Just a Shy Guy

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

As we continue to look at songs from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs, the song this time is called Just a Shy Guy. Alcohol is sometimes referred to as a "social lubricant": for somebody who's Just a Shy Guy, alcohol or other drugs can be what they use to get themselves loosened up enough to be more outgoing in potentially tense social situations. As the middle section of this song discusses though, sometimes the popular media's portrayal of the effectiveness of these substances is not realistic (despite what Charlie Sheen may be trying to tell us): no big surprise there!

Many of the songs on this album tie into my approach to visualizing how our reality is formed, which as I've said before began for me when I read Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful book "A Wrinkle in Time" at the edge of eight. Both this song and the next one we'll be looking at (Trying to Escape) tie nicely into the idea that we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, gradually becoming one version or another of ourselves through chance, choice and the actions of others. These songs, written for a show aimed at teenagers, are about how for teens that probability space may seem more obvious - we go through our adolescence trying on different hats, different personas, trying to decide which version of ourselves we are going to try to be. This probability space is a constant theme in my book and this blog: read Are Bees More Sixth Dimensional and Entangled Awareness and OBEs for some of the more recent explorations of this concept.

Let's talk about the process of creating these songs a bit. They were recorded back in 1983 on a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 Portastudio: this was an innovative four-track mixer/recorder that used standard cassette tapes. I had become convinced at the time that this was the breakthrough everyone was looking for: finally, a machine with good enough recording quality that it would allow you to record in your basement or living room and create something that could be good enough to play on the radio! Nowadays, with people making high quality digital multi-track recordings in their bedrooms using powerful but inexpensive computer-based systems, this accomplishment may not seem as notable. But back then, in a pre-midi, pre-ProTools world, attempting to record fully-produced pop music without going into a recording studio was still pretty much unheard of. Recording a full band with multiple overdubs to four track also required lots of "bouncing" from track to track or machine to machine, and of course every "bounce" adds to the tape hiss, so this is not an easy thing to do! The fact that songs like Just a Shy Guy and Courage actually made it to being playlisted on our local FM rock station back then is still an accomplishment that I'm very proud of.

These songs feature myself on vocals and keyboards, Cal Harle on drums, and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. The three of us have played together in a number of bands over the years, and we're still good friends. Cal is also one of the best foley artists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and he continues to do foley for all of my studio's film and television work. Jack has built a very successful career for himself as a guitarist and composer, check out his website at jacksemple.com. Recording these songs took many hours and I'm grateful for the time these guys put into this ambitious project. Here's the lyrics:

JUST A SHY GUY
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Sometimes I don’t know what to say
Sometimes I don’t know what to do
Sometimes I don’t know how to act
And the fact is I’m scared that you’ll find out too
I don’t wanna be a big star, but I
Don’t wanna have to play the clown
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
The other people in my neighbourhood
They same to do just fine
Everything seems understood
There’s no one wastin time

But I just don’t know where I stand
And when I stand it’s always wrong
And when I try to play it cool
As a rule it’ll end up I don’t belong
There’ll be someone with a new name
That they made up to hang on me
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
What if I was a little more
Like all those TV shows?
The kind of guy that the girls adore
The guy sayin anything goes

It’s a different world on my TV
They’re all working on some new cocaine deal
Life’s a never-endin party
Fine wines with their Cheerios
Sometimes I just can’t believe it’s real

And so I guess I’ll carry on
I’ll keep on runnin in the race
To a space where I feel like I really belong
I’ll keep on looking for myself now, tryin to
Find the one I think is me
Someday I might find out who I am
Someday I might find out who I am

Next: Trying to Escape

Entangled Awareness and OBEs

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHP2liY0oDE

For the last several entries we've been referencing back to questions that came up on my Theatre of the Mind podcast interview with Kelly Howell. This time, let's look at the question of "what dimension am I in when I have an out-of-body experience".

I'll be the first to admit that OBEs are one of the areas I haven't done a lot of reading on. The whole realm of lucid dreaming would seem to be related to this "what dimension am I in" question: in one of my early blog entries, Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions, I mentioned an interview I had done back then with Ben Q's Dreaming Life blog, which is dedicated to the exploration of lucid dreaming. So here's what it comes down to for me: with the approach to visualizing the dimensions I've created, what we basically have is a "filing system", something that lets you catalog one kind of existence and its relation to another, and see how the multiplicity of parallel worlds, the multiplicity of different-initial-conditions universes, and the different kinds of information patterns that make up our awareness and our reality can be puzzled together. So, what drawer in our filing system should we be placing OBEs and lucid dreaming?

Last time, in Entangled Neurons, we looked at a proposed explanation for the creation of memory, and I tied that to the idea of our "arrow of time" being a line in the fourth dimension that is actually branching and twisting in the fifth: any time a branch occurs, a memory is created. The mind-boggling idea that there are all these different versions of "you" or "me" being created with every splitting off that is occurring at every planck frame as per Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics does need to be tempered somewhat: right at this instant, I am part of a cloud of probabilistic "me"s that are all continuing on the same general path, the same branch. That's true at the quantum level, and it's true at the macro level: all of the tiny random occurrences and inconsequential decisions (shall I put my hand here or here when I push that door open?) tend to cancel each other out, to keep us moving in the same trajectory. It's only when our choice, or chance, or the actions of others create an event that really does split us onto a new fifth-dimensional path that a long-term memory is created.

Entangled Awareness
Trying to keep a sense of "me" inside this probabilistic cloud is really a simple process then, right up until one of those major branches occurs. But what then? Let's say that my major branch that occurred today was that a gang of thugs beat me within an inch of my life. Would I be a different person as a result of that experience? I find it hard to believe that such an event wouldn't change me. Suppose that as a teenager I had hung out with a different crowd and become addicted to heroin. Would I be a different person from the one I am now? Would I even be alive now these four decades later? Put in those terms, Everett's Many Worlds don't seem to be as unfathomable an idea. But people do seem to have more trouble imagining this process when it's described as them splitting off into all these different universes that quantum theory's Universal Wavefunction, as Everett called it, says really do exist. Remember this: while we're in our physical bodies (made out of 3D atoms and molecules and being powered by thermodynamic chemical reactions that move us in a particular direction in the fourth dimension which we tend to call "time") we can only observe one version of ourselves at a time, even if our "entangled awareness" is connected to the other versions of our current self that are on the same trajectory, the same branch of our spacetime tree.

Which takes us to lucid dreaming and Out-of-Body Experiences. The short movie at the start of this entry was published by New Scientist magazine last week. It shows (as one example of many similar experiments that have been done) that it's surprisingly easy to convince people that they are not in their own bodies. But if we're talking about OBEs as actual experiences, then we are talking about part of the pattern that represents a person's awareness actually being able to separate itself from the physical body, something that I will insist is like those "Seven Wonders of the Quantum World" we looked at last blog entry: these processes appear to be unimaginable from the linear, causally related frames that become our comparatively simple 4D "line of time". For this reason, I will continue to suggest that OBEs, lucid dreaming, and quantum "spookiness" (and so on) are all connected to extra dimensions.

Now, what if your OBE is as mundane as simply rising above the bed and watching yourself sleep? There's no reason why this system of awareness that is a part of your consciousness (or "soul" if you prefer), having used the fifth dimension to escape the confines of your physical body, can't then continue to observe the linear progression of time as it occurs in the fourth. But how much fun is that? Even just taking advantage of the ability to travel through walls, fly through the air, and quickly go visit a far away friend can be imagined as simple manipulations of the fourth dimension through the fifth (creating, as Madeleine L'Engle described so beautifully, "wrinkles in time") in order to continue viewing other aspects of the version of reality that we're currently occupying.

But what if the OBE becomes more transcendent? What if a person feels themselves more connected to all living creatures? What if a person finds themselves in a world completely unlike the one we are in? As seemingly limitless as the fifth dimension may seem to be from our perspective, it's still more useful to think of it as our probability space - the many things both "before" and "after" that could potentially be causally connected to our "now" at any particular instant are part of that realm. So anything that appears to transcend those limitations, it follows, must be a representation of an awareness that is in the additional extra dimensions beyond the fifth. In My Stroke of Insight, when Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about her unique experiences as a neuroscientist feeling a remarkable connectedness to the universe as a result of a burst blood vessel in the left/analytical side of her brain, she is definitely talking about an awareness that moves beyond the fifth dimension.

We've talked before about shamanic rituals, psychedelics, empathy, entrainment, and meditation as being other examples of how people can move parts of their awareness beyond the limits of 4D spacetime into the extra dimensions. Here are some past blogs where those topics have come up:
Do Shamans See Other Dimensions?
The Shaman
Creativity and the Quantum Universe
The Comedian
Where Are You?
Life is But a Dream
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics

What Dimension is an OBE in?
I would sum this all up very simply: the more you are able to do things that are impossible within our physical world of spacetime, the less your OBE is embedded within the fourth dimension and below. The more connectedness you feel to others, to all living things, to all elements of our universe and beyond, the more you are moving towards the tenth dimension. But as the original tenth dimension animation implies, once you get to the ultimate enlightenment of considering all possibilities simultaneously in the tenth dimension, you are back in perfect symmetry where everything cancels everything else out. Everything canceled out means nothing is happening in the dimensions below: no vibrations, no change... as I like to say, that which ceases to change ceases to exist. While there is a certain peacefulness in contemplating that big, beautiful, perfectly balanced zero for a while, isn't it much more interesting to be observing something rather than nothing? It's for that reason that the symmetry gets broken and a universe such as ours pops into existence. And within that universe, it's your job to figure out how to make the best use of what you have been given, and to enjoy the journey.

Let's close with my song about feeling connected to the parts of our awareness that are beyond the limits of spacetime: "I Remember Flying".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffS0X0arG7M

Rob

Next: Changing Reality

Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster?

Poll 54 - "Speaking purely subjectively, does it feel to you like time is moving faster from day to day now than it did when you were a child?" Poll ended December 15 2009. 82.6% said "Yes", 10.7% said "About the same", and 6.7% said "Slower".

First of all, I'm surprised that almost 7% of respondents said time is moving slower for them now than it did when they were a child. Most of us, as this poll shows, remember what it was like to be 8 years old, starting a school year in the fall, and feeling like next year's summer holidays were far, far away. I'm convinced that this is not just an "I hate school" thing because personally, I loved grade three, Miss Cranch was one of my all-time favorite teachers, I had good friends and learned a lot (hey, that was also the year I first read A Wrinkle in Time!). But oh my, I certainly do remember how thinking a decade, or even a year, into the future seemed like an impossible time-span that would take just short of forever to occur.

As some of you already know from my facebook page, my eldest son Todd and his wife Audra just had a baby girl, so now I'm a grandpa! Where did that time go? Again, looking back from this vantage point it seems like an astonishingly short time ago that Todd was eight years old himself.

Is time moving faster? I created this poll question around the same time that I published what has turned out to be my most-viewed blog entry of all time, Jumping Jesus. That blog talks about the accelerating information stream we all have to deal with as it doubles over shorter and shorter time spans. In the following couple of months, I published entries like Life is But a Dream, Time is in the Mind and Consciousness in Frames per Second which also explored this intimate relationship between our role as observers and our experience of time.

For me, this becomes a relativistic question. If space is accelerating its expansion, and our experience of time is accelerating, and our incoming information flow is accelerating, then wherever you are within that curve becomes your personal experience, what you become acclimatized to. By the time Todd was 8, time was already moving faster for me, as I was then in my 35th year. But Todd's own experience back then was no doubt the same as mine had been, with the months crawling by much more slowly for him. Even though we were both part of the same consensus reality each of us were experiencing it differently.

So, if each of us are experiencing the same (or a similar) reality differently, are there any ways for us to look "outside the system" to say whether things are really changing or if this perceived acceleration is just some strange side effect of the aging process? There's another poll we'll be discussing in a couple of weeks that explores this idea further - it's called "Placebos and our Interface with Reality".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 55 - Lying to Children

Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzlRuygMGHY

Here's another way of describing the Imagining the Tenth Dimension visualization that answers a commonly asked question: when we look around we see a three-dimensional world. Why do we need to think about any more than that? Isn't every dimension past those first three unnecessary? This time around we'll discuss that question.

So. Why do we need more than 3 dimensions? Because the third dimension is filled by the universe in its current state. We need to add a fourth dimension to get to the universe in some other state. The combination of these four dimensions is commonly called "space-time", but this project says that "time" is just one of the possible directions in the fourth dimension, and the accepted concept of time-reversal symmetry shows us that time's opposite direction is just as scientifically valid.

Then why do we need more than 4 dimensions? Because the fourth dimension is filled by the time line (or "world line" as physicists sometimes call it) representing our universe from its beginning to its end. We need to add a fifth dimension to get to the bush-like branching structure of possible futures and pasts that extend out from our universe in its current state. After spending two years pondering the idea of our observed reality being defined in five dimensions, Albert Einstein come out in full support of Theodor Kaluza's startling proof of that idea way back in 1921. This project uses its own logic to arrive at the same conclusion: our observed reality comes from the fifth dimension.

Then why do need more than 5 dimensions? Because the fifth dimension is filled by the world lines that are logically compatible with our universe in its current state, right from its beginning to its end. We need to add a sixth dimension to get to all of the events that physicists tell us are part of the over-all wave function for our universe but which are so unlikely they take longer than the beginning to the end of our universe to occur. This includes the version where one of us pops out of existence right now and reappears on the moon, and it also includes the version where it's 2008 and Madeleine L'Engle (the author of one of my favorite books from childhood, "A Wrinkle in Time") is still alive. A theory devised by German physicist Burkhard Heim was recently brought to my attention, and the original formulation of that theory was based on the idea of our four dimensions of spacetime being augmented by two more "timelike dimensions". To be clear, Heim Theory now has extended versions created by his associates which postulate 8 and even 12 dimensions, but as we discussed in a postscript to my blog entry "Time in 3 Dimensions" the idea of a scientific theory based upon dimensions four through six as being different parts of a wave function representing "time" in all of its possible expressions seems like a noteworthy connection for further exploration.

Okay. Why, then, do we need more than 6 dimensions? Because the sixth dimension is filled by all the world lines for all possible versions of our universe. We need to add a seventh dimension to get to the other universes that are completely decoherent to our own, that have a completely different fine structure constant and initial conditions. Once we get to one of those other universes, each will have its own unique expression within the first six dimensions, filling those six dimensions up with their own unique wave function patterns which will be completely inaccessible and decoherent to our own universe's wave function - much like tuning in a radio station, all of those other patterns continue to exist out there within timelessness, but each universe will be tuned into their own "channel", their own starting/ending position within the omniverse that creates their unique patterns in the dimensions below.

Then why do we need more than 7 dimensions? Because the 7th dimension is filled by all of the possible universes that, like our own universe, have locked-in fine structure constants. There are even more exotic universes possible, though, and that would be those strange and unlikely universes built from oscillating or gradually changing fine structure constants. In that sense, the eighth dimension can become like "time" for the seventh dimension: much as the fourth dimension gives the third dimension a way to change from one state to another, the eighth dimension can give a way for a point within the seventh dimension to change to (or within) different states. Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation also shows some interesting connections in that regard, as it appears an 8-dimensional geometry may be what provides an underlying structure that defines all possible subatomic particles for the universe we are in.

Then why do we need more than 8 dimensions? Because the eighth dimension is filled by all the possible physical expressions of matter and energy that could ever be expressed. We need to add a ninth dimension to get to the organizing patterns in the information that cannot be expressed as matter or energy, and the patterns that could become a reality but which exist only as potentials. Quantum physicists sometimes talk about a continuously burbling "quantum foam"as being the underlying structure for all reality, and that would be another way of thinking about the ninth dimension. This project has called those patterns that spring into existence in the ninth dimension the "big-picture memes" that can be used to define or select one pattern over another in the dimensions below.

Then why do we need more than 9 dimensions? Because the ninth dimension is filled by all of the organizing patterns and random fluctuations that could or could not become universes or coherent structures of any kind in the dimensions below. We need to add a tenth dimension to get to the enfolded symmetry state where all of those potentials are summed together and balance each other out, which gives us a logical and natural way to understand where our universe or any other universe or any other organizing pattern naturally comes from. In that sense, the tenth dimension is the Omniverse, or what Gevin Giorbran (in his acclaimed book Everything Forever) referred to as the Set of All Possible States for our universe, or for any other universe. As we discussed in my blog entry Time in Either Direction, physicists like Sean M. Carroll have shown us how this underlying symmetry state can be used to imagine how our universe (or any other universe) is really just a temporary deviation away from that perfectly balanced symmetry that exists both "before" the big bang, and "after" the end of the universe: a return to enfolded symmetry, the absolute zero that our universe's accelerated expansion is now moving us towards more and more quickly.

In entries like Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, we've talked about how the reality that we are witnessing down here in spacetime can be thought of as the shadows of higher dimensional shapes and patterns. As we've discussed here today, we can see how we move from the very general choices that are made from a starting point in the highest dimensions. Then, we can see how the patterns and shapes of each dimension below brings the shadows of those patterns into more and more specific focus, until we arrive at the sharply delineated reality which is the beautiful 3D universe we are witnessing in each quantum frame, one planck length after another. Fractals and helix shapes of the natural world, the universe as a hologram, the Poincaré Theorem's proof that our universe is the 3D surface of a 4D hypersphere, the Deutsch team's proof of the bush-like branching structure of parallel universes created through chance and choice being equivalent to the quantum wave function... these ideas and many more can be tied into this way of visualizing reality. And when you add in the mysteries of how consciousness, memes and spirit are also part of the specific observation of our 3D reality, the "now" that each of us is uniquely traveling within at this very instant, you have arrived at a very big idea indeed!

Why do we need more than 3 dimensions? To hold all of those possibilities. 3 dimensions are simply not big enough to hold the timeless whole of enfolded symmetry that our reality ultimately comes from.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Omniverse Almanac

The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Since it's the holiday season, here's a blog entry to lighten the mood: "The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension". :-) The songs in this blog entry are from the 26-song collection attached to this project, in this case these are songs recorded very simply with me sitting at my beat up old piano.

Twenty years ago I was writing the music for a play about the end of the world. Placed twenty thousand years in the future, it was probably ahead of its time: its premise was that our ongoing environmental abuses had destroyed all plant and animal life and made our planet so unstable that the last remaining inhabitants were being forced to leave the Earth forever.

Let's think back to twenty years ago. The 80's, quite frankly, were not a real great decade for environmental consciousness. The "Me" Decade, as it's sometimes called, was looking back at the horrific environmental warnings of the sixties and seventies and saying "Look! Nothing happened! We're all fine! Relax!". This got me thinking that no matter what time in history you're looking at, there's always been a small contingent waving their arms and saying the "end is nigh"! In the 80's, trying to get the audience to imagine that the end was coming as a result of our pollution of the environment seemed to me to have some difficulties: but eventually, I reasoned, there's going to have to be a time when one of those end of the world predictions come true, whether that be tomorrow, or twenty thousand years from now. Was there a way, I wondered, to make those predictions seem more real to the audience right now?

I should mention here that (as I describe in my book) I had been pondering the ideas of branching timelines and important "cusps" that each of us experience as far back as the age of seven, and a wonderfully subversive book by Madeleine L'Engle called "A Wrinkle In Time" that I read a number of times as a child definitely had already caused these ideas to have started brewing way back then.

I should also mention here that I was really worrying about things that were none of my business: I was the composer, and the playwright creating the text for this project had already come up with a story rich in metaphor and texture. But there was still something about the environmental catastrophe angle that, for me, seemed to need a little bit more. So I kept thinking.

This is when the way of imagining reality that became the tenth dimension project first became locked in for me. The first three dimensions are easy: think of a line, that's the first dimension, draw a second line that crosses the first (which creates a plane), that's the second dimension, bend those lines and you're in the third dimension. I was reading an article about quantum physics, and trying to imagine how our reality could be so strange: down at the quantum level, everything is a wave until it's observed, at which point its wavefunction is collapsed into one state or another. How, I asked myself, can the act of observation be what causes subatomic particles to stop being waves? It was just too weird. The way I decided to explain it to myself, then, was that this must mean that those waves exist in the fifth dimension, and that it is us moving down our 4D line of time, picking one part of the waveform out from the other, that gives us the quantum observer effect. But what, I asked myself, if this was also happening not just at the quantum level, but also within our physical reality of spacetime? If we think of our timeline as being in the fourth dimension, then that would mean that there are other parts of the fifth dimension where end of the world predictions had already come true, and that if you wanted to get to those other timelines you would have to jump through the sixth dimension to get there.

I remember sitting in a coffeeshop with the playwright, excitedly drawing little diagrams of lines and branches on a napkin and showing how you could fold the napkin to jump from one reality to another. This, I said to him, is how you can explain how the end of the world is constantly coming: because if it had already come, we wouldn't be around anymore to ask why these end of the world predictions never seem to come true. This would mean, I reasoned, that at the end of the play the characters were waiting to be rescued by someone from one of these other realities where the end of the world hadn't happened yet: some place out there in the fifth or sixth dimension. And the clincher, for me, was that once we got to the seventh dimension that was as far as the logic could be taken, and the fact that so many spiritual and mystical systems also assigned a special significance to the number seven seemed to add to the impact of what I was imagining.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I may not have explained these ideas back then as well as I could have, but the upshot is that the playwright looked at me like I was crazy and the conversation was dropped. So. Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea about a way to imagine how our reality is constructed, out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, and that was where the idea and I stayed. Over the following two decades I showed these concepts to a number of other people, trying to get them interested in working on projects that explored these ideas: some people seemed to get what I was talking about but there were also quite a number who gave me that "you're crazy" look.

Still, for me, the idea never went away, and about five years ago I decided to write some songs about the ramifications of all this: let's just say my obsession was still strong, because in my spare time I ended up writing over forty songs in about two months surrounding the ideas that sprang for me from this way of imagining reality. In the back of my mind I was planning that some day these songs would end up on a CD with a little booklet explaining the ideas. As it turns out, that CD project ended up flipped on its head, because I ended up with a 220 page book about these ideas, and the lyrics to 26 of those songs I wrote back then are printed at the end of the book.

Okay. Now let's move on from the cheery topic of the End of the World, to talk about Death.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Four years ago, in 2004, I almost died. I went in for routine laparoscopic surgery to have my gall bladder removed, and the surgeon accidentally sliced open a large (and unusually positioned, apparently) vein on my liver. My entire chest cavity quickly filled with blood, making it impossible for them to see exactly where the bleeding was coming from, so they jammed some packing into the general area and closed me up. I woke up the next day blown up like a large balloon with almost half of my blood not flowing in my veins, but pooled in my chest and gut. The surgeon explained that this was the best option, because the blood was pressing on my vital organs from the outside, and that if they had drained the blood off, my blood pressure would have dropped to the point where I most likely would have gone into shock and died.

The internal bleeding took several days to stop completely, and it took almost three months before all of that blood in my gut had been absorbed back into my system and I stopped looking (and feeling!) like I was very pregnant. So there I was, lying in the hospital, with my family putting on a brave face for me but knowing how close it had been. Within a day or two of this disaster, my eldest son was at my bedside, and I again started trying to tell him about this way of imagining reality: although he didn't give me the "you're crazy" look (bless him for that), he did confess later on that he presumed this was just the ravings of a man stoned on morphine.

But that's not where our story about death ends.

About two and a half years ago, in 2005, I went on a trip to Australia. Up to that point in my adult life I had been reading mostly science fiction novels and Stephen King thrillers for my entertainment, and of course the never-ending stream of equipment manuals I was constantly poring through as part of my day job as a composer and studio owner. But it was around this time that I had decided to start reading more "serious" science books, and that's why the light reading I took with me to Australia was by physicist Michio Kaku, an eye-opening book called "Hyperspace: a Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension".

Now, some people will tell you that my way imagining reality is not the one that's currently taught in physics classes, but what kept happening for me as I read Kaku's book was that I could see ways that string theory and cosmology could quite easily be pasted onto what I had been thinking. More importantly, what that book showed me is that my way of imagining didn't go far enough, because it accounted only for the universe we live in, as a point in the seventh dimension. What, I reasoned, if the other different-inital-conditions universes Kaku was talking about were other "points" in the seventh dimension? My immediate inspiration was that this meant the line, branch, fold pattern I had already imagined to get to the seventh dimension could be repeated a third time, leaving us with absolutely every possible expression of reality up there within the tenth dimension.

But we're still talking about death here. So on my way back from Australia to Canada I developed blood clots in my legs (a not uncommon problem from sitting too long on the plane), which gradually migrated to my lungs. Feeling increasingly weak and short of breath in the weeks that followed, I finally got to the point where I couldn't even fall asleep because I kept having to gasp for breath, and I ended up in the hospital's Cardiac Surveillance Ward for almost two weeks, hooked up to heart monitors and that lovely oxygen tube.

For someone looking for a two week holiday, I highly recommend the Cardiac Surveillance Ward (just make sure you're in there with nothing actually wrong with your heart!): the nurses are friendly and work very hard to keep you calm and peaceful. The beds are comfortable, and once the blood thinners they put me on started to work and the clots in my lungs started to clear, I actually felt pretty good.

So there I was, with this recent insight about how my way of imagining reality could interface with leading-edge theories about cosmology and extra dimensions. I had my wife Gail bring in my laptop and during my two week stay in the hospital, I wrote the first draft of my book. I've been asked more than once what drugs I was taking when I wrote all my unusual ideas down: but lots of people still think I'm kidding when I say I was on "oxygen"!

During the following year, I took that ninety page first draft I had written in the hospital and did a lot more reading about physics and cosmology. I was thrilled to discover that my way of blending quantum waves and branching timelines from twenty years before was in fact a real and recognized scientific theory, first advanced by Hugh Everett III, and it was commonly known as the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics. Everett went to his grave in 1982 largely unrecognized for the significance of his work, but over the past ten years or so his theory has been increasingly embraced by the modern physics community.

And while I was adding all this research into my book, I also created the audio soundtrack for an eleven-minute animation I was envisioning, that would more clearly illustrate those concepts I had been drawing on napkins in coffeeshops twenty years before. The talented folks at OH! Media here in Regina Saskatchewan Canada worked with me to turn my simple hand-drawn sketches into the interesting visuals which are seen in the book and the animation, and in the accompanying website which was launched at the end of June 2006. Within a few days, the website vaulted to popularity, and this project became known all over the world.

If anything, the project continues to gradually become more popular now because of the growing fascination people are having with the middle ground I'm trying to portray: a place where science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics can be shown to all be talking about the same thing. The website is currently averaging almost two million hits a month, and my little book, written as I lay in a hospital bed wondering if my heart was about to do me in, has been sold all over the world.

Why has this project been so popular? Because it isn't just about physics: it's about creativity, and inspiration, and souls, and memes (which are ideas that can be transmitted across time and space). It's about the place where information equals reality (a quantum physics idea that applies to many other things), which in our modern accelerated world of information, means people with shared beliefs are connecting to each other more quickly than ever before.

And, with the increasing fascination these days over the Mayan Calendar's predictions of the "end of time" happening in 2012, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil predicting a rapidly approaching "Singularity" where humans and technology merge, the fact that this project began as a way of thinking about the End of the World adds new resonance (but to be clear, both Kurzweil and promoters of the Mayan Calender are not talking about an apocalypse, they are instead talking about a great leap forward in the way our conscious minds interface with space and time... so, not an End of THE World, but an end to the antiquated ways of our current world).

Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Now I'm a guy with an idea that millions of other people around the world have seen and enjoyed, and which more and more people are becoming convinced is not crazy at all, and just may be the truth about the nature of our reality. Perhaps most amazingly, all of this happened with almost no advertising or promotion, just through the power of shared ideas in our modern hyper-connected world. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: to close, a song about hope for the future.


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

Quantum Theory and the Multiverse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

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

Time as a spatial dimension

How is my "way of imagining" ten dimensions different from what a student of physics or string theory would be taught? The simplest answer is this: I start from the assumption that time is part of a full spatial dimension. Most of us have gotten used to the idea that time can be called the fourth dimension, and Einstein's theories of spacetime have shown us that we can imagine time as a dimension which can be bent by large masses or concentrations of energy to create gravity, or stretched by near-speed-of-light travel to create twins who are no longer the same age. However, even though a dimension which can be bent and stretched may sound like a spatial dimension, the traditional scientific position has always been to keep time as a separate quality which is overlaid on the other spatial dimensions: when string theorists have talked about a reality created in ten dimensions, they were really referring to nine spatial dimensions, plus one temporal dimension. Likewise, M-Theory's eleven dimensions are actually based on ten spatial dimensions, or eleven dimensions when time is added in.

When I propose that time is part of a full spatial dimension which we third-dimensional creatures are experiencing in a limited way because we are built from chemical reactions and processes that obey the thermodynamic laws of entropy, I go out on a limb where some are not willing to follow. By blending concepts from Edwin Abbott's famous book "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions" with concepts from string theory, quantum physics, the anthropic principle, and Everett's "multiverse", and then throwing in concepts from Minsky's Society of Mind, Dawkins's theory of memes, and metaphysics/New Age concepts of souls/ghosts/reincarnation, I fully realize I am trying to blend schools of thought which to some might appear to be completely incompatible. Nonetheless, the feedback I have gotten on my book has been generally very favorable: I believe that this is in part because I have always been quick to acknowledge my position as a generalist, and that my framework for discussion extrapolates beyond what you would be taught in a physics class today. That is one of the reasons I was so pleased to have famous author Greg Bear give me his endorsement for my book: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse--clear, elegant, personal and provocative". Having a Hugo and Nebula winning science fiction author acknowledge what I've created as being an interesting take on the nature of reality puts, to my way of thinking, just the right spin on the project: this is a work of imagination which many have found thought-provoking, but no one should feel they are being tricked into believing that this proposed framework is the currently approved teaching of mainstream science.

To be clear, the supposition that time and space are part of a larger system which we are experiencing in a unique way is not just science fiction. To quote from my book: "string theorists have been expressing concepts which we once expected to hear only from yogis and gurus. Nathan Seiberg, of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying 'I am almost certain that space and time are illusions'. Edward Witten (one of the most respected researchers in modern physics, and the man who first advanced M-Theory) has said that 'time and space may be doomed'. Viewpoints such as these hint that the way of looking at the dimensions we are exploring in this book may not be a outlandish as some might think."

What about the fashionable groundswell that has arisen lately saying that string theory is unprovable conjecture, and "not even wrong"? Where does that leave my way of imagining reality? Since the concept I am proposing was only distantly related to mainstream string theory in the first place (as a few string theorists have pointed out online), the question is not really relevant. I have proposed a way of imagining higher dimensions, based upon the unusual assumption that "time" is really just the way you move within a particular dimension from one state to another: for us, we experience time as the fourth dimension, but for a two-dimensional Flatlander, "time" would be the third dimension, and so on. Time exists in no dimension in particular, then, it is just a way of moving within whatever dimension you are currently examining, from one state to another.

One of the conclusions I reach in the book is that our reality is based upon a series of points that are no less than the planck length apart from each other, drawing the line that we experience as time. The simultaneous wave/particle nature of subatomic particles, then, would be a result of this process: waves of probability are observed in the assembly of slices that we are moving through, each "slice" representing a three-dimensional state of our universe, and each slice being a point on the fourth-dimensional line we are drawing from the available fifth-dimensional choices (and in quantum terms, each slice being an observed/collapsed state of those probability waves).

Last June, Scientific American released a wonderful special edition issue called "A Matter of Time". Lee Smolin's article in that issue, "Atoms of Space and Time" introduced me to "loop quantum gravity". I found this article very interesting because I could overlay it on my "way of imagining" quite easily. Loop quantum gravity is based upon the same supposition as mine: that our reality is defined by discrete packets of time and space, creating the illusion of continuous reality that we see around us (which in no way, of course, is intended to say that Lee Smolin would endorse my way of imagining the ten dimensions!).

Last week I started reading Mr. Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics", which discusses some of the other theories of reality apart from string theory, and I would recommend this book highly as an excellent alternative to the books by Kaku, Greene, and Randall that I have recommended on my website.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob