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

The Stream

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz2Lx4DLNUQ

Two days ago, I was awakened by a vivid dream. The content was unusual enough that I immediately sat down at my computer and published it as my last blog entry, which was called News From the Future.

If you read that entry, you will have noticed that I omitted the fact that this story had come to me in a dream. Why did I do that? Because I know that there are many out there who have been trained to reject dreams as nothing more than random bits of junk, just the brain sorting through its data. On the other hand, I know that there are regular readers of this blog who completely accept the idea that dream states are plugged into extra-dimensional patterns, alternate realities not part of our own, and in that sense are not that different from the visions a Shaman might witness while in an altered state of consciousness.

It's possible, too, that both might be equally true: that the brain, in the process of sorting through recently acquired memories, is plugging into memes that exist in the sense that Richard Dawkins meant when he originally coined the term: memes are information patterns, ideas, or beliefs, that exist outside the restrictions of linear time.

At the end of that previous entry, I listed some of the recent news articles I had read in New Scientist and Scientific American which seemed to connect to my dream, and I also listed some of my blog entries which have played with similar ideas in the past. Clearly, the idea that some unconscious/subconscious part of my mind was fitting all those ideas together is easy to see, regardless of whether you believe in ideas advanced in blog entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe and Our Non-Local Universe which say that there is now scientific proof that our universe is connected together in ways that transcend the limitations of the fourth dimension. Could there really be a "stream" of connectedness that our minds are sharing, as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor proposed in her marvelous My Stroke of Insight?

I've talked a few times before about twine.com, the brainchild of web 3.0 pioneer Nova Spivack. Here's a link to a recently published essay of his called Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web. In it, he discusses the quandary I presented in News From the Future: as tools like twitter make the web increasingly fluid, how does an end user make sense of the deluge? How do we filter the sludge out from what we really need? Nova concludes his essay like this:

The emergence of the Stream is an interesting paradigm shift that may turn out to characterize the next evolution of the Web, this coming third-decade of the Web's development. Even though the underlying data model may be increasingly like a graph, or even a semantic graph, the user experience will be increasingly stream oriented.

Whether Twitter, or some other app, the Web is becoming increasingly streamlike. How will we filter this stream? How will we cope? Whoever can solve these problems first and best is probably going to get rich.

Dreams of wealth aside, what I find so fascinating about these ideas of convergence and increasingly instantaneous connection across minds is the possibility that technology really could give us some bootstraps to pull ourselves up into a new mode of connectedness. In that sense, what we are talking about could be related to Kurzweil's Singularity just as much as it could be related to Zen Buddhism. And with my own project, getting people to see their underlying connectedness has been a running theme from the beginning. Here are some past entries where I've explored those ideas further:
Tens, Google, and the Expanding Universe
I Know You, You Know Me
You are Me and We are All Together
Daily Parrying
Where are You?
Poll 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?
Poll 37 - Do Shamans See Other Dimensions?

Finally, I wanted to mention a new scientific study just published by researchers from UCLA, who used high-resolution MRIs to discover that people who meditate regularly had "significantly larger volumes" in certain key parts of their brains. Isn't that amazing?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - Here's an article published yesterday by TechCrunch called "Jump Into the Stream".
Next: Evolution's Fast Lane

Polls Archive 37 - Do shamans see other dimensions?

A direct link to the above video is at https://youtu.be/9kWjfkFIQCk

Poll 37 - "In his book 'Supernatural', Graham Hancock notes the remarkable similarities between ancient cave paintings from across tens of thousands of years and around the world. This shows that ancient shamans were able to see patterns from other dimensions." Poll ended April 11 2009. 38% agreed while the rest disagreed.

I've only recently finished reading this book. (At almost 500 pages, Supernatural is not a book you read in a night!) Along the way, I've alternated between wrestling with my own in-grained skepticism and a feeling that Hancock is lifting the veil on extremely important material. His work connects to a number of the ideas I've promoted with my project: that our reality is connected together in ways unseen, that there are patterns that exist outside of spacetime that are participating in the ongoing process of creation, and that there are a number of ways for people to become more sensitized to these hidden processes. In my book, I lumped altered states resulting from meditation, trance, repetitive tribalistic activities like dance and drumming, and visions seen under the influence of hallucinogens as all being part of the same kinds of processes that could be allowing people to glimpse these patterns, and my song "From the Corner of My Eye" is also about that supposition. In my blog entry The Shaman I added more traumatic experiences such as fasting or intense pain to that list (as these are also not uncommon in shamanistic practices from around the world), but while doing so I noted that even though all of these altered states I've listed may somehow be related, many people immediately jump to the conclusion that any discussion of altered states is really just talking about drugs. This, I think, is unfortunate because it can allow some people to jump to the conclusion that altered states are "unnatural".

For baby boomers like me, most of us have had it drummed into us that anything seen under the influence of mind-altering drugs is not to be taken seriously, that it is merely the chemistry of the brain being disrupted, and no good will come of it. When I was writing my book, including psychedelics in the list of useful altered states for sensing extra dimensions was an intuitive leap based upon reading other's reports, since I have no experience with these substances myself. Still, as I've documented elsewhere, I was surprised upon the release of my book to be contacted by so many people who had taken LSD, mushrooms, and so on, telling me that what they saw under the influence of these substances seemed easier to explain within the context of my way of visualizing the dimensions. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most of what I thought they were talking about were geometric patterns and time-shifted artifacts... glimpses into the fifth spatial dimension. Almost six months after launching my project, I decided to set up an "altered states" area over at the tenth dimension forum as people with seemingly-related drug experiences kept contacting me. Since then, I've heard more and more stories from persons using DMT, ayahuasca, salvia divinorum and other drugs, and those people have described some really mind-boggling visions: but to me these were no more mind-boggling than the insights revealed, for instance, in Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's journey into the connections of her own mind to the universe that she recounted in her marvelous "My Stroke of Insight".

In Supernatural, Graham Hancock provides a context to altered states of all kind that is much deeper than what I had suspected, but now that he has done so I see more of the same connections in the stories I have been told by people writing to me in emails or at my forum. He makes some very persuasive arguments that the visions seen under those states have remarkable connections and similarities across tens of thousands of years and around the world, and this highly-detailed repetition alone indicates that our minds are really being allowed to "tune in" to other modalities of existence that actually do exist, but which were inaccessible without entering these altered states (in the same way that a radio can "tune in" to different radio stations - the waveforms coming from those other stations are already out there, just waiting to be heard).

To be clear, what Hancock is referring to here is not just similarities in geometric shapes or visions of bright lights, he has a long list of iconic images and creatures that occur again and again from the recorded visions of ancient man right up to modern time. He makes the bold assertion that these experiences are at the root of the development of civilization, and that all of the world's religions have as their source the ecstatic visionary experiences of those who shared their visions of these "other worlds" with others around them.

I would suggest reading the following blog entries, in the order below, if you would like to follow my reasoning for supporting the challenging conclusions of Graham Hancock's groundbreaking book. And if you have read the above paragraphs and decided to reject these ideas outright (as did 61% of the visitors answering the above poll question), I have some sympathy for that position: it is only through the process of reading Mr. Hancock's book that I have come around to an acceptance of these ideas, and I am almost certainly not going to convince any skeptics in a few paragraphs when it took Mr. Hancock almost 500 pages to carefully lay out his case for these ideas.

The Holographic Universe
The Shaman
You Have a Shape and a Trajectory
Creativity and the Quantum Universe
The Comedian
Where Are You?
Our Non-Local Universe
Illusions and Reality

To finish, here's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek song about those ancient mysteries that connect ancient shamans to you and I: "What I Feel for You".
A direct link to the above video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w06IRgChaMY

Next - Polls Archive 38 - Do Musicians Have More Empathy?

Our Non-Local Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBPBc4iZtro

Entanglement-at-a-distance does physically exist, in the sense that it has physically verifiable (and verified) consequences. Which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered.
- theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat

(I've talked before about the underlying patterns of information that create our universe, and of ideas that connect us all together, and how much I like the term Richard Dawkins gave us for this concept: "memes". Memes, as ideas that instantaneously connect together "outside of spacetime" are a great example of thinking about our universe from a timeless perspective. I saw another great example of the kind of synchronicities that arise as people around the world think similar thoughts right after I finished writing today's blog entry. The above quote is from a blog entry posted just a few days ago by award-winning theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat. Click here to read his blog entry in full, and you will see a great many parallels to the blog entry you're about to read.)

Principle of locality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. Quantum mechanics predicts through Bell's inequality the direct violation of this principle. Experiments have shown that quantum mechanically entangled particles violate this principle: they have been shown to influence each other when physically separated by 18 km, thus the principle of locality is false.

As the above wikipedia definition clearly states, our universe is non-local, despite what our intuition might tell us as we look around at our world. Understanding that our 4D spacetime is really just a shadow of patterns that exist outside of time, within the fifth dimension and above (see The Holographic Universe) gives us a way to visualize how entangled particles can be connected in ways that seem impossible, and this also gives us a way to see how the Shamanistic viewpoint regarding hidden forces which are outside our physical domain makes sense in this context: it's all part of our non-local universe.

The above picture comes from the National Human Genome Research Institute website.

The National Institute of Health published an article recently about ground-breaking new DNA analysis procedures that look at the helix not as a sequential ladder, but as a 3D shape. To quote from the article:

The sequence of the 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome holds the answers to many questions pertaining to human development, health and disease. Consequently, much research aimed at understanding the genome has focused on establishing the information encoded by the linear order of DNA bases. In the new study, however, researchers focused on how those bases chemically interact with each other to coil and fold the DNA molecule into a variety of shapes.

"We often think of DNA as a string of letters on a computer screen and forget that this string of letters is a three-dimensional molecule. But shape really matters," said Dr. Margulies, who is an investigator in NHGRI's Genomic Technology Branch. "Proteins that influence biological function by binding to DNA recognize more than just the sequence of bases. These binding proteins also see the surface of the DNA molecule and are looking for a shape that allows a lock-and-key fit."

I've talked many times about Richard Dawkins and his "River Out of Eden" concept, thinking about genes as being shapes that are connected across time (or as I like to say, the fourth spatial dimension, since for us "time" is just one of the two possible directions in that dimension). When we've already been encouraged to think of a genome as being a fourth dimensional shape (or as Bruce Sterling likes to say, a "spime"), I have to admit I assumed that 3D analysis of DNA was already in place!

This all relates to trying to think about our reality as existing outside of spacetime - if you think of reality as being only a linear sequence of events relentlessly moving forward on our "arrow of time", you are missing an important part of the picture.

Discover Magazine put up an amusing article on their website a couple of weeks ago, called Twenty Things You Didn't Know About Time. The last two entries in particular caught my eye:

19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

With my project, I insist that those two ideas are related - both "before" and "after" the beginning and end of our universe are the same state: but to understand that idea requires a perspective which is "outside" of time as we know it. One of my personal favorite blog entries about this idea is "Local Realism Bites the Dust", which you might want to check out.

Quantum physics tells us that our reality is connected together in ways that seem impossible: instantaneous effects with widely separated but entangled particles make no sense within our sequential physical world... unless you can embrace the idea that our universe is non-local. An article in the March issue of Scientific American, written by David Z. Albert and Rivka Galchen, offers an explanation of Bell's Theorem which arrives at this important concluding paragraph:

Researchers carried out experiments using entangled photons instead of electrons (which alters the angles to use but makes the experiment technically much less difficult) and found results that conformed with quantum mechanics’s predictions. And so by Bell’s theorem there must not be any determinate values carried by those photons. And because that contradicts EPR’s conclusion, the assumption that nature is local is also wrong. And so the universe we live in cannot be local.

Our non-local universe allows for connections that transcend the "now" that we are in at this instant, and that is not some kind of mystical mumbo jumbo, that is an accepted scientific fact. Since that idea can be used to explain so many of the other mysteries we've been exploring with this project (most recently in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Shaman, and The Musician) only adds weight to this conclusion, as non-intuitive as it may seem.

Embrace your non-locality! And enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

Where Are You?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Befk-LZVOg0

Laughing and crying, you know, it's the same release
- Joni Mitchell, from her 1974 song "People's Parties"

As I mentioned two entries ago in The Comedian, I'm from the province of Saskatchewan, Canada, and am proud to have been working on the hit Canadian TV show Corner Gas for the past six years (Corner Gas is a smart comedy about people living in a fictional town in Saskatchewan). Artist/musician Joni Mitchell, quoted above, is also from Saskatchewan, and last blog entry we talked about the new scientific studies showing how learning to play music can rewire the brain towards having more empathy. Empathy has been a running theme for the last several entries, and we're continuing that discussion here.

When I typed the above lyrics into google one of the top hits that came up was this:
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22178/56973-healing-tonics--laughing-crying
This is an article written by Shari Covens which blends ancient mysticism with a modern viewpoint. She mentions the seven chakras, and as I've mentioned before seven also holds an important position within my way of visualizing the dimensions: my song Seven Levels is about that idea, and its opening verse includes a mention of chakras as one of the fascinating possible tie-ins to this concept.

Stay with me now, these threads really do all weave together in their own strange way. Joni Mitchell started her career in the 60's as a folk singer, and sometimes played at a folk club here in my home town called "The Fourth Dimension" (another very tiny tie-in to my project). Joni Mitchell released her first album in 1968. That same year, a psychedelic folk music band from Scotland called the Incredible String Band released a song called Douglas Traherne Harding.

Last month we also talked about John Thomas Bryant, creator of Astrotometry. Here's a lovely video John recorded of artist/musician Margaret Fabrizio, talking about Douglas Harding:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=WzN76a8Ubls

Which leads us, finally, to the title of this blog entry: Where Are You?

There's a site called Perceiving Reality that asks the same question. If you have nine minutes, watch this thought-provoking video, which seems to be connected in various ways to the discussions we've been having here:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0drT_L4G8w8

If you got to the end of the above video, you may have been as surprised as I was to see that it was about the teachings of the Kabbalah, a system of ancient mysticism I know little about, but which seems to have some very interesting connections to my way of visualizing reality - including, as others have pointed out to me, and as I showed in my blog entry Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers, some fascinating parallels between the helix logo created for this project and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

Here's another video that connects to all this - Maxwell Igan talks about the "nothing that is behind your eyes" and how that ties into consciousness and empathy, vibrations and patterns, connectedness and love.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=v9AH7JZGAp0

Understanding the ways that we are all connected has been a running theme with my project. I've talked a number of times lately about two of my blog entries from last fall which use Beatles lyrics to tie together modern physics and ancient wisdom - I Know You, You Know Me and You are Me and We are All Together seem to keep coming up in this conversation. In the latter of those two entries, I described a highly unusual dream I'd had a few days before: I'm not in the habit of recounting dreams in this blog, but this one was quite different from any others. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came upon the Maxwell Igan clip above, which would have been released just a week or so after I had my dream, and this blog entry from comedian Joe Rogan, in which he talks about having had the same insight this past summer:

http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/232

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that "we are all one" is some new idea that has just arisen within the last year - I discuss the same idea in my book, and of course various threads of spiritual and mystical thought have said the same thing for millennia. What I'm remarking upon here is only my own personal journey, where I had an insight, then was surprised to find other people expressing the same ideas in short order, and that experience is part of the pattern-matching process that all of us go through as we recognize the connections between the memes all around us.

In the above blog Joe describes how high he was when he came up with his insight, and of course the ideas I'm talking about from those Beatles lyrics are also connected to their experiments with psychedelics. The fact that I came up with the same idea without drugs (as I've said many times now, I have no personal experience with psychedelics) is something I find very interesting: and as I just mentioned in The Comedian, I'm becoming more and more intrigued as I read Graham Hancock's book Supernatural about what that could mean. Is it possible that the visions seen while in various states of altered consciousness (which includes much more than just drug-induced states), as experienced by Shamans throughout mankind's existence, and continuing to be part of many very different people's experience up to today, might be more real than we've been led to suspect? Is it possible that shared thought patterns and new inspirations are giving us tangible glimpses into the memes, the patterns of information that exist outside of time and space? And as I've said many times in this blog, and also touched upon in my book: could meditation, trance, and other altered states be providing ways for us to glimpse other aspects of our reality which are just as real but hidden from view?

This position is easily ridiculed, I know. As I've discussed in entries like Daily Parrying and Ever Seen an Aura?, there has been a tradition, particularly within the scientific community of the past century, to dismiss anything that acknowledges the participation of our consciousness within the creation of the reality we are witnessing as being superstition and ignorance. But what are we to make of it when scientists start expressing related ideas about how all matter is connected together, about hidden dimensions that hold patterns that create our reality, about there being ways of viewing reality in which "time" has no meaning? Let me finish this blog with a famous quote from Albert Einstein:

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

Was Albert smoking the same stuff as Joe? Probably not, and neither was I. But each of us, in our own way, are describing the same idea about how each of us is part of a larger whole.

Where are you in all this? You're right at the very center of your own version of the universe. But you are connected to everyone else, and to everything else, in ways that are very important to remember: and as more and more people realize that, the world becomes a better place.

To finish, the song we mentioned above - our own universe is defined at the seventh dimension, a fact that has mystical, spiritual and scientific connections. The song is called "Seven Levels".

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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - After writing this entry about memes and hidden patterns that connect us together, I came upon an entry posted last week in C. Om's What Is Really Good? blog which adds some thought-provoking tangents to this question - click here to read "Ever Seen Yourself?".

Next: More on Augmented Reality

The Comedian

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0XhvytW7TI

Last blog we talked about Scott McCloud, comics artist and well-known author: I've talked before about his insightful book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Scott makes great observations about the underlying connections that give different graphic approaches their impact and underlying meaning - to my way of thinking, his ideas tie very nicely to my own discussions about memes as extra-dimensional patterns that connect us together in ways unseen.

In The Shaman and Modern Shamans, we talked about how this way of seeing reality is a basic part of a shaman's job description: as it says in the wikipedia article about this topic, a shaman bases their actions on the understanding that there are invisible forces that come from outside our reality. Graham Hancock's book Supernatural makes some fascinating arguments that shamanic visions are not just "hallucinations" (images produced by disrupted brain chemistry), but may actually be glimpses into patterns, shapes, and even life-forms that exist across other dimensions! Again, if you're willing to go there, it seems very easy to tie those claims to my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed.

In You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, we quoted from a New Scientist Magazine article about MRI studies done on an impersonator, showing how a professional impersonator was using different parts of his brain to "become" his different characters, activating parts of his brain that are not used in normal speech.

How does an actor "become" a different person? Empathy. Next blog, we're going to talk more about empathy and what that concept means within my way of visualizing the dimensions: but today I'd like to talk about another group of people who use empathy in their work: comedians. Here's a clip from the opening scene of the very first episode of a hit television series produced right here in my home province of Saskatchewan, Canada, centered around a gas station in the fictional prairie town of Dog River.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Veu-Cm7aHMw

For the past six years my company, Talking Dog Studios, has had the privilege of creating the music and sound for the above show: Corner Gas, Canada's number one Canadian-produced program. Creator and star Brent Butt has participated in the creative process right from the start to the finish, and as sound guys we've been fascinated to learn Brent's unique viewpoints on what should and shouldn't appear in the final audio mix, and how important these decisions are towards whether an audience will laugh or not. Brent tells us that years of working the comedy clubs have shown him just how subtle the difference can be between a joke the audience finds hilarious and one that gets not much response, and that those subtle changes are what can make a big difference from night to night.

Like any other live art, it can be a magical experience to be part of a crowd that becomes completely engaged with the performer on stage. I've talked before, in entries like Information Equals Reality, Music and the Dance of Creativity, and Magnets and Souls about how the physics concept of entrainment can be related to these ideas. When a skilled comedian like Brent Butt gets a crowd of people laughing, his deep empathy for his audience and masterful timing can make the evening become funnier and funnier: in that sense, empathy is a form of entrainment.

That feedback loop between performer and audience also works in film and television, and shows how important "the ride" as opposed to "the joke" can be: the best comedies, once they get you giggling, can sweep you along, keep you smiling, keep you ready for the next big laugh, and most importantly give you time to laugh before moving on with more stuff. In a live environment, a comedian can play the audience like a conductor plays a symphony orchestra, and as a result every performance can be different depending upon the audience's responsiveness, participation, and what might distract them from "the ride" on a particular evening. In a film or television show (particularly ones like Corner Gas done in the modern style with no laugh track), the writing, performing, editing, and mixing all have to have their focus on understanding where the big laughs are going to be, and what things might distract the audience from getting to those laughs. Brent, my hat is off to you, the huge success of Corner Gas is a testament to your deep understanding of what makes comedy work.

So. A comedian's job, like all great artists, is all about empathy with his audience. Interestingly, a lot of comedians, Brent Butt included, also play a musical instrument. Next blog entry, in The Musician, we'll continue this exploration into empathy, and what connects us together in ways unseen.

To close, here's a clip from rebel comedian Bill Hicks (1961-1994) that takes some of the ideas we've just talked about and expands them into a cosmic view of reality:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7criyE09uy0

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Musician

Creativity and the Quantum Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

There's an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it's called Entangled Life. Let's look at some excerpts from the article:

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus­cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth.

One of the central controversies surrounding my project is whether it's really correct to apply the thinking of quantum mechanics to the macro world: traditionally, science has taught that the weird world of the quantum wave function--where outcomes are derived from probabilities and randomness, and particles can be in more than one place at the same time--is completely separate from the physical world we see around us. One of the main ideas of my project is that all of these quantum effects occur in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth, and this logical application of what makes one spatial dimension "outside" the previous one works all the way up - we've talked about this logic in entries like Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions, Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, and You Can't Get There From Here.

Visualizing the wave function for our universe as coming from the "next dimension up" gives us a way to reconcile how such seemingly strange and unimaginable quantum effects as entanglement and tunneling could be a part of our reality: like the 2D flatlander, who would have some hope of being able to imagine the third spatial dimension as "time" but would find the fourth dimension completely strange and unimaginable, we as 3D creatures are in the same quandary. How can we imagine all this quantum weirdness as being connected to our solid physical world? With my project, I provide a way to visualize the fifth dimension that ties in with that idea and many others.

Here's some more excerpts from that Discover Magazine article:

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics.

To unearth the bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”

This revelation is amazing enough. But then the article goes on to talk about new research that explores other ways in which the quantum world is very much a part of our macro world, imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness. Please do read the entire article, here are three more brief quotes:

• Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. In 2007 Turin... and his hypothesis received support from a paper by four physicists at University College London.
  

• In 2007 four biochemists from the Auton­omous University of Barcelona announced that the secret to green tea’s effectiveness as an anti-oxidant... may also be quantum mechanical. Free radical molecules, by-products of the body’s breakdown of food or environmental toxins, have a spare electron. That extra electron makes free radicals reactive, and hence dangerous as they travel through the bloodstream. But an electron from the catechin (catechins are among the chief organic compounds found in tea, wine, and some fruits and vegetables) can make use of quantum mechanics to tunnel across the gap to the free radical. Quantum tunneling has also been observed in enzymes...

• Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona... speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

Visualizing how much this quantum dance is participating in the creation of the world we see around us is really not that dissimilar to the journeys of discovery that we've just looked at in The Shaman and Modern Shamans. In Music and the Dance of Creativity, we talked about this joyful process of creativity that underlies our universe, and in The Holographic Universe we talked about the new scientific evidence announced in 2009 confirming that for our 4D universe, our "line of time" is not continuous but rather being constructed one planck frame at a time. That new scientific evidence can be added to the list of reasons supporting my conclusion that in order for the quantum world to make sense, we have to see how it is coming from the fifth dimension.

Out of All Possibilities, One is Selected
In entries like Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse, we looked at trying to visualize how our specific universe might be able to "come into focus" from the omniverse, where every possible state exists simultaneously. Let's think about how that is essentially a creative process that we are describing - out of all possibilities, one is selected. Take a close look at Mark Anderson's Discover Magazine article, and his description of how photosynthesis uses quantum effects to achieve such high efficiency. Now, here's a section of that article in which I've substituted some words to help us to see how "quantum weirdness" can also easily be thought of as a description of the creative process:

Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Seeing the probability space of our "fifth dimensional hologram" all around us, waiting with new ideas and inspirations for us to bring into our reality simply by observing some aspect of the wave function of possibilities, is another way of understanding how much the quantum world and our macro world are tied together, all part of the same continuum, and all part of the ongoing creative process that is happening at every instant in every part of our universe.

Enjoy the journey of discovery!

Rob

PS - Here's a song about how these quantum processes are part of the creation and creativity that is all around us, and that we are a part of as we distill one physical reality from the many quantum paths available to us: it's called "Making It Up as I Go".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkehQ97ltA

Next: New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Astrotometry

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDgJ0zDxqDE


In The Shaman, we talked about the definition of Shamanism found in wikipedia:

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

We also talked about visionaries like Terence McKenna, who some have called a Modern Shaman. In the followup to that entry, we talked about other people I would call Modern Shamans, Alex Grey and Grant Morrison.

This time around I'd like to talk about a fascinating fellow who we might call a "technoshaman": John Thomas Bryant. A technoshaman, we could say, is someone who embraces the shamanic principles of there being hidden forces and patterns that come from outside of our perceived reality, but who embraces modern technology as one of the means to study and reveal those hidden connections. John sees technology not only as a conduit for consciousness, but as a new life-form evolving with us inside.

Gravity as a hidden connection
Einstein realized that in order for photons to entangle throughout the cosmos, gravity must somehow cooperate with the movement of light. Einstein resolved the "spooky action at a distance" of quantum mechanics with something he called "Teleparallel Gravitation". Now, Bryant has observed coincidences of solar activity and planetary movements he believes validates Einstein's hypothesis that the Universe has an inherent time-space symmetry.

The great minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Feynman, Wheeler, Hawking all kept trying to get us to visualize time as being something that exists out there, simultaneously, in the same way that space exists out there and all around us. Now, Bryant is working on a brand new system which shows a deeper understanding of these ideas: Bryant is proposing that time folds over multiple axes, and believes the mysteries of the photon can be sorted out by treating it as an indicator of where space-time folds.

He calls his vision of a manifold of space-time the "astrotome". His system of understanding that "tome", that large "book" containing all possible expressions of mass and energy, is called "Astrotometry". John is providing some tantalyzing glimpses into the possibilities of what it means if the sun is actually our "primary time axis" as John refers to it. Could solar features be entwined with events that are approaching us in time here on Earth, like earthquakes, hurricanes, or volcanos? If every thing and every time exists simultaneously, then reverse-time causality, and resonances and nodes that connect the future, the present, and the past together are easier to visualize. And as I reported not long ago in "Google and the Group Mind", this idea has been confirmed by scientists in the lab: there really are experiments that have been conducted now which prove that the future "leaks" back into the present.

Astrotometry
I'd like to quote from John here, because he's able to describe his work much better than I:

In the three dimensional version of Astrotometry, the observed movement of the photon is understood to be a sort of illusion. Astrotometry models matter and energy as node-patterns in standing waveforms. The node-patterns re-materialize from moment to moment in a conservative 3D space where nothing may move without simultaneously effecting and being affected by everything else.

The node patterns are created by "common carrier" waves which ebb and flow from six orthogonal directions. In a seventh movement the resulting node-pattern creates feedback in its carrier as the waves interfere and curl. From the interference patterns the process starts all over. The space where the node-pattern reforms seems the same from the pattern's super-similar perspective. Since time-relative changes in the pattern is the only indication of movement, the relative movement between its moments must be indirectly observed. Astrotometry provides the physics for Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover: the node-pattern isn't actually moving. Matter and energy are being translated through space by the underlying mechanisms of time which fold through as a part of all physical structures.

What is theorized to be moving is not the photon, but the underlying carrier waves. This is why there is a particle-wave duality. Matter materializes and re-materializes in every moment from underlying waveforms that carry it through space. This mechanism provides an explanation for relativistic time and movement.

In Astrotometry, this space between moments is sorted out by observing super-symmetric movements in the cosmos.

You are to be forgiven if you found the above mind-boggling, I do as well. With John's work, I often feel like I'm watching an icy tip sticking out of the water, and I don't really have a clear vision of the giant form that's lurking in the depths below, even though I keep catching glimpses. Nonetheless, I see a lot of connections between his groundbreaking scientific theories and the ideas I've been playing with in my project, in that he's not afraid of embracing the philosophical/metaphysical/spiritual aspects of imagining connections that transcend space and time.

John has generously created a large volume of work on YouTube as he works through this huge cloud of ideas, and he has three different channels you should check out:
www.youtube.com/astrotometry
www.youtube.com/cosabio
www.youtube.com/patternsinchaos

Here's a few of my favorite movies John has posted, but there are many more to choose from, as I'm sure you'll find when you go to the above links.

The Moon Illusion - I believe this is the first video of John's I ever saw. If you've never heard of the Moon Illusion, you'll be in for a surprise! After I started showing this video around to people my brother-in-law Russell told me that this is one of the things scout leaders will show their troops while out on overnight camping trips, and the way to make the moon illusion go away is to bend over and look at it upside down through your legs!

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Aml_nDO3c

Visualizing Astrotometry: gets into John's underlying theory more specifically, a useful introduction.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w1719dBfB0


On Quake Predictions: John's theories have allowed him to make some very interesting connections between earthquakes and solar flares, this is where we start to understand just how huge the concepts he's playing with really are.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1MXQodT4Tg

On the Use of Electrical Technology is one of my favorite movies of John's, I love the physical journey he takes us on while also exploring his unusual ideas.

A direct link to the above is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQtzL_6amtg

Part 1 - October 14 - Sunspot 1005: with this video, John shows us his some of the more ancient mystical connections he sees to his work. This is another of his most far-reaching and challenging videos, I love it.

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

I would invite you to go check out John's website, www.astrotometry.com, for a more in-depth introduction to his work. Also, please note that John wants us to use his website as the central reference for the latest thinking about astrotometry, as for him this is all very a much a work in progress.

In the last video above, John poses this question: "What's the difference between a shaman and a sorcerer? The shaman uses his knowledge to benefit the community, and the sorcerer uses his knowledge to benefit himself." In that sense, John is a shaman: his goals are all about finding ways to understand the world, and to heal it with a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that create the reality we are all a part of. For me, that shamanistic drive is one of things I find most interesting about John's work, and I wish him every success in getting his unusual scientific studies out into the world.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: You Have a Shape and a Trajectory

Modern Shamans

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKfTzZO7mGU

In The Shaman, we talked about the idea that shamanism deals with hidden forces, spirit worlds, and seeing things the rest of us cannot. From there, we moved to Terence McKenna, one of a great many visionaries from the latter part of the twentieth century who were interested in psychedelics as a way some have used for opening their minds up to those hidden patterns that create our reality - an idea that, for me, connects very much to trying to imagine how our reality could be shadows of extra-dimensional patterns and shapes.

By the time some are calling Terence McKenna a "modern shaman", it could be argued that we have moved beyond the proper definition of the word. Shamans, some people insist, are not part of the tribe, they are outcasts who in modern times might be the ones who end up in a psychiatric hospital under surveillance! While McKenna may not have been a "mainstream" figure during his lifetime, I think it would be stretching things to say that he was "not part of the tribe". We talked in that same blog about the ongoing controversy over whether the Native American visionary Black Elk should be called a shaman, when "medicine man" is the more correct term within his culture.

Shamans, Modern Shamans, Technoshamans...
With all that in mind, please accept my apologies if you object to the use of the word "shaman" in the broader definition I'm playing with here. When I think of the phrase modern shaman (an interesting pair of words to search for in google) I think of people who are blending modern viewpoints with ancient mysticism, sacred geometry with physics, spirituality with science. Another useful term that relates to all this is "technoshaminsm". In the wikipedia article on that word we see this:

Technoshamanism is a term used to describe various methods of integrating modern technology into shamanic practice (see shamanism). Methods of doing this include such diverse disciplines as synthetic drug use, modern psychotherapy, and raving.

Technoshamans generally embrace the view that mystical experiences are at least partially biological in nature; as such, they find the use of biological and mechanical means to influence and even induce mystical states and experiences perfectly acceptable. Technoshamanism is strongly related to the modern primitive movement.

Let's look at a few people I would call a Modern Shaman, using my admittedly very loose definition of the word:

Grant Morrison
Ever hear of author Grant Morrison, creator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel series The Invisibles? Here's an example of a successful creative individual who is completely willing to talk about the usefulness of psychoactive substances in his work. He has some very "out there" theories about the nature of reality, our relationship to the fifth dimension, how consciousness is participating in all of that, and how we are all connected together: ideas that readers of my blog and my book will recognize as regular themes, but I have to admit to being completely unaware of Grant Morrison's work up to now. Clearly, Mr. Morrison and I have been exploring many of the same ideas and I would now love to read some issues of The Invisibles... and some day I'd love to hear his reaction to my original eleven-minute animation. I warn you, the following video is laced with profanities and he begins by announcing that he's drunk, but keep watching: I think this is a worthwhile video, as Grant has a unique and intellectually challenging point of view.

A direct link to the above video of Grant Morrison speaking at DisInfo is at http://vodpod.com/watch/55396-grant-morrison-disinfo-lecture

Alex Grey
Alex Grey, on the other hand, is someone I've know about for a while: his website is at alexgrey.com. Alex is a New York artist whose work blends psychedelic imagery with archetypal images of the body and the spirit. Like Grant Morrison's ideas, Alex Grey's art portrays imagery that seems to be plugged into many of the same memes I've been exploring with my project: multidimensional geometries, auras, chakras, and a spiritual viewpoint that embraces our connectedness are all themes found regularly in the art of Alex Grey. Here's a trailer for a movie about his work called Entheogen:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=hcOXGmg0x_o. If you go to entheogen.tv you will see that Alex embraces the concept of technoshamanism, so he ties into all of this discussion very deeply.

The concept of sacred geometry comes up regularly in these discussions of the nature of reality and extra dimensions, but that's another blog for another day.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Astrotometry

The Shaman

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

You are the center of the Mandala:

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

Changing your operating system

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


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton