Real Choice Part 1

Copyright © 2010 Lif C. Strand
www.spiritualhorsemanship.com

Part 1: Life, The Universe and Everything

Today my filly, SE Redhill Sonetta, is two months old. I am spending a little time with her every day, just a few minutes or so – never long enough for her to get bored. What Sonetta and I do each time is really a microcosm of the big picture of Spiritual Horsemanship, which is in itself a microcosm of the way the Universe works. Big concepts can come in little, furry packages!

As above, so below; as below, so above. The concepts of micro- and macrocosm are pretty old – they’re from the Greek neo-Platonic system, which says that the patterns of life are the same everywhere; life’s patterns are reproduced in all levels of the cosmos from the tiniest to the largest scale.

The modern concept of “holographic universe” originated with the work of British physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, who each independently developed a theory of the holographic nature of the universe. This concept is explained in the book The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, in which Talbot examines the work of Bohm and Pribram and explores the metaphysic implications underlining quantum mechanics supersymmetry.

A hologram is a three-dimensional image created using a laser. If a hologram of is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the original. No matter how often divided, each piece of the hologram will always produce the original image. This is possible because of the behavior of subatomic particles (see Zero Point Field).

A holographic universe is a universe in which everything, from the tiniest to the largest, is of the same pattern, just like the Greeks said. You can find examples everywhere: Images of brain cells that look just like galaxies , images of atoms that look like solar systems that look like galaxies.



In the Greek macro-microcosm system the mid-point is Man, who summarizes the cosmos. And why not? The human body is composed of the same matter as anything else in the universe, the only difference being that the matter is in different magnitude than, say, a star. A difference of quantity, not quality: At the smallest level of matter that a human body is made of, the same electromagnetic energy fills the void between the body’s smallest particles as fills the void between the rest of matter in the universe. Living beings like humans are pretty much in the middle of this scale of the subatomic to the universe. The only thing the Greeks had wrong is that it isn’t Man alone at the mid-point, but all living beings. In the Big Picture scheme of things, my filly Sonetta is more like me than a single atom or a galaxy is.

A little science. All living tissues have an electric charge and are capable of transmitting such charges. Signals to and from our brains, our very thoughts, produce electric signals which travel along nerves as waves of electrically charged ions. The electromagnetic energy of our brains is measurable, and according to quantum physics, at the subatomic particle level, the electromagnetic energy of our very thoughts will affect all subatomic particles nearby.

If everything is responsive to and influenced by everything on the subatomic level, creating a holographic universe, then in essence, everything is not only made of everything else, everything in some sense is everything else.

This means that that difference between me and Sonetta I mentioned above is truly insignificant in any scheme of things, big or small.

Choice matters when working with horses. Remember the good old Golden Rule, “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”? In a holographic universe, the Golden Rule is not so much good advice as a statement of how it all works. In a holographic universe, what you do unto others actually is doing unto yourself. And this brings us to the issue of choice – real choice.

Next: Real Choice Part 2


Real choice, for a horse, is often different than what a human thinks it is. With Natural Horsemanship, we talk about making requests or our horse, however most of the time, by ‘request,’ we actually mean that if a horse doesn’t do what we say we will find a way to make the horse wish it had. Haven’t you heard the phrase “make the right choice easy, the wrong choice hard”?

That’s not real choice, it is force in disguise...