Michael Talbot a MÔMO IMPRINT and “The Key”

Journal for Studies on The Key, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2013

THE EMPTY MAN Michael Talbot A MÔMO IMPRINT and “The Key”

CLIFTON STRANGE

Taking The Key to be a ‘true encounter’ is possible in view of the originality of its ideas, the elegance with which they are expressed, and their explanatory power (Darger 2003). But since The Key came under renewed scrutiny with Strieber’s 2011 claim that his own 2001 printing of The Key had been ‘censored’, concepts and motifs previously thought unique to The Key have been found in Strieber’s prior work and in the works of others (Hammarskjöld 2011). This article examines the influence of Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe (1991) on The Key, noting points of correspondence in both basic concepts and terminology, the latter ex- tending to the words of the so-called Master of the Key himself. The existence of not only concepts but specific memes from The Holographic Universe in The Key further problematizes any acceptance of The Key as a straightforwardly transcribed conversation and ‘true encounter’.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dr. G. Trouvé who pointed out Michael Talbot’s importance in Strieber’s Breakthrough and his possible importance in The Key.

KEYWORDS: strieber, talbot, holographic universe, holism

Something New

Strieber begins Breakthrough (1995) by saying he ‘withdrew from public life in 1989’ after the publication of Communion and Transformation intending never to return unless he ‘had something truly new to say’. At least part of what Strieber had to say that was ‘new’ evidently came out of contact with Michael Talbot during this six-year period. Strieber devotes a

Clifton Strange, School of Social Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel • email: [email protected]

ISSN 1235-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9913 online/12/020189-23 © 2013 The Empty Man Ltd DOI: 10.1080/135634604212600218069 Clifton Strange chapter to Talbot in Breakthrough (“Michael’s Gift”). In this chapter he describes his relationship with Talbot:

Long before we became good friends, we were acquaintances. We had been introduced at a writer’s convention in the early eighties. He was in his twenties then, an intense and deeply humorous man, obviously brilliant, obviously a little put off by the swirling mass of other writers at the convention. I was intrigued by him and, as I am always eager to see young writers come along, encouraged him to send me his new book.

Talbot’s novel, A Delicate Dependency, appeared in paperback in 1982. Like some of Strieber’s own works, it dealt with vampires. According to Strieber it was ‘one of the best that has been written’. Sometime after reading the book, writes Strieber:

I got back in touch with Michael, and there followed a friendship that slowly moved from the casual to the more serious. […] As we got to know each other better, I discovered that Michael was fascinated by science and had some experiences that had convinced him that our understanding of the universe and our place in it is very limited. In his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, he wrote, “There is evidence to suggest our world and everything in it—from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons—are only ghostly images, projec- tions from a level of reality so beyond our own that it is literally beyond both space and time.”

The above shows that Strieber had read The Holographic Universe by the time of Breakthrough in 1995. In addition, Strieber quotes from The Holographic Universe at least four other times in the course of his chapter, establishing that it was not a passing familiarity. As Strieber writes:

The Holographic Universe had been published in 1991, and he hadn’t let me read any of it beforehand, but when I finally got a copy of the book, I had devoured it in a single sitting.

Strieber and Talbot evidently had a back-and-forth on a wide array of unusual topics. At around the time of the Communion experiences, Strieber was communicating some of these to Talbot, writing:

When I’d described the Communion encounter to him in February 1986, his eyes lit up and he said, “You’ve broken through…damn you!” We laughed, and I promised to introduce him to the visitors.

540 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

The above is interesting to students of Strieber’s accounts, given that Strieber represents himself in Communion as having been someone to whom otherworldly topics were completely — alien. Talbot’s comment could only have been made, it is clear, in a context fairly rich with understanding. Strieber writes that he and Talbot fell out of touch, until Talbot contacted him to tell him he was dying:

Michael and I didn’t see much of each other for some years, so his call in 1992 came as quite a shock. He’d apparently known about his disease for some time at that point, and when I went to see him he was a profoundly altered man. Of course, I feared AIDS. He scoffed. “I wish I had AIDS. This is worse than AIDS.”

“Michael’s Gift” is a collection of Strieber’s reminiscences on Talbot combined with details from Talbot’s book. Strieber repeats a number of fascinating histor- ical episodes used in The Holographic Universe and was apparently moved enough by one of them that:

In the summer of 1994, I made a personal pilgrimage to the little church of St. Medard in Paris where the abbé is buried. At the church, I found the cemetery still walled up! The abbé’s grave was such a wellspring of the unknown that the Age of Reason simply closed it—and it remains closed.

As influential asThe Holographic Universe appears to have been on Strieber, Talbot’s death was at least equally so. “Michael’s Gift” contains a compelling account from Strieber’s perspective of Talbot’s decline and Strieber’s witnessing his moment of death (in a sense). In fact, Strieber situates Talbot’s illness in the context of contact with the visitors:

Michael phoned me and asked me to get the visitors to help him with his cancer. Hearing his words, realizing that they meant that the chemo- therapy must be failing, my heart almost broke in two. […] I asked for help for Michael, just sat in the middle of a dark room in the night and asked and asked and asked in my mind and heart—pleaded, begged, demanded, cajoled, promised… and all the while had the certain feeling that this is not about curing the living; that insofar as it is about death, it is about dying well. […] About a month after I pleaded on behalf of Michael’s body, I got a let- ter from him. In it he described an experience of waking up to a pack of wolves in his bedroom. They leaped on him and he thought that they were

541 Clifton Strange

death come, that he was finished. But they did not eat him, they seemed to be eating the tumor itself, that wild colony lodged in his blood, licking it, devouring it. He felt a little stronger, perhaps, but was by no means cured. In fact, the tumor was getting worse. I decided to organize a weekend at the cabin on his behalf. I was no longer asking the visitors to come to him and cure him. I asked them to help him face death. […] So I got to feeling pretty sad. For his part, Michael was cheerful. […] Later I got Michael to read to us from The Holographic Universe, and he chose sections about all that is available in the cosmic hologram, access to the future and the past, to other realities, to the hidden world of the soul.

Strieber goes on to describe an encounter between Talbot and one of the taller female-like ‘visitors’ in which Talbot at first doesn’t seem aware of her/see her as being a visitor; then as if driven on some deep level Talbot enters into a moment of intimate sharing with her through the glass door. The encounter itself is fascinating. Strieber presents the narrative sequence in such a way as to suggest that he witnessed it in a full waking state, having gotten up out of bed and gone downstairs where it unfolded:

I was awakened at about five in the morning, very suddenly. It was the gray hour just before dawn. I’ve long felt an affinity for the dawn, and I thought of walking out into the woods until sunrise. Then I realized that I was in a deliriously light, tingly state, and I began to hope that they’d come. I sat there feeling the state growing, eager for it to develop fully. But it didn’t. Instead, it turned off so abruptly that I gasped from the sudden sense of returning weight. For a moment I was disappointed, but then I heard a voice downstairs. […] The voice was calling quietly. I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I knew that it was Michael. Assuming that he was in some way uncomfort- able, I went to attend to his needs. Halfway down the stairs, I saw him walk across the family room and pause, rather tentatively, before the front door. This was a full-pane double French door […]

However, at the end of the encounter Strieber writes:

I don’t remember anything after that. My next clear memory is of waking up. The first thing I thought was, Michael is going to be one hell of an excited guy.

542 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

It is ultimately unclear, of course, whether Strieber was ‘dreaming’ getting out of bed, or whether he did indeed do so and simply ‘forgot’ everything that followed. Talbot later woke and said he had had an ‘odd dream’, describing in close parallel what Strieber apparently saw. Strieber asks in his chapter: ‘Had it been a shared dream?’ According to Strieber, physical traces were found on the glass and where the curtain had been disturbed which Strieber adduces as proof that his version had occurred. One night ‘about a month later’, Strieber was given a ‘lesson of primary importance’ involving Talbot’s death. According to Strieber, he and his family were at the cabin where he was ‘meditating in the guest room’ when:

Suddenly, I felt a presence in the inky blackness. This presence was really strong, and my impression was one of dreadful evil. An instant later I saw something on the floor before me—a thing like a giant salamander, so black that it was visible only as a thick, squirming darkness against the shadowy floor. It undulated, moving away from me. The means of locomotion was primitive in the extreme, and the thing seemed to exude a quality of dread. Then I saw that there was a glowing thread connected to it—and to me. I looked down, appalled: the thread in its jaws was unreeling out of my chest. I got out of there fast. […]

After Strieber fled to his bedroom, he describes the following:

I lay there in misery, tossing and turning. I tried to read but I couldn’t concentrate, tried to pray but the words kept getting lost. I felt unan- chored, spiritually and physically. Also, there was a pain inside my chest that felt like a burn. The impulse was to pull at the skin, to get it open and get to the wound. Not for the first time, I worried that I’d finally scared myself so badly that I was having a heart attack. […] It was just before dawn when I woke up. I felt awful. I was still terribly afraid, literally trembling in the thin light. I was also sweating and thirsty and got up to get a drink. […] No sooner had I turned down that hall on my way to the guest bedroom where I meditate, than I saw around me great billows of glowing smoke. […] Out of the center of the smoke there came a hand that glowed a soft electric blue. As if it was finding its way along a string, this hand touched my chest, then my own right hand, and for a few moments I grasped its

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clammy coolness, feeling static crawl along my palm, as if the hand was made of some kind of charged material. Without warning, Michael’s voice burst into the center of my brain, and it was howling, pleading, not wanting to go, not understanding why. My mind almost closed down, such was the terror I felt and the anguish—a grinding, cutting anguish of soul. I remember telling him that it wouldn’t last forever, that there would be deliverance. Then our hands separated. An instant later, the hall was the hall again. Sunlight was starting in the windows, soft and new.

What happens next, intellectually speaking, is rather hard to explain.

Clutching my chest, I sank down. I wept bitterly, full of anguish that Michael must have died and that he had somehow been transported to hell, that his beautiful life must have contained some hidden wrong. Such was my torment that I lay on the hall floor, my knees up to my chest, my arms around my head. I lay there and cried and prayed to God that Mi- chael be saved, that this terrible thing not come upon him. And then there came into me a tremendous peace, as if every cell in my body had suddenly surrendered. I saw good and evil as one, I saw angels and demons as different aspects of the same vast compassion, and knew that hell is only what we make it, and that mercy is everywhere, in the air, the heart, the old light that sings us through babyhood. Before that moment, I was in the habit of hating the people who op- pressed me. I would wish evil things on them, I would pray against them. But now I saw that such prayers are not wanted, that there is a love that is literally without qualification, and that it is immediately present, here and now, always. […] I saw beyond good and evil, thanks to Michael, and I saw that my attempt to classify the visitors as one or the other was just an illusion and was the reason they had withdrawn from me. I realized that the visitors viewed good and evil as tools of the soul. […] I saw the true meaning of “love thine enemies” […]

One might allow that a vision of Talbot being taken to Hell could impart a lesson to Strieber about what he previously in the chapter called ‘dying well’. So how does one get from the death of a friend to ‘love thine enemies’? Strieber’s account is difficult to make sense of unless it is supposed that what occurred was not an inference or step in some thought-process but a shift in overall perspective. Somehow (though it is not made explicit how) Strieber went from terrible

544 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

anguish, convinced his friend Michael was being transported to Hell, to serene acceptance and a conviction that good and evil were ‘tools of the soul’, two different sides of a more basic and universal fact, compassion. This shift in perspective, while convincingly laid out for the reader as an emotional event, is nevertheless murky and obscure. One might ascribe to Strieber a banal Catholicism in which Hell as a literal reality is part of the goodness and justness of God. But Strieber distances himself from his Catholicism in this chapter, repeatedly using the phrase ‘beyond good and evil’. [1] A clue for this ‘breakthrough’ can be found earlier in the narrative, in between the ‘presence in the inky blackness’ that he felt in the guest room and the ‘billows of glowing smoke’ that came with Talbot’s passing. Strieber writes:

The religious beliefs instilled in me in childhood predispose me to concepts like heaven and hell. Had I been raised differently and had different beliefs, I might not have thought that I had been touched by something from hell.

Perhaps what Strieber means here is that he subjectively understood at the moment when Talbot’s hand was clutching at his chest that the event was too carefully tailored to him; that it too closely matched his expectations about Hell and about Talbot’s place in it. It is possible this coincided with the realization that even a direct contact with Hell was, in principle, survivable and a subset of some very different, potentially greater reality. It might naturally follow that this space opened up from the pressing immediacy of contact with Hell itself could be mapped by analogy on to (the many torments of) the visitors. In this moment of freedom at surviving Hell/sensing it was not ‘real’, a new vision of the visitors might snap into place for Strieber, allowing him to reconcile the many irrecon- cilables. If the above interpretation is true, the chapter does not make it easy to determine. Strieber’s storytelling is vivid and compelling and, as usual, illustrates emotional truth. But the intellectual content is implicit, always left aside in favor of captivating, poetic-sounding language. The chapter weakly tries to frame itself in terms of the question ‘Were they evil or good?’, but that question is lost along the way — and Strieber has hardly been wrestling with the question to this point in the book. Where it appears at the start of the chapter, Strieber is more concerned with the question of contact in general and proving that they exist. Two days after his vision of Talbot being dragged away to Hell, Strieber received word that Talbot had died on the day of his own vision/encounter. The chapter ends rather abruptly with the feeling-rich but elliptical statement: ‘This was the gift that Michael Talbot gave me’.

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The Gift that Keeps on Giving

It seems evident that Michael Talbot had a marked influence on Whitley Strie- ber. In trying to determine the precise contours of that influence, we see that at a minimum it seems to have involved a subjective transformation which to the outside seems vague and somewhat open-ended. But perhaps there is more to it than that. As Strieber sums up Talbot’s influence in the same chapter:

The key to the new way of thinking I was seeking was handed to me by a dying man. [italics added]

Hirugarren-Begia (2011) has noted the numerous cases of substantial and significant overlap betweenBreakthrough and The Key. To cite just a few instances in the chapter “Michael’s Gift” alone:

Breakthrough, “Michael’s Gift” The Key, 2001 version […] we little band of recently risen How do we surrender to God? animals, barking at our visitors with Return to the forest. Otherwise, you voice as yet hardly changed from the will destroy the earth and yourselves. days when we lived in the forest. (p 15)

[…] mercy is everywhere, in the air Forgiveness is everywhere. It is the soul’s very air. (p 72)

[…] there is a love that is […] is You can find your perfection right immediately present, here and now, now, this moment, always. (p 21) always

[…] had shown me what the love that What of Jesus? What of Buddha? (p 24) is spoken of by Christ and Buddha truly is.

The darkness had taught me […] the The darkness is the compassion of true meaning of compassion God (p 49)

546 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

I saw the true meaning of What is compassion? compassion: that it is the courage to Finding what others need the most give what is most needed, no matter and giving it to them. (p 61) how much it hurts

I saw the true meaning of “love thine Remember that the air is never so enemies,” that the enemy makes the sweet, nor thy wife so comely, nor victory sweet as certainly as the light thy child so beautiful, as after the depends on the darkness to be seen. battle won. We depend upon our If there was no evil, good would be enemy for the sweetness of our lives. invisible Love your enemy, for he is your best friend. Without the darkness, you would never know the glory of the firmament. (p 55)

The language is so similar in the above that a disinterested observer might conclude Strieber simply reworked some of the text from Breakthrough into a new book. Yet The Key is supposed to be a verbatim transcription of a conversation with an otherworldly champion of mankind — one with totally new and world-chang- ing views different from Strieber’s own. Whatever the meaning of these individual similarities, the question can certainly at least be asked now as to the relationship between Talbot and The Key. Given what we shall see one might also ask whether Michael’s ‘gift’ — ‘the key’ he gave to Strieber — was not in fact The Key itself.

Reflecting the Holographic Universe

Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe is concerned with holism in a particular sense. Broadly speaking, holism means a preoccupation with the whole — a pref- erence for a whole over its parts, up to and including ascribing a difference in meaning or even behavior to a whole when compared to its parts. Talbot in The Holographic Universe is indeed preoccupied with the universe as a whole, as a totality. But in a more precise sense, Talbot’s position is that while it is more meaningful to speak of the universe as a whole, the whole universe is also directly reflected in and contained by every single one of its parts. What makes this point of view possible is both a technological device and a thought-device — the hologram. Per Talbot:

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A hologram is produced when a single laser light is split into two separate beams. The first beam is bounced off the object to be photographed. Then the second beam is allowed to collide with the reflected light of the first. When this happens they create an interference pattern which is then recorded on a piece of film. To the naked eye the image on the film looks nothing at all like the object photographed. In fact, it even looks a little like the concentric rings that form when a handful of pebbles is tossed into a pond. But as soon as another laser beam (or in some instances just a bright light source) is shined through the film, a three-dimensional image of the original object reappears. (14-15)

Talbot continues:

Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable aspect of holograms. If a piece of holographic film containing the image of an apple is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the apple! Even if the halves are divided again and then again, an entire apple can still be reconstructed from each small portion of the film (although the images will get hazier as the portions get smaller). Unlike normal photographs, every small fragment of a piece of holographic film contains all the information recorded in the whole. (16-17)

For Talbot, not only is the universe taken as a whole a kind of projection, but because of the nature of that projection the universe as a whole is fully present in each of its parts. This gives rise to a holographic holism with many remarkable implications:

The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensem- bles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flipside. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every » cell « in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:

To see a World in a » Grain of Sand «

548 Notes on The Key and Michael Talbot

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. (50, emphasis added)

The relevance of the hologram to cosmology has been noted by others, and the scientific press is full of examples including recent articles inNew Scientist “Our World May Be a Giant Hologram” (Chown 2009) and “Our Universe May Be a Giant Hologram” in Discover Magazine (Greene 2011). Perhaps without exception though these articles deal with the ‘holographic principle’: the theory that the universe may be a projection off the outer edge of a two-dimensional space, an idea that developed in the course of answering the question whether information survives a black hole (Bekenstein 2003). The ‘holographic principle’ comes out of string theory and its story involves such luminaries as Stephen Hawking. Talbot never discusses black holes or string theory in The Holographic Universe (each term appears just once in descriptions of other scientists’ work).[2] What Talbot calls the holographic model or holographic paradigm has a very distinct lineage: it comes from the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribram. Each has a chapter devoted to his work in Talbot’s book. Bohm, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, was behind an unorthodox interpretation of quantum theory that stressed the wholeness of all things. This interpretation, as his collaborator Basil Hiley has pointed out, is best called the Bohm Interpretation (BI), though the matter of nomenclature is complicated as there are differing aspects and offshoots including de Broglie-Bohm theory and so-called Bohmian mechanics (Hiley 2002, 2010). The other scientist, Karl Pribram, was a leading neurosci- entist of his time who in conversation with Bohm developed what he called the holonomic model or holonomic mind theory, which asserts among other things that some brain processes are non-local. It is important here to note that Bohm’s and Pribram’s ideas are not identical when it comes to consciousness, cosmology, or anything else. The Holographic Uni- verse advances one interpretation (Talbot’s) of features shared by both scientists’ work which it then calls the holographic model or paradigm. Talbot’s aim in presenting this paradigm is to suggest there is a scientific basis for mystical experience, paranormal and unexplained phenomena, miracles, reincarnation, and the mysteries of the human brain. His overriding purpose is to break down the wall he perceives to exist between the supernatural and science, to make the supernatural a proper object of scientific study. [3] As he states in a separate essay:

More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by Science and even establish the paranormal as a » part of Nature «. (emphasis added) [4]

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If this sounds like Strieber’s The Key, that is because it is. In a strikingly similar formulation, one finds inThe Key:

There is no supernatural. There is only the natural world, and you have access to all of it. Souls are » part of nature «. (14, emphasis added) The Key, too, makes it its express purpose to break down the barrier between the so-called supernatural and the natural world (‘There is no supernatural, only physics’, 40). Like The Holographic Universe it attempts to bring all sorts of fringe phenomena under the umbrella of science in a sort of Grand Theory of the Para- normal: phenomena like the soul, reincarnation, crop circles, miracles, out of body travel, alien abductions, alien implants, and so on. The Key, like The Holographic Universe, asserts the interconnectedness of all things (an old concept) owing to nonlocality and quantum entanglement and offers a vision of the world that is manifestly one of holographic holism. But reading The Holographic Universe after studying The Key one finds statements that, subjectively speaking, seem to resonate too much. For example, we find in The Key on page 32:

So the whole of God is in the tip of my finger? The whole of God is in a » grain of sand «. In a single electron. A quark. (emphasis added)

Recall Talbot’s use of ‘grain of sand’ above. Of course, it might be said that Blake’s ‘grain of sand’ is now ubiquitous as a metaphor, especially in reference to holography. [5] But it is worth mentioning that in The Key it appears in the following passage:

God, then, is in the fragments? God is like a » hologram «. The whole is fully present in every fragment, no matter how small. So the whole of God is in the tip of my finger? The whole of God is in a » grain of sand «. In a single electron. A quark. I had not thought of God as a hologram before. [6] Infinite consciousness is in everything. In your pajama. In my sweater. All knowledge is present in every » cell «, every spark of fire, bit of trash. (32, emphasis added)

So in addition to ‘grain of sand’, then, ‘cell’ is also used as a primary visual example — by both Talbot and Strieber. At issue here, to some extent, is whether the similarities between the two

550 Michael Talbot and “The Key” texts go beyond a shared aim of part of the New Age movement, i.e. the desire to find a basis for spirituality in science. In other words, whether a sensitive reading discovers by accident similarities that cannot be explained by even the fairly idiosyncratic desire to collapse the supernatural into the natural through a holographic model. The answer to the question seems to be in the affirmative. Take this example from The Key:

Many of the dead who wait in the world have less than you do, by a very great deal. But not all. Some are exceedingly rich, and can report to you even about the true past and the logical future (41)

Recall the excerpt from The Holographic Universe above:

We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. (50)

The temporal conceit in the distinction between true past and logical future in The Key matches exactly Talbot’s ‘the whole past and implications for the whole future’, as if the present and past were a continuous entity but the future somehow qualitatively other, something in the realm of logical implication — despite the fact that both books admit to the reality of precognition (and that the past, present, and future are a completed whole). Now take this passage from The Key:

What has been hard for you to understand is that the speed at which these electrons move carries the taste of your being and the memory of your lives. Each one carries a different fraction of the whole. There are trillions of electrons in a single elemental body, and they contain a detailed memory of every second of life. This is why, for example, when certain areas of the brain are probed, the physical buffering mechanism can be paralyzed, causing the memories stored in this way to flood into the chemical cells. The person then has stunningly detailed recall of past events, as if the moments were being lived again. Nothing of your life is forgotten, or of all your lives. (42)

This passage is memorable partly because of the striking near-visual of a brain being probed, but also because the Master of the Key’s off-handed encyclopedic recitation of a fact apparently coming out of the medical literature — an odd or obscure fact delivered with perfunctory authority (characteristic of his commu- nications throughout).

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The same medical anecdote appears in The Holographic Universe:

In a series of landmark experiments, Penfield used this fact to his ad- vantage. While operating on the brains of epileptics, he would electrically stimulate various areas of their brain cells. To his amazement he found that when he stimulated the temporal lobes (the region of the brain behind the temples) of one of his fully conscious patients, they reexperi- enced memories of past episodes from their lives in vivid detail. One man suddenly relived a conversation he had had with friends in South Africa; a boy heard his mother talking on the telephone and after several touches from Penfield’s electrode was able to repeat her entire conversation; a woman found herself in her kitchen and could hear her son playing outside. Even when Penfield tried to mislead his patients by telling them he was stimulating a different area when he was not, he found that when he touched the same spot it always evoked the same memory. […] From his research Penfield concluded that everything we have ever experienced is recorded in our brain, from every stranger’s face we have glanced at in a crowd to every spider web we gazed at as a child. (12)

To a reader who has only encountered this medical anecdote in The Key, finding the above at the start of The Holographic Universe may well be shocking. It is hard to call it coincidence when viewed in context with Talbot’s relationship with Strieber; the fact that Strieber read The Holographic Universe and had it read to him; the many other instances of similarity between the two books; and the greater context of elements of The Key apparently coming from elsewhere. [7] Everything seems to be in play when it comes to similarities between The Key and The Holographic Universe. A variety of such similarities can be spotted at a glance, and some of these will be presented in a later section. But first there is at least one deeper and more substantial way in which these two books are bound together. Blake’s ‘Grain of Sand’ appears in a section in the The Holographic Universe called “Consciousness as a More Subtle Form of Matter”. Talbot uses the word ‘subtle’ throughout The Holographic Universe where he: a) gives the term a peculiar and distinctive sense, and b) uses it in connection with energy. The word ‘subtle’ also appears in The Key; less frequently, but likewise used in a distinctive way and in connection with energy. On closer reading one discovers that Talbot’s The Holo- graphic Universe serves as missing guide to the way the word is used in The Key. Indeed, the physics of The Key seems to correspond to the unorthodox and idiosyncratic physics of The Holographic Universe.

552 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

Subtle Energy and Complex Patterns

The Key like The Holographic Universe presents a vision of an expanded natural world with frequent reference to concepts from theoretical physics. Still, certain ideas in The Key seem to slip through the cracks, introduced as if only to be passed over for still more provocative ones. Interestingly, two related sets of such opaque ideas can be better understood when read in conjunction with The Holographic Uni- verse where they not only appear by name, but are fleshed out in greater detail. The first has to do with the term ‘subtle’. It appears twice in The Key, first in relation to ‘intelligent energy’:

There is no supernatural, only physics. But the physics and electronics involved in communicating with intelligent energy is very » subtle «. Nothing, however, that you are not capable of now. The devices needed to make your beginning are already sold in stores. (40, emphasis added)

The electronics needed are said to be ‘subtle’, yet surprisingly is available ‘in stores’. The word ‘subtle’ appears again a second time:

What is prayer? A lost science of communication. This planet was once covered by a gigantic instrument of communication and ascension. Tones were important to inducing a correct flow of energy in the bodies of creatures. The ringing of the Egyptian obelisks set the correct frequency. Using this instrument, human beings could project themselves into higher worlds— what you call interstellar space, but also higher space. All of the ruins you see and consider as entirely separate from one another were actually part of the single great machine. This was a » subtle « machine. It did things far more sublime than any of your current machines. It was a machinery of God, this machine. It was very intelligent, infused with many souls. It could be addressed—programmed, if you will—with carefully patterned groups of words. These formulae became ritualized among the ignorant as prayers and magical formulae, for they assumed that the machine must be the god of those who addressed it, and they tried to do the same, in hope that it would grant them some benefit. However, the language of the machine was the language of nature, for the machine was not separate from nature. (62-63, emp. added)

In both cases what is being discussed is ‘intelligent energy’ in connection with devices or ‘physics and electronics’ said to be ‘subtle’. Despite the repeated insistence that all things are amenable to scientific description, that there is

553 Clifton Strange no ‘supernatural’, etc., the word ‘subtle’ is only vaguely used in The Key. Yet it is clearly intended to denote an empirical reality. What might it refer to? If the word ‘subtle’ here simply meant ‘small’ or ‘hard to detect’, saying that communicating with intelligent energy is subtle/hard in the same breath as saying the means to detect it is already-sold-in-stores/easy would be somewhat confused and self-contradictory at the level of exposition — which would be unusual for The Key. Rather, it seems that the word ‘subtle’ refers to something else, some other quality not mentioned in the text. Luckily, the word ‘subtle’ appears in The Holographic Universe, where it is likewise used in a highly distinctive way, even appearing in the phrase ‘subtle energy’. Here are some of the places where Talbot uses the word ‘subtle’ (taking meaning as use) on the way to its definition: On page 40, Talbot introduces the term ‘subtle’ in connection with David Bohm’s effort to find an alternative to mainstream quantum theory and the strict either/or complementarity of the Copenhagen interpretation. According to Tal- bot, Bohm hypothesized the existence of a new type of field at the sub-quantum level which ‘like gravity […] pervaded all of space. However, unlike gravitational fields, magnetic fields, and so on, its influence did not diminish with distance. Its effects were subtle’ (39-40). On page 50, Talbot continues his discussion of Bohm: ‘In fact, Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter’ (50). On page 165, Talbot discussing the ‘human energy field’, writes:

One mystical phenomenon that appears to involve the ability to see reality’s frequency aspects is the aura, or human energy field. The notion that there is a » subtle « field of energy around the human body, a halolike envelope of light that exists just beyond normal human perception, can be found in many ancient traditions. (emp. added)

On the next page (166) Talbot writes:

Many psychics assert that there are seven main layers, or » subtle bodies, « each progressively less dense than the one before it, and each increasingly more difficult to see.

and:

According to Indian yogic literature, and to many psychics as well, we also have special energy centers in our body. These focal points of » subtle energy « are connected […]

554 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

Of course, in referring to these layers as ‘subtle bodies’ [8], Talbot instantly calls to mind those other highly distinctive terms in The Key, i.e. the ‘radiant body’ [9], the ‘energetic body’, the ‘elemental body’, the ‘electromagnetic body’, and even the ‘being-body’. This particular construction (‘—-body’) in its different forms appears dozens of times in The Key. Talbot uses the term ‘subtle body’ again on page 221 and on page 260. [10] Talbot gives us more as to the meaning of the word ‘subtle’ on page 175 when he writes:

The normal frequency range of the electrical activity in the brain is between 0 and 100 cycles per second (cps), with most of the activity oc- curring between 0 and 30 cps. Muscle frequency goes up to about 225 cps, and the heart goes up to about 250 cps, but this is where electrical activity associated with biological function drops off. In addition to these, Hunt discovered that the electrodes of the electromyograph could pick up another field of energy radiating from the body, much» subtler « and smaller in amplitude than the traditionally recognized body electricities but with frequencies that averaged between 100 and 1600 cps, and which sometimes went even higher. Moreover, instead of emanating from the brain, heart, or muscles, the field was strongest in the areas of the body associated with the chakras. “The results were so exciting that I simply was not able to sleep that night,” says Hunt. “The scientific model I had subscribed to throughout my life just couldn’t explain these findings.” (175, emp. added) [11]

Here we begin to see just to what quality the term ‘subtle’ may be referring, scientifically speaking. First, the passage associates ‘subtle’ energy with smaller amplitude and higher frequency, and it also suggests that the field is localized in areas traditionally associated with the ‘chakras’. Talbot goes on:

People who have frequencies above 900 cps are what Hunt calls mystical personalities. Whereas psychics and trance mediums are often just conduits of information, mystics possess the wisdom to know what to do with the information, says Hunt. They are aware of the cosmic interrelat- edness of all things and are in touch with every level of human experience. They are anchored in ordinary reality, but often have both psychic and trance abilities. However, their frequencies also extend way beyond the bands associated with these capabilities. Using a modified electromyogram (an electromyogram can normally detect frequencies only up to 20, 000 cps) Hunt has encountered individuals who have frequencies as high as 200, 000 cps in their energy fields. This is intriguing, for mystical tra-

555 Clifton Strange

ditions have often referred to highly spiritual individuals as possessing a “higher vibration” than normal people. If Hunt’s findings are correct, they seem to add credence to this assertion. (176)

The implication is that the higher the frequency, the more completely one gains access to/merges with/approaches the limit that is the All. As Talbot writes on page 177: ‘recall Bohm’s assertion that there is no such thing as disorder, only orders of indefinitely high degree’. It calls to mind this fromThe Key:

Entropy is the natural tendency of all things to disintegrate. Evil is the addition of intention to that process. Hate is like cold. It has an end. [12] Love is like heat. It does not. (58)

This in turn calls to mind the final paragraph of the last chapter ofBreakthrough published many years earlier:

We will discover then that ecstasy is an energy like heat, without an upper limit. [13]

Nevertheless, at the core of Talbot’s notion of the ‘subtle’ is order. While the subtle takes place at high levels of energy, what characterizes it more than anything else is the quality of order. As Talbot writes on page 44:

Nevertheless, the limited response to [Bohm’s] ideas about wholeness and nonlocality and his own inability to see how to proceed further caused him to focus his attention in other directions. In the 1960s this led him to take a closer look at order. […] As Bohm delved more deeply into the matter he realized there were also different degrees of order. Some things were much more ordered than other things, and this implied that there was, perhaps, no end to the hierarchies of order that existed in the universe. From this it occurred to Bohm that maybe things that we perceive as disordered aren’t disordered at all. Perhaps their order is of such an “indefinitely high degree” that they only appear to us as random (interestingly, mathematicians are unable to prove randomness, and although some sequences of numbers are catego- rized as random, these are only educated guesses).

Now on pages 46-47:

One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image.

556 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this deeper level of reality the implicate (which means “enfolded”) order, and he refers to our own level of existence as the explicate, or unfolded, order. He uses these terms because he sees the manifestation of all forms in the universe as the result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings Between these two orders. For example, Bohm believes an electron is not one thing but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space. When an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron’s ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycer- ine, at that particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.

On pages 47-48:

The existence of a deeper and holographically organized order also explains why reality becomes nonlocal at the sub-quantum level. As we have seen, when something is organized holographically, all semblance of location breaks down. Saying that every part of a piece of holographic film contains all the information possessed by the whole is really just another way of saying that the information is distributed nonlocally. Hence, if the universe is organized according to holographic principles, it, too, would be expected to have nonlocal properties. […] This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Ein- stein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the ap- parent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seam- less extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other.

Bohm’s concepts of implicate and explicate order, as they are presented by Talbot in The Holographic Universe, propose an unseen world both inside and outside spacetime. In this view, the cosmos is composed of ever more esoteric levels of order and relationality to the point where even randomness itself in the everyday sense is in question. These levels of order are in principle without limit. This brings us to the second set of ‘scientific’ terms left undeveloped in The Key: complexity and pattern.

557 Clifton Strange

Any specific recommendations? Paying attention to physical sensation is paying attention to energetic sensation. Being awake to oneself and one’s surroundings increases the intensity of the impressions so that they affect the spin of the electrons that are present in the nervous system. In this context, being awake means being aware of one’s own self while at the same time absorbing impressions from the outside. The increase in spin and enrichment of the » complexity of the pattern « of being that results brings more and more form to the radiant body. You will remember yourself after your death—who and what you were, why you existed, and what you intend for your future. You will, in short, acquire a true aim, and join the companions of God in their journey toward ecstatic and conscious union with one another and all that is. It is the difference between being a plant and being Rembrandt. The plant has a certain fragment of self-awareness, but Rembrandt is vastly » complex «, a being rich with fully realized talents and self-awareness that makes him a worthy companion in higher form. (17-18)

Like what is ‘subtle’, pattern and complexity represent lacunæ in The Key. They are terms referring to physical realities that are left unexplained. Here they com- bine in the phrase ‘complexity of the pattern of being’, but the term ‘pattern’ appears elsewhere:

Lives in elemental form change the » patterns « of the electrons that form the soul and intensify their spin. The great dead have lived lives consciously devoted to the evolution and growth of the radiant body. But most of you, in the state of death, bear only fragmentary bits of what you were in life. Simple » patterns «, weak spin, no clear form to the radiant body and no ability to maintain it. (19, emp. added)

When another elemental forms that fits the » pattern « of that particular fragment, it will return to the physical in search of more sensation. (17, emp added)

Just as with the term ‘subtle’, pattern and complexity get a fuller treatment in The Holographic Universe:

In the past decade science has discovered that many chaotic phenomena are not as disordered as they seem and often contain hidden » patterns « and regularities (177, emp. added)

558 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

‘Chaos theory’ is a double misnomer. In the sense in which it was used during antiquity, chaos properly means void. But even in today’s common usage, ‘chaos theory’ really refers to the mathematical study of hidden levels of order that underlie apparently chaotic phenomena. This informs Talbot’s use of the word ‘pattern’: he is speaking to higher levels of order in the sense of Bohm. This can also be seen in his use of the word ‘subtle’:

Just as the physical body is subordinate to the etheric, the etheric body is subordinate to the astral/emotional body, the astral/emotional to the mental, and so on, says Gerber, with each body functioning as the tem- plate for the one before it. Thus the » subtler « the layer of the energy field in which an image or thought manifests, the greater its ability to heal and reshape the body. (188, emp. added)

What Talbot is getting at is something like morphic field theory popularized by Rupert Sheldrake, according to which physical reality is but content to the form of energetic reality; energy organizes matter, and higher levels of energy organize lower levels. The Holographic Universe never mentions Sheldrake or morphic fields. But Bohm acknowledged the compatibility, suggesting that his own concepts applied to biology would be ‘very similar to what Sheldrake calls a morphogenetic field and morphic resonance’ (Lemley 2000). And Bohm’s collaborator Basil Hiley refers to them by name in Hiley (2002), saying the quantum potential is ‘reminiscent of the morphogenetic fields’. Talbot continues:

Similarly, this same dynamic linkage between mental images, the energy field, and the physical body may be one of the reasons imagery and visualization can also heal the body. It may even help explain how faith and meditation on religious images enable stigmatists to grow nail-like fleshy protuberances from their hands. Our current scientific understanding is at a loss to explain such a biological capacity, but again, constant prayer and meditation may cause such images to become so impressed in the energy field that the constant repetition of these» patterns « is finally given form in the body. (188, emp. added)

And on page 189:

Physicist Tiller agrees. “The thoughts that one creates generate » patterns « at the mind level of nature. So we see that illness, in fact, eventu- ally becomes manifest from the altered mind patterns through the rachet effect—first, to effects at the etheric level and then, ultimately, at the

559 Clifton Strange

physical level [where] we see it openly as disease.

And again Talbot connects this with the ‘subtle’:

In a wide-ranging speculation Tiller even suggests that the universe itself started as a » subtle « energy field and gradually became dense and material (189, emp. added)

Talbot’s discussion of Bohm’s higher levels of order involves repeated use of the word ‘pattern’. The term appears in The Holographic Universe in the context of interference patterns, which are the basis for holography in general. But for Talbot, the term ‘pattern’ has a distinctly Bohmian sense. As Talbot writes:

As soon as Bohm began to reflect on the hologram he saw that it too provided a new way of understanding » order «. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference » patterns « recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disordered to the naked eye. Both possess » orders « that are hidden or enfolded in much the same way that the » order « in a plasma [14] is enfolded in the seemingly random behavior of each of its electrons. But this was not the only insight the hologram provided. (46, emp. added)

Pattern is linked with order, and order exceeds what is immediately visible (what Bohm calls the ‘explicate’) and continues into higher and higher unseen levels (the ‘implicate’). The Holographic Universe is a useful guide to how the terms ‘pattern’ and ‘complexity’ may be used in The Key. The Master of the Key uses the term ‘subtle’ without explaining it; but Talbot presents the term alongside physical characteristics, i.e. higher frequency and order. The Master of the Key also uses the terms ‘pattern’ and ‘complexity’ without explaining them further; but Talbot uses ‘pattern’ in the context of a concrete phenomenon, i.e. interference patterns, and alongside Bohm’s holographic concepts of order against which the term ‘complexity’ can easily be read. We already know that the Master of the Key reads over shoulders [15]; which is perhaps to say, Strieber has read many books including The Holographic Universe, this being the likely source from which the brain-probing anecdote has come along with basic concepts and even terminology. But there is still more overlap: as we shall see, the Master of the Key bizarrely takes a stand in a partisan physics debate compatible with Bohm’s; and the physics of consciousness in The Key corresponds neatly to that of Bohm in The Holographic Universe.

560 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

Quantum Mechanics as a ‘Partial’ Theory

One of the more opaque statements in The Key appears on page 20 in connection with quantum mechanics:

This can become a scientifically valid means of communication? It already is, even here. Although you do not presently understand the true meaning of indeterminacy, what you refer to as quantum physics offers a useful partial view of the inner workings of the physical world. […] (20)

The use of the word ‘partial’ here is an odd one. On its face it suggests that the ‘view’ in question is somehow not complete or is lacking something. An ordinary reader might well gloss the word in context to simply mean that an imperfect Mankind aspiring to ultimate scientific knowledge has still not got it completely right. But sensitive to word choice, the same reader might ask: why use ‘partial’ and not ‘limited’? Or ‘imperfect’, ‘crude’ — even ‘primitive’? The Holographic Universe serves again to clarify what is another strange obscurum in the text. Part of Talbot’s second chapter, “The Cosmos as Hologram”, discusses David Bohm’s dissatisfaction with the prevailing Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics:

Both his sense of the importance of interconnectedness as well as his growing dissatisfaction with several of the other prevailing views in physics caused Bohm to become increasingly troubled by Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory. (38)

Today it is increasingly understood that what we now call the Copenhagen interpretation does not altogether match Niels Bohr’s matured view; which is to say, what passes now under the name ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ was a collection of views that were never completely reconciled, the subjectivist aspect read into the concept of complementarity coming mainly from Heisenberg (Howard 2004). But nevertheless, in the history of quantum mechanics and in Talbot’s narrative, one major adversary of Bohr and the so-called Copenhagen interpretation was none other than Einstein:

In 1935 Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Ros- en published a now famous paper entitled “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” In it they explained why the existence of such twin particles proved that Bohr could not possibly be correct. (36)

561 Clifton Strange

Suddenly one begins to see what was evidently meant by the Master of the Key by ‘partial’. The famous EPR paper reference by Talbot raises the question of the completeness of quantum mechanics. According to Talbot:

As they pointed out, two such particles, say, the photons emitted when positronium decays, could be produced and allowed to travel a significant distance apart. Then they could be intercepted and their angles of polarization measured. If the polarizations are measured at precisely the same moment and are found to be identical, as quantum physics predicts, and if Bohr was correct and properties such as polarization do not co- alesce into existence until they are observed or measured, this suggests that somehow the two photons must be instantaneously communicating with each other so they know which angle of polarization to agree upon. The problem is that according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, let alone travel instantaneously, for that would be tantamount to breaking the time barrier and would open the door on all kinds of unacceptable paradoxes. Einstein and his colleagues were convinced that no “reasonable definition” of reality would permit such faster-than-light interconnections to exist, and therefore Bohr had to be wrong. Their argument is now known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, or EPR paradox for short. (36-37)

This aspect of the EPR critique is easier to understand when the ‘significant distance’ Talbot refers to above is imagined at an astronomical scale. If the two particles were measured at the same instant, one near the sun, for example, and the other here on earth, so long as they correlated, then the information about their states would have to have been passed between one another at a speed faster than light (since it takes roughly eight minutes for light to travel from the sun to earth). Such a non-local interaction would violate the theory of relativity. Natu- rally Einstein was concerned, but this was not the core of the argument. The primary contention of the EPR paper is that the problem with quantum mechanics is that it is not a complete theory. Its incompleteness was why, in Ein- stein’s view, quantum mechanics could lead to difficulties like the one mentioned above. What did Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen mean by ‘complete’? The EPR paper begins:

In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality. […] In quantum mechanics in the case of two physical quantities described by non-commuting operators, the knowledge of one precludes the knowledge of the other. Then either (1) the description of reality given by quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities can-

562 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

not have simultaneous reality. Consideration of the problem of making predictions concerning a system on the basis of measurements made on another system that had previously interacted with it leads to the result that if (1) is false, then (2) is also false. One is thus led to conclude that the description of reality as given by a wave function is not complete.

Complementarity in quantum mechanics entails that certain things cannot be known simultaneously. The two examples most commonly given are position and momentum. In the orthodox view, values for the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot exist simultaneously. At a minimum this is because they cannot be experimentally known, though the interpretations as to the meaning and scope of complementarity run the full gamut of quantum mechanics. The so-called EPR paradox in somewhat caricatured form comes down to this: Taking two particles that originated at the same source, say, from the decay of a single original particle, one can say the momentum for both particles is equal. When it is measured for the first, it is also known for the second. But if the position for the second is also measured, then one knows both position and momentum for the second particle. This contradicts the notion of complementarity; and since it contradicts, Einstein and others felt a complete theory in which all elements of a physical system could be given values had to exist. The issue here, however, (as with most paradoxes) has to do with assumptions. In the case of EPR, two closely related assumptions are at work: locality and separability. As Howard (2009) notes, separability was as much Einstein’s concern as locality. Taking two systems (e.g. particles) very far apart physically and claim- ing that they could still contain information about each other raised the question about whether any systems could ever be considered separate from one another — a necessity when it comes to physics and mathematical description. This fundamental concern about the possibility of scientific description was arguably more important to Einstein than even the causal question of whether there might be ‘spooky action at a distance’. Assuming, then, separability in terms of scientific description, and assuming that information cannot be derived non-locally, that is, about other systems, especially at superluminal velocity, Einstein felt that the wave function in quantum mechanics did not correspond to an objectively real event. It was a statistical approximation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would be found that would allow for predictions to be made in which values could be known for each element of a system in accordance with normal physical intuitions. Needless to say, Einstein’s view is not the one that prevailed in physics. Heisenberg’s interpretation (which has become synonymous with the ‘Copen- hagen interpretation’, a phrase Heisenberg himself coined) prevailed overall. In this interpretation wave function collapse is seen as objectively real: the physical

563 Clifton Strange states measured are literally created by the experimenter/observer and his appa- ratus (cf. Schrödinger’s cat). But this impulse toward an ‘objectively real’ interpretation of the wave function was nevertheless due to the complementary desire on the part of Heisenberg to advance a ‘subjectivist interpretation’ whereby ‘such concepts as ‘objective reality’ have no immediately evident meaning, when they are applied to the situation which one finds in atomic physics’ (Heisenberg, 1955). Bohr, by contrast, never took any position on the objective reality of quantities like position and momentum prior to observation. Bohr’s view seems to be more in line with the famous line from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ (About what cannot be spoken of, one must remain silent.) Howard, summing up Bohr’s position, writes: ‘No wave packet collapse. No antirealism. No subjectivism’ (Howard, 2004).

What does all this mean for The Key? The Master of the Key’s view that quantum mechanics is a ‘useful partial’ theory puts him in rarefied company. On the one hand, ‘useful’ here echoes the statement made everywhere in the literature that quantum mechanics is ‘the most successful theory in the history of science’, always made in the spirit of affirming that whatever its unexplainables, it works, i.e. quantum mechanics is extremely ‘useful’. On the other, the view that quantum mechanics is ‘partial’ in the sense of incomplete puts him squarely in the camp of critics of quantum mechanics like Einstein. More specifically, it also suggests that the Master of the Key holds that the collapse of the wave function is not an objectively real event. We pause here for a note on interpretation. The statement in The Key by the Master of the Key that ‘quantum physics offers a useful partial view of the inner workings of the physical world’ (20) could be another pedantic intonement. Tak- ing the Master of the Key to be a sort of Strieber on steroids, the latter whose authoritative delivery of the latest findings in the scientific literature has been a hallmark of his commentary throughout his career [Strieber even has a high-rank- ing Pentagon general in his novel 2012 implausibly yell in an argument: ‘Well, I read my share of science journals and I say it is!’], we might view this as another instance of the genius of the unconscious. Strieber has programmed his Master of the Key with another factoid, another piece of high learning gleaned from his many sojourns among the science journals. This statement may be nothing more than a meme that on closer analysis has little meaning. Only the Master of the Key’s surprisingly partisan position in this theoretical physics debate is also that of David Bohm, whose physics is the basis for The Ho- lographic Universe. As Talbot notes, Bohm published a textbook called Quantum Theory in 1951. Whitaker in his Einstein, Bohr, and the Quantum Dilemma says of the textbook:

564 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

[It] quickly became recognised as highly authoritative and comprehensive. This book was written largely along orthodox lines - there is, for example a proof or ‘proof’ that quantum theory is inconsistent with hidden variables. But during the writing of this book Bohm became dissatisfied with the views of Copenhagen. (245)

Bohm was therefore not only a leading physicist who was conversant with quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen mold — he was able to write a textbook on it that for a time was a classic in the field. And as Whitaker notes, Bohm in his book touches on the issue of hidden variables. A ‘hidden variables’ theory in the context of theoretical physics is one that advocates that there are hidden variables unacknowledged by quantum theory that would account for all known and observable behavior. Those variables are thought to be precisely what are lacking in the so-called incomplete theory, i.e. what must be supplemented in order to make the theory ‘complete’. Recall that Einstein was of the view that quantum mechanics was incomplete, and therefore a ‘hidden variables’ theory would be one that might potentially satisfy him. For Bohr, Heisenberg, and the Copenhagen school, quantum mechanics was complete so long as you accepted that subatomic reality was fundamentally different than macroscopic reality and not amenable to classical intuitions. In 1952 and henceforward, Bohm independently pursued an approach previously sketched out by de Broglie. As Whitaker writes:

In this approach, one defines the wave-function in the usual way. But in addition there is a particle with a precise position and a precise momentum at all times - hence it follows a specific trajectory as time advances. I would emphasise that this position and momentum exist entirely independently of any measurement. Particle position and trajectory are related to the wave-function. […] But in the de Broglie-Bohm theory, it is statistical all the time; there is a distribution of actual values. We use probability because of our own igno- rance, not because of any indeterminacy in the properties of the particle; these properties themselves are well-defined at all times. (247)

In de Broglie-Bohm theory, there is a wave and a particle. The particle rides the wave somewhat like a schooner on the sea. But in the mathematical rework- ing of quantum mechanics, Bohm isolated a term written Q which to his mind represented quantum potential energy (Hiley 2002, 2010). In addition to the internal energy of the particle, there was an unpredictable (relatively speaking) additional energy that produced non-local effects and strange trajectories. This additional energy was in its way nothing more than additional information avail-

565 Clifton Strange able to the particle indicating where and how it should go in relation to everything else in the universe. The net result is that Bohm’s theory removed the measurement problem from quantum mechanics. It allowed for the actual reality of systems in the absence of observation, while matching in accuracy the calculations of quantum mechanics. Most importantly, it satisfied the EPR criterion of completeness, though contra Einstein it expressly called for nonlocality in terms of interaction and what ultimately was the inseparability of all physical systems. If the Master of the Key’s physics is that of The Holographic Universe and David Bohm, this is certainly support- ed by the fact that for the Master of the Key, quantum mechanics is a ‘partial’ theory. The evolution of Bohm’s ideas over subsequent decades is an interesting one, but one for the purposes of investigating The Key we must leave aside. As Talbot points out, famous experiments by John Bell and later Alain Aspect established non-locality as an experimental fact. But they did not, however, establish inseparability, i.e. Bohm’s wholeness interpretation as the dominant paradigm in quantum mechanics — despite the fact that Bell’s experiments were inspired by Bohm’s thinking. We will focus now on Bohm’s views on consciousness to sketch out their compatibility with The Key. In their 1993 book Wholeness and the Undivided Universe, Bohm and Hiley write:

It is interesting in this context to consider again the meaning of the word ‘subtle’. As stated in chapter 8, section 8.6, this is “rarefied, highly refined, delicate, elusive, indefinable”; its Latin root is sub-texere, which means “finely woven”. This suggest a metaphor for thought as a series of more and more closely woven nets. Each can ‘catch’ a certain content of a corresponding ‘fineness’. The finer nets cannot only show up the details of form and structure of what is ‘caught’ in the coarser nets; they can also hold within them a further content that is implied in the latter. We have thus been led to an extension of the notion of implicate order, in which we have a series of inter-related levels. In these, the more subtle-i.e. ‘the more finely woven’ levels including thought, feeling and physical reac- tions-both unfold and enfold those that are less subtle (i.e. ‘more coarsely woven’). In this series, the mental side corresponds, of course, to what is more subtle and the physical side to what is less subtle. And each mental side in turn becomes a physical side as we move in the direction of greater subtlety.

Again, the word ‘subtle’. What Bohm is getting at with his ideas of the implicate and explicate order is that anything we typically observe in a spacetime context (which is anything we typically observe) emerges out of a prespace (Hiley

566 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

2010). The prespace involves all sorts of relations of the whole to itself via levels of order that along the way produce space and time as local effects. Conscious- ness itself is another name for this relating; consciousness relates and creates order. But consciousness does not belong to some separate sphere. Bohm expressly argues against dualism in Wholeness, and asserts that the ‘subtle’ phenomenon of consciousness is part and parcel of the rest of the universe. It is cut from the same cloth. For Bohm, not only is consciousness a ‘subtle form of matter’, but as Talbot writes:

In fact, Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things. As Bohm puts it, “The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with the electron.” (50)

Consciousness is active form, an instance of the universe’s ongoing self-orga- nization. It not only produces form, but in a way is form itself. Yet it is also has a physical reality. O’Hanlan notes in his superb “Consciousness in The Key: Logical and Energetic” (O’Hanlan 2008) that Strieber seems to advance two simultaneous definitions of consciousness: a logical one and a physical-energetic one, producing a situation according to O’Hanlan ‘as either/or and as complementary in its own way as the wave-particle duality’ (O’Hanlan, 417). We will echo some of his points briefly before asking the question: what is the place of ‘form’ in The Key? For the logical definition, O’Hanlan cites:

How does an intelligent machine become conscious? The instant it realizes that it is not conscious is the instant it becomes conscious. (65)

This is a consciousness-as-emergence definition for O’Hanlan, but one that also involves strict logical contradiction as its setting. It is reminiscent of the tension-of-opposites concept, and also the trope frequently mentioned by Strie- ber of ‘squaring the circle’. This definition of consciousness also has a relationship to complexity: it is implied that self-consciousness is more complex than ordinary consciousness, through the additional reflecting self-relation, which places it squarely in the tradition of logical definitions for consciousness. For the physical-energetic definition, the examples are numerous. The phrase

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‘conscious energy’ alone establishes it, but the energetic aspect can also be bridged to through complexity:

It is the difference between being a plant and being Rembrandt. The plant has a certain fragment of self-awareness, but Rembrandt is vastly complex, a being rich with fully realized talents and self-awareness that makes him a worthy companion in higher form. (18)

There is also the classic subjectivity-as-withdrawal-from-world aspect:

Objective sensation is consciousness. You are within life, but not entirely absorbed in life. Part of you observes yourself from a distance. (26)

But the physical is never lost:

Infinite consciousness is in everything. In your pajama. In my sweater. All knowledge is present in every cell, every spark of fire, bit of trash. (32)

So far everything seems to be very compatible with Bohm: consciousness is part of a continuum, and even has an energetic reality, but perhaps of a higher order of complexity than the ‘physical’. So what about form?

Why is life so common? Because perception is essential to the structure of the universe. If a thing is not perceived, it doesn’t have » form «. Life is thus the mechanism that gives » form « to nature. However, matter need not be perceived by an intelligent creature to have » form «. When it is, different laws apply, because the perception of intelligent creatures influences the » form « of what they perceive by the expectations built into their brains. The universe looks as it does to you, and functions by the laws that you see controlling it, because of the way your brain manages the process of perception. Conscious creatures, however, may control the » form « of the universe. The truly conscious are responsible for the laws that intelligent creatures follow by nature. (46, emp. added)

We can see that in The Key there is a third definition of consciousness overlooked in O’Hanlan, and it is that which gives form. Without Bohm and The Holographic Uni- verse, the Master of the Key’s statements above would look perhaps like a simple throwback to the subjectivist Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics or another iteration of the New Age tenet of mind-making-reality. Indeed, they might also be taken to represent von Neumann/Wigner’s view of the collapse

568 Michael Talbot and “The Key” of the wave function as objectively real and caused by consciousness [16]. But in total, the holographic holism in The Key; the importance of ‘form’ and consciousness’ specific ability to create it; the notion that consciousness is everywhere in the physical world with the privileged example of plasmas; and the notion of ‘conscious energy’, establish that the Master of the Key’s physics of consciousness is very much like that of David Bohm in The Holographic Universe. As Talbot writes:

Because all such things are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer is the observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results, the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory. (50)

Additionally, the notion that perception (giving rise to form) is responsible for our reality, and that the physical make-up of the brain in ‘intelligent creatures’ influences the form of things via the ‘process of perception’ is echoed in Talbot:

According to Pribram this does not mean there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? “Both are real to me, “ says Pribram, “or, if you want to say, neither of them are real.” (55)

And more radically:

The difficulty is also another indication of how radical a revision Bohm and Pribram are trying to make in our way of thinking. But it is not the only radical revision. Pribram’s assertion that our brains construct objects pales beside another of Bohm’s conclusions: that we even construct space and time. The implications of this view are just one of the subjects that will be examined as we explore the effect Bohm and Pribram’s ideas have had on the work of researchers in other fields. (55)

The idea of consciousness conferring form sheds a great deal of light on two different aspects of The Key. For one, the notion that consciousness can increase (in the direction of radiance, for example): how can a creature that is either conscious or not conscious (logical definition), a black-and-white proposition, also be able to gain in consciousness? The answer is the second aspect needing clari- fication: what happens during meditation?

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Any specific recommendations? Paying attention to physical sensation is paying attention to energetic sensation. Being awake to oneself and one’s surroundings increases the intensity of the impressions so that they affect the spin of the electrons that are present in the nervous system. In this context, being awake means being aware of one’s own self while at the same time absorbing impressions from the outside. The increase in spin and enrichment of the complexity of the pattern of being that results brings more and more form to the radiant body. You will remember yourself after your death—who and what you were, why you existed, and what you intend for your future. You will, in short, acquire a true aim, and join the companions of God in their journey toward ecstatic and conscious union with one another and all that is. (17-18)

Consciousness feeling itself (in the manner of objective sensation, cf. earlier definition) confers form upon itself. Order confronts order. And with increasing (applications of) form comes an increasing ‘physical’ reality. Contemplating consciousness, say, through philosophical or scientific analysis is the approach of consciousness through knowledge. The benefits do not accrue to consciousness (as much):

No amount of scientific knowledge of the ‘unconscious’ will provide as much food for the energetic body as true relationship with the Hindu gods. (27)

There is a deep compatibility between the physics of The Key and the physics of Bohm in The Holographic Universe. It includes not only the physics of the hologram, but extends even to Bohm’s and Pribram’s fairly unique views on consciousness — which places The Key’s physics beyond that of even other ‘Bohmians’, i.e. the DGZ school of Bohmian mechanics which rejects the quantum potential early and never gets as far as Bohm’s ruminations on implicate/explicate order and consciousness. How can this be explained? How should we regard a text that on the one hand is presented as revelatory, but on the other seems to reflect and even borrow from an earlier work by someone else?

Other Similarities

There are other points of correspondence between The Key and The Holographic Universe. Here is a non-exhaustive list in no particular order:

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Mankind is one. From The Holographic Universe:

[A]s Bohm puts it, “Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.” (61)

From The Key:

Who were Mohammed and Buddha? Exactly who history portrays them to have been. But to understand what happened to them, you must understand that your entire pantheon of deities is you. God is you. The gods are you. Angels and demons are you. So it was mankind who spoke to Mohammed in his cave. So also, to Buddha under the Bhodi Tree, and to Christ in the desert. Who do you think showed him the cities of the plain? Satan is man, just as God is man. (27-28)

Individualized experiences at death. The Holographic Universe:

That our innermost feelings and desires are responsible for creating the form we assume in the afterlife dimension is evident in the experiences of other NDEers. (246)

In The Key:

And what of death itself? What should we expect? A death is as unique as a face. You die into your expectations. But you generally survive them. (19)

On the ‘life review’ and feelings after death. The Holographic Universe:

During this instantaneous and panoramic remembrance NDEers reex- perience all the emotions, the joys and the sorrows, that accompanied all of the events in their life. More than that, they feel all of the emotions of the people with whom they have interacted as well. They feel the happi- ness of all the individuals to whom they’ve been kind. If they have com- mitted a hurtful act, they become acutely aware of the pain their victim felt as a result of their thoughtlessness. (249)

In The Key:

At first, after you die, you begin to taste of the most exquisite pleasure.

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It is extremely intimate, extremely personal, and as it builds, you begin to live in more and more of your lives. You taste the food and smell the air, you kiss your kisses and love your loves, and it gets more and more beautiful and more and more innocent. And then, suddenly, your hand is opening the gas canister—and you are swept with all the fear that made you do it, the primitive tribalism that you indulged to monstrous and dis- torted proportions. You feel sick with a filthy disease, you feel agonizingly ugly, as you kneel at the feet of those you destroyed. (44)

The Sufis. The Holographic Universe:

In a notion that parallels Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders, the Sufis believed that, despite its phantasmal qualities, the afterlife realm is the generative matrix that gives birth to the entire physical universe. (261 and other repeated mentions)

In The Key:

Although the great Sufis have, some of them, somewhat, surrendered to God. (28)

You will find the science of ascension in the dancing of the Sufis (39)

The Kingdom of Heaven. From The Holographic Universe:

More than that, each of us contains the location of heaven.

From The Key:

You can go to heaven immediately, right now, with your next breath. You can remain there forever, even while living this life. How? Surrender. To whom? The kingdom is within you. (60)

Mankind’s extinction: From The Holographic Universe:

Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction. (49)

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From The Key:

The future of mankind is either to ascend or go extinct. (68)

Cosmos full of non-physical life. From The Holographic Universe:

The truth is that we simply do not have the information necessary to assess how many nonphysical species are sharing our own space. Although the physical cosmos may turn out to be an ecological Sahara, the spaceless and timeless expanses of the inner cosmos may be as rich with life as the rain forest and the coral reef. (282)

From The Key:

Intelligent life is extremely rare because planets which can sustain complex bodies are extremely rare. Life, however, is common. It is not just planetary. Life is ubiquitous. It is a part of the essential structure of reality—the nervous system, as it were, of the body of God. There is much energetic life, for example, that is not intelligent. Life need not be planet-bound at all. (46)

Midwives to our birth. Talbot quotes Strieber on page 300:

Strieber, for one, believes this is precisely why UFOs are here: “I think that they are probably midwifing our birth into the nonphysical world—which is their origin. […]”

Now this from The Key:

You human beings are right on the edge of becoming a conscious species. This is why we are here. We’re midwives to your birth, as you yourself have speculated. (47)

Finally, in closing this list of signs of Michael Talbot’s possible influence on The Key:

That’s an even more clever answer—what’s your name, anyway? If I said Michael? (22)

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Conclusion

The Holographic Universe is not the sole influence on The Key. The sheer number of influences, an embarrassment of riches, makes a banal hypothesis like plagiarism impossible. The evidence suggests that The Holographic Universe was one source of many put toward a great unconscious synthesis to answer questions pressing in Strieber’s mind: what is the soul? is reincarnation real? was there a past civiliza- tion? and so on. One by one the legs are being kicked out from under The Key. Ideas once appearing convincingly original, even revelatory are showing up elsewhere by the dozen. One now wonders whether there is a single original idea in The Key that does not appear among Strieber’s prior public speculations, wisdom received from the visitors, or sources within his intellectual milieu such as The Holographic Universe. For instance: On a recent 2013 New Year special Strieber tells of visitors saying not all humans have a soul, but all may have one. This instantly calls to mind the idea in The Key that human beings participate in ‘conscious energy’ to differing degrees, raising the question whether this idea came from the visitors or the Master of the Key (or both) (or neither). But then one discovers that it is also found in Gurdjieff, the Gurdjieff Foundation being where Strieber learned to meditate. From that obscure source, Wikipedia:

The Fourth Way teaches that humans are not born with a soul, and are not really Conscious, but only believe they are Conscious because of the socialization process. A person must create/develop a soul through the course of his life by following a teaching which can lead to this aim, or he will “die like a dog,” and that men are born asleep, live in sleep and die in sleep, only imagining that they are awake. The system also teaches that the ordinary waking “consciousness” of human beings is not consciousness at all but merely a form of sleep, and that actual higher Conscious- ness is possible. (Wikipedia, “The Fourth Way”)

It is only a short step to say as in The Key that one could maintain his consciousness after death through the power of attention:

You are saying that we don’t all have souls? I am saying that you are not all discreet [sic] radiant beings, but all participate to some degree or other in conscious energy. To remain a separate being after death, there must exist the ability to maintain the structure of the radiant body by the action of attention. This is why we have been so insistent that you meditate. Otherwise, we will lose you when you die and

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we don’t want that. If a being cannot self-maintain after the elemental body no longer does it automatically, it is absorbed into the flux of conscious energy. You go into the light, as it were. (16-17)

and:

How does a person evolve this radiant body? The imprinting of essence with experience requires effort and attention. It is the object of all ‘paths’ and ‘ways’ to higher consciousness. It is the object of real prayer. To begin, you must meditate. Who does not meditate, disintegrates. (17)

In the same Wikipedia article, one also sees mention of Gurdjieff’s Law of Three and Law of Seven. These motifs, too, appear in The Key:

Which is why the visitors communicate with me in Masonic terms? Precisely. Three is three and seven is seven. The craft is God’s plan for freedom. (34) [17]

Strieber’s own relationship to The Key seems to be one of a certain distance. On the one hand his attitude has been pragmatic, presenting it to the public as what to him is an important text; on the other straightforwardly promoting it for the profit motive, up to and including the ill-advised 2011 edition whose editorial shortcomings when pointed out produced a strange theory of ‘censorship’ from a confused and panic-stricken Strieber. Strieber has not renounced his identity and adopted every one of the book’s precepts; he has not abandoned his life to worship at the feet of a street urchin in India, and there is no sign that he has abandoned his center-right Cold War-era politics for the Master of the Key’s anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist radicalism. Strieber’s ambivalence toward his own text may be one of the points arguing in favor of the text originating in some independent event, barring that other banal hypothesis, cynical fabrication. Nevertheless, the fact that so much of The Key seems to be composed of Strie- ber’s previous pronouncements reworked — along with concepts taken from elsewhere, similarly reworked in order to appear more brilliant, more profound — suggests the The Key cannot be taken at face value as a ‘true encounter’.

Postscript

In the comedy of hypotheses to emerge in the UFO era is the co-creation theory. From this point of view, the UFO phenomenon is the co-creation of the

575 Clifton Strange participant and some independent X, the boundary between which can never be determined. This theory (without knowing it) owes much to the controversies in anthropology more than thirty years ago as to whether there can ever be an objective observer entirely separate from the culture being described, whether the anthropologist can ever be free from cultural biases when trying to record the other culture. This in turn bears a kinship to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics as well the popularization of the general notion of truth being ‘relative’. This latter owes to the emergence of cultural relativism in Bible studies in Germany in the 1800s. The co-creation theory suffers from endless Panglossian explanations as to what precisely creates: one ego, two egos, the unconscious mind, the collective unconscious, archetypes, the Imaginal. Minimally, it seems to require a type of magical thinking in which the co-created reality is called up out of the ether in a way that recognizes no rules or combinations. At it worst it is used to imply a dualism in which there is this world and another perfectly homogeneous world constructed out of fantasy (i.e. the Imaginal) which is indistinguishable from the mental world other than that it is real. At the heart of this theory, or rather in the hearts of its proponents, is a desire to cheapen and to simplify the UFO ‘phenomenon’. Merging with the interests of the hallucinatory drug culture, co-creation is seized upon by those who are as if desperate to say: ‘it’s all in the mind, man!’ Drug-induced hallucinations are equated with the contact experience and everyday experience and all are considered exactly identical — all real, that is, unreal to the same degree. Whatever the many failures of ‘co-creation’, Strieber’s The Key does seem to lend itself to this perspective. If there was an independent event of some kind, if some X did appear at his hotel room door one night, the many instances of ideas and phrases in The Key from Strieber’s earlier work and elsewhere show that The Key was at least co-created. Of course, this could be taken further: the same could be said of The Key that skeptics and debunkers say of all channeled material, viz. its author is ‘the genius of the unconscious’. Strieber tapped into the deep power of his mind to resolve difficulties facing him and produce an ingenious synthesis. His unconscious mind produced a work of inspired genius in the same way artistic works and scientific discoveries have been made for ages. This latter would certainly be consistent with Strieber’s personality. Lurking around the edges is a sort of desire to be know-it-all, master of the scientific literature, speaking with authority on topics with which he likely has consider- ably less than expert familiarity. Is The Key Strieber’s own unconscious attempt to be a sort of smartest kid in the class by creating a Grand Unified Theory of the Paranormal? Did his ambition require that he borrow from Talbot’s The Holographic Universe in order to accomplish that end, synthesizing Talbot’s ideas but leav- ing traces behind in the form of digested remnants? That Strieber is brilliant is

576 Michael Talbot and “The Key” undeniable. But his brilliance is itself now also a part of his contact mythology, appearing everywhere from his wife Anne confessing under hypnosis that she thought the visitors wanted him because of his mind to Strieber’s own comment to the visitors in Communion: “You’ll ruin a beautiful mind!” Thus its role can be questioned.

But what if an X did show up in his hotel room that night? As usual, the ‘reality’ of the contact phenomenon is what holds the door open. If there were no contact phenomenon, Strieber’s The Key would fall under its own weight like so many divinely inspired books before such as the Book of Mormon, whose angelic pronouncements just happened to perfectly correspond to Joseph Smith’s idiolect. The Key is full of phrases and formulations that predate the hotel room ‘true encounter’. They appear variously in Strieber’s own writings or in an- ecdotes he has related in interviews. It is only the reality of the contact phenomenon in general, and its strangeness, that merits giving The Key any further thought. There is at least one other way to look at Strieber’s creation of The Key, one compatible with the co-creation perspective as well as the evidence but not suffering from the willy-nilly formlessness of a creation out of an Imaginal real. This point of view involves two postulates:

1. The simplistic view of time as a straight line is abandoned. As has been known in relativity for a hundred years there is no universal Now. Rather there are different nows depending on one’s relative speed and position. This means that there is no such thing as time travel per se; instead, whenever one travels in time, even ahead by ten minutes, one is also traveling in space. (This is also trivially true because the earth moves during that ten minutes.) Just as importantly, but perhaps more profoundly, whenever one travels in space in any way not re- stricted by the speed of light and the usual relativistic effects, one is traveling in time. If aliens are winking out of existence in one place and re-emerging in another, even if both places trivially share the same ‘present’ in a timekeeping sense, time travel has occurred. Extraterrestrials showing up from some other planet, some other dimension, or some other reality might automatically be fitting into a timestream that is exoteric to them.

2. Even in what is considered ‘space travel’, therefore, the difficulties expected in time travel may exist. What might this mean? It might suggest that just traveling in ‘space’ necessarily curtails the possible extent of contact because it is also a matter of fitting into time. Strieber has made much in recent years of the principle of least action in order to assert that time travel is possible. [18] Might the problems associated with an interaction governed by the principle of least action be at the center of contact? After all, there are experiences are not successfully

577 Clifton Strange written into memory, a sense of strangeness or discontinuity, memories of being seemingly being in two different places (timestreams) at once.

Contemplating the principle of least action in the context of time travel and space travel leads to one powerful corollary: any effect by an external influence will necessarily appear to have been created by causal necessity. In other words, any change made from ‘outside’, because of the suturing effect of the principle of least action, must reflect itself in a way properly integrated into the causal chain. It will appear plausible, even inevitable. If it did not appear so, the principle of least action would not be doing its job. If some outside agency wanted to communicate ‘truths’ to Strieber, but was limited by the principle of least action, everything that was said would have to resemble or be composed of elements of the past, up to and including retro- causation. The event would have to be as indistinguishable as possible from the chain of events that had led up to the moment of interaction. At stake here is not some latter-day concept of temporal paradox, lateralized to include space, but imagining what might be a real physical process. The huge gaps in memory in some abductees may not be only due to aliens wiping their memories in order to conceal the interaction. The mind may itself be unable to reconcile its memories from a different time-domain since remembering itself is a kind of integration (of one type of past into one type of present). Perhaps the degree to which one is able to remember and/or interact with the visitors is precisely the degree to which the consciousness involved is extra-temporal. In other words, consciousness may intrinsically possess a limited degree of freedom when it comes to the efforts of the principle of least action. If a true state of affairs had to be communicated to Strieber, that communication might involve the pressing into service of ideas and expressions Strieber already had in what by comparison was a rough form. Thus a whole continuum of contact anomalies may be explained: from Robbert van den Broeke’s strange photos containing images taken straight from Billy Meier’s hoaxes; to Meier’s hoaxes themselves in and around real contact; to Linda Cortile’s efforts to hoax Budd Hopkins in and around her own real contact; to crop circle hoaxers who later confess they were under a kind of direction. It also reaches to mathematical equations written in a trace state by Stan Romanek, including the Drake equa- tion, which for being outside of Romanek’s experience and education level still do not add anything ‘new’ to human knowledge. The same goes for Romanek’s photographing a hybrid child in front of witnesses — the image disappeared from the camera though the girl had been seen by many. One might think here that the ‘damage’ was done: the girl had been seen, and that was more direct evidence of her reality than any photo might provide. But if consciousness does possess a limited degree of freedom, in this particular case, the photo disappear-

578 Michael Talbot and “The Key” ing from the camera might have been the principle of least action suturing the wound and again, in this particular case, erasing the consciousnesses involved was not necessary. This tendency toward self-negation, which is rendered homogeneous in esoteric accounts of the ‘Trickster’ or in bad applications of Jungian archetypal thinking, would in this scenario be a heterogeneous process with a different reach depending on circumstances.

Is this entire explanation an example of obscurum per obscurius? One is perhaps reminded of Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Second Stain”: ‘I am going far to screen you, Lady Hilda.’ If an X did not appear at Strieber’s door that night, then The Key falls from being a document of revelation, a ‘sacred text’ (as Strieber himself has called it) to mere literature. It retains its exquisite elegance of expression and its visionary qualities. But its relation to an intrinsic truth vanishes. If X did appear, then the truth of that ‘true encounter’ exists as an unknowable thing-in-itself, as if something cut out of a photograph that is discernible only by its absence. The Key’s words are as if a swirling ’round a hole, a Lorenz attractor of sorts, coupled to a reality they can never touch. Of course, the problem is each abductee seems to have his or her own X. Each encounter brings with it its own cosmic pantheon of different-looking beings in different configurations of power and supremacy. Different apocalyptic visions are given as inevitable futures: nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse, solar flares, earthquakes. Different ideas about God and reality are passed off as the final, conclusive truth. If The Key is a revelatory document, it may be just one among many. If its sweep- ing worldview is not the grand organized system it purports to be, but another fragment of an unknowable picture — then very far from being a ‘true encounter’, for so brilliantly presenting itself as the truth, The Key leads us to a place of absolute aporia.

Notes

[1] Whatever can be said about Strieber’s Catholicism, he is not an ordinary Cath- olic viewing the ‘visitors’ through the lens of Catholic dogma. His presentation of the visitors is too complex and multi-sided. Though he periodically returns to the question as to whether they are ‘angels’ or ‘demons’, this seems done in order to more generally question the meaning of the visitors, i.e. their purpose and ultimate moral or ethical nature, not whether they correspond to this or that category in the Catholic pantheon of otherworldly entities.

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[2] Interestingly, Strieber gets this wrong in ‘Michael’s Gift’:

This was Michael’s poetic and yet accurate way of expressing the sig- nificance of what physicists call string theory, which postulates that all subatomic particles are actually short vibrating strings of energy embedded in higher dimensions and that what we call “reality” is in hyperspace no more substantial than a vibration.

In fact, it was not string theory that Talbot is describing in The Holographic Universe at all, but the Bohm Interpretation (BI) as it was developed by Bohm along with his notions of implicate/explicate order. One is reminded of Einstein’s term Ge- lehrsamkeit here, which he used in criticizing his own EPR paper. The ease with which Strieber passes off his erudition or booklearning (as the term might be trans- lated in keeping with Einstein’s sense) and yet still is completely wrong may be part of a pattern — a desire to be master of explanations. This may inform the creation of The Key.

[3] Talbot’s personal mission is clear given that his other books Mysticism and the New Physics (1980) and Beyond the Quantum (1986) also try to base the supernatural in physics but without the holographic angle.

[4] The above is available online as a PDF entitled “The Holographic Universe: Does Objective Reality Exist?” Date unknown.

[5] Indeed, the line from Blake appears in Bekenstein’s 2003 article (60), and its use in the holographic literature may well predate Talbot.

[6] Given what we have seen of Strieber’s familiarity with The Holographic Universe, this statement seems very questionable.

[7] What is remarkable — and telling — is that this medical anecdote is used in The Holographic Universe to explain what Pribram was reacting against. On pages 12-13, according to Talbot, Pribram’s mentor Lashley was never able to find any evidence of the ‘engram’ Penfield theorized and was unable to repeat the effects of Penfield’s brain-probing. Lashley (and Pribram) rejected the evidence offered by Penfield’s experiment which in any case purports to show the opposite of the holographic approach, viz. that memory is embedded in local structures in the brain. Talbot goes on to mention a different experiment in which parts of the brains of trained rats were removed — with the rats still able to act according to their earlier training. Thus, Pribram later developed his holographic model of brain function to account for this latter type of evidence and not the Penfield

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brain-probing. As Talbot writes:

What was startling was that not only had Lashley failed to produce any evidence of the engram, but his research actually seemed to pull the rug out from under all of Penfield’s findings. The probing of brain areas to elicit specific memories is contrary to the holographic model.

This manner in which the brain-probing meme shows up in its opposite context in The Key suggests unconscious appropriation by Strieber, especially given the way he wildly mischaracterized The Holographic Universe’s physics in Breakthrough.

[8] The term ‘subtle body’ seems to come out of yoga. Cremo in his The Forbidden Archaeologist gives it as a translation of linga sharira, though this translation appears debatable. A recent book on the history of yoga in America has the title The Sub- tle Body (Syman 2010). The term ‘subtle body’ also appears in Aleister Crowley (Crowley 1982). It goes at least as far back as G.R.S. Mead’s The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition published in 1919.

[9] The term ‘radiant body’, while it might well come to Strieber via Talbot as a variation on ‘subtle body’, does exist in the esoteric literature. It appears in G.R.S. Mead’s The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition published in 1919 in the second chapter, “The Radiant Body”. Mead was a member of Madame Blav- atsky’s Theosophical Society, and was Blavatsky’s personal secretary.

[10] On page 273, Talbot uses the term ‘subtler dimensions’ to describe the separate realm of subtle energy. The phrase appears in his discussion of so-called ‘light beings’. Though ‘light beings’ are not named in The Key, ‘radiant beings’ are named, characterized by having a ‘radiant body’ formed of ‘conscious energy’. Interestingly, on the same page the word ‘ecstasy’ appears in a Talbot quote from George Russell.

[11] This section surprisingly provides a direct glimpse of what the so-called Master of the Key was referring to when he is to have said: ‘But the physics and electronics involved in communicating with intelligent energy is very subtle […] The devices needed to make your beginning are already sold in stores’ (40, emp. added). Talbot’s chapter “Seeing Holographically” is spent describing exactly this effort by certain researchers to see ‘subtle energy’ using electronic devices (as if in answer to The Key’s question).

[12] Interestingly, in the Jan. 4, 2013 issue of Science it was announced that tem- peratures below absolute zero have been reached.

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[13] Ecstasy is the central concept in The Key, appearing thirty-seven times in one form or another (Zhenzhou 2011). Here Strieber is already naming it, associating with heat and a lack of ‘upper limit’ long before the Master of the Key introduces him to the concept.

[14] Talbot’s use of the term ‘plasma’ here also dovetails with The Key. The word appears twice in The Key: on page 41 and 59. In one case it is implied that the soul is a plasma; in the other that ‘energetic beings’ may be detected using instru- ments that detect plasmas. It is worth noting that Bohm’s most important early work was in the physics of plasmas (Whitaker 244).

[15] From The Key:

The Meister Eckhart? How did you know I was interested in that? I read over shoulders, child. A bad habit of mine. (67)

[16] von Neumann’s interpretation is summed up in Whitaker’s helpful if somewhat simply written Einstein, Bohr, and the Quantum Dilemma. Calling it the Prince- ton interpretation, Whitaker writes that von Neumann noted that because the wave function could be generalized to include the entire universe, the so-called Heisenberg cut (the line drawn between observable and observer) had to be made at the ‘ego’. As Whitaker notes, however:

So full responsibility for collapse is put onto the observer - in the capacity of abstract ego’. Note that, in as direct a comparison as may be made, Bohr would allow measurement to be accomplished by any macroscopic object in a measurement chain. For von Neumann such objects could be treated quantum-mechanically - until one reached the human observer. The importance of observers has been widely discussed, particularly by one of today’ s greatest theoretical physicists, John Wheeler. If we should say that nothing really happened till wave-functions could be collapsed and definite physical results achieved, does that mean that the Universe had to wait for observers to evolve before physics could start? (Astro- physicists may be no more happy with von Neumann than with Bohr!) And who could collapse them - prehistoric man? a child? or, since one is talking in terms of experiments, does it have to be a trained physicist, and if so is a PhD required or just a BSc? In the next chapter we shall meet Schrodinger’s famous cat - can it collapse its own wave-function? (199)

582 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

von Neumann’s interpretation is of special interest because it drives Strieber’s “The Open Doors”. One gets the impression from Strieber’s repeated mention of von Neumann and the problem of the visitors that he does not see von Neu- mann’s position as just one of many QM interpretations; he also does not seem aware that it is now regarded as among the least correct, partly because of devel- opments in understanding quantum decoherence. It is interesting to note that at least according to Whitaker, the view that ‘consciousness’ directly collapses the wave function by choosing one particular branch comes out of Wigner, who worked with von Neumann at Princeton. A subtle shade of difference separates the two’s views: von Neumann evidently maintained the emphasis on measurement, implicating ‘consciousness’ only insofar as it was possessed by an observer taking measurements. Wigner on the other hand added consciousness as its own variable to mathematical equations. If Whitaker is correct here, it would seem as if like Bohr, von Neumann’s position may have been mistaken by History for the slightly stronger view held by one of his close colleagues. Strieber’s “The Open Doors” might in turn owe more to Wigner’s physics than to von Neumann’s.

[17] A treatment of Gurdjieff and Strieber would go beyond the scope of this paper. But it is interesting to note in passing some of Gurdjieff’s comments on life after death and reincarnation:

“But if a struggle begins in him, and particularly if there is a definite line in this struggle, then, gradually, permanent traits begin to form themselves, he begins to ‘crystallize.’ “But crystallization is possible on a right foundation and it is possible on a wrong foundation. ‘Friction,’ the struggle between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ can easily take place on a wrong foundation. For instance, a fa- natical belief in some or other idea, or the ‘fear of sin,’ can evoke a terribly intense struggle between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and a man may crystallize on these foundations. But this would be a wrong, incomplete crystallization. Such a man will not possess the possibility of further development. In order to make further development possible he must be melted down again, and this can be accomplished only through terrible suffering. “Crystallization is possible on any foundation. Take for example a brigand, a really good, genuine brigand. I knew such brigands in the Caucasus. He will stand with a rifle behind a stone by the roadside for eight hours without stirring. Could you do this? All the time, mind you, a struggle is going on in him. He is thirsty and hot, and flies are biting him; but he stands still.

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“Another is a monk; he is afraid of the devil; all night long he beats his head on the floor and prays. Thus crystallization is achieved.

Note the frequent and unmistakable use of the words ‘crystallize’ and ‘crystallization’. On page 48 in The Key in the discussion of what happens after death:

When they die, they will see that they have crystallized imperfections in themselves by the indulgence of self-will. They will suffer the fire of love, as I have already described it. Some of them will die in eternity and be part of you no more. Others will go on to become companions of God.

[18] Strieber returns to the principle of least action again and again in order to suggest that time travel might be possible. He does this in order to question the popular science-fiction-inspired understanding of extraterrestrial contact as simple interaction with interplanetary visitors. However, he also takes the view that time travel might explain some of the ‘high strangeness’ of close encounters. On a 2006 Dreamland interview with Dr. Lynne Kitei, Strieber suggests that the principle of least action might be constraining the ability of some of these ‘visitors’ to make contact. The point here in this Postscript is broader: the principle of least action can come into play not simply within a linear-time scenario of ‘time travel’ and its paradoxes, but rather any time something from ‘outside’ tries to integrate into a closed system of reality. Taking Bohm’s emphasis on wholeness, one can suppose a thing only ‘exists’ as the sum of its relationships, to other things and to the whole. Introducing a new thing into the system from ‘outside’ is in a sense introducing a relationless object into the system. There would be perhaps only a localized ability to integrate, by force. It is possible to imagine a resistance against this foreign object that is quite natural to the system. For example, filling a container with water and sealing the lid constitutes just such a closed system. Teleporting a golf ball into the container would instantly create a kind of pressure and counter-pressure, a local disturbance affecting all water molecules displaced but also an attempt to restore itself to original conditions by ejecting the ball as foreign body. Kept within the boundaries of the container, it is unable to do so until the ball teleports back out. The water fills back in keeping to the original set of relationships as closely as possible, the past disturbance no longer existing except perhaps as a mangled memory. The sense of discontinuity, by way of a break in the temporal form of experience, is often the first thing contactees perceive and may reflect and result from consciousness’ limited degree of freedom.

584 Michael Talbot and “The Key”

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Links

Bekenstein, Jacob. “Information in the Holographic Universe.” Scientific American http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

Braun, et al. “Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom.” http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/52

Casteel, Sean. “Interview with Whitley Strieber.” http://www.seancasteel.com/ws2.htm

Crowley, Aleister. Magick Without Tears. http://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/

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Gurdjieff, G. I. “Gurdjieff on Reincarnation” from P. D. Ouspensky: http://www.sott.net/article/108570-Gurdjieff-on-Reincarnation

Hiley, Basil. “Some Remarks on the Evolution of Bohm’s Proposals for an Alternative to Standard Quantum Mechanics.” http://www.bbk.ac.uk/tpru/RecentPublications.html

Howard, Don. “Revisiting the Einstein-Bohr Dialogue” http://www.science20.com/don_howard/revisiting_einsteinbohr_dialogue

Lemley et al. “Heresy”. Discover Magazine http://discovermagazine.com/2000/aug/featheresy

Strieber, Whitley. “Missing Time and the Future.” Whitley’s Journal, Unknown- country.com, 19 Jul 2006. http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/missing-time-and-future

Talbot, Michael. “The Holographic Universe: Does Objective Reality Exist?” http://spirit-of-one.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/holography_03.pdf

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