room from no apparent uh you know Source the windows were closed there was no one there who could have thrown it the Poltergeist was also fought of throwing strangely enough pieces of drift glass and broken beer bottles or pop bottles they find worn smooth on the beach and once in my New York apartment because the Poltergeist followed me wherever I moved until I was in my early 20s I saw actually saw one of these things materialized I was just sort of daydreaming looking up near the ceiling and all of a sudden out of nowhere this this strange little brown thing appeared and I as I looked at it came zooming down at me hit me in the chest dropped to the Florida was one of these pieces of glass and so these were um you know extraordinary things and and but at the same time I and my family became so accustomed to them I have two sisters that we'd be playing because another thing the Poltergeist would do was Stomp all over stomp up the stairs down the stairs to the room do your bang bang bang bang bang and if we were playing it got so if we heard something stop up the stairs and glanced over the stairs and there were nothing there we'd just go back to playing it was so mundane a part of our existence and um you said they did have negative aspects you know it wasn't all positive that's true because one of the things that I discovered and has caused me to believe that the Poltergeist was an unconscious psychic projection of mine is that it was always colored by my moods most of the time I was in a good mood and it was mischievous would do silly things like one morning I woke up with dried spaghetti noodles all over my chest and no explanation I lived alone and no unless a burglar broken boils some noodles you know and threw them on my chest I don't know where they came from and I have no history of sleepwalking or anything like that another uh instance it took all of my socks draped them over the plants in the in my house silly things like that but if I were in a bad mood if I were going through some sort of rough time in my life the Poltergeist became nasty and there were a few occasions not many were stigmata-like bites would appear in my hands a couple of times needles or metal objects that were halfway between nail and needle would appear out of nowhere to zoom into my flesh so this only happened twice and things like that so you could screw those as negative but on the other hand I view them as positive because I learned so much from them well I I think it's important to mention this because you know in a lot of the folklore these kinds of manifestations are associated with the Demonic and I think by using the lens of a holographic model you're able to see it in a different light that's true and it's important to note that and one of the things that I've learned from it is when these negative things were happening there were occasions even though I'd had lengthy experience of this Poltergeist that I'd start to think oh my gosh maybe I'm being demonically attacked when I believe that it started to manifest even more as a demonic attack but when I would sort of come to my senses and go no I know that this is I can see the emotion reason that this is is manifesting in this way and go okay I'm going to stop this I'm going to you know have a positive frame of mind all the negative stuff would stop I always had control but if I relinquished that control and allowed my beliefs to go into some interpretation go it's a demon it's of this it's that then it would get me and it was another instance uh where I when I slipped in my New York apartment where I was um playing piano at night • I had the lights off I was playing in the dark and I live on the ground floor and the piano is situated so that the back of the piano is toward a window and as I was sitting there playing away all of a sudden there was an intense burst of light in my face it was like a flash bulb went off right in my face and my first just sort of visceral reaction to it was oh my gosh a truck is driving it's come off the road and is driving through my window so I literally threw myself over the piano thinking that I'm about to be killed by this this truck or whatever and after I sort of regained my you know my senses and stood up I looked back at the window there was no sign of what had caused this light I thought well that is strange and I turned back around and as I looked in the room it was what looked like a luminous soap bubble about three feet in diameter hovering in the air and it sounds strange but it terrified me because people go What's So Scary About aluminous soap bubble but it was so unexpected and yet so real I immediately I started moving my eyes from side to side to see if it was an after image on my retina I started blinking to see if it would go away it was as real as the tables and the chairs man there was a distinct sort of feeling of Evil coming from it and I started to run out of the room and then I caught myself and I thought because I'm basically just an extremely curious person by

Nature. I thought if I run out of the room, I'm always going to wonder what this thing was and what would have happened had I stayed. So I really summoned my courage and I stopped and I addressed it. I said, "I want you to know you're just scared the daylights out of me, but I'm I want to know why you're here, what you are." And when I said this, this bubble, which is hovering in the air, backed up. And somehow I knew that the fact that it backed up, that it had wanted to scare me, and it had backed up.

Now, this bubble appearing had been, uh, presaged by a number of very negative Poltergeist phenomena. A couple of the bites that occur at that time in this. I didn't know what was going on. The bubble, after it was only there for maybe a minute or two, but it seemed like an eternity at the time. Then the bubble, uh, left the room, hit a door, and sort of burst in sparkles and was gone. And but distinctly negative was my, I mean, I knew it was a negative presence.

A couple of days later, a friend called me, and I had not told her about the experience or anything. And she said, "Michael, I have a letter that I think you should read." And it turned out, I had just moved to New York from Michigan. I'd attended Michigan State University, and there was a group of people there that were really only acquaintances of mine. They weren't that important in my life, but they were into black magic. And somehow they had fancied, which was totally their fantasy, not not mine, that I was some sort of magician and that they had, that I was attacking them. And so they were doing group meditations and casting spells to get me counter-magic, right? And I, I had not even thought of these people.

But what that taught me is that I realized that because I still think I was in, in part, feeding this phenomena with my own psychic energy, is that I was not shielding myself. Because what happened when I learned this, I, while I was going on, I was so interested, I allowed it to happen because I wanted to see where it was going. I wondered what the bubble was. I didn't say, "Okay, get out of my reality." But as soon as I found out they were, what they were doing, I said, "Okay, all of this stops now." And just through an act of will, he said, "This will not go this direction." And as soon as I, I put forth that act of will, all of these things, the, the negativity ceased, and the Poltergeist resumed its, its harmless aspect.

And what that taught me is that, you know, I'm sometimes asked, "Do you think people can cast spells or can exert an outward influence?" To you, and I think that our will is always, it's what our will determines. But you also have to be conscious. You have to sort of shield yourself. And I have learned that I have to believe, have developed a strong belief, that I'm protected, so that my unconscious doesn't believe that I'm not protected and allow these things to occur. And when you do that, you are protected.

So your sense is that these various events are taking place at another level of reality that's related to the holographic model? I, I do. I think that they're not just hallucinations. And I say that because I've had equally extraordinary experiences where there've been other people present seeing the same thing. But what's interesting is again, you know, it's the holographic model says there's no division between the brain, our thoughts, in the world out there. Is that they always have some sort of psychological correlation with what's going on in my life? I can look at them and I can go, "The reason this is negative is because these people were casting spells." And there have been event after event after event. Or the reason the Poltergeist is negative is because I'm going through a bad period emotionally. And I've, so I've discovered that they are psychological exteriorizations that become real.

And I say that because, as I said, I don't believe they're hallucinations because other people have witnessed them with me. And the only explanation in my mind is that our thoughts do project into reality on occasion, do bleed through from the subject to the objective. Now, I want to explore with you more carefully the nature of the Poltergeist entities themselves in these other realities. And I think a good way to approach that would be to step back for a minute and talk a little bit about what is life? What constitutes a living being?

Well, again, we're getting into this area of conceptual pigeonholes, putting over, you know, on the universe, right? And it's interesting, in another book of mine, I addressed this issue at some length, "Beyond the Quantum." Because if you try, if you think about it, how can you define life? You know, there's, every time anyone has tried to come up with a definition, well, life reproduces itself, it uses oxygen. Whatever your definition is, you can always find something that doesn't seem to be alive that fulfills those criteria. My sixth grade science class, my teacher gave a list of things that, that categories or qualities that she said, "This typifies a living thing." And it occurred to me that fire fulfilled all those qualities. And I said, "You know, excuse me, does that mean fire is alive?" She said, "Well, no, obviously not." And I said, "Well, how does this, you know, mesh with your definition?"

And this was addressed a few years back, um, in a book called "Life Beyond Earth" by a physicist named Gerald Feinberg and a biochemist named Robert Shapiro, where they try to come up with a definition of life. And in a strange kind of way, they arrived at a definition that, in my mind, says that everything is alive. They don't quite interpret it that way, but they said, "Life is the more ordered a phenomena is, the more that you can assume it's alive." But again, order, how do we recognize order? Order is something that we recognize with our heads. And in quantum physics, there's like, Bohr, for example, says that that electrons appear to be alive. And he's not alone. There are a number of physicists who think that every portion of the universe is live, is alive.

And I think I've come to believe that every small fragment of the universe possesses some life, that it is a manifestation of life, of of some kind of consciousness, not not a human consciousness, but some kind of consciousness. And you can't draw a distinct border between what is alive and what is not. I might just mention parenthetically that one of the best works I'm aware of in this regard is Arthur Young's book, "The Reflexive Universe," in which he discusses the amazing, uh, qualities of a photon, that that seem to exhibit. Right? Particles seem to make decisions in unique ways. You know, you can shoot an electron at a barrier. If you throw a pebble at a window, it, I, you know, it either hits the window and bounces off, or it hits the window and breaks through. You shoot an electron at a barrier, can do all kinds of things. It can hit, bounce off. It can stop just before the window, dematerialize on the other side. It can stop just before the window and reverse its direction. And the, these, you cannot take any electron and predict what it will do, just like you cannot take any human being and with absolute certainty predict what it will do. Which is, you know, there's a sort of uncertainty principle in life. And I think it's this quantum indeterminacy that, that, that everything possesses living, and what we formally call non-living.

So as these holographic patterns, these interference patterns, come together, they form like standing waves, in a sense. And these holographic standing waves can manifest in in different ways. I mean, your experiences are quite unusual. I doubt if many viewers will have the kinds of experiences that you have. And yet, I think they're very important for us all to know about because they, they represent things that are kind of on the fringes of our own experience, right? In different ways. And what you're suggesting is, is that there's a kind of, I, I don't know the right word, and of course, you've pointed out the problems with words, but a quasi life-like quality to these poltergeists, that it doesn't quite fit, you know, the old occult models, like, I don't know.

Well, no, they represent, Carl Jung said that our, our complexes, you know, things that the sort of belief systems or the agendas that manifest in our consciousness are quasi-independent, that they take on a life of their own. And yet, they're a projection of our consciousness. And not a projection, but a manifestation where consciousness. And to me, the Poltergeist was like a complex. It was like one of these semi-autonomous things, but it wasn't only inside my psyche any longer. It manifested, it exteriorized. And I think, you know, you look, there's so many phenomena like this that we try to interpret as objective. The UFO phenomena is a classic example where it just doesn't seem to fit a purely objective explanation. They, they're, you know, there are thousands and thousands of UFO experiences every year. Many of them take a very absurd form. And it just doesn't seem possible that we could be visited by thousands and thousands of extraterrestrials behaving so absurdly all the time. And yet, the evidence is very substantive that there's something going on. And I'm not the first. Many people have looked at this and said, "Gosh, this seems to be a psychological quality of these things, and yet they seem to be real."

And I believe I've coined the term "omni-jective." That the universe is all omni-jective. It's neither subjective nor objective. That that everything possesses qualities that we associate with both. And the UFO phenomena, if you look at it, it can almost, I believe, can be interpreted like a dream. That that their metaphors and symbols that it speaks in the language, what Erich Fromm called "The Forgotten Language," the language of the psyche, this symbolic language of the dreams. And in fact, all of the mystical experiences I've had, instead of looking for them and going, "This is an angel, this is a ghost, this is a spirit," I look at them and go, "This is real. And other people have seen it. But what is its psychological meaning? What is it meant to teach me? How is it a projection of my consciousness, my psyche, and perhaps the psyche of those who've witnessed it with me?"

Let's go into more detail and more depth about your own personal encounter with this Poltergeist, how you came to understand what it really was for you. Well, you know, I don't know how I came to understand. I always just sort of knew it was a projection of mine. I mean, when I was a very small child, I didn't, because you don't have the intellectual savvy of an adult. But as I grew older, it was just so obvious to me that it was such a direct reflection of my interior landscape, of my, what was going on in my psyche, that I, I automatically assumed it was. And it came as a shock to me when I started reading about Poltergeists that people didn't just accept that matter-of-factly, that of course it is, what are the standard explanations of this projection? But there's still people say, "Maybe it's a spirit, maybe it's this, maybe it's that." And so there was, I don't have a specific point in time where I went, "Aha, this is the event that teaches me." I always just kind of understood it.

When you developed some kind of a relationship with it as time went on? I did develop a relationship with it. And I guess, you know, the one thing that did help me understand it in those terms was an experiment conducted by the parapsychologist E.R.C. Owen, where he and a group of people got together and they decided to create, they, to hold seances. But instead of conjuring up a ghost, they decided to create a ghost. So they named him Philip. And to, to make sure that they were creating this ghost, what they did is they constructed an artificial history for Philip, but one that didn't, that contained historical inaccuracies. Like they said he was a, uh, lived in the Middle Ages, but the king at the time that, that he lived was not the king that actually lived in those times. It was a king that had died.

A fictional ghost? A fictional ghost, yes. And they held the seances. And there's, there's another interesting thing in this is that they start, they approached it first by being very mystical and very solemn and sitting around a table and holding a seance in that way. Nothing happened. And then they, then they read, uh, about the research performed by earlier, an early investigator that said the Victorian seances were always very boisterous. They drank, they laughed, they sang. So that's, they started holding seances where they laughed and they drank and they sang. And boom, Philip started to manifest, would start to answer through table wrappings. And it became clear that Philip was a projection of the group, in the sense that, like Philip, for example, enjoyed certain songs. And he's happened to enjoy certain songs that the group enjoys singing. However, if one member of the group wasn't there that night, Philip might drop one of his favorite songs and have no knowledge of it. So it seemed that that member was contributing that favorite song.

On the other hand, Philip was quasi-independent because he made up some things on his own that didn't, that no one was consciously adding to his history. One of the things they said is that he had left his wife and fallen in love with a barmaid. And Philip, through this table-wrapping communication, they said, "Oh, by the way, I never loved her. I just, I just, you know, went away with her, but I never loved her." And he came up with that. No member of the group had fabricated that aspect of Philip. And if you think about it, this is, this too is a quality of the psyche. I, I learned this once when I was, um, I used to have a problem where I would nervously pull out the hairs in my beard. And I thought, "Okay, I've got to stop this." And so just through an act of will, I, I, you know, went cold turkey on this habit, as one has to do with habits. And I was sitting and typing at my word processor one day, and all of a sudden, I realized that I was typing with one hand. And I thought, "Why am I typing with one hand?" I looked down, and my other hand was sneaking up to pull a beard hair out. I was, a part of my psyche was trying to fool myself and pull this out. So it became quasi-independent. That habit was part of me, but what was, I was a mess you created. And then it developed, you know, it develops its own agenda.

And let me speculate a little bit, because throughout this entire program, I've had this urge to pull something out of my eye. And I've been, I looked in the mirror earlier and I realized there are no hairs, there's nothing tickling me. I thought there was. And yet, I kept telling it like that. That could be an example of some kind of a holographic standing wave or, right? Well, for genetic field. And anyone who's meditated knows that, you know, when you try to quiet your mind, you're assailed by one thought after another. And they seem to assail you, not you bring them in. They have their own independence, their own agenda. And when I look at my interior landscape, every emotion, every desire, every feeling I have, I recognize is a part of me, but has its own inner impetus, is self-organizing, becomes semi-autonomous, and swarms in my head. And I, I really come to think of myself not as "I," but as "we." And, you know, that each of us is a, just a plethora of different consciousnesses, thousands, perhaps, and, you know, uncuttable consciousnesses, that our psyche is as rich with these entities, which are part of us, they're, they're not separate from us, but they also have their own agenda. But our psyche is rich with these things as, as the Amazon rainforest is rich with life forms.

One of the interesting points that you made in an earlier discussion is that many of these phenomena, although they're quite real and they have an autonomous, uh, reality after we ourselves have created them, but they might not necessarily be meaningful. Uh, they might be striking, in a sense, right? Lead nowhere? Right. Well, I think synchronicity is to fall in that category. They're, synchronicities are meaningful coincidences, things that seem to be just coincidence, but occasionally are incredibly meaningful. Sometimes they're not. I had a series of synchronicities, um, uh, where, uh, one morning I was doing push-ups and I had the TV on. There was a game show, and I wasn't consciously watching the game show. And all of a sudden, as I'm doing push-ups, I realized that I answered one of the questions without consciously focusing on what the game was about. And I said, "Who was Buffalo Bill?" And it was Jeopardy, and the game show, the question had been, you know, William Cody, Buffalo Bill's other name. And, I didn't think anything of it. And they, later that day, a friend called me up and he said, "You know, if anyone knows the answer to this question, maybe you do. But we're, John, we're having an argument here." And my friend's an actor. And he said, "Were John Barrymore's dying words, 'Aren't you the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?' to a stagehand?" That means he's collapsed. And I thought about it. I thought, "Well, there's Buffalo Bill." But it didn't really sink in too much because it was just the second time it happened.

Later, later that day, when the mail came, I got a Smithsonian Magazine and I opened it up. And the article I opened it up to was, "Buffalo Bill is Alive and He's Coming Back." And so there was, boom, boom, boom, Buffalo Bill, three times in a row. Now, occasionally I have synchronicities three times in a row or something like that that I look at and go, "Oh, this is what this is meant to teach me." But in this particular instance, I, I thought, "This is a kind of little holographic dust storm that's gathered that doesn't have cosmic significance." And I really sort of frown on people that every event in their life, they go, "This is meaningful. I've got it. What is God telling me?" Because the chair fell here. What? Sometimes they're meaningful, sometimes they have profound meaning, but sometimes they're just these little, little self-organized exteriorizations of the psyche that are spinning outside of yourself like a dust storm and don't necessarily have meaning. And I guess to make that distinction, to be able to discern between them, uh, comes from understanding or having a sensitivity to an appreciation for the holographic landscape around us.

Well, to understand how they can manifest, definitely. And equally understanding how, you know, the language of the psyche, which we don't do. You know, so we don't even pay much attention to our dreams. And yet, we have this enormous, you know, this enormous universe inside ourselves that's constantly giving us lessons and messages. And no, I, I interviewed, uh, this psychiatrist, Montague Allman, for this book. And he, he said something which I knew, but he articulated in a way that really sort of drove the meaning home for me. And he said that, you know, that he, he has lots of patients. He said, "It doesn't matter who the patient is in the waking state. He can have a man who's a total jerk, but in his dreams, there's a wisdom system that's way beyond him. That his dreams are constantly trying to teach him not to be a jerk, or not to be selfish, or not to be greedy, or whatever." I thought, "This is true." Our dreams have this, this wisdom. And yet, most human beings don't pay enough attention to dreams to even remember them on a regular basis. They, they let them in the, you know, exist in this foggy interior world and they don't access it. I think it's the Talmud that's where it says, "An uninterpreted dream is like a letter left unopened." And I believe that. I think we have to do that as well.

I'd like to push the boundaries even further now, Michael. And I, I know that you've had personally some UFO types of experiences, very much related to the sorts of things that Whitley Strieber reports. And, and I want to wonder if you wouldn't mind narrating for us what happened to you and how you've come to view these experiences. Yeah, I don't mind at all. And, and if they were actually started with something that doesn't seem to be a UFO experience, but when I was three years old, uh, I have a memory in my head, and I don't know where it began or where it ended, but it's absolutely vivid to this day. This woman, I call her a woman, but I don't know, it might just have been an androgynous being. It's a figure with long white hair, wearing a long white robe, taking me out of my bed or walking me through the woods. And I was terrified because it was dark and I didn't know who this person was. The only way that I could deal with it was to sort of tell myself, "This has got to be my mother," even though my mother is, does not fit the physical description of my mother. Uh, we got to the shore of a lake. And this, this entity said to me, "Are you afraid, Michael?" And I said, "Yes, I'm very afraid." It said, "Then hold your hand palm up, or toward the moon." I did that. And said, "Now close your hand very slowly." And as I did that, I felt a softness in my hand, a palpable softness, like when you hold your hand outside a car window and feel the wind, but there was no wind blowing through my hand. And this, this being said, "Do you feel that?" And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Then," or it said, or he said, "Then I want you to remember, Michael, whatever happened in your life, don't ever be afraid, because for you, the darkness is soft." And it was a very comforting message. And then a couple of years later, I, I said it, I told my mother about it, and she didn't quite know what, you know, a no-no being took you out or whatever. And, you know, again, when you're a child, you don't process these things intellectually. You just accept the world in a sort of magical way.

How old would you say you were? I think it was about three when, when this occurred. And when I was five, my father and a friend saw a UFO come down in the woods near where my, my family's house was. And they have, it was then obscured by the trees, but out of the trees came two figures. First, a man in a black business suit carrying an attaché case, which was completely absurd. And at the time, we did not know that this is a common motif in UFO lore, that in UFO experiences, they call the Men in Black. They, of course, they don't make sense of their extraterrestrials unless they're like, you know, extraterrestrial Amway salesmen or whatever. But, so they, they were just, you know, completely nonplussed by this experience. Then out of the woods came this figure with long white hair and a long white robe. And the man in the business suit vanished, walked off into the thicket and was gone. But the figure in the long, with the long white hair and the long white robe stopped in a cornfield and stood there. My father and his friend became very frightened. Grow back as well. My mother, myself, and my father's friend's wife were camping out less than a mile from where this had occurred. They came back and they got us in the car and they said this amazing thing happened. They told us a story, drove us up. And I, when I looked at this being, I thought, "Oh, it's her. It's like I always called the woman a white, it's the woman in white." But again, as a child, you don't necessarily even mention these things. I didn't say, "Oh, by the way, that's her," to my parents. My father wanted to go see this, this being, talk to it, and say, "What are you? Why are you here?" My mother said, "No, no, no." And, and finally, we watched it for about 10 minutes and finally drove away, not, not knowing quite what to do, since everyone was too afraid to approach it.

The next day, my father went back with a neighbor who taught astronomy at the local Grand Rapids Junior College. And they looked for the landing site of this thing that had come out, which looked like a green ball of light and came zooming out of the air. They couldn't find the landing site, but they did find the footprints of this being in this white robe. And they looked like little skis, they're pointed and very narrow, and they went back into the woods. They took photographs of the footprints, my father's hand next to him for size comparison. Unfortunately, the photographs have been misplaced, but there are lots of people had seen them at the time. And, that experience, after that occurred, is when the Poltergeist phenomena manifested in the house. And it's become, you know, now in UFO phenomena, the Poltergeist hauntings often follow UFO sightings. And this isn't further evidence UFOs aren't just a purely objective phenomena. They seem to blow some sort of psychic doorway open, and people, when strange things start happening. And with me, I believe it blew some sort of gasket open that allowed the psychokinetic essence or energy to come out. And, um, when I look at this and try to interpret it in terms of, as I say, extraterrestrials, it just doesn't make sense. I believe that, I don't quite know what it is, but I believe the universe has many, many levels of reality. I think UFOs are non-physical. Definitely think that we are not necessarily meant to interpret them at face value.

And when you say non-physical, are you implying that they're not part of this holographic reality either? They're a different channel on the holographic television set, a different channel than our physical universe. And, and I believe. And I think I think they're uncountable channels on the holographic TV. And probably as many civilizations and, and such a richness of life on those levels as there is on our own planet, on our own universe, probably. And that they're probably consciousnesses and civilizations that are advanced enough to bleed through. But maybe some of these things also, we don't, you know, there may be, they may be like just at the level of, of wildlife, you know, in their mentality, but on another level of reality. They may not be sophisticated, but they may have the ability to sort of manifest in a form that, that fools us. And actually, what I think is going on is that when you encounter something, there's a truly of another reality, you don't, you can't, your perceptions and trying to pull it out of this blur of energy and make it into a hologram, don't quite know, know how to put it into form. And so I think that the reason there are many psychological motifs in UFO experiences is because there's something going on, but the surface appearance is a product in the person's own psyche. In other words, a lot of what's going on in these various holographic realities are like ink blots, right? Right. They can be interpreted like dreams, as well. That they have psychological symbols in them. But they're also something real there, because UFOs can be tracked on radar, they leave circles, you know, on the ground, they leave traces of physical evidence. And so I think a reminder, there's a story, I don't know if it's apocryphal, I've never really been able to track it down. It's been attributed to Darwin, Magellan, but something to the sense that, that what I think, if you use Magellan, that when Magellan first went ashore in Tierra del Fuego, that the natives saw that he came ashore in robes, but he left his ship anchored out in the harbor. And, they said, "Well, how did you get here?" And he said, "In that ship." And they couldn't see the ship. Yes. Now, we certainly know that there's evidence of this. You know, there, there are tribes in the Gold Coast of Africa that can't see photographs or can't see movies. And that, there's sometimes times, you know, that there seems to be our cultural upbringing imprints in us, what we can perceive. That sometimes we literally can't perceive something because we don't have the vocabulary, the cultural and perceptual vocabulary to see it. I think UFOs fall into that category in a very extreme way, that they are so alien to our ordinary perception that our brain really pulls a deep psychic back, psychological baggage out of our, out of our psyches to put them to hammer them into some form. And when we look at them and read them at face value, like that, their abductions or whatever, I think that we're looking at our own unconscious interpretation of the phenomena. And that we have to go deeper. We have to see beyond our own psychological baggage to truly begin to recognize and understand what's going on.

Well, it would seem to me that it's true that we've been blinded by our, our culture. We're very much like, uh, the people in, as described in Plato's Cave, who can only see the shadows on the wall and not the light. But yet, I feel, feel that something's happening there. There is a movement in the culture. The very fact that you can take a rather respectable scientific concept like the holographic model of the brain and the holographic model in physics and in C, and that it can be, without a lot of stretching, used to incorporate many of these very things. And in premium, for one, acknowledges that as well, suggests that, right or wrong, the model is, is helping us to open our eyes to them. I think so. Yeah. It's interesting, there's a sort of a bit of a movement afoot to begin to look at these things, you know, because it's, it's kind of the story of the blind man and the elephant, where they go up, one touches the trunk, one touches the leg, and says, "Well, this animal's like a snake." "No, this animal's like a tree." Because they're not seeing the whole picture. And there are various, uh, researchers, for example, Ken Ring, that, who I mentioned earlier, the near-death experience researcher, who said, "Look, let's look at UFO experiences, let's look at shamanistic experiences, and let's look at near-death experiences, and look at their similarities. Maybe they're all portions of some proverbial elephant that we're missing." And I think he's right. I think that they're all experiences with the other channels on the holographic TV set. And when we interpret them at face value, their extraterrestrials come here to abduct us and perform genetic research, whatever, we're, we're being like the blind man and the elephant, and we've got to look at the larger picture.

Yeah. Now, have you, in your adult life, had further UFO experiences as a follow-up? Well, I have had them as an adult. I had a period when I was in college where I was driving with a friend, and, uh, we saw a UFO and got out of our car. We were going from, uh, East Lansing, Michigan, to Saugatuck, which I believe was something like a two-hour drive, I'm not quite sure. But we knew how long the drive was supposed to take. We got out of our car to watch this UFO and we watched it for what we thought was about five minutes. And we made no other stops. And when we arrived, uh, at our destination, all of our friends said, "Where have you been? You're hours late." And this was the first time that we looked at our watches and realized that we had this proverbial missing time, that we lost time. Now, I've had people try to hypnotize me, and unfortunately, I, I have not gone under to be able to access what occurred in that missing time. But I, I believe that, you know, something, you know, I had some encounter with this, uh, non-ordinary reality that we're in, in this particular instance, labeling UFO, but as I say, is just the tip of the iceberg. If something vested, yeah.

Now, you mentioned the pieces of the puzzle earlier, and one piece that we haven't touched on, I'd like to bring in now, is relates to past lives. You've written a book, "Past Lives," on this very topic. Do you see it relating? Oh, I do, very much so. I think, I think we, human beings, know so little about the universe. And I had another personal experience that I had was when I was a very small child. I remembered my past lives, fragments of them. I, I did not know the word reincarnation. I was very confused. But the, the memories in my, my realization that I lived before were so vivid that I wouldn't call my parents, "Mom and Dad." I didn't understand why these two kindly people were saying they were my parents, because I knew I'd had other parents. I thought, "Where am I? Why am I here?" And I remembered different periods of history that I, again, I didn't know what periods they were. It was a visual memory, and it was very confusing for me. And I would always manifest all these strange habits. I drank incredibly strong black tea, like at the age of six, I was brewing myself tea whenever I could get away with it without my parents finding out. I sat cross-legged on the floor. I would never sit in furniture. It took, took years to train me to sit in chairs. And lots of things. I remembered various ways that I died. I would ask my mother, I say, "Would you remember when I drowned?" "Well, how, why did I drown?" She didn't know what I was talking about. Whether they grew older and learned about the concept of reincarnation, I realized that I had all these experiences. I want to very quickly say, I don't remember being any Pharaoh, you know, anyone famous, anything like that. I think there's, unfortunately, there's a lot of nonsense associated with reincarnation. And such is the idea, "Why does everybody think they were Cleopatra?" Right? But I don't think, I think people, you know, if you have eight people who think they're Cleopatra, you don't have evidence of reincarnation, but of something a bit more frivolous. And, um, but the research doesn't show that everybody thinks they were somebody. No, no, quite the contrary. There's a past life, uh, researcher, psychologist named Helen Wambach, who's deceased now, but she regressed large groups of people, hundreds, and sent them back to various past lives. And what you would do is you would pick a time period, for example, the 1850s, 60s, and say, "What were you alive then? And if so, where were you?" Figuring that if people were fantasizing, even on an unconscious level, that we're able to associate that time period with the Civil War. And she would come up with a lot of Civil War past lives. She didn't. And, in fact, in all these literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of past lives, she had no one who remembered being anyone famous. She also had things that seemed to very much mesh with historical reality. Only 10% of the past lives that her subjects had lived were lived as aristocratic lives or in lives of luxury. The other 90% were grueling, as peasants, as laborers, you know, eking out, you know, hunter-gatherers, that sort of thing. And, uh, some very interesting historical, uh, pieces of information came out, like she'd started to discover that if at various time periods, people described forks as having none. Like at one point, people said forks had two prongs, then they had three, then they had four. And this is a very obscure historical fact that that is the, the progression of the fork. So there were things like that. But as I say, no, no famous people. And it did seem to, to reflect historical reality, not fantasy, because who would fantasize being a peasant or a laborer? You know.

We've talked about past lives, we've talked about Poltergeists, we've talked about UFOs, and we've talked about the holographic model in science. How do you integrate things? Well, I, I think they're all part of this, the same reality that we live in, a, a spiritual universe. That I, I very much believe that our soul lives many, many lives and goes through these things. And I think at this point in our development, that we've been, that we have manifested in the physical because we don't have a consciousness that's developed enough to deal with reality with its full grandeur and plasticity. That for us, it would be very frightening if there weren't solid rules, if everything started to slip and slide. But I think as your soul goes along, it starts to learn to deal with more than this reality, with other levels on the holographic television set. And when you start to open those doorways, that's when reality, the plasticity of reality, starts to seep in. But then you go through a sort of shamanistic rite of passage, because you've got to go through, most people go, put an interpretation on it, they go, "Oh, this is an angel, or this is, you know, a demon, or a UFO abduction." And if you do that, you're missing the basic lesson of shamanism, which is that everything that you experience in the non-ordinary reality of the shaman has psychological meaning for you. That that you were entering a level of reality that responds so directly to your thoughts, that your every thought helps what manifest. And in that instance, you can't ask, "What is there?" but "Why if I created what is there?" And I think that's the lesson that our souls are learning as we evolve.

In other words, one might say that these various so-called paranormal experiences are what my friend and mentor Arthur Young would call, uh, wow kinds of experiences. They serve another purpose, and it's not an obvious, uh, purpose necessarily, but perhaps ultimately, it's to push us somehow into a higher state of consciousness, to, to force us to try and, and understand the deeper meaning. I, and I agree with that. And it's, they're a natural, uh, manifestation of the evolution of consciousness. As your soul evolves, you start to open up the plastic levels of reality, and these things start to enter. And that in itself teaches you, you know, that it may not necessarily be that the universe is saying, "Here, I'm giving you this to teach you," but you are manifesting what you have to learn about yourself. And just as we, you know, we manifest moods and beliefs that we have to learn about if we're to deal with them properly, these are things that manifest at a very, in a very profound and paranormal way. But our part, our still Rorschach, as you said, our ink blots of who and what we are as souls.

You speak in your book, "The Holographic Universe," of higher states of consciousness, or, you know, the evolutionary force of all of this. I wonder if we can go into that, you know. Well, I think, as I said, I think that we are evolving as consciousnesses, as souls. And I think that eventually, we, we, we can move on to other levels of reality, non-physical levels. There are other channels, what I've been calling other channels on the cosmic TV set, the holographic TV set. And I think that to deal with those channels, that that we are, we're really just infants. The human race, you know, we tend to think of ourselves as very advanced, but we really, like one of the, uh, metaphors that I use is, we're like babysitting at the control panel of a jumbo jet. And a soul is is infinite and has infant capability. But for us to learn how to access that, those things, we, we are at the moment babies at the control panel, just flipping switches and occasionally causing profound things to trip into our reality, but not quite understanding them, and certainly not controlling them. Not seeing that the evidence, the real evidence, for example, of a synchronicity is that our psyche does have reverberations in in the world out there. And if that's the case, you know, how do we begin to really look at how to, to manifest things, you know, not just simple coincidences, but positive things in our life, and control our thoughts enough that we don't manifest bugaboos and demons and things like that? Because we are like the sorcerer's apprentice. We have to learn to deal with this ability. And that's why it opens up slowly, because before you can deal with it, you don't want those gateways blown open.

And it would seem, I think, that many of the great mystics and and spiritual teachers have offered, uh, road maps or or guidelines for entering into these higher states that allow them to integrate all of these these phenomena without getting swept away or getting romantic about them, but to see them in a kind of larger perspective. Yeah, I think you're right. And it's interesting to me that the one common thread that goes through all these road maps is that these other levels of reality are reached through the inner universe, through the head, you know, by going into that inner universe. That that's where this, the vastness of the true universe exists. And in our culture, we think that what's inside our head is less real than what's out there. I believe that what's inside our head is more real than the consensus reality. We just haven't accessed the level that shows us how profound and magical that that interior reality is. Most of us. Mystics have. And there's even a sense, if we push it, uh, that the very notion of what's inside our head, that we would even think in those terms, is is a function of maybe that we're caught in what the Hindus call Maya, the illusion that's created by by the holograph. We, we see ourselves as the holographic projections rather than as the source of those projections. Right. Well, I, in "The Holographic Universe," I say that we're children that have not yet learned to color out without coloring books. We can't just freestyle draw. And that's why we're locked in this apparently solid, substantive reality. Because for most of us, our consciousness is at a point where if we were thrust into a level of reality where we could instantly manifest as real anything that we thought about, we don't control our thoughts and our emotions enough to manifest only good things. We'd start to worry about, you know, something and manifest that. And so for most of us, to access those levels of reality would be kind of like being on a very bad LSD trip. And that's why we're growing. And, but at a certain point, we won't need the comforting borders and and boundaries of Maya, of this physical universe. At a certain point, we'll learn how to move beyond.

Well, and that sounds like is something of the story that you went through in coming to terms with the Poltergeist experience. Yeah. In all of my experiences, I mean, every one of them has taught me, as I say, not only about the universe, but more importantly, about myself. And, what, you know, what I have to deal with. Because I think the most spiritual, uh, thing a person can do is, is, you know, sometimes people say to me, "Gosh, I wish I had your experiences. What can I do? Can I meditate? Can I say a mantra?" And sometimes the best answer is to see a therapist, deal with your own baggage, because that's, that's what you have to deal with first. You know, I learned this in, I did it on, when I was on book tour, I, I did a radio interview, a New Age radio interview in San Francisco, where, uh, the man who was was doing the interview was a substitute host, and he didn't know that we had confirmed the interview. So he was sitting as the air time was approaching, sweating bullets, thinking, "I might not be there." When I arrived, he just bit my head off, really screamed at me and said, "How, how dare you not confirm?" And we had confirmed. He didn't know that. And he said, "Get in here." And so I went into the control room. And he sat down. The light went on. And he leaned to the tour of the mic and he said, "Hello." And I thought, "This is just very wrong. You know, this is not, you know, this, we, you cannot be a smiling spiritual person if you've got all this undoubted baggage." And that's, that is the most spiritual thing that we can do is to learn to deal with the here and now. If you're an insecure person, you deal with your insecurity. You don't try to move objects with your head, you know, with psychokinetically. And those are the things because you, if you don't deal with those, you're not going to be in a very pleasant situation. That outer reality, that outer, that in that holographic reality, it's not going to be pleasant for you until you have this inner peace and health in your own psyche.

Well, you know, what you're suggesting here is something, uh, I think more profound than just a simple, uh, platitude or a moral truth. What

I think if if I can read into what you're saying, it has implications for science. It seems that for the scientific community to be able to come to terms with the many things that we've been talking about and to understand the full realization of, uh, possible through the holographic model and other comparable models that are being developed now, it's going to require a level of personal development on the part of those scientists. Very much though, just won't be able to get it. I mean, I'm constantly astounded to know reading about some of the the individuals, the men who work in the atomic bomb, and they're asked, you know, well, didn't you ever think of the implications? They go, frankly, no. That's, you know, why, you know, what what has happened to us that we can develop something that that a brilliant mind can develop an atomic bomb without thinking of the implications? And that's because we don't look at the larger picture. They were just, they had their nose to the grind so so to speak. They were so interested in the physics of it, they didn't think of what the implications were. And clearly, our world is in desperate straits because we've done this over and over again. We've gone off in one direction or another with just one value parameter, you know, without, you know, like, well, this will help us get energy, but it might destroy the ozone layer or whatever. You know, we don't put these spiritual values or deal, do you become conscious beings before we start wielding these things? And and that's, you know, again, that's why we seem to be like infants sitting at the control panel of a double jet. We've got to learn about what's inside to be able to control this control panel before we start flitching. And that can switch. It isn't just immoralism. It seems to be, uh, directly implied by the notion of a seamless universe that we can't separate our personal growth, our our moral growth from our understanding of the world around us. We've reached that barrier. Well, Bohm says that we have to understand that the universe is an unbroken hole and that when we don't, when we fragment the universe, we are leading to our own destruction. You know, when you look at, for example, poverty without looking at education, and he applies it to sociological things like this, that you have to, and we've learned this in the ecosystem, you know, ecologically, you can't say we can do this and it won't affect that. Everything is infinitely interconnected on every level and every dynamical level of reality, and we have to look at the larger picture at the at the infinite interconnection without focusing in on a fragment of this unbroken wholeness.

And Michael, I wonder, um, we've got about five minutes left. If you could kind of synthesize what we've been saying and also talk about what is an extra frontier for you and what works. I really well, what I'd like to do next is I'm working on a book that is the practical application of this holographic idea, you know, and all of its various phases, like talking about the placebo effect. And I mentioned the study where thirty percent of people taking placebo of a new chemotherapy lost their hair because they were told that they might be taking a toxic drug. We've got to understand that we have this, I call it the infinite self inside us. It has enormous capability, but our conscious mind feeds it all kinds of things unwittingly and gives it all kinds of of mistaken directions. You know, for example, I live in New York City, and a lot of people say, well, don't you think the air is killing you? Well, I look at that placebo study, know that these people just that sentence, you know, this drug may cause you to lose your hair, cause them to lose their hair when they weren't even taking the drug. That's the power of our infant self. We can cut, we can cause ourselves to lose our own hair. We can cause ourselves to respond and incredibly negative or incredibly positive ways, just by the model of reality we hold inside our head. So one has to be very careful. Like I, when people ask me that about air pollution, I go, well, if I believed I were dying, I know that my body would respond in kind. And I want to write a book that really deals with all these things in all kinds of levels, saying here are the practical applications. Outweighs it. You don't have to deal with the very sort of heady space-time aspects of these things. Here's the way these things can impact in your everyday life, and that you've got to start looking at, you know, the The wonder of these things, but bring them down to the to the earthly level, so to speak.

I'm kind of kind of puzzled by that because you use the term the infinite self, and it almost seems to me there's a little catch in there. Like if you believe you're going to die from air pollution, or now we have all these messages on cigarettes and on alcohol, you know, drink this and you'll get birth defects, right, or other problems. And we think we're doing a good thing. And and it suggests that we might want to re-examine some of that. But if we think in terms of the infant itself, maybe that's maybe it's okay to learn the hard way. Well, it's it's interesting, and I don't know. It's a very, very delicate issue because I'm, for example, I'm not saying throughout nutritional knowledge, but I now know that like when I, I try to eat a healthy diet, but if I eat a candy bar, I no longer tell myself this is killing me. I bless everything that goes into my body and I say this will only make me better, even though I sort of another part of me knows that I don't want to eat nothing but candy bars. But I tell myself that everything that happens to me is as if is affecting me in a positive way, not a negative way, because I know that the value value of this of of doing this. And the analogy that I use there's a the Anthropologist Gregory Basin was a New Guinea where they have these one of the use for a currency, these huge stone coins. And so whenever a major financial transaction would take place, I'd have to move with one of these amazingly heavy stone clients from one community to another. During one of these events, one of these stone coins sank to the bottom of the ocean. And the fellow was shipping it to another fellow said, well, everyone knows where it is. It's there down at the bottom of the ocean. You it belongs to you now. No one's going to get it. The guy thought about it. He said, okay, it's my stone coin now. And when he made a financial transaction, the necessity is Shifting moving the stone coin instead of moving. And he said, well, now it belongs to you. Everyone knows it's down there at the bottom of the ocean. And I think that's what we've got to do with belief systems. They they continue to use the same mode of currency, but without carrying the weight of the stone coin. We've got to use our nutritional knowledge without really affecting and impacting the infant itself. We've got to carry the stone coin around without the weight.

Yeah, that's that's a very nice analogy. And, uh, also by way of closing, I want to just mention what you said a moment ago that you always bless your food because it it seems that that represents an appreciation for for the larger, one might say, holographic dimension or spiritual dimension of who we are and what our food is. Well, mystics say that everything is an expression of God, and nothing that is an expression of God can hurt you. And I think that's the ultimate. That's it. We have to look at everything as so interconnected that we can only look at the positive aspects, even though a part of us may sort of implicitly recognize negative aspects, but we can't put a charge on them because that activates our own belief systems, the placebo effect, a whole range of things that start to create the hologram in that way. Michael Talbot, that's a wonderful note to close on. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you.