What is a holographic microsystem? I will try to explain that. First, however, we take a brief look at the theory behind, and its origin. That brings us far back into the dawn of recorded history, to Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Mighty, also known as the god Thoth of old Egypt. His Greek name, Hermes, gave name to Hermeticism. Whether he were a physical person who really formulated the teaching, or if he only lent his name to it, is beside the point in this discussion; as are the many questions regarding the identification of Hermes with Thoth (not undisputed). A fundamental principle of Hermetic thought, however, is the basis for the holographic paradigm.
"All things are in the universe
and the universe in all things."
(Giordano Bruno, 1591)
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence)
Literature sometimes claims that Hermeticism was born in Ptolemaic Alexandria. That is both right and wrong. It is true that some of its literature was compiled there, and that it was there it came to be called Hermetic; but many of its original ideas are much older, maybe as old as Egyptian civilisation itself.
In Harran (ninth century AD), a people managed to be officially recognised by Islam as a "people of a book", calling themselves Sabians. That name they just adopted, upon the advice of a specialist in Islamic law, because a people with that name is mentioned in the Qur'an. They announced their holy books to be a number of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. In Harran, Hermeticism was subsequently cultivated, and new texts were created.
Rejected by Christianity, Hermeticism, over the time, came to permeate Islam. It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that second only to the usual, authoritative sources, it exerted a dominant influence on Islamic thought.
In Europe, the inflow of new ideas during the Renaissance, not at least via refugees from collapsing Moorish Spain, brought Alchemy from the Arabs. Discredited by vulgar applications, or lack of proper understanding, it is easy today to frown on this discipline. That, however, is unfair. It is the mother of science; and as our own knowledge gradually grows, one by one of its claims have shown to be true. But that is not the point here, Alchemy is another discussion; but along with it, Hermeticism streamed into European thinking. Hard to reconcile with official Christianity, it was more or less forced into a clandestine existence; and into art, where it flourished. When scientific orthodoxy replaced Christian dogma, it survived in various forms of occultism, where it was sometimes (not always) vulgarised and brought away from its cosmological connection.
Science, itself originally a part of Alchemy and Hermetic thinking (Newton, for example, was mainly an Alchemist, not a scientist in the modern sense), soon cut off the ties with its origin, just to become paralysed by its own limiting dogma. It has, however, gradually found its way back to a few of the old ideas, although often incorrectly presented as new and original. As we will see below, a major Hermetic concept has in a tangible way proved itself in genetics; and it is the basis for the hologram, which gave Dennis Gabor a Nobel Prize in physics in 1971.
Hermeticism sees reality as one and whole, with interconnected parts. The relation between the parts and the whole is governed by a principle, which more than anything else characterises this school of thought:
"As above, so below." That sums it up.
We can reverse it too, and say "As below, so above."
Another way to express it is to say that microcosm reflects macrocosm, and the other way around.
In modern science, this is most clearly illustrated by genetics. Every cell contains a set of all the genes of the organism, all information that is required to build up the whole body. You have the whole of yourself in every single cell. Then we can say that a cell is a holographic microsystem of the organism, while the organism is a holographic macrosystem of the cell.
The term "holographic" here denotes a system where every part contains the whole (or a reflection of it). A modern scientific word for an ancient concept.
In India, the cosmology of Hinduism is unmistakably holographic in nature, although, of course, that term is not used. Neither do they talk about Hermeticism. The question whether there is an early connection between Indian and Egyptian thought, or if there are parallel but independent traditions leading to similar results, is beside the point here. It is a fact, however, that Indian philosophy still contains this element, mostly expressed in what we would call religious terms. The Visvasara Tantra expresses it. "What is here is elsewhere."
In old Babylonia, too, thinking was basically holographic; and we find it in old China as well. Even among American Indians and various indigenous peoples. Contemporary western-style science has only fragmentarily stumbled across the holographic idea, without allowing its fundamental paradigm to be affected. There are individual exceptions, however. People as physicist David Bohn (1917 - 1992), and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram (1919-2015), both firmly anchored in the scientific tradition; found that current science left too much unexplained. Independently they both arrived at what we can call a general holographic model instead. Pribram meant that brain is a hologram, Bohn that universe is. Such a model is slowly gaining ground in limited scientific circles, but is still controversial, to say the least.
An interesting point here is that there is nothing new in this model. It is just a description in scientific terms of what has been known and used for millennia. But it was (and is) rejected by a science, which, over the last 200 or so years, has grown its own over-specialised and narrow-minded orthodoxy, where prestige and money mean more than unprejudiced advancement of knowledge and understanding.
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