Moving from observation to participation
How a shift towards a conscious-holographic model of the cosmos can move us from living with agency, attention, and intention
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
— Albert Einstein —
Most people are working with fragmented models of reality. On the one hand we have science explaining the mechanisms of it, but also largely excluding lived experience. On the other hand we have spiritual and esoteric systems accounting for all the weird and wonderful aspects of our lived experience, but are often dismissed as woo-woo and irrelevant for us modern people. And somewhere in the middle, Philosophy oscillates between the two but without really resolving the gap. The result? A lack of a shared language for not only understanding the reality and the material world we live in.
More importantly, it also leaves pondering about the nature of our roles as living, breathing, conscious beings within it. Do we have good reasons for believing what we do? What do we do with the deeply positive transcendent experiences and feelings of deep connection, meaning, and awe that emerge from interactions with nature, with others, and with the Universe? What, if anything, can we say about the big metaphysical questions like: Do we have a soul? What is consciousness? What happens to us when we die? Is there a God?
This has lead to a rift in our minds where many of us experience a sense of cognitive dissonance between a spiritual yearning, and a feeling of being no more than random, purposeless blobs of matter rigidly following natural laws that appeared from nowhere for no apparent reason.
Towards Bridging the Gap
University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and a leading figure in quantum theory, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, author of Languages of the Brain, independently proposed holographic models to address limitations in prevailing accounts of quantum phenomena and brain function. Related ideas later emerged in theoretical physics through the work of Leonard Susskind, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Charles Thorn, with figures such as Stephen Hawking contributing to the broader development of holographic principles. And although Bohm and Pribram’s proposals did not establish a unified theory, they did set a conceptual precedent that later reappears, in a more formalised mathematical context, in holographic approaches within theoretical physics.
At the same time the big questions around consciousness has become a kind of area de jour and scientists such as John von Neumann, Robert Lanza and Bob Berman proposing that consciousness is the key to influencing reality (wave function collapse), and that order or reality may actually require the presence of a conscious observer (the notion of biocentrism). More recently, Maria Stromme, Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University, has even proposed an entirely new theory of the origin of the universe in which consciousness is viewed as a fundamental field underlying everything we see around us.
When we connect the dots between these two disciplines, we get a framework that bridges the gap between matter and mind, and between science and lived experience.
We’re Living in a Conscious-Holographic Cosmos
In a conscious-holographic model, information, matter, and consciousness are not separate ontological categories, but aspects of a single underlying process. Reality functions less like a collection of objects and more like a hologram, in which our world and everything within it appear as projected images from a level of reality so far beyond our own that it lies outside conventional notions of space and time.
At the basis of this is an informational field, with a kind of collective memory or universal consciousness as its substrate. Interactions within this field cause it to vibrate, like a violin string, generating wave interferences that give rise to resonance patterns in the form of superpositions. These resonances organise into interference patterns, where multiple potential configurations exist simultaneously, each containing the whole in distributed form.
Within this field, coherence determines stability. Areas of high coherence stabilise into persistent patterns, while areas of low coherence remain fluid and indeterminate. Through interaction with a conscious observer, the wave function collapses, selecting from these potential configurations. What is selected is not created from nothing, but resolved from what already exists as structured possibility.
The brain then localises these interfering wave patterns into sensations and perceptions, which we experience as either internal or external. In this sense, the brain functions like a laser projecting a holographic image: it manifests something specific from the underlying interference pattern, much as a laser reveals an image when shone through a holographic plate. Without the lens of the brain, as without the laser, what remains is not a formed image, but an interference pattern.
The Implications
Within this framing, the conscious-holographic model offers an integrative account of phenomena that sit outside of conventional explanatory frameworks, including those that appear resistant to explanation under standard scientific, neurobiological and psychological models. Experiences such as telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, phantom limb phenomena, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and mystical states of unity, while typically categorised as distinct or anomalous, can now be reinterpreted as different modes of access or resolution within the same underlying field structure.
And although these ideas remain highly controversial, and the holographic model itself is not widely accepted within mainstream science, it nevertheless continues to attract serious engagement from researchers who see it as a potentially more comprehensive framework for integrating matter, mind, and experience into a single coherent explanatory system.
This is because this conscious-holographic model is an early step towards a wider way of understanding things, where unusual or “anomalous” experiences aren’t dismissed, but seen as meaningful clues about how the system itself is structured. It is also a model that has been explored by several researchers at the intersection of consciousness studies and theoretical physics specifically because of its ability to sense of a wide range of phenomena so elusive they generally have been categorised outside the province of scientific understanding.
So, within this conscious-holographic model of the cosmos, we now have a framework to explore, understand and answer questions around those deeply positive transcendent experiences, the nature of consciousness, and even those around death, the soul and the nature of god.
This is what will form the basis for a wider body of work that will explore such phenomena, experiences, and practices within a unified model, with the aim of bridging scientific, metaphysical, and esoteric knowledge systems; re-animating a sense of sacred participation in lived experience; and clarifying the mechanisms through which attention and intention shape experiential reality. At its core, this project is a re-articulation of an older intuition: that humans are not passive observers of a fixed world, but active participants within a co-generated, conscious cosmos.
This essay draws on ideas from my books Living in a Quantum Reality and A Participatory Cosmos. For a deeper exploration of these ideas, consider purchasing your copy. To support the work you can subscribe to my Substack, or make a small donation.
Lieze Boshoff is an author and researcher exploring consciousness, metaphysics, and anomalous experience through the lenses of contemporary science, psychology, and philosophy. With a background in clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and doctoral research on consciousness and perception, her work examines reality as a participatory, holographic field in which mind and matter are inseparable. She writes at the intersection of science, symbolism, and the unseen, investigating how experience itself shapes the cosmos we inhabit.
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