Are bees more sixth dimensional?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtGcNk7Rhs

Six is an interesting number that we haven't talked about as much recently with this project. Coincidentally, last week we looked at Philip Zimbardo's The Secret Powers of Time, where he suggested that there are six possible ways for people to interface with time: awareness tends to be oriented towards positive or negative versions of past, present, or future.

With my approach to visualizing the dimensions, our universe has six dimensions to express all possible versions of itself, and all of that becomes a single "point" in the seventh dimension: we looked at this most recently in "Our Universe as a Point". A couple of years ago here at the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog, in an entry called Time is a Direction, I had this to say about the number six:

"Do a google search on the words 'six directions' and you will see how deeply embedded that concept is into various spiritual/metaphysical systems. Do a google search on 'six dimensions' and you will find an interesting mix of musings about business/social connections (the six degrees of separation concept), geometry/physics, and other discussions about the nature of reality from the viewpoint of ancient spiritual systems."

In Three Becomes One, we looked at various geometric patterns that can be derived from the triangle, and the images we're looking at here come from the wikipedia article on hexagons, which are six-sided polygons. The image at left is a hexagram, created by superimposing two triangles. A six-sided hexagon appears in the middle of this shape, and can also be created if you draw new lines joining the six outer points of this shape.

As you'll see if you spend some time examining the different patterns shown above, the idea of triangles being pushed apart from a central point into a symmetrical pattern from which other shapes emerge can be seen time and again in these images, and of course all of this is old hat to fans of sacred geometry.

The six-sided hexagon is not just an abstract concept from your geometry class: it appears in nature as well. Here are some pictures demonstrating that.

First of all, one of the most obvious ones: the hexagons of a beehive's honeycomb. Then, the six-sided scutes of a turtle's carapace.

Next, at left we see a North polar hexagonal cloud feature on Saturn, discovered by Voyager 1 and confirmed in 2006 by Cassini; and at right we see naturally formed basalt columns from Giant's Causeway in Ireland.

Hexagons also appear in snowflakes, and even at the molecular level in various compounds.

In Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?, we discussed something that can be connected to The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project, which is a more recent entry looking at one of the central ideas to my project which has now received some support from scientists at Oxford University: the fifth dimension can be thought of as our probability space. The wave function of potential pasts and futures that connect to our "now" is a pattern in the fifth dimension which we are potentially connected to through chance and choice, Everett's Many Worlds.

Being able to see fifth-dimensionally, then, would be to see all the possible world lines that are causally connected to a particular instant of our spacetime universe. And someone who is more connected to the past and future through intuition, inspiration, creativity, deja vu, clairvoyance, and so on, could be said to have a more fifth-dimensional awareness.

Seeing sixth-dimensionally, on the other hand, would be seeing all the possible versions of the universe you are within, including the versions that are not causally connected - like the one where you pop out of existence here and reappear on the moon, or the one where it's 2010 and Michael Jackson is still alive. The sixth dimension is the complete Quantum Field for our unique universe, including those outcomes which we acknowledge must exist as possible versions, but which would take longer than the existence of the universe for us to observe. Can any living creatures see sixth-dimensionally?

Here's an article sent to me by my friend Ian Reclusado of the always interesting blog Reclusland. The article is called Honeybees are Found to Interact with Quantum Fields.

In this article, we see a fascinating theory proposed by Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Dr. Shipman analyzed the complex dance patterns bees use to indicate the position of new sources of food to each other. She discovered that the geometric patterns the bees use in the dance made sense if they were analyzed using a "sixth dimensional flag manifold", an analysis method also useful in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks. Please read the entire article, it presents some amazing insights.

According to many sources there are now 30% less honeybees in the world than there were in 2006. Are bees more sixth-dimensional? Perhaps they are. Why, then, have bees been disappearing from our planet in record numbers for the last four years? That's an intriguing question, and the subject of a number of books that have come out in the last year, including Fruitless Fall, The Hive Detectives, and A World Without Bees. Are bees our sixth-dimensional canaries in a coalmine, warning us about environmental catastrophes that we need to avoid, and that in some sixth-dimensional versions of our universe, have already not avoided?

We'll continue this exploration next time as we talk about a new company exploring the world of connected ideas, who are using a honeybee as their logo: 6things.com .

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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?

Our Universe as a Dodecahedron

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu1GD_AifpM

Last time we talked about our universe within the omniverse. Now let's talk about the shape of our own universe.
This is an image of a rotating dodecahedron, from wikipedia. This unique platonic solid incorporates the golden ratio, which is often denoted by the Greek letter phi, usually lower case: φ. When you stack a number of dodecahedra together, interesting things happen with the way the different faces and vertices rotate: they can be seen to enfold one into another, and the resulting hints of rotating helix shapes, fractals, and the spirals found in nature link not just to the broad field of sacred geometry, but to cosmological theories about the structure of our universe.

These next two images come from a mind-blowing visualization tool you can download from http://geometrygames.org/: it's called Curved Spaces.
In entries like Poll 49 and Poll 58 we've talked about how our universe is not really flat and infinite, but rather slightly curved, making it finite but unbounded. In entries like An Expanding 4D Sphere and When's a Knot Not a Knot? we've also talked about the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture. Curved Spaces includes the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space mode pictured here, which lets you fly through the stacked dodecahedra that would form the surface of the 4D hypersphere our finite but unbounded universe resides within. And by putting a planet earth at the center of each dodecahdron, this fly-through gives us one way of visualizing how Everett's Many Worlds could be defined by our observation of the universe as a series of planck frames, one after another, each frame separate but connected to other possible adjacent frames: another favorite topic of this project.

In older entries like Everything and Seeing Eye to Eye, we've touched on the amazing ideas of Dan Winter, who continues to present an ever-growing body of work. As I've said before, Dan's web pages can seem overwhelming, but there's no denying his passionate pursuit of his ideas. The animated images we're looking at here come from Dan's gigantic goldenproof web page, which you'll see does include lots of graphics, animations, and movie clips if you scroll further down that page. The first two animations I've grabbed from Dan's website show the basic idea, which Dan describes this way:
"These visuals are graphed from my original equation of Golden Ratio on the correct conic dodeca stellation of how Hydrogen Radii- nest/embed into the PLANCK LENGTH (field coupling- to MAKE GRAVITY) - using GOLDEN RATIO - successful wave adding and multiplying (non-destructive compression)."

As you know, the different electron shells of an atom are discrete - when an electron moves from one level to another, it doesn't travel through the intermediate space: it simply pops from one to the other, in a manner very similar to the "flatlander ant on a folded newspaper" concept we showed in the original tenth dimension animation. This is yet another example of how our reality, which seems continuous, is actually divided into tiny little "steps", or "frames" that are each one planck unit apart from the next: not just in space, but in space-time as well.

Dan quotes from The Golden ratio, ionic and atomic radii and bond lengths, a paper by Raji Heyrovska written in collaboration with J. Heyrovsky of the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. - The summary of the paper includes the following:

This work arose from the author's finding that the ratio of the radius of hydrogen, estimated recently (C.H. Suresh, N. Koga, J. Phys. Chem. A, 105, 5940 (2001)) by density functional methods, to the ground state Bohr radius is the Golden ratio, which operates in a variety of natural phenomena. It is found that the Golden ratio indeed plays a quantitative role in atomic physics.

Dan cites the above as confirmation of his own ideas about how important the golden ratio is to our fractal, enfolded reality. For me, this all ties back into the idea that our observed universe is being constructed one planck frame at a time by constructive interference occurring in the fifth dimension: which, as I've been saying from the outset of this project, is where our "now" is actually being observed from instant to instant, as it's chosen from a probability space of possible pasts and futures.

Let's look at one more interesting thing about a dodecahedron: it can be constructed from five pyramids, like so:

A tetrahedron is a four-sided pyramid, with each triangular face the same size. At left we see five interlocking tetrahdra. Each one is color-coded so it's easier to tell them apart, and these have been rotated to make all of their outer points equidistant from each other. As you can see in the right-hand image, these points can be joined by pentagons, and when we do so our old friend the dodecahedron emerges once again.

What's the point? We'll continue this discussion next time with Our Universe as a Point.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Monkeys Love Metallica

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82zjaUNmvj0

Photograph: Andy Fossum/Rex Features. As seen in The Guardian UK article referenced below.

Sometimes we talk about ideas that seem to contradict each other. In a number of entries, like Jumping Jesus, Evolution's Fast Lane, and The Stream, we've looked at mounting evidence that we're in a constantly accelerating meme-space, where ideas are connecting together more and more quickly, and the amount of information that each of us is asked to process on a daily basis is constantly increasing. In Placebos Becoming More Effective? we talked about an editorial the New York Times published earlier this month called "Old Fogies at 20". This article suggests that university age students are seeing a generation gap between them and their high-school aged siblings: particularly in the world of technology and the internet, trends and expectations are changing so quickly now!

It can be hard to perceive an acceleration when you're within a system where everything is accelerating, but we do catch glimpses. So on the one hand we talk about The Stream, The Singularity, Transhumanism, Artificial Intuition, Conscious Computers, and so on. On the other hand, we talk about time being an illusion and parts of each of us being connected to patterns that exist well outside of the limits of the "now" of our 4D spacetime. How do the two ideas fit together? First of all, let's look at some recent examples of these big picture patterns.

We've talked a few times about the deep underlying connections of sacred geometry and how the Golden Ratio has been considered a thing of beauty for thousands of years. Like fractals, shapes and patterns such as these occur naturally, and perhaps that's why we're so attracted to them, because they represent deeper connections to reality that are outside the limits of our observed spacetime. Here's a Science Daily article from earlier this month that extends this idea even further: it suggests that scientists have now discovered evidence of the Golden Ratio in the quantum world!

Music and sound also seem to connect us together in powerful ways that speak to a more timeless perspective. In The Big Bang and the Big O, I referred back to sections in my book where I discuss how certain sounds seem to reach us at a primal level: could the dreaded chalkboard squeal connect us to genetic memories of some ancient flying predator who swooped down from the sky making a similar sound? Here's a great TED Talks video featuring sound consultant Julian Treasure, it's called The Four Ways Sound Affects Us. It speaks very effectively to the idea that we are all connected together by the ways we react to sound. Watch this five minute video:

A direct link to the above http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRepnhXq33s

Julian is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, hotels -- on how to use sound and music more effectively. This leads us to the title of this entry, Monkeys Love Metallica. Okay, I admit it, "love" is overstating the case for dramatic effect but here's a link to a New York Times article my friend Pete Chema of Ten Feet Deep sent to me a couple of weeks ago, please check it out: "Music for Monkeys".

The Guardian UK also published a related article this past September that goes into more detail about this research, here's a link to that: Scientists create music that helps monkeys chill out. Both articles are linked to a study, published this past September in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, that (to quote from The Guardian article):

...will help psychologists understand the evolutionary roots of music and its effect on the brain, the authors said.

"The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary perspective, we are finding that the note patterns, dissonance and timing are important for communicating affective states in both animals and people," said Chuck Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Now, what Dr. Snowdon is talking about here seems to easily connect to ideas we've talked about in entries like The Geometry of Music and Disorders of the Mind: music, like the the other patterns we've just looked at, connects in ways that go beyond the limits of our 4D spacetime. But at first glance, the results of Dr. Snowdon's study seem to contradict the ideas he tells us he was exploring.

In the study, 14 cotton-top tamarins were played clips of music while the researchers noted any changes in behavior. Pieces included Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, a soft piano piece from The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails, Metallica's Of Wolf and Man and Tool's The Grudge.

According to the Guardian article, the monkeys didn't exhibit any clear response to these piece of music one way or another, except for the Metallica song,which had the unexpected effect of calming them down.

Interestingly, the New York Times article claims the scientists saw a similar soothing effect on the monkeys with the Tool song, but most of the other articles I found reporting on this study appear to only single out Metallica. Frankly, I have to suspect that most reporters covering this story grabbed on to the "Monkeys Like Metallica" angle because it makes for a more memorable story. Unfortunately, singling out Metallica from Tool does create some misperceptions here, though.

The monkeys did not respond one way or another to the other pieces of music. Does this mean that farmers who play classical music to their cows to keep them calm might be kidding themselves? Shouldn't Adagio for Strings have made these monkeys sad? If animals are part of the same continuum that we are, shouldn't they respond in ways similar to we humans to the joy, the sorrow, the anger, the range of human emotions that we can hear in a powerful piece of music?

Perhaps what we're talking about is more related to this accelerating generation gap we looked at above. Are our more subtle responses to music mainly cultural, mainly a learned behavior? In the same way that a young child might now expect that all viewing screens are multi-touch displays, perhaps our varying emotional responses to the music of the last four hundred years or so is something we've been trained into through repetition?

The key here is understanding that the monkeys responded to the highly rhythmic music of Tool and Metallica, and didn't respond to the long phrases and more free tempos of the other two pieces. What is the common denominator behind the development of music? Repeating structures. The drum. Patterns that can entrain the heartbeat and breath, that make a creature feel a certain way when they move along with the music. Adagio for Strings, then, is just a too subtle for our monkey friends to hear as a communication of emotion: this a generation gap of a different magnitude but similar nonetheless.

But where this gets even more interesting is when Dr. Snowdon brought in David Teie, a cellist with the American National Symphony Orchestra, to create some pieces of music that were inspired by (but to be clear, not specifically based upon) the sounds these monkeys use to communicate to each other. Here are a couple of the pieces: first, one inspired by the sounds these animals commonly produce when things are fine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2009/sep/02/monkey-music-calls-example

This second piece has melodic and rhythmic connections to the calls the tamarins produce when they are anxious or alarmed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2009/sep/02/monkey-music-calls-science

Certainly, this music sounds odd to our ears, but the tamarins responded as you might expect: they lounged around and ate more when the first piece of music was playing, and became upset when the second piece played. Any film soundtrack composer exercises their creativity in plugging into these same underlying connections, finding ways to soothe us, or ways to upset us with the palette of sounds, the melodic shapes and the rhythmic structures they choose. Clearly, Dr. Snowdon would have to experiment with a much larger range of musical compositions that are generally agreed to communicate a variety of specific emotions to humans, and I'm certain that such experiments would help to reveal what is primal and what is learned in modern humans' reactions to music of all kinds.

So, do Monkeys Love Metallica? Definitely a gross generalization, even if it's fun to use as a headline! But can monkeys respond emotionally to some kinds of music? This scientific study points to "yes".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Noein

Just Six Things: The I Ching

A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbplSTSK3mY

In Alien Mathematics, we talked about the work of cosmologist Martin Rees, who proposed that there are only six basic structures underlying our reality. A few entries later, in The Map and the Territory, we looked at the difficulties in trying to map the extra dimensional patterns that create our reality, because a map becomes less useful when it tries to represent too much. A map with a scale of 1 to 1, for instance, should be able to faithfully capture absolutely every detail about a landscape, but a much smaller map is going to be significantly more useful as a guide.

Think about this, then. What if there were an ancient mapping system which boiled down our current position within the multiverse to only six parameters? This takes us, tangentially, to a territory that some readers of this blog won't be comfortable with, but which has enough connections to the big picture ideas we've been playing with that I believe it's worthy of consideration: this ancient system of mapping our reality is called the I Ching. Victor Robin, a student of the I Ching from California, explained it to me this way:

This is the Ancient Chinese way of viewing the Universe as energy, or Qi, moving through us and everything around us. (sounds familiar, huh?)

The Yi Jing (I Ching) is a compilation of centuries of ascetic observation put into a format that intentionally invites the participation of present timespace. The most common way people use the Yi Jing is by tossing coins to determine which verses are appropriate for the user to read at his point in "time." The user prepares to throw the coins by mentally focusing on a "question" for the Yi Jing to "answer."

Here's a few quotes from the wikipedia article on this subject:

The I Ching is a "reflection of the universe in miniature." The word "I" has three meanings: ease and simplicity, change and transformation, and invariability. Thus the three principles underlying the I Ching are the following:

1. Simplicity - the root of the substance. The fundamental law underlying everything in the universe is utterly plain and simple, no matter how abstruse or complex some things may appear to be.
2. Variability - the use of the substance. Everything in the universe is continually changing. By comprehending this one may realize the importance of flexibility in life and may thus cultivate the proper attitude for dealing with a multiplicity of diverse situations.
3. Persistency - the essence of the substance. While everything in the universe seems to be changing, among the changing tides there is a persistent principle, a central rule, which does not vary with space and time.

I love how those three ideas sum up trying to think of our universe of genes, memes, and spimes from a perspective which is "outside" of our spacetime, a running theme in this project (see Information Equals Reality, You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, and The Big Bang is an Illusion
for a few examples). The I Ching also fits nicely with another subject we've touched on in this blog a number of times, sacred geometry. Here's more from that wikipedia article:

Richard S. Cook reported that that the I Ching demonstrated a relation between the golden ratio (aka the division in extreme and mean ratio) and "linear recurrence sequences" (the Fibonacci numbers are examples of "linear recurrence sequences") :

...the hexagram sequence, showing that its classification of binary sequences demonstrates knowledge of the convergence of certain linear recurrence sequences ... to division in extreme and mean ratio... that the complex hexagram sequence encapsulates a careful and ingenious demonstration of the LRS(linear recurrence sequences)/DEMR (division in the extreme mean ratio relation), that this knowledge results from general combinatorial analysis, and is reflected in elements emphasized in ancient Chinese and Western mathematical traditions.

Thinking of the I Ching as a road map of our available probability space, then, leads to its use for divination:

The I Ching has long been used as an oracle and many different ways coexist to “cast” a reading, i.e., a hexagram, with its dynamic relationship to others. In China the I Ching had two distinct functions. The first was as a compendium and classic of ancient cosmic principles. The second function was that of divination text. As a divination text the world of the I Ching was that of the marketplace fortune teller and roadside oracle. These individuals served the illiterate peasantry. The educated Confucian elite in China were of an entirely different disposition. The future results of our actions were a function of our personal virtues. The Confucian literati actually had little use for the I Ching as a work of divination.

John Thomas Bryant (who you will recall from his fascinating Astrotometry project), pointed out this hexagram, number 24, to me. Here's one version of the descriptive text for that hexagram: "A movement is accomplished in six stages and the seventh brings return".

The idea that our universe has six degrees of freedom, which are then constrained at the seventh dimension, seems very related to all this. There are, of course, many other systems of divination, and I realize how easy it is for people to dismiss all this as superstition. Like many other aspects of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, though, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that ancient wisdom may have figured some things out about our reality which science has yet to catch up to. As more and more physicists embrace the idea of a multiverse, and as Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics also sees increasing support, we see that ultimately everything about our universe exists simultaneously as a wave function that is outside of space and time. If so, then connections such as those explored thousands of years ago by Chinese scholars may not be as much of a stretch after all.

Have you ever had your palm read, or a tarot card reading, or a personal astrology analysis done? Was it all absolute bunk? If so, then the rest of this blog will be of no interest to you. On the other hand, if you have ever had the experience that many people around the world have had, where the reader seemed to know things, have insights, even specific knowledge that surprised you with its details, then you may be willing to consider that this is more than just lucky guesses that we're talking about here. Clearly, some people who do readings like these have strong intuitive capabilities, and regardless of the system of divination they use, that intuition helps them to be more effective at telling people's futures. I would say, then, that dismissing such events as coincidence, or worse still the deliberate deceptions of scam artists is too harsh a judgment: if we really are navigating our way through a probability space of unique outcomes that are available from our current "now", and those outcomes already exist within a timeless set of states that exist outside of our spacetime, then I don't think it's that hard to imagine that some people are more able to intuitively "see" the map of that upcoming information space than others.

We'll continue even further with this discussion about divination and superstition in an upcoming blog where we look at some fascinating reports from Norway, that entry will be called Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu". To close, here's a video for one of the 26 songs that go along with this project, a song about our ongoing quest to figure out the secrets of the universe: "What I Feel For You".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w06IRgChaMY

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation

Related blogs:

Poll 40 - Now vs. the Future
The Holographic Universe
Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens)
Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses
We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
Poll 12 - Possible and Impossible Outcomes
Poll 7 - Can We Predict the Future?
Your Sixth-Dimensional Self
What Do You Want to Change?
Intuition
Remembering the Future

Nassim Haramein

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZj1XAjcTY

We've talked in previous blogs about fractals, sacred geometry, water and its connection to life and inspiration, and how the "zero" and the "ten" in my way of visualizing the dimensions are really two complimentary ways of looking at the same thing: perceiving the underlying perfectly balanced symmetry state that our universe or any other springs from. One thing I've remarked upon before is that the "zero", as a point, represents the push towards the infinitely small, and the "ten" represents the push towards the infinitely large, but both are part of the same continuum (and are represented as such in the graphic created for this project - the zero and ten are on a line, and the other dimensions are "outside" of that line). Within my way of visualizing the dimensions, then, the zero and ten are of indeterminate size, and the other dimensions represent ways of slicing up infinity to get to more specific subsets of reality, including a universe such as our own.

A number of people have remarked to me that physicist Nassim Haramein has a Unified Field Theory which seems to connect in some interesting ways to the ideas I've been talking about. If you're in a hurry, start listening to the video below at about 7:45, because pretty well everything up to that point is preamble. At 7:45 he begins to talk about there being much more to our reality than what we see around us, and that he (like me) had an intuition about this at the age of seven which he became fascinated with.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPgII_4ciFU

By the end of this first clip, you can see him starting to describe the same way of visualizing spatial dimensions which I talk about in my original animation, and as I've remarked previously in entries like We Start With a Point, A Point Within the Omniverse, and Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, this is known as the point-line-plane postulate. In the following video, you'll see that he says the first and second dimension don't really exist, and then he says by that logic the third dimension doesn't exist, since it's made out of things that don't exist!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TV3a09vFYI

To solve this quandary, he goes back to the zero that we start from, the point of indeterminate size, and posits that the fractal nature of our reality tells us that everything is constructed from points, each point recursively/infinitely embedded within all other points, and therefore all points are connected to each other. He tells us that his theories are now being peer-reviewed at several American universities.

He points out that this idea may seem similar to the theory of the big bang, which says our universe sprang from a "dot" the size of Planck's length. But in Nassim's theory, all "dots" contain the potential for a universe, because they are all connected together. In the following video he shows clips from a couple of movies: the opening sequence of "Contact", and the ending of "Men in Black", both of which give us graphic ways of visualizing a universe that is embedded in other universes. I've remarked elsewhere that the "universe embedded in a rose in an abandoned parking lot" idea from Stephen King's Dark Tower series is another interesting fictional portrayal of this recursive/fractal idea.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRWeyCfCE1M

The universe is infinite. How do you fit infinity within a finite space? Fractals. In the above video he shows how this could possibly be imagined through infinite recursion, watch the video and you'll see what I mean. Or check out the following two animations from the wikipedia article on fractals: the object at the left is known as a Sierpinski Triangle, and to the right is a Koch Snowflake.

If you were to imagine drawing a circle on a piece of paper, then fitting either of these shapes within that circle, you would see a very similar idea to what he's talking about here. Although both of these animations only show the first ten steps or less, in both cases the process we are seeing could be repeated forever, as each new step proceeds down to a smaller scale than the one before. In the following video he continues this idea:

A direct link to the above video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-RjjNgBDyk

.. and here's how he sums it up (I've edited him a bit here):

"Although I can place an infinite amount of triangles in a circle, I will never exceed the first boundary I made for myself. Never. I just showed you how infinity fits in a so-called finite space: because you can divide to infinity within a circle!

"What does that mean? Let me give an example for physics: we build faster and faster accelerators that cost billions of dollars, to get smaller and smaller. If we were to understand this principle of fractals, we would see very quickly that you can always keep dividing: so we would give up the search for some fundamental particle that's going to end the search. And we would start to understand that what we need to discover is the dynamic of the division, the dynamic of the quantization... rather than continuing to see how much further we can keep going down into infinity."

If you've followed him this far, you will now start to hear him say things about our connectedness, and our interface with reality that very strongly connects to the things I talk about regularly with my project. Here's one thing I want to make absolutely clear: Nassim is not promoting a worldview that comes from ten spatial dimensions, but he is promoting a very similar concept to what I portray as being the tenth dimension: an infinite "set of all possible states" that contains all possible expressions of matter and energy, all enfolded together into an underlying whole, a zero which is "full rather than empty" as Gevin Giorbran explained so well in Everything Forever. When you read blog entries like The Invariant Set, Imagining the Omniverse Addendum, Google and the Group Mind, Dreaming of Electric Sheep, and Why Do We Need More than 3 Dimensions?, you'll see fractals discussed from various approaches. The thing that we should all be clear about here is that fractals are often defined as having "non-integer" dimensions: and as you'll see if you read the wikipedia article on Hausdorff Dimensions, that Sierpinski fractal (which we looked at above) has a dimensionality of approximately 1.585. By the time we are imagining reality coming from ten dimensions but when those dimensions can contain any number of "fractional" dimensions, it really does seem like my description of the ten dimensions allows for us to include an infinite number of vectors within that set: as Nassim says, this is another way of thinking about how an infinite set could be contained within a so-called finite space.

The word "multiverse" has come to have multiple definitions. When someone uses that word, are they talking about the set of parallel universe outcomes for our own universe as described by Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, or are they talking about the ten to the power of 500 universes with different initial conditions from our own universe which are predicted by string theory? Often, the definition of this word depends upon who you are talking to. Because my way of visualizing the dimensions provides a way to enfold and relate both of those concepts into a hierarchy, I have come to prefer to use the omniverse as the word that combines all of those possible states into one.

If you'd like to hear more from Nassim Haramein, please go to this youtube channel, iiisis2, where all forty-five videos that make up the presentation we're looking at here are posted.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Augmented Reality - 10thdim Music Videos

Illusions and Reality

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aSqfZR8v1A

Here's a link to an article published yesterday at physorg.com: it talks about fascinating new research being conducted at MIT regarding the ways our senses interact with each other.

Have you ever thought about how much our brains are synthesizing the input that comes in from our senses into one coherent whole? With sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste we perceive not five worlds but one. Adding other senses, like equilibrioception (balance and acceleration), thermoception (heat and cold), proprioception (relative positions of the parts of the body), and nociception (physiological pain), only makes us appreciate that much more what a complex set of data is coming in, to be knit together into one experience that becomes our conscious and unconscious observation of the world around us.

The surprising information this MIT study reveals is that it shows how one sense can trump another in surprising ways, as part of the synthesis process we're talking about here. It demonstrates this by using a variation on what's known as the waterfall illusion, which you can read about in the wikipedia article on motion after-effects. The waterfall illusion occurs when you watch falling water for a minute or so, then look over at the rocks and they appear to be slowly rising.

Here's a YouTube video called "LSD Trip" that provides another nice example of motion after-effects:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9uYEM2osYQ

Back in October 2008, in Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens), we talked about other optical illusions that demonstrate how much our minds are responsible for what we see around us. A few weeks after I published that entry, there was another article at physorg.com called "Optical Illusions: Caused by Eye or Brain?", which talked about microsaccades - the tiny involuntary motions of the eye that help us to see the world around us by continually providing very slightly different input. I talked about microsaccades back in August 2007 in a blog entry called Constructive Interference. Amazingly, without microsaccades, it turns out that we would quickly become blind to any stationary objects around us unless we were continually moving our heads around.

By the time we're thinking about the unbelievably complex amount of information that we are processing instant by instant throughout the day, I've proposed that it's really not that big a leap to think that there could be some multi-dimensional awareness of our non-local universe which each of us already possesses, and that experiences like instinct, intuition, deja vu, simultaneous inspiration, creativity, the power of music, empathy, and even much more supernatural concepts than that might all be indications of our ability to perceive and process information which comes from beyond the already complex "now" of any particular moment in spacetime. Mind boggling? Sure. But like most of the concepts we play with in this project, if we take these ideas one at a time and enfold them together, seeing how one can be encapsulated within another, we can work our way back out to the biggest picture of all, where all of this happens simultaneously as part of the enfolded symmetry state which Gevin Giorbran called SOAPS, the Set Of All Possible States. As we discussed last time, physicist Tim Palmer is now calling that biggest picture of all The Invariant Set, but mystics, philosophers, and scientists have all come up with other ways of thinking about exactly the same thing.

Speaking of mystics, last time we looked at a video by artist Charles Gilchrist, who I've really become a fan of. Here's the next video in that same series of his about sacred geometry, another way of thinking about the parts of our reality which exist outside of spacetime. Regular readers of my blog will recognize a lot of the same themes that I am constantly playing with in Charles Gilchrist's inspiring work.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMk0estzXc

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - The Time Paradox

The Invariant Set

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIhi2urqJ0

Gevin Giorbran called it SOAPS - the "set of all possible states". For our universe, I called it "a point in the seventh dimension", and for the omniverse of all possible universes and information patterns, I called it the tenth dimension in its unobserved state of perfectly enfolded symmetry. Now, here's some excerpts from an article in the March 30 2009 issue of New Scientist Magazine that explores a concept from physicist Tim Palmer called "The Invariant Set". I would say we're all talking about the same thing: viewing the universe from a timeless perspective.

Can fractals make sense of the quantum world?
New Scientist Magazine, 30 March 2009
by Mark Buchanan

QUANTUM theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don't exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances.

...what if there were a way of showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?

If you listen to physicist Tim Palmer, it begins to sound plausible. What has been missing, he argues, are some key ideas from an area of science that most quantum physicists have ignored: the science of fractals, those intricate patterns found in everything from fractured surfaces to oceanic flows (see What is a fractal?).

...Palmer's ideas begin with gravity. The force that makes apples fall and holds planets in their orbit is also the only fundamental physical process capable of destroying information. It works like this: the hot gas and plasma making up a star contain an enormous amount of information locked in the atomic states of a huge number of particles. If the star collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole, most of the atoms are sucked in, resulting in almost all of that detailed information vanishing. Instead, the black hole can be described completely using just three quantities - its mass, angular momentum and electric charge.

Many physicists accept this view, but Palmer thinks they haven't pursued its implications far enough. As a system loses information, the number of states you need to describe it diminishes. Wait long enough and you will find that the system reaches a point where no more states can be lost. In mathematical terms, this special subset of states is known as an invariant set. Once a state lies in this subset, it stays in it forever.

A simple way of thinking about it is to imagine a swinging pendulum that slows down due to friction before eventually coming to a complete standstill. Here the invariant set is the one that describes the pendulum at rest.

Because black holes destroy information, Palmer suggests that the universe has an invariant set too, though it is far more complicated than the pendulum.

Complex systems are affected by chaos, which means that their behaviour can be influenced greatly by tiny changes. According to mathematics, the invariant set of a chaotic system is a fractal.

Fractal invariant sets have unusual geometric properties. If you plotted one on a map it would trace out the same intricate structure as a coastline. Zoom in on it and you would find more and more detail, with the patterns looking similar to the original unzoomed image.

Gravity and mathematics alone, Palmer suggests, imply that the invariant set of the universe should have a similarly intricate structure, and that the universe is trapped forever in this subset of all possible states. This might help to explain why the universe at the quantum level seems so bizarre.

...The key is the invariant set. According to Palmer's hypothesis, the invariant set contains all the physically realistic states of the universe. So any state that isn't part of the invariant set cannot physically exist.

...In a paper submitted to the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, he shows how the basic idea can account for quantum uncertainty, contextuality and other quantum puzzles (www.arxiv.org/abs/0812.1148).

I've talked before about fractals and recursion, and how those relate to this way of visualizing reality. While Dr. Palmer is not talking about extra dimensions with his theory, it's very easy to use his "Invariant Set" concept in the context of my project: in entries like The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, Our Non-Local Universe, and Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? I've talked about what's possible and impossible within this way of viewing reality, and how the logical progression from one spatial dimension to the next that I'm portraying gives us a way to see how the universe, the multiverse, and the omniverse are related to each other: each is a subset of the next, and all make more sense when we learn to view them from the perspective where (as Einstein liked to say) "the distinction between past, present, and future is meaningless".

I mentioned that with my system, I would say our own universe's "invariant set" is locked in at the seventh dimension: this can also be connected to the string theory idea that our 3D universe is constrained by a seventh-dimensional brane. Now, here's a lovely video by artist Charles Gilchrist that shows a connection between the number seven, fractals, infinite recursion, timelessness, and the forms of sacred geometry.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9OlPsndVs

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Edit: Here's a link to a story on Tim Palmer's Invariant Set Postulate published August 17th 2009 at physorg.com.

Next: Illusions and Reality

Modern Shamans

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKfTzZO7mGU

In The Shaman, we talked about the idea that shamanism deals with hidden forces, spirit worlds, and seeing things the rest of us cannot. From there, we moved to Terence McKenna, one of a great many visionaries from the latter part of the twentieth century who were interested in psychedelics as a way some have used for opening their minds up to those hidden patterns that create our reality - an idea that, for me, connects very much to trying to imagine how our reality could be shadows of extra-dimensional patterns and shapes.

By the time some are calling Terence McKenna a "modern shaman", it could be argued that we have moved beyond the proper definition of the word. Shamans, some people insist, are not part of the tribe, they are outcasts who in modern times might be the ones who end up in a psychiatric hospital under surveillance! While McKenna may not have been a "mainstream" figure during his lifetime, I think it would be stretching things to say that he was "not part of the tribe". We talked in that same blog about the ongoing controversy over whether the Native American visionary Black Elk should be called a shaman, when "medicine man" is the more correct term within his culture.

Shamans, Modern Shamans, Technoshamans...
With all that in mind, please accept my apologies if you object to the use of the word "shaman" in the broader definition I'm playing with here. When I think of the phrase modern shaman (an interesting pair of words to search for in google) I think of people who are blending modern viewpoints with ancient mysticism, sacred geometry with physics, spirituality with science. Another useful term that relates to all this is "technoshaminsm". In the wikipedia article on that word we see this:

Technoshamanism is a term used to describe various methods of integrating modern technology into shamanic practice (see shamanism). Methods of doing this include such diverse disciplines as synthetic drug use, modern psychotherapy, and raving.

Technoshamans generally embrace the view that mystical experiences are at least partially biological in nature; as such, they find the use of biological and mechanical means to influence and even induce mystical states and experiences perfectly acceptable. Technoshamanism is strongly related to the modern primitive movement.

Let's look at a few people I would call a Modern Shaman, using my admittedly very loose definition of the word:

Grant Morrison
Ever hear of author Grant Morrison, creator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel series The Invisibles? Here's an example of a successful creative individual who is completely willing to talk about the usefulness of psychoactive substances in his work. He has some very "out there" theories about the nature of reality, our relationship to the fifth dimension, how consciousness is participating in all of that, and how we are all connected together: ideas that readers of my blog and my book will recognize as regular themes, but I have to admit to being completely unaware of Grant Morrison's work up to now. Clearly, Mr. Morrison and I have been exploring many of the same ideas and I would now love to read some issues of The Invisibles... and some day I'd love to hear his reaction to my original eleven-minute animation. I warn you, the following video is laced with profanities and he begins by announcing that he's drunk, but keep watching: I think this is a worthwhile video, as Grant has a unique and intellectually challenging point of view.

A direct link to the above video of Grant Morrison speaking at DisInfo is at http://vodpod.com/watch/55396-grant-morrison-disinfo-lecture

Alex Grey
Alex Grey, on the other hand, is someone I've know about for a while: his website is at alexgrey.com. Alex is a New York artist whose work blends psychedelic imagery with archetypal images of the body and the spirit. Like Grant Morrison's ideas, Alex Grey's art portrays imagery that seems to be plugged into many of the same memes I've been exploring with my project: multidimensional geometries, auras, chakras, and a spiritual viewpoint that embraces our connectedness are all themes found regularly in the art of Alex Grey. Here's a trailer for a movie about his work called Entheogen:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=hcOXGmg0x_o. If you go to entheogen.tv you will see that Alex embraces the concept of technoshamanism, so he ties into all of this discussion very deeply.

The concept of sacred geometry comes up regularly in these discussions of the nature of reality and extra dimensions, but that's another blog for another day.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Astrotometry