Thursday, May 31, 2007

Everything

Everything fits together.

Everything.

Everything has a potential shape in the tenth dimension… but in the tenth dimension it remains as unrealized potential. Things don't really start getting interesting until we precipitate that potential into the dimensions below.

Everything has a place that it begins and a place that it ends: and my visual way of imagining reality allows us to envision how that is true for any idea, or any vibration, or any physical construct, in the universe, and the multiverse.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this project began for me as a set of songs I had written about the nature of reality. When people didn't seem to understand what I was getting at, I imagined I would create a booklet to go with the CD, and that booklet blossomed into a 220 page book and a popular website. Here are six Big Ideas I've tried to sum up with the six songs that I've finished recording so far for this project :



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

1. Everything Fits Together. As we come to understand the interconnectedness of our reality this becomes self-evident, but a lot of people in the world still have not gained this perspective, and they feel needlessly trapped in their lives because of that. By the time you have really imagined the tenth dimension, you have seen what the seers and mystics have been describing for millenia, but you have also seen what quantum physicists and cosmologists are trying to explain to us right now: what is the nature of reality?



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

2.The quantum observer exists whether you believe in this concept or not. So. Whether you believe that everything in this world and this universe are the result of pure chance, blind determinism, and some lucky throws of the dice for cosmology and evolution over the ages… or whether you believe that what we are seeing is the result of a divine intent of some kind… the result, as what we are seeing at this moment will be the same. Both belief systems are compatible, because reality is viewing itself through an Unseen Eye, the “outside the system” viewpoint which Gödel showed us through his Incompleteness Theorems.



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

3. Although there are ten dimensions to reality, all there really are for our own universe is seven, and one of those is the point in the seventh dimension that for our own universe represents the omega we are heading towards and the alpha we come from, all wrapped up as a single unmoving point in the seventh dimension (as I sing in ”Seven Levels”). This means there are really six vectors in our unique reality, and six degrees of freedom/six degrees of separation that tie us all together. When the sixth level is also the first level (like a mobius strip but in the sixth dimension, the quantum observer becoming self-referential/self-aware, the undulating snake grabbing its tail), we are left with the fifth dimension, which is where we really are (as Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed after sitting on the idea for a couple of years). I believe that the golden mean and the stacked dodecahedra forming ubiquitous rotating helices show how matter, energy and memes are organized for our universe in the fifth dimension we are currently navigating through - Dan Winter has compiled some amazing insights into these ideas.



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


4. From the Anthropic Viewpoint, the reason we're here is because we're here. Is that so bad? It is, if people in power are using fear and ignorance to keep you down, and placing themselves in more and more extreme positions of conspicuous wealth while promoting a system that lets there be starving children and needless suffering in the world. If you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, you run the risk of being his puppet and his victim! My song takes the opposing viewpoints of determinism and a peaceful/joyful acceptance of the multiverse and pits them against each other throughout the song.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4


5. One of the things modern society has taught us to be suspicious of is the integrated mind - despite the fact that, as my song ”Automatic” says, “we've all been running on automatic since we were back in the trees”. I believe Julian Jaynes got it right: what we think of as consciousness now is a recent development, probably from the last few thousand years, and prior to that time we existed in a more integrated frame of mind, where ideas for doing things and intuition (remembering the future that already exists) were heard as internal “voices in the head” that people of the time viewed as the voices of ancestors, or spirit guides, or the commands from a God. That integrated state is still one we all can fall back into without realizing when we're doing repetitive activities, and sometimes find we have to use when we're performing complicated or challenging physical or mental activities. A mind that is not constantly nattering on to itself with its narrator voice is a productive mind, and a healthy mind, and something that proponents of meditation strive towards.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4dkYKxP4aM

6. Sometimes you just have to find a way to relax, because tension and fear and hatred are your enemies. Even a short five minute meditation once a day can help to tune you into your own internal voices, let them be heard or let them be quiet, and can help to move you to a better place in the ten dimensions. Turquoise and White is my song about getting away, even if it's only for a few minutes in your mind. Indirectly, it's also about physical stance and how something as simple as adopting a more alert or a more relaxed posture can change mental attitude, and changing your mental attitude can instantly put you on a trajectory to a better part of the multiverse, even though your location down here on our limited fourth dimensional line doesn't change one bit.

What is reality? All we are is a set of ideas across the dimensions. And that is a beautiful and wondrous thing.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Intuition

Our minds are all about recognizing patterns, sorting things out, finding sense within the noise. There are days when I feel plugged into a hidden world of synchronicity and surprise messages from the universe, and there are days when I feel like my poor ol' brain is not quite all there.

One of the things people like best about my way of imagining the ten dimensions is that it shows an intuitive and self-consistent visual picture of how reality could be constructed. As Tom Huston mentioned in the article in the current issue of "What Is Enlightenment?" about my project, I have been constantly surprised at the number of people who tell me that what I have portrayed can easily be made to fit with their own belief system and their own experience: from physics teachers to long distance faith healers, from excited kids to deep-thinking philosophers, from people of various spiritual backgrounds, to people who have taken various hallucinogens who tell me their visions are easily explained by my way of imagining reality.

Will my intuition one day be confirmed by science? That would be the most wonderful bit of synchronicity ever. I'm a composer, not a physicist! What drove me to create my tenth dimension site and its accompanying book was the feeling that I had stumbled upon something unique twenty years ago: the idea seemed so self-evident to me that I knew it was just a matter of time before other people would be talking about the same ideas. Three years ago, when I was forced to face the possibility of my own mortality (I almost bled to death on the operating table during a routine surgery gone wrong), I found the spare time and the resources to begin putting my ideas to paper, and, beginning last summer, to send them out to the world through the web. Twenty years ago I was a person out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, with no hope of being heard. Now, with virtually no promotion other than word of mouth, the beautiful social networking world of the internet has drawn over one and a half million visitors to my website. Web 2.0 is waking up to this new way of imagining reality, and I am no longer just some dude in the middle of nowhere with a crazy idea.

Once you have my way of imagining the dimensions in mind, you can see a way to combine free will and determinism, and how multiverses could exist “just around the corner”. But this is not just about our universe of matter and energy, it is also about the “quantum observer”: I propose that the universe of memes and spirit are interacting with the physical universe across these same ten dimensions to create forms of order, life, and the desire for continuance. Being interested in “what happens next”, I propose, is one of the basic dividing lines between inanimate molecules and the first building blocks of life, but it can also seem self-evident that our unlikely universe has been interested in its own continuance since the very beginning.

Every minute of every day, we avoid doing the things that will stop us from continuing along our line of time, and I wonder how many accidental death victims would tell you from the afterlife “I just didn't see it coming”, or “it was too late for me to get out of the way”: if you can see your own impending death, there might be a way for you to stop it from happening.

A few weeks ago I read an article about research conducted by scientists (including Nobel Prize laureate Brian Josephson) into our ability to see into the immediate future. If our future already exists as possible branches in the fifth dimension, then isn't that what we are sensing every moment we refuse to step off the curb in front of the vehicle speeding by? If I didn't have a sense of what is happening next, how could I carry on a conversation, or finish typing this paragraph? Even a goldfish can see far enough into the future to get out of the way of danger.

Likewise, I was reading this month's Wired magazine this morning, which has a great article about the research being done into athletes who seem to be able to predict the future and sense outcomes long before their teammates: could Wayne Gretzky's legendary ability to be able to make plays be borne in part from an enhanced ability to see the future?

Then tonight I saw a great new blog entry from "CP" on the zaadz website, entitled ”No One Likes You in the Future”, and I felt once again that the world is connected together in ways behind the scenes that we can only begin to imagine.

My song Everything Fits Together is about the same idea.




Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Multiverse and Dark Matter

A half dozen years ago, when I first read in a Stephen Hawkings book about the multiverse, I was immediately struck by how it fit with my unusual way of imagining reality.

Critics of the multiverse concept like to point to this as an unprovable, undetectable fantasy masquerading as a scientific theory, something created by physicists with overactive imaginations, and embraced by nuts like me. How could we prove the existence of parallel universes? Whether you are imagining other universes that spring from other separate sets of initial conditions--other universes that have different basic forces--or whether you are imagining the extreme Many Worlds version of the multiverse that I have come to believe in, which is that every possible branch from any moment in time for every possible universe actually exists... in either case, the easy-to-ask question remains the same: if those other universes exist, why can't we see any evidence of their existence?

One of the more extraordinary claims I have made with this project is that dark matter offers us proof that the parallel universes of the multiverse do exist; and that the source of dark matter is gravitational attraction from those nearby parallel universes of the multiverse which we are constantly branching to (and from!). I believe that dark matter proves that there is more out there than just the single observed universe of hard determinism that we see around us from moment to moment.

Energy and mass are directly related, two sides of the same coin, as Einstein demonstrated. But according to modern science, only four per cent of the universe is accounted for. 73% of the universe is dark energy (the unexplained force which is now causing our universe to accelerate apart from itself), and 23% is the "missing matter" whose gravitational attraction has kept the universe from flying apart as quickly as we would have expected it to, based upon the gravitational attraction of that visible four per cent. So, as I have discussed before, we find ourselves to be living in a “lucky” universe, where the initial big bang conditions created just the right balance between mass and the value of the gravitational force to create a universe which did not immediately collapse in upon itself, or did not immediately fly apart without allowing any significant matter to coalesce.

In a previous blog, I mentioned that experts such as Kaku, Greene, and Randall have told us that of the four basic forces (from weakest to strongest those are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), gravity is the only one that travels across the dimensions. In other words, those other three forces are rooted to the structure of matter within our fourth-dimensional spacetime, while gravity is part of the more basic underlying fabric from which spacetime is constructed. A reader of that previous blog commented that they disagree with this idea because the energy of thought and spirit can also travel across the dimensions, something that I happen to agree with, but here we are talking about what hard science believes about forces and dimensions.

Here's what I say in my book about this idea:

If gravity exists in the fourth dimension and above (which is the current belief of string theorists), doesn’t that mean our new way of viewing the ten dimensions offers a much simpler explanation of dark matter? If all other possible timelines do really exist, then isn’t it conceivable that there will be a certain amount of gravitational pull from the fifth dimensional paths that are most adjacent to our current point in time, with the amount of “gravitational leakage” diminishing as we travel further away on a different fifth-dimensional path from our own fourth-dimensional line?

At any moment in the history of the universe, the number of future paths available to be chosen out of the quantum waves of indeterminacy will be the same. This is not to say that some paths won’t take on substantially more significance for us as a species or for each of us as individuals, but rather that the sum of all available choices that are available will always be the same, which is why the “dark matter” gravitational pull our universe experiences does not constantly fluctuate up and down.

Plus, as we’ve already discussed, Feynman’s “sum over paths” concept tells us that there are an equally large number of paths which could have been taken to arrive at the current moment, even though each of us are aware of only one of those paths. This means that the picture we’re now imagining has an equally large amount of “gravitational leakage” that would be coming from those paths as well. This concept helps us to imagine how the gravitational pull from those other dimensions is not just pulling us forward in time towards the many branches we could be about to take, but is also coming from all of the paths which could have been taken to get us to any particular moment on our fourth-dimensional line.

In my personal opinion, this is the most exciting confirmation that the ten dimensions as we are imagining them here could truly be connected to the structure of reality–in this context, dark matter has a simple explanation. All we have to do is accept that time is a spatial dimension rather than a quality that we overlay on the other dimensions.

One of the verses of my song "The Unseen Eye" talks about this same concept:

And the missing dark matter that binds the universe
The mysterious mass that science cannot find
Is in the many worlds of possibility
That are just around the corner in time


Here is a link to a previous blog which prints all the lyrics to that song. And here, for fun, is a video of that song:



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

Coming up: "Ghosts and Intuition"

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions

The simultaneous wave/particle nature of reality means that many things that appear to us as particles are waves just being observed in a certain state. By the time we have arrived at the tenth dimension as the enfolded timeless whole (as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran), we have finally reached what some people think of as God, or a state of enlightenment (as referred to in Tom Huston's article about this project in the current issue of What Is Enlightenment?, or the ultimate theory of everything.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I spend a lot of time talking about triads, insisting that all dualities have a third option, which can be both, neither, or no choice. Our physical world interacts with a world of memes and spirit, and the third option that results can be life as we know it, or it can be just the timeless whole that represents every possibility contained within the multiverse. But the dualities of one order pushing against another as we move along our line of time (a line that is actually created by a series of slices, here we go again with that simultaneous wave/particle stuff) allow us to see that this instant in time is a slice of a waveform, and that waveform is reflected in the beautiful and complex universe that we see around us.

Waveforms are interesting, because one waveform can incorporate many different frequencies simultaneously. So, a simple single line drawn from the big bang to the end of the universe can be overlaid with the many different waveforms representing the many possible expressions of reality, and the organizing dynamics that push against each other to create the preference for one kind of reality over another in different parts of the multiverse.

One of the reviewers for my book on Amazon.com has this to say:

"The present exposition is an imaginative and strangely "musical" way of imaging superimposed dimensions--not surprising perhaps, since the author among his achievements also is a musician. Still, the treatise has relevance for physicists. It is also pleasurable to read."
(thanks for the kind words!).

I suppose, since I spend a lot of my work day staring at waveforms, thinking of reality as being a complex waveform precipitated from potentials contained within the higher dimensions doesn't seem like much of a leap to me. Once you arrive at this idea, you have a way of explaining entrainment (how like attracts like, how attitude affects outcome, how eating live veggies imparts healthful vibrations, how charismatic or depressed personalities can immediately impart their "vibe" to a room full of people, how "Sync" as described by Steven Strogatz can cause order to arise out of chaos, how thoughts become things, and so on).

Thinking of our reality as a waveform also shows how there are always certain sets of "you can't get there from here" points in our physical reality (both past and future), but how a reality of memes and spirit can move more freely across time and space. This week in the blog dedicated to lucid dreaming, "Dreaming Life" , host Ben Q. published an interview with me where we discuss some of those ideas. I encourage you to check out this fascinating blog on a regular basis.

One of the most unusual and convincing examples of how reality could be constructed from waveforms, and the possiblity that the mind can be used to change our reality came to me a few months ago from Deena Zalkind Spear, whose lovely book "Ears of the Angels" tells a story most of us would have thought unbelievable, had it not been collaborated by so many intelligent and sensitive classical musicians. Told with a self-deprecating sense of humor, Deena's book is a pleasure to read, and I recommend it highly if you're looking for something that will challenge your limited worldview of physical reality.

Finally, while we're talking about vibrations and waveforms, we have now posted my song "Everything Fits Together" to a site called "JamGlue", which allows you to remix all of the instrumental and vocal parts to the song in whatever way that pleases you (click on the Remix button to see the song as six sets of waveforms, and you may want to work through the tutorials on the site to see what the possibilities are). These "stems" (as we call them in the audio industry) can also be downloaded from Amie Street, so if you have an audio sequencer of your own, I invite you to cut and paste this material to your heart's content. And please, email me mp3s of any of your mashups of this song you think are worth listening to (rob at tenthdimension dot com), and I will post them at a future date. These songs are released under a Creative Commons license, basically this says you are free to play with and re-edit this material as long as you give me credit as the original composer, and do not sell your remixes.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS: The blog in which I originally published the lyrics to this song can be found here. And three videos of "Everything Fits Together" are below, just for fun:



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

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist