An in-formed universe requires an in-former . . . Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder what makes the Universe exist. Be curious. 

     --Stephen Hawking, physicist 

Real-izing 

Neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists are coming to recognize that we don’t perceive a direct representation of “external” reality but, instead, our senses and brains operate as a translation and integration service to our innate consciousness. What we think, feel, and believe, whether it’s “true” or not, significantly affects our notions of what’s real. 

The old adage “seeing is believing,” is being turned on its head as studies are progressively discovering that we literally “see” what we believe. 

Numerous experiments have shown that we see what we expect to see. Psychologists have demonstrated that when our attention is distracted we miss otherwise obvious events and co-create the realities we perceive--traits often expertly manipulated by mentalists such as the UK’s Derren Brown. 

A well-known (and jaw-dropping) example is the phenomenon of “change blindness,” an experiment on which was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin in 1998. Such reality myopia occurs when our attention is diverted. Researchers have concluded that change blindness is due to a lack of informational attention before and after the distraction. The brain fills in the gaps and concludes that no change has occurred, even when it actually has. 

Simons and Levin’s research was conducted at Cornell University where experimenters held a campus map and asked passers-by for directions. After around fifteen seconds into a person’s directions, two further experimenters, together carrying a door, walked in between the conversation. As they were moving on, the initial experimenter who’d been asking the way switched places with the one carrying the back of the door, who then took the place in receiving help from the passers-by. 

When the passers-by completed their directions, the experimenter explained that a psychological study of how people pay attention was being undertaken. Asking whether the passers-by had noticed anything unusual when the two people carrying the door went by, if the response was no, the experimenter then asked whether the passers-by had realized that they weren’t speaking with the same person who’d initially approached them and was previously being given assistance. 

Over half the passers-by failed to notice that the person they had been speaking with had changed to another stranger in the middle of their conversation! 

Scientists over the last couple of decades have also tested how what we think and believe actually alters our physiology. 

For Eastern practitioners of mind-based traditions, such abilities have always been self-evident, but in recent years Western scientists have studied and increasingly corroborated such claims. 

In 2002, the Harvard Gazette reported a series of experiments beginning in the 1980s, and directed by Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School, that investigated the Tibetan Buddhism meditative practice of tum-mo. Not only were the monks involved in the experiments 

able to demonstrate a conscious ability to reduce their metabolism by up to sixty-four percent but also to significantly raise their body temperatures. Translated as “inner fire,” tum-mo’s visualization and focusing technique has been used for many centuries as a rite of passage to prove a monk’s aptitude by being able to survive and thrive in the inhospitably low temperatures of their homeland. Adepts are even able to produce sufficient inner heat to cope with a night-long meditation in the freezing cold, sitting naked on the snow. 

Due to the spiritual practices homed over millennia, Hindu yogis are also now being subjected to scientific investigation of their renowned powers to control bodily pain through the power of thought. 

In 2004 a team of researchers, with lead author Erik Peper of the San Francisco State University, reported their study of a yoga master able to pierce his tongue and neck with skewers while suffering neither pain nor bleeding. Experimental measures showed that a coherently high level of alpha brain-waves, associated with deep yet alert relaxation, revealed his ability to consciously reduce the electrical activity in his skin, thus reducing pain response and blood flow. (1) 

BEYOND THE BRAIN 

Real-izing that everything we call physical reality is the expression of the in-formational intelligence of cosmic mind completely reframes the question of human and, indeed, all consciousness and cognizance. 

Hitherto, the view of most neuroscientists has been that our consciousness somehow arises from the brain as a localized phenomenon. Just as a turbine generates energy, so the view goes our brain generates consciousness, somehow. 

That final “somehow” is crucial. While neuroscience has managed to map neural networks in the brain, identifying which areas light up during certain mental processes and progressively noting their holographic nature, there remains no mechanism for the integration of neuronal activities with the immaterial perception of self-awareness. 

Based on numerous experimental data on the nonlocality of our consciousness, an alternative has been to view the brain instead as a computer: a receiver and transmitter of nonlocal information 

However, with increasing discoveries and the emerging understanding of the cosmic hologram, the computer-brain-mind metaphor is also coming to be seen as too limited in its perspective. Not only does it fail to account for the inter-dimensional communications reported extensively by transpersonal experiencers, but still more fundamentally, it implicitly suggests a duality between the physical world and consciousness. 

Instead, the paradigm-shifting view of the cosmic hologram, whose perception recognizes the actual immateriality of the physical realm and the ultimate unity of consciousness, is offering a new view of the brain and its purpose.

By identifying the brain as playing an important role in the in-formational organization of the embodied awareness of human beings, it redefines each of us as a unique and microcosmic individuation of the intelligence of the cosmic hologram of our Universe: literal co-creators of reality.

Given too that, as we’ve seen, the cosmic hologram of our universal experience is inherently nonlocally and holographically connected, our consciousness too is so nonlocally infused.

The Cosmic Hologram by Jude Currivan, PhD © 2017 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com

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