Three Becomes One

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcTK7Mnu70

Image from wikipedia: "Borromean Rings".
With my approach to visualizing the ten spatial dimensions, I group three dimensions together, call that a "triad", and condense it into a single entity so that it becomes a point in the next dimension up. By the time I've done that three times, I arrive at ten, the same number which Pythagoras also defined as the ultimate number encompassing all possible expressions of our reality. Let's look at some of the ways that ancient wisdom ties into all this, starting first with this mystical insight from the current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America:

In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change. If you’re a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.)

- John Michael Greer, as quoted by "tao", from http://drivingsocrates.com/?p=267

When I came across the above text I was struck by how strongly it seemed to relate to the triads from my approach. Here's another quote, this one from a site dedicated to Chinese martial arts:

Then the link between the qi of the earth and the qi of the sky can be formed, causing the practitioner to shape the unity of heaven, earth and person; three becomes one.

The Dynamics of Creation
In Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, I summed up the dynamics of creation like this: "One thing pushes against another, and out pops a third thing". Is this a schoolboy description of sex? Sure, why not! Long before sex came along, there's been single-celled fission, mitosis, a dividing apart: that's one kind of creation, binary and asexual. The other is sexual reproduction, a more robust form of creation because it takes elements from two sources and combines them to create something new. Hegel's dialectic is often summed up in a similar way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Monad, Dyad, Triad

Pythagoras taught that odd numbers are masculine and divine, and even numbers are earthly and feminine. While such a conclusion might seem misogynistic, it's worth noting that Pythagoras welcomed females into his discipline, and his wife and daughters were accomplished mathematicians. In chapter four of my book, "The Binary Viewpoint", I suggested that the desire to catalog things into yes/no, right/wrong (and so on) tends to be a more masculine approach, while the holistic "yin/yang/both together" tends to be a more feminine one. Does this mean I would disagree with Pythagoras and say that odd numbers are more feminine, because they're less dualistic, less binary? It's an interesting thought.

"One state/an opposing state/both simultaneous" is also, of course, the basis of quantum mechanics, science's most-proven description of the foundation of our reality, and something which I've insisted will eventually be shown to be just as connected to our macro reality as it is to the quantum: it's all part of the same continuum. The June issue of Scientific American has just published an article about the first demonstration of quantum superposition on an object large enough to be seen by the naked eye! This demonstration is a major leap forward: while scientists have previously demonstrated superposition with atoms and molecules, this new experiment shows quantum superposition in an object made out of roughly ten trillion atoms. Suddenly, Schrödinger's cat, usually portrayed as nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment, moves a little closer to being something connected to our actual physical reality.

The Law of Threes
So. Two is a dynamic push and pull, while three is more stable, more balanced. In jokes and in fairy tales, it seems more satisfying when something happens three times. Lots of superstitions gravitate to this number: good luck, bad luck, celebrities dying, and so on are seen to come in threes. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - entire belief systems are built on threes. To be sure, the phrase "Law of Threes" means a number of things depending upon who you consult, but here's the most popular answer as provided by "Galeanda" at Answerbag.com:

The Law of Threes states "every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes".

In the final chapter of my book, I reached the conclusion that three systems are interacting, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns, or waveforms.

It's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology. Philosopher Karl Popper made a similar proposal that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information. And imagine my surprise to be told that there are branches of Kabbalah which also teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual.

Three Threes
Here's an interesting version of my approach to visualizing the dimensions, using ideas connected to the point-line-plane postulate: which, as we've said before, can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions.

Start with a point. Choose a second point. Join those two points with a line, you're in the first dimension.

How far away are those two points from each other? Now find an additional point that is the exact same distance away from those first two points but not on the line. What have you created? An equilateral triangle, and you're in the second dimension. The fact that such a triangle can be created with nothing more than a compass and a straight edge is well known to students of sacred geometry and the vessica piscis, concepts we've looked at before in this blog.

Now find an additional point that, again, is the same distance away as those first three points are from each other. What have you created now? This four-sided pyramid is called a tetrahedron. As you can see, it's made from four equilateral triangles, and now you're in the third dimension.

An article published last week in New Scientist magazine suggests that the tetrahedron is the most efficient shape for packing a large number of items into a 3D space. When we're thinking about how three becomes one, imagine collapsing this tetrahedron's outlying points towards any single point. This gives us a useful mental image for seeing how the underlying structures of our 3D space could be connecting to the fourth dimension, as we enfold all of our 3D universe in its current state -- its current "now" -- into a planck-length-sized frame which then becomes a "point" on our 4D line of time.

In Our Universe as a Dodecahedron, we looked at what happens when you rotate five superimposed tetrahedrons so that all their points are equidistant from each other, which took us to the discussion of the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture, and the proposal that the slight curve of our spacetime gives rise to the fifth-dimensional Poincaré Dodecahedral Space that our universe resides within. But once again, if you look at these beautiful symmetrical shapes, can you imagine how all of those points could easily be converged to a single central point?

In that same entry we talked about fascinating fellows like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein who are showing us ways of visualizing how everything is connected through points or point-like structures. With "Three Becomes One", what we're trying to head towards is a way of imagining an underlying symmetry, and how that symmetry can be enfolded to eventually arrive at the unobserved whole, the big beautiful zero that our universe is moving towards and springing from within timelessness. Pull those points apart symmetrically and you get beautiful shapes like the vessica piscis, the triangle, the tetrahedron, and the dodecahedron. Allow the points to converge and you end up back where we started, at a point of indeterminate size.

Since gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, that pushes or pulls, it must factor in here at a fundamental level. Let's continue to explore this idea more in our next two entries, Gravity and Free Will, and Gravity and Entrainment.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S.:
Pictured at left: diagram showing congruence of null lines from Twistor Theory.
Pictured at right: diagram of Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil.


According to the June issue of Scientific American, there's new excitement about Twistor Theory and String Theory being united by the highly respected theoretical physicist Ed Witten. A number of people have asked me to talk about the work of Marko Rodin, I wonder what he would have to say about this latest development?

Where Are You?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Befk-LZVOg0

Laughing and crying, you know, it's the same release
- Joni Mitchell, from her 1974 song "People's Parties"

As I mentioned two entries ago in The Comedian, I'm from the province of Saskatchewan, Canada, and am proud to have been working on the hit Canadian TV show Corner Gas for the past six years (Corner Gas is a smart comedy about people living in a fictional town in Saskatchewan). Artist/musician Joni Mitchell, quoted above, is also from Saskatchewan, and last blog entry we talked about the new scientific studies showing how learning to play music can rewire the brain towards having more empathy. Empathy has been a running theme for the last several entries, and we're continuing that discussion here.

When I typed the above lyrics into google one of the top hits that came up was this:
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22178/56973-healing-tonics--laughing-crying
This is an article written by Shari Covens which blends ancient mysticism with a modern viewpoint. She mentions the seven chakras, and as I've mentioned before seven also holds an important position within my way of visualizing the dimensions: my song Seven Levels is about that idea, and its opening verse includes a mention of chakras as one of the fascinating possible tie-ins to this concept.

Stay with me now, these threads really do all weave together in their own strange way. Joni Mitchell started her career in the 60's as a folk singer, and sometimes played at a folk club here in my home town called "The Fourth Dimension" (another very tiny tie-in to my project). Joni Mitchell released her first album in 1968. That same year, a psychedelic folk music band from Scotland called the Incredible String Band released a song called Douglas Traherne Harding.

Last month we also talked about John Thomas Bryant, creator of Astrotometry. Here's a lovely video John recorded of artist/musician Margaret Fabrizio, talking about Douglas Harding:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=WzN76a8Ubls

Which leads us, finally, to the title of this blog entry: Where Are You?

There's a site called Perceiving Reality that asks the same question. If you have nine minutes, watch this thought-provoking video, which seems to be connected in various ways to the discussions we've been having here:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0drT_L4G8w8

If you got to the end of the above video, you may have been as surprised as I was to see that it was about the teachings of the Kabbalah, a system of ancient mysticism I know little about, but which seems to have some very interesting connections to my way of visualizing reality - including, as others have pointed out to me, and as I showed in my blog entry Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers, some fascinating parallels between the helix logo created for this project and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

Here's another video that connects to all this - Maxwell Igan talks about the "nothing that is behind your eyes" and how that ties into consciousness and empathy, vibrations and patterns, connectedness and love.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=v9AH7JZGAp0

Understanding the ways that we are all connected has been a running theme with my project. I've talked a number of times lately about two of my blog entries from last fall which use Beatles lyrics to tie together modern physics and ancient wisdom - I Know You, You Know Me and You are Me and We are All Together seem to keep coming up in this conversation. In the latter of those two entries, I described a highly unusual dream I'd had a few days before: I'm not in the habit of recounting dreams in this blog, but this one was quite different from any others. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came upon the Maxwell Igan clip above, which would have been released just a week or so after I had my dream, and this blog entry from comedian Joe Rogan, in which he talks about having had the same insight this past summer:

http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/232

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that "we are all one" is some new idea that has just arisen within the last year - I discuss the same idea in my book, and of course various threads of spiritual and mystical thought have said the same thing for millennia. What I'm remarking upon here is only my own personal journey, where I had an insight, then was surprised to find other people expressing the same ideas in short order, and that experience is part of the pattern-matching process that all of us go through as we recognize the connections between the memes all around us.

In the above blog Joe describes how high he was when he came up with his insight, and of course the ideas I'm talking about from those Beatles lyrics are also connected to their experiments with psychedelics. The fact that I came up with the same idea without drugs (as I've said many times now, I have no personal experience with psychedelics) is something I find very interesting: and as I just mentioned in The Comedian, I'm becoming more and more intrigued as I read Graham Hancock's book Supernatural about what that could mean. Is it possible that the visions seen while in various states of altered consciousness (which includes much more than just drug-induced states), as experienced by Shamans throughout mankind's existence, and continuing to be part of many very different people's experience up to today, might be more real than we've been led to suspect? Is it possible that shared thought patterns and new inspirations are giving us tangible glimpses into the memes, the patterns of information that exist outside of time and space? And as I've said many times in this blog, and also touched upon in my book: could meditation, trance, and other altered states be providing ways for us to glimpse other aspects of our reality which are just as real but hidden from view?

This position is easily ridiculed, I know. As I've discussed in entries like Daily Parrying and Ever Seen an Aura?, there has been a tradition, particularly within the scientific community of the past century, to dismiss anything that acknowledges the participation of our consciousness within the creation of the reality we are witnessing as being superstition and ignorance. But what are we to make of it when scientists start expressing related ideas about how all matter is connected together, about hidden dimensions that hold patterns that create our reality, about there being ways of viewing reality in which "time" has no meaning? Let me finish this blog with a famous quote from Albert Einstein:

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

Was Albert smoking the same stuff as Joe? Probably not, and neither was I. But each of us, in our own way, are describing the same idea about how each of us is part of a larger whole.

Where are you in all this? You're right at the very center of your own version of the universe. But you are connected to everyone else, and to everything else, in ways that are very important to remember: and as more and more people realize that, the world becomes a better place.

To finish, the song we mentioned above - our own universe is defined at the seventh dimension, a fact that has mystical, spiritual and scientific connections. The song is called "Seven Levels".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - After writing this entry about memes and hidden patterns that connect us together, I came upon an entry posted last week in C. Om's What Is Really Good? blog which adds some thought-provoking tangents to this question - click here to read "Ever Seen Yourself?".

Next: More on Augmented Reality

Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers

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

In Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism, I wrote about the creative explorations of Jake Kotze, who writes about the connections between popular culture and our reality. Jake published his own blog entry about my project, click here to read about his thoughts on how my way of visualizing the ten dimensions might be tied into the mythos he's been mapping.

One of the connections he makes note of is the importance of the number ten in the system of Jewish Mysticism known as Kabbalah, and its Tree of Life. The graphic below is from the wikipedia article on the subject, but if you search in google for "tree of life" you will find many similar diagrams.

Jake's proposal is that artists and writers, as they create new storylines and visual imagery, might be plugging into hidden patterns that reveal more about the underlying connections behind our reality than they might realize. For instance, he has mapped out the many images of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers that began appearing in popular entertainment in the years prior to 9/11. Coincidence? Or an example of resonances that connect across space and time? You really have to spend some time reading through Jake's blogs to appreciate that this is much more than an idle diversion for him: he has created a huge body of work that boggles the mind.

Since my project is not just about dimensions, but a way of understanding the relationship between consciousness and the patterns within the information that becomes our reality, there are some obvious connections between our two projects. The idea of combining synchronicity with mysticism is really not that big a stretch - anyone who has experienced a moment of surprising synchronicity has already had a taste of a mystical experience. A bit of synchronicity happened to me not long after my book was published, when people began asking about the strong visual similarity between the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the helix I had created as an icon for my project:

I had to admit that I knew nothing about Kabbalah, but the connection did seem fascinating. Another surprise happened earlier this year when I heard from a fan about the notion of "triads" within the Kabbalah. "Triads" is also the word I chose to refer to the groups of three dimensions that are created by the line/branch/fold metaphor I use in my visualization of the dimensions.

In my book, chapter four is about what I call the "binary viewpoint": this is the tendency for us to try to categorize things into "this is what it is" and "this is what it isn't". By the end of that chapter I discuss an idea that comes from both quantum physics and ancient mysticism: there is always a third state to consider along with that binary yes/no or on/off: both states simultaneously (which, in a kind of a zen flip, is essentially the same as no choice being made). Thinking about the third dimension, then, is really thinking about the first three dimensions simultaneously, as a triad. The fourth through sixth and seventh through ninth also have a certain self-contained quality within my way of visualizing, so we end up with three triads, and in my project those three triads then become one in the tenth dimension.

An online document called "An Introduction to the Kabbalah for Beginners" is where someone first pointed me to, to show me that system's use of the term "triads". Here's what it says:

The Tree of Life contains three Triads. The first triad has been called the Intellectual World or Olahm Mevshekal, the second is called the Moral World or Olahm Morgash, and the third is called the Material World or Olahm Ha-Mevetbau.

Starting from the top of my helix logo, it's easy to superimpose these words onto my triads. The Intellectual triad is the seventh through ninth dimensions - readers familiar with my project will recognize how many times I have said this is where "Information equals reality", and this is where the "big-pictures memes that prefer one kind of reality over another" reside. The second triad, the fourth through sixth, can very easily be referred to as the Moral triad, since this is where the different parallel universes resulting from "choice, chance, and the actions of others" (another phrase I've used so often with this project) would be found. And the Material triad, obviously, would be dimensions 1 through 3, where we find the actual physical atoms and molecules that make up our universe.

What can I say? I knew nothing about Kabbalah when I created this project: this is synchronicity at work. Memes that connect across time and space, providing simultaneous inspiration, communicating meaning through shared experiences which may not even be our own. As I said in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, I am continually humbled by the people from around the world who say they see connections between my way of visualizing reality and their own impressions of how things really work.

Here, to finish is one of my 26 songs attached to this project, another one of the simpler productions with me sitting at my old piano. This song is about the quandary you always end up with when you're trying to explain where it all comes from: whether you call it God, Indeterminacy, the Tenth Dimension, or something else, you have to end up following the cause and effect, the chickens and eggs and eggs and chickens, back and back through the links of the chain until finally, you arrive at something that has always just "been".

My song about this idea is called "Blind Faith".


A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vppy4BOdSJ0

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)

FAQ 10 - Is this about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

10. Is this project about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens, etc.?

Where Are You?
Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics
The Shaman
Modern Shamans
You are Me and We are All Together
Nassim Haramein
Jumping Jesus
Placebos and Nocebos
Song 16 of 26 - Turquoise and White (a song about meditation and positive visualizations)
Song 2 of 26 - Seven Levels (a song about the interesting connections to the number seven)

This was one of the surprising outcomes of this project for me: I'm no expert on these ideas, but a number of visitors to the tenth dimension forum and my channel on youtube have written in to say they see strong connections between some of the items on the list above and my way of visualizing reality. For a project that is trying to find a central meeting point between science and philosophy, physics and spirituality, this may not seem like a surprising outcome, but the breadth of the different belief systems that people have said they see connections to is a thrill. Here are some blog entries about this:

Vibrations
Tuning Into Reality
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

You might also be interested in the "Altered States" area of the tenth dimension forum. And Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment magazine also touches upon these ideas, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here.

Quantum Theory and the Multiverse

One of the things that has made my eleven minute animation so popular is that it gives the general public a way to imagine the extraordinary implications of quantum physics, and the multiverse, something that many would have thought impossible. Having worked their way through these ideas gives some people a new sense of wonder about the incredible universe in which we live. On the other hand, others have reacted with knee-jerk outrage, dismissing the entire project as "new age What the Bleep hippie crap".

From the outset, I have made it very clear that this is a work of creative exploration and intuition from a non-scientist. Hoping to get over the label of "crackpot" so that we can discuss these unique ideas in their proper context, I have embraced the term: in the scientific community, a crackpot is one who advances ideas even though they have no formal training in the area they are speaking about, and that is a fair description. What I have created is not a theory, it is a framework for discussion, and the almost two million unique visitors who have flocked to the tenth dimension site show that these ideas have strong resonances for a great many people from around the world.

Does acknowledging that I am a composer, not a physicist, make this an easy target for naysayers assuming that this is some sort of a scam, or that my ideas must automatically be wrong? Would I have been smarter to conceal my background and let people assume that this new way of imagining the dimensions is already accepted by mainstream science? My feeling was that these ideas showed too much promise to be discarded, and I have made every effort to be forthright from the outset of this project about my qualifications.

In the current issue of "What Is Enlightenment?" magazine, senior associate editor Tom Huston had some very kind words to say about this project. From a 2 1/2 page article entitled "Your 3-D Universe is So Passé", here are some of his comments:

"...the highlight of the site is a delightfully lucid Flash animation... explaining how each successive dimension builds and expands on the dimensions below it.... and by the time we arrive at the tenth dimension, which comes across as a kind of Teilhardian Omega Point encompassing absolutely every possible timeline of every possible universe, 'there's no place left to go'."
"...the simplicity of Bryanton's ten-dimensional model is striking, and he points out at the beginning of his book that what he's proposing has little to do with the incredibly intricate mathematical formulas comprising the theories espoused by Greene, Randall, and other professional physicists. His multiple dimensions are purely speculative and built on logical consistency, requiring nothing more than a basic grasp of high school geometry to understand."
"His argument hangs together surprisingly well, testifying to the more than two decades of thought he put into his model before revealing it to the world. In chapters with such diverse titles as "The Quantum Observer", "The Paradoxes of Time Travel", and "Memes, Music and Memory", Bryanton's multidimensional matrix manages to make sense out of more mysteries than any one theory should justly be able to handle."
"Some forum participants have remarked on the similarity between Bryanton's model and the ten sefirot of Kabbalah, which represent the hierarchical gradations of divine creation, while others have suggested that the whole thing is just a novel elucidation of the paradoxical wisdom of Zen"
"Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is conveying the concept of alternate dimensions to an audience that might never pick up a book on cosmology, string theory, or quantum geometry. And judging from some of the comments it has been garnering in the blogosphere, it's expanding worldviews, blowing minds, and provoking plenty of philosophical and spiritual inquiry as well".

This project is about the interesting ways that physics and philosophy seem to be traveling towards agreement as to the nature of reality. I have compared it to an amazing science fiction book I read as a child, Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time". That book awakened my eight-year-old brain to the possibilities of there being much more to our reality than what we see before us, in the same way that Imagining the Tenth Dimension is doing so for a new generation of thinkers and dreamers. Teachers who have shown my animation to their students have used it as a jumping off point for discussions of multidimensional topology, political theory, philosophy, and cosmology.

As a way to awaken curiosity and challenge narrow thinking, this project has proven to be very effective. As one fan wrote to me, "this isn't string theory, but it's right" (my blog entry about Intuition is, in a way, a response to those kind words). Anyone who has wrestled with the challenging implications of quantum physics, entanglement, the multiverse, and the role of the observer should come away with a sense that we are only beginning to understand how rich and strange our reality and our place within that reality really is. Please check out the book " Quantum Enigma" by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, two physics professors from the University of Santa Cruz, for a level-headed discussion of consciousness and its relation to quantum mechanics.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob