a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
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.
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.
Poll 33 - "If, as Einstein said, the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion, then I could meet another incarnation of myself right now." Poll ended February 12, 2009 - 54% agreed while the remainder disagreed.
Last poll, I remarked upon how instructive these polls can be for me - for instance, I would have thought the idea that "time is a direction, not a dimension" would have gotten a lot of people to agree, since it's central to this way of visualizing reality, but that poll came in with very similar results to this current one. On the other hand, I would have thought that the idea that one could meet an incarnation of themselves right now would have seen more disagreement, since this is one of the more unusual ideas from my project. 54% of the visitors to this forum are willing to agree with that notion? I'm pleasantly surprised.
This is one of those ideas that occurred to me many years ago as an extension to my way of visualizing the dimensions of reality stacked one upon another, a concept that I had been showing to anyone who would listen for the last twenty-five years or so. Back in 2002, I wrote about 50 songs that explored the tangents that come from this way of visualizing reality, with the plan that I would pick my favorites and record a CD. I was also thinking that I would write a little booklet to accompany the CD in which I would explain how this "new way of thinking about time and space" tied all of the songs together.
When I actually got around to writing the CD booklet in 2005, it grew to 220 pages, and that "new way of thinking" eventually became my popular 11-minute animation which has been seen by millions of people around the world. Since the book's publication in 2006 my songs have become somewhat secondary to the project, which is fine, but I believe there are still ways that song lyrics can make these ideas more accessible. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Connections". The last verse of that song went like this:
I think I met myself today I think I saw my eyes Another me in another body Livin another life
Likewise, with my song "Burn the Candle Brightly", I was thinking about the patterns representing us that carry on after death:
So when this journey is over And that beautiful spark is finally gone We can see that the vessel is empty But we know that the light carries on
... and my song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" also talks about this idea from the first person perspective:
Now I lay me down to sleep To rest my weary head If I should die in slumber deep Remember what I said
It’s not the end of the world It’s not the end of the dream It’s just the end of a body Not the end of a soul
One of the books I've referred to a number of times in this blog is Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". Let me quote a few paragraphs from this enlightening and inspiring book, much of which is about the structures and forms that create the mysterious "I" of consciousness. In the latter part of the book, though, he expands these ideas into what it means to have a representation of other people - your spouse, your children, your parents, a very close friend - held within those same structures. Specifically, how much of that can be thought of as being an actual part of what it is that makes that person uniquely who they are? And if any part can be thought of in that way to any degree, then what happens when the real person dies? Hofstadter writes:
The bond created between two people who are married for a long time is often so tight and powerful that upon the death of either one of them, the other one very soon dies as well. And if the other survives, it is often with the horrible feeling that half of their soul has been ripped out. In happier days, during the marriage, the two partners of course have individual interests and styles, but at the same time a set of common interests and styles starts to build up, and over time a new entity starts to take shape.
And later on...
The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the "Holden Caulfield symbol" in J. D. Salinger's brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield -- but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn't as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a "miniature" one. You couldn't ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constitutued the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger's brain.
In my own book, I suggest that what each of us think of as our unique "soul" is actually a large and interconnected set of memes, some of which rise and fall in prominence over a lifetime, and memes by their very definition are patterns of information that exist across space and time, connecting together in ways that are beyond the physical limitations of the world we see around us. This leads me to some conclusions that are related to what Mr. Hofstadter is talking about, but I go a little further out on the same conceptual limb:
Here’s another way to look at this idea: if each of us has a unique soul, where are all the new souls coming from? Our planet’s population has exploded in numbers, so there must be new “soul material” being created from somewhere (if there really are only a certain number of souls allocated to this planet, then the chances of any one of us being the reincarnate soul of a person who lived here in the last few thousand years are approaching the chances of winning a lottery!). In the New Age community, theories abound regarding what that source of all those new souls might be. All of those theories may be held within the version of reality that we are advancing here: if our soul is a conglomeration of memes that exist outside of time, then other versions of that soul could exist in other universes, in other locations within our universe, in other parts of the history and future of our universe, and even right now in other parts of our own world. The idea that it’s possible to meet another incarnation of yourself right now may take some getting used to, but it is an important aspect of the version of reality we are exploring.
And later on:
It may appear, then, that if we imagine a particular meme that has existed since the perceived beginning of our universe, collapsing a specific version of reality out of the wave of potential universes through the act of its observation, that we are imagining an aspect of the Creator-God. But there is a second way to view this puzzle. Could the feeling of “self” that each of us holds within us also be “just geometry”? In other words, what if this interlocking web of memes were exactly like the interlocking web of physical realities implied by the Many Worlds theory? This would mean that the potential for all ways of viewing the world, and the potential for all the different systems that we think of as being our own soul, are also held within an indeterminate wave of potential at the tenth dimension that has always existed, and will always exist.
In entries like Everyone Has a Story, Being More Fifth-Dimensional, You are Me and We are All Together, The Big Bang and the Big O, and Going to the Light I've continued my exploration of how ideas from cosmology and philosophy, from science and spirituality, can be blended together into an understanding of our reality which embraces a timeless perspective. Once we've arrived at an appreciation of the timelessness that exists outside of our spacetime, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe or any other arises, it becomes easier to think about how it really could be possible to meet another person right now who is basically you, living another life, in another body, experiencing the world with their own unique perspective but intimately connected through those underlying information patterns which exist outside of spacetime.
White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye's three color receptors (cones) are approximately equally stimulated.
An infinite-bandwidth, white noise signal is purely a theoretical construction. By having power at all frequencies, the total power of such a signal is infinite and therefore impossible to generate. In practice, however, a signal can be "white" with a flat spectrum over a defined frequency band.
There's a lot of connections in the above to what we've been talking about here with the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. In entries like Randomness and the Missing 96%, Unlikely Events and Timelessness, and Imagining the Omniverse, we've talked about the tenth dimension as being all possibilities existing simultaneously, an enfolded symmetry that, like a pencil balanced on its tip, is always ready to fall one way or another and create a pattern, or create a universe. In my book I also compare the tenth dimension to white noise or white light. Here's how I end chapter one:
In the picture we’ve constructed here, the tenth dimension when viewed by itself becomes quite uninteresting compared to the multitude of possibilities that are generated when we descend down to the dimensions below. Speaking poetically, the tenth dimension is like white noise, an endless field of all colours and vibrations blurred together. Because it encompasses all possible realities without delineation between those realities, it is like a void. Where things do get interesting is when we cut cross-sections out of that formlessness to view some specific aspect: like our two-dimensional Flatlander viewing the feet of a human creature visiting from the dimension above as ten lines that become two, there is no way for anyone in a dimension less than ten to perceive all of the possibilities that the tenth dimension contains. In any dimension lower than ten, all that can be viewed of reality is cross sections. But that is what makes our existence so interesting: not the infinite “white noise” of possibilities; but that out of all those possibilities that could be, we are in this very specific one, right here, and right now.
I think the connection of white noise or white light to infinity in the wikipedia description we just looked at is very interesting, since I've talked about the tenth dimension in those terms as well, and how each spatial dimension has its own version of infinity. As I've said in entries like "Is there more than one infinity?", "Can there be a positive and negative infinity?", and "Why stop at ten dimensions?", a very important phrase to remember is "there are many roads to infinity".
Thinking about the tenth dimension as "white light", then, brings to mind a metaphysical connection as well. What are we talking about when we hear that a dying person or a departing soul should "go to the light"? In the Big Bang and the Big O, we quoted Oscar Janiger, who described death as a return to "the fundamental substrate of all things" - another way of describing the "outside the system" qualities of the tenth dimension.
In entries like Elvis and the Electrons and We Start with a Point, we've talked about how this works from a physics standpoint. In entries like You are Me and We are All Together and I Know You, You Know Me, we got more specific on how this could be related to ideas of all conscious awareness being aspects of the same connected whole. But, as we just discussed in entries like Do You Believe in Ghosts? and Have You Ever Seen an Aura?, the idea that there is more than just the physical world we see around us is a concept that some people can accept and others cannot. I have to presume, dear reader, that if you have made it this far then you are willing to at least consider the possibilities.
To finish, here's one the 26 songs I wrote for this project, and it's about the tiny little hints we catch fleeting glimpses of that suggest to us that the universe is even more strange and complex than we've been led to believe: the song is called "From the Corner of My Eye".
PS - Due to popular demand we now have a 6 DVD set of video blogs for sale at the Tenth Dimension store. Thanks everyone for your support of this project!
Poll 30 - "Have you ever had an experience which led you to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world?" Poll ended December 30 2008. 43% said yes, while the rest said no.
This poll question relates to poll 28, which asked if visitors to the blog had ever seen a person's "aura". The results for both polls were very similar in terms of percentage for yes and no, although I think it's also noteworthy that a substantially larger number of people responded to this poll question than the other - this seems to confirm that a lot of people have an opinion about what happens to us after death, while less of us have an opinion about auras.
Continuing that idea, here's a link to an article from a recent issue of Scientific American Mind, called "Never Say Die - Why We Can't Imagine Death". In a "Key Concepts" summary, the editors boiled down Jesse Bering's article to these three points:
Almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
Even people who believe the mind ceases to exist at death show this type of psychological-continuity reasoning in studies.
Rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.
What does this last point mean? This is quite easy to relate to if you've ever had a general anaesthetic. The surgeon asks us to count down from ten, we make it through a few numbers and then our experience of reality just "stops". Completely unlike the process of sleep, where we are still dimly aware of our surroundings, and able to be roused if need be, the patient on the operating table simply has a hole in their awareness, for them the surgery did not happen until they wake up in the recovery room. In the way of thinking that this project plays with, it's like their awareness was simply folded across the fourth dimension, creating a discontinuity where they simply "jumped" from the moment in spacetime where they were being put under, to the moment in spacetime when they start to come to afterwards. Here's a paragraph from Jesse Bering's article:
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
The article also talks about the concept of "person permanence" - something that delights babies is the surprise of playing "peekaboo", and young children soon learn that the people around them continue to exist even when they can't be seen. Person permanence, then, also gives us all a deep-seated intuition that some part of a person carries on after death. In this blog I've recommended Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" many times, because it offers some clear-headed discussions of the patterns and connections that carry on after a loved one dies.
So: there are many very logical reasons for why any of us can believe that some part of a person's spirit carries on after death, and perhaps a great many more visitors would have said "yes" if my question had been as simple as that. But what I was asking for was more specific than that - it's one thing to intuitively believe that some part of us carries on, and it's quite another to admit to having had a supernatural/paranormal experience which seemed to confirm that idea.
How many of us have heard stories like this one - "I remember the day Grandma died, she appeared at my window and smiled at me. The phone rang a few minutes later telling me she was gone, and all I could say was 'I know'." Anyone who has had an experience like that will tell you they know for sure that there are parts of us that continue on, and all of the above dispassionate discussions about person-permanence and consciousness will not convince them otherwise.
In blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, I've talked about how these ideas can be integrated into my way of visualizing reality. Our minds are very sensitive to patterns within the noise, and personally I have no trouble accepting the idea that parts of our consciousness exist within timelessness, connecting us all together across the spacetime of the fourth dimension, the probability space of the fifth dimension, and beyond. To close, here's my song about death and what carries on: "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep".
On the day he died, he had packed up his computer and shipped it to me. When it arrived here at my studio I found on the hard drive all of his research, the master files for the four books he had written during his lifetime, and hundreds of other files with various essays and other snippets of writing that he had authored. I was completely mystified. I sent Gevin multiple emails that day asking if this was a present to thank me for helping to promote his book, but received no response.
The day after the mysterious arrival of the computer, I received a letter from Gevin, asking that I take over managing his website and book because he would no longer be able to do so. Needless to say, I was devastated by the news of his passing: but in the weeks that followed, once I had accepted that he was truly gone it fell to me to begin keeping his website up and running and handling various aspects of his company and projects.
Gevin's stated wish in his letter was that I be given full rights to his work. So, in order to be able to honor the wishes of my departed friend, and with the co-operation of Gevin's family, a legal transfer of ownership has been completed and Gevin’s body of work is now my responsibility. “Everything Forever – Learning to See Timelessness” can now be bought directly through the Tenth Dimension store in hard cover, soft cover, or as a downloadable pdf. It also continues to be available through Amazon, Amazon UK, and various other online booksellers.
Why did Gevin honor me with this? His letter is very clear: "If you don't keep it going no one else will". Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been recommending this book since I first discovered it in the spring of 2007, and that I feel Gevin's work is an invaluable companion piece to my own project. When Gevin felt he could no longer carry on, he passed an important responsibility on to me, and the preservation and advancement of Gevin's ideas is a privilege that I respectfully embrace.
Prior to 1998, Gevin Giorbran authored three books in which he described in detail how our universe eventually ends, as space expands perfectly flat and time reaches absolute zero. In 1998, when astrophysicists discovered the expansion of the universe is in fact accelerating towards absolute zero, it became apparent to Gevin that he needed to refine and polish the presentation of his ideas in order to better communicate them to the scientific mainstream and the general public. Everything Forever is Gevin's masterwork, in which he finally accomplished that goal. I believe the value of his insights was only just beginning to be recognized: go to Amazon.com and you will see that "Everything Forever" has received very high praise from discerning reviewers:
A Brilliant Jewel By P.J Young
Gevin Giorbran, in his book Everything Forever, premises much of his insight on the idea that what is "real" are not only the states the universe empirically occupies but also the states the universe can potentially occupy. These potential states are not mere abstractions or conceptual titillations; rather these implicit states are of immense ontological relevance when we consider the full landscape of the universe throughout time. Indeed, as time is concerned, Giorbran notes that it is more than temporal horizontal movement; time also has a vertical dimension where potential states of the universe are playing out within the "adjacent possible" - a term he openly borrows from Stuart Kauffman. Giorbran's universe is much like a brilliant jewel that shines in many different ways depending on one's pathway through it, but ultimately, the jewel, or the universe when considered as a whole, is unchanging and unchangeable.
Moving toward symmetry By David J. Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.
In this exhaustive masterpiece Gevin Giorbran gives us a unique and original "hypothesis of everything". From the big bang, or Alpha state, to the final Omega state, the universe is not winding down as the traditional explanation of the second law of thermodynamics is currently understood. Rather, the universe is going from one type of order, "grouping order" to another type, "symmetry order".
Time, energy, the forces of nature, and meaning are all a result of the universe moving toward its most probable future, a future of perfect balance.
According to Giorbran, energy is a product of imbalance, and time is simply the transformation of matter into the fullness of space symmetry.
Gravity can be understood as pockets of "time in reverse". Gravity represents our past pulling time backwards. The electromagnetic force represents the arrow of time moving toward the future. The opposite charges of the electron and proton are simply the tendency of these particles to seek balance. "Forces are simply the shapes of probability waves, and those shapes bond particles together, in groups, in lattices, in symmetries."
The past and the future are quantum potentials, and conscious beings are continually creating the most likely futures and the most likely, consistent pasts. Meaning arises as a result of the decoherence of these potential states.
"Everything Forever" is the most significant book concerning the nature of reality I've read in years. I highly recommend this book for those looking for a simple and elegant hypothesis of the infinite, meaningful universe.
The Universe is NOT winding down. By "Jerry"
"Everything Forever" articulates Einstein better than I have ever read before. I had to read page 25 to my electrical engineering students. Gevin Giobran uses concepts of other great physicist and folds them into his own concepts of time and the Universe. Reading is laborious at times but the book demonstrates that in order to explain "what is" one must consider all possibilities of what could have been but is not. This then places a boundary, or shape on our thoughts.
GENIUS By Dr. Lee Price
Giorbran's latest book is pure genius. Well thought out, rewarding and thought provoking. He takes the concepts of time, anti-time and timelessness and makes them easy to grasp. I particularly enjoyed the section on how the future helps arrange the present. I wish I could be around in a 100 years to see how current theories were altered by his contributions. You will read this book more than once.
Exploring Time By J. S. Parker (Portland, OR USA)
Understanding time is key to understanding cosmology. Despite its ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, however, time is an elusive subject. Giorbran has done a marvellous job of pulling together all the various aspects and understandings of time into a readable and, more importantly, understandable framework.
His reviews of various theoreticians in the history of the subject are excellent. He has a unique ability to take complicated concepts and explain them simply, but comprehensively. It is the best summary of Boltzmann's work leading to the second law of thermodynamics that I have found. The relativistic concepts of Einstein and even Stephen Hawking's "imaginary time" are explained in a surprisingly graspable manner.
However, it is not simply another summary of past and current thought. He develops his own ideas on the nature of order (what he calls "grouping" and "symmetry" orders) that provides the basis for his conclusions on the nature of time as we experience it and timelessness as can be experienced--the subtitle of the book is "Learning to See Timelessness". And it is in these concepts of order and timelessness that he lays his foundation for re-establishing meaning and purpose in the evolution of the universe.
The book is solidly based in current scientific understanding of cosmology. But he integrates these understandings in a new and exciting framework. Whether one agrees with his ideas or not, the book will open many avenues for thought and exploration. The quotations and references that are interspersed throughout the chapters provide additional viewpoints as well as providing an attractive format. There are multiple illustrations, pictures and charts which enhance and clarify the text.
The book is clearly the result of a long and thoughtful exploration by the author. It is one that will enrich any reader.
Through our respective projects, Gevin and I had each come up with useful ways of visualizing the timeless background that our universe or any other universe springs from, and I am proud of the fact that Gevin devoted several pages of his book to an explanation of why my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project is as worthy of serious consideration as Gevin's concepts from Everything Forever have proven to be. In the year prior to his death, he and I had many fascinating and challenging discussions about the ramifications of the huge cloud of ideas surrounding our projects: we both shared a feeling that it is just a matter of time before our ideas will become integrated into mainstream science, and we shared our frustration that that time is not here yet.
If Everything is Forever, where is Gevin now? Life is full of mysteries. As Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Regardless of where you think Gevin is right now, he, like all of us, is part of the information that becomes our reality--a pattern within timelessness--and that will always be true.
"Option-itis" Here's something I've said before: things become less interesting to us as the number of choices multiply. If, as I've proposed with this project, the sixth dimension includes every possible expression of the wave function for our universe, then it includes the version where I went crazy, shot up my town, died in a hail of bullets. Do I ever want to even witness that particular version of reality? No thank you!
Nine dimensions, three triads, enfolded into the tenth dimension Last blog, we talked about how dimensions four through six can be called the "moral" triad. It's that narrowing down of possibilities, through the moral decisions I've made so far, that have created the fifth dimensional subset that I have access to from this "now" forward--and that will continue to be true for the rest of my life. If you are fully engaged with that process, what could be more exciting? Every instant we are observing new possibilities from a fantastically complex wave function that exists across the dimensions, but which are also uniquely defined by our own personal set of experiences.
Some people like to make fun of this idea, but this is essentially true: we are each creating a version of the universe through our role as quantum observers, and the path that each of us takes is unique. But we're each also participating in a consensual reality that has been created by the other people we share this reality with, which means their moral decisions are also part of my probability set. This is the hard part, because it means someone else can still choose to kill me, or they can do things that limit my access to possible futures I'd like to get to.
Thinking about Parallel Universes Which takes us to the craziest part of this idea: each of us have already died through bad luck or bad choices made, that's just not the part of the multiverse that we're currently witnessing. Believe it or not, that's the idea that started this all for me back when I was seven, but it has taken me many years of thinking and reading to arrive at the conclusion that this crazy idea is supported by science!
I've written many times about the proof published by the Oxford University team under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, a proof which New Scientist magazine listed as one of the most important scientific stories of 2007: the bush-like branching structure of our quantum wave function, and the parallel universes that result from chance and choice for each of us are provably equivalent. This means the universe where I took five minutes longer to get out of bed this morning is part a different parallel universe, which is just as real as the one I'm currently witnessing, it just happens to not be the version I'm traveling within. Mind-boggling? You bet. But also, as it turns out, completely compatible with what I've been claiming since I first came up with this way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago.
I'm a Spime and So Are You In the original tenth dimension animation, we imagined a person's body as if it were a spime: a four-dimensional object. In the animation, we said this:
If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension, you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.
If there were only one possible timeline from the beginning to the end of a person's life, that would be the end of the discussion. But as we explored in my book and blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, I'm proposing that our reality actually comes from the probability space of the fifth dimension, and it's easy to envision the branching structures that result from chance and choice as being part of a tree-like structure in the fifth dimension.
Souls as Systems With this project, we're imagining a person's "soul" not as a single self-contained unit, but rather as being a multi-layered system of memes, a "society of mind" across the dimensions. Now we're talking about a set of parallel universes where, in many of them, bad things have happened that resulted in our deaths: but since everyone reading this blog is alive and not dead (I presume), we know that those branching timelines are not part of the parallel universe we're each currently witnessing. Yikes! What does this all mean?
How unlikely is the "Now" we're each currently in? In Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about the idea that dark matter and junk DNA might be telling us more than we realize about how unlikely our current reality really is. And if we add up all of the bad luck and deliberate actions of others that could have resulted in each of us being dead by now, don't we arrive at the same conclusion? When you consider how many situations exist within all of the possible parallel universes for our universe where events conspired to result in each of us dying, it really does seem like a marvelous thing that we get to experience this reality which must be way out on the edge of the bell curve, a highly unlikely universe where each of us have managed to survive... for now.
So now, let's think about that "long undulating snake" that is our body not just in the fourth, but in the fifth dimension. From conception to death, there is the actual 4D "line of time" we have followed, and (as the Deutsch team have proved) there is the bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes extending out from our current "now". So we have something like a dandelion gone to seed held in our minds, with a single stalk representing the past and a "ray" of possible futures at the head.
But what about that missing 96%? Does it factor into the equation here as well? If we're thinking about all of the many possible paths that we have traveled upon up until now which, in a multiverse of possible timelines must include those times when we've already died, we can see in the past a great many other branches which extended off from the main stalk and ended. In my book I said this:
For each of us, we will be able to remember moments of malicious, random, or foolish action that could have done us in. It’s hard to forget that moment where a large object falling or a silly risk taken might have resulted in our death if we had only been in a slightly different place and time. According to the worldview we’re exploring, all of those things did actually happen: that drunk driver you saw last year came over the hill and smashed into you head on, and now you’re dead.
Asking the Big Questions This is a question people ask themselves all time: what happens to us when we die? One interesting proposal I saw recently suggested maybe whatever we expect to happen is exactly what does happen! If you believe there will be nothing, that's what you get. If you believe that you will be able to continue to watch this particular version of the universe and see what happens to your loved ones, that's what happens. If you believe you will be enfolded back into a white light of all patterns and frequencies, that's where you'll go. And so on! By the time we're "outside" of the arrow of time, there's no reason to assume that these options are mutually exclusive, either: free from the limitations of a physical body riding along an entropy-driven timeline, a person's awareness could explore every parallel universe simultaneously if that was what they wanted to do!
I've quoted from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop before with his well-considered musings on what parts of the pattern that represents a person might continue on. Now here's a different way of thinking about this idea: if there is a fifth-dimensional spacetime tree of other possible timelines for our universe, and each of us has timelines where we've already died, then could it be that there are parts of our consciousness, the interlocking patterns that make up our "society of mind" that chose to jump on to our current timeline because they wanted to see what would have happened if they hadn't died? The old adage "once bitten, twice shy" takes on a whole new meaning - if there are tiny voices in my head saying "remember how I died last time I tried that!" then perhaps next time I will be less likely to take a silly risk.
My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is a meditation on the question of what happens to us when we die. To finish, here's a video of me sitting at my old piano singing that song.
PS: Have each of us already died in other parts of the multiverse? That's one of our poll questions right now. And a few blog entries ago I mentioned a project called The Omniverse Almanac, some interesting fiction writing which explores a similar world of ideas, check it out!
The reason animals are called animals is because the word "animal" comes from the Latin word, anima, meaning "soul". So, what the soul did, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas--who were the main authorities for the medieval view--was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlaid the instincts, the movements, and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.
So the human soul had three levels, or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health and in healing from injury and disease... Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.
I've used "corn starch monster" videos before (which is what we're looking at in the three short youtube clips that start this entry) to demonstrate how a simple action like a low frequency vibration can impart something to a corn starch and water mixture that reminds us of life, and how the reverse is also true: most of us have seen the astonishing difference between a living creature and what that same creature appears as when the spark of life has departed. Some of us have also seen what's it like when a person's soul has left their dying body before the body is dead: even when the physical body continues to struggle on with that most basic desire to continue, it can be clear to us that the "vibration"that made that person who they were is no longer there. Would it really be such a stretch for us to think that a magnet had "died" if one day it ceased to attract and repel other magnets?
From the most primitive beginnings of life on the planet, to human beings and beyond, all life shares the same trait - a desire to continue, an interest in "what happens next". Do corn starch monsters and magnets desire to continue? That's like asking whether my car desires to move forward after I step on the gas pedal. Animation (movement), is not the same as anima (life, soul): so, while things that are alive move, things that move are not necessarily alive. Still, it's interesting to think about a time not very many centuries ago when it was believed that magnets had souls, and to apply that idea to what I've been talking about here: how something as simple as a meme-based vibration pattern across dimensions could be what imparts, using constructive interference with physical reality, the anima to living things.
All of this also strongly relates to the current bestseller I've just finished reading, My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. After a left hemisphere stroke removed Dr. Taylor's ability to plan and think linearly, she spent time thinking only with her right brain, where she reports that she felt an intimate connection to the one-ness that we all share within the universe. I recommend this book highly because it touches upon so many of the things I have talked about with this project - how "souls" can be thought of as coming from different energy/vibration/meme patterns, interlocking together to create what we each of us thinks of as a unique "me", and how some people create energy which other people are drawn to and inspired by, while other people seem to suck the energy out of a room. The corn starch videos, I think, are good starting points for discussion - thinking about how different patterns and waves really could be interacting to create what we know of as life and consciousness. Books like Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life add more pieces to the puzzle as we think about how different waveforms can entrain one another, and ultimately this is all part of the path towards seeing how everything fits together to create our reality.
We'll close this entry with a video for one of the 26 songs that are part of this project. This one is about the soul, the mysterious spark of life that each of us carries within, and it's called "Burn the Candle Brightly".
We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more? - Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who died just three days ago at the age of 96
Last blog, we talked about the omniverse: what if this project had been called "Imagining the Omniverse"? The omniverse is a term coined to imagine all of the possible universes, all of the parallel universes resulting from chance and choice for each of those universes, all of the possible expressions of matter and energy which exist simultaneously within the underlying quantum fabric of reality.
As mind-boggling as that concept is to hold in our heads all at once, there is still another way of looking at all of this: our specific universe is reflective of big-picture-memes, ways of organizing that omniverse's information that becomes our reality. Calling that "God", or a Quantum Observer acting within an O-region, or just the random assortment of implicate patterns responsible for distilling out one version of reality over another, has much more to do with mindset than the actual processes that we are thinking about: and this is how we got to David Bohm's idea of implicate and explicate order being reflective of how our universe came to be part of just one of the many multiverses that exist within the omniverse.
Ever hear of "digital physics"? Look that term up in wikipedia. Experts such as Seth Lloyd, John Wheeler (quoted above), and David Deutsch, all of whom I have mentioned regularly in this blog, are listed as proponents of digital physics, which advances the same theory that I have been promoting here: our universe is reflective of patterns that exist within timelessness, and time as we experience it is an illusion, only a tiny slice out of what's really happening "out there". Digital Physics does not require there to be extra dimensions, but I believe it ties very nicely to what I've been talking about here: the idea that our universe is created one planck length after the next, with our fourth-dimensional "line of time" twisting and turning in the fifth dimension is the way into that discussion.
Comparisons between digital physics, the universe as a hologram, and the idea that we as observers could "reverse fine tune" our universe are all connected to the way of visualizing reality that I'm promoting here. There are clear echoes of The Matrix in all of this as well, which make some people assume I'm talking about science fiction here: but the tenth dimension meme continues to grow, as more and more people begin to see connections between their own ways of understanding reality and what's being discussed here.
John Wheeler was a strong believer in the anthropic principle, which ties into the Omniverse idea I talked about in the last blog entry as well. As his quote at the start of this blog entry reveals, he also liked to talk about the role of the quantum observer in a "self-excited circuit" that creates the reality we see around us from out of the background of quantum indeterminacy, and that is a fascinating discussion by itself. Here are some previous blog entries where I've talked about how John Wheeler's theories can be related to my way of visualizing reality:
My good friend Gevin Giorbran passed away unexpectedly this week. Gevin had some amazing insights into the nature of reality and the ultimate fate of the universe, this and much more can be found in his book "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness".
At the core of Gevin's ideas is a beautiful and simple concept, one which ties together very nicely with my own thinking about how our reality is constructed, and Gevin and I had many lively conversations about the ramifications of this over the past year. The above video was recorded in December, and our intention was to do more of these in the months to come but now that is not to be. Please take a look, and also go to Gevin's website www.everythingforever.com for more insight into this man's marvelous mind.
Is Gevin enjoying the journey even now? That's a painful question to consider, but I do believe that we are all patterns in the information that is reality, and parts of the pattern that once was Gevin Giorbran now continue on through his writing, and our memories of him - whether that be through videos like the one in this blog or other more personal memories.
But is the very specific pattern that was Gevin still with us now on this particular timeline, or has that pattern been subsumed back into the larger whole, the Omega state of enfolded symmetry that he wrote about so beautifully? That is a large question indeed.
I will continue to support Gevin's ideas: I believe he was a visionary thinker whose theories will one day be confirmed by the mainstream, and I am grateful to be able to say that I knew him as a friend.
Since it's the holiday season, here's a blog entry to lighten the mood: "The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension". :-) The songs in this blog entry are from the 26-song collection attached to this project, in this case these are songs recorded very simply with me sitting at my beat up old piano.
Twenty years ago I was writing the music for a play about the end of the world. Placed twenty thousand years in the future, it was probably ahead of its time: its premise was that our ongoing environmental abuses had destroyed all plant and animal life and made our planet so unstable that the last remaining inhabitants were being forced to leave the Earth forever.
Let's think back to twenty years ago. The 80's, quite frankly, were not a real great decade for environmental consciousness. The "Me" Decade, as it's sometimes called, was looking back at the horrific environmental warnings of the sixties and seventies and saying "Look! Nothing happened! We're all fine! Relax!". This got me thinking that no matter what time in history you're looking at, there's always been a small contingent waving their arms and saying the "end is nigh"! In the 80's, trying to get the audience to imagine that the end was coming as a result of our pollution of the environment seemed to me to have some difficulties: but eventually, I reasoned, there's going to have to be a time when one of those end of the world predictions come true, whether that be tomorrow, or twenty thousand years from now. Was there a way, I wondered, to make those predictions seem more real to the audience right now?
I should mention here that (as I describe in my book) I had been pondering the ideas of branching timelines and important "cusps" that each of us experience as far back as the age of seven, and a wonderfully subversive book by Madeleine L'Engle called "A Wrinkle In Time" that I read a number of times as a child definitely had already caused these ideas to have started brewing way back then.
I should also mention here that I was really worrying about things that were none of my business: I was the composer, and the playwright creating the text for this project had already come up with a story rich in metaphor and texture. But there was still something about the environmental catastrophe angle that, for me, seemed to need a little bit more. So I kept thinking.
This is when the way of imagining reality that became the tenth dimension project first became locked in for me. The first three dimensions are easy: think of a line, that's the first dimension, draw a second line that crosses the first (which creates a plane), that's the second dimension, bend those lines and you're in the third dimension. I was reading an article about quantum physics, and trying to imagine how our reality could be so strange: down at the quantum level, everything is a wave until it's observed, at which point its wavefunction is collapsed into one state or another. How, I asked myself, can the act of observation be what causes subatomic particles to stop being waves? It was just too weird. The way I decided to explain it to myself, then, was that this must mean that those waves exist in the fifth dimension, and that it is us moving down our 4D line of time, picking one part of the waveform out from the other, that gives us the quantum observer effect. But what, I asked myself, if this was also happening not just at the quantum level, but also within our physical reality of spacetime? If we think of our timeline as being in the fourth dimension, then that would mean that there are other parts of the fifth dimension where end of the world predictions had already come true, and that if you wanted to get to those other timelines you would have to jump through the sixth dimension to get there.
I remember sitting in a coffeeshop with the playwright, excitedly drawing little diagrams of lines and branches on a napkin and showing how you could fold the napkin to jump from one reality to another. This, I said to him, is how you can explain how the end of the world is constantly coming: because if it had already come, we wouldn't be around anymore to ask why these end of the world predictions never seem to come true. This would mean, I reasoned, that at the end of the play the characters were waiting to be rescued by someone from one of these other realities where the end of the world hadn't happened yet: some place out there in the fifth or sixth dimension. And the clincher, for me, was that once we got to the seventh dimension that was as far as the logic could be taken, and the fact that so many spiritual and mystical systems also assigned a special significance to the number seven seemed to add to the impact of what I was imagining.
Now I'll be the first to admit that I may not have explained these ideas back then as well as I could have, but the upshot is that the playwright looked at me like I was crazy and the conversation was dropped. So. Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea about a way to imagine how our reality is constructed, out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, and that was where the idea and I stayed. Over the following two decades I showed these concepts to a number of other people, trying to get them interested in working on projects that explored these ideas: some people seemed to get what I was talking about but there were also quite a number who gave me that "you're crazy" look.
Still, for me, the idea never went away, and about five years ago I decided to write some songs about the ramifications of all this: let's just say my obsession was still strong, because in my spare time I ended up writing over forty songs in about two months surrounding the ideas that sprang for me from this way of imagining reality. In the back of my mind I was planning that some day these songs would end up on a CD with a little booklet explaining the ideas. As it turns out, that CD project ended up flipped on its head, because I ended up with a 220 page book about these ideas, and the lyrics to 26 of those songs I wrote back then are printed at the end of the book.
Okay. Now let's move on from the cheery topic of the End of the World, to talk about Death.
Four years ago, in 2004, I almost died. I went in for routine laparoscopic surgery to have my gall bladder removed, and the surgeon accidentally sliced open a large (and unusually positioned, apparently) vein on my liver. My entire chest cavity quickly filled with blood, making it impossible for them to see exactly where the bleeding was coming from, so they jammed some packing into the general area and closed me up. I woke up the next day blown up like a large balloon with almost half of my blood not flowing in my veins, but pooled in my chest and gut. The surgeon explained that this was the best option, because the blood was pressing on my vital organs from the outside, and that if they had drained the blood off, my blood pressure would have dropped to the point where I most likely would have gone into shock and died.
The internal bleeding took several days to stop completely, and it took almost three months before all of that blood in my gut had been absorbed back into my system and I stopped looking (and feeling!) like I was very pregnant. So there I was, lying in the hospital, with my family putting on a brave face for me but knowing how close it had been. Within a day or two of this disaster, my eldest son was at my bedside, and I again started trying to tell him about this way of imagining reality: although he didn't give me the "you're crazy" look (bless him for that), he did confess later on that he presumed this was just the ravings of a man stoned on morphine.
But that's not where our story about death ends.
About two and a half years ago, in 2005, I went on a trip to Australia. Up to that point in my adult life I had been reading mostly science fiction novels and Stephen King thrillers for my entertainment, and of course the never-ending stream of equipment manuals I was constantly poring through as part of my day job as a composer and studio owner. But it was around this time that I had decided to start reading more "serious" science books, and that's why the light reading I took with me to Australia was by physicist Michio Kaku, an eye-opening book called "Hyperspace: a Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension".
Now, some people will tell you that my way imagining reality is not the one that's currently taught in physics classes, but what kept happening for me as I read Kaku's book was that I could see ways that string theory and cosmology could quite easily be pasted onto what I had been thinking. More importantly, what that book showed me is that my way of imagining didn't go far enough, because it accounted only for the universe we live in, as a point in the seventh dimension. What, I reasoned, if the other different-inital-conditions universes Kaku was talking about were other "points" in the seventh dimension? My immediate inspiration was that this meant the line, branch, fold pattern I had already imagined to get to the seventh dimension could be repeated a third time, leaving us with absolutely every possible expression of reality up there within the tenth dimension.
But we're still talking about death here. So on my way back from Australia to Canada I developed blood clots in my legs (a not uncommon problem from sitting too long on the plane), which gradually migrated to my lungs. Feeling increasingly weak and short of breath in the weeks that followed, I finally got to the point where I couldn't even fall asleep because I kept having to gasp for breath, and I ended up in the hospital's Cardiac Surveillance Ward for almost two weeks, hooked up to heart monitors and that lovely oxygen tube.
For someone looking for a two week holiday, I highly recommend the Cardiac Surveillance Ward (just make sure you're in there with nothing actually wrong with your heart!): the nurses are friendly and work very hard to keep you calm and peaceful. The beds are comfortable, and once the blood thinners they put me on started to work and the clots in my lungs started to clear, I actually felt pretty good.
So there I was, with this recent insight about how my way of imagining reality could interface with leading-edge theories about cosmology and extra dimensions. I had my wife Gail bring in my laptop and during my two week stay in the hospital, I wrote the first draft of my book. I've been asked more than once what drugs I was taking when I wrote all my unusual ideas down: but lots of people still think I'm kidding when I say I was on "oxygen"!
During the following year, I took that ninety page first draft I had written in the hospital and did a lot more reading about physics and cosmology. I was thrilled to discover that my way of blending quantum waves and branching timelines from twenty years before was in fact a real and recognized scientific theory, first advanced by Hugh Everett III, and it was commonly known as the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics. Everett went to his grave in 1982 largely unrecognized for the significance of his work, but over the past ten years or so his theory has been increasingly embraced by the modern physics community.
And while I was adding all this research into my book, I also created the audio soundtrack for an eleven-minute animation I was envisioning, that would more clearly illustrate those concepts I had been drawing on napkins in coffeeshops twenty years before. The talented folks at OH! Media here in Regina Saskatchewan Canada worked with me to turn my simple hand-drawn sketches into the interesting visuals which are seen in the book and the animation, and in the accompanying website which was launched at the end of June 2006. Within a few days, the website vaulted to popularity, and this project became known all over the world.
If anything, the project continues to gradually become more popular now because of the growing fascination people are having with the middle ground I'm trying to portray: a place where science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics can be shown to all be talking about the same thing. The website is currently averaging almost two million hits a month, and my little book, written as I lay in a hospital bed wondering if my heart was about to do me in, has been sold all over the world.
Why has this project been so popular? Because it isn't just about physics: it's about creativity, and inspiration, and souls, and memes (which are ideas that can be transmitted across time and space). It's about the place where information equals reality (a quantum physics idea that applies to many other things), which in our modern accelerated world of information, means people with shared beliefs are connecting to each other more quickly than ever before.
And, with the increasing fascination these days over the Mayan Calendar's predictions of the "end of time" happening in 2012, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil predicting a rapidly approaching "Singularity" where humans and technology merge, the fact that this project began as a way of thinking about the End of the World adds new resonance (but to be clear, both Kurzweil and promoters of the Mayan Calender are not talking about an apocalypse, they are instead talking about a great leap forward in the way our conscious minds interface with space and time... so, not an End of THE World, but an end to the antiquated ways of our current world).
Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Now I'm a guy with an idea that millions of other people around the world have seen and enjoyed, and which more and more people are becoming convinced is not crazy at all, and just may be the truth about the nature of our reality. Perhaps most amazingly, all of this happened with almost no advertising or promotion, just through the power of shared ideas in our modern hyper-connected world. How cool is that?
In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.
Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.
Here's what I say in my book about meditation:
Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?
This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.
When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".
In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".
This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!
Posts
