I said in the st chapter that I thought if we are living in a hologram, “one of the most important changes we need to make in our beliefs and our behavior is to stop trying to change the experiences we encounter.” I still feel that way, because it also makes sense even if we are not living in a hologram. But I can also imagine many physicists ughing hysterically at me, saying, “Are you nuts? The most important thing is to realize that nothing we see ‘out there’ is real.”

  And they’re right, of course. What we have always thought of as “reality” isn’t “real” in a hologram. And that should make a huge difference in the way we think about life.

  So, what does “reality” mean? The dictionary definition is “the state or quality of having existence or substance.” If you see an apple on your kitchen counter, you believe that the apple is “matter,” and therefore “real.”

  To get more specific (if you remember your physics from school), matter is made of up particles, which contain atoms that are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And here’s where we start to have problems….

  It turns out that the things we think make up “matter” (protons and electrons, for example) aren’t always particles. A very famous experiment called the “Double Slit,” first performed in 1801 and repeated thousands of times since with the same result, “demonstrated the wave-particle duality of electrons, photons, and other fundamental objects in physics.”[

  I won’t go into more detail about the Double Slit experiment in this post, because I have written extensively about it in my free ebook (Butterflies are Free to Fly: A new and radical approach to spiritual evolution) Let’s just say that there is no question these days that the things that make up what we call “matter” are not solid… not particles at all when they are not being observed. They become waves instead.

  If you’ve ever pyed a video game on your computer, you can think of it this way…. When your avatar is in a room, for example, the room appears very real and the things in that room seem very solid. You can pick up a sword you need to py, or food you need to give you energy. But what happens when you leave that room and continue on your journey? The room disappears and is repced by your next environment, whatever that may be. Where does the first room go? Everything that appeared solid about the room and its contents ceased to be made of particles, became waves and “disappeared”—they literally ceased to be “real” when they were not being observed.

  That’s precisely how a hologram works. A hologram is made up of things that are not particles to someone looking at the hologram from the outside, and that observer can pass their hand right through the hologram because it is not solid matter. But that apple on the kitchen counter still looks “real” from the outside, just like the best video games today look so very real when you’re pying them.

  But what happens if you are inside the hologram? Very different story. Inside the hologram, that apple on your kitchen counter not only looks real, but actually “is” real, in the sense that you can touch it, pick it up, and eat it.

  A company called Cisco a couple years ago used holography during their annual meeting being held in India, and projected two executives who were in San Jose, California onto the stage in India where a moderator was standing. The moderator could walk over to the hologram of the two executives and pass his hand right through them—because they weren’t real; they were a hologram. But the two executives inside the hologram were able to see and touch each other normally and considered each other very “real.” (You can watch a 1-minute video of this at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KHH93krGOLedQ-LRqjML-F0mAU7654pA/view?usp=drive_link and other simir videos at https://thetrumanshowistrue.com/index.php/watch-the-videos/)

  “It is retively easy to understand this idea of holism in something that is external to us, like an apple in a hologram. What makes this difficult is that we are not looking at the hologram; we are part of the hologram.”[i

  Obviously, the point is that if the physics experts are right and we are living in a hologram, the world around us would appear to be “real” and solid and made up of particles. But it’s not. It only appears to be. Apparently, what’s actually going on is that we are receiving wave frequencies downloaded to our brains which we then project “out there” to create the holographic world we see and inhabit. Or, as world-renown neurophysiologist Dr. Karl Pribram put it, “our brains mathematically construct ‘hard’ reality by relying on input from a frequency domain.”[ii

  The ramifications of that are mind-blowing, and I can easily understand how a physicist might consider this to be the most important thing about living in a hologram. But this topic will require a few more posts ter on.

  [ https://brilliant.org/wiki/double-slit-experiment/

  [i Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe, p. 46

  [ii Talbot, Michael. An essay called The Holographic Universe