The mystery of knowing: family constellations and the holographic universe

Everyone is lying on the floor. Dead.

A woman I’ve not spoken with beforehand asked for an impromptu constellation about her relationship with her daughter.
But within minutes, all the representatives have collapsed.

One says she is a man, clutching his belly, describing searing pain. So, this is clearly not a miscarriage, which was my first thought.
Another feels she’s in a mass grave, surrounded by bodies.
I’m at a loss. I turn to the client for explanation.

“I’m half Libyan,” she tells me quietly. “Family members from my father’s village were killed in the civil war there.”
Nothing in our brief interaction, not even her name, suggested this history. None of the workshop participants knew.
Yet somehow, the field knew.
The representative feeling the belly wound suddenly connects the dots: “Yes, I feel I am a perpetrator. I was shot in the belly.”

This end scene is what Family Constellations founder Bert Hellinger described in his books about his workshops: perpetrators and victims lying calmly together after death. There is peace between them. Only in life do we feel hate, strife and suffering. All morality – so important in daily life – is meaningless after death. After death, all that remains is unconditional acceptance.

The impossible knowing

If you’ve experienced family constellation work, you know this phenomenon. Representatives access information they couldn’t possibly know through normal means. They feel physical sensations in body parts that mirror the original person’s ailments. They know about deaths, births, traumas, or secrets that have been buried for generations.

If you’re a sceptic and find this hard to believe: do join the next workshop!

How is the impossible possible?

I get asked this question in every workshop. My honest answer is that I don’t know. But I know what I experience, what hundreds of participants have experienced. The knowing is real. The information – whenever we can check the details with living family members – is accurate. The healing that follows from understanding the pattern, closing that open loop, is genuine.

You can decide for yourself how to interpret this, but here’s my two cents.

I’ve been exploring a framework from theoretical physics that offers a fascinating possibility – NOT as THE ANSWER (because we know from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that THE ANSWER is 42😊), but to think about what might be happening when representatives download information from somewhere beyond their individual awareness.

Where does the information come from?

The universe as information

In the 1970s, physicists studying black holes made an interesting discovery. When they calculated how much information a black hole could contain, they found something unexpected: the information wasn’t stored in the black hole’s volume, but on its surface, its two-dimensional boundary, called the event horizon.
All the information about everything that gets sucked into a black hole – stars, planets, light, matter – is in effect encoded on a flat surface, like a cosmic hard drive. This was so counterintuitive that it led to what’s called the “holographic principle.”
The holographic principle suggests that all the information in any volume of space can be encoded on its boundary surface. Just like a hologram on a flat piece of film can contain a three-dimensional image, our three-dimensional universe might be a projection of information encoded on a distant two-dimensional boundary.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s cutting-edge theoretical physics, developed by Nobel Prize-level scientists like Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, and mathematically proven (in specific contexts) by Juan Maldacena.

A cosmic DVD

Now, here’s where it gets interesting for constellation work.
If all information in the universe is encoded on these boundaries, then in a sense there’s a database on our lives and those of our ancestors. It’s not like it’s sitting somewhere in space, rather, it’s the foundational structure of reality itself. And crucially, this encoding includes time: past, present, future, all encoded together. Time is a concept for humans, existing for us, but the informational field holds it all at the same time.

Imagine a DVD containing an entire movie. The beginning, middle, and end are all present simultaneously on the disc as data. The experience of time – one scene following another – only emerges when you play it. Similarly to that DVD, the boundary encoding might contain all information about spacetime’s entire history “at once.” What we experience as the flow of time is something that emerges from how that information is displayed. We are actors in the movie, not external observers. As such, we experience it one frame at a time.

But what if consciousness under certain conditions can access other parts of the encoded information?

Our antenna

When a representative steps into a constellation, something shifts. When they empty their brain to feel what’s going on in the constellation field, they’re no longer operating purely from their individual consciousness, no longer bound to their personal history and knowledge. They become, in a sense, an antenna tuned to a different frequency.
If the holographic principle is correct, and all information about the universe is encoded on these boundaries, then perhaps what we call “the knowing field” in constellation work is this universal information structure.
The representatives, if they are taking on their role without preconceptions, aren’t creating information or imagining it. They’re downloading it from a source that already contains the complete story of that family system.

How it gets transferred to these representatives is not (yet) clear. Researchers on telepathy and remote viewing are hinting at an electromagnetic field, like Wi-Fi and radio waves. The router or radio can translate these waves to data. Maybe there’s a way that we humans can do the same for – most notably – intense emotions. We all know the stories of close friends or family knowing about a serious accident or death of their loved one.

Of course, sometimes a representative is unable to release their own reality, and they may feel they need to tell their daughter as a stand-in for a mother: “I love you”. However, the field will instantly react to this lack of truth. Eyebrows will be raised by the other participants, and the daughter stand-in will reply without hesitation: “I don’t believe you”.

The information source

A universal source of information would explain several puzzling aspects of constellation work.

Why representatives know things that aren’t (consciously) known by anyone in the room
The information isn’t traveling person-to-person through normal channels. It’s already encoded in the structure of reality itself. Representatives access it directly.

Why physical sensations match the original person
If information about someone’s back pain, belly wound, or illness is part of the encoded data about that person’s existence, a representative tuned to that information can experience it as if it were their own.

Why healing one person affects absent others
If we’re all connected through this fundamental information structure, shifts in one part of the system can propagate through the encoded information to other parts. A toddler whose tantrums stopped after a family constellation on the topic wasn’t in the room, but she’s part of the same encoded family system. Think ripple effect. Although weirdly, in my experience, things happen instantly. An estranged brother called a couple of minutes after a constellation about him was broken up.

Why perpetrators and victims find peace together
At the deepest level of information encoding – beyond the human experience of time and separation – there’s unity. The black hole boundary doesn’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” matter, between “good” and “bad” people. It encodes all of existence equally. What Hellinger observed as peace after death might be representatives accessing this deeper level where separation and the morality of the living dissolve.

Beyond space and time

Carl Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious. This is a deeper layer of psyche shared across all humans, containing patterns and archetypes that transcend individual experience. For instance, the recurring symbols and myths across cultures with no contact with each other.
The holographic principle offers a potential physical mechanism for something like the collective unconscious.
If consciousness interfaces with this boundary information structure, then different people in different times and places might be accessing overlapping portions of the same encoded information field.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells us about a book she wanted to write, but life interfered, and she never finished the book, abandoning the idea altogether. A couple of years later, she met up with novelist Ann Patchett, and they found that Ann was about to finish the book that Elizabeth never got to write. Same protagonist, same storyline. The information was out there; the book was just waiting to be written.

Paul McCartney tells us a similar story about “Yesterday”. He was convinced it was an existing song, since it came to him in one finished piece. Only after weeks of searching for the song writer, he realized that he could claim it as his own, even if it didn’t feel like it was.

The information field could explain why Jung’s archetypes appear independently across cultures, why many inventions and breakthroughs come at the same time, by different people, in different places on the globe.
It this how constellation representatives access personal family information without prior knowledge, across continents and generations? They’re not receiving transmissions person-to-person. Instead, they’re reading from the same script, just from different positions in time and space.

Because if this encoding includes time – past, present and future together – then we’re touching on something even more profound. The grandmother’s unlived love, the great-grandfather’s unresolved war trauma, the client’s future healing are potentially all available in the present moment to those who can switch off their pre-frontal cortex and tune in. This may be how we heal from transgenerational trauma. 

Sitting with the mystery

I want to be clear: all this is speculative.
There are other explanations out there if you do a Google or Chat GPT search on this form of therapy.
However, physics as it stands now supports the idea of 2D data sources and a holographic universe. Whether this extends to consciousness, family systems, and constellation work is a fascinating possibility for me, rather than proven science.
Isn’t it remarkable that cutting-edge physics has arrived at a view of reality that makes these incredible experiences more conceivable? That the universe might actually work in a way that allows for the seemingly impossible kind of knowing we witness in the constellation workshops?

Bend your brain

When you step into a constellation as a representative, you’re doing something extraordinary.
You’re setting aside your ordinary consciousness: your personal history, your ego, your analytical mind, your preconceived notions of reality as well as your need to know through conventional means. By switching off your brain and just feeling what feel, noticing what’s different, now, here in this field, you’re allowing yourself to become a receiver for information that exists beyond the boundaries of your individual self.

Where exactly does that information come from and does it reach us?
Is it electromagnetic? Is it travelling at the speed of light or is entangled particles? Or does the info all come from the client in the room, and are we just synchronizing to them, as the social animals we are?
Maybe we’re downloading from that universal information field encoded in the fabric of spacetime itself. Maybe consciousness is far more connected to the fundamental structure of our everyday reality on earth than we’ve imagined.

I don’t know with any certainty.
But I believe that when we access “the field,” we’re accessing something as real and physical as gravity or electromagnetic radiation. It’s just operating at a level that physicists have barely begun to describe and understand.
So, I know it’s real. I know when it’s accurate. I know it facilitates profound healing. And the representatives in the field know it too.

The mystery remains. But it’s a mystery that invites us into wonder rather than scepticism, into possibility rather than limitation. Everyone who has worked with me knows that “impossible” is not a word in my dictionary. That is also why I love this work, on the edge of possibility, and find it so immensely interesting.

Rewriting the script

Remember that in Transactional Analysis (see my blog post if you don’t remember), we talk about life scripts – unconscious life plans created in childhood.

As a child, each of us wrote our life script with a pencil.
Most people don’t realize they did before being made aware of it by the question: “how will your life end?”. And more importantly, they don’t know (yet) that they have an eraser and that they still have the pencil to rewrite and redesign their reality tunnel.

Constellation work reveals that we’re not just carrying our own scripts. We’re carrying the scripts of our ancestors, encoded in the family system, passed down through generations. The grandmother who couldn’t have her love. The grandfather who was shot in the belly. The mother who lost one of her babies.
Their stories become part of the information field we’re born into. And without knowing, we may be fighting their fights, living the future they intend for us, resolving their unresolved trauma’s.

When representatives access this information, they’re reading the family script. And when we work with it consciously – when we bring love where there was rejection, acknowledgment where there was ignoring, peace where there was conflict – we’re not just healing the past.

If the above principle is right, we’re changing the encoded information that shapes the present and future.
The client who felt her DNA changed wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Something fundamental shifted in how information flows through her family system. Her daughter felt it without being in the room because they’re part of the same encoded pattern.

You have an eraser. You have a pen. And you have access to a field of information far vaster than your individual mind.

The question isn’t whether this is possible – we see it happen in every constellation.
The question is: what will you do with this extraordinary gift of knowing?