Plato’s cave may be the earliest on record, but contemporary culture gives us a variety of ways to think of the non-physical reality that exists beyond our familiar physical reality. Inception and The Matrix are two wonderful recent examples. Star Trek’s personal Holodeck, though, is probably the most useful.
The Observer Effect
In quantum mechanics, there’s a foundational experiment called the double slit experiment which shows human observation actually changes the way matter and energy behave. This is known as the observer effect. The famous Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment builds on this concept to show that random outcomes don’t get “locked into” reality until someone observes the result. Until observed, a random outcome can only be expressed mathematically and represented physically as a probability or wave function, but once observed, that wave function collapses to a fixed physical reality.
That got really technical really fast, but the point is that things don’t exist quite the way you think they do until you look at them. If a tree falls in the forest with nobody there to observe it…
Right now, all the physicists are inhaling in preparation to protest. These rules have been proven for the world of the extremely small for sure, but actual scientists would protest at using these conclusions to say anything about the world of the very large. In fact, the physics of the very large isn’t even relatable to the physics of the very small. Our different scientific understandings of the two worlds are incompatible models.
Finally, scientists don’t want their work to be sullied with philosophical, spiritual, or religious implications. Seth and Ramtha (and others) have said a lot on this topic, however.
Star Trek’s Holodeck
Sure, it’s fiction, everybody knows that. But as many of the fans are serious science nerds, there has been a lot of explanation of some of the mechanics of the holodeck. Let’s go through the relevant parts here.
When you walk into an already running holodeck on the Star Trek ship of your choice, you see an entirely different landscape than what was visible from your previous corridor. According to the lore, everything you see, at least beyond arm’s length, is a hologram. Everything close enough to touch is either replicated into physical existence with a combination of replicators and transporters, or it’s still a hologram with some version of a force field to provide touch sensation and resistance.
Of the five senses, we’ve covered vision and touch. Sound can be produced with today’s speakers but more immersive sound experiences probably need tractor beams to jiggle air molecules from source locations. Smell involves replicating the proper chemicals in the proper locations. Taste can be embedded into whatever replicated food is part of the Holodeck program.
We’re not this much of a nerd usually, we promise. We’re filling in a few gaps with whatever fictional technologies are available to accomplish the needed task. Our sense of balance can be manipulated with artificial gravity and maybe even inertial dampeners. Etc, whatever. The point is that reality is constructed as needed according to the senses involved in perceiving that reality.
The concurrent personal Holodeck
Star Trek constantly has groups of crew members entering the Holodeck together. They enter together but often spread apart beyond view of each other. Despite the Holodeck itself being a relatively small room, the space between the participants or observers can become quite large. In this case, the holodeck blocks the actual view of the physical participant and instead shows a holographic version off in a distance. The images, sounds, and smells of the distant participant are recreated virtually from the appropriate vantage point.
Given this model, let’s imagine that various participants can each enter their own personal Holodeck. They can appear to be in the same room together, but each observer will only be shown virtual versions of the other participants.
To make things more concrete, let’s assume there are five participants, and the Holodeck image is of the bridge. Five distinct observers simultaneously coexist on a shared virtual bridge. If three of them each walk over to the flight controls and touch the console, each of the three observers will be touching a separate but identical-looking virtual console. The remaining two can watch from afar as it appears their three teammates are walking to the flight controls. If any of them get too close to each other, they will literally bump into each other’s holographic representation. The Holodeck will even sprinkle the surrounding air with participants’ individual scents. Any talking back and forth will be reproduced from the appropriate virtual location.
Personal Holodeck and shared reality
Alright, we get it. Personal Holodecks for all. The question is, how do the individual Holodecks know to present the exact same view to each participant with the same real-time updates due to the other participants moving around? Glad you asked.
This is actually a very solved problem by today’s standards. Video games do this all the time with shared virtual environments. You can have thousands of players all coherently interacting in a single shared environment with everyone being updated in near real-time. There’s no reason futuristic fictional holographic technology can’t do the same.
The personal holodeck as our model
This is the model the channeled teachers speak of, and they’re remarkably consistent.
The Seth Material
We remember, but cannot locate, Seth saying, “Your sense organs create the world around you.” Hunting for that exact line didn’t turn anything up, but we did find something much better! In their first book, The Seth Material, Seth was referring to a drinking glass while saying,
“None of you sees the glass that the others see. Each of the three of you creates your own glass, in your own personal perspective. Therefore you have three different physical glasses here, but each one exists in an entirely different space continuum.”
Seth, The Seth Material, Chapter 10
That description very much coincides with the shared experience via the personal holodecks model described above. Each personal holodeck creates an entirely different (virtual) space continuum.
Have you ever discussed an object in front of a couple of other people, and noticed a prominent feature only after someone points it out? Did you think to yourself how on Earth you could have missed it? Maybe it was a blip in the network protocol. One of the personal holodecks didn’t update entirely or skipped over some shared details.
Seth describes a similar situation by continuing the discussion and seemingly bringing in the observer effect.
“Physical objects cannot exist unless they exist in a definite perspective and space continuum. But each individual creates his own space continuum. I want to tie this in with the differences you seem to see in one particular object. Each individual actually creates and entirely different object, with his own physical senses then perceive.”
“You, Joseph, perceive Mark sitting in the chair. He sits in his own chair which he constructed in his own space continuum and personal perspective.”
“You and Rupert perceive Mark, and yet neither of you sees Mark’s Mark. As he sits in his chair, he is constantly creating his own physical image, using his own psychic energy, and using particular atoms and molecules for the construction of his body.”
Ramtha
Ramtha teaches the same thing. It’s worded a little differently, and everything is couched in “the bands.” The bands satisfy the function of the personal holodeck, and Ramtha spends a great deal of time explaining that the items that occupy an observer’s bands are created with that observer’s own energy.
“There is nothing that exists outside of that bandwidth. There is one vast nothing out there. The illusion is you think you can see beyond it. You can’t. You are agreeing with other bands.”
Ramtha, final chapter, A Master’s Key for Manipulating Time
In the holodeck analogy above, we implicitly rely on the notion of a computer network to join the personal holodecks to produce a coherent shared experience. In the movie The Matrix, the matrix was this unifying link. Anyone who hooked into the matrix was then part of the shared experience. In the movie Inception, they kind of glossed over the details and showed a bunch of tubes and IVs between the dreamers.
Ramtha’s teachings are a little unique, as far as we can tell, in that he puts time into describing the link that unifies the shared experience. He says we all hook into “social consciousness,” and that it’s essentially a form of “telepathy” that we all utilize nonstop every day without consciously realizing it.
Combining concepts
Using the analogies and language developed in earlier posts, we would describe the shared experience aspect of the personal holodecks as residing in level 1 of the psyche and the personal holodecks themselves as level 2.
St. Germain spends a large amount of time encouraging meditation on his notion of “the cloud” in his alchemy book. Either he didn’t cover it or we didn’t understand it at the time, but he didn’t seem to distinguish at all between the personal holodeck and the link between all personal holodecks (i.e. levels 1 and 2). Still, this is our favorite reference so far on how to consciously manipulate the shared experience. Ramtha spends huge amounts of time on this topic as well but having never attended the in-person school, we suspect we’re missing many of the details.
Manipulating reality aside, visualizing this model helps to understand how things work under the hood. Probably more importantly though, it’s a belief that permits you to better allow the LOA to do its thing.
