In recent years, our scientists have discovered special sources of light in which there is only one wave length and in which all waves are aligned together to form a very harmonious condition called coherent light. Most of us are already familiar with this light under the name laser light, and we have come to know that it is a form of concentrated light that does not diffuse in the way that ordinary light does and, because of this, such a beam of light is able to travel long distances without loss of power and without losing its sharpness of definition. But this aspect of coherent light is not the one which is of primary interest in this discussion, although it is a necessary part of it.

The object of this essay is rather to draw attention to another phenomenon which has come out of the use of coherent light, or laser beam, and this is the principle of the holographic image or hologram. The reason for being interested in this process is that it defines principles of the behaviour of light waves which may be a valuable pointer to the way our mind nature functions, and the way that such minds interact with one another. When a beam of coherent light is divided into two parts which, later on, meet and interact together to form what is called an interference pattern, or the hologram, it becomes the source of several fruitful analogies which offer new models of the function of the mind. So we will only be using the physical hologram as a starting point to suggest the manner in which thought waves, rather than light waves, may work together both in our individual and universal natures.

To begin with we will look closely at the way in which this physical hologram is formed so that the mechanics of the process become clear enough for us to use in our further analogies. On the left side of the diagram we see the source of coherent light is a laser beam.

This beam passes to a half mirror where it is divided into two parts; one part continues on its way unaltered and is focused onto a photographic plate, while the other part is diverted by mirrors and is focused onto an object, after which, it is then allowed to pass on to meet its other original half-beam on the same photographic plate.

This meeting causes the two beams to interfere with each other as they are photographed on the film. The reason why they interfere rather than harmonise with each other is that, although they started as two exactly similar parts of the same beam of laser light, the fact that one of the halves of this beam has encountered an object on its way to the photographic plate has caused a distortion in this beam which is not present in the other beam. The nature of the distortion caused by the object is thus registered as the nature of the distortions caused when the two beams come together again. Such a meeting of waves which are slightly out of step with each other causes another set of waves to be set up which emanate from each point of discord or interference. All these very subtle interference wavelets thus form a pattern which registers the ‘grating effect’ that the one beam has on the other.

What happens now, is that, instead of a photograph of the object being produced on the plate, which we would expect in an ordinary photograph, we get a photograph of all the tiny squeaks and bangs caused by the first half of the beam having a difference of opinion with the second half of the beam. The pattern caused by this argument, called an interference pattern, turns out to be nothing like the pattern of the argument itself. This photograph is known as the hologram and appears to be a series of meaningless abstract shapes. It is therefore not a photograph for us to use if we wish to record the object in question but, strangely, it is more of an internal memorandum for the use of the light waves themselves in a language that we cannot understand. Yet there is a way in which this memorandum can be deciphered again.

If we wish to find out what the object was that the beams of light are having their argument about, it is found that we must use the same original source of coherent light that caused the hologram to be formed.

If we direct this specific light through the interference pattern on the photographic plate the language of the object of the light beams is again converted into the visual language of the object so that its image is reproduced again in a form that is recognisable. There are fringe benefits in this reproduction which are beyond what we expect from an ordinary photograph. It seems that there is such a concentration of information about the object in this holographic method of photography that a spread of detail is reproduced when we apply the coherent light, which causes the image to take on a more three-dimensional quality than normal. The spread of the information about the object being more informative than that of an ordinary camera, seems to tell us more about the solidity of the shapes.

However, it is not this three-dimensional ability either, that holds the most useful analogies for our purposes, but rather it is the way in which the two beams from the same source work together. The first part of the beam which remains unchanged as it meets the photographic plate is known as the 'reference beam', while the second half of the beam which is led to encounter the object is called the 'working beam' or the 'object beam'. The result of their encounter, which is the hologram itself, has another property which further draws attention to the special form of language in which the hologram is recorded. It is found that if the photograph of the interference pattern is made on a glass plate and the plate is broken into many pieces, each piece will respond to the original coherent light by producing the whole image of the object and not just part of the image as we might expect.

Obviously, the bigger the piece of the hologram in use, the clearer the image will be, but, even so, the fact that every piece of the hologram in some way repeats the information of every part of the hologram is pointing clearly to a principle which is of very great interest.

That the word hologram is used to describe this type of interference pattern indicates that there is a special process at work which gives a holistic effect. The term holistic is applied to events in which every part of the situation is considered to be in resonant response to every other part. It is as if every indivisible part of the whole were telling every other part about its experience, and, at the same time, each of these parts were listening for, and recording, what the other parts had to say.

A very simple analogy is when we say that every drop of the ocean contains the same elements as every other drop, and also contains the same elements as the ocean itself. But the more useful realisation is that the individuals on the photographic plate, which are the grains of the emulsion, are interlinked in a reciprocal way so that all the information of the group is shared, and yet, in which the value of the individual grain is important to the whole. But even this last analogy is misleading, for the essential holographic effect is happening in the light waves themselves before they are recorded on the grains of the photographic emulsion. The clarity of the holistic effect is then limited by the efficiency of the nature of light and the quality of the grain of the photograph.

In the case of water, we notice that if we drop two pebbles into a smooth surface, the ripples spread out and run over one another, creating nodes of interference as they go. But water is such a crude form of wave compared with light that the effect of the secondary waves spreading out from the nodes cannot be detected. When we come to light, the delicacy of response is very much improved, and so this secondary network from the nodes can be recorded. Even so, we know that this process is limited by the fact that the smaller pieces of the broken holographic plate do not give such a clear picture of the whole object.

But we can see that we have started to move in a definite direction of greater efficiency, so that the principle which is called holistic, whereby every part of a body of events is aware of, and sympathetic to, every other part, is gaining in effectiveness as the medium in which it occurs become finer and more completely efficient in response. We must therefore allow ourselves to conjecture that the nature of the waves created by thought in our mental nature is as far beyond light as light is beyond water, in delicacy and efficiency of response, so that the highest level of mind will carry a significance that is so efficient that it is also, by that very efficiency, unable to contain itself locally, and is thus bound to become universal in effect. Universal mind, having no resistance in terms of inefficiency, thus pervades everywhere with vision, understanding and awareness in a way that we humans limit to our immediate contact with one another by such terms as personal space.