Michael Talbot Quotes
Best 55 Quotes by Michael Talbot – Page 1 of 2
“The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.
Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.”
Mysticism and the New Physics Quotes
“We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.”
The Delicate Dependency Quotes
“How disorienting and isolating immortality must be, and how strong he must be to weather it.”
“I told you, knowledge is our Holy Grail, and I daresay the wisdom possessed by the vampire would boggle your imagination.
You see, we don't have political allegiances to worry about, or religion, or differing mores. We all work together for one purpose: to further our achievements and our learning.”
“It is a sad truth, but it is a truth, indeed, that the knowledge of the human species far surpasses their wisdom.”
“We are lucidly aware that achieving through mere physical force establishes the rules of a game from which there is no escape.
When one grants oneself the moral justification to use force, one cannot logically deny it in one's enemies, for all moralities are relative.
The dissimilarity between different human cultures alone suggests that one cannot establish universal goods and evils.”
“We're still in the Dark Ages. The scared and the superstitious savage still lurks behind the mask of civilization and he will remain there for untold generations to come.”
The Holographic Universe Quotes
“A typical out-of-body experience event usually occurs spontaneously and occurs more often during sleep, meditation, anesthesia, illness, and traumatic pain.
In this case, the person suddenly feels that his mind has been separated from his body. He often finds himself floating in the air above his body, realizing that he can go to other places or fly.”
“Although Jung's concept of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current understanding of the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its existence.
The interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic model, however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected.
Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or as Bohm puts it, 'Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.'
If each of us has access to the unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all walking encyclopedias?
Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes it is because we are only able to tap into information in the implicate order that is directly relevant to our memories.
Anderson calls this selective process personal resonance and likens it to the fact that a vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or set up a vibration in) another tuning fork only if the second tuning fork possesses a similar structure, shape, and size.
Due to personal resonance, relatively few of the almost infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate holographic structure of the universe are available to an individual's personal consciousness, says Anderson.
Thus, when enlightened persons glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a context similar to that in which Einstein studied physics.”
“And so we have come full circle, from the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective reality — the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars — to the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its warp and weft the innermost processes of consciousness.
Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe. In the next chapter we will explore how this connectivity, as well as other aspects of the holographic idea, affect our current understanding of health.”
“As Bohm delved more deeply into the matter he realized there were also different degrees of order. Some things were much more ordered than other things, and this implied that there was, perhaps, no end to the hierarchies of order that existed in the universe.
From this it occurred to Bohm that maybe things that we perceive as disordered aren't disordered at all. Perhaps their order is of such an 'indefinitely high degree' that they only appear to us as random (interestingly, mathematicians are unable to prove randomness, and although some sequences of numbers are categorized as random, these are only educated guesses).”
“As soon as Bohm began to reflect on the hologram he saw that it too provided a new way of understanding order. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disordered to the naked eye.
Both possess orders that are hidden or enfolded in much the same way that the order in a plasma is enfolded in the seemingly random behavior of each of its electrons. But this was not the only insight the hologram provided.
The more Bohm thought about it the more convinced he became that the universe actually employed holographic principles in its operations, was itself a kind of giant, flouring hologram, and this realization allowed him to crystallize all of his various insights into a sweeping and cohesive whole.
He published his first papers on his holographic view of the universe in the early 1970s, and in 1980 he presented a mature distillation of his thoughts in a book entitled Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
In it he did more than just link his myriad ideas together. He transfigured them into a new way of looking at reality that was as breathtaking as it was radical.”
“At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability.
For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain.
In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability.
In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film.
If a second object, similar but not identical to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film.
The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear.
By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.
A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years.
In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently.
An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same.
The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry.”
“Because all such things are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer is the observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results, the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory.
In fact, Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order.
Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things.
As Bohm puts it, "The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with the electron."
Similarly, he believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe.
Even a rock is in some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in all of matter, but in 'energy', 'space', 'time', 'the fabric of the entire universe' and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and mistakenly view as separate things.
The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole.
This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time.
Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake's famous poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.”
“Because the term hologram usually refers to an image that is static and does not convey the dynamic and ever active nature of the incalculable enfoldings and unfoldings that moment by moment create our universe, Bohm prefers to describe the universe not as a hologram, but as a 'holomovement'.
The existence of a deeper and holographically organized order also explains why reality becomes nonlocal at the subquantum level. As we have seen, when something is organized holographically, all semblance of location breaks down.
Saying that every part of a piece of holographic film contains all the information possessed by the whole is really just another way of saying that the information is distributed nonlocally.
Hence, if the universe is organized according to holographic principles, it, too, would be expected to have nonlocal properties.”
“Bohm and Aharonov found that under the right circumstances an electron is able to 'feel' the presence of a magnetic field that is in a region where there is zero probability of finding the electron.
This phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when the two men first published their discovery, many physicists did not believe such an effect was possible.
Even today there is enough residual skepticism that, despite confirmation of the effect in numerous experiments, occasionally papers still appear arguing that it doesn't exist.”
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“Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.”
“Bohm believes an electron is not one thing but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space.
When an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron's ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerine, at that particular location.
When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.”
“Bohm believes the same is true at our own level of existence. Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.
The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small 'pattern of excitation' in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean.
"This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation," states Bohm.
In other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable.
More than that, it is not even a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things.
This infinite sea of energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order. Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix, to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies.
And even this is not all it may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to believe the implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed of orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development.”
“Considered together, Bohm and Pribram's theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world:
Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond both space and time: The brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.”
“Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms.
Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns.
Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics — the same mathematics holography employed — to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms.
The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct.
Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses.
It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists.
Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies.
Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis.
Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre.”
“During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking.
One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole.
This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent 'things', but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality.
It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such 'electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people'.
Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine."
An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist.
All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property 'nonlocality'.
The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light.
To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side.
When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different.
But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on.
If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case.
No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays. 8).”
“For example, at a recent conference on psychoneuroimmunology — a new science that studies the way the mind (psycho), the nervous system (neuro), and the immune system (immunology) interact — Candace Pert, chief of brain biochemistry at the National Institute of Mental Health, announced that immune cells have neuropeptide receptors.
Neuropeptides are molecules the brain uses to communicate, the brain's telegrams, if you will. There was a time when it was believed that neuropeptides could only be found in the brain.
But the existence of receptors (telegram receivers) on the cells in our immune system implies that the immune system is not separate from but is an extension of the brain. Neuropeptides have also been found in various other parts of the body, leading Pert to admit that she can no longer tell where the brain leaves off and the body begins.”
“Grosso, who traveled to Italy to study Padre Pio's stigmata firsthand, states, "One of the categories in my attempt to analyze Padre Pio is to say that he had an ability to symbolically transform physical reality.
In other words, the level of consciousness he was operating at enabled him to transform physical reality in the light of certain symbolic ideas. For example, he identified with the wounds of the crucifixion and his body became permeable to those psychic symbols, gradually assuming their form."
So it appears that through the use of images, the brain can tell the body what to do, including telling it to make more images. Images making images. Two mirrors reflecting each other infinitely. Such is the nature of the mind/body relationship in a holographic universe.”
“He believes the relationship between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves.
A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a radar wave pushes a ship. Rather, it provides the electron with information about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own.
In other words, Bohm believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity, a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, structureless point.
The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all subatomic particles, indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only of consciousness but of all matter. It is this intrinsic commonality, says Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK.
He states, "On this basis, psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were focused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding the basic processes of the material systems in which this psychokinesis was to be brought about."
It is important to note that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is, a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics.
Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal 'resonance of meanings', or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle of polarization.
For technical reasons Bohm believes mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of 'super' nonlocality, would offer such an explanation.”
“Holography also explains how our brains can store so many memories in so little space. The brilliant Hungarian-born physicist and mathematician John von Neumann once calculated that over the course of the average human lifetime, the brain stores something on the order of 2. 8 x 1020 (280, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) bits of information.
This is a staggering amount of information, and brain researchers have long struggled to come up with a mechanism that explains such a vast capability. Interestingly, holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage.
By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams.
By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in fifty Bibles!”
“If a person has the power to create disease, this is also an indication that he has the power to heal.”
“If our universe is only a pale shadow of a deeper order, what else lies hidden, enfolded in the warp and weft of our reality? Bohm has a suggestion.
According to our current understanding of physics, every region of space is awash with different kinds of fields composed of waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least some energy.
When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe!
Some physicists refuse to take this calculation seriously and believe it must somehow be in error. Bohm thinks this infinite ocean of energy does exist and tells us at least a little about the vast and hidden nature of the implicate order.
He feels most physicists ignore the existence of this enormous ocean of energy because, like fish who are unaware of the water in which they swim, they have been taught to focus primarily on objects embedded in the ocean, on matter.”
“If we can be lucky enough to cut through our disbeliefs and tap into the healing power within, we can cause tumors to melt away overnight.”
“In 1947 Bohm accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University, an indication of how highly he was regarded, and there he extended his Berkeley research to the study of electrons in metals. Once again he found that the seemingly haphazard movements of individual electrons managed to produce highly organized overall effects.
Like the plasmas he had studied at Berkeley, these were no longer situations involving two particles, each behaving as if it knew what the other was doing, but entire oceans of particles, each behaving as if it knew what untold trillions of others were doing. Bohm called such collective movements of electrons plasmons, and their discovery established his reputation as a physicist.”
“In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution.
They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos.
More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information.
In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from 'higher planes of consciousness', and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality.
In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings.
Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right.
It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind.
"After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out", says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav.
To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.”
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