LIFE – AN ENQUIRY PART- 1

 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

Without an exception everyone in this universe has faced the question of the meaning of life. Once it starts, the process does not end. Whether one  finds the meaning or purpose of life is still a question. Why does man search? Is it on account of his mortality, his impending obliteration? We can each ask ourselves, why?. It has been the subject matter of all philosophy, like Plato said ‘Philosophy is a meditation on death’. Man’s quest for immortality has taken on various forms and has resulted in great thoughts, great expressions by way of the arts – sculpture, painting and music and great scientific inventions and discoveries. Here I am talking about the evolution of man, not as a biological but as a conscious being.

We always tend to initiate our enquiry from the earliest thinkers, from the scriptures, from our religion to the present day of scientific inventions and enquiry. What is it, that man has arrived at now, after the passage of centuries? How different is our thought process, building up on what has been thought before? Has man been able to come closer to the gates of immortality?

One of my good friends, Easwaran had posted an extract from Michael Talbot’s ‘Introduction to the Holographic Universe’, in our email group. It was fascinating to read the extract and made me want to read more. One of the main architects of this astonishing idea was David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein’s and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists. So I read more on David Bohm. I am only putting forward certain extracts that are relevant to my process of enquiry, from David Platt’s article on ‘David Bohm and the Implicate Order'.

“A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image. Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded within each region of the photographic record.

Underlying his innovative approach to many different issues was the fundamental idea that beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness.

there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it -- from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons -- are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time”

Bohm gives the analogy of a flowing stream:

“On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances".

So my enquiry starts with the fundamental idea that has been arrived at by one of the world’s eminent scientists, that “beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness”.