The New Science of Psychedelics

What happens when a pattern becomes aware of its own existence?

Back in 1963, it was Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time that started me thinking about the dimensions that lie beyond the 3D world we see around us. Now, since 2006, Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been introducing budding thinkers to a way of imagining how our bendy/stretchy space-time could be derived from the timeless “everything” of Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe concept, or the beautifully symmetrical zero of Gevin Giorbran's Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness. Last entry we looked at Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, and the participation in that project of mainstream physicist Kip Thorne, who endorses and explains the scientific underpinnings of the wormholes and time dilation depicted in that film: the "bendy/stretchy space-time" I just referred to. Nolan's film encourages us to think about a "block universe" as Minkowski described it, where different events are merely positions within a timeless 4D structure that becomes easier to imagine when we consider it from the outside vantage point of the fifth dimension.

Here's the question we are asking: what is the source, the background pattern, the underlying process, from which our observed universe emerges? Some theorists ascribe meaning to that pattern, while others call it chaos, or "just a bunch of stuff that happened" (a useful phrase from Homer Simpson). But however we think about them, those underlying patterns exist, and modern research in a wide variety of disciplines inches us ever closer to understanding their nature.

If all I am, if all you are, is a space-time pattern, a spime if you prefer, then that pattern exists within the realm Einstein liked to talk about, where the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion. I began this entry asking this: what happens when a pattern recognizes itself?

Life Happens
Life recognizes life. Awareness is drawn to awareness. Patterns of similar nature congregate together because of their structural similarities, and order really does sometimes arise from chaos. With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, the 400+ YouTube videos, 26 songs, animations and of course the book have all provided people from around the world with a new way of thinking about how their reality is created. But it's more than that: it's because so many people see patterns within my approach which easily tie to their own observations. Case in point: psychobiologist and science writer David Jay Brown said this about my project in his recent book The New Science of Psychedelics:

Physicist Michio Kaku's book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension and Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension both seem to provide uncanny maps of the territory that one encounters after smoking salvia or DMT. Like the two-dimensional character in Edwin Abbott's book Flatland, we seem just as limited in our three-dimensional perspective.

Being mentioned in the same sentence as Kaku is remarkable indeed, particularly since I've stated from the outset of this project that I'm not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be one. Clearly, anyone who calls me a “pseudo-scientist” is ignoring that fact, and that should be the end of the discussion. David knows this, and I'm grateful to him for his vote of confidence. But let's keep this straight: I'm simply a creative thinker who has come up with an intuitive way to organize the information that becomes our observed reality, or any other. My project uses the logic of the point-line-postulate (the accepted methodology for visualizing any number of spatial dimensions) to imagine the ten spatial dimensions which, coincidentally, string theory has told us our reality is derived from. But it also turns out that my approach is very useful for analyzing lots of other kinds of information, and that's why the fan-base of Imagining the Tenth Dimension has been so widely varied: because it gives so many people a way of organizing their thinking that helps them see the patterns that lead to one outcome or another, to one universe or another.

Patterns happen

Do psychedelics provide a way of "lifting the veil", so to speak, to allow us to see the hidden connections that we all share across the extra dimensions? Since I have no personal experience with psychedelics, I'm not the best person to answer that question, but here's what I believe: researchers are finding commonalities across cultures, across widely separated geography, and across the ages, that indicate there is something more than just random misfiring of neurons embedded within aspects of the psychedelic experience, and other meditative or trance-based states of the mind. Here's how David finishes the above-quoted paragraph:

From a three-dimensional point of view it seems like there aren't any other directions to go besides backward and forward, right and left, up and down. But there is another direction that we can move into, another dimension that contains this one within it, and the way to get there is by going directly into the center of our own minds.

My approach to visualizing the dimensions helps us to see those patterns as existing within the timeless background that lies beyond the observed limits of our constantly evolving 4D space-time bubble. And David Jay Brown, who has written for Wired, Discover, and Scientific American on the subject of modern psychedelics research, and who has published a number of books exploring the interesting outer fringes of science, has given his enthusiastic support to my project. For that I am very grateful. Unfortunately, though, these zen-like concepts of "everything and nothingness" also happen to have been a popular line of questioning for mystics and the enlightened (of whatever definition you care to associate with that term) throughout the ages, a  fact that makes those intent upon an atheistic, free-will-is-an-illusion point of view likely to dismiss these discussions outright. Be that as it may, I stand firm in my belief that there are things about this approach that speak directly to the underlying truth of where our reality comes from, so I will continue to fight the good fight for these ideas.

Now that we're holding within our minds the idea of there being a version of 4D space-time where everything happens at once,  let's go back and look at one of my most popular videos: Imagining the Fourth Dimension.  
A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN4KC_zlW4g 

Enjoy the journey,

Rob 

P.S. - Ultimately, finding a way to imagine what the big beautiful zero our reality comes from could be like brings with it a certain peace, as Terry Gilliam reminds us in his current film, The Zero Theorem. We'll talk about that film next.
 

Psychedelics and Spacetime

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wr5oO9fJWU

"Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." - David Jay Brown
"Utterly charming, beautifully illustrated, and elegantly designed, O is for Omniverse is a book to be read aloud, again and again." - David Jay Brown

David Jay Brown has been a good friend to this project, offering very kind words for both of my books. He is the author of seven mind-expanding books about the evolution of consciousness, achieving optimal health, and the future, including four well-known volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers: Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and writes regularly for publications all over the globe, including Scientific American.

David is also one of the world's leading experts on psychedelics, and has acted as editor for issues of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies newsletter: the MAPS Bulletin. One of my facebook friends is Rick Doblin, Ph.D, and Rick is the current Executive Director of MAPS. It was through Rick that I heard about an event they are holding in Los Angeles from December 10th to 12th this year which promises to be very interesting; it's called Catalysts: Psychedelics in Culture, Consciousness, and Creativity. Click here to see the facebook page dedicated to this event.

In recent entries like Extra-Dimensional Geometry and Thinking Bigger, we've been talking about how difficult it can be for our "monkey brains" to visualize extra dimensions. In Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional, we looked at the startling evidence that bees use sixth-dimensional geometry to describe the location of food sources to each other through their complex dance patterns. How could a bee be able to think in six dimensions when even four can seem like a stretch for we human beings? For me, these discussions always come down to finding ways to picture what parts of our reality come from the extra dimensions which are at additional "right angles" to the four dimensions of spacetime, which leads us to the title of this entry.

I know I keep repeating myself on this topic, but people come to these blogs sometimes without having read other parts of my body of work so I want to be clear on this: I have no experience with psychedelics myself, and that leads me to the conclusion that people do not need to take psychedelics in order to visualize what lies beyond our reality. There are other paths to these insights. Nonetheless, I hear every day from people who have taken psychedelics of various kinds and tell me that my approach to describing how the dimensions are connected together makes a great deal of sense when applied to what they experienced, and in many cases has helped them to understand what they perceived.

Terence McKenna was a charismatic speaker, a philosopher, an author, and a strong advocate for psychedelics. With my project, I've spoken a number of times about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which makes the claim that there are multiple ways for human beings to achieve altered states which allow them to peer into these additional realms, and psychedelics offer one of those ways. In the following YouTube video, you'll hear Terence McKenna voice a contrasting view: he says psychedelics are the only way for people to open their minds up to these possibilities.

Terence on Psychedelics and Religion (thanks to Joshua Holmes for showing me this video!):

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ngKwlHLwGs

Here's a link to a Terence McKenna article which proposes that as primitive human beings developed consciousness , those who narrowed their perceptions down from these extra realms to "spacetime only" developed an evolutionary advantage. Let me quote some of that article here:

I think that, and it seems logically compelling to me, that consciousness as ordinarily experienced is a human ability shaped by evolutionary pressure, and since evolutionary threat and harm usually comes at us in three dimensional space, this is where consciousness has been forced...to concentrate and define itself.

... So what happens when you take a compound like psilocybin in silent darkness in a situation of no threat and low anxiety and low input from the exterior world is that this function, which is essentially in most situations a closed fist ready to strike out at something coming from nearby, unfolds into something much more beautiful, much more interesting, and much more true to itself. In other words, not defined by an exterior context or situation, but defined by its own mechanics.

The question is this: are the visions experienced by persons taking psychedelics simply tricks of temporarily altered brain chemistry, or are people actually catching glimpses of something real? And does that mean someone with the proper grounding in extra-dimensional geometries and cosmology might be able to find a way to incorporate those visions into their theories? Here's a link to a page which reprints a seven-year-old article appearing in New Scientist magazine. The original article bore the whimsical title "Einstein an Acid". The reprint on Alok Subbarao's blog calls the article "Pscychedelic-Influenced Astrophysics".
The article is about some creative new proposals for the structure of reality which came from Metod Saniga, who was at that time an astrophysicist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and is now a professor at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, Vienna University of Technology . Dr. Saniga was quite willing to admit that he came up with these insights while under the influence of psychedelics, but he also portrays himself as a serious-minded scientist, and accepts that some critics will reject his ideas outright because of pre-conceived notions about the evils of psychedelics.
The diagrams at left come from the New Scientist article on Dr. Saniga's proposed new framework. Is there a way to marry this approach to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension framework? Perhaps, but if so that's not immediately apparent to me. If you go to Dr. Saniga's website you'll see that his interests are far-reaching, and do extend into the more metaphysical tangents that we've played with in this project, so I would certainly like to know more about this man's work and if any of his innovative concepts have received any mainstream acceptance yet.
Finally, here's a quote from Terence McKenna on David Jay Brown:

"That our perfected selves whisper to us from the future is but one of David Jay Brown's fertile insights." --Terence McKenna, author of Food of the Gods.

Clearly, this is an idea which connects to my project as well, including one of my favorite blog entries from a few months back, Love and Gravity. We're going to continue exploring these fascinating patterns that are at "right angles" to our spacetime next time with an entry called Bees and Tangential Thinking. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton
PS - I'd like to thank my facebook friend Joshua Holmes, who kindly offered the use of the painting seen at the beginning of this blog when he heard I was doing an entry on psychedelics - this painting is Joshua's visual interpretation of a DMT trip. Thanks so much, Joshua!

Magnets and Morality

Here's the opening few paragraphs of an amazing article published at MSNBC on March 29th. The article, written by Eric Bland, is entitled "Study: Magnets Can Alter Morality":

Magnets can alter a person's sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

"It's one thing to 'know' that we'll find morality in the brain," said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. "It's another to 'knock out' that brain area and change people's moral judgments."

Please read the whole article, this study reaches some surprising conclusions.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love to propose new ideas for how my approach to visualizing the dimensions might reflect back upon the reality we see around us. But every now and then I come across new ideas like the one above which take these ideas in new directions I simply hadn't foreseen but still seem to have a logical connection.

Let's step back for a minute.

In my book, I talked about how some people seem to be able to entrain the thoughts and feelings of others, a sign of a good salesman, an effective politician, or a charismatic leader. Are some persons more likely to be transmitters of strong vibrations which allow them to entrain the thoughts and feelings of those around them, while some others are more likely to become followers because they are more attuned to receiving rather than transmitting?

In Information Equals Reality, we talked about how easy it can be to change your energy, and I described a very simple visualization tool for increasing your alertness that a number of people have told me they found surprisingly effective. In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we looked at a study which demonstrated that people who cross their arms are more likely to continue to try to solve a difficult problem: more evidence of the strong connections between the mental and the physical. But these connections go surprisingly deep! In entries like Placebos Becoming More Effective?, Placebos and Nocebos, The Placebo Effect, Changing Your Genes, and Changing Your Genes Part 2, we've explored various studies that indicate that not only can changes in attitude and lifestyle change your health (the most obvious result), but this can also change which genes are expressed, and even influence which genes are passed on to your offspring!

In an entry called Magnets and Souls, I quoted Rupert Sheldrake from David Jay Brown's wonderful book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Here's part of what Rupert had to say:

Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.

So here we are now with a new scientific study that indicates magnetic pulses applied to a specific position within the brain can disrupt a person's sense of morality: the test subjects appear to be more likely to look at outcomes rather than the moral reasons a person might pursue one path of action over another. Morality seems like one of those high-level functions that should be distributed throughout the mind, but this study appears to reveal that it resides at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes. I find that to be amazing!

How much concern should we all have about this discovery that a magnetic field can disrupt moral judgment? How big of a worry should this be for those of us in particular who live in big cities where we are continually bathed in increasingly high levels of electromagnetic energy? Definitely, this is a concern worthy of further scientific study.

Last week, in Fourth Spatial Dimension 101, I suggested that our extra-dimensional selves would be an ornate web of interacting patterns, something much more complex than the "long undulating snake" that we start off with in the original animation. Visualizing the energy field that represents a person's physical presence, and their consciousness, and how that might interact with a magnetic field, adds yet another layer of complexity that it appears we now need to consider if we're looking at the whole picture.

Next week we're going to get a little more metaphysical again as we continue this exploration of vibrations and energy: the entry is called "Vibrations".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Augmented Reality - Faceball

The Shaman

Before we start this entry, here's a new video we posted on YouTube yesterday which is attached to a blog entry from a month ago: "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?". I'm posting it here for all the subscribers to this blog who wouldn't have seen this video back when that previous blog entry was first released.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U. And now, on with today's entry!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO2h_NPkE8

I've quoted author and psychobiologist David Jay Brown before, who had some very kind things to say about my book:

Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered. Bryanton presents a uniquely compelling model of our 10-dimensional universe, that allows one to visualize and grasp the topography of the higher dimensions in a step-by-step manner. This is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of physics, shamanic exploration, or the nature of reality.

Last time we talked about Augmented Reality, new technology which allows us to visualize things that aren't part of our physical world. This time I'd like to look at David Jay Brown's suggestion that my way of visualizing reality is useful for people interested in shamanism. There's an extensive article on this subject in wikipedia, here's one sentence that I think is key:

Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.

The idea that our reality is created by extra-dimensional patterns and shapes is, of course, central to my project. Whether one thinks of those as "invisible forces" or something more metaphysical, I've been insisting, may have more to with point of view than what it is we're really describing. Regardless, though, a shaman's viewpoint has to embrace the basic idea that I've been promoting here: that there is much more to our reality than the 3D world we see around us, and finding ways to visualize how that could be requires us to embrace a perspective which is "outside" of time, and "outside" of space. What I think is remarkable, though, is that this same "timeless" viewpoint has been central to the theories of many of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century: we've talked about this before in entries like Wormholes and Dimensional Folding and Scrambled Eggs.

Black Elk
Ever hear of Black Elk? He was a Lakota medicine man who lived from 1863 to 1950. While there appear to be varying opinions on whether it's proper to call Black Elk a shaman, I would say there are strong connections between this man's transcendent viewpoint and what is referred to as shamanism in other parts of the world. There's a well-known book called Black Elk Speaks which recounts his visions and insights, in what some are calling "the most famous Native American book ever written". A YouTube visitor named "crazedmystic" posted the following quote from Black Elk Speaks on one of my video blogs a few weeks ago:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all.

I love this quote, not just because it speaks to the enfolded nature of reality which I am constantly going on about, but because it states it in such a beautiful way. I've tried to portray similar ideas about the connectedness that we all share, and the beautiful hoop, the "zero" that holds all other possibilities in so many other entries: Going to the Light, "t" Equals Zero, Imagining the Omniverse, and The Big Bang and the Big O, to name just a few.

Drums and Trance
What else is central to the shamanistic experience? It's impossible to generalize too much because shamans appear in various cultures throughout the world: still, music, trance, and altered states of consciousness can all play a large role. Have you ever been in a drum circle? This is one of those things that comedians like to make fun of, but there really is something there - the power of the drum, the shared experience of a large group of people becoming physically and mentally entrained through just drumming together, and the trance-like altered states of consciousness that can spring from such an experience can be surprisingly uplifting. One of my favorite books about all this was written by Mickey Hart, well-known musicologist and drummer for the Grateful Dead, called Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

"Altered states of consciousness", of course, can be brought about through various natural means, including dance or meditation, or through more traumatic experiences, but for many people the phrase makes psychedelics spring to mind immediately.

Psychedelics
We started this blog with a quote from David Jay Brown. As we discussed in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, David is a respected expert on psychedelics and their serious study: he is also sometimes a guest editor of the newsletter published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelics Studies, which you can find at maps.org.

Which brings us to Terence McKenna, who some have referred to as a modern shaman. Here's a very interesting video showing Terence McKenna talking about shamanism in a way that seems very related to what I've been talking about here: McKenna tells us that a shaman would have to be able to tune into the "bifurcating trees of possibility" (McKenna's words) that are coming towards them from beyond the solid reality they see around them. I'd like to think that McKenna would have appreciated the connections between what he's talking about in this video, and the way that I've portrayed the fifth dimension as being part of our probability space (in entries like Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses and Predicting the Future). In entries like The Holographic Universe and Slices of Reality I've also described the fifth dimension as the place where we can see the underlying patterns of our reality are springing from, another related idea. And speaking of Augmented Reality, in a fanciful moment I find myself wondering if we'll ever get to the point where certain psychedelic experiences could be simulated using an augmented reality interface to superimpose those effects over top of the world we see around us? Now that would be quite the software program.


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=S_qx5Pd9Z-M


It really is too bad that Terence McKenna passed away in 2000, well before the advent of YouTube, as he has some fascinating presentations out there that are finding a new audience through the medium of streaming video, but without his participation in the dialog we are deprived of the instant feedback loop that can make YouTube and its comments sections so interesting. To close, here's a couple more of Terence McKenna videos that relate to all this:

You are the center of the Mandala:

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MHsB3RviFN4

Changing your operating system

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ctjNqQPnAk8


Next, we'll continue this discussion with an entry called "Modern Shamans".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Big Bang and the Big O

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iofBT3Vhs

"I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history." - Oscar Janiger

A few days ago, in Poll Question 30, we talked about death and how natural it is for us to believe that some part of us carries on afterwards. Here's a quote from well-known psychiatrist and psychedelics researcher Oscar Janiger, this is from the 1993 book Mavericks of the Mind, a brain-expanding collection of interviews by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick:

David Jay Brown: Have you ever given any thought to what happens to human consciousness after physical death?
Oscar Janiger: I've given a lot of thought to it, but I'm afraid not much productive thought. My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality... my thought is that, for myself only, that I'm simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I--which is now a kind of fruitless phrase--am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Persons familiar with my project will recognize several ideas here: we are all connected to a larger whole (or, as physicist Michio Kaku puts it, we each have a wave function that gently seeps out into the entire universe), there is an enfolded symmetry containing all possibilities that is "before" the Big Bang (which I've talked about in entries like "The Big Bang and the Big Pie" and "Imagining the Omniverse")... but Dr. Janiger's bold connection of the Big Bang to sexual orgasm is an idea that's new to me. So this time around, let's play with that as a concept.

Rock On!
Are you familiar with the origins of the term rock and roll? Originally, this phrase was a euphemism within the American black community for sexual intercourse, originating in the 1930's. It's a particularly evocative phrase, I think, because it implies something that's more sensual: rather than an unimaginative binary in/out of straight lines and ejaculation, "rocking and rolling" brings to mind curves and creativity, a sex act that is interested in the combined satisfaction of both participants.

In the 1950's, disc jockey Alan Freed is credited with popularizing rhythm and blues records and using "rock and roll" as the new label to promote this predominantly black music style to the white audiences of America. Did the average white American know about the sexual connotations of the phrase? They did not. In fact, with racism still deeply embedded in 1950's American culture, the term "rhythm and blues" was a much more difficult sell because of its common association with "negro" culture, so giving this music style a new name was an important key to helping it find a broader audience.

As a music style, how do you define rock and roll? I've talked before about neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music", a wonderfully diverse book which ties together many of the ideas my project also plays with: what gives music its power? What connects music to memory, and what allows music to be able to universally communicate emotion across centuries and across cultures, transcending time and space? Dr. Levitin talks about the subtle interplay of rhythm and groove, the cultural and genetic connections of dance and vocalizing, and yes, how intertwined those are with sex not just for human beings but throughout the animal kingdom.

"It's got a back beat, you can't lose it" - Chuck Berry
For all the rhythmic interplay and emotional connections that the best rock music is plugged into, that snare drum cracking away on the two and four is an extremely important ingredient - it's one of the things that gets people up out of their chairs and makes them want to move, and that dancing is what made puritanical parents of the 50's and 60's reel back in horror, condemning this music because of the sexually suggestive ways they saw their kids bopping around on the dance floor back then.

Dr. Levitin helps put this in context for us. Throughout the history of life on this planet, we see again and again that rhythmic displays and vocalizations are how mates are attracted, and how one creature demonstrates to another that it's healthy and vigorous, in other words a good choice for a sexual partner. In that sense, "rock and roll" was much the same as any dance music that had come before, and not nearly as big a deal or as new an idea as many suggested it was. What rock and roll was doing was the same as any other music that communicates emotion and physicality, and I've talked about this in other blog entries like "The Geometry of Music" and "Information Equals Reality". This also relates to sections of my book where I talk about the genetic connections shared by all living things in patterns that exist across time and space, and this is where I came up with a few fanciful connections of my own:

All of the body’s senses have ways to connect through our minds and our memories to other points in time and space. Sights, sounds, smells, and even textures can conjure up connections that are part of the complex system of memes that make up our individual experience across the higher spatial dimensions we are now imagining as being used to construct the ten dimensions of reality.
How about the well-known experience of a certain smell vividly bringing to mind a moment from the past? Scents and pheremones are known to be powerfully and intricately tied to memory and instinct, in ways that would seem to fold time. Could molecules of a certain scent that bring to mind a certain memory be exerting their power in part because those molecules are clumped together in a higher dimension? If that were the case, the doorway to the memes and memories of a different time and place could be much more easily accessed when the same fragrance is encountered again, because in a higher dimension that different time and place really would be in that much closer proximity to each other.
Sounds also can trigger memory and even instinct. We have already mentioned the squealing sound of chalk on a chalkboard being commonly reviled. Could this be because it resembles the cry of some prehistoric predator which our distant ancestors learned that they should retreat from as quickly as possible? Or, as another example, could the desire to urinate at the sound of running water be a racial memory that connects us to our ancestors who chose to urinate in a place where their urine would be carried away? That would mean the potential ancestors we could have had who constantly chose to urinate in their own standing drinking water supply died of disease, did not become our ancestors, and therefore we have no connection across time to them. As we discussed before, these ideas can also tie into the work of Richard Dawkins, who proposed a new way of looking at genes and how their “desire for continuance” connects them from the past to today in a “river out of Eden”.

It's All About Connections
Isn't it obvious that if we're talking about sex, then we're talking about a connection that we share with all of our ancestors, and if we're thinking outside of time and space then the pattern that represents "orgasm" is something that we share with our fathers (and at least some of our mothers) back to the beginning of sexual reproduction on this planet? But Dr. Janiger suggests an even deeper connection than that, back to the moment of creation for our universe.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed. More and more physicists, including Frank Wilczek, John Moffat, and Sean Carroll have put out articles and books in the last few months which talk about a state which exists "before" the big bang, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe (or any other) springs, and this of course is one of the central ideas to my way of visualizing reality.

Still, I think it's important when we talk about the Big Bang being equivalent to a huge orgasm that we don't just apply the forward motion explosion/ejaculation image, because from our perspective that's actually backwards! What do I mean by that?

As we've discussed in entries like Scrambled Eggs and Time in Either Direction, when we think about our position within spacetime, and we think about the move back through time to the big bang, we are thinking about a gradual paring away of choices: a move towards the very simple initial conditions which defined our universe's basic physical laws. From our perspective, then, what lies "beyond" the big bang? Not our universe, not some other universe, but the enfolded symmetry of all possible states, where, as John Moffat says "t equals zero". We'll talk about this idea more next blog, but this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a "yes" state, a "no" state, and a "simultaneously yes and no" state. From our perspective, then, the move towards the big bang takes us to the highest grouping order (as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently showed us), or the most primary binary state for our universe (as Seth Lloyd asks us to think of it), but the actual "orgasm" of the big bang is what happens when we move beyond the big bang and back into the enfolded whole that we should all be celebrating as the source of every possible reality.

And for me, that's the connection between the big bang and the big "O".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: "t" Equals Zero

David Jay Brown and Psychedelics

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHXLfDaZH24

Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered. Bryanton presents a uniquely compelling model of our 10-dimensional universe, that allows one to visualize and grasp the topography of the higher dimensions in a step-by-step manner. This is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of physics, shamanic exploration, or the nature of reality.
--David Jay Brown, author of Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse

How's that for a recommendation? I'm thrilled! I've quoted from David's writing a number of times in this blog, and would certainly have referenced his material during the writing of my book if I had been lucky enough to come across it back then. I've talked many times about the exciting synchronicities of ideas that happen across time and space, and how those connections can be so easily integrated into the way of visualizing reality that I've come up with for this project. For me, reading Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse was a revelation, because there were so many experts interviewed in that book who were discussing concepts which I raised in my own book, even though at that point I was unfamiliar with many of those experts and their writing.

David Jay Brown holds a Master's Degree in Psychobiology from New York University. Some of you may know his name from the excellent article he wrote for Scientific American Mind, published December 2007, called "Psychedelic Healing": this article was about the renewed interest in the use of psychedelics in the treatment of addiction, depression, and other mental disorders.

In one of my blogs about my song Seven Levels, I discussed some of the connections between psychedelics, mysticism and the number seven. Last blog entry, in "Twisted Dimensions", I returned to the idea from string theory that our universe might be embedded in a seven-dimensional brane. Since my project also attaches a significance to the seventh dimension as being the place where the wave function of all possible expressions for our particular universe are enfolded into what we can think of as a "point", I'm fascinated to see the connections between these many threads.

I've also been fascinated to be contacted by people who have experience with various psychedelics who tell me that my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed gives them a model for understanding and interpreting their experiences. At the tenth dimension forum, there is an Altered States section where I've heard from people who have taken LSD, salvia divinorum, DMT, magic mushrooms, and so on.

In my book and with my song From the Corner of My Eye, I've also explored other connections between disorders of the mind, perceptual tricks of vision, and how they might be revealing information to us about the underlying structures of reality. From over at Dr. Clifford Pickover's Reality Carnival (which recently posted a link to my project, thank you Reality Carnival), here's an entry about a surprising affliction known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which otherwise normal people suffering from degeneration of their visual systems begin witnessing strange creatures... no psychedelics involved!

A YouTube user known as OcularStream just posted this 1997 BBC documentary on "Psychedelic Science", this is well worth watching if you have an hour: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=1BUwlYWs25c

I was particularly interested in part three of this video:

This is about the use of a psychoactive tea preparation known as ayahuasca in Brazilian culture - the idea that a mainstream religious movement of "just plain folks" meet weekly to commune with these psychedelic visions, and treat it not as entertainment but a deeply spiritual experience, is something I find significant.

As another interesting bit of synchronicity, it turns out that my province, Saskatchewan, was where some groundbreaking research into the clinical use of psychedelics was performed in the 50's and early 60's, a fact I mentioned previously in my blog entry Seeing the Big Picture - From 40 Kilometres Up!. Dr. Abram Hoffer, one of the Saskatchewan doctors who conducted those studies back then, appears in the above BBC documentary, and he laments how research was shut down in the 60's because of a fearful rejection by the governments of the time of all psychoactive drugs. Dr. Hoffer talks about the surprising successes of programs where in clinical trials they gave their patients a few small doses of LSD in controlled and peaceful environments: for instance, in one study about half of the alcoholics who received this treatment program said the experience changed their lives, and their desire to abuse alcohol was eliminated.

As we can see in the above BBC documentary, and in the above Scientific American article, that research is slowly resuming now. Which leads me back to David Jay Brown's wonderful recommendation for my project (thank you David, I'm grateful!). David's reference to "shamanic exploration", in the context of the lovingly administered treatments documented by Dr. Hoffer, or the peaceful ayahuasca communions in Brazil, is very connected to what I'm thinking about with this project: finding ways through the power of the mind to transcend the 4-dimensional world and perceive the extra dimensions that create our reality.

Here, to close, is a video of me sitting at my old ("nicely out of tune") piano singing one of the 26 songs I have attached to this project: in the final analysis, it's all about Connections.

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - here's a link to another of my songs that relates to the discussion of addiction and finding a way out: Addictive Personality
And for a serious website about research into the use of psychedelics, check out the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). David Jay Brown edited the last issue of the MAPS Bulletin, it's on the subject of Technology and Psychedelics.

Next: John August and The Nines

Daily Parrying

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5HyTz9xaBc

I'm nearing the end of the quotes I'm going to be making from Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, I hope all these references have sold a few books for David Jay Brown. But one of the interviews that I thought was particularly eloquent was with Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor of psychiatry:

The word "God" has become the shortcut term for what has historically been applied to the overarching or the ultimate creative principle in the universe, that is sometimes experienced in humanlike terms--because I think that our psyche can grasp things if we anthropomorphize them--but, in its essence, is mysterious, luminous, numinous, and overwhelming in its sense of presence when one is open to it. The problem is it's all concept now, mostly, because the actual experience of the divine has been pretty well eradicated from the Western psyche by what Rilke called "daily parrying" so that, as he put it, the senses by which we can know the spirit world have atrophied. So you can only know it experientially, and people that know it experientially are not very good at describing it in a way that's going to create the experience for somebody else. Therefore, somebody who hasn't had the experience, or whose senses aren't open will say, well, you haven't convinced me, because I haven't had the experience. So that's usually where the conversation ends... God as a separate entity, a theistic notion of a being that is separate from us--no, I don't have any sense of that. I have a sense of being part of some infinite spirit wisdom, or spirit intelligence, that is sometimes present, real, and alive to me. But I'm indwelling in it, and it in me.

"Daily parrying" - what a great phrase for what happens in science and culture, where people are trained by tiny little hints every day to be suspicious of anything that hints at something greater than us, or that might plug us into a larger sense of our shared connectedness. In "Animals and Kids" I suggested this might be how kids are taught to be suspicious of the moments when they turn off their narrative voice and just "be". In "Spirituality, Connections and the Ten Dimensions" and "Is God in the Seventh Dimension" I quoted a section from my book that expresses similar sentiments to what Dr. Mack is saying above: the way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here does suggest there are organizing patterns from higher dimensions, and whether you call those patterns "God" or something more clinical doesn't change what we're talking about. However, if by "God" you believe we're talking about an entity who judges and punishes, or who makes your football team win and the other team lose because that's what you prayed for, then we need to be clear that that's not what we're talking about here. Is there something that chose our universe from out of the multiverse, a pattern that unites us, a creative process that causes life in all its complexity and diversity to spring forth from simple chemical reactions, and an enfolded whole that we can return to when we die? That's what we're talking about here.

Quoting Max Planck
This also relates to the currently running poll question, quoting good old Max Planck, whose work is central to this way of imagining how our reality is constructed. The poll question asks if you agree or disagree with the following statement from Dr. Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". While I certainly don't want to appear to be so presumptuous as to be claiming that my intuitive way of imagining how our reality is constructed should be equated with the rigorous scientific proofs offered by experts in their field like Max Planck, I do take comfort in the possibility that my ideas are simply ahead of their time: already in the two years since my book was published, major advancements have come from physicists David Deutsch, Sean Carroll, and Anton Zeilinger which confirm key predictions about the nature of reality that I made in my own book. I've talked before about books by respected experts such as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and Douglas Hofstadter which agree in many ways with my depiction of the shared, multi-layered nature of what is commonly called the soul, and Jill Taylor's viewpoint strongly aligns with my own ideas about the importance of finding ways to quiet that constantly nattering "narrator voice" we carry within us. Clearly, these ideas speak to philosopher Ekhart Tolle's bestselling books as well: it's all about being in the "now". How many more of the supposedly "fringe science" conclusions I've drawn about how our reality is constructed will eventually be confirmed by mainstream science?

Daily Parrying
This all takes us back to a question asked here before - how much of this "daily parrying" is the result of a deliberate effort to keep the general public from becoming aware of the possibilities that are out there (ideas that are explored in entries like "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", and "Flatlanders on a Line"), and how much is the result of random events? One of the most popular videos from this project, "Secret Societies", takes the extreme position that everything is a conspiracy. This idea is also explored in "The Anthropic Viewpoint" which makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we live in The Great Hydrogen Conspiracy, since hydrogen is the most abundant element! The point we're trying to arrive at here is that if our universe was selected from a larger multiverse, then there must be events and processes we can point to that caused that to happen. I believe that whether you call those selecting patterns randomness, conspiracy, a natural outcome, or God, has more to do with your point of view than what we're describing, and that this subtle "daily parrying" we are subjected to throughout our lives has a lot to with the point of view any one of us now has.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids
Another of the songs associated with this project that deals with the idea of subtle influences forming our worldview is Insidious Trends.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: God 2.0

Magnets and Souls

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21KA8JL9qU



A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbTHExJzJXs


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmEStxGgsI


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKxKVpHZe5Q

Rupert Sheldrake had some more to say in David Jay Brown's book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse that I thought was useful to add to the ideas we've looked at in entries like Being More Fifth Dimensional, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Are Animals and Kids More Fifth Dimensional?:

The reason animals are called animals is because the word "animal" comes from the Latin word, anima, meaning "soul". So, what the soul did, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas--who were the main authorities for the medieval view--was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlaid the instincts, the movements, and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.

So the human soul had three levels, or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health and in healing from injury and disease... Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.

I've used "corn starch monster" videos before (which is what we're looking at in the three short youtube clips that start this entry) to demonstrate how a simple action like a low frequency vibration can impart something to a corn starch and water mixture that reminds us of life, and how the reverse is also true: most of us have seen the astonishing difference between a living creature and what that same creature appears as when the spark of life has departed. Some of us have also seen what's it like when a person's soul has left their dying body before the body is dead: even when the physical body continues to struggle on with that most basic desire to continue, it can be clear to us that the "vibration"that made that person who they were is no longer there. Would it really be such a stretch for us to think that a magnet had "died" if one day it ceased to attract and repel other magnets?

From the most primitive beginnings of life on the planet, to human beings and beyond, all life shares the same trait - a desire to continue, an interest in "what happens next". Do corn starch monsters and magnets desire to continue? That's like asking whether my car desires to move forward after I step on the gas pedal. Animation (movement), is not the same as anima (life, soul): so, while things that are alive move, things that move are not necessarily alive. Still, it's interesting to think about a time not very many centuries ago when it was believed that magnets had souls, and to apply that idea to what I've been talking about here: how something as simple as a meme-based vibration pattern across dimensions could be what imparts, using constructive interference with physical reality, the anima to living things.

All of this also strongly relates to the current bestseller I've just finished reading, My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. After a left hemisphere stroke removed Dr. Taylor's ability to plan and think linearly, she spent time thinking only with her right brain, where she reports that she felt an intimate connection to the one-ness that we all share within the universe. I recommend this book highly because it touches upon so many of the things I have talked about with this project - how "souls" can be thought of as coming from different energy/vibration/meme patterns, interlocking together to create what we each of us thinks of as a unique "me", and how some people create energy which other people are drawn to and inspired by, while other people seem to suck the energy out of a room. The corn starch videos, I think, are good starting points for discussion - thinking about how different patterns and waves really could be interacting to create what we know of as life and consciousness. Books like Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life add more pieces to the puzzle as we think about how different waveforms can entrain one another, and ultimately this is all part of the path towards seeing how everything fits together to create our reality.

We'll close this entry with a video for one of the 26 songs that are part of this project. This one is about the soul, the mysterious spark of life that each of us carries within, and it's called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydru-VYfybU

Enjoy the journey, one planck length at a time.

Rob Bryanton

Related entries:
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Vibrations and Energy
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Music and the Dance of Creativity

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June Report

Making New Connections

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh8FFfQ8p-s

In "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse" (a book of interviews conducted by David Jay Brown which I've quoted from a number of times already), neuroscientist Candace B. Pert, famed discoverer of the brain's opiate receptors which bond with endorphins, had this to say:

...we are making new neurons every day in our brains... now it's accepted as a fact, but for a long time it wasn't. Two long-term colleagues... great scientists... were poo-pooing the actual biological importance of it. They were saying... we have no evidence that it's important...

I'm getting ready to give a lecture...I'm going to talk about the implications for our own mind, body, health, and how we can utilize this discovery. I mean, it's no longer just a truism to say think positively, choose positive thoughts, and to make an effort to not put negativity into words. Every time you repeat something, you're stabilizing this neuronal network that's forming. There's always a nascent network that's forming, and there's a constant living and dying of neurons. And what lives and what dies depends on how often it's used. So the more negative things you think or say about yourself, you're just reinforcing those circuits. So to me this is huge. I still can't get over it!

In the same book, well-known author, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil had this to say:

Am I the same consciousness that Ray Kurzweil was a year ago? And you say, Well, Ray, you're the same stuff. It's the same arm and the same face. But actually, no, I'm completely different particles than I was a year ago. Virtually all of my cells have been replaced. Now you say, Well, okay, but, Ray, most of your neurons haven't been replaced. Some of them have, but neurons tend to last longer than most of the other cells, which get turned over. But even those neurons that existed a year ago actually were made of different particules. The actual physical atoms and molecules making them up have been replaced, so nothing is the same as it was a year ago. Actually, the only thing that's the same is the pattern.

There's a certain continuity of pattern, of how all these atoms and molecules are put together, that does have a continuity between between myself today and myself a year ago. So that means what we are is a pattern, and the pattern persists. I draw an analogy to the pattern that water makes in a stream, as, say, it darts around some rocks. If you look at a stream going around some rocks, you see a certain pattern, and that pattern can look very stable. It can stay the same for hours or even years. But the actual water molecules making up the pattern changes in a fraction of a second, because water's flowing by... And we're really pretty much like that pattern of water, because this stuff is flowing through us, and we're not the same particles at all.

My song Change and Renewal is about these ideas as well. In fact, the connections between my lyrics and what Kurzweil says may make it seem like my song was written as a response, but in fact the song was written years before the above quote was published. It's yet another demonstration of the fact that a lot of people around the world have been thinking about similar things, as we start to understand the underlying patterns that create our reality.

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

This is what our brains and our consciousness are made to do: constantly making new connections, creatively stringing together a "chain of attention" one planck length after another to create an observed reality from out of all the possible universes that exist within the multiverse our universe is a part of, and, ultimately, within the omniverse.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other blogs related to this:
Everyone Has a Story
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
Song 24 of 26 - See No Future
I Remember Flying

Coming up next: The Tenth Dimension Polls Archive, questions 11 through 15

Are animals and kids more fifth-dimensional?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXoOA-BSKcg


In blog entries like "Being More Fifth-Dimensional" and "Death?" I've made the suggestion that dogs could be more tuned into the "probability space" of the future than we are because of a more well-developed sense of smell and hearing. This is what makes them great guardians and sentries, and is no doubt a very good reason why humans have liked having dogs around for at least the past ten thousand years. But many of us, I believe, have seen evidence that dogs and other animals are more "tuned in" to what others are thinking, and sometimes to events that might be coming, in ways that are about much more than just having better sniffers than we do.

In my book I spoke briefly about Rupert Sheldrake and his concept of morphic resonance - an idea that is quite easy to integrate into the ideas I've promoted here. If, as quantum physicists say, reality is ultimately just information, then patterns that connect across the fifth dimension and above could easily be part of nonlocality, entanglement, empathy, prescience, and yes, "Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home" (my favorite Sheldrake book). In another book I've talked a lot about lately, David Jay Brown's "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse",
Sheldrake describes a parrot with remarkable powers:

The parrot N'kisi, belonging to Aimee Morgana in New York... turns out to be one of the most remarkable animals in the world. He's an African gray that now has a vocabulary of more than 950 words, which is a world record, and he speaks in sentences...

So this is a completely astonishing situation of an animal that talks and uses language in a meaningful way--better than chimps or gorillas that have been taught to use language through American Sign Language... most amazing of all is that he picks up what his owner's thinking telepathically and comments on her thoughts and intentions--even on her dreams.

We set up a whole series of controlled tests to see if he really could pick up what she was thinking. In these tests we filmed the parrot continuously in one room, and the owner was in another room--with all the doors closed, on another floor of the house, so there was no sound transmission possible. She looked at a series of photographs that she hadn't seen before, which were in sealed randomized envelopes. In each trial, she was filmed as she opened an envelope and looked at the picture in it for two minutes. She didn't say anything. Then we had an independent transcription of what the parrot said. Three independent people transcribed it, blind, not knowing what was going on. We then saw whether the words the parrot said matched the picture the owner was looking at. In some tests the parrot didn't say anything. But when he did, we could see if the words corresponded--and in an astonishingly significant way they did. In some trails, for example she was looking at a picture of a man on a phone, and the parrot said "What'cha doing on the phone?". In other trials she was looking at pictures of flowers, and the parrot said "Those are flowers. It's a pic of flowers".

The constantly nattering "narrator voice"
In my book and past blogs I've talked about the Julian Jaynes "Bicameral Mind" theory which suggests that the normal mode of operation for human beings up until a few thousand years ago was to not be operating with a "narrator voice" that says "now I am walking", "now I am driving", and so on, and that the older, more integrated mode of operation can actually be advantageous to us when we return to it - it's much harder to hit a ball or play a violin or drive a car if we are thinking about every little action. Complicated activities like these are more easy to perform if we can find a way to just "be". Is it also possible that kids operate in this integrated mode more easily, until constant reminders from the adults around them to "pay attention and stop daydreaming" trains them out of it? That's what I'm proposing.

Julian Jaynes introduced his theories to the world with his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". My song "Automatic" is about this bicameral mind theory, and the conclusion we can draw from the above: being more bicameral is being more integrated, less fractured. Quieting our narrator voice allows us to do more, despite the influence of western culture which has trained us to be suspicious of those moments when they happen. I believe this ties nicely to the quote from Nobel-prize-winner Kary Mullis referred to in my last blog entry: this is about being more tuned into the parts of you that are spread across time, which according to this way of visualizing reality is being more fifth-dimensional.

One "now" after another, one planck length at a time
The amazing "now" that each of us is in from moment to moment is always coming from this probability space of the fifth dimension. This means that the possibilities available to us are always much more diverse than what might seem to be there if we are convinced that we are merely travelling down a straight and limited fourth-dimensional line of time. Does that make the fifth dimension a dangerous idea? Well, even though this doesn't mean that the fifth dimension is some kind of magic, some would say it does.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Local Realism Bites the Dust

Being More Fifth-Dimensional

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz-Iz5oTADM

Back in March 2007 I wrote a blog entry called "Death?" in which I played with the idea that dogs might be more tuned into what I often refer to as the bush-like branching structure of possible futures from the fifth-dimensional probability space that we are each navigating through. Here's a quote from that blog entry:

I am reminded of Al Gore's story, "it was like a man from the future came back to tell me about the bad things that were going to happen". Warnings from the future can come in many shapes and sizes. Dogs use well-developed senses like smell and hearing which are better at telling the future than the more immediate senses such as touch or taste - by the time you can touch or taste impending death, it is probably too late. If you can "smell trouble brewing", you stand a better chance of survival. Are dogs from a bit in our own future then? Sure, if you'd like to think of it that way. The early warning system that a dog can provide is not that different from Al Gore's man from the future: because dogs sometimes know when bad stuff is coming before the rest of us do. Being able to smell things or hear things that are further away in time and space than what we humans are capable of gives them that power.

Now, here's a few quotes from the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Kary Mullis.

I think there is so much more in existence besides matter, energy, and time. Nineteenth-century physics had those in an orderly arrangement, but it is too weird to be just that.

If you think about yourself as something going through time, how thick are you? You've got a have a certain finite "thickness" in time, or you wouldn't exist. So you might be a fraction of a second, or a second wide, or five, sliding through time.

It might be that certain parts of you are weeks, months, or years wide. Or maybe some part of you is "now" all the time--from your birth (or maybe even before birth) to your death. Some part of you is in the future at any moment, and some part of you is in the past, because you couldn't possibly be just in this infinitesimally thin thing we call "now"--because there wouldn't be room you in there!

These Kary Mullis quotes are from the book I mentioned two entries ago, "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse". Please check David Jay Brown's books out, lots of stimulating food for thought: and regular readers of this blog, I trust, will be able to see that there are an awful lot of parallels between Dr. Mullis's ideas about reality and my own. As I've said many times, these unexpected connections between people from radically different backgrounds who all seem to be heading towards the same central set of ideas is a major theme of my project.

Are you more fifth-dimensional? Are you tuned in to the probability space that opens before you, and taking joy in the tiny moments of synchronicity and intuition that just might be glimpses of a wider, more fifth-dimensional perspective?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Are animals and kids more fifth-dimensional?