Happy Birthday Paul

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeG_gfx1b60

Tomorrow, June 18, is Paul McCartney's birthday. Happy 67th birthday Paul, wherever/whatever you are right now!

(This, of course, is the greeting I also posted for John Lennon and George Harrison on their respective birthdays this past year. Am I being morbid here? Not at all! Instead, what I'm trying to do is recognize that all of us are made up of patterns that extend well beyond the limits of our own physical bodies, and while that may be easier for us to imagine once someone passes on, it is just as true for those of us who are living right here, right now, in this current slice of the multiverse.)

Here's Paul singing "That Was Me": one of his more recent songs, and one that I think relates well to the discussions we've been having here.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWB8AM3xWfY

In entries like You are Me and We are All Together, We're Already Dead (But That's Okay), Everyone Has a Story, and Your Fifth-Dimensional Self, we've talked about one of the conclusions we are forced to look at when we think about our existence within a multiverse of other universes, most of which we couldn't exist within: is this nothing more than luck? Or could the new Biocentric Universe theories be correct, and our presence within the universe actually have "reverse fine-tuned" the constants and patterns that were previously indeterminate? Last week, the work of Professor Louis Crane was discussed at physorg.com, and he has some amazing theories about future (or past) civilizations using fine-tuned black holes to create future universes that support life, creating a potentially infinite chain from one universe to the next.

As I've said before: when you consider how unlikely our universe is, and when you consider all the bad luck or malicious intent that could have killed each person reading this before now, how could you not feel anything but wonder? And now, imagine yourself being Paul McCartney, looking back at a life that even with all of its heartache and challenges, has been incredibly blessed? In the above song, Paul pages us through a scrapbook of his memories, little snippets that sum up a life well-lived.

But why does he say "That Was Me"? Shouldn't it be "That is Me"? Isn't he still Paul McCartney?

I believe Paul, as he has done so many times before, is pointing to a profound truth here with a simple but catchy melody and a nicely crafted lyric. My song Change and Renewal and blog entries like Making New Connections have explored similar concepts to what his choice of verb tense is referring to here: Paul is not the same person he was when the Beatles became famous, all of the cells in his body have been replaced many times over since then, and many of the belief systems and meme patterns that made him who he was back then have been modified and replaced over the years.

The same is true for all of us, of course. While we each obviously have a direct fourth-dimensional connection to our younger selves through our physical bodies, it would be foolish to suggest that we haven't changed: that's what life, creativity, and the universe are all about.

Here's a few paragraphs from the end of chapter 5 of my book which discuss this higher-dimensional interlocking system that makes each of us who we are down here in the fourth dimension:

Parts of that system of beliefs will extend back through our lifetime, attached to our physical bodies through memory to become a feeling of “self” that may not ever change. But, as we have already discussed, there are also parts of that system of beliefs that will constantly be in flux, altering over time as life experience changes the ways that a person thinks about themselves and the world.
We could think of this constantly changing system as a “society of memes”. Like Minsky’s concept of consciousness and intelligence, there will always be a large number of memes within each physical body which are competing for dominance, and which are brought to the forefront or suppressed depending upon their relevance and usefulness at any particular moment. It is the physical being we have been since conception, combined with that interlocking system we think of as our soul, that entwine in the sixth dimension to create an ornate and highly textured shape that is each of us, and which we see only a tiny cross-section of as we move along our line in the fourth dimension.
The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension.

...and in chapter eight I said this:

The same is true of all the molecules in our bodies. We are constantly going through a process of exchange and renewal, so that in the passing of ten years many of the molecules inside our body are not the same as the ones that were there previously. Imagine the fourth- and fifth-dimensional net connecting the carbon that was in your body ten years ago with where it is today. Imagine the connections across time and space back to the creation of that carbon in the dying of other stars billions of years ago, since that is where all carbon in our universe comes from originally. Once again, the image of a fantastically huge new web of connections is made, and those connections are invisible and unknown to us within our limited viewpoint traveling along our narrow fourth-dimensional line.

So, Sir Paul, thank you for sharing this song and your many talents with us, and a very happy birthday to all the parts of you that are not only connected to your physical body at this moment, but to all the other parts that have been or will be, and which now float out there in the other layers of our reality.

To finish, here's a fun song, one of the 26 I wrote for this project. It's called "Hang a Left at the Lights", and it's about the process of choice, change, and renewal that each of us are constantly participating in as we observe our fourth-dimensional line selected from the available paths of our fifth-dimensional probability space.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCTkcMADHk4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Logic vs. Intuition

Scrambled Eggs

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZVd_Ez23g

I suppose you could say this is a continuation of the "Beatles" theme we started with last week's entries "I Know You, You Know Me", and "You are Me and We Are All Together"... since Paul McCartney tells us when he first came up with the melody for his classic hit "Yesterday", the phrase he would sing to himself is "scrambled eggs".

Isn't it funny how we each have our own perspective, and find it so very hard to imagine some other perspective different from our own?

With my project, I've been trying to get people to understand that "time" is just a direction, not a full dimension, and like any other direction there is an opposite direction to "time" that makes just as much sense (north has its south, up has its down, and time has its "anti-time"). This idea is central to the way of visualizing reality that my book and this project is based upon: look up "time reversal symmetry" if you'd like to know more about how this concept of time having two possible directions is an accepted idea from mainstream science. In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction", I talked about physicist Sean M. Carroll's proposition put forth in a recent article in Scientific American, that there could be other universes that operate in the opposite "direction" of time to ours, which means in those universes it would be like eggs could unscramble and go back into their unbroken shell.

For most of us, that thought is unfathomable. What would it be like to live in a universe where every choice, every random occurrence results not in a bush-like branching structure of more possible outcomes, but less?

Even the idea that there are more copies of our universe created through chance and choice takes some getting used to: but the Deutsch team's 2007 proof confirms Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which tells us there is a wave function of possible futures at both the quantum and macro level. Quantum mechanics is one of the most proven theories of reality known today, so a proof that shows there is a direct continuum from the quantum to the macro world is an important breakthrough: this is why New Scientist Magazine called the Deutsch team's proof one of the most significant science stories of 2007. But the upshot of the Many Worlds theory is that right now, if I break an egg, there are other versions of our universe where I didn't break the egg, and still others where I broke more than one egg, and others where I did lots of other things involving much more than just eggs. Each of those other universes exist, but at any particular instant I can only observe one of them.

Clearly, in our universe, eggs can be broken, eggs can become scrambled, and once that has happened they can't be unscrambled. There are an increasing number of possible paths forward, just as there are many ways to break an egg, but none of those possible paths will reduce the options back to a universe where a broken egg can once again become unbroken.

Now, let's look at this idea from the opposite perspective.

Believe it or not, we live in a universe right now where each choice taken, and every random outcome at both the quantum and macro level, results in less and less choices. As we flip our minds into this opposite viewpoint, it's quite easy to see: by observing one possible outcome, there are a huge number of other logical outcomes that are no longer available. If I get out of bed at seven this morning, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I got out of bed at six. If I go out my front door this morning and turn right, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I went out my front door this morning and turned left. With each branching universe observed, a huge number of other universes became inaccessible, because they are no longer part of the fifth-dimensional probability set for our universe in it current state.

In one of the more poetic paragraphs from my book, I talked about the "angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler's head"). Isn't it clear that this is why so many cultures regard their children as a sacred trust? A child has a huge set of possible paths branching out into the future before them: but with each choice taken and every random action, some of those potential futures are pared away. From this other perspective, then, it's like we're living right now in a world where eggs unscramble themselves and go back into their shells!

Ultimately, what we're talking about here is timelessness. Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - have tried to get us to visualize that the distinction between past, present, and future is really immaterial. Quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger often use a phrase that this project also embraces: in the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. So, whether we're talking about Everett's Many Worlds, or just our own universe moving through time, we should really be thinking about how the other possible states already exist, and have always existed, within timelessness.

(diagram from "Everything Forever". Gevin Giorbrans's caption for this graphic reads:
"The order of one type is the disorder of the other.")

When we're thinking about timelessness, all branches exist simultaneously. As we move down our line of time, each new instant takes away a set of possible branches that are no longer accessible, and adds another set of branches that are now part of the spacetime tree for our universe. This double-edged sword that we're thinking about here is the magic of the two kinds of order, grouping order and symmetry order pushing against each other to create the "now" that we are currently observing: and Gevin Giorbran's wonderful and uplifting book Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness gives us a powerful and intuitive way to imagine that process. Click here if you would like to watch the last interview I did with Gevin before his untimely death.

Here, to close, is one of my personal favorites from the 26 songs I've attached to this project: it's about picturing our universe as just one of many possible universes that exist within timelessness. This video was created by Ryan Hill, and the song is called "The Anthropic Viewpoint".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, October Report

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link for the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein

In David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked about the possibility that psychedelic experiences might actually be used in the treatment of addictions and mental illness, when given in properly supervised circumstances. Though I have no personal experience with psychedelics I'm fascinated when I read about the experiences of others who have gone out to the edges of perception and brought us back some jewels for us all to admire.

Last blog was entitled "I Know You, You Know Me": a phrase from a Beatles song. This time we're using another phrase, this one which John Lennon tells us was based upon an insight that came to him while he was taking an acid trip. (The song this is taken from, "I Am the Walrus", is also quite famously known as a song John Lennon concocted after learning that schoolteachers were incorporating Beatles music into their lectures, and Lennon took great delight in creating a song which would be so deliberately obscure no one would be able to interpret it. Nonetheless, the opening phrase of the song is reported to be a serious effort by Lennon to explain an insight he perceived while under the influence of LSD:

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

Last blog we talked about the feeling of connectedness that a growing number of people are sharing right now around the world. It's so easy to be cynical about ideas like this, and yet books by serious scientists like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, whose "My Stroke of Insight" I have talked about a number of times before, are showing us that there is more than just naive wishful thinking to such an idea: it appears that it is part of our basic human awareness, the underlying seeds of consciousness that make us who we are, that is naturally driven to find the connections of the one to the many.

I don't usually talk about my dreams in this blog, but I had a doozy a few weeks ago which, if you will indulge me, I would like to share.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to cover an impossibly long span of time? In this dream, I started from my current life, interacted with people in ways that were sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating or infuriating, and eventually I died. After a brief break I started another life, this time still laden with the memories of what had ticked me off and what I had enjoyed in my previous life, and this definitely had an influence on my new life and the decisions I made. Again and again I repeated the process, and eventually I started to recognize myself in other bodies, often acting from a certain belief system which was flawed by misunderstandings and bad luck that had come before, and eventually I had lived every life that there was to have lived in the history of the world. I awoke with a feeling that if only we could all have such an experience, we would all be able to understand why so many of us can appear to act with unreasoning negativity - we are all interacting without truly understanding what makes the other person do and say the things they do.

Okay, it was just a dream, everyone has strange dreams from time to time. But since this project has me obsessed with finding connections, I saw an eerie echo of my dream a few days later when I read this passage from Michio Kaku's "The Physics of the Impossible". He is talking about Richard Feynman, whose "sum over histories" method is one of the concepts I have used many times in my book and this blog:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

With his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron's journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it explains a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. ...Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.

Feynman's crazy notion about one single electron, and antimatter particles traveling backwards in time grew into his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which has been experimentally verified to one part in 10 billion, making it one of the most accurate theories of all time. Feynman and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for this discovery. If you click here you can read his Nobel acceptance speech from that year, which is an entertaining and insightful exploration of the creative mind.

Could our universe really have only one electron, whizzing back and forth within timelessness to create the trillions of electrons we see at any particular "now" for our universe? Could consciousness be the same, only one consciousness traveling back and forth across time, experiencing the endless complexity of our universe from a unique perspective each time, but ultimately seeing itself complete the same journey over and over again? Perhaps John Lennon and Richard Feynman were thinking about ideas that were more similar than either of them could ever have realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Since we've been talking about Beatles music, let's finish this entry with what I would consider to be the most Beatles-esque of the 26 songs I've written for this project, and it even begins with a mention of Paul McCartney, who reports that the first time he smoked marijuana he had the insight that there are seven levels to our reality. A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


Next: Scrambled Eggs

The Geometry of Music

One of my favorite phrases I have quoted from people's reviews of my book is from K. Flekkoy, who had this to say at amazon.com: "an imaginative and strangely 'musical' way of imagining superimposed dimensions". I was strongly reminded of that phrase today when I saw the picture at left, which was created by Dmitri Tymoczko of Princeton University. I came across the picture in an article published a few days ago by ScienceDaily.com, click here for the full story.

The article is about three music professors -- Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University -- who (to quote from the article) "have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric."

Their system uses colors and a five-dimensional grid to analyze and portray the differences and similarities between one piece of music and another: "geometrical music theory", as they are calling this new system, provides a rich set of visualization tools that analyze elements like rhythm, melodic density, and chord structure, in a sense boiling a piece of music down to its essence and providing ways of visualizing that essence.

In this picture, the red dot at the center represents a diminished seventh chord, and the other nearby dots are some of the chords we would be most familiar with. As an analysis method, it appears their system is more suited for chordal music, and "Western" sensibilities as opposed to the music of other cultures, but within that context these professors are saying this graphing method might be able to show the differences between the composition style of Lennon versus McCartney, or how classical compositions from centuries past are related to modern-day pieces.

It's All About Connections
Persons familiar with the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project will recognize one of my central themes here: what gives a piece of music its innate power, its emotional and cultural resonances? Thinking of music as being created from interlocking sets of memes that are connected across time and space is an important key, and it appears these three researchers are now providing us with new tools to categorize those musical memes.

Another related fascination for me is the rhythm of language, and how different cultures have their own patterns of pitch, rhythm, and grouping. How does emotion translate into speech in different languages, and are there universal physicalities for communicating sorrow, happiness, fright, (and so on) that transcend language? Might such connections be able to be tracked and coded with a similar visualization tool to the one we're looking at above?

A blog entry at Cosmic Variance talks about the work of researcher Diana Deutsch, who specializes in the psychology of music. There is a real audio interview embedded into that blog entry, listen to the first four minutes or so for a fascinating example of how music and language are so easily intertwined. When we begin to see ourselves as being part of patterns that exist across time and space, this all ties in nicely.

Edit: A few days after I published this entry, Millsley (one of the regular contributors to the tenth dimension forum) posted his latest list of fascinating links that fit into the Everything Fits Together paradigm. This collection of podcasts from WNYC about music as patterns was one of those links.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Other entries related to this:
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Music and the Dance of Creativity
Song 19 of 26 - Positive Vibes
Song 6 of 26 - Connections
Seeing Eye to Eye

Google, Memes and Randomness

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXNWfX8sz8

Can you remember what life was like before Google? That's what this week's poll question is about:

2008 is the Tenth Anniversary of Google, our world's premium meme-tracker. How would you say Google has changed the way you interact with the information that is our reality?
- Better, more immersive
- Worse, more superficial
- No change from 10 years ago

As you can see, I am using language related to this project to ask a question whose answer might seem obvious to some, but the question is an important one: by the time information becomes so much easier to access, are we in danger of becoming a world of skimmers, flitting along the top peaks but rarely immersing ourselves in the deep valleys of that information?

Google helps us to settle questions that ten years ago might have been the source of endless debate, and surely debate can be a healthy exercise in the exploration of ideas. But the conversation-stopping moments that used to happen ("When was Paul McCartney born?" "Hmm, I used to know that, guess that brain cell's no longer kickin' in. No wait, was it... umm..." "Oh well, never mind...") have been replaced with a few deftly chosen keywords into the Google Search window and the answer is there for our perusal in 0.14 seconds.

But we're talking about much more than rock star trivia here. In fact, we're talking about all aspects of human knowledge, being revved up and churned through and exchanged at rates that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. In "Tens, Google, and the Expanding Universe" we played with ideas surrounding the expanding sea of information that Google gives us access to, and the interesting coincidence that 2008 is the tenth anniversary of both Google and the discovery that our universe's expansion is accelerating.

Order from Randomness
Starting from the quantum mechanics idea of Information Equals Reality, I have been talking about a random set of patterns encoded into the underlying quantum fabric of our reality, and how that randomness works as a satisfactory starting point for imagining the complexity of the universe we're in right now. Randomness is really not the interesting part of the story, though: what is interesting is that true randomness has to have pockets of order, parts where one state is preferred over another, and those pockets of order will have places where they begin and places where they end. Flipping a coin one hundred times will not give you endlessly repeating heads/tails/heads/tails outcomes, nor will it give you 50 heads outcomes followed by 50 tails outcomes, even though statistically speaking that is what we would expect our overall totals to be very near for such an exercise. Likewise, if the unobserved whole of quantum indeterminacy that our universe came from is truly random, then there must be pockets of grouping within that randomness. Calling those pockets the "big-picture memes" that caused our universe to be the one selected out of a multiverse of other universes is an idea I've been promoting... for more about the patterns that begin and end being what creates our probabilistic reality, please refer to my blog entries called "Everything" and "You Can't Get There From Here".

This leads us back to Google, and the thing that Google is so good at: keeping track of the memes of all shapes, sizes and durations that are part of the Information that is our Reality: memes are patterns in the information, and memes tend to rise and fall over time. In my last blog entry I talked about the Search Bar here at the top of my browser: if I type a single letter in I am immediately presented with 10 or so Suggestions, which tells me these are some of the memes that are most active at this moment for our culture. If I were to make note of the Suggestions that came up today, then perform the same check a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, and so on, what would I see? There would be some Suggestions that continue to be the same, and there would be some that were short-lived. Keeping a record of these lists would be like a mini time-capsule, and of course there are a number of efforts under way around the net to capture records like these so that we will be able to analyze and compare the changes that have happened in our Googleverse of information from years past and over the years to come as the web continues to develop.

I'm a Spime (and so are you)
Something as simple as writing down the 26 top Suggestions corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet gives us a rudimentary way to track some of the memes that rise and fall, and the shapes that would be created by the duration for a certain Suggestion over months or years is conceptually similar to the "long undulating snake" or Long Body we are imagining as ourselves across the fourth dimension, with our embryonic self at one and and our deceased self at the other. This also relates to the concept of Spimes that Bruce Sterling has been using to refer to physical objects that have been tracked so that they now have a defined and recallable shape across space and time.

How can we tell if a meme or a spime is the result of randomness, or deliberate manipulation? Whether or not you believe the patterns that created our universe are the result of randomness or the deliberate manipulation by a higher power, they are patterns nonetheless. The patterns of information that sustain across a period of time continue to be operated upon by other patterns in the future, and this concept is very connected to what Richard Dawkins is talking about with his description of the randomness that creates life and evolution: once something is no longer being acted upon by these processes, it ceases to have any further change.

Tracking the Changes
Which leads, finally, to one of my favorite phrases for this project: "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". Whether you are talking about the formation of our universe, the beginning of life, or the memes that rise and fall and Google helps us to track, that concept applies. Genes, memes, and spimes: each is a shape or a pattern across space and time. Those that cease to exist cannot be operated upon by patterns in the information that is our reality from that moment forward. Those that continue to exist can be combined together or modified, sometimes in ways that are improvements that allow them to continue in time still further for even more editing and manipulation, and sometimes in ways that will soon cause them to cease to exist: which is how a sea of information becomes a universe, how a primitive chemical reaction becomes a human being, and how a simple idea can become known throughout the world.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: June 18 1942. But you probably already googled that if you were interested, didn't you? To finish this entry, a new video for one of the 26 songs from this project. This is about the dancing patterns of information that create our reality: "From the Corner of My Eye".


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyP5jxFe5Po

Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes

Quantum physics tells us everything is information. Memes and genes are both patterns in a specific fourth dimensional line that stretches from the beginning point (which in our universe's biggest picture of all is the big bang) to the ending point (which in our biggest picture of all is absolute zero and timelessness). Those memes and genes, in the indeterminate future/past of quantum mechanics, fan out into the fifth dimension, which is where Kaluza proposed and Einstein eventually agreed that our physical reality exists.

In smaller sections, selfish genes through the ages are really just a fourth (or fifth) dimensional pattern, and the rise and fall of species attached to those genes through the ages is just as easy to imagine as is it is to imagine the rise and fall of ideas: either can be visualized as shapes that have a beginning and an ending, once you have gotten used to the Tenth Dimension way of imagining reality. This is an important idea which I have referred to before: everything has a beginning and ending, and that's just as true whether you're talking about dinosaurs, the Macarena, or what we think of as the spirit or the soul.

That's also true whether you're talking about things that can be considered evil: which takes us to the idea that there is a global awakening from a bad dream that is beginning to happen right now. No question, that's a very political idea... but it is also a hopeful idea. This awakening is going to represent a big change from the power structures that we have suffered under for the last century or two. George Harrison got it right, All This Must Pass before we can get on to better times.

Web 2.0 has an awful lot to do with that, something that mainstream media is having trouble assimilating. How does the first guy in line for the iPhone end up being one of the most talked about celebrities in the world? Celebrity for the sake of celebrity gives ambitious people like Mr. Packer the fifteen minutes of fame promised to him by Andy Warhol. But this is not just about the new generation's media. What do the currently rising popularity of people like Deepak Chopra and Paul McCartney have in common? Their work speaks to the underlying truths that define our reality.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is also part of that picture - it has done more than just capture the attention of an audience of almost two million. By showing people who were previously without hope that indeterminacy and the multiverse tell us that there are other versions of our lives where we do better than we are doing right now, it gives us an easier target to strive towards. And that's especially true for people who are trapped in repeating loops of addiction or negative behavior. Unfortunately it's much less true for the starving child in Africa, but that could be changing soon as well.

Last blog we looked at the question What Do You Want to Change? Realizing how everything fits together is an important part of that idea, and that's true whether we're talking about memes, spimes, or our shared consensual reality. Next blog, we'll talk about the Wii Generation and how that has the potential to tie into the new awakening.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Seven Levels

(Edit: click here to go to a blog entry that shows a number of videos created for this song)

In my song Seven Levels, I talk about the significance of the number seven. Here are the lyrics to the song, which you can hear using the link in my list to the right, or there are several ways to hear it from the tenthdimension.com website as well.

SEVEN LEVELS - music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Paul announced it with a gleam in his eye
Timothy found it a-written on high
Sanskrit mystics, chakras too
Everybody says it so it must be true

There are seven levels, levels to the universe
Seven levels, from seven down to the first


First comes the point, a singularity
Impossibly small, as in geometry
No width or depth, a place to start
Imaginary construct, the very first part

Then comes the line of first dimensionality
The simple way from point A to B
The second is a branch, from one line to another
A splitting apart, it’s easy to discover

There are seven levels, levels to the universe
(move through 2 to travel to a 1)
Seven levels, from seven down to the first
(fold through 3 to jump to another 2)


Three is the curve, three’s our space
The world we live in, everything and every place
Now you find when you fold the lines
A to B is shorter, they can even collide!

And four is time, a line so narrow
Past to future, straight as an arrow
The simple way from one day to the next
A journey taking us from birth to death

There are seven levels, levels to the universe
(move through 4 to travel to a 3)
Seven levels, from seven down to the first
(fold through 5 to jump to another 4)


Five is a branch or a split in the line
Back to the future, a wrinkle in time
And this is how it’s always gone
We choose from five for the four we’re on

Cause there are seven levels, levels to the universe
(move through 5 to travel to a 4)
Seven levels, from seven down to the first
(fold through 6 to jump to another 5)


Six is the space we’d have to move through
To change reality: if we wanted to
Live in the world where JFK
Was never murdered, six’d be the way

And seven is all, a singularity
Simultaneous, every possibility
Every yes and every no
Eternity, infinity, impossible to know

There are seven levels, levels to the universe
(seven is infinity a formless bore)
Seven levels, from seven down to the first
(things get interesting here in four)
There are seven levels, levels to the universe
(seven is infinity a formless bore)
Seven levels, from seven down to the first
(things get interesting here in four)


This song starts by mentioning the many mystical connections to the number seven: as the first verse alludes to, Paul McCartney tells us in his biography that the very first time he smoked marijuana, he announced his insight that "there are seven levels". The song "And Your Bird Can Sing" from the Beatles album Revolver includes a reference by John Lennon to "seven wonders", which is also thought to be a reference back to Paul's drug-inspired insight. What caused Paul to pick the number seven?

Likewise, sixties LSD Guru Timothy Leary had a strong affinity for the number seven, declaring that there are seven levels of consciousness (in his book "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" and his essay "The Seven Tongues of God"), and it is probably not coincidence that seven grams of his ashes were launched into space in 1997. Still, it should be clear that this fascination we human beings have with the number seven is not all just about drug-inspired psychedelic visions.

Any number, of course, has its own unique set of intellectual/emotional resonances, particularly the lower primes. However, a google search for words such as "seven mysticism" shows the cornucopia of connections that man has found for this interesting number through the ages. Perhaps it's just coincidence that there are seven chakras of energy in Hinduism and New Age thinking. But I find the connections very interesting when you look at the sanskrit yoga system: the desired yogi state is that the practitioner become absolute master of his six 'principles,' as he merges to one-ness in the seventh.

In the "way of imagining" that we explore in this song and my book, we are saying that there are ten dimensions, but that our particular universe is really contained within six full dimensions, and a seventh where the universe is a single point: it "merges into one-ness in the seventh", so to speak.

Some questions get asked a lot in the tenth dimension forum, and this is one of them: based upon what we've explored here, why does this "way of imagining" need any more than seven (or perhaps even just six) dimensions? Why ten? We'll discuss these questions in upcoming blogs.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob



A direct link to this video is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs