Gravity and Light

In an ideal world, every interface should be able to be boiled down to a simple interplay between only two currently available choices, so that even a very limited input device (one operated by a physically challenged person, for instance) can navigate, right from the very first yes or no. Finding what the most basic choice is can be the hardest part of designing an interface!

Some people are not comfortable with the idea of "Thoughts Become Things", because it feels so counter-intuitive to the observed physicality we see around us. Is everything just vibrations and constructive interference patterns? Is a person's consciousness and our physical reality all just a reflection of a complex vibration across the dimensions? In the model proposed in "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", we begin by talking about the geometric concept of a point. Later in the book, it becomes clear that this "starting point" can be in any dimension we choose to imagine it (if it's in the third dimension it could be at position x,y,z; in the seventh dimension it could be at position t,u,v,w,x,y,z; and so on). If the tenth dimension encompasses all aspects of indeterminacy, then no matter which of the nine dimensions you choose to place that first "point", its position collapses out a particular reality from the multiverse... in other words, it becomes the first yes/no, and by its selection it is already reducing the available options to a certain subset of the indeterminate whole.

I would argue that no matter what dimension you place that first point, the first thing that point defines is the value (or range of values) for gravity in the universe (or universes) that you are selecting. Physicists tell us that gravity is the only force that travels across all dimensions. Therefore, even if the information is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, any reality (ours included) can't have an indeterminate value for gravity. What do I mean when I say this information could be irrelevant? Well, for instance, if I define a set of co-ordinates in the third dimension to create a cube, I can determine the volume of that cube. Whether that cube exists in our universe or in some other universe with a different value for gravity, I can still determine its volume. But as soon as I am imagining a cube that physically exists, I am defining it as being in a real three-dimensional universe, which means that even though I am only assigning the x,y,z co-ordinates and values for this cube, its existence as a real object necessitates that it also be part of an implied subset drawn from the wave of quantum indeterminacy: a reality defined from the ninth down to the first dimensions. If gravity is everywhere, then any subset of reality must be limiting the available choices for gravity.

What if the point I'm thinking about is in the seventh through ninth dimensions? Then we can imagine our point, because it is of indeterminate size, as encompassing multiple values for gravity. Whether it would actually be possible to create a three-dimensional reality from a seventh-dimensional point encompassing a range of values for gravity is a science fiction question, a challenge for the imagination.

The second thing that can be locked in is the value for how close one point can be to the next in the reality we are choosing to examine. For our universe, this value is known as the planck length, and its value tells us why nothing in our universe can travel faster than the speed of light, and why our reality breaks down into quantum indeterminacy when we try to examine things that are closer to each other than the planck length - it's because "time" is not continuous, it is granular. Time gives us this illusion of being a continuous fourth-dimensional line, but it's actually being created by a series of three-dimensional points each representing our universe in a particular state-space, and each of those points is one planck length away from the next. While it's entirely possible to imagine a universe constructed from points that are closer together or further apart than the one we live in, they would be part of some other subset of the multiverse.

But how can something as complex as physical reality be boiled down to just a vibration across the dimensions? Here's an analogy: think about a sound wave. Using the interplay of only two factors, amplitude and frequency, we can create something as simple as a sine wave, or as harmonically complex as the human voice, or as dynamic as a thunderstorm. In the digital realm, the degree of accuracy with which a sound can be represented is reflected by the number of bits used to represent the amplitude, and the sampling rate used to represent the frequency. Once the bits and sampling rate are high enough (and any audio geek will tell you these numbers should therefore be much higher than the 16 bits and 44.1K sample rate of a CD), any sound imaginable can be properly represented.

The speed of light, then, shows us the "sample rate" for our universe, which determines what frequencies can be properly represented in the waveform of our physical reality. As we approach the speed of light or the planck length, reality breaks down, it can no longer be properly represented.

Consciousness, in its own way, can be boiled down to an interplay between gravity and light, but consciousness is not confined to the physical world, so those words can easily be used metaphorically. Still, an idea can have a certain gravity (or lack thereof), and a frequency (or mix of multiple frequencies) which, like the amplitude and frequency of any other waveform, allows us to create any idea imaginable. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I argue that the clouds of memes and spirit that exist across time are part of what we take on to become a unique personality, and because those factors are not rooted in the limited physical realm, they can be transmitted across generations, and also be responsible for simultaneous inspiration or the sudden ascendency of new memes. The biggest-picture-of-all memes which have existed since the beginning of our universe have such a long waveform that they could easily be represented by a much lower sample rate - but since time is really an illusion, what we are really talking about here is just another way of viewing our slice of the multiverse.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

P.S. - the new "Utopia" issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine is now hitting the newsstands. Please flip to page 26 and read the fantastic article by Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.



The link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Seeing Eye to Eye

Each living creature has a grid of awareness that represents their point of view, their interface with reality, their way of looking at the world. That interface is comparatively simple for an amoeba or a fruit fly, but just as unique as our own. Each of us has a personal matrix that represents our beliefs, our history, the set of memes or the society of mind that drives us forward and keep us interested in "what happens next". It is that desire to continue that sums up the difference between things that are living and things that are not, and this is true at both the physical and the spiritual levels of our reality.

But there I go getting all metaphysical again. There are the hard determinists who have a great deal of problem with any framework for discussion that involves there being more than one reality, more than one timeline for the universe. This point of view is easy to understand: we look back in time and see a predictable, provable universe which obeys the second law of thermodynamics. We see the evidence of only one timeline stretching back to the big bang, so why should there be more than one stretching into the future? The timeless multiverse and determinism would seem to be drawn from two separate and incompatible belief systems, two mutually exclusive grids of awareness.

I've been told that there are oriental languages where the colloquial phrases for time involve "looking forward into the past", and alternatively "looking behind us to see the future": these phrases imply that the past is easy to see, just as if we were looking straight ahead of ourselves, while the future is something that we can only catch hints of, because it is behind us. I would argue that the future is hard to see because it is being drawn from the indeterminate wave of possible branches available to us from the fifth dimension, and some people (including those who have viewed the tenth dimension animation) would agree, while there are others who will never see eye to eye with me on this idea.

Everybody's heard the corny old saying, "the eyes are the window to the soul". Isn't it interesting, though, how eye contact is such an important part of human interaction? Even in the animal kingdom, eye contact is an important part of interplay, with modes of making/avoiding eye contact quickly establishing social order or provoking/avoiding conflict. What is it about eye contact with another person or another animal that tells us so much so quickly about their attitude, their tension, the speed of their internal clock, their health and vitality, their way of looking at the world? What does trying to see eye to eye with with a snake tell us about how close their point of view relates to our own, and why is that so different from looking into the eyes of our more nearby mammal cousins? Eye to eye contact, as simple as it appears, is surprisingly complex.

It's also intensely personal, in that it is impossible to look more than one person or creature in the eye at the same time. In psychology and philosophy, the concept of the "Other" relates to this idea - and an important part of the development of consciousness is when we become aware that there is a difference between our internal world of thought and the external world of physical reality and other people. This is not to say that the two worlds are in conflict - but rather, to say that eye contact appears to be a way for two creatures to see within each other, and to see how much their points of view agree and disagree with each other at some basic primal level.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we start from the traditional binary viewpoint, that there is a way to describe every particular thing about the Universe as being the result of saying "these are the things that something is" and "these are the things that something isn't". To quote from the book:

Cosomologist Jacob Bekenstein estimates that if you were to digitize all aspects of the universe as we know it, it would take approximately 10 to the hundredth power bits of data. That’s the number one followed by one hundred zeroes! So, if you were to have data storage in your computer equal to that amount, it might appear that you should be able to re-create and search through all aspects of the universe. It’s amusing to note that particular number, one followed by one hundred zeroes, has a name that was coined by Milton Sirotta in 1937: he called it a “googol”. That word is commonly spelled “google” today. Is this a coincidence? It would seem we have revealed the ultimate goal of the world’s most popular search engine–that all aspects of the universe will be catalogued and searchable within its google-sized confines.

The concept of the Other gives us a simple description of the interplay between our internal "observer" and the external physical world, which occurs at any conscious moment. As physical creatures, we are all participating in a consensual reality where the basic laws of physics are locked in, and the laws of thermodynamics seem to be moving us from the big bang to entropy. Gevin Giorbran's "Learning to See Timelessness" shows us how the interplay between grouping order and symmetry order provide a dynamic tension to create the world we see around us. With the concept of the multiverse as presented in its extreme form here, we are supposing that each of us are in our own unique reality, while we also share a consensual reality constrained by the laws of physics and the fact that there are only a certain number of possible branches available to us within the fifth dimension at any single instant. The extent to which those two realities (our internal world of conscious awareness and our external world of observed reality) are at odds with each other tells us much about the uniqueness of our own point of view, or how unusual our own sets of circumstances might be, and can be used as a way to imagine how the dynamic tension between grouping and symmetry could be what is locating each of us in our own particular realm of time, space, and shared history within the multiverse. Each of us are in our current position on a point in the third dimension, with a trajectory in the fourth dimension which can be changed at any moment by accessing the fifth dimension paths available to us. Those changes happen for the world (and the universe) at important "cusp" moments, and personal cusp moments can happen whether we choose them or whether chance and the actions of others choose them for us.

Dan Winter's Implosion Group (always good for a densely packed and potentially overwhelming collection of thought-provoking tangents) has a page about the twinkle in the eye which appears to relate to these ideas as well. My song "The Unseen Eye" is also related, as it talks about the nature of reality as being the result of a certain state-space being observed by our consensual reality, out of all of the other possible state-spaces which potentially exist out there in the timeless multiverse. When two creatures look in each other's eyes, they are seeing a summation of where they are in the ten dimensions, and the Unseen Eye is the combination of the internal and external points of view that combine to create the reality those two creatures share. Is The Unseen Eye God? If you like. It really depends upon your own unique "point" of view, doesn't it?



The link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0

Here is a previous blog which prints out the lyrics for this song.


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

What is Enlightenment?

Since this project was launched, I have always been careful to describe this as a "new way of thinking" rather than an established scientific theory. As it says on the back cover of my book, it is "not about about mainstream physics. Rather, Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".

I have always liked the idea that the best scientific theories seem to have an inherent elegance or "rightness" to them that allows the general public to have at least some intuitive understanding, even if they can't do the heavy math or analyze the deep theories behind the science. As we move towards a time where we have philosophers and scientists seeming more and more to agree on what's happening out there in the timeless multiverse, we begin to feel that both factions really and truly are talking about the underlying structures of reality. As I said a few blog entries ago, it's like gophers popping their heads out of their burrows and catching sight of each for the first time.

I am very pleased to note that the upcoming issue of "What is Enlightenment?" magazine is doing a feature article on my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston has written a two and half page article, "Your 3-D Universe Is So Passé" which will be part of their issue entitled "Searching for Utopia". This magazine is on newsstands at stores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Chapters, Whole Foods, etc., and I invite you to pick up a copy.

My song Everything Fits Together, for me, sums up the concept of enlightenment - the idea that there is an underlying order to the universe which we can intuitively understand and relate to is key, as well as the idea that there is an inner peace we can all strive to achieve once we perceive that underlying order.

Here again, and for the new visitors to this blog from What Is Enlightenment, are three videos for that song: Everything Fits Together. Here also are two links to previous blogs about this song: one which prints the lyrics, and one which gives a bit more discussion about the ideas behind the song.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck





A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

The Dark Side

Goths (and many of the subgenres of metal music) embrace the following mythos: it's okay to be fascinated with the dark side. In fact, there are future versions of yourself where if you use a little bit of ruthlessness and self-serving evil now, you will get to the future you're interested in, where you will have all the things you want.

Sure, a rising tide lifts all boats, but it's very hard to imagine a world where everyone knows The Secret and yet no one in the world has profited at the expense of another - and as critics have pointed out, no matter how much you tell a starving child in Africa about The Secret, they are not going to be able to manifest their thoughts into actions and become millionaires.

Still, this dichotomy between self-serving action and action that benefits the world is what makes The Anthropic Viewpoint so interesting for me: people have to know that there is a version of the future where you make the best of whatever the combination of your own set of choices, random chance, and the actions of others have dealt out for you.

That's what's holy about people who make the best of a bad situation, be that a person debilitated by disease (the much-celebrated "indomitable human spirit"), or a person who lives a simple but fulfilled life. That's what's sad about people who don't believe that there is anything more to reality than the hard physical world we see before us: if you don't have any faith that something good has been at work to get us here, and that something innately good is still moving us forward on the branches of the reality tree we are climbing, then you are more likely to leave this world unhappy to be going into the abyss.

In my book, I suggest that anyone wanting to create fiction about time travel would do well to use the self-consistent version of the multiverse depicted in the tenth dimension animation, the ramifications of which are discussed in the other ten chapters of my book. It's easy to imagine this multiverse as being where Star Wars took place - and Terry Gilliam movies like Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits and Tideland* (as well as much of the writing of Philip K. Dick) all come from various parts of that same limitless alternate reality that exists in our minds, in our dreams, and out there somewhere in the sixth dimension. Maybe we can't get there from here, but those versions of reality are still part of the big Joseph Campbell-sized archetypes which are part of the shapes and vibrations that help to motivate us as quantum observers to create the fourth dimensional line we are drawing in a fifth dimensional plane that is derived from the rounded shapes and sudden bifurcations of the sixth dimension.

Fractals and the bifurcations of Chaos Theory give us ways to see the repeating patterns in nature and history which are exactly the same as the shadows cast from higher dimensional objects: in this case though, I am proposing that those higher dimensional objects can be thought of as meme-systems in the higher dimensions. We already know that we live in a universe that prefers order over disorder, and creativity over stasis (just two examples of the many possible systems at play), because that is part of what has defined our universe from its very beginning. Based upon the established trajectories from the big bang to now, those biggest-picture-of-all memes will likely always be part of the universe we live in.

While "using the Force" may only be an idea created for a movie, it is not that much different a concept from having faith in a higher power or using The Secret to gain advantage. When George Lucas via Star Wars talks about "embracing the dark side", this is about what happens when you pursue a version of the future where you and a few others profit at the expense of the future of most others around you - which also makes this whole discussion very political, because politics is about the eternal struggle between the demands of the powerful, and the basic needs of the masses. A path chosen that gives one group of people selfish power over many others is the downside of politics - power and money tend not to encourage altruistic motives, unfortunately. When politics manages to really be about democracy and the choices of a few benefiting the world, we are looking at great leaders indeed. The dirty little secret of The Secret, then, could be that if you are not happy with your current lot in life, it's possible that is because you are living in a version of the universe where someone else has used their power to turn thoughts into actions by creating a world where they have profited, but as a result you have been deliberately placed at a disadvantage! In other words, if you're not taking control of your own future, then somebody else who cares very little about your welfare might be doing it for you.

Finally, just for fun, here are two related videos by Ryan Hill for my song "Seven Levels". If reality stems from the tenth dimension, but our own universe and all of its basic laws (including the memes that prefer order over disorder, etc.) are locked in as a point in the seventh dimension, then there are really only seven levels (and six degrees of freedom!)to the reality we are experiencing. By the time we move to a different point in the seventh dimension and up, we are no longer in the universe we have already occupied for the past 13.7 billion years. Instead, we have moved into the other universes which are decoherent with our own... but that's a whole different discussion!



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




Enjoy the journey,

Rob

* I should mention that I have been a Terry Gilliam fanatic for decades, and was very fortunate to have a song written by myself and my son Todd sung on camera by one of the characters in Terry's recently released film Tideland.

Tuning In to Reality

All around the world, a new group of thinkers and dreamers are popping their heads out of their gopher holes and catching sight of each other for the first time. Scientists and philosophers, it would seem, are being drawn towards a common set of central truths as to the nature of reality, and what is really happening behind the scenes when we use words like consciousness, spirit, time, and entropy.



The eleven minute animation that vaulted Imagining the Tenth Dimension to popularity continues to draw new fans on a daily basis. Although I must continually point out that the ideas in this animation originate from a non-scientist (me), and are not what you will be taught today in a physics class, I am also gratified at the number of people who have thanked me for what is most commonly being referred to as a new and mind-blowing experience.

As an inquisitive eight-year-old, I was introduced to some of the basic ideas of dimensions and the folding of spacetime through Madeleine L'Engle's transcendent children's book "A Wrinkle in Time". Did L'Engle get all of her science right? No. Does that matter? To the extent that this wonderful book (as it did for countless other fans, I'm sure) expanded my young mind's perception of the universe to want to know more about these topics, those approximations and tiny liberties she took in creating her work of imagination matter very little. Previous generations to mine might have been drawn to the writing of H.G. Wells, or that granddaddy of creative books about dimensionality, Edwin Abbott's 1884 classic “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” (from which came my use of the concept of two-dimensional Flatlanders).

More recently, books by science fiction visionaries like Greg Bear and Stephen Baxter, and movies as diverse as The Matrix or Groundhog Day are really about the same ideas that I have been exploring all my life: that our reality is being created from branching possibilities that already exist across the dimensions. This idea, I believe, finds a useful balance between hard determinism and free will, showing how there are certain outcomes which appear to be inevitable based upon the trajectories and choices already taken within the "sum over histories" that got us to this moment, but how each of us still has a great deal of control over our own version of reality from any particular moment forward.

Last blog I mentioned The Secret. Someone wrote to me and suggested that Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a more well-balanced, less simplistic representation of the same ideas as are advanced by Rhonda Byrne and her team: a fact that I find fascinating since I did not hear about The Secret until well after my book was published. Likewise, I have been contacted by fans of Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations With God" series of bestselling books, telling me that the ideas I present are completely compatible with Neale's, and perhaps even offer an explanation for how the processes he describes could be manifesting themselves. How do coincidences of thought like this occur when I had never read any of Neale's work? Must be spring, hello all you other gophers!

Right now I'm reading an exciting new book by Gevin Giorbran called "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness". This beautifully illustrated book is a gold mine for anyone interested in a cataloguing of the many ways that science (and philosophy!) have shown us that time can be thought of as much more than the limited one-way-arrow that we experience. Gevin has some remarkable insights into the underlying dynamic tensions that create the reality we are witness to, and I'm sure I will be talking about this book more in upcoming blogs.

One email I received a couple of weeks ago had this to say about Imagining the Tenth Dimension: "this isn't string theory, but it's right!". That feeling of something clicking, of seeing new ideas and having a little "A-ha!" light of recognition come on, is one of the things I have heard most from fans of this project. Is my eleven minute animation the "Wrinkle in Time" for up-and-coming minds of the twenty-first century? To the extent that I believe that my "new way of thinking about time and space" can be a useful step towards a more enlightened view of reality, I would be very proud if that was how this project someday grew to be remembered.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Death?

Let's talk about death.

Seeing a vision of your own impending death is not something that should be shown to children until they realize that dying young is unusual, and that there are many times in your life when you will almost die but something will save you. Realizing this important fact should help a child to become more well-rounded and less fearful in their interactions with the world.

Still, whether we accept it or not, there is a part of each of us that eventually dies (and perhaps that part dies much too soon!). I’ve been told that in Disney cartoons, the only people who die are parents or predecessors: if this is true, Disney has been around for much too long for this to be an accident. Why would Disney choose this? The death of a loved one is something that everybody has to see eventually. By only showing people other than children dying in entertainment aimed at children, has Disney made a conscious decision to give their audience a way to start considering the possibility of death, without traumatizing them? All kids need to be taught a certain amount of caution, but has Disney deliberately made it their policy not to kill off the characters kids are most likely to personally identify with in a show? It would be interesting to know more about this.

Seeing a vision of an impending death of yourself or a loved one is potentially very useful because if the vision is far enough into the future then you can probably find a way to dodge every bullet and continue on – and continuing to be alive is one of the ways that you can continue to navigate the fifth/sixth dimensional matrix of the multiverse (my reference to dodging bullets and The Matrix is completely intentional here). Stories of near-death experiences are legendary: people in extraordinary moments like this sometimes talk about how time stretched and they were able to see everything crystal clear. As adults now, for each of us there will almost certainly be those crazy moments we can look back upon and see how we narrowly survived death (through luck, skill, the actions of others, doesn't matter what the circumstance might be). But of course, there must also always be the one time when you really do die, and one last time each of us may well see the elastic nature of our perception of time. That same “stretching” of time, I believe, has a lot more to do with the number of important cusps we are passing on our fourth dimensional timeline than most of us realize, but that’s a whole other discussion.

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

Here is one of the more "out-there" concepts from my book: the miracle that we see as "life" is an interference pattern between the quantum wave function of the physical system and the systems of memes and spirit that occupy the more metaphysical world. Both of those systems can interact with each other to create the spark of life, and that spark of life is readily apparent to us when we look at living things or dead things:



This is a video of an interesting illusion of life that demonstrates in a simple way how such a complex result as life could really be nothing more than a moire pattern, a pattern of constructive interference. We see a bowl of corn starch mixed with a bit of water (which we can think of as the physical world) being vibrated by a specific frequency (which we can think of as the meme-system world). Our brains look at the resulting movement and see something that seems very much like life. Does the corn starch come alive? Of course not! But this demonstration is useful for helping to show us how two systems can have a simple interaction and begin to show us the behaviors that we know of as life.

At the end or the Cornstarch Monster video, when the vibration is removed, the appearance of life goes away. In the version of the ten dimensions I am advancing here, I would propose that the same thing is happening: when a person physically dies, those vibrations that were animating the body in the physical world could continue on (as ghosts, spirit guides, or the voices of the ancestors, or just shared memories and experiences from those left behind) or they could dissipate into a greater realm of memes and beliefs that I am proposing must be part of the tenth-dimensional framework we're imagining here.

Finally, just for fun, here's a new video for my song "Seven Levels". Lyrics to the song were posted in a previous blog.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Remembering the Future

One of the things discussed in the tenth dimension forum a few times in the last half a year has now become a media darling, embraced by Oprah and mentioned on countless talk shows and newscasts: “The Secret”. What is it about "The Secret" that agrees with Imagining the Tenth Dimension? It’s that the multiverse holds all the different possible future “you”s that could spring from this moment in time onwards.

Saying “this moment in time onwards” gets tricky though: if time is an illusion (an idea agreed upon as much by cosmologists as it is by mystics), and the multiverse of all possible pasts and futures for our universe and all other universes really exists, then what are we talking about here? The version of you that from your current circumstances has the best good fortune and makes the best choices to live the best life possible (whatever you perceive that optimistic phrase to mean) must already exist in the web of connected possible universes that we are navigating through in the fifth and sixth dimension, as we are each drawing our fourth dimensional line.

What’s the difference between good planning/eye of the tiger/good luck/good choices/holding on to your dreams and The Secret? Clearly, if someone is saying to themselves “all good things are going to come my way” while they are drinking themselves to death, the choices for a “best life possible” coming to that person are limited: the available paths will not open up until they stop destroying their health with whatever bad choices they are making. Does repeating “all good things are going to come my way” cause this person to stop hurting themselves? No guarantees there, I’m afraid. But if it does, we are back to good planning/eye of the tiger being the reason for the person’s future success. The secret of The Secret, then, is that it gives us all a way to believe that our future success is a possibility. This is one of the conclusions reached in Imagining the Tenth Dimension as well.

When the Tenth Dimension forum was launched, one of the very first questions asked was from a person who said they understood the animation, but they didn’t see how this knowledge was going to improve their own crappy life. Here’s part of the answer I provided at the time:

That's a tough one to answer, all right. I deal with this topic several times in the book: the idea that attitude affects outcome is certainly relevant, but it is too easy to toss around, and often easy to dismiss because there are so many other factors to consider. The starving child in Africa would not suddenly flourish if only they would let a smile be their umbrella. The person dying of cancer will tell you they did not actively choose a fifth dimensional path that is resulting in their untimely death. And the person killed without warning in an act of senseless violence may have been able to avoid that event if only they had been in a different place at that moment, but since there was no way for them to see the event coming, how could they have chosen the better path other than by dumb luck?

Critics of The Secret dismiss it as more empty-headed new age nonsense, the latest cash grab to take money from unhappy people looking for a quick fix to their unhappy lives. I think there is something at the core of The Secret though, and it is something most of us can remember from our childhood: there are certain things about your future that are easy to predict, and if you continue to believe they are going to happen they eventually will.

The Secret teaches that positive thoughts about the future are what create your own best future, and negative thoughts create bad outcomes. It also teaches that thought expressed with negative prefixes will get misinterpreted: if you think “I don’t want to be poor”, the universe hears that as “I want to be poor”. This must also mean that if you think “I am not a bad person” the universe hears “I am a bad person”, so it appears we must all be careful with how we mentally voice our goals (in fact, this is sometimes raised as a criticism of The Secret, since it seems to make the Universe rather perverse in its deliberate misinterpretation of our wishes).

The simplicity and purity that a child approaches life with is often underlined as being an admirable trait towards which we should all aspire. But what if you happen to be a child in some war-torn or strife-ridden part of the world who is about to die in some violent and uncontrollable way? You are going to be good at predicting the short term future: unfortunately, the prediction you are making is merely “this is where my life ends”. In that situation, The Secret appears to be useless. A child in that situation feels voiceless, and helpless to change the future.

If you live in times of peace, on the other hand, chances are good that you as a child have every confidence that you're going to live forever. This is not just the illusion of immortality imparted from the inability to imagine one's own death that we're talking about here: most children seem to innately believe that they are going to live on forever, at least in some form. They also believe that the part that lives forever has a voice. Julian Jaynes suggests that the voices we human beings have traditionally heard in our heads were what we used to (and sometimes still do) hear as a god or a spirit or a ghost or an explainable disembodied presence... the voices of the ancestors.

So. Perhaps predicting the future successfully can also be thought of as Remembering the Future. The topic of predicting the end of the world comes up regularly in this discussion – perhaps that is the same thing, that there were those in the past who predicted catastrophe, and on some of those other timelines our own consensual reality didn’t share, those people were right. In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore says (I’m paraphrasing here) “it was as if a man from the future came back and showed me the bad things that were going to happen unless we did something about it”. That, to my way of thinking, aligns perfectly with the worldview of Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: Death?