Thankful 1

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Another video of me in my living room pounding away at my old piano, singing one of the 26 songs from my book.

We live in a seemingly impossible universe - the fine structure constants are tuned to within surprisingly narrow margins - just a little less gravity and it all would have flown apart into nothingness from the big bang, a little too much gravity and it would all have collapsed back in upon itself by now. How did we get so lucky? That's the conundrum. Some people point to a simple version of the Anthropic Principle which says the reason we're asking how we ended up in this unique universe that supports life as we know it is because if the universe didn't support life as we know it, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

For me, the version of the Anthropic Priniciple which says all those other universes do actually exist rings much truer. As the current issue of Scientific American discusses, modern science is starting to explore some of the other forms and chemical processes that "life as we don't know it" could be able to exist in other parts of our own universe... and some even more fantastical constructions of energy and matter that become interested in "what happens next" might well flourish in other completely separate different-initial-conditions-universes from our own, out there in other parts of the multiverse.

Whether you believe in a Creator-God that put together this intricate puzzle, or whether you believe in a Dawkins-style "blind watchmaker" of chance and selection which got us to where we are now, there's nothing wrong with feeling some wonder and some humility at how extraordinary it all really is. And saying "thank you" for something as wonderful as all this, regardless of your belief system, is just good manners!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

Everything

Everything fits together.

Everything.

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

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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


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



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


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



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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

The Multiverse and Dark Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Coming up: "Ghosts and Intuition"

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Seeing Eye to Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension

This week an excerpt from chapter three of my book was released in the online magazine CRAM, check it out.

The very first issue of this magazine caught my eye when I saw the following three tidbits at the top of the very first page:
“+ About 2500 people in the United States have the last name Cram, accounting for .001% of last names. + Card Random Access Memory (C.R.A.M.) was a type of magnetic storage device used in the early 1960’s. + The 1940 twelve-inch Cram’s Terrestrial Illuminated Glass Globe is notable for a few reasons…”

Aha!, I said to myself. It’s clear to me that this magazine understands the points I have been making with the tenth dimension project: that there are systems of belief, collections of memes, and shared consensual reality that connect us all across time and space. Those 2500 people with the last name CRAM, even though they represent only .001% of the last names in the US, would represent a random access database that would be surprisingly representative of the many ways of looking at the world that all of us share, and would also allow us to quickly find some of those in the world who have unique points of view.

I’ll be the first to admit that I may have been reading more into the connections between those three tidbits than was intended by the editors of Cram. But I stand by the interpretation: as this project (the 11-minute animation, the website, the book, the songs, the videos, and this blog) have found their way into the world, I am continually surprised at the new connections people find to my way of imagining the ten dimensions and their own systems of belief.

In the past week I have been contacted by a number of people with strong Christian beliefs, thanking me for giving them a way to describe a reality which seems connected to science and cosmology but leaves room for there to be creator, or a force in the world that is working towards an ultimately positive outcome. In the book I approach this idea several different ways – from the anthropic viewpoint, our universe seems to have already been selected from a multiverse of universes, the vast majority of which would have been inhospitable to life as we know it. From the role of the quantum observer collapsing/observing reality from an indeterminate wave of possibilities, we already seem to be on a trajectory established at the big bang which is moving us along on a timeline towards a version of our universe which will last much longer than the many less stable configurations which could have been selected. I also touch on ideas of how the voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels, spirit guides and even alien presences could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality.

What I try to be very careful to do in the book is not force one way of interpreting all this upon the reader: whether one chooses to believe in a Creator who drives this whole impossibly complex mechanism forward, or if one believes in a Blind Watchmaker of chance and natural selection, what we our now experiencing as our reality is the same. As I say in Chapter Two:

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.


There are many more interpretations of my way of imagining the dimensions which people have brought to me – I was immediately surprised, for instance, at the number of people who had taken various hallucinogens and felt that what they had seen and experienced could be interpreted through the filter of what I’m presenting. As I’ve said a number of times in the tenth dimension forum, I don’t have any experience with hallucinogens myself, but I find such suggestions fascinating.

In the past week I’ve also received several emails from people convinced that the end of the world is coming in 2012, another topic I explore in the book. In the book I said that I expect that this is a rising tide of belief that will become increasingly popular over the next few years. The End of the World is also one of the 26 songs I have written for this project, and this idea will no doubt be a recurring theme in future blogs.

I should also point out that the Amazon “Search Inside this Book” function is now activated for my book, so that any ideas explored in the blog can also now be typed into Amazon’s search function to read excerpts from the book. Referencing the Index for the book will also provide you with search terms for further exploration.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

The Unseen Eye

In my song The Unseen Eye, I talk about a number of topics which I explore extensively in my book: the nature of time, the Big Bang, the quantum observer, playing dice with the universe, dark matter, and so on. 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.

THE UNSEEN EYE - music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

(In the distance we hear children, repeating a strange little skipping song out on the playground:)
(“All we are is a point of view
It makes me me. It makes you you.
Quantum waves are many things
Until we view them, then they spring
Into our world as what we see
It makes you you, and it makes me me”)

In the universe of all universes
Anything is possible
Everything has happened, and will happen again
In the universe of all universes
Grey and formless
Till you choose a point, to become the first -- when
You can think of it as data
This dark and shapeless void
Unrealized potential
In the static and the noise
Till in the universe of all universes
The unseen eye
Opened and collapsed the wave, and we entered on in

Now we know it’s the act of observation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye

Now any single point that we choose for entry
Leads to a long chain
From the very first yes, or the very first -- no
All the laws of physics, all the rules of nature
Defined in an instant
By the very first choice, or the dice we throw
Though Einstein objected
To imagining a God
Who gambles for Creation
The thought was just too odd
But deep within us in every living creature
There’s a connection
To this shared consensus, of the world we know

Cause we know it’s the act of participation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye

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

Now the universe of all universes
If the truth be known
Is an awful bore, viewed as a whole
But just a tiny shard viewed from any angle
Reveals complexity
It reveals such beauty, reveals a soul
So does it make a difference
How we got to what we see
If it’s really just coincidence
It’s still a wondrous thing

And we know it’s the act of observation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
And the unseen eye, is you and I
And the unseen eye, is you and I
And the unseen eye, is you and I


Here's a paragraph from my book about the starting point for these ideas:

"If we can agree that our conception of time as a one-way “arrow” is an illusion created by our unique point of view, then ultimately we can come to the viewpoint that the big bang is also an illusion, as it is just a side effect of collapsing the tenth dimension with the very first yes/no. The point at which we enter the tenth dimensional system becomes the big bang (that is to say, the beginning) for the dimensions below. The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?"

This song is a good example, I believe, of the usefulness of lyrics and melody for conveying ideas that might otherwise seem too intimidating or obscure. As I have discussed in the tenth dimension forum, the 26 songs that appear as lyrics at the end of my book were the original impetus for this project: as I showed the songs around, it became apparent that more explanation was going to be needed to help people understand my thought processes. Originally I had planned to write some notes that would be included as an insert booklet with the CD of these songs. Eventually, though, as I fleshed my ideas out more fully that booklet grew to become the 220 page book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" which, much to my surprise, has now found an audience in dozens of countries around the world.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob