a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
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.
"Why isn't there nothingness? Nothingness would have been decidedly elegant. In the Ultimate Multiverse, a universe consisting of nothing does exist. As far as we can tell, nothingness is a perfectly logical possibility and so must be included in a multiverse that embraces all universes."
- Brian Greene, discussing a concept which with this project we have called the Omniverse, in his book The Hidden Reality
At the end of the Introductory chapter of my book, I said this:
"...the point of this exercise will be that by imagining all ten dimensions, we will have imagined a fabric that can account for all aspects of reality. A tall order! Let’s begin."
How do we get to the tenth dimension from the ninth? As with every other dimension, we envision a point that encompasses the entire ninth dimension, and call that a "point" in the next dimension up. Persons familiar with my animation know what I say next:
"...if we’re going to imagine the tenth dimension as continuing the cycle, and being a line, then we’re going to have to imagine a different point that we can draw that line to. But there’s no place left to go! By the time we have imagined all possible timelines for all possible universes as being a single point in the tenth dimension, it appears that our journey is done."
But is our journey really done? Far from it. The ramifications of this way of visualizing the dimensions are many indeed, and that's why I continue to find things to discuss about this project in my blog, and that's why I've published about four hundred videos at my youtube channel over the past five years since this project was launched. Some of the ideas that we haven't even touched on yet since we started this latest series two months ago include the following:
1. Some people suggest it's arbitrary to stop at ten dimensions. Did we run out of fingers so we decided there couldn't be any more? Indeed, if you're not assigning any meaning to the individual dimensions, then the point-line-plane postulate allows you to keep adding as many dimensions as you want. People also ask Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? In my book and my blog I've insisted that ten is really all you need to consider all aspects of reality, and that supporters of M-Theory acknowledge that there are ways in which the 11 dimensions they are talking about are functionally equivalent to the ten dimensions string theory is talking about. The graphic at right comes from New Scientist magazine, in a recent special feature called "Instant Expert: Theory of Everything", please do follow the link to read the whole article.
Another way of showing this equivalence is to say that M-Theory proposes ten spatial dimensions plus time. With my project, I say that time isn't a dimension, it's a way of describing change from state to state within any dimension: so the tenth dimension with no time is the Ultimate Ensemble that Max Tegmark spoke of, or the timelessness that Gevin Giorbran spoke of in Everything Forever, or the Ultimate Multiverse that Brian Greene refers to in the quote with which we started this entry. As I said in my original animation, if there were no superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension, there would be no reality precipitated in the dimensions below: no time means no vibrations, no change. And because every one of the spatial dimensions we're looking at here are mutually perpendicular to the others, change in the tenth dimension automatically affects the entire system in various ways.
2. A number of people who have watched my animation notice that by the time you get to ten in its unobserved state, in a way you're back to where you started - with a point of indeterminate size. As I've said before, this was the intent of the helix logo created for this project - the 0 (or nothingness) and the 10 (or the Omniverse) really are connected concepts, and that's why I represent them as being on a line inside the other dimensions as you can see in the animation below. Would this connection allow for a repeating cycle effectively creating infinite dimensions? Though some people have suggested that idea, it doesn't feel quite right to me. The idea that there are really no dimensions, that there are just infinite vectors within one underlying fabric which is dimensionless, actually resonates more strongly for me, because that's a way of describing the tenth dimension using a different mindset. But personally, I still believe there are good reasons to believe in the existence of extra dimensions beyond space-time, and that there are good opportunities within these paths to the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small for us to consider the continuously repeating recursion that relates conceptually to Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, or John Wheeler's description of the universe as a self-excited circuit. In Imagining the Ninth Dimension, we looked at Stuart Kauffman's idea that there is a force for ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, and we'll return to ideas related to all this further on in this entry.
3. This takes us to a very big question. If we're trying to build an image which reflects "all aspects of reality", how do life and consciousness fit into this picture? Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life is that it's "a unique process which creates pockets of negative entropy". Physicists talk about the beginning of the universe being the most highly ordered/lowest entropy version of our universe, and how the "arrow of time" represents an overall climb in the amount of entropy, despite the efforts of life within these little pockets where (as Dylan Thomas put it so beautifully) it 'rages against the dying of the light'. This theme of life and consciousness being like a fire, a spark, that somehow engages with space-time and our fifth-dimensional probability space to keep itself moving forward is the theme of a number of the 26 songs I created for this project. I talked about those songs and this way of thinking about life and creativity in a blog entry called Novelty.
4. The phrase "self-excited circuit" comes from a paper published in 1979 by physicist John Wheeler, you can read about it in the wikipedia article on Digital Physics. As part of his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)", Christopher Langan (who some readers will know as "the smartest man in America") has published an animated version of the simple drawing Wheeler created for his paper on the self-excited circuit, showing a "U" (standing for universe), incorporating an eyeball representing the quantum observer, looking at its "tail" that represents the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept that we talk about regularly with this project. Wheeler also coined the phrase "'it' from 'bit'"which ties nicely to these discussions. That animation is pictured below.
So is the universe itself a self-excited circuit, that was most excited at the big bang and is slowly winding down from there? Or was the universe in a superposition of possible states until life first emerged somewhere, and began observing more organized versions of the universal wave function from that point on in the world line? The Biocentric Universe theory supports the latter idea. Perhaps Stuart Kauffman's God 2.0 supports the former? I think there's interesting evidence for both ideas, but ultimately I lean more towards the idea that there are organizing patterns in the extra dimensions which exist outside of time and space which have selected this (or any other) universe, and which keep the universe from dissolving into chaos. Gravity and Love is a blog entry from this past December which takes this idea out to a more metaphysical level if you're interested. I have used similar logic to argue for dark matter and dark energy as evidence of extra dimensions.
In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson called O is for Omniverse, we devoted the letter "J" to John Wheeler:
j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist
who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail
as a way to imagine that some branches of our line
might be changed in the past as we look back from today
so the branching tree that extends from "now"
is even more surprising: it branches either way
Here's a video showing the letters "I" and "J" from that book, you can see a lot more if you go to omniverse.tv.
5. If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, does that mean that in a sense Schrödinger thought it was the most "alive" back then? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?
6. One of the surprises for me with this project was how many people from the psychedelics community have embraced this way of visualizing the dimensions: for instance, author and research scientist David Jay Brown, a world-renowned expert on psychedelics, said this about my book: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." With no psychedelics experience myself, I find this particularly fascinating: in this blog, I've talked about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which advances the idea that persons around the world and throughout human history have had experiences and visions when they are in altered states of consciousness (whether those are self-induced trance states, or through the use of psychoactive substances) that show remarkable similarities. Do such experiences "lift the veil" so to speak, and allow people to see actual aspects of the extra dimensions? It's a possibility I find very attractive. In my book and this blog I've explored many other more "out there" concepts that can tie to this: are prescience, deja vu, out of body experiences, lucid dreaming, perhaps even ghosts and spirit voices all examples of how there are patterns of awareness which exist outside of our limited space-time window into reality?
7. Another of the surprises for me with this project was the people who looked at my helix logo and presumed this was all about Kabbalah, because of the similarities to The Tree of Life (pictured at left). Yes, I see the connections, but I don't recall ever seeing the Tree of Life until after my book was published and comments started to come my way about this coincidence. What I find particularly interesting is that there are schools of thought within the Kabbalah which teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual. In the last chapter of my book, I reached a similar conclusion that there are three systems interacting through constructive interference, 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 of grouping, or waveforms. Likewise, it's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology: philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information (I talked about all this in greater detail in my blog entry Three Becomes One). Is this recurring idea that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information another example of how Imagining the Tenth Dimension plugs into some deeper truths about our reality? I believe it is. And constructive interference is an important phrase to keep in mind through all this, as it applies to quantum mechanics, the universe as a hologram, Wheeler's self-excited circuit, and the role of life and consciousness in creating this universe or any other.
8. Let's look at this idea more carefully: "a world created by observation/participation". In Imagining the Eighth Dimension, we mentioned a concept from a paper published by Lee Smolin and others at arxiv.org, which proposes that we can have a deeper understanding of general relativity if we accept that "different observers construct different spacetimes, which are observer-dependent slices of phase space". And with this project, we keep returning to Everett's idea that there is an unchanging "set of all possible states" or "phase space" which exists outside of spacetime, and that quantum mechanics makes the most sense when we understand that this is not a process of collapse we are talking about here, it is only a process of observation. Does that mean then that we, as quantum observers, are each creating our own reality? And if so, how much control do we have?
There's no question that each of us is at the center of the observed universe, and even though that might sound like a return to ancient thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, the cosmological horizon is real, and this fact would be just as true for an observer on the other side of our currently observed universe - they too would find themselves to be at the center of a space-time sphere, with their very own unique version of the cosmological horizon.
So here I am in a unique universe created through my participation as a quantum observer, which is part of a 5D probability space (as we discussed in Imagining the Fifth Dimension). Does that mean I'm a part of Wheeler's self-excited circuit, the universe observing itself? Does that make me part of a universal creative force, or as Einstein referred to it, "the Old One"? In fact, am I an aspect of God, observing some unique aspect of My creation? Or am I part of an underlying life force which creates pockets of negative entropy, pushing against the natural decline of the universe? These are all different ways of thinking about the same idea, use whichever one you're the most comfortable with if you feel so inclined. For me, the most important part of this discussion is not what label you place upon this process, but the fact that this way of visualizing our reality presents a strong argument for free will. Yes, there is ultimately only one underlying form, one underlying geometry, but you and I (and all living things) are within something much more interesting. We are each moving points within a fifth dimensional probability space, observing a shared consensus reality which connects us all together, but also each observing our own unique version of that space.
For persons trapped in negative loops of abuse or addiction, this is particularly important to understand. If free will is an illusion, then how can we hope to break out of these patterns? The fifth dimension shows the way. As I say in my song Addictive Personality:
Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done
Not all habits are bad, of course, and it's in our nature to be attracted to things that make us feel good. The addictions we're talking about here are the ones that are the opposite of the universal creative force, the ones that conspire to extinguish that "spark" of life which Schrödinger described. Each of us, with our free will, have to be the one to decide whether we're on the path we want to be on, and to recognize that we have the power to change that path if we choose to do so. Does that mean we're magical creatures, capable of changing anything about our reality? Does it mean a starving child in Africa can become rich and famous simply by thinking better thoughts? No. But it also means that we are not the powerless automatons that the hard determinists would have us believe ourselves to be, and that there is a constantly evolving "best possible version" of ourselves that already exists within our fifth dimensional probability space which we each have the potential to get to with the choices we're able to make.
9. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Automatic". In it, I talk about the powerful idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his groundbreaking book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes proposed that until about 3,000 years ago, humans lived their lives with their conscious and subconscious minds fully integrated. When the subconscious developed a plan or had an intuition, humans heard this as a "voice" inside their heads, which they often interpreted to be the voices of gods or ancestors. Then something happened: the "narrator" voice of the conscious mind assumed dominance, and the subconscious mind's processes became more submerged. Still, there are a great many activities which we perform better when we can quiet our "narrator voice": driving a car, hitting a golf ball, playing a musical instrument or typing on a keyboard all go better when we can get our narrator voice to stop conducting traffic, saying "do this, now do that", and just let things flow. And yet, despite the advantages of this mode of operation, most of us have been taught to be suspicious of those moments when we stop narrating: we're told to stop daydreaming, get our minds back in the game, and so on.
Most of us are comfortable with the idea that there is some kind of duality to our consciousness. The difference between left brain/right brain approaches to processing the data coming in from our senses is well documented. And with this project, we have often talked about the "me" that is attached to the physical body, and the other parts of our awareness that are more connected outside of space and time. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight is amazing to me because it blends these two ideas so beautifully - is the right brain more connected to those larger patterns that are outside of our physical reality? Dr. Taylor provides a compelling personal narrative that tells us this is so.
Here again is where we get into those more metaphysical ideas - that what I call "me" is much more than the collection of memories attached to my physical body, and instinct, intuition, inspiration, creativity, and the underlying processes of life itself are part of the gigantic patterns that exist outside of our physical reality. This is a dynamic system we're talking about, with each of us assuming new patterns of awareness, discarding old ones, becoming entrained and entraining others with the wave-like interactions of constructive and destructive interference that are occurring within the extra dimensions to create our observed reality. Is it possible for these patterns to exist completely separate from a physical body? Proponents of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming would say yes, and anyone with a sufficiently convincing supernatural story to tell will also be much more likely to accept this possibility.
Anthony Peake's work puts a tighter focus on these ideas - in his 2008 book The Daemon, he offers evidence that each of us have a left brain/physical consciousness called the Eidolon; and we each have a right brain/metaphysical awareness called the Daemon, which has the foreknowledge of what is to come and sometimes "steers" the physical body into better outcomes. In terms of Everett's Many Worlds and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, could this Daemon be an awareness operating from the sixth dimensional phase space of all possible outcomes for our universe, traveling from conception to death with each version of a unique individual as they physically navigate the possible world lines of their fifth dimensional probability space?
10. This project keeps coming back to quantum mechanics: the fact that our reality is divided into quantum "frames" and not continuous, the branching probabilistic outcomes of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the idea that everything is potentially connected within the underlying quantum world is central to this "new way of thinking about time and space". Ultimately, does everything fit together through instantaneous quantum superposition across space, across time, and across all of the different versions of our universe or any other? Is it startling to think that the point of indeterminate size that we start from is also where we end up with this project, and to consider that the nested hyperspheres of each additional dimension can also be encompassed by this point of indeterminate size? No matter where we end up, we need to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of reality devised so far, so whatever Theory of Everything we're trying to get to, we should keep in mind the truth about the underlying quantum nature of the universe we're in.
So as we think about there being a duality to our awareness (a left brain/physical, and a right brain/metaphysical), it's interesting to think of our physical existence as it's defined by branching paths within the fifth dimensional probability space and the quantum wave function. In a blog entry called Entangled Neurons, we looked at a new scientific study indicating that quantum entanglement is intrinsic to the process of memory creation, and in Entangled Awareness and OBEs, I said this:
...right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created.
For years, scientists have been fond of saying that quantum physics has nothing to do with the warm and wet world of living things, but that opinion is now changing. A paper published last year at arxiv.org suggests that DNA is held together using quantum entanglement. In other blog entries like The Quantum Observer and Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we've looked at new evidence that photosynthesis and bird navigation are also utilizing quantum processes. Ideas such as these are the first inklings of a new science called quantum biology, and this all ties very nicely to the idea that life itself is a unique process which is engaged with our space-time in ways that transcend the limits of the "here" and the "now", in the same way that quantum entanglement and superposition seem supremely mysterious until we accept that there is more to the universe than the limited space-time reality we see around us.
Likewise, the new buzz around the evidence that neutrinos have been detected that arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than the speed of light is very interesting, but I would caution people who says this disproves Einstein's Theory of Relativity: in my opinion, this would only be the case if you don't believe in the existence of extra dimensions. But if these neutrinos somehow took a tiny shortcut outside of spacetime, and essentially "burrowed" through the fifth dimension to arrive a little earlier, that would not violate relativity, and if this effect were proved and confirmed by other experimenters this could well be the first direct evidence of the existence of extra dimensions. How cool would that be??
As I say in song number 1 of the 26 songs I created for this project: Everything Fits Together. I hope that this project has helped to awaken your senses to the possibilities of just how true that phrase really is.
Last week I introduced you to my 1983 concept album, Alcohol and Other Drugs. This month I'm going to show you some of the songs from that album, starting here with a video for side one cut one (hey, it was 1983 and although CDs had been invented by then almost nobody had bought a player yet): "We All Are Chemicals".
I wrote the songs on this album to accompany a live show called The Good Life, sponsored by the Saskatchewan Alcoholism Commission, which Regina's Globe Theatre toured through the high schools of Saskatchewan that year before over 30,000 students. Each song looks at different attitudes towards drugs and alcohol, which for me brings to mind this pervasive meme:
Throughout human history, and even back to the various tales of animal intoxication (birds that enjoy fermented fruit being a commonly cited example), living creatures have always seemed attracted to finding ways to enter altered states.
A google search for "animal intoxication" turned up this Erowid book review about that topic as the top result, and on YouTube this Mike Jay documentary came up, which is a serious look at the history of mind-altering substances called "High Society".
In The Good Life, "We All are Chemicals" was sung by a character who (predictably enough) has a meltdown by the end of the show, and of course his recipes for what drugs to never take together are deliberately ludicrous. Still, even though the "living creatures are drawn to altered states of consciousness" meme has proved to be a powerful one, it can also be used as an excuse for drug abuse, and the slippery slope from the desire for novelty or enlightenment to abuse and addiction makes this meme one that should always be accompanied by education. As preachy as it may sound, know what you're putting into your bodies, kids!
Here's the lyrics to the song:
WE ALL ARE CHEMICALS - words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
When I wake up in the morning
And I get out of my bed
And I need a little something
To wipe the sleep from my head
No, no, no I don’t go to the kitchen
And I don’t go to the store
I just go up to my closet
Up on the second floor
Where there’s a world of wonders locked inside a little chest
There’s a thousand chemicals, I love them all the best
We all are chemicals, so don’t you be surprised
We all need chemicals to survive
It’s a difficult decision
You know it always was
Tryin to find the chemical
For my day’s first buzz
I’ve got little magic mushrooms
Or the very finest smoke
I’ve got uppers and downers
Acid or coke
I am a scientist, my body is the lab
Workin with my chemicals, what fun I have had
We all are chemicals, so don’t you be surprised
We all need chemicals to survive
It’s a question of balance
It’s a question of control
And knowing when to give the go ahead
And when to tell yourself no
So I never mix tequila with my sensimilla weed
I don’t put sugar in my coffee if I’m on heroin or speed
This is the good life, don’t you throw it all away
Careful of which chemicals you take every day
Last time we talked about Novelty, and the idea that an interest in "what happens next" is what separates life from the basic thermodynamic chemical reactions that we derive our energy from.
So what about the use of mind-altering substances to increase our sense of novelty? Surely, the warm glow and shared laughter of friends having a bottle of wine together can be thought of as an innocent way of making the world seem more "novel" to them, at least for a little while? Don't the many other kinds of "systematic derangement of the senses" , whether they be the act of a lone participant or part of a large group's shared experience, and whether they be substance-induced or achieved through other trance-based or ritualistic means, speak to our desire to break out of the limited here and now, to be plugged into something larger, more novel?
But of course, the subject of alcohol and other drugs is a complex and sensitive topic. I remember a science fiction story by Bruce Sterling in which a near-future person marvels at what a "sledgehammer drug" alcohol is, leaving them mystified as to its popularity back in the twentieth century, and preferring other much more subtle substances to alter their minds. It's interesting that even the phrase "alcohol and other drugs" could seem designed to place alcohol at the "less dangerous" part of the equation, when it's no secret that alcohol is a habit-forming and potentially lethal drug: much more so, in a number of people's opinions, than marijuana, for instance. We might ask why alcohol is even legal, when we look at the damage it does every day.
I've remarked before that I find it fascinating that even though I have no personal experience with psychedelics, I hear regularly from people who feel my approach to visualizing the dimensions helps them to understand the visions they experience while under the influence of these substances. To which I've sometimes added, I also find it interesting that I never hear from people that my approach to visualizing the dimensions helps them to understand what they saw after drinking a case of beer. The conspiracy-minded observer of this situation might ask how these decisions as to which mind-altering substance is legal and which are not came to be made. After all, drugs like opium, heroin, and cannabis were legal in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Coca-Cola, for instance, quite famously contained 9 milligrams of cocaine per glass up until 1903! And the use of psychoactive substances like peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca is well-documented back many thousands of years to the dawn of civilization.
Last summer, Wired Magazine published an article about the controversy over Alcoholics Anonymous and how it works, and an editorial about alcoholism that showed how alcohol messes up the brain's ability to predict bad consequences (including the addict's inability to predict what will happen if the abuse continues), and how it suppresses neuroplasticity, an important part of our mental processes we just looked at in Changing Your Brain.
Am I saying alcohol should be abolished? No. Prohibition, like the current war on drugs, only makes criminals of innocent people and provides a healthy profit for organized crime. And for me, the point of using the phrase "alcohol and other drugs" is that it points out that alcohol, like any other mind-altering substance, needs to be treated with respect, because over-indulgence can have serious consequences.
One of the running themes for this project has been that my approach to visualizing the dimensions can provide persons who are trapped in self-destructive cycles a way out: this is the subject of songs like Addictive Personality, Positive Vibes, and See No Future. Which takes us back to my 1983 concept album, Alcohol and Other Drugs, which I want to show you some of the songs from this month. Sponsored by the Saskatchewan Alcoholism Commission, these songs were part of a show which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan during the 1983 to 1984 school year, and the show was presented live by the Globe Theatre's touring company before over 30,000 Saskatchewan teenagers back then. We're going to start with Side One, Cut One: We All Are Chemicals.
Novelty. Is the desire for change the basic craving that drives life forward?
In his marvelous book "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin makes the point that even eight month old babies have a well-developed sense of melody and rhythm, and enjoy predictable music (read "pop" music here if you like), but they are particularly likely to notice predictable music which then breaks out of the established mode of what their sense of melody will lead them to predict. Regular readers of this blog know that I became a grandfather last year, and little Cadence turned one last week. Whether you're playing peekaboo, or watching her laugh at a musical game where an established pattern is changed, you can see the joy she takes from moment to moment in what happens next.
This is a phrase I've used before in my book and my blog: "life is any process which is interested in what happens next". This applies so nicely to the idea of music as opposed to random noise: in fact, our brains tend to suppress noise, as we talked about in Ringing in the Brain. Sure, you could say music is noise, but it's noise that has been organized in certain ways: and most of us like music which has repeating patterns which allow us to predict at least somewhat what is going to happen next. But the most interesting music of all is the music which solidly sets up an expectation, and then takes us someplace else instead - that's the musical events that we remember, that's the music that we're more likely to fall in love with. This relates very easily to the memory-creation processes we discussed last year in Entangled Neurons.
"What happens next": we like novelty, we prefer pleasant surprises over boredom (and the ongoing popularity of horror films would indicate that a number of us crave any kind of surprises, pleasant or not!). In this blog we've talked a number of times about writer/philosopher/psychedelics activist Terence McKenna, who died in April 2000. His "Novelty Theory" (also known as "Timewave Zero") project suggested that our planet regularly sees repeating cycles of higher and lower novelty, but that we will be approaching a point in 2012 where the number of novelty events climbs exponentially, eventually causing some sort of a tipping point and transition to a new form of worldwide consciousness. This year we've been talking about how light is at right angles to spacetime - this exponential curve that McKenna (along with many others) envisions could be another way of thinking about a new quantum observer system which is at "right angles" to our current existence. How much more novel can we get than that?
This month, there was a New Scientist article written by Katharine Sanderson about a new experiment with the lofty goal of creating "Life, but Not as We Know It". The experiment is being conducted by a team at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lee Cronin. Here's a quote from Dr. Cronin that relates nicely to our discussion:
Stripped down to its barest essentials, life can be seen as a struggle against thermodynamics and its drive towards ever more featureless uniformity.
This is another way of phrasing Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life, which we looked at in entries like Conscious Computers and Logic vs Intuition: life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.
Life is what makes us more than just a set of thermodynamic chemical processes. Life is engaged with spacetime in a way that keeps it wanting to move forward in our 4D hyperspace, not just through its own life, but through nurturing the generations that come afterwards. And ultimately, life is part of patterns which exist outside the narrow limits of our 4D reality. This has been a running theme through a number of the 26 songs I attached to this project, including Burn the Candle Brightly, What Was Done Today, Change and Renewal, See No Future, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Connections, and Thankful.
Speaking of songs, I've talked before about how for me Imagining the Tenth Dimension really started out as a "concept album", a collection of songs about the nature of reality. Coming up, I'd like to show you some of the songs from a somewhat-related concept album I released way back in 1983: "Alcohol and Other Drugs".
"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!):
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!
For the last several entries we've been referencing back to questions that came up on my Theatre of the Mind podcast interview with Kelly Howell. This time, let's look at the question of "what dimension am I in when I have an out-of-body experience".
I'll be the first to admit that OBEs are one of the areas I haven't done a lot of reading on. The whole realm of lucid dreaming would seem to be related to this "what dimension am I in" question: in one of my early blog entries, Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions, I mentioned an interview I had done back then with Ben Q's Dreaming Life blog, which is dedicated to the exploration of lucid dreaming. So here's what it comes down to for me: with the approach to visualizing the dimensions I've created, what we basically have is a "filing system", something that lets you catalog one kind of existence and its relation to another, and see how the multiplicity of parallel worlds, the multiplicity of different-initial-conditions universes, and the different kinds of information patterns that make up our awareness and our reality can be puzzled together. So, what drawer in our filing system should we be placing OBEs and lucid dreaming?
Last time, in Entangled Neurons, we looked at a proposed explanation for the creation of memory, and I tied that to the idea of our "arrow of time" being a line in the fourth dimension that is actually branching and twisting in the fifth: any time a branch occurs, a memory is created. The mind-boggling idea that there are all these different versions of "you" or "me" being created with every splitting off that is occurring at every planck frame as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics does need to be tempered somewhat: right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created.
Entangled Awareness Trying to keep a sense of "me" inside this probabilistic cloud is really a simple process then, right up until one of those major branches occurs. But what then? Let's say that my major branch that occurred today was that a gang of thugs beat me within an inch of my life. Would I be a different person as a result of that experience? I find it hard to believe that such an event wouldn't change me. Suppose that as a teenager I had hung out with a different crowd and become addicted to heroin. Would I be a different person from the one I am now? Would I even be alive now these four decades later? Put in those terms, Everett's Many Worlds don't seem to be as unfathomable an idea. But people do seem to have more trouble imagining this process when it's described as them splitting off into all these different universes that quantum theory's Universal Wavefunction, as Everett called it, says really do exist. Remember this: while we're in our physical bodies (made out of 3D atoms and molecules and being powered by thermodynamic chemical reactions that move us in a particular direction in the fourth dimension which we tend to call "time") we can only observe one version of ourselves at a time, even if our "entangled awareness" is connected to the other versions of our current self that are on the same trajectory, the same branch of our spacetime tree.
Which takes us to lucid dreaming and Out-of-Body Experiences. The short movie at the start of this entry was published by New Scientist magazine last week. It shows (as one example of many similar experiments that have been done) that it's surprisingly easy to convince people that they are not in their own bodies. But if we're talking about OBEs as actual experiences, then we are talking about part of the pattern that represents a person's awareness actually being able to separate itself from the physical body, something that I will insist is like those "Seven Wonders of the Quantum World" we looked at last blog entry: these processes appear to be unimaginable from the linear, causally related frames that become our comparatively simple 4D "line of time". For this reason, I will continue to suggest that OBEs, lucid dreaming, and quantum "spookiness" (and so on) are all connected to extra dimensions.
Now, what if your OBE is as mundane as simply rising above the bed and watching yourself sleep? There's no reason why this system of awareness that is a part of your consciousness (or "soul" if you prefer), having used the fifth dimension to escape the confines of your physical body, can't then continue to observe the linear progression of time as it occurs in the fourth. But how much fun is that? Even just taking advantage of the ability to travel through walls, fly through the air, and quickly go visit a far away friend can be imagined as simple manipulations of the fourth dimension through the fifth (creating, as Madeleine L'Engle described so beautifully, "wrinkles in time") in order to continue viewing other aspects of the version of reality that we're currently occupying.
But what if the OBE becomes more transcendent? What if a person feels themselves more connected to all living creatures? What if a person finds themselves in a world completely unlike the one we are in? As seemingly limitless as the fifth dimension may seem to be from our perspective, it's still more useful to think of it as our probability space - the many things both "before" and "after" that could potentially be causally connected to our "now" at any particular instant are part of that realm. So anything that appears to transcend those limitations, it follows, must be a representation of an awareness that is in the additional extra dimensions beyond the fifth. In My Stroke of Insight, when Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about her unique experiences as a neuroscientist feeling a remarkable connectedness to the universe as a result of a burst blood vessel in the left/analytical side of her brain, she is definitely talking about an awareness that moves beyond the fifth dimension.
What Dimension is an OBE in? I would sum this all up very simply: the more you are able to do things that are impossible within our physical world of spacetime, the less your OBE is embedded within the fourth dimension and below. The more connectedness you feel to others, to all living things, to all elements of our universe and beyond, the more you are moving towards the tenth dimension. But as the original tenth dimension animation implies, once you get to the ultimate enlightenment of considering all possibilities simultaneously in the tenth dimension, you are back in perfect symmetry where everything cancels everything else out. Everything canceled out means nothing is happening in the dimensions below: no vibrations, no change... as I like to say, that which ceases to change ceases to exist. While there is a certain peacefulness in contemplating that big, beautiful, perfectly balanced zero for a while, isn't it much more interesting to be observing something rather than nothing? It's for that reason that the symmetry gets broken and a universe such as ours pops into existence. And within that universe, it's your job to figure out how to make the best use of what you have been given, and to enjoy the journey.
Let's close with my song about feeling connected to the parts of our awareness that are beyond the limits of spacetime: "I Remember Flying".
Poll 37 - "In his book 'Supernatural', Graham Hancock notes the remarkable similarities between ancient cave paintings from across tens of thousands of years and around the world. This shows that ancient shamans were able to see patterns from other dimensions." Poll ended April 11 2009. 38% agreed while the rest disagreed.
I've only recently finished reading this book. (At almost 500 pages, Supernatural is not a book you read in a night!) Along the way, I've alternated between wrestling with my own in-grained skepticism and a feeling that Hancock is lifting the veil on extremely important material. His work connects to a number of the ideas I've promoted with my project: that our reality is connected together in ways unseen, that there are patterns that exist outside of spacetime that are participating in the ongoing process of creation, and that there are a number of ways for people to become more sensitized to these hidden processes. In my book, I lumped altered states resulting from meditation, trance, repetitive tribalistic activities like dance and drumming, and visions seen under the influence of hallucinogens as all being part of the same kinds of processes that could be allowing people to glimpse these patterns, and my song "From the Corner of My Eye" is also about that supposition. In my blog entry The Shaman I added more traumatic experiences such as fasting or intense pain to that list (as these are also not uncommon in shamanistic practices from around the world), but while doing so I noted that even though all of these altered states I've listed may somehow be related, many people immediately jump to the conclusion that any discussion of altered states is really just talking about drugs. This, I think, is unfortunate because it can allow some people to jump to the conclusion that altered states are "unnatural".
For baby boomers like me, most of us have had it drummed into us that anything seen under the influence of mind-altering drugs is not to be taken seriously, that it is merely the chemistry of the brain being disrupted, and no good will come of it. When I was writing my book, including psychedelics in the list of useful altered states for sensing extra dimensions was an intuitive leap based upon reading other's reports, since I have no experience with these substances myself. Still, as I've documented elsewhere, I was surprised upon the release of my book to be contacted by so many people who had taken LSD, mushrooms, and so on, telling me that what they saw under the influence of these substances seemed easier to explain within the context of my way of visualizing the dimensions. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most of what I thought they were talking about were geometric patterns and time-shifted artifacts... glimpses into the fifth spatial dimension. Almost six months after launching my project, I decided to set up an "altered states" area over at the tenth dimension forum as people with seemingly-related drug experiences kept contacting me. Since then, I've heard more and more stories from persons using DMT, ayahuasca, salvia divinorum and other drugs, and those people have described some really mind-boggling visions: but to me these were no more mind-boggling than the insights revealed, for instance, in Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's journey into the connections of her own mind to the universe that she recounted in her marvelous "My Stroke of Insight".
In Supernatural, Graham Hancock provides a context to altered states of all kind that is much deeper than what I had suspected, but now that he has done so I see more of the same connections in the stories I have been told by people writing to me in emails or at my forum. He makes some very persuasive arguments that the visions seen under those states have remarkable connections and similarities across tens of thousands of years and around the world, and this highly-detailed repetition alone indicates that our minds are really being allowed to "tune in" to other modalities of existence that actually do exist, but which were inaccessible without entering these altered states (in the same way that a radio can "tune in" to different radio stations - the waveforms coming from those other stations are already out there, just waiting to be heard).
To be clear, what Hancock is referring to here is not just similarities in geometric shapes or visions of bright lights, he has a long list of iconic images and creatures that occur again and again from the recorded visions of ancient man right up to modern time. He makes the bold assertion that these experiences are at the root of the development of civilization, and that all of the world's religions have as their source the ecstatic visionary experiences of those who shared their visions of these "other worlds" with others around them.
I would suggest reading the following blog entries, in the order below, if you would like to follow my reasoning for supporting the challenging conclusions of Graham Hancock's groundbreaking book. And if you have read the above paragraphs and decided to reject these ideas outright (as did 61% of the visitors answering the above poll question), I have some sympathy for that position: it is only through the process of reading Mr. Hancock's book that I have come around to an acceptance of these ideas, and I am almost certainly not going to convince any skeptics in a few paragraphs when it took Mr. Hancock almost 500 pages to carefully lay out his case for these ideas.
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.
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:
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