Today a fair number of scientists regard nature as a computer. Describing the universe as a computer does make a certain amount of sense where laws governing how the universe works are expressed in mathematical formulas. You can use those formulas to compute what nature will do, such as when the moon will position itself for the next solar eclipse, etc. Just as you do a digital computation to figure out where the moon will be, nature simply conducts a real-time analog computation of its own that puts the moon where it is supposed to be.

The direct experience of living nature has been felt in all times and places but it is in the alchemical tradition where “soul” and “spirit” take on their most tangible, living form. In the alchemical vision, all matter is alive and animated with spirit. From this vision, the earth is a single living organism. It is fertilized and impregnated by the celestial spirit of the sun, stars, and planets. All matter is evolutionary, striving toward higher forms, and deep within the bowels of the earth all metals are ripening toward gold. Because of this, alchemy is not an attempt to manipulate matter, but the cultivation of a natural process.

Alchemy is rooted in the perception that nature is an unfolding, dynamic process, characterized by the power of transformation. Around 4000 B.C.E. smelting was applied to copper and bronze, and later, around 1200 B.C.E., to iron. The workings of the first metallurgists took place as a ritualized activity in an atmosphere of secrecy. Working with molten metals involved risk and directly exposed the practitioners to the elemental and numinous powers of nature. Smelting involved a purification by fire, and the ritual activities of the first metallurgists involved their purification as well.

The beginnings of global alchemy are lost in prehistory, but European alchemy begins in Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians had always seen their land as an image of the heavens. The Nile was pictured as a terrestrial reflection of the celestial stream on which the gods and planets sailed. The sun is a source of fertility, but in Egypt life depends equally on the cool waters of the Nile. Each year like clockwork in late July, the Nile would flood, depositing rich black silt in the regions surrounding it. The Arabic word al-kemi means “the black land,” an ancient name of Egypt. Dredged up from the depths, moistened by the stream of life, and fertilized by the sun, the black earth of Egypt embodied the vital energies of the gods and cosmic powers. This rich effluence of the earth when cooked by the sun gave birth to crops, animals, and the dazzling pageantry of life. From earth and sun arose the baking of bread, every art and science, and the sound of hymns that reverberated in the temples. From earth and sun arose the entire social structure, culminating in the image of the pharaoh, the divine, golden spark who encapsulated on earth the cosmic powers of regeneration and eternal life. 

Through the transformation of black earth into the living tapestry of a high civilization, life in Egypt was itself an alchemical process. The earliest alchemical texts that survive are Greek writings that appeared in Egypt. Some are merely collections of recipes; others endow the alchemical process with spiritual and mystical implications. Alchemical theory as it has come down to us is heavily influenced by the ideas of Greek philosophy and rests on several assumptions. From the ideas of Democritus and Plato the alchemists assumed that matter is capable of transformation. From the writings of Aristotle the alchemists developed the idea that nature is teleological or developmental. Teleology is most readily seen in living organisms, which unfold in a developmental way. Given an adequate opportunity, it is the nature of an acorn to unfold into an oak tree as it is the nature of a child to grow into a mature, self-realized adult. The Stoics identified the creative power of nature, the Logos, as a “seed power” present in all things. It is the nature of the spermatikos logos or seminal essence to carry all things to the fruition of their essential nature.

Like the unfolding life of plants and animals, metals grow and develop within the womb of the earth. Aristotle taught that the moist exhalations of the earth give birth to metals, which then grow and mature. Veins of metal spread outward from a seed and, given enough time, will grow back if harvested. The active growth process is fueled by the vital power of the sun in the same way that the sun causes plants and other organisms to emerge from the dark soil of the earth.

Ancient Greek mystery religions celebrated the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of heaven and earth that brings forth the fruit of life. Certainly for anyone who lives close to nature, the fertilizing influence of the masculine heavens on the receptive, feminine earth is a fact of daily life. When speaking of the virtues of the sun, Copernicus duly noted “the Earth conceives from the Sun and is made pregnant with annual offspring.” In the Renaissance, the philosopher Bernardino Telesio wrote, “we can see that the sky and the earth are not merely large parts of the world universe, but are of primary—even principal rank. . .They are like mother and father to all the others.” His contemporary Giordano Bruno similarly described himself as “a citizen and servant of the world, a child of Father Sun and Mother Earth.”

The early alchemists who saw the entire cosmos as an organism drew upon the ideas of Greek philosophy to offer a coherent explanation of the development of metals within the earth. Behind everything is a type of prime matter which is itself formless. The four elements of fire, air, water, and earth, are qualitative forms of matter that exist in tension with one another. One element can be transformed into another, and the soul, spirit, or pneuma within anything is the determining formal element, the essential spark that bestows qualities on the prima materia.

The Stoics had taught that all matter was alive and dynamic, permeated by spirit and intelligence. This intelligence, the Logos, was often associated with the fire of the heavenly bodies and the life giving power of the sun. Aristotle, too, had spoken of ether, the fifth element or quinta essentia out of which the heavenly bodies were fashioned. Compared to the four elements, this was a pure and heavenly radiance, a glowing substance akin to spirit. It was practically inevitable that all of these principles would become identified with one another. For the ancient alchemists, ether or the quinta essentia came to be seen as the form-giving logos, the fiery life principle that ensouled plants, animals, and the gestating metals within the womb of the earth. Within each living thing was a spark of star fire, a celestial, animating flame.

In the same way that the universe was composed of the terrestrial sphere and the starry heavens, so too was each thing composed of body and spirit. At night the dew of heaven would descend to the earth, charged with the rays of the glowing celestial bodies. This dew, rich in heavenly and ethereal essences, would nourish plants, revitalize the soul of the earth, and stimulate the generation of metals. As early as Babylonian times the seven metals were identified with the seven planets. The Sun ruled over gold, the Moon silver, Mercury over quicksilver, and so on. The divine, ethereal rays of the planets seeded their kindred metals to grow in the earth. As the fifth-century alchemist Proclus of Byzantium wrote,“Gold and silver, as found in nature, as well as all other metals and substances, are engendered in the earth by the celestial divinities and the effluvia that come from them. The Sun produces gold; the Moon silver; Saturn lead; and Mars iron.

Seeded by the heavens, matter takes form, yet all matter is evolutionary and aspires to return to a more spiritual state.” Furthermore  Meister Eckhart wrote,“copper is restless until it becomes gold.”

Over the course of centuries, metals naturally develop and mature in the earth. The alchemist merely acts as a midwife to accelerate and nurse along the natural process. As one alchemical writer clearly explains, “We help the metals to arrive at maturity, just as a gardener may assist fruit, which by accident is prevented from ripening.” The greatly sought after Philosophers’ Stone was the miraculous catalyst that would speed up the natural process of transformation.

If the Earth is the matrix or womb of gestation, the alchemist’s flask is an artificial womb in which the work takes place. Gazing into the flask, the alchemist discovers every process of nature reflected. Gestation, fermentation, cooking, transformation, sublimation, creative decay, dismemberment, dissolution, coagulation, circulation, and regeneration are all keywords of the alchemical process. There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.

In mythology, nature spirits, or deities are composed of etheric matter. Their job is to build and maintain the plant kingdom while working in conjunction with the devas and elementals. They are said to have been here since the beginning of time, have created the landscape of reality, and simulated a consciousness of humanity’s place in the environment.

There are millions of devas living inside the Sun, where the indwelling solar deity is called the Solar Logos—these devas are called solar angels, or sometimes solar devas or solar spirits. Sometimes, it is believed, they visit Earth and can be observed, like other devas, by humans whose third eyes have been activated. There are also devas living inside all the other stars besides the Sun; these are called stellar angels. In the Findhorn material, the term deva refers to archetypal spiritual intelligences behind species, in other words the group soul of a species.

There are those who believe Earth has a core crystal beneath the Great Pyramid, functioning much like a central computer that runs the grid programs of our reality. It was allegedly programmed by Tehuti aka Thoth after the fall of the Atlantean Program … and the Egyptian Program began. This crystal, may not be physical, but has consciousness. It is referred to as the Hall of Records, Akashic Records, collective unconsciousness, or the grids/matrix that create the realities which we virtually experience.

The original Atlanteans were thought projections created by the algorithms of a simulation. They were tall, thin, ethereal beings who could take on different forms. They allegedly came from Sirius and Orion remaining on this planet until the end of their experiment. They could move through space and time and had heightened awareness.

The reason they came here varies depending on which researcher you read. Some believe they came here to seed the human race while others believe they stayed and are monitoring and adjusting human evolution. Like the alchemists, they explored and recorded their findings through telepathy and technologies beyond human understanding. It would be nice to have some answers before the human experiment ends.

In much the same regard Lemuria was a massive spaceship that came from the Pleiades and seeded part of the human biogenetic experiment. Lemuria allegedly disappeared or sank into the sea. “Atlantis Rising” refers to the return of consciousness in the alchemy of time as the simulation of reality ends. Reality as a simulation or hologram is no longer a fringe theory — but has Nobel Prize winners and other thought leaders believing in it. All scientific discoveries start out as theories; some ultimately proven, some not. 

There is still the question of whether our universe actually exists? We may be simply living in something’s reality simulation. The theory that reality, as we consciously experience it, is not real, goes back to indigenous peoples who believed that we exist in a dream or illusion. In our current timeline, we refer to our reality experience as a matrix, grid, simulation and hologram. There are those trying to prove the simulation exists and others who are trying to disprove it.

If time is an illusion, then so is everything else, and the universe is a consciousness hologram or simulation. Reality is a projected illusion within the hologram. It is a virtual experiment created in linear time to study emotions. Our simulation is composed of grids created by a source consciousness brought into awareness by electromagnetic energy at the physical level. The hologram is created and linked through a web, or grid matrixes. Because the hologram had a beginning ergo it has an end, as consciousness evolves in the alchemy of time. As the grids collapse, everything within the hologram will end as it fades to black.

The simulation hypothesis naturally contends that reality is a simulation (most likely a computer simulation), of which we, the simulants, are totally unaware. Some versions of this hypothesis rely on the development of simulated reality, a fictional technology. The hypothesis has been a central plot device of many science fiction stories and films. There is a long philosophical and scientific history to the underlying thesis that reality is an illusion. This skeptical hypothesis can be dated as far back as the Indian philosophy of maya or illusion.

Hypothetical reality could be simulated — for example by computer simulation — to a degree indistinguishable from “true” reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. This is quite different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of actuality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to separate from “true” reality.

The simulation theory is the proposal that all of reality, including the Earth and the rest of the universe, could in fact be an artificial simulation, such as a computer simulation. Some versions rely on the development of a simulated reality, a proposed technology that would be able to convince its inhabitants that the simulation was “real.” The simulation hypothesis bears a close resemblance to various other skeptical scenarios throughout history. The suggestion that such a hypothesis is compatible with all of our perceptual experiences is thought to have significant epistemological consequences in the form of philosophical skepticism. There is a long philosophical and scientific history to the underlying thesis that reality is an illusion. This skeptical hypothesis can be traced back to antiquity; to the “Butterfly Dream” of Zhuangzi, or the ancient Greek philosophy of Anaxarchus and Monimus which likened existing things to a scene-painting and supposed them to resemble the impressions experienced in sleep or madness. A version of the hypothesis was also theorized as a part of a philosophical argument by René Descartes.

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.

It is possible to argue that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears.

Therefore:

1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero, or
2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero, or
3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

This trilemma points out that a technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. If even a tiny percentage of them were to run “ancestor simulations” (that is, “high-fidelity” simulations of ancestral life that would be indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or “Sims,” in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) would greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors. Using a type of anthropic reasoning to claim that, if the third proposition is the one of those three that is true, and almost all people with our kind of experiences live in simulations, then we are almost certainly living in a simulation.

This argument goes beyond the classical ancient ‘skeptical hypothesis,’ claiming that we have interesting empirical reasons to believe that a certain disjunctive claim about the world is true, then the third of the three disjunctive propositions being that we are almost certainly living in a simulation is likewise true. There might be empirical reasons for the ‘simulation hypothesis’ and that therefore the simulation hypothesis is not a skeptical hypothesis but rather a ‘metaphysical hypothesis.’ There is no strong argument as to which of the three trilemma propositions is the true one: If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). As a corollary to the trilemma it should be noted that unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.

Some philosophers disagree, proposing that perhaps Sims do not have conscious experiences the same way that unsimulated humans do, or that it can otherwise be self-evident to a human that they are a human rather than a Sim. By substituting ‘neural ancestor simulations’ (ranging from literal brains in a vat, to far-future humans with induced high-fidelity hallucinations that they are their own distant ancestors) for ancestor simulations, every school of thought can agree that sufficiently high-tech neural ancestor simulation experiences would be indistinguishable from non-simulated experiences. Even if high-fidelity computer Sims are never conscious, reasoning leads to the following conclusion: either the fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage and are able and willing to run large numbers of neural ancestor simulations is close to zero, or we are in some kind of (possibly neural) ancestor simulation.

Some scholars categorically reject anthropic reasoning, dismissing it as merely philosophical, unfalsifiable, or inherently unscientific. Some critics propose that we could be in the first generation, and all the simulated people that will one day be created do not yet exist. Simulation hypothesis thus leads to a contradiction that if we are typical, as it is assumed, and we are not capable of performing simulations, such an assumption contradicts that it is easy for us to foresee that other civilizations can most likely perform simulations.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has noted “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality.” When Elon Musk isn’t outlining plans to use his massive rocket to leave a decaying Planet Earth and colonize Mars, he sometimes talks about his belief that Earth isn’t even real and we probably live in a computer simulation. Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the ‘Simulation Hypothesis,’ which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence.

Stephen Hawking presented a new idea to try to explain what happens to everything that falls inside black holes. The information that falls into a black hole has to be stored somewhere, or it would violate a law of quantum mechanics. Hawking said information about what’s inside a black hole is projected on the edge of the black hole, also called the horizon, in a hologram. He says this applies to every black hole in the universe, and has resolved the longstanding paradox the physicists face. Other top physicists have been reserved, saying that if you fell into a black hole, you’d die. In black holes, gravity is so extremely strong, not even light can escape them. But scientists wondered if there would be any kind of remains, like ashes: could evidence that you had once existed come out of the black hole? In the 1970s Hawking showed that black holes eventually run out of energy and die. When that happens, we assume that all the information stored inside must be lost. But this would go against the laws of quantum mechanics in which information can’t be lost.

New research in theoretical physics shows that black holes aren’t the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be, but instead benign—if imperfect —hologram generators. The world could have been captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice, according to a new theoretical perspective. The ‘fuzzball’ theorists have come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort. They believe that when material touches the surface of a black hole, it becomes a hologram, a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist just as before.

The ‘holographic principle,’ the idea that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum field theory in fewer dimensions, has been used for years as a mathematical tool in strange curved spaces. New results suggest that the holographic principle also holds in flat spaces. Our own universe could in fact be two dimensional and only appear three dimensional—just like a hologram. At first glance, there is not the slightest doubt: to us, the universe looks three dimensional. But the ‘holographic principle’ asserts that a mathematical description of the universe actually requires one fewer dimension than it seems. What we perceive as three dimensional may just be the image of two dimensional processes on a huge cosmic horizon. Until now, this principle has only been studied in exotic spaces with negative curvature. This is interesting from a theoretical point of view, but such spaces are quite different from the space in our own universe. New results obtained by scientists now suggest that the holographic principle even holds in a flat spacetime.

Matter, the ‘stuff’ we seem to touch and feel, is actually mostly empty space. Our senses deceive us. A self-interested occupant of a high-fidelity simulation should strive to be entertaining and praiseworthy in order to avoid being turned off or being shunted into a non-conscious low-fidelity part of the simulation. Someone who is aware that they might be in a simulation might care less about others and live more for today: your motivation to save for retirement, or to help the poor, might be muted by realizing that in your simulation, you will never retire and there is no poverty.

Under the assumption of finite computational resources, the simulation of the universe could be performed by dividing the continuum space-time into a discrete set of points. Simulated beings might wonder whether their mental lives are governed by the physics of their environment, when in fact these mental lives are simulated separately (and are thus not governed by the simulated physics). They might eventually find that their thoughts fail to be physically caused. This would mean that Cartesian dualism is not necessarily as problematic of a philosophical view as is commonly supposed. Similar arguments can be made for philosophical views about personal identity that say you could have been another human being than the one you are, as well as views about qualia that say colors could have appeared differently than they do (the inverted spectrum scenario). In both cases, all this would require is hooking up the mental lives to the simulated physics in a different way.

The first to state the basic concept of reality as a simulation was Plato in the famous allegory of the cave, describing people imprisoned since childhood  who were led to believe that artificial light-based representations of reality were truly real. In fact, they were a fabricated illusion in which at least one argument rests on the premise that given sufficiently advanced technology, it is possible to represent the populated surface of the Earth without recourse to digital physics; that the qualia experienced by a simulated consciousness are comparable or equivalent to those of a naturally occurring human consciousness, and that one or more levels of simulation within simulations would be feasible given only a modest expenditure of computational resources in the real world. If one assumes first that humans will not be destroyed nor destroy themselves before developing such a technology, and that human descendants will have no overriding legal restrictions or moral compunctions against simulating biospheres or their own historical biosphere, then it would be unreasonable to count ourselves among the small minority of genuine organisms who, sooner or later, will be vastly outnumbered by artificial simulations. Epistemologically, it is not impossible to tell whether we are living in a simulation. For example a window could pop up saying: “You are living in a simulation. Click here for more information.”

At present, Earth provides the only example of an environment that has given rise to the evolution of life. Highly energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule around four billion years ago and half a billion years later the last common ancestor of all life existed.

The development of photosynthesis allowed the Sun’s energy to be harvested alchemically directly by life forms; the resultant oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and formed a layer of ozone (a form of molecular oxygen [O3]) in the upper atmosphere. The incorporation of smaller cells within larger ones resulted in the development of complex cells called eukaryotes. True multicellular organisms formed as cells within colonies became increasingly specialized. However, imperfections in a simulated environment might be difficult for the native inhabitants to identify and for purposes of authenticity, even the simulated memory of a blatant revelation might be purged programmatically. Nonetheless, should any evidence come to light, either for or against the skeptical hypothesis, it would radically alter the aforementioned probability.

A dream could be considered a type of simulation capable of fooling someone who is asleep. As a result, the ‘dream hypothesis’ cannot be ruled out, although it has been argued that common sense and considerations of simplicity rule against it. One of the first philosophers to question the distinction between reality and dreams was Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher from the fourth century B.C.E. He phrased the problem as the well-known “Butterfly Dream,” which went as follows:  

The philosophical underpinnings of this argument are also brought up by Descartes, who was one of the first Western philosophers to do so. In Meditations on First Philosophy, he states “… there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep,” and goes on to conclude “It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.”

The dream hypothesis is also used to develop other philosophical concepts, such as the idea of  ‘nested Simulations’ : the existence of simulated reality is seen to be unprovable in any concrete sense as there is an infinite regress problem with the argument: any evidence that is directly observed could be another simulation itself. Even if we are a simulated reality, there is no way to be sure the beings running the simulation are not themselves a simulation and the operators of that simulation are not a simulation. Recursive simulation involves a simulation or an entity in the simulation, creating another instance of the same simulation, running it and using its results. It may be best not to find out if we’re living in a computer simulation since, if it were found to be true, such knowing may end the simulation.

We may well be living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present — deja vu — perhaps in precisely in the same way, hearing the same words, saying the same words. Such an impression is a clue that at some past time-point a variable was changed, reprogrammed as it were, and that because of this an alternative world branched off.

The most extreme form of Gaia theory is that the entire Earth is a single unified organism; in this view the Earth’s biosphere is consciously manipulating the climate in order to make conditions more conducive to life. Scientists contend that there is no evidence at all to support this last point of view, and it has come about because many people do not understand the concept of homeostasis. Many non-scientists instinctively see homeostasis as an activity that requires conscious control, although this is not so.

Much more speculative versions of Gaia theory, including all versions in which it is held that the Earth is actually conscious or part of some universe-wide evolution, are currently held to be outside the bounds of science. The Earth is a self-regulating environment and the planet itself is the core of a single, unified, cooperating and living system — a superorganism that regulates physical conditions to keep the environment hospitable for lifeforms.

Gaia theory is about the evolution of tightly coupled systems whose constituents are the biota and their material environment, which comprises the atmosphere, the oceans, and the surface rocks with self-regulation of important properties, such as climate and a seemingly alchemical compositions which are a consequence of this evolutionary process. Like living organisms and many closed-loop self-regulating systems, it would be expected to show emergent properties in which the whole will be more than the sum of its parts.

In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then click off again and on again several times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if hard reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is ‘there’ or ‘not there’ because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so.

In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to events experienced by Carlos Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined.

Such a holographic universe can also be explained as svabhāva. Different terms have been used to translate this Sanskrit word into English: “inherent existence” and “intrinsic nature” appear to be the more popular choices, but “substance” and “essence” have also been proposed. The Buddhist sage Nāgārjuna describes the perception of simulation of phenomena in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, utilizing the Buddha’s theory of  “dependent arising” (pratitya-samutpada) to deal with such metaphysics referred to as “middle way” (madhyama pratipad). It is the middle way that avoids both substantialism as well as nominalism in both the real as well as simulated perceived phenomena:

All things exist

All things do not exist

All things both exist and do not exist

All things neither exist not do not exist.

In 1860, a well-known French Egyptologist Marquis d’Argain discovered a strange looking ring in the excavations of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The ring, several thousand years old, was adorned with geometric ornaments which were placed and balanced according to some very special arrangement. According to d’Argain, the ring originated in the ancient city of Atlantis. Another famous Egyptologist, Arnold de Belizal, later inherited the ring and found it emits electromagnetic waves capable of creating energy fields which work as a force of energy. This energy allegedly protected the wearer, giving him increased psychic abilities, the ability to heal, and good luck.