Novelty

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_ANS2k97IM

Novelty. Is the desire for change the basic craving that drives life forward?


In his marvelous book "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin makes the point that even eight month old babies have a well-developed sense of melody and rhythm, and enjoy predictable music (read "pop" music here if you like), but they are particularly likely to notice predictable music which then breaks out of the established mode of what their sense of melody will lead them to predict. Regular readers of this blog know that I became a grandfather last year, and little Cadence turned one last week. Whether you're playing peekaboo, or watching her laugh at a musical game where an established pattern is changed, you can see the joy she takes from moment to moment in what happens next.

This is a phrase I've used before in my book and my blog: "life is any process which is interested in what happens next". This applies so nicely to the idea of music as opposed to random noise: in fact, our brains tend to suppress noise, as we talked about in Ringing in the Brain. Sure, you could say music is noise, but it's noise that has been organized in certain ways: and most of us like music which has repeating patterns which allow us to predict at least somewhat what is going to happen next. But the most interesting music of all is the music which solidly sets up an expectation, and then takes us someplace else instead - that's the musical events that we remember, that's the music that we're more likely to fall in love with. This relates very easily to the memory-creation processes we discussed last year in Entangled Neurons.

"What happens next": we like novelty, we prefer pleasant surprises over boredom (and the ongoing popularity of horror films would indicate that a number of us crave any kind of surprises, pleasant or not!). In this blog we've talked a number of times about writer/philosopher/psychedelics activist Terence McKenna, who died in April 2000. His "Novelty Theory" (also known as "Timewave Zero") project suggested that our planet regularly sees repeating cycles of higher and lower novelty, but that we will be approaching a point in 2012 where the number of novelty events climbs exponentially, eventually causing some sort of a tipping point and transition to a new form of worldwide consciousness. This year we've been talking about how light is at right angles to spacetime - this exponential curve that McKenna (along with many others) envisions could be another way of thinking about a new quantum observer system which is at "right angles" to our current existence. How much more novel can we get than that?

This month, there was a New Scientist article written by Katharine Sanderson about a new experiment with the lofty goal of creating "Life, but Not as We Know It". The experiment is being conducted by a team at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lee Cronin. Here's a quote from Dr. Cronin that relates nicely to our discussion:

Stripped down to its barest essentials, life can be seen as a struggle against thermodynamics and its drive towards ever more featureless uniformity.

This is another way of phrasing Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life, which we looked at in entries like Conscious Computers and Logic vs Intuition: life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.

Life is what makes us more than just a set of thermodynamic chemical processes. Life is engaged with spacetime in a way that keeps it wanting to move forward in our 4D hyperspace, not just through its own life, but through nurturing the generations that come afterwards. And ultimately, life is part of patterns which exist outside the narrow limits of our 4D reality. This has been a running theme through a number of the 26 songs I attached to this project, including Burn the Candle Brightly, What Was Done Today, Change and Renewal, See No Future, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Connections, and Thankful.

Speaking of songs, I've talked before about how for me Imagining the Tenth Dimension really started out as a "concept album", a collection of songs about the nature of reality. Coming up, I'd like to show you some of the songs from a somewhat-related concept album I released way back in 1983: "Alcohol and Other Drugs".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Bees and the LHC

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzhLlsk1k78

Have astronomers finally found direct evidence of other universes? Read this Technology Review article for more on that.


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

The above newly published video accompanies a blog entry from earlier this year, called "Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional?". More recently, we talked about bees, Terence McKenna, and Stephen Hawking (an unlikely trio if ever there was one) in Bees and Tangential Thinking. Do bees sense the sixth dimension, and that's why the "waggle dance" they use to convey the presence of food sources to each other make sense when analyzed using six dimensional flag manifold geometry, the same geometry which can be used to analyze the actions of quarks at the subatomic level? It's fascinating to consider! But at this point there are still mainstream scientists not convinced that extra dimensions even exist.

The June issue of Scientific American, as shown here, had as its cover story "12 Events That Will Change Everything". As you've probably guessed, the one that stood out for me was the event described by George Musser: the discovery of definite evidence of extra dimensions. Here's a few paragraphs from Mr. Musser's excellent article:

As fantastic as extra dimensions of space sound, they might really exist. From the relative weakness of gravity to the deep affinity among seemingly distinct particles and forces, various mysteries of the world around us give the impression that the known universe is but the shadow of a higher-dimensional reality. If so, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva could smash particles together and release enough energy to break the shackles that keep particles in three dimensions and let us reach into that mind-blowing realm.

Proof of extra dimensions “would alter our whole notion of what reality is,” says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in 1990 wrote a four-dimensional version of the video game Tetris to get a taste of what extra dimensions might be like. (You keep track of the falling blocks using multiple 3-D slices of the full 4-D space.

In modern physics theories, the main rationale for extra dimensions is the concept of supersymmetry, which aims to unite all the different types of particles into one big happy family. Supersymmetry can fulfill that promise only if space has a total of 10 dimensions. The dimensions could have gone unnoticed either because they are too small to enter or because we are, by our very nature, stuck to a 3-D membrane like a caterpillar clutching onto a leaf.

To be sure, not every proposed unified theory involves extra dimensions. So their discovery or nondiscovery would be a helpful data point. “It would focus what we do,” says physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University, who made her name studying the caterpillar-and-leaf option.

...If the LHC produced subatomic black holes, they would be immediate proof of extra dimensions, because gravity in ordinary 3-D space is simply too weak to create holes of this size. For geometric reasons, higher dimensions would strengthen gravity on small scales. They would likewise change the small-scale behavior of other forces, such as electromagnetism. And by dictating how supersymmetry operates, they might lead to distinctive patterns among the masses and other properties of particles. Besides the LHC, scientists might find hints of extra dimensions in measurements of the strength of gravity and in observations of the orbits of black holes or of exploding stars.

The discovery would transform not only physics but also its allied disciplines. Extra dimensions might explain mysteries such as cosmic acceleration and might even be a prelude to reworking the entire notion of dimensionality—adding to a growing sense that space and time emerge from physical principles that play out in a spaceless, timeless realm.

In Bees and Tangential Thinking, we looked at Terence McKenna's proposal that perceiving extra dimensions is the more natural state for living creatures, but that as complex creatures like us evolved there were certain evolutionary advantages to limiting awareness to the "here" of 3D space and the "now" of our point within 4D space-time. In Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional? I made the somewhat whimsical suggestion that bees could now be disappearing from the planet because of their sixth-dimensional awareness, which might be a confirmation of McKenna's ideas. Commenters at YouTube were quick to point out that the most popular theory is that it's a fungus which is decimating the honeybee population of the world, but the jury seems to still be out on that one, as this recent article from Ars Technica explains. Microbes? A fungus? A virus? Pesticides? Coincidences that bees in different parts of the world are dying off at the same time, but from different causes?

And finally, how would being able to see sixth-dimensionally protect a honeybee from these popularly stated causes? Perhaps there would be no advantage, or no disadvantage, since the bees (like us) are physically constrained to the 3D atoms and molecules of their bodies.

The interesting information remains that there may be creatures on our planet able to perceive extra dimensions, and that in itself should be added to the evidence that we expect to mount in 2011 that the extra spatial dimensions are physically real, and not just "mathematical masturbation" as some critics have claimed.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Time Travel Paradoxes

Poll 69 - Bees and Tangential Thinking

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a26ej-H7aU


Last time, in Psychedelics and Spacetime, we discussed the aspects of our reality that come from extra dimensions, and whether it's possible for us to perceive those additional spatial dimensions which, by definition, are at additional sets of "right angles" to our 4D spacetime. In the next few entries we'll look at some poll questions that have explored concepts related to "tangential thinking".

Poll 69
Poll 69: "Are bees more sixth-dimensional"? Poll ended August 9 2010. 40.5% said yes, while 59.5% said no.

For somebody reading this poll by itself, I realize this must have seemed like a very strange question indeed! My blog entry "Are Bees More Sixth Dimensional" should make the reason for this question more clear. In that entry, we looked at an article about a fascinating theory proposed by Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Dr. Shipman analyzed the complex dance patterns bees use to indicate the position of new sources of food to each other. She discovered that the geometric patterns the bees use in the dance made sense if they were analyzed using a "sixth dimensional flag manifold", an analysis method also useful in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks. Please read the entire article, it presents some amazing insights.

In Psychedelics and Spacetime, we looked at Terence McKenna's passionate proposals that primitive creatures were by nature more aware of the extra patterns that are "outside" of our spacetime, and that as organisms like us evolved to become more complex, there was an evolutionary advantage afforded by narrowing our focus down to just the "here" and "now" of our current position within spacetime. Being connected to the cosmic "all" could well be a distraction when what you really need to do right now is focus on the hungry predator hiding just beyond those bushes!

If bees really are using sixth-dimensional geometry to communicate with each other, could this be an example of a creature who found a way to utilize a part of this extra-dimensional awareness that McKenna suggests was actually the more natural mode of existence for living creatures? Could the numerous scientific studies coming out recently indicating that the cells within our bodies seem to be having "conversations" with each other be examples of how the simpler components of a living creature are still more plugged into these extra-dimensional patterns? And might the nearly instantaneous neuronal patterns related to the formation of memory which we looked at in Entangled Neurons also be an indication that we still use extra-dimensional patterns within our brains even if we're not conscious of those actions?

We've talked before about Stephen Hawking's famous quote:

I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time at the big bang. But there's another kind of time, "imaginary time", at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.

What is Hawking's "imaginary time"? I would say that if it's at right angles to our 4D spacetime, then it must be the fifth dimension. While I understand his use of "time" and "imaginary time" to convey these fourth- and fifth-dimensional ideas to the public, they do create some confusion. Calling the fourth dimension "duration" rather than time, and the fifth dimension our "probability space" has been my suggestion for making these concepts more clear, something that we explored in more detail in "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?".

So perhaps Stephen Hawking is more fifth dimensional, but bees do him one better by being more sixth dimensional? An interesting thought!

Next: Poll 70 - Are Tangents Bad?

Psychedelics and Spacetime

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wr5oO9fJWU

"Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." - David Jay Brown
"Utterly charming, beautifully illustrated, and elegantly designed, O is for Omniverse is a book to be read aloud, again and again." - David Jay Brown

David Jay Brown has been a good friend to this project, offering very kind words for both of my books. He is the author of seven mind-expanding books about the evolution of consciousness, achieving optimal health, and the future, including four well-known volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers: Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and writes regularly for publications all over the globe, including Scientific American.

David is also one of the world's leading experts on psychedelics, and has acted as editor for issues of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies newsletter: the MAPS Bulletin. One of my facebook friends is Rick Doblin, Ph.D, and Rick is the current Executive Director of MAPS. It was through Rick that I heard about an event they are holding in Los Angeles from December 10th to 12th this year which promises to be very interesting; it's called Catalysts: Psychedelics in Culture, Consciousness, and Creativity. Click here to see the facebook page dedicated to this event.

In recent entries like Extra-Dimensional Geometry and Thinking Bigger, we've been talking about how difficult it can be for our "monkey brains" to visualize extra dimensions. In Are Bees More Sixth-Dimensional, we looked at the startling evidence that bees use sixth-dimensional geometry to describe the location of food sources to each other through their complex dance patterns. How could a bee be able to think in six dimensions when even four can seem like a stretch for we human beings? For me, these discussions always come down to finding ways to picture what parts of our reality come from the extra dimensions which are at additional "right angles" to the four dimensions of spacetime, which leads us to the title of this entry.

I know I keep repeating myself on this topic, but people come to these blogs sometimes without having read other parts of my body of work so I want to be clear on this: I have no experience with psychedelics myself, and that leads me to the conclusion that people do not need to take psychedelics in order to visualize what lies beyond our reality. There are other paths to these insights. Nonetheless, I hear every day from people who have taken psychedelics of various kinds and tell me that my approach to describing how the dimensions are connected together makes a great deal of sense when applied to what they experienced, and in many cases has helped them to understand what they perceived.

Terence McKenna was a charismatic speaker, a philosopher, an author, and a strong advocate for psychedelics. With my project, I've spoken a number of times about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which makes the claim that there are multiple ways for human beings to achieve altered states which allow them to peer into these additional realms, and psychedelics offer one of those ways. In the following YouTube video, you'll hear Terence McKenna voice a contrasting view: he says psychedelics are the only way for people to open their minds up to these possibilities.

Terence on Psychedelics and Religion (thanks to Joshua Holmes for showing me this video!):

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

Here's a link to a Terence McKenna article which proposes that as primitive human beings developed consciousness , those who narrowed their perceptions down from these extra realms to "spacetime only" developed an evolutionary advantage. Let me quote some of that article here:

I think that, and it seems logically compelling to me, that consciousness as ordinarily experienced is a human ability shaped by evolutionary pressure, and since evolutionary threat and harm usually comes at us in three dimensional space, this is where consciousness has been forced...to concentrate and define itself.

... So what happens when you take a compound like psilocybin in silent darkness in a situation of no threat and low anxiety and low input from the exterior world is that this function, which is essentially in most situations a closed fist ready to strike out at something coming from nearby, unfolds into something much more beautiful, much more interesting, and much more true to itself. In other words, not defined by an exterior context or situation, but defined by its own mechanics.

The question is this: are the visions experienced by persons taking psychedelics simply tricks of temporarily altered brain chemistry, or are people actually catching glimpses of something real? And does that mean someone with the proper grounding in extra-dimensional geometries and cosmology might be able to find a way to incorporate those visions into their theories? Here's a link to a page which reprints a seven-year-old article appearing in New Scientist magazine. The original article bore the whimsical title "Einstein an Acid". The reprint on Alok Subbarao's blog calls the article "Pscychedelic-Influenced Astrophysics".
The article is about some creative new proposals for the structure of reality which came from Metod Saniga, who was at that time an astrophysicist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and is now a professor at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, Vienna University of Technology . Dr. Saniga was quite willing to admit that he came up with these insights while under the influence of psychedelics, but he also portrays himself as a serious-minded scientist, and accepts that some critics will reject his ideas outright because of pre-conceived notions about the evils of psychedelics.
The diagrams at left come from the New Scientist article on Dr. Saniga's proposed new framework. Is there a way to marry this approach to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension framework? Perhaps, but if so that's not immediately apparent to me. If you go to Dr. Saniga's website you'll see that his interests are far-reaching, and do extend into the more metaphysical tangents that we've played with in this project, so I would certainly like to know more about this man's work and if any of his innovative concepts have received any mainstream acceptance yet.
Finally, here's a quote from Terence McKenna on David Jay Brown:

"That our perfected selves whisper to us from the future is but one of David Jay Brown's fertile insights." --Terence McKenna, author of Food of the Gods.

Clearly, this is an idea which connects to my project as well, including one of my favorite blog entries from a few months back, Love and Gravity. We're going to continue exploring these fascinating patterns that are at "right angles" to our spacetime next time with an entry called Bees and Tangential Thinking. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton
PS - I'd like to thank my facebook friend Joshua Holmes, who kindly offered the use of the painting seen at the beginning of this blog when he heard I was doing an entry on psychedelics - this painting is Joshua's visual interpretation of a DMT trip. Thanks so much, Joshua!

Temporal Mass

Is everything about our reality accelerating? What do the impressions of childhood, that time moves very slowly from month to month, and our impression that time moves much more quickly from year to year as we get older, tell us about our reality? In Jumping Jesus, we looked at Robert Anton Wilson's ideas on the exponential growth of information and innovation that we are all now having to deal with. Over at the tenth dimension forum, Daniel McQueen recently submitted this thought-provoking post:

If you take a gravitationally-attracted body (IE, something with mass), and let it freely move about in 3-dimensions, it will tend to move with ever-increasing speed towards the strongest gravitational pull. Any child who has played the wood-box game of Labyrinth can attest to it. Furthermore, if there is only one such source, the object will move in a straight line.

In our observations, the three arrows of time all point from past to future. Without explaining the physics of each arrow (Pick up Michio Kako's book "Hyperspace" to read about time's arrows in detail), it is our observation that objects moving at non-relativistic speeds move in a constant velocity towards time(future) and away from time(past). Limiting the timeline to 1d (and ignoring alts or forbids), I pose this question.

Do we have temporal "mass"?

To a child younger than 3 years, minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days, and days seem like weeks. Any kid put in 5 minutes timeout or "quiet time" will tell you its an eternity. Birthdays seem to take forever to come around.

I am a few months away from my 29th birthday. I can remember most of my life, and I have to admit, the 1980s went by really slow (1981-1989), the 1990s went a little faster (my freshman year of high school seems like a long time ago, even though it was 1995), and the 2000s seem to have flown.

At the same time, my younger cousin, age 9, from my p.o.v. has grown up really fast. From her p.o.v., it seems to have been forever since she was in pre-school.

The point is this: My age in seconds (days, fortnights, or whatever time units you want to use) is quite higher than hers. I have more temporal "mass" one could say. Perhaps this is why I seem to move faster through the days than my cousin does? And even though this is purely a perceptional issue, I think it is an interesting one. Each week seems to go by faster to me than the last. Either I am imagining things, or I am incessantly rolling down a shallow hill towards my ultimate resting place (death).

That's an interesting idea, Daniel, thanks for posting it! The question, for me, becomes this - if everything about our reality is accelerating, then these questions all become relativistic. Someone born 9 years ago has been part of the most accelerated development in all of recorded history, in a universe that is continuously accelerating its expansion, and in a world where people are instantaneously connected together in ways that were science fiction a decade ago... and yet to that 9 year old person this time has taken an interminably long time. Is it the observer or the observed who are accelerating? Does the universe have more "temporal mass" now in the same way that each of us as individuals do, and that's where the impression that time and space are both accelerating is really coming from? And if the Biocentric Universe theories are correct, then does this tie into the idea that our observation is what creates spacetime, rather than the other way around?

Gevin Giorbran described our spacetime reality as being pulled at either "end" by two organizing forces: grouping order and symmetry order. If Information Equals Reality, then everything about our reality can be divided into two lists: "this is the way our universe is right now" and "these are the ways our universe isn't". Obviously, when we think about the remarkably unlikely configuration of mass and energy, organizing patterns and information that represents our universe at this instant, this means the second list is much much larger than the first. But time's arrow tells us that we are moving away from the highest grouping order (the past), and the traditional view has been that what we are moving towards is some gloomy kind of high entropy soup where all of that information becomes meaningless noise.

We keep returning to the idea that our universe, as stated in a Scientific American article by physicist Sean Carroll, is a "temporary deviation from symmetry". Symmetry is perfect balance, a natural process that happens all the time - things have a way of evening out. Starting from the work of physicist David Bohm, Gevin Giorbran showed how the highly-ordered beginning of our universe is one way of ordering the information, or showing perfectly-balanced symmetry, and the "ending" of our universe is not meaningless noise, but the other most balanced way of representing that information. To use an absurdly simple representation, let's say the information representing our universe is like a big handful of coins tossed on a table. With H for heads and T for tails, it's like the beginning of our universe would be where we threw HHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTT, our current position in spacetime would be some random-looking collection of results (THHTTHTTTHHTTTTHTTTHTHHHT), and what we're moving towards is HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT. The beginning and the end, then, are two ways or representing the same thing, a perfectly balanced order, and what looks like a random assortment in the "middle" is really a causally-connected representation of one frame from within a process of gradually moving from the first set to the last set, from grouping order to symmetry order.

(Let me remind you, though, that when we're thinking about concepts like "past" and "future" and "before" and "after", these are useful for thinking about how things relate from one state to another, but we're not really thinking about the whole picture until we are visualizing how these events really already exist simultaneously within the timeless omniverse.)

Gevin suggested that gravity is a force that comes from the "past", from that highest grouping order, since gravity is what draws things together into groups. With his Timewave Zero and Novelty Theory, Terence McKenna suggested that what we are moving towards now is the highest "novelty". He proposed that we're on an exponential curve where eventually our timeline becomes so filled with possibilities that we jump to another level, where we can see the place where all of those potential states that we could now be moving towards exist simultaneously: and in my way of visualizing the dimensions that would be viewing our reality from the extra dimensions. When we get to that highest degree of novelty, we'll be at the highest symmetry order - absolutely every bit of information will have been appreciated along with its unique opposite, within that ultimate state of highest symmetry order which all enfolds together into a big beautiful zero that is not empty, but full of all those possibilities.

Thinking about Robert Anton Wilson's Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero", and Daniel McQueen's idea of a "temporal mass", then, might be different ways of thinking about the very same thing. Is the future pulling us towards it at an increasingly accelerated rate? Signs point to "yes".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: O is for Omniverse A and B


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

The Shaman

Before we start this entry, here's a new video we posted on YouTube yesterday which is attached to a blog entry from a month ago: "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?". I'm posting it here for all the subscribers to this blog who wouldn't have seen this video back when that previous blog entry was first released.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U. And now, on with today's entry!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO2h_NPkE8

I've quoted author and psychobiologist David Jay Brown before, who had some very kind things to say about my book:

Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered. Bryanton presents a uniquely compelling model of our 10-dimensional universe, that allows one to visualize and grasp the topography of the higher dimensions in a step-by-step manner. This is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of physics, shamanic exploration, or the nature of reality.

Last time we talked about Augmented Reality, new technology which allows us to visualize things that aren't part of our physical world. This time I'd like to look at David Jay Brown's suggestion that my way of visualizing reality is useful for people interested in shamanism. There's an extensive article on this subject in wikipedia, here's one sentence that I think is key:

Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.

The idea that our reality is created by extra-dimensional patterns and shapes is, of course, central to my project. Whether one thinks of those as "invisible forces" or something more metaphysical, I've been insisting, may have more to with point of view than what it is we're really describing. Regardless, though, a shaman's viewpoint has to embrace the basic idea that I've been promoting here: that there is much more to our reality than the 3D world we see around us, and finding ways to visualize how that could be requires us to embrace a perspective which is "outside" of time, and "outside" of space. What I think is remarkable, though, is that this same "timeless" viewpoint has been central to the theories of many of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century: we've talked about this before in entries like Wormholes and Dimensional Folding and Scrambled Eggs.

Black Elk
Ever hear of Black Elk? He was a Lakota medicine man who lived from 1863 to 1950. While there appear to be varying opinions on whether it's proper to call Black Elk a shaman, I would say there are strong connections between this man's transcendent viewpoint and what is referred to as shamanism in other parts of the world. There's a well-known book called Black Elk Speaks which recounts his visions and insights, in what some are calling "the most famous Native American book ever written". A YouTube visitor named "crazedmystic" posted the following quote from Black Elk Speaks on one of my video blogs a few weeks ago:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all.

I love this quote, not just because it speaks to the enfolded nature of reality which I am constantly going on about, but because it states it in such a beautiful way. I've tried to portray similar ideas about the connectedness that we all share, and the beautiful hoop, the "zero" that holds all other possibilities in so many other entries: Going to the Light, "t" Equals Zero, Imagining the Omniverse, and The Big Bang and the Big O, to name just a few.

Drums and Trance
What else is central to the shamanistic experience? It's impossible to generalize too much because shamans appear in various cultures throughout the world: still, music, trance, and altered states of consciousness can all play a large role. Have you ever been in a drum circle? This is one of those things that comedians like to make fun of, but there really is something there - the power of the drum, the shared experience of a large group of people becoming physically and mentally entrained through just drumming together, and the trance-like altered states of consciousness that can spring from such an experience can be surprisingly uplifting. One of my favorite books about all this was written by Mickey Hart, well-known musicologist and drummer for the Grateful Dead, called Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

"Altered states of consciousness", of course, can be brought about through various natural means, including dance or meditation, or through more traumatic experiences, but for many people the phrase makes psychedelics spring to mind immediately.

Psychedelics
We started this blog with a quote from David Jay Brown. As we discussed in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, David is a respected expert on psychedelics and their serious study: he is also sometimes a guest editor of the newsletter published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelics Studies, which you can find at maps.org.

Which brings us to Terence McKenna, who some have referred to as a modern shaman. Here's a very interesting video showing Terence McKenna talking about shamanism in a way that seems very related to what I've been talking about here: McKenna tells us that a shaman would have to be able to tune into the "bifurcating trees of possibility" (McKenna's words) that are coming towards them from beyond the solid reality they see around them. I'd like to think that McKenna would have appreciated the connections between what he's talking about in this video, and the way that I've portrayed the fifth dimension as being part of our probability space (in entries like Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses and Predicting the Future). In entries like The Holographic Universe and Slices of Reality I've also described the fifth dimension as the place where we can see the underlying patterns of our reality are springing from, another related idea. And speaking of Augmented Reality, in a fanciful moment I find myself wondering if we'll ever get to the point where certain psychedelic experiences could be simulated using an augmented reality interface to superimpose those effects over top of the world we see around us? Now that would be quite the software program.


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=S_qx5Pd9Z-M


It really is too bad that Terence McKenna passed away in 2000, well before the advent of YouTube, as he has some fascinating presentations out there that are finding a new audience through the medium of streaming video, but without his participation in the dialog we are deprived of the instant feedback loop that can make YouTube and its comments sections so interesting. To close, here's a couple more of Terence McKenna videos that relate to all this:

You are the center of the Mandala:

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MHsB3RviFN4

Changing your operating system

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ctjNqQPnAk8


Next, we'll continue this discussion with an entry called "Modern Shamans".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton