Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

The tenth dimension site is averaging two million hits a month now. The meme that was set in motion since this project was launched in the summer of 2006 keeps growing, as people continue to view the animation, read the book, and discuss these ideas around the world.

By far the most-viewed and most-discussed question at the tenth dimension forum has been this: "Is God in the Tenth Dimension"? Other topics rise and fall in popularity from week to week (as memes often do), but this deep question is the one that people keep coming back to with their own unique views on the matter. I have put my own two bits in from time to time but the discussions there have been passionate and widely varied, and that is all I am interested in doing here: promoting the discussion of ideas.

Regular visitors to this blog or the forum will know that this is the idea I advance in my book: if we are imagining that our universe comes from an indeterminate quantum state, and that (as quantum physicists say) "information equals reality", then everything is just patterns in that information. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name? But the corollary to that idea has to be to accept that calling what we're thinking about "God" makes some people uncomfortable. Giving the exact same thing a name that they are comfortable with doesn't change what we're talking about, it just changes the name. Since I'm such a fan of Richard Dawkins, I say this knowing full well that what I am proposing here flies directly in the face of his book "The God Delusion": sorry about that, Dr. Dawkins.

Ultimately, asking if God is specifically in the Tenth Dimension is not the point of these discussions: what we're really talking about is whether there is a way for the ideas of spirituality and science to co-exist, each acknowledging that ultimately they are talking about the same thing. But this time, let's work through the framework for discussion that I've advanced for how to visualize the dimensions and see where "God" works as a name for the pattern that created our universe.

The tenth dimension as I have portrayed it is the timeless void of quantum fields, the unobserved whole that is "outside the system", and therefore unimaginable to us from within the system. Seems like a good place for an omnipotent being, and in the sense that God can be all things to all people, and that God can be thought of as the summation of everything that is and ever shall be, this is an obvious place to start. The only fly in the ointment here, I think, is that any attempt to observe any aspect of the tenth dimension spills us into the reality of the dimensions below. So, if we leave God up in the tenth dimension exclusively, I would say we're imagining a God who never actually does anything... as I've said before, imagining the "all-vibrations-simultaneously/white light" of the tenth dimension by itself is really the most boring part of the discussion.

Another discussion that has happened recently at the forum is whether the tenth dimension as I've portrayed it should be called a dimension at all, since what I'm really saying is that the tenth dimension can be thought of as the entirety of the ninth dimension, but viewed as a single point of indeterminate size. A visitor named "Alyssa" argued that this is deceptive, and other visitors to the forum then suggested that she think of dimensions 1 through 9 as each being an additional layer of an onion; to which I added the Zen-like idea that we could think then of the ninth dimension as being what happens when you look at the entire onion, and the tenth as being what happens when you don't look at the onion. Clearly, imagining something that is unobservable is tricky whether you're talking about the indeterminate fields of quantum mechanics, or whether you're talking about God. But if we're portraying a God who causes absolutely everything to happen, then the ninth dimension would certainly be a place for Him/Her to be.

My way of visualizing the dimensions suggests that the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimensions show us how to imagine the big-picture memes that organize the information that eventually becomes reality. From the ninth down to the seventh, the ways of expressing energy/mass are gradually narrowed down, until we arrive at our unique universe as an unwavering point in the seventh dimension. In my previous blog entry ("How to Make a Universe") I touched on one of the ideas from my book: if the multiverse contains 10 to the power of 500 other universes (a possibility inferred from string theory), some of those other universes would be much less stable than our own, instantly exploding into nothingness or collapsing back in upon themselves. So here's another possible location for God: we might be imagining that out of all the possible universes, God chose to create the one we're in because He/She prefers creativity over destruction, life over no life, order over disorder, and so on. Are those phrases also big-picture memes, ways of organizing the information that becomes our reality? Sure. But the question then becomes, if those other less productive universes do really exist out there within the multiverse, did our God create them? Or are there other Gods out there who created those other universes, because of their own preference for a different kind of universe than the one we live in? A pantheon of Gods both benevolent and malevolent spring to mind then, a distasteful idea to some, an appealing idea to others.

What about the fifth dimension? If our universe of spacetime is being constructed one frame at a time, by quanta that are each one planck length away from the next, then I have proposed that the probability space of the "next available branches" is contained within the fifth rather than the fourth dimension. This means that as we are constructing what feels like a fourth dimensional line of time, we are actually twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, which gives us a way to imagine how the fifth dimension and above could appear to be curled up down at the planck length for us, and yet those higher dimensions could also contain the astonishingly large concept of the multiverse-filled-with-universes which we have come to imagine.

If everything from the beginning of time within our specific universe is the result of an observation of the quantum wave function, then the fifth dimension looks like a great location to place God, and to see how we are all connected together though the consensual reality that we share, each as our own quantum observer. In other words, the combined quantum observer effect that creates our universe right from the Big Bang to "now" could be God. As I say in my book:

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.

People who say that God works in mysterious ways, and that what feels like bad luck may actually be part of God's master plan, would be fine with leaving God in the fifth dimension. Personally, here's where I stand with that idea: try as I might, I can't imagine a God who has deliberately created a world that allows evil and inequity to exist as part of His/Her plan. Is there a force for destruction and selfishness and chaos that helps to make our world less beautiful than it could be? For any specific universe, I have placed all the timelines that could potentially have existed (but some of which are now unavailable because of what has come before or what comes after) out in the sixth dimension, and if we are going to imagine that there are forces doing battle to create the world we live in, then that battle must be raging in the sixth dimension. The good guys don't always win, and bad luck happens to the best of us: which would mean the chaos and deliberately chosen paths that cause one part of our world to prosper while so many others suffer is part of the temptations and bad choices that each of us have to acknowledge exist out there in the sixth dimension for our specific universe.

Which leads me back to the seventh dimension. If God is the pattern that created the world and the universe we live in, I think that's the best place to find Him/Her. But I can see arguments for placing God in other dimensions, including the tenth, or even across all dimensions, depending on your own point of view.

I'm attaching two videos that are relevant to this discussion, both of which are in previous blogs which include their lyrics. One is called "The Unseen Eye": if our reality is created by a quantum observer, then there is an Unseen Eye which began collapsing the wave function right from the Big Bang. The other is "What Was Done Today": if the fifth dimensional probability space we are navigating through has been defined by what has already come before, then there are possible futures we can no longer get to because of chance and circumstance, and deliberate choices that have already been made.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ikj7ozGMQM

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton