An invition to gratitude

From Michael Winn, at www.HealingTaoUSA.com ,
or
www.HealingDao.com

A Soul-stice Blessing and Meditation on Gratitude:

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...
you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace...
you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...
you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church or other gathering without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If your parents are still alive and still married... you are blessed with a family that is very rare.

If you hold your head up with a smile on your face and are truly thankful...you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

If today, you can hold someone's hand, hug them or even touch them on the shoulder ...
you are blessed because you have made contact with another human being.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

Count your blessings, and pass this message along to remind others how blessed we all are. Gratitude to the Life Force that manifests everything is a powerful way to come into intimate relationship with the Tao. The Life Force is the life blood of the Tao, our only means of communicating with the Great Mystery of the Unknown (wuji).

After contemplating this feeling of gratitude, I recommend sitting in the stillness of the Deep Cosmic Yin Inner Smile that is naturally happening at this time. Silence, but with an open heart.

Bless you and those you love this Solstice time, in whatever form you celebrate it!

May the Inner Light of the Tao Shine in Us,

Michael Winn

Boriska - an Indigo child?

From Pravda June 2004


Boriska-boy from Mars
03/12/2004 19:38

Sometimes, some children are born with quite fascinating talents, unusual abilities.

I was told the story of an unusual boy named Boriska from members of an expedition to the anomaly zone located in the north of the Volgograd region, most commonly referred to as "Medvedetskaya gryada".

"Can you imagine, while everyone was sitting around the campfire at night, some little boy (about 7 years of age) suddenly asked everyone's attention. Turned out, he wanted to tell them all about life on Mars, about its inhabitants and their flights to earth," shares one of the witnesses. Silence followed. It was incredible! The little boy with gigantic lively eyes was about to tell a magnificent story about the Martian civilization, about megalithic cities, their spaceships and flights to various planets, about a wonderful country Lemuria, life of which he knew in details since he happened to descend there from Mars, had friends there.

Logs were cracking, night's fog enveloped the area and the immense dark sky with myriads of brightly lit stars seemed to conceal some sort of a mystery. His story lasted for about an hour and a half. One guy was smart enough to tape the entire narration.

Many were stunned by the two distinctive factors. First of all, the boy possessed exceptionally profound knowledge. His intellect was obviously far from that of a typical 7-year-old. Not every professor is capable of narrating the entire history of Lemuria and Lemurians and its inhabitants in such details. You will be unable to find any mentioning of this country in school textbooks. Modern science has not yet proved existence of other civilizations.

Second of all, we were all amazed by the actual speech of this young boy. It was far from the kind kids his age usually use. His knowledge of specific terminology, details and facts from Mars' and Earth's past fascinated everyone.

"Why did he start the conversation in the first place," said my interlocutor. "Perhaps, he was simply touched by the overall atmosphere of our camp with many knowledgeable and open-minded people," continued he.

"Could he make this all up?"

"Doubtful", objected my friend". "To me this looks more like the boy was sharing his personal memories from past births. It is virtually impossible to make up such stories; one really had to know them."

Today, after meeting with Boris' parents and getting to know the boy better, I begin to carefully sort out all the information obtained around that campfire. He was born in Volzhskii town in a suburban hospital, even though officially, based on the paperwork, his birthplace is the town of Zhirnovsk of Volgograd region. His birthday is January 11th, 1996. (Perhaps it will be helpful for astrologers).

His parents seem to be wonderful people. Nadezhda, Boriska's mother, is a dermatologist in a public clinic. She graduated from Volgograd medical institute not so long ago in 1991. The boy"s father is a retired officer. Both of them would be happy if someone could shed the light onto the mystery behind their child. In the meantime, they simply observe him and watch him grow.

-After Boriska was born, I noticed he was able to hold his head [up] in 15 days, recalls Nadezhda. His first word "baba" he uttered when he was 4 months old and very soon afterward started talking. At age 7 [months], he constructed his first sentence, "I want a nail." He said this particular phrase after noticing a nail stuck in the wall. Most notably, his intellectual abilities surpassed his physical ones.

-How did those abilities manifest themselves?

-When Boris was just one year old, I started giving him letters (based on the Nikitin's system) and guess what, at 1,5 he was able to read large newspaper print. It didn"t take long for him to get acquainted with colors and their shades. He began to paint at 2.

Then, soon after he turned 2, we took him to the children day care center. Teachers were all stunned by his talents and his unusual way of thinking. The boy possesses exceptional memory and an unbelievable ability to grasp new information. However, his parents soon noticed that their child had been acquiring information in his own unique way, from some place else.

-No one has ever taught him that, recalls Nadya. But sometimes, he would sit in a lotus position and start all these talks. He would talk about Mars, about planetary systems, distant civilizations.we couldn"t believe our own ears. How can a kid know all this? Cosmos, never-ending stories of other worlds and the immense skies, are like daily mantras for him since he was 2.

It was then that Boriska told us about his previous life on Mars, about the fact that the planet was in fact inhabited, but as a result of the most powerful and destructive catastrophe had lost its atmosphere and that nowadays all its inhabitants have to live in underground cities. Back then, he used to fly to earth quite often for trade and other research purposes. It seems that Boriska piloted his spaceship himself. This was during the times of the Lemurian civilizations. He had a Lemurian friend who had been killed right before his own eyes.

-A major catastrophe took place on earth. A gigantic continent was consumed by stormy waters. Then suddenly, a massive rock fell on a construction. My friend was there, tells Boriska. I could not safe him. We are destined to meet some time in this life.

The boy envisions the entire picture of the fall of Lemuria as though it happened yesterday. He grieves the death of his best friend as though it was his fault.

One day, he noticed a book in his mother's bag entitled "Where do we come from?" by Ernst Muldashev. One should have seen the kind of happiness and fascination this discovery triggered in the little boy. He's been flipping through pages for hours, looking at sketches of Lemurians, photos of Tibet. He then started talking about high intellect of the Lemurians.

-But Lemuria ceased to exist minimum 800 000 years ago., I uttered in response to his statements. Lemurians were 9 meters tall! Is that so? How can you remember all this?

-I do remember, replied the boy.

Later, he began recalling another book by Muldashev entitled "In Search of the City of Gods." The book is mainly devoted to ancient tombs and pyramids. Boriska firmly stated that people will find knowledge under one of the pyramids (not the pyramid of Heops). It hasn't been discovered yet. "Life will change once the Sphinx will be opened," said he and added that the great Sphinx has an opening mechanism somewhere behind his ear (but he does not remember where exactly). The boy also talks with great passion and enthusiasm about the Mayan civilization. According to him, we know very little about this great civilization and its people.

Most interestingly, Boriska thinks that nowadays the time has finally come for the "special ones" to be born on earth. Planet's rebirth is approaching. New knowledge will be in great demand, a different mentality of earthlings.

-How do you know about these gifted kids and why this is happening? Are you aware that they are called "indigo" kids?

-I know that they are being born. However, I haven't met anyone in my town yet. Perhaps may be this one girl named Yulia Petrova. She is the only one who believes me. Others simply laugh at my stories. Something is going to happen on earth; that is why these kids are of importance. They will be able to help people. The Poles will shift. The first major catastrophe with one of the continents will happen in 2009. Next one will take place in 2013; it will be even more devastating.

-Aren't you scared that your life may also going to end as a result of that catastrophe?

-No. I'm not afraid. I have lived through one catastrophe on Mars already. There still live people like us out there. But after the nuclear war, everything has burnt down. Some of those people managed to survive. They built shelters, new weaponry. There was also a shift of continents there, although the continent was not as large. Martians breathe gas. In case they arrived to our planet, they would have been all standing next to pipes and breathing in fumes.

-Do you prefer breathing oxygen?

-Once you are in this body, you have to breathe oxygen. However, Martians dislike this air, earth's air, because it causes aging. Martians are all relatively young, about 30-35 years old. The amount of such Martian children will increase annually.

-Boris, why do our space stations crash before they reach Mars?

-Mars transmits special signals aimed at destroying them. Those stations contain harmful radiation.

I was amazed by his knowledge of this sort of radiation "Fabos". This is absolutely true. Back in 1988 resident of Volzhsky Yuri Lushnichenko, a man with extrasensory powers attempted to warn Soviet leaders about the inevitable crash of the first Soviet space stations "Fobos 1" and "Fobos-2". He also mentioned this sort of an "unfamiliar" and harmful for the planet radiation. Obviously, no one believed him then.

-What do you know about multiple dimensions? Do you know that one must fly not on straight trajectories, but maneuvering through the multi-dimensional space?

Boriska immediately rose to his feet and started to pour all the facts about UFOs. "We took off and landed on Earth almost momentarily! [instantaneously?]" The boy takes a chalk and begins drawing an oval object on a blackboard. "It consists of six layers," he says. 25%--outer layer, made of durable metal, 30%--second layer made of something similar to rubber, the third layer comprises 30%--once again metal. The final 4% is composed of a special magnetic layer. "If we are to charge this magnetic layer with energy, those machines will be able to fly anywhere in the Universe."

-Does Boriska have a special mission to fulfill? Is he aware of it?- I pose these questions to his parents and the boy himself.

-He says he can guess,- says his mother. He says he knows something about the future of Earth. He says information will play the most significant role in the future.

-Boris, how do you know all this?

-It is inside of me.

-Boris, tell us why do people get sick?

-Sickness comes from people's inability to live properly and be happy. You must wait for you cosmic half. One should never get involve and mess up other peoples' destinies. People should not suffer because of their past mistakes, but get in touch with what's been predestined for them and try to reach those heights and move on to conquer their dreams. (These are the exact words he was using).

You have to be more sympathetic and warmhearted. In case someone strikes you, hug your enemy, apologize yourself and kneel before him. In case someone hates you, love him with all your love and devotion and ask for forgiveness. These are the rules of love and humbleness. Do you know why the Lemurians died? I am also partially at blame. They did not wish to develop spiritually any more. They went astray from the predestined path thus destructing the overall wholeness of the planet. The Magic's Path leads to dead end. Love is a True Magic!

-How do you know all this???

-I know.Kailis.

-What did you say?

-I said "hello!" This is the language of my planet.



Gennady Belimov "NGN"



Read the original in Russian: http://science.pravda.ru/science/2004/6/79/308/16265_MARSIANIN.html (Translated by: Anna Ossipova)

A test for masculinity/femininity

Androgynous You scored 63 masculinity and 66 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on masculinity You scored higher than 0% on femininity

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

You like paintings? How about a genuine fake?

This must be saying something quite important about the value of art. From the Guardian, 8 Dec 2005:

The master forger

John Myatt was responsible for the biggest art con of the 20th century, and ended up going to jail for it. Now his story is being turned into a Hollywood movie - and a prestigious gallery is showing his 'genuine fakes'. He tells all to Mark Honigsbaum

Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian

John Myatt is showing me some of his recent creations. "That's a Giacometti," he says, pointing to an abstract in swirling whites and grays entitled Apples on a Stool, 1949. "I'm not sure it's quite finished yet." Next, Myatt walks me to another wall of The Air Gallery, in London's Mayfair, hung with a Modigliani, several Picassos and, in the centre, a large Ben Nicholson. "Now, this is actually a painting that failed," he says. "In the end I had to paint over it with primer and sand it back to the canvas.

For a painter who is celebrating his first London opening, Myatt is disarmingly honest about both his working methods and his failings as an artist. But then, this is not the first time that Myatt's versions of works by Giacometti and Nicholson have found their way into the West End.

Between 1986 and 1994, Myatt churned out more than 200 new works by surrealists, cubists and impressionists, passing them off as originals with the help of an accomplice, John Drewe, an expert at generating false provenances. Despite the fact that many of Myatt's paintings were laughably amateurish (they were executed in emulsion, not oil), they fooled the experts and were auctioned for hundreds of thousands of pounds by Christie's and Sotheby's. It was, said Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad when they finally caught up with Myatt in 1995, bursting into his Staffordshire studio at the crack of dawn, "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century". Indeed, to this day, some 120 "Myatts" are still said to be in circulation.

Now, having served his time - Myatt was sentenced to 12 months in prison in 1999 but was released for good behaviour after four months - and with Michael Douglas poised to turn his exploits into a feature film (working title, Art Con), he feels he has nothing to apologise for.

"If someone came to me with one of my fakes now I wouldn't let on," says Myatt, who is 60. "I figure that the paintings aren't doing any harm. Besides, I'd be losing a perfectly innocent person money."

Instead, he is seeking to forge a new career, so to speak, as a purveyor of what he calls "genuine fakes". These are works by the very same artists he used to imitate when he was a criminal - not only Giacomettis and Nicholsons but Monets, Matisses and Renoirs. They even come with the artist's signature. The only difference is that on the back of the canvas is a computer chip and the legend "Genuine fake" written in indelible ink.

In an age when a broken-down hut can win the Turner prize and Damien Hirst can make millions flogging "spot" paintings produced by teams of assistants, Myatt is hoping that his venture will be seen as a refreshing take on the question of what constitutes art. "So many things today are invented," he says. "I think genuine fakes slot into that rather nicely. With a fake painting, you're free to ask, does it go with the curtains? You can't do that with a genuine Van Gogh because it's worth millions."

Myatt didn't set out to by a faker. As a young art student he had high hopes of establishing his own artistic style. But whenever he turned his hand to landscapes or portraiture, he says the result was invariably "academic" and "dull". Instead, he taught evening classes and began selling the odd fake to friends and colleagues. In 1983, he placed an ad in Private Eye that read: "Genuine fakes, 19th- and 20th-century paintings from £150." The ad ran four times before he received a call from Drewe. "He had a mohair coat, wore expensive hand-made shoes and drove a Bristol motor car," says Myatt. "He told me he was a professor of physics. I believed him."

Drewe began by commissioning a Matisse, followed by several Dutch-style portraits. Soon Myatt was visiting him at his home in Golders Green and was on first-name terms with his wife

The turning point came with the ninth commission. Drewe had run out of ideas, so Myatt suggested a painting by the German cubist Albert Gleizes. "It was based on a drawing I'd seen in a book. I called it Portrait of an Army Doctor. At first, John hung it on his stairway like all the others. It was only later that I think he got the idea to take it to Christie's."

The first thing Myatt knew about it was when he got a call from Drewe saying the auction house had offered him £25,000 and "how do you fancy £12,500 in a brown envelope?". "It did not take me any time at all to make the wrong decision," says Myatt. "It was as much money as I earned as a teacher in a year."

Although Myatt had recently separated from his wife and was having to bring up their young son and daughter alone, he does not wish to make excuses. The truth, he says, is that he also enjoyed it. He began by knocking off fake Giacomettis, driving to Liverpool to catch an exhibition of the Swiss surrealist's work, then rushing back to Staffordshire to make the first brush stroke.

"I try to get the artist's work to hypnotise me," says Myatt, who compares himself to an art-world Rory Bremner. "I also surround myself with lots of books. I like to know everything - where he was, what he was doing, what his relationship was like with his wife - when he was painting."

In retrospect, Myatt says it is incredible that any of his paintings fooled the experts (it was only by chance, for instance, that he used the same cotton duck canvas favoured by Giacometti). Gradually, however, Myatt learned to use the correct materials and water down his emulsion with KY jelly to give it an authentic-looking glaze. Meanwhile, Drewe devoted his energies to generating fake provenances, collecting old gallery receipts from places such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts and slipping new entries into the card indexes at the Tate and V&A.

The scam eventually unravelled in 1995 when Drewe's wife went to the police (they were going through a bitter separation) and Scotland Yard raided Myatt's house. At first he denied everything, but when the officers discovered an unposted letter to Drewe in his briefcase saying that he wanted out, Myatt realised that the game was up. "The letter more or less amounted to a signed confession. The police were very nice about it. We ended up sitting round the kitchen table discussing art."

Myatt survived Brixton prison by doing portraits of his fellow inmates in exchange for phone cards, earning himself the soubriquet "Picasso". But when he was released, he says, the last thing he wanted to do was pick up a paint brush. Then he got a phone call from the officer who had arrested him, asking for a portrait of his family. This was followed by a commission of a Giacometti from a member of the prosecution team at his trial and a version of Dufy's Casino at Nice for the Bar Council. Another convert is the TV presenter Anne Robinson, whom Myatt got to know while painting her portrait for a BBC2 documentary, Art Crime.

By 2002 Myatt was back to painting fakes in earnest - the difference being that he now found he could sell them under his own name for substantial sums of money (genuine Myatt fakes go for anywhere from £850 to £4,700). But while his prominent disclaimers are designed to keep him out of jail, he says he cannot vouch for what others in the art world may do.

"I went to a fraud conference in the summer and met a lady from the Giacometti foundation," he says. "She said it's no good putting 'Genuine fake' on the back; all they'll do is re-line the canvas.

"As long as you're selling in good faith, I'm told that you're not committing a crime. What happens to the paintings in 70 or 80 years' time is out of my control".

· Genuine Fakes, an exhibition of paintings by John Myatt, is at The Air Gallery, 32 Dover Street, London W1 until Saturday

icw cream is good for the soul

I found this in Gary Craig's EFT newsletter.

Cross My Heart

Last week I took my children to a restaurant. My six-year-old son asked if he could say grace. As we bowed our heads he said, "God is good. God is great. Thank you for the food, and I would even thank you more if mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And liberty and justice for all! Amen!"

Along with the laughter from the other customers nearby I heard a woman remark, "That's what's wrong with this country. Kids today don't even know how to pray. Asking God for ice-cream! Why, I never!"

Hearing this, my son burst into tears and asked me, "Did I do it wrong? Is God mad at me?"

As I held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job and God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly gentleman approached the table. He winked at my son and said, "I happen to know that God thought that was a great prayer."

Really?" my son asked.
"Cross my heart." Then in theatrical whisper he added (indicating the woman whose remark had started this whole thing), "Too bad she never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is good for the soul sometimes."

Naturally, I bought my kids ice cream at the end of the meal. My son stared at his for a moment and then did something I will remember the rest of my life. He picked up his sundae and without a word walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, "Here, this is for you. Ice cream is good for the soul sometimes and my soul is good already."


This story courtesy of http://www.homeholidaysfamilyandfun.com

(I would have liked to hear about the woman's reaction, too.)

If you don't think reality is an illusion, read this:

The Holographic Universe

Michael Talbot

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of 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 the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

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.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply 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. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

(There's more here)

Goodbye, dear pup

Our bitch had two pups about nine weeks ago. Today one of them went to another home - some folks we vaguely know who live up the hill a way.

I'd grown to love these little creatures. I was sad to say good bye to this little, vibrant, trusting piece of doggy life. Even though I don't want to keep them - we have already too many dogs.