Imagining the Omniverse

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, has just published a new book on the latest thinking in physics and cosmology called "Lightness of Being". To quote from the recent review of this book in New Scientist Magazine:

...if the Higgs boson is not responsible for most of the mass around us, what is? The answer, Wilczek tells us, is empty space.

Still, the idea that all familiar mass - our desks, chairs, bodies - comes from energy crystallized out of nothing is rather mind-bending. And it leads Wilczek to wonder...is space and time themselves a condensate that similarly crystallized from nothingness in the earliest moments of the big bang?

Again and again, new revelations come from the scientific community that confirm the basic ideas I've been putting forth - that there is a place where everything fits together, where every state exists simultaneously outside of our 4D spacetime, an enfolded zero or "nothing", and that is where our universe or any other comes from. As Wilczek suggests, and I have been saying as well, this is also where the missing 96% of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy which pervade our reality, comes from as well.

So this time around, I'd like to continue with ideas introduced in my previous blog, "Dreaming of Electric Sheep".


Here we are, out in timelessness, the underlying fabric that is "outside the system": the place where past, present and future have no meaning. This is the perfectly balanced symmetry state that physicists talk about as being where our universe comes from - and the phrase they commonly use is that our universe came about as a result of the breaking of that symmetry. As we mentioned in "The Big Bang and the Big Pie", the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is about to be awarded to scientists who described the mechanism for how our universe spontaneously arose from this broken symmetry. Symmetry-breaking is often used to explain why our universe is composed mainly of matter rather than antimatter, and the fact that our universe is so far out of balance in this way is often described as being one of the major unexplained mysteries of modern science.

What does symmetry mean, exactly? It means that things are balanced. Every possibility has an opposite possibility. Every plus has a minus. What may not be immediately evident about symmetry, though, is that when you take all of those positives and negatives contained within perfect symmetry and add them together, you end up with a big, beautiful number - zero.

Zero, then, is not empty, it's full - full of every other possibility, perfectly balanced and assembled in that underlying symmetry that our universe or any other universe comes from - zero is where it all starts, and zero is where it all ends. Because it's the source of everything else, that zero has many names in many different ways of thinking - but right now, let's call that zero the "omniverse".

What happens within this omniverse, this zero, when things become out of balance? Most of the time, the results are quite inconsequential, and balance is soon restored. Down at the quantum level, physicist John Wheeler described how there's a constantly bubbling chaos, a random noise of particles and energy that continually pop in and out of existence - a "quantum foam", as he called it, and this quantum foam continues to be part of the background for our universe or any other.

But as we travel around within all the different variations contained within this zero--this underlying set of all possible states where past, present and future all exist simultaneously--occasionally we'll come across a surprisingly large deviation, where the information that is contained within this zero is pushed in a very interesting way in one direction or another, creating a large move away from the perfect balance of where we started. Here's something amazing then: from this perspective, out here within the timeless background of the omniverse, when we look at one of these interesting deviations we're looking at the entire life of a universe as one simultaneous shape. This could be a universe where nothing much ever happens, or it could be a universe that quickly flies apart into maximum entropy. It could be our universe, with its unique values for gravity and the speed of light; or it could be some other universe with a completely different value for its fine structure constant. It could even just be an interesting pattern of information, an idea, that doesn't actually coalesce into a universe at all! Still, no matter what we're looking at, it's something that defines a shape that represents a break from symmetry at one extreme, and a return to symmetry at the other.

Now let's think about this in terms of our own universe. That break from symmetry, from down here in spacetime, looks in one direction to be our highly ordered big bang, and in the other direction looks to be the end of the universe. Right at this very instant, we're someplace within that shape, and all of the other possible positions within that shape represent all of the possible timelines that could have or will have occurred for our universe right from one edge of its existence, right from one edge of this shape, to the other.

(And what's "before" the big bang, and "after" the end of our universe"? Thinking about timelessness, we can see that both are the same thing - in either case, we're talking about being back within that beautiful enfolded "zero", that perfectly balanced symmetry, the omniverse.)

But still, what does all this have to do with something as complex as our own universe? What would cause a larger, more complex deviation to occur? There needs to be some sort of logical pattern, an ordered causality that moves from one state to another, creating steps that allow us to move further and further away from the balancing point. For our own universe, that logical causality happens because our universe is constrained by a set of locked-in physical laws that allow these different states to be stacked upon each other, moving us far away from that underlying perfectly balanced symmetry state, all the way out to that very first yes/no selection pattern that quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd invites us to think of as the beginning of our universe.

Here's a way to think about that: let's dive right into that forest of all possible states for all possible universes contained within the omniverse. No matter where we begin, the most likely result is that the place we start to observe will appear to be random information, and we won't be able to see very far at all. But as we move around and look at this data from different angles and starting positions, every now and then we'll see places where the "trees" within our forest happen to align, and we'll be able to see further, or we'll see coherent patterns. For something as complex as our own universe, we're talking about an exceedingly unlikely set of alignments to take place within the data: but because we're talking about underlying selection patterns that exist outside of time and space, the word "unlikely" ceases to have much meaning. No matter how unlikely a pattern might be, if it's a pattern that could possibly exist at all, then that pattern already exists within the timeless background of the omniverse.

Let's go back to that perfectly balanced zero that we started from. We can think of this as a vast plain representing every possible expression of matter, energy, and information. That "quantum foam" we talked about, then, is really the quantum equivalent of a series of coin tosses: tiny little deviations one way or the other, particles and antiparticles, waveforms that are pushing towards the positive or the negative. Baby universes that quickly pop in and out of existence, then, would be (on a much larger scale, or course) like those areas of grouping and symmetry order that we would see within 100 tosses of a coin.

Traveling around within this omniverse of all possibilities, we'll occasionally find coherent structures that represent a potential universe, and if we then look more closely at the dimensions below, we'll find the wave function for that particular universe and all of the possible states for that particular universe, and each universe will have unique characteristics as defined by its position within the omniverse.

Our own universe, then, is constrained by its basic physical laws, which appear to not have changed over the life of our universe. Physicists talk about the big bang as being the "most ordered state" for our universe, and how everything from there on has been a move from more order to more entropy. Now, we've just been looking at a way to see how our universe is the result of a push towards a large amount of grouping order, and the arrow of time that we are experiencing now is the result of a return to symmetry order - but here's the hardest part to wrap our minds around: where this is all occurring is outside of time and space, and it all occurs simultaneously.

A number of the great minds of the twentieth century tried to get us all to visualize this place where, as Einstein liked to say, "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless". As we're imagining the omniverse, what we're thinking about is the timeless place where our universe, and all of the possible parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for our universe, and all of the other possible universes and their own wave function of possible expressions all enfold together - into a beautifully balanced zero which is not empty, but full, of all the other possibilities.

To finish, here's a video for one of the 26 songs I've attached to this project: this is me sitting at my old piano in my living room, singing a song about the extra dimensional patterns that create our reality, and how sometimes we might be able catch a glimpse of those patterns in our day-to-day life. The song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8IBDXv_xI

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Edit: A few months later another related blog was published: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

Next: New stuff at the store

The Big Bang and the Big Pie

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kiP12-u2GYY

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, used the large fortune he amassed to institute the Nobel Prizes, and the latest Nobel Laureates were announced a few weeks ago. ...the big bang, dynamite, there's a joke in there somewhere, make one up if you want.

In You are Me and We are All Together, I quoted this fascinating bit of information from Michio Kaku's book The Physics of the Impossible:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

Antimatter, like wormholes, is one of those concepts some of us have learned about through science fiction, which might lead us to believe that it's a fictional concept. Watch out for that wormhole! Activate the antimatter drive! Blast 'em with the antimatter gun! It turns out, though, that the issue of why our universe has so very little antimatter in it is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology.

North has its South, Time has its Anti-Time
In entries like Scrambled Eggs and Time in Either Direction, we've talked about the mainstream science concept that there could be other universes where time flows in the opposite direction to what we're experiencing. Think about what Feynman is telling us, then: if a conscious observer were traveling within our own universe in time's opposite direction, they would be faced with a universe which is made up of an unexplainably large number of antiparticles and antimatter, and almost no matter! From their perspective, the fact that our universe is so asymmetrical would be an equally unsolved mystery.

In a few weeks, the 2008 Nobel Prize recipients will travel to Oslo and Stockholm to receive their awards. You can click on this link to read about the Physics prize, or you can click here to download an 8 page pdf with some nicely presented background information. This year the Physics prize is being awarded in pieces - half went to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, IL, USA,

"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"

and the other half was awarded jointly to Japan's Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa

"for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"

Our universe is a temporary deviation from symmetry
To sum up their discoveries very briefly, these scientists have demonstrated that there is an underlying symmetry that our universe comes from (a concept I have talked about many times here), and because of that underlying symmetry, at the origin of our universe there should have been an equal number of matter and antimatter particles. The fact that our universe has so many fewer antimatter particles, then, must be because there were more particles than antiparticles back then - so, while most of the opposing particles and antiparticles obliterated each other, there were (according to these scientists) about one extra particle of matter for every ten billion particles of antimatter, and that one out of ten billion particles are the ones that remain to create the astonishingly huge universe we find ourselves to be in right now. Another mind boggling concept to wrap our heads around!

Thinking about Timelessness
Now let's add one more even more mind-boggling concept on top of all that. If it's the accepted definition of antimatter that it's just matter that is traveling backwards in time, how are there any naturally occurring antimatter particles at all in our universe right now? If those particles were created within the big bang, they're going in the wrong direction to be part of our universe. How can this be? It's because the big bang is an illusion. In "The Past is an Illusion", we quoted this famous phrase:

This separation between past, present and future is only an illusion…
- Albert Einstein

... and this is where it takes us. Richard Feynman showed us that antimatter particles are coming from the future and heading towards the past. So, if we're talking about symmetry being broken to create our universe, we're not just talking about an event that happened 13.7 billion years ago: we're talking about a broken symmetry which occurred to simultaneously create our universe and all of it possible timelines, right from the big bang to the final moment of our universe, in a place that is "outside of time". In this project, that place is a "point" within the seventh dimension and above. That "point" is a selection pattern, which chooses our universe and its basic physical laws from out of an enfolded background state where all possible universes and their possible timelines exist simultaneously. Gevin Giorbran called that underlying state "Timelessness", and in my project I call that the indeterminacy of the tenth dimension in its unobserved state.

The Big Bang and the Big Pie
Saying "the big bang is an illusion" is a way of saying that the big bang's effects are only one way of looking at the information that becomes our reality. In the biggest picture of all, the big bang--just like time itself--becomes irrelevant, because we are talking about the place where everything happens all at the same time. Our "now" that we are observing at this instant, then, as amazing and beautiful and complex as it might be, is still only the tiniest of slices of that much larger pie that represents every possible state for every possible universe, and every possible way of organizing the information that could potentially create any of that.

So: enjoy the journey on your tiny slice of pie!


To close, here's one of the videos for my song which includes the lyric "the big bang is just an illusion": the song is called "The Unseen Eye".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

Rob

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, November Report

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link for the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein

In David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked about the possibility that psychedelic experiences might actually be used in the treatment of addictions and mental illness, when given in properly supervised circumstances. Though I have no personal experience with psychedelics I'm fascinated when I read about the experiences of others who have gone out to the edges of perception and brought us back some jewels for us all to admire.

Last blog was entitled "I Know You, You Know Me": a phrase from a Beatles song. This time we're using another phrase, this one which John Lennon tells us was based upon an insight that came to him while he was taking an acid trip. (The song this is taken from, "I Am the Walrus", is also quite famously known as a song John Lennon concocted after learning that schoolteachers were incorporating Beatles music into their lectures, and Lennon took great delight in creating a song which would be so deliberately obscure no one would be able to interpret it. Nonetheless, the opening phrase of the song is reported to be a serious effort by Lennon to explain an insight he perceived while under the influence of LSD:

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

Last blog we talked about the feeling of connectedness that a growing number of people are sharing right now around the world. It's so easy to be cynical about ideas like this, and yet books by serious scientists like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, whose "My Stroke of Insight" I have talked about a number of times before, are showing us that there is more than just naive wishful thinking to such an idea: it appears that it is part of our basic human awareness, the underlying seeds of consciousness that make us who we are, that is naturally driven to find the connections of the one to the many.

I don't usually talk about my dreams in this blog, but I had a doozy a few weeks ago which, if you will indulge me, I would like to share.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to cover an impossibly long span of time? In this dream, I started from my current life, interacted with people in ways that were sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating or infuriating, and eventually I died. After a brief break I started another life, this time still laden with the memories of what had ticked me off and what I had enjoyed in my previous life, and this definitely had an influence on my new life and the decisions I made. Again and again I repeated the process, and eventually I started to recognize myself in other bodies, often acting from a certain belief system which was flawed by misunderstandings and bad luck that had come before, and eventually I had lived every life that there was to have lived in the history of the world. I awoke with a feeling that if only we could all have such an experience, we would all be able to understand why so many of us can appear to act with unreasoning negativity - we are all interacting without truly understanding what makes the other person do and say the things they do.

Okay, it was just a dream, everyone has strange dreams from time to time. But since this project has me obsessed with finding connections, I saw an eerie echo of my dream a few days later when I read this passage from Michio Kaku's "The Physics of the Impossible". He is talking about Richard Feynman, whose "sum over histories" method is one of the concepts I have used many times in my book and this blog:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

With his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron's journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it explains a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. ...Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.

Feynman's crazy notion about one single electron, and antimatter particles traveling backwards in time grew into his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which has been experimentally verified to one part in 10 billion, making it one of the most accurate theories of all time. Feynman and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for this discovery. If you click here you can read his Nobel acceptance speech from that year, which is an entertaining and insightful exploration of the creative mind.

Could our universe really have only one electron, whizzing back and forth within timelessness to create the trillions of electrons we see at any particular "now" for our universe? Could consciousness be the same, only one consciousness traveling back and forth across time, experiencing the endless complexity of our universe from a unique perspective each time, but ultimately seeing itself complete the same journey over and over again? Perhaps John Lennon and Richard Feynman were thinking about ideas that were more similar than either of them could ever have realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Since we've been talking about Beatles music, let's finish this entry with what I would consider to be the most Beatles-esque of the 26 songs I've written for this project, and it even begins with a mention of Paul McCartney, who reports that the first time he smoked marijuana he had the insight that there are seven levels to our reality. A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


Next: Scrambled Eggs

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 11

Poll #11 - "Traditionally, each of us has one indivisible soul. While each person's individual experience is indeed unique, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space. "(poll ended April 3 08)

76% said "I agree", while the remainder disagreed.

"I think there is so much more in existence besides matter, energy, and time" - Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis

I've talked in this blog a number of times about Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop", which was published well after my own book came out. In my book I refer to Hofstadter's previous masterwork "Godel, Escher, Bach", as well as Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind". These ideas relate in similar ways to my current references to Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" concept: there are very good arguments for us to stop thinking of each of us as being a self-contained "soul". The above poll question is my attempt to sum up the viewpoint of experts like Hofstadter and Minsky... a viewpoint that aligns very nicely, in my opinion, with the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with in this project.

"...information is never destroyed. More and more information is constantly being created, and it's not lost, and energy and matter are incontrovertible. So somehow there must be some survival, because one being represents a huge amount of information. So I can imagine that there is survival, but I'm not sure exactly what form it takes." - neuroscientist Candace B. Pert (famed discover of the brain's opiate receptors)

Are you the same person you were twenty years ago, or are there things about your beliefs and viewpoint that have changed? Do you ever marvel at how one person can change the mood of an entire room just by entering? Have you ever had an experience that made you suspect a loved one who had passed on might be trying to get a message to you? Each of these, to varying degrees, are examples of personal experiences many people in the general public have had. Finding that there are ways that we can visualize how our reality is constructed that allow for these hidden connections to occur is what we're trying to do with this project. And despite the dismissive attitudes of some in the scientific mainstream, experts like biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who I refer to briefly in my book), Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis (quoted above), and well-known neuroscientist Candace Pert (also quoted above) tell us there are numerous scientific studies that prove we are connected together across time and space in ways that might be surprising to acknowledge.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For more about this idea:
Song 25 of 26 - What I Feel For You
Song 6 of 26 - Connections
Your Sixth-Dimensional Self
Song 14 of 26 - I Remember Flying
Song 4 of 26 - The Unseen Eye
FAQ 11 - Is this about memes, creativity, connections?
FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and quantum observer?

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next: Poll 12 - Is our universe random, or is it probabilistic?

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?

The Controversy Over Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Suppose that twenty years ago you had come up with a new framework for imagining how reality is constructed, which appeared to be so simple that you knew others must have already thought of it, and it was just a matter of time before you came across those people. What if you felt that the more you read about leading edge theories of physics and consciousness, the more you saw ways of applying your own framework to what you were reading, but still you could find no one else talking about your unique approach? That was the position I found myself in 2005 when I began writing “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”.

When I commissioned the talented folks at OH!Media to create the eleven minute animation explaining the basic concepts from chapter one of my book, I knew that what I was presenting was going to resonate strongly for some, and be considered the work of a crackpot by others, and I was comfortable with that. Sure enough, as soon as the internet discovered the website and the animation, the controversy began: this guy has it all wrong, this guy doesn’t understand basic physics, this guy is a charlatan. Anyone who spent more than a minute on the tenth dimension website and forum knew I was always careful to point out that I was portraying a new idea which was not the position of mainstream science, but by having the gall to even present my new and fanciful way of imagining the dimensions I have always been an easy target for criticism: so be it.

In my book I talk about how, for each of us, consciousness is constructed from an interlocking system of memes and drives which change over time, with different parts of the system rising and falling in dominance, and new parts being acquired while others are discarded. Each of us has a personal “grid” that represents our unique point of view, and there is no question that my way of imagining the ten dimensions falls well outside of some people’s grid, while it aligns very well with others. The strongly divided “I love it/I hate it” response that the animation and the book have triggered is a wonderful demonstration of the nature of consciousness and beliefs, and what connects us all together or pushes some of us apart. In one part of chapter eight, “Dark Matter and Other Mysteries”, I talk about some of the more “out there” concepts such as Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” and the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know”:

Many experts would, of course, dismiss examples such as these as “crackpot theories”, or perhaps they would assign them the slightly less derogatory label of “fringe science”.
Terms like “fringe science” will usually make mainstream scientists turn on their blinders. Anything that can be categorized under this label, they would say, is obviously not worthy of any serious research or consideration. Brian Josephson is a famous example of a respected scientist who has been forced to forsake his established position within the mainstream world of physics because of his desire to see more rigorous scientific methods applied to certain kinds of “fringe science”.
Brian is a Nobel Laureate whose “Josephson Junctions” began as a theory which sprang from his profound understanding of superconductivity and quantum tunnelling. These Josephson Junctions have become one of the most powerful tools currently being used for research into the subtle magnetic fields of the brain, of earthquake prediction, and of the gravity waves predicted by modern cosmologists’ theories of the beginning of the universe. His innovative discoveries certainly qualify him as one of the great minds of the twentieth century.
However, somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Josephson is now a famous advocate for research into the physics behind paranormal phenomena. Here’s what he says on his website: “One of my guiding principles … has been the scientist's motto 'Take nobody's word for it' (nullius in verba), a corollary of which is that if scientists as a whole denounce an idea this should not necessarily be taken as proof that the said idea is absurd: rather, one should examine carefully the alleged grounds for such opinions and judge how well these stand up to detailed scrutiny”. Mr. Josephson also documents on his website some of the efforts he feels the established scientific community has made to ridicule and discredit any research which falls outside the commonly accepted norms, which would certainly include Mr. Josephson’s research into the physics of the paranormal.

Now, Brian Josephson is a genius. I, on the other hand, am just some guy who came up with an interesting new way of imagining ten dimensions, something that most people would have said was impossible prior to working through the exercise. But in the past week or so, a few negative reviews of my book have appeared at Amazon.com from people who portray me as a crackpot pretending to be a physicist. So, I’m probably going to get even more flak for doing this, but I have now posted my own review of my book there:

A note from the author (Rob Bryanton)

This book is called "Imagining" the Tenth Dimension, its subtitle is "a new way of thinking" about time and space, and the book description includes the phrase "not about mainstream physics". If anyone sees all this and somehow concludes that this book is about an established and proven theory of reality currently supported by mainstream physics, then they would be mistaken. The book's website, www.tenthdimension.com includes a "Preamble" link which clearly states the intent of the book, and the author's blog also includes a brief biography of his award-winning work as a composer and sound designer. The introductory blog includes important background information about the nature and intent of this project as well.

Most people who buy this book do so because they saw the eleven minute animation which presents the ideas from chapter one of the book. Please, if you are considering buying this book and have not seen that animation, go take a look first at http://one.revver.com/watch/99898 . If you watch this animation and disagree with the conclusions drawn, then you will most certainly disagree with the rest of the book as well. On the other hand, if you find the ideas presented in the animation to have a certain resonance with your own way of imagining reality, then this book might be of interest to you, as it travels through a wide-ranging discussion of science, philosophy, metaphysics, and spirituality.

For the people who have posted positive reviews of my book at amazon.com and amazon.ca, thanks so much for your support. You are the people I was hoping to share these ideas with, and I’m very glad that you got some enjoyment and inspiration from what I have created.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob