Entangled Awareness and OBEs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Rob

Next: Changing Reality

I Remember Flying

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Soe2swgtsE

Last post was a song about contemplating death. One of the central ideas of Imagining the Tenth Dimension is that the system that represents our consciousness is independent from but interacting with the system that represents physical reality. Within that framework, what happens when we die? I believe that the "chain of attention" that represents a personality collapsing the indeterminate wave of possibilities that we look back upon as the line of time has a choice at (or near) death - it can continue to focus on the line of time (Ghosts of Flight 401, anyone?) or it can disperse into its component memes. Here's a few paragraphs from chapter seven ("The Paradoxes of Time Travel") of my book:

It should come as no surprise that the science fiction authors of more recent decades are the source of a cornucopia of delights when it comes to discussions of the nature of time and space. The gifted science fiction author Greg Bear wrote an excellent series of books (“Eon”, “Eternity”, and “Legacy”) in which a privileged class of scientists acquires the ability to navigate through the worldlines that represent the alternate futures and pasts of our universe. Mr. Bear is blessed with the ability to write science fiction that incorporates enough hard science to make his suppositions feel very real, and the “theory of the universe” which he implies within his writing–in not just these particular novels but a number of his others as well–tends to be completely compatible with the multi-dimensional nature of reality as we are describing it here. I owe him a debt of gratitude for the ways which his writing has expanded my own concepts of how space, time and consciousness work together.
Likewise, Stephen Baxter’s “Manifold” series of novels eloquently express the processes of repetition and exploration which are implied within these pages, and are useful in expanding one’s concept of what our universe’s different pasts and futures could contain. In particular, his descriptions of what the “end of the universe” could be like were influential in some of the ideas expressed in these pages.
It could be that there are other ways of navigating through higher dimensions that don’t require us to invent a time machine. What if vivid dreams were actually our minds navigating through other fifth-dimensional realities as we sleep? What if dreams that had illogical/unpredictable jumps in them were because of sixth-dimensional “folds” that jumped us from one fifth-dimensional line to another? What if dreams of flying were actual memories of parts of our system of memes and beliefs (or, if you prefer, our soul) remembering what is it like to be free of our physical bodies and navigate through multi-dimensional time and space, free and unfettered? We’ll explore ideas such as this more in chapter nine.

Personally, I have had vivid dreams of being able to "fly" (or perhaps "levitate" would be a better word for the experience) for as long as I can remember. I had another of those dreams just last night, as a matter of fact. Here are the lyrics to my song about this idea, which is one of the 26 songs associated with my book.

I REMEMBER FLYING
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I remember flying
Flying so high
I’d push off from the ground
And push into the sky
I would leave the surly bonds
Of gravity behind
I remember flying
From some other time

I remember floating
Ascending to the clouds
Achieving elevation
Then descending to the ground
I remember thinking
It was natural as can be
To be up there floating

I remember moving
In languid slow motion
Like some giant creature
Deep in the ocean
Flying, diving, swooping, soaring, climbing, looping, laughing...

I remember flying
From so long before
And I think that there will come a day
I’ll be flying once more
I remember flying
From more than my dreams
I wish I was flying
Right now

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions

The simultaneous wave/particle nature of reality means that many things that appear to us as particles are waves just being observed in a certain state. By the time we have arrived at the tenth dimension as the enfolded timeless whole (as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran), we have finally reached what some people think of as God, or a state of enlightenment (as referred to in Tom Huston's article about this project in the current issue of What Is Enlightenment?, or the ultimate theory of everything.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I spend a lot of time talking about triads, insisting that all dualities have a third option, which can be both, neither, or no choice. Our physical world interacts with a world of memes and spirit, and the third option that results can be life as we know it, or it can be just the timeless whole that represents every possibility contained within the multiverse. But the dualities of one order pushing against another as we move along our line of time (a line that is actually created by a series of slices, here we go again with that simultaneous wave/particle stuff) allow us to see that this instant in time is a slice of a waveform, and that waveform is reflected in the beautiful and complex universe that we see around us.

Waveforms are interesting, because one waveform can incorporate many different frequencies simultaneously. So, a simple single line drawn from the big bang to the end of the universe can be overlaid with the many different waveforms representing the many possible expressions of reality, and the organizing dynamics that push against each other to create the preference for one kind of reality over another in different parts of the multiverse.

One of the reviewers for my book on Amazon.com has this to say:

"The present exposition is an imaginative and strangely "musical" way of imaging superimposed dimensions--not surprising perhaps, since the author among his achievements also is a musician. Still, the treatise has relevance for physicists. It is also pleasurable to read."

(thanks for the kind words!).

I suppose, since I spend a lot of my work day staring at waveforms, thinking of reality as being a complex waveform precipitated from potentials contained within the higher dimensions doesn't seem like much of a leap to me. Once you arrive at this idea, you have a way of explaining entrainment (how like attracts like, how attitude affects outcome, how eating live veggies imparts healthful vibrations, how charismatic or depressed personalities can immediately impart their "vibe" to a room full of people, how "Sync" as described by Steven Strogatz can cause order to arise out of chaos, how thoughts become things, and so on).

Thinking of our reality as a waveform also shows how there are always certain sets of "you can't get there from here" points in our physical reality (both past and future), but how a reality of memes and spirit can move more freely across time and space. This week in the blog dedicated to lucid dreaming, "Dreaming Life" , host Ben Q. published an interview with me where we discuss some of those ideas. I encourage you to check out this fascinating blog on a regular basis.

One of the most unusual and convincing examples of how reality could be constructed from waveforms, and the possiblity that the mind can be used to change our reality came to me a few months ago from Deena Zalkind Spear, whose lovely book "Ears of the Angels" tells a story most of us would have thought unbelievable, had it not been collaborated by so many intelligent and sensitive classical musicians. Told with a self-deprecating sense of humor, Deena's book is a pleasure to read, and I recommend it highly if you're looking for something that will challenge your limited worldview of physical reality.

Finally, while we're talking about vibrations and waveforms, we have now posted my song "Everything Fits Together" to a site called "JamGlue", which allows you to remix all of the instrumental and vocal parts to the song in whatever way that pleases you (click on the Remix button to see the song as six sets of waveforms, and you may want to work through the tutorials on the site to see what the possibilities are). These "stems" (as we call them in the audio industry) can also be downloaded from Amie Street, so if you have an audio sequencer of your own, I invite you to cut and paste this material to your heart's content. And please, email me mp3s of any of your mashups of this song you think are worth listening to (rob at tenthdimension dot com), and I will post them at a future date. These songs are released under a Creative Commons license, basically this says you are free to play with and re-edit this material as long as you give me credit as the original composer, and do not sell your remixes.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS: The blog in which I originally published the lyrics to this song can be found here. And three videos of "Everything Fits Together" are below, just for fun:



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





A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI