We are a mess. Our planet is becoming a wasteland. Our families are in disarray. Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse exists at astronomical levels. If we are fortunate enough to be doing well financially, we live in four-story resource-guzzling houses where we don’t see our spouses or children for days. Meanwhile, our children are snuggled away in their own little rooms plugging away at computers, games, or music designed by huge corporations to entertain, brainwash, and entice into consuming. God forbid we should need to commune with our husband, wife, or child!

Meanwhile, our politicians are going to war against others through shock and awe campaigns in order to help boost oil tycoons’ profits. Shock and awe is another term for creating trauma. Trauma is a way of life that is consciously planned on as a way of  getting control over a people or person. What is the physical abuse of a child or a spouse if not a means to control and to dominate into submission?

Where does trauma come from? I would say from a dualistic philosophy of life that pits one thing against the other. It’s man against woman, parent against child, this theory versus that theory, or this set of religious dogma against another. Trauma is also created in our need to control others. The supervisor says, “Do it my way, or it’s the highway.” Granted we need structure, but is a Nazi style work environment really the answer? Or does it lead to more throat-cutting and neurotic reactions in employees?

We live in a highly divided world, a division that some say is evidenced by our alienation. Being alienated means we don’t feel at home here on this planet; we feel isolated. But I’m here to tell you that integrity is the foundation our being. You are an integrated whole. Understanding your wholeness is where you become holy. Religion is a verb meaning to connect. Religious is what we all are in our deepest essence, be we atheist, Jew, Christian, Muslim, or Pagan. We are connected.

This means we have integrity whether we realize it or not, for integrity is the nature of our being. David Bohm, a contemporary of Einstein, speaks to our integrity in his holographic theory of the universe (Talbot, 1991). Bohm refers to the universe we see as the Manifest Explicit Order. These words on the paper or screen you are reading are the Manifest Explicit Order. This reading arises; however, from a much deeper matrix called the Unmanifest Implicit Order. This implicit order is an infinite ocean of energy that contains infinite potential. This means that this writing and your reading it has existed in me, you, and the universe through timeless eternity as a potential.

So, now I’ve defined two orders, unmanifest and manifest. Are they really two? No! I would say that the manifest relates to the unmanifest as the surface waves of the waters relate to the ocean. Furthermore, from my explanation of how this article was conceived, you have gotten the idea that how I conceive this article and how a baby is conceived via intercourse between a woman and a man are one process. What is deemed as two separate processes is one process mirroring itself.

This is what Lao Tzu means when he refers to Tao as The Way… the intercourse of yin and yang. The Way is Creativity and dissolves all boundaries. The Way speaks to the writing of this article, as well as the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Koran, the Rig Veda, and Native American sand paintings. The Way even refers to, relates to, flowers blooming in the spring (manifest) upon soaking up the warm sunshine (initiating impulse, Eros) after spending a winter buried underground as a seed (unmanifest).

Now let’s go deeper into this through a discussion of holographic photography. In holographic photography, a laser beam is shined towards an object, say you. The light bounces off you and goes onto a holographic plate where the image of you is stored in waveform. Another laser goes through the plate and projects an image of you in 3-D. What’s really interesting about this is that if we break the plate into a thousand little pieces, what we get when we shine the laser through a piece is not a shattered you, but a whole you.

Bohm uses holographic photography as a metaphor for how the universe works. He states that in the part is the whole and the whole is in the part. For example, if we took a microscope to your finger, we would ultimately come to the atoms that make up your cells. These atoms will be found existing in the same relationship to the space in your body as stars relate to intergalactic space. Ultimately, going deeper, we will see nothing but darkness where matter and time disappear (Chopra, 1993, p.42).

At this point, you arrive at the place where Genesis 1:27 of the Bible states, “and the Earth (you) was without form, and void and darkness were upon the face of the deep.” Or, as the Hindu Rig Veda puts it, “Darkness enfolded darkness with no distinguishing signs; all this was water.” Or, the Stanzas of Dyzan, “Darkness radiates Light and Light drops one solitary egg into the Mother Deep (Raghaven, 1988, p. 84). The Light shining out of the Darkness is you reading this piece now and me writing it now in one Eternal Now. This timeless and spaceless realm of infinity shines forth as temporal time and space. What is in time and space is what has always been in the timeless and spaceless. This division is necessary as evidenced in the term M-Other. For self-awareness to occur, there has to be a division, an-other.

Yet, in any part is the whole. For example, in the Bible is the Rig Veda is the Stanzas of Dyzan. Indeed, every time you hear of a newborn baby being born you can hear God shout, “Let there be Light! And the Light divided the darkness.” Hence, M-Other.

Integrity is something we already have with no idea we have it. Why? Because we are locked into a warring belief system that pits human against Nature, man against woman, left against right, and the retaliation against terrorism by shocking and awing through bombing people into submission. Looking at this holographically, we see that even in our divisive, warring mentalities we are integrated. This is how Christ came out with his “Don’t remove the mote from your brother’s eye unless you remove it from your own.” “Loving thy neighbor as thyself” is a realization of the truth of our universal condition. Holographic physics is but a rendition of what’s been said over and over and over again in religious texts. “And God created Adam in his image, male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27). This statement is about you here and now.

Likewise, we cannot separate criminals out from our sociopathic politicians and corporations controlled by a handful of the rich. The “it’s all about me!” mentality must be confronted and replaced with “it’s all about us.” While a fertilized egg divides in half and then multiplies into various cells, the fact is, it remains one. Just so, we are each a cell in this planet’s living tissue and in being a cell we speak to the entire planet. We are a holographic image of the planet and of the universe.

If we start seeing the holographic wasteland of our divided mentalities bent on control and domination reflected in the devastated wasteland brought forth by pollution, can we start to heal then? The only way is if we see pollution in our growth-gone-wild mentalities. Can we let go of being a cancer upon the face of this planet? It can only happen if we let go to control, warring mentalities, and excessive growth. My bets are on us. The savior is in us... not in any leader or movement. This is the truth that truly sets us free.

References:

Chapra, Deepak, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old, (Three Rivers Press, New York, NY: 1993).
Iyer, Raghaven, The Jewel in the Lotus, (The Pythagorean Sangha and Concord Press, London, England: 1988).
Iyer, Raghaven, The Jewel in the Lotus, (The Pythagorean Sangha and Concord Press, London, England: 1988).
Kwok, Man-Ho, Palmer, Martin, Ramsay, Jay (Tr), The Tao Te Ching (Element Books, Rockport, MA: 1993).
Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY: 1991).
The New Jerusalem Bible (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc, New York, NY: 1985).
O’Flaherty, Wendy (Tr), The Rig Veda (Penguin Books USA Inc, New York, NY: 1981).

Burl Hall is a master’s level counselor doing in-home work with families. Burl is also a freelance author. He is seeking a publisher for his Sophia’s Web: Reclaiming our Wholeness in a Divided World, and is also currently working on a new manuscript called Lover’s Path Home. Burl has a masters’ degree in Counseling Psychology from Towson State University. He may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .