The Greater One's Knowledge, The Greater One's Ignorance
I write for those who tolerate a temporary state of ambiguity, who can take change easily, unafraid of handling wild ideas. Those who cannot will drop out. Few scientists will read to the end.
This is the result of some living room discussions that I had with friends over a period of time. They became more and more elaborate as topics were added to the original discussions. Eventually, my friends felt that presenting these ideas to a broader audience would be in order. Finally, I gave in to the well-intentioned nagging of my friends and put down some of these ideas on paper.
As I sat down to write, I wondered whether it was the right time to do so. The accumulation of knowledge is a continuous process, and it is difficult to say at what point one should say: "Stop here and write down whatever information has accumulated up until now.” I have decided to start writing at my present level of ignorance simply because the circumstances forced me to do so. It is certain that I could describe many things better and add many new ideas if I were to start this book two or three years from now. However, I would still face the same situation because one’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. For example, when one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five or ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does the accumulated information. The more one knows, therefore, the greater his level of ignorance. This effect does seem to justify my decision to publish this information now.
Therefore, I do not claim that the information contained here is the final truth, but I hope that it will stimulate more thinking and speculation by future scientists and interested laymen.
Much of this information has come through intuitive insight, which is no justification, of course, for omitting a rational support for this material. When we come to the description of the “shape” of the universe and the process of its creation, however, a rational support becomes tenuous since we are dealing with material that cannot be fully supported yet by scientific facts. Here the principal guide for judging the material presented is one’s intuition or subjective experience.
This is designed for people whose imagination has not been stifled by the standard educational process. It is written for people who can still be awed by the way ants build their burrows, by the cold elegance of a snake, or the beauty of a flower. I am writing for people who can tolerate a temporary state of ambiguity, for those who can take change easily and are not afraid of handling wild ideas. Those who cannot tolerate change will drop out very quickly. Few scientists will read to the end. But I do hope that it will stimulate the thinking processes and implant some ideas into the minds of future scientists, those who will be at their peaks about the end of this century.
I am attempting to build a model of the universe that will satisfy the need for a comprehensive picture of “what our existence is all about.” In other words, a holistic model that encompasses not only the physical, observable universe that is our immediate environment and the distant universe observed by our astronomers but also other “realities” as well. Normally, we do not consider the emotional, mental, and intuitive components of our beings as “realities." I will try to persuade you that they are. The phenomena that we call “unexplained,” like psychokineses (the moving of an object with the power of the mind), telepathy, out-of-body phenomena, clairvoyance, etc., can all be explained once we know the general underlying principles governing them.
Recently, there has been a great deal of controversy concerning these subjects. The majority of laymen and most scientists do not presently believe in the existence of such phenomena. Rather than getting ourselves involved in the controversy over the possibilities of telepathy, or whether one can function out of this body or not, I will try to demonstrate the underlying mechanisms and explain how these things might work. It will be left to the reader to decide whether the explanations I am suggesting make sense or not.
First, I suggest that the general underlying principle in all the phenomena mentioned above is an altered state of consciousness. These altered states allow us to function in realities that are normally not available to us. By “normally” I mean our usual waking state of consciousness or realities that are available to the person who can so regulate himself. I shall try to fit these realities into an orderly spectrum.
When taken together, all these realities form a large hologram of interacting fields in my model. Most of us see the universe through a tiny window, which allows us to see just a single color, or reality, out of the endless spectrum of realities. Viewing our universe through this tiny window forces us to see the world in a sequential form, that is, as events that follow each other in time. This is not necessarily so.
The concept of a “model," as I am using it here, generally implies a theoretical construct that fits as many of the known facts as one has available into a neat, elegant, and compact package. A good model will also allow the prediction of the behavior of elements or components of this structure. This is a good test for the validity of the model. Also, it is nice to have a model that does not violate any presently accepted physical laws, so as not to step on anyone’s toes or cause any hassles. I believe that the model I am introducing complies with these requirements, although it comes very close to the edge of present knowledge. But then, there is nothing wrong with trying to nudge that edge a tiny bit further. But a model is a model only and not the absolute truth; therefore, it is subject to change as new information appears on the horizon. When one model does not suffice to account for all the phenomena, a new one will have to be built.
The theory of relativity emphasizes the notion that no matter what we observe, we always do so relative to a frame of reference that may differ from someone else’s, that we must compare our frames of reference in order to get meaningful measurements and results about the events we observe.
The quantum theory asserts that there is no way one can measure some sets of things, like momentum and position, together very accurately; it suggests (at least in one widespread interpretation) that this is so because the consciousness of the experimenter interacts with the experiment itself. Therefore, it becomes possible that the attitude of the experimenter must also influence the outcome of any particular experiment. Now this is serious business, for unless we are able to account for and describe what consciousness is, it will always put an experiment in doubt. So the problem is: What is consciousness?
If you leaf through you will see a lot of diagrams, and you may have the impression that this is technical or even scientific. Well, don’t worry about that. I myself am a fairly stupid fellow who could not learn any mathematics at all. In fact, my brush with academia was a rather short one: I was expelled from the kindergarten at the age of four for some alleged subversive activities and have never managed to resume normal studies since, not to mention graduating from anyplace. So my mind has remained blank and unspoiled by higher learning.
In order for us to develop a common language, I have to utilize some elementary concepts in science such as the behavior of sound and of light waves, and finally, a hologram. I have tried to make the description of this behavior as palatable as possible and as short as possible. I have to convey to you how Nature works by simple examples that will suffice perfectly to handle the final concepts. I suggest, therefore, that you bear with me for the first four chapters. Beyond that it’s all downhill and fun.
Things become pretty outrageous because I rush into places where even angels fear to tread (I consider angels to be a fairly timid, unenterprising bunch). One of the points is to show that when information about subjects like poltergeist phenomena, psychokinesis, ESP, ghosts, telepathy, psychic healing, spontaneous mystical experiences, etc., is organized into a reasonable order, we find that these phenomena are a manifestation of “consciousness” on increasingly higher levels. I will, for example, handle reincarnation as a matter of fact, completely disregarding the great controversy that rages over the subject. There are two reasons for this: first, the simple fact that when one puts himself into the proper level of consciousness, one may obtain this information first hand; second, we know that energy cannot be lost within a closed system. The main characteristic of the phenomenon of life is that it counteracts the general tendency of things to “run down." That is, a system containing a high degree of order will tend to run down toward a state of disorder while dissipating the availability of energy (increase in entropy).
Let us take the human body as an example. In order to keep ourselves alive, we have to eat. But what do we eat? We eat either animal, vegetable, or mineral products. But where do these come from? The vegetables or grasses take suitable minerals from the soil of our planet, put order into them, and organize them into molecules that are used to build live cells of the plant. Some of these cells are digestible by our digestive system, and some are not. We and other plant-eating animals eat the plant material and organize it into a more complex molecule - a protein found in meat. Man and other predators have the choice of eating directly the protein built up by the plant-eating animals.
The DNA of our chromosomes, which contain the information required to build extra copies of our bodies, are extremely stable substances. Very rarely do we find gross errors within that system. That is, we encounter few people who have two noses, three legs, etc. Our physical properties are well guarded within our chromosomes, down to the very finest detail, and a very high degree of order and stability is maintained there. This shows how life organizes random minerals into a very stable structure and maintains this order for a long period of time. (This is negative entropy.)
What happens when we die? The organizing life energy departs, and our bodies start decomposing rapidly. Our precious information-carrying proteins decompose into badly smelling substances within three days. With time, in the grave, these substances will be broken down into still simpler ones. We have returned to the planet the substances we borrowed from it.
But there is another component to life other than the physical body. We know that during our lifetime we build up and store enormous amounts of information. That information is also energy that is becoming organized. In childhood, the events that occur to us seem to be random and unconnected, a kind of fallout from the world of the grown-ups. As we grow up, we begin recognizing the patterns of events and their causes; in short, we put order into them.
This order is analogous to the order the life force has put into the minerals to organize and integrate them into a living material body. During a (human) lifetime, we organize a lot of in formation on many levels. Emotional information is built up, mental information is built up, etc. This information bundle is not material, although some will say that it is the brain that contains it. What we have here is a “body” of information. It is a nonmaterial entity containing all the knowledge that we have accumulated over a lifetime, including our personality traits and character. It is the nonmaterial “us.”
In life we deal, therefore, with two organizing systems, one material and one nonmaterial. At the time of death, the physical system decays, and disorder sets in; will the same thing happen to the nonphysical energy system? This system, which I shall call the “psyche," is the organizer and processor of this information, and that information is stored outside our physical bodies. I assert that the psyche can exist independent of the physical body, that this thinking and knowing part of us is conserved. It is nonphysical and therefore not subject to decay after the death of the physical body.
This “body” of information will eventually be absorbed in the large reservoir of information produced by all mankind, which I shall call the ”universal mind.” However, this will occur over a very long period of time. It may take many thousands or millions of years for this to happen. Thus, nothing is lost. The physical body is reabsorbed by the planet, and the “body” of information is also absorbed back whence it came. No organised energy is ever lost. An experiment showing the independence of the psyche from the physical body is described.
In short, I suggest that people having problems with accepting the concept of reincarnation consider this bundle of organized information as having continuity in time, while the physical body serves as just a temporary vehicle for the psyche. When the psyche, after having been without a physical body for a while (the period after death), decides that it needs additional pieces of information obtainable only through the physical body, it will acquire one and continue to associate with the new body until it wears out and dies.
Nature, as I hope to show later, needs all this information, which is organized energy, and will not allow it to go to waste. It will be stored in Nature's large information-storage hologram: the universal mind. Normally, we have no recollection of previous lives due to a self-protective mechanism similar to that which prevents us from bringing up material buried deep in our subconscious.
While in the last few years we have been witnessing a great increase in the area of psychic phenomena, still the majority of people suffer from what one may call the “giraffe syndrome," which goes as follows: one nice day an elderly resident of the Bronx decides to visit the zoo. As he walks along, admiring all the unusual animals, he suddenly finds himself staring at a set of very tall legs. As he lifts his eyes, he finds the belly of the animal connecting those legs; he keeps looking up, and all he sees is neck, neck, and more neck, and then, somewhere up in the clouds, a head. “No,” he says, “this is impossible. There is no such animal.” And with that he turns away from the giraffe and walks calmly on, not casting even a single glance back at it.
Most people have the giraffe syndrome when it comes to those controversial areas. Especially so affected are scientists, with the exception of a very few pioneering spirits. The problem is that they view reality through a tiny window, and they like to stay within the frame of that window. They decide that if the giraffe is too big for their window, then it’s too bad for the giraffe; as far as they are concerned, it is non-existent. Fortunately, the levels of consciousness into which I divide the different phenomena are easily available, so that anyone who is willing to spend the time and effort does not need to rely on my description of things. He can go to the zoo and see things for himself.
I must apologize to women readers for calling the Creator “He.” A Creator is neither He nor She but both. But somehow I couldn't bring myself to call Him "Chairperson of the Universe.” I don’t think He would go for that, nor could I face Him in good conscience afterward.
Itzhak Bentov, 1977
Keep nudging the edges.