Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension

This week an excerpt from chapter three of my book was released in the online magazine CRAM, check it out.

The very first issue of this magazine caught my eye when I saw the following three tidbits at the top of the very first page:
“+ About 2500 people in the United States have the last name Cram, accounting for .001% of last names. + Card Random Access Memory (C.R.A.M.) was a type of magnetic storage device used in the early 1960’s. + The 1940 twelve-inch Cram’s Terrestrial Illuminated Glass Globe is notable for a few reasons…”

Aha!, I said to myself. It’s clear to me that this magazine understands the points I have been making with the tenth dimension project: that there are systems of belief, collections of memes, and shared consensual reality that connect us all across time and space. Those 2500 people with the last name CRAM, even though they represent only .001% of the last names in the US, would represent a random access database that would be surprisingly representative of the many ways of looking at the world that all of us share, and would also allow us to quickly find some of those in the world who have unique points of view.

I’ll be the first to admit that I may have been reading more into the connections between those three tidbits than was intended by the editors of Cram. But I stand by the interpretation: as this project (the 11-minute animation, the website, the book, the songs, the videos, and this blog) have found their way into the world, I am continually surprised at the new connections people find to my way of imagining the ten dimensions and their own systems of belief.

In the past week I have been contacted by a number of people with strong Christian beliefs, thanking me for giving them a way to describe a reality which seems connected to science and cosmology but leaves room for there to be creator, or a force in the world that is working towards an ultimately positive outcome. In the book I approach this idea several different ways – from the anthropic viewpoint, our universe seems to have already been selected from a multiverse of universes, the vast majority of which would have been inhospitable to life as we know it. From the role of the quantum observer collapsing/observing reality from an indeterminate wave of possibilities, we already seem to be on a trajectory established at the big bang which is moving us along on a timeline towards a version of our universe which will last much longer than the many less stable configurations which could have been selected. I also touch on ideas of how the voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels, spirit guides and even alien presences could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality.

What I try to be very careful to do in the book is not force one way of interpreting all this upon the reader: whether one chooses to believe in a Creator who drives this whole impossibly complex mechanism forward, or if one believes in a Blind Watchmaker of chance and natural selection, what we our now experiencing as our reality is the same. As I say in Chapter Two:

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.


There are many more interpretations of my way of imagining the dimensions which people have brought to me – I was immediately surprised, for instance, at the number of people who had taken various hallucinogens and felt that what they had seen and experienced could be interpreted through the filter of what I’m presenting. As I’ve said a number of times in the tenth dimension forum, I don’t have any experience with hallucinogens myself, but I find such suggestions fascinating.

In the past week I’ve also received several emails from people convinced that the end of the world is coming in 2012, another topic I explore in the book. In the book I said that I expect that this is a rising tide of belief that will become increasingly popular over the next few years. The End of the World is also one of the 26 songs I have written for this project, and this idea will no doubt be a recurring theme in future blogs.

I should also point out that the Amazon “Search Inside this Book” function is now activated for my book, so that any ideas explored in the blog can also now be typed into Amazon’s search function to read excerpts from the book. Referencing the Index for the book will also provide you with search terms for further exploration.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

6 comments:

Rosaria said...

Hello Rob,

I came across "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" while browsing a "Shift in Action" post. I was completely impressed with your animation... It's simplicity saved the day for me as it built the bridge to an abstract concept which I previously failed to cross (or connect with) when I heard it described as "Vertical Time." You're a modern day Einstein!! I hope you don't mind that I added the link to your blog/animation to my blog, "The Song of Infinity". Please let me know if this is a problem for you.

Namaste,
Jillian Theresa Carelli
(777 ha,ha,ha)

Rosaria said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Rob, you should check out my blog, as I've been studying the physics for the anthropic principle for quite some time now:

http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/

Rob Bryanton said...

Hi Jillian, of course! I am very flattered that you want to link to my blog. I hadn't heard of "Vertical Time" before, but some other fans of the site have pointed out that the Timewave Zero concept advanced by Terrence McKenna can also be more easily explained within the concepts I'm proposing.

Thanks for writing!

Rob

Rob Bryanton said...

Hi island, thanks for the link. I'll definitely be spending more time at your blog, some thought-provoking stuff there.

Rob

Unknown said...

You might also look at this conversation that I've been having with "someone" on the New Scientist blog:

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/02/physicists-debate-nature-of-space-time.html#nbicomments

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist