Before I start this entry, here's a new video I posted on YouTube yesterday which is attached to a blog entry from a month ago:
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U



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


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 all along: 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: I've talked about this before in blog entries like Wormholes and Dimensional Folding and Scrambled Eggs.

Black Elk
I was recently introduced to Black Elk, 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 blog entries over the past year: 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
I started this blog with a quote from David Jay Brown. As I 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 with my project: 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). And, 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.

A direct link to the above video is at a 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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

http://revver.com/video/1209427/gevin-giorbran-everything-is-forever/
http://www.everythingforever.com

Seven months ago, my good friend Gevin Giorbran, author of "Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness", took his own life.

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 at www.tenthdimension.com/digital. It also continues to be available through Amazon, Amazon UK, and various other online booksellers. Profits from the sale of Gevin's works will go to the Gevin Giorbran Memorial Fund.

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 at my forum and 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:


    4.0 out of 5 stars 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...

    5.0 out of 5 stars Moving toward symmetry
    By David J. Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.

..."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.

    5.0 out of 5 starsThe 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...

    5.0 out of 5 stars 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.

    5.0 out of 5 stars Exploring Time
    By J. S. Parker (Portland, OR USA)

...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.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S. Here is the last video interview I conducted with Gevin Giorbran, as it turns out this is just a few months before his death:
http://revver.com/video/522811/rob-bryanton-talks-to-special-guest-gevin-giorbran/
And here is a pdf of the first few chapters of Gevin's book as a free sample:
http://www.scribd.com/full/6299234?access_key=key-1vasx9tzpi40k9rspqpq

Are we approaching some sort of global shift in consciousness, and could that be triggered from higher dimensions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

2008 will be the tenth anniversary of the surprising announcement that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, an idea that seems counter-intuitive: if our universe started from high energy/high order (the big bang) and is moving towards low energy/low order (maximum entropy), that implies the image of a clockwork toy that is winding down, and that image does not fit with a universe of accelerating expansion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology

This month's Scientific American features a great article about "branes" and how the accelerating expansion of the universe may be proof of the existence of higher dimensions (I propose this as a possible explanation in my book as well). The article by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo, is called "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride": please check it out.

2008 is also the tenth anniversary of Google, the search engine that has changed the way we interact with information more than any other invention in the history of mankind. "Don't be evil" is their unofficial motto, and that's a great one: the power of Google to inform and guide the general public's impression of what ideas are important and what ideas are popular is immense, and the on-going war from get-rich-quick scammers and spammers who try to manipulate Google's search results for their own profit is a huge part of that story.

The Imagining the Tenth Dimension way of visualizing reality can be used to tie all these ideas together. "Information Equals Reality" has been the prime focus for my blog entries in the last few weeks: this basic idea from quantum physics shows us how "everything fits together", and the desire to find a unity within a diverse range of ideas is what this project is all about.

http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2007/11/information-equals-reality.html

If Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes in the information that is the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all patterns that result from the flip-book of third-dimensional "now"s that we are stringing together from one frame of planck time after another.

In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, sound is an important part of the information being conveyed: for instance, no matter what dimension we are exploring there is the arrow sound effect representing a particular point, a scrape indicating lines being constructed from joining one point to another, and the card-riffling sound effect to show that anything we think of as a continuous line is actually being constructed one point at a time, if we can only look close enough.

Burgess and Quevedo's article explains how our universe might be the result of the interactions of a three-dimensional brane with a seven-dimensional brane, with the ends of certain superstrings constrained by branes they are sliding around within. To use my flipbook analogy, then, we can see how the illusion of continuous reality that we are experiencing is actually a series of 3D states for our 3D universe interacting with a 3D brane, and each observed state is one planck length away from the next: each observed state can be thought of as a page in a gigantic cosmic flipbook. The flipbook from the big bang to "now" appears to be one specific set of flipbook pages (which we think of as the 4D line of time), but each "next available now" page that could possibly be selected for our flipbook comes from a fifth dimensional probability space, and the fifth dimension is where Kaluza proved our reality is defined. Every parallel universe that could have resulted from our big bang, whether it is observed or not, exists as a potential "flipbook" in the sixth dimension, and all of those possible states are locked together by the seventh-dimensional brane our universe is also interacting with.

The idea I advance of our universe's basic physical laws being a result of our specific "location" in the multiverse (as a "point" in the seventh dimension, or as a result of our interaction with a 7D brane), then, can be tied into this concept. As usual, though, I will take pains here to caution readers that I am not claiming my way of visualizing the dimensions is the explanation for string theory, any more than it is the explanation of Kabbalah, zero-point field theory, Japanese anime and videogame plots, metaphysics, or any of the other diverse range of belief systems which fans of the tenth dimension project keep pointing me towards as having interesting resonances with my way of visualizing reality. 
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime
From moment to moment, day to day, Google has been tracking the information that makes up our reality for almost ten years. Ideas that can be tracked across time and space are known as "memes", and physical objects that can be tracked across time and space are known as "spimes": which means that the flipbook of "now"s we have imagined from the big bang to today can be thought of as a spime that represents the story of our current universe from its inception, and that idea is a very powerful meme.

I've always marveled at the audacity of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button: the idea that out of all the information in the world, Google might be able to show you the very best link of all still seems like mysterious magic to me, and I admit to never wanting to use that button because I like to have choices. Still, the Google toolbar's Suggestions window is a great example of the accelerating information space we live in now: try typing in just the letters of the alphabet one after another into that window, and read the top ten suggestions (there's that number again!) that come up for each. This gives you a snapshot in time of what is important, what is talked about, what is the dominant set of memes within our culture right now. Both memes and spimes are multi-dimensional shapes, each with a beginning and an ending someplace out there in the timeless multiverse.

The feeling that we live in times that are accelerating towards something larger, as a result of the rapidly accelerating meme-space we live in, might be connected to the same higher-dimensional effects that are causing our universe to accelerate its expansion as well: I believe both are eventually going to be shown to be the result and the proof of higher dimensions in the information that is creating our reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

The tenth dimension site is averaging two million hits a month now. The meme that was set in motion since this project was launched in the summer of 2006 keeps growing, as people continue to view the animation, read the book, and discuss these ideas around the world.

By far the most-viewed and most-discussed question at the tenth dimension forum has been this: "Is God in the Tenth Dimension"? Other topics rise and fall in popularity from week to week (as memes often do), but this deep question is the one that people keep coming back to with their own unique views on the matter. I have put my own two bits in from time to time but the discussions there have been passionate and widely varied, and that is all I am interested in doing here: promoting the discussion of ideas.


Regular visitors to the forum or readers of my blog will know that this is the idea I advance in my book: if we are imagining that our universe comes from an indeterminate quantum state, and that (as quantum physicists say) "Information Equals Reality", then everything is just patterns in that information. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name? But the corollary to that idea has to be to accept that calling what we're thinking about "God" makes some people uncomfortable. Giving the exact same thing a name that they are comfortable with doesn't change what we're talking about, it just changes the name. Since I'm such a fan of Richard Dawkins (as he originated the powerful concept of memes), I say this knowing full well that what I am proposing here flies directly in the face of his book "The God Delusion": sorry about that, Dr. Dawkins.

Ultimately, asking if God is specifically in the Tenth Dimension is not the point of these discussions: what we're really talking about is whether there is a way for the ideas of spirituality and science to co-exist, each acknowledging that ultimately they are talking about the same thing. But this time, let's work through the framework for discussion that I've advanced for how to visualize the dimensions and see where "God" works as a name for the pattern that created our universe.

The tenth dimension as I have portrayed it is the timeless void of quantum fields, the unobserved whole that is "outside the system", and therefore unimaginable to us from within the system. Seems like a good place for an omnipotent being, and in the sense that God can be all things to all people, and that God can be thought of as the summation of everything that is and ever shall be, this is an obvious place to start. The only fly in the ointment here, I think, is that any attempt to observe any aspect of the tenth dimension spills us into the reality of the dimensions below. So, if we leave God up in the tenth dimension exclusively, I would say we're imagining a God who never actually does anything... as I've said before, imagining the "all-vibrations-simultaneously/white light" of the tenth dimension by itself is really the most boring part of the discussion.

Another discussion that has happened recently at the tenth dimension forum is whether the tenth dimension as I've portrayed it should be called a dimension at all, since what I'm really saying is that the tenth dimension can be thought of as the entirety of the ninth dimension, but viewed as a single point of indeterminate size. A visitor named "Alyssa" argued that this is deceptive, and other visitors to the forum then suggested that she think of dimensions 1 through 9 as each being an additional layer of an onion; to which I added the Zen-like idea that we could think then of the ninth dimension as being what happens when you look at the entire onion, and the tenth as being what happens when you don't look at the onion. Clearly, imagining something that is unobservable is tricky whether you're talking about the indeterminate fields of quantum mechanics, or whether you're talking about God. But if we're portraying a God who causes absolutely everything to happen, then the ninth dimension would certainly be a place for Him/Her to be.


My way of visualizing the dimensions suggests that the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimensions show us how to imagine the big-picture memes that organize the information that eventually becomes reality. From the ninth down to the seventh, the ways of expressing energy/mass are gradually narrowed down, until we arrive at our unique universe as an unwavering point in the seventh dimension. In an entry in the General Discussion area ("How to Make a Universe") I touched on one of the ideas from my book: if the multiverse contains 10 to the power of 500 other universes (a possibility inferred from string theory), some of those other universes would be much less stable than our own, instantly exploding into nothingness or collapsing back in upon themselves. So here's another possible location for God: we might be imagining that out of all the possible universes, God chose to create the one we're in because He/She prefers creativity over destruction, life over no life, order over disorder, and so on. Are those phrases also big-picture memes, ways of organizing the information that becomes our reality? Sure. But the question then becomes, if those other less productive universes do really exist out there within the multiverse, did our God create them? Or are there other Gods out there who created those other universes, because of their own preference for a different kind of universe than the one we live in? A pantheon of Gods both benevolent and malevolent spring to mind then: a distasteful idea to some, an appealing idea to others.

What about the fifth dimension? If our universe of spacetime is being constructed one frame at a time, by quanta that are each one planck length away from the next, then I have proposed that the probability space of the "next available branches" is contained within the fifth rather than the fourth dimension. This means that as we are constructing what feels like a fourth dimensional line of time, we are actually twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, which gives us a way to imagine how the fifth dimension and above could appear to be curled up down at the planck length for us, and yet those higher dimensions could also contain the astonishingly large concept of the multiverse-filled-with-universes which we have come to imagine.

If everything from the beginning of time within our specific universe is the result of an observation of the quantum wave function, then the fifth dimension looks like a great location to place God, and to see how we are all connected together though the consensual reality that we share, each as our own quantum observer. In other words, the combined quantum observer effect that creates our universe right from the Big Bang to "now" could be God. As I say in my book:

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

People who say that God works in mysterious ways, and that what feels like bad luck may actually be part of God's master plan, would be fine with leaving God in the fifth dimension. Personally, here's where I stand with that idea: try as I might, I can't imagine a God who has deliberately created a world that allows evil and inequity to exist as part of His/Her plan. Is there a force for destruction and selfishness and chaos that helps to make our world less beautiful than it could be? For any specific universe, I have placed all the timelines that could potentially have existed (but some of which are now unavailable because of what has come before or what comes after) out in the sixth dimension, and if we are going to imagine that there are forces doing battle to create the world we live in, then that battle must be raging in the sixth dimension. The good guys don't always win, and bad luck happens to the best of us: which would mean the chaos and deliberately chosen paths that cause one part of our world to prosper while so many others suffer is part of the temptations and bad choices that each of us have to acknowledge exist out there in the sixth dimension for our specific universe.

Which leads me back to the seventh dimension. If God is the pattern that created the world and the universe we live in, I think that's the best place to find Him/Her. But I can see arguments for placing God in other dimensions, including the tenth, or even across all dimensions, depending on your own point of view.

Finally, here are two of my songs that are relevant to this discussion, both of which you can find the lyrics and videos for in The Songs section of the tenth dimension forum. One is called "The Unseen Eye": if our reality is created by a quantum observer, then there is an Unseen Eye which began collapsing the wave function right from the Big Bang. The other is "What Was Done Today": if the fifth dimensional probability space we are navigating through has been defined by what has already come before, then there are possible futures we can no longer get to because of chance and circumstance, and deliberate choices that have already been made.


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers about my mom, who gave us quite a scare for the last couple of weeks but is more stabilized now. That's the good news, but with inoperable lung cancer this is all just a matter of time, and trying to make her comfortable as possible now for her last few months.

I was talking with my friend Gevin Giorbran, author of Learning to See Timelessness, about how the wide perspective of the multiverse and the "infinities upon infinities" concept that he and I have independently come up with ways to describe gives one a calmness in the face of death. Yes, I am sad that my mom's time with us is ending here, but she believes and I believe that the spirit carries on to whatever degree that it is interested in doing so after death. My particular belief system goes into aspects of this in much more depth than hers, but on that basic point we are in agreement and she and I take much comfort in that knowledge.

One of the more extraordinary claims I make in my book is that what we think of as the "soul" is more akin to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept, and that we spend our lives integrating and rejecting various meme-systems floating out there in the dimensions, and the particular subset we have taken on at any one moment defines who we are... but this is a system that changes somewhat over our lives.  This gives us an easy way to answer the old conundrum, where do all the new souls come from? There were less than ten million of us on the planet in 10,000 BC, 2.5 billion of us in 1950, now we're around 6.5 billion! Statistically, the chances of any one of us being the reincarnated soul of a person who lived on this planet in the last two thousand years are becoming vanishingly small, down into lottery ticket territory. Unless...

By the time we have imagined that timelessness is a real description of our place in the cosmos, and that what we think of as a soul is a specific collection of memes, then there is no reason to assume that there is a limit to the perceived number of souls, or the locations in time of those souls. In fact, there is no reason to assume that you couldn't walk up to someone on the street right now and realize that you have met another incarnation of yourself! But it gets even stranger than that. 

According to my way of imagining the dimensions, in our physical bodies we are each on the equivalent of a mobius strip, travelling down a specific "line of time" in the fourth dimension, unaware of the twists and turns that we are making in the dimensions above. I have written much about what this means in the fifth dimension, including the fact that Theodor Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations of gravity and light can be combined if they are defined in the fifth dimension, not the fourth-dimensional space-time that seems to have become stuck in the general public's mind more easily. Most people are unaware that the basic aspects of our physical reality are being defined in the fifth dimension.

Imagining my fourth dimensional body as an undulating snake, with my conceived self at one end and my deceased self at the other, is one of the starting points of my visual way of imagining the dimensions. Imagining the fifth dimensional branches of choice and possibility  that extend out from this moment shows how a hard determinist could look back in time and see the proof that there is only one reality, because after the fact that is all we can see; while a person believing in free will can look forward into the fifth dimension and see that their future is not written in stone after all. However: going through that exercise artificially diminishes the the size and import of what has come before, since the undulating snake leading back to the beginning of my physical body seems to be much smaller than the exploding dandelion seed of the possible branches set before me from this moment forward.

So now, let's think of our bodies in the sixth dimension. Where is my sixth dimensional self the largest? If you think about it for a moment, you will see it is at the moment of conception. From there, the branching possibilities that will get me to some version of my adult self are exponentially larger than any time thereafter. This seems to relate to Terrence McKenna's "timewave zero" concept, which suggests that novelty increases as the end of the universe approaches, but it is the mirror image of his idea: the possible cusps of change that an embryo or even a smal child have before them are absolutely immense compared to the more limited subset that we have left to choose from by the time we are adults. Here is one of the more often-quoted paragraphs from my book:

"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."

Religious teachings which say we should approach the Lord as a little child resonate with this idea as well. That reverence, that sense of wonder, that appreciation of the novelty and the vast potential that are held in every instant of time, in every quark and neutrino, and in the spirit energy all around us is part of an awakening that all of us as adults yearn for. On the other hand, whether we are talking about the death of a spirit or the death of a physical body, what we are really talking about is what happens when those processes cease to be interested in "what happens next".

What does timelessness mean for me and my mom? Even right now there are parts of me and all her loved ones that are waiting to greet her on the other side, outside of the limited realm of spacetime. And because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey.

And that is what enjoying the journey should always be about.

Rob

Someone posted this deceptively simple question on the tenth dimension forum a few days ago: "What is friendship?". Everybody has an answer to this question, but that's because we're talking about a basic organizing force of the universe (it's all part of grouping and symmetry, waveforms and entrainment). In the ten dimensions, your friends are for the same things everybody else says they're for: to help each other out (and your friends would do this, I would say, by adding their vibrations and their consensual reality to yours when that's what's needed).

I could use a few positive thoughts at the moment - I'm spending at least part of every day with my mom right now. A couple of months ago, she told me she is ultimately peaceful with the idea of her impending death. Like many others on the planet, she feels she has had a good life and knows that while her body is dying, there are parts of her that continue on. Still... now that we're getting into the harder parts of dying from inoperable lung cancer, sometimes it's harder for her to keep that in mind on the days when she's suffering.

Most of the immediate family are able to be nearby, which is a blessing. But I have a question for my new friends here at zaadz,: do you have any words of wisdom for me that would seem appropriate to a 77 year old, which I could pass along to my mom and dad to help them get through this with the peace that I know mom's authentic self already has come to terms with? I would be grateful.

By the way, I know our role is to laugh with her whenever possible, and to console her when that's what she needs. Those are two things we're pretty good at as a family. What goes good on top of that?


Still trying to enjoy the journey,

Rob

Everything fits together.

Everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Our minds are all about recognizing patterns, sorting things out, finding sense within the noise. There are days when I feel plugged into a hidden world of synchronicity and surprise messages from the universe, and there are days when I feel like my poor ol' brain is not quite all there.

One of the things people like best about my way of imagining the ten dimensions is that it shows an intuitive and self-consistent visual picture of how reality could be constructed. As Tom Huston mentioned in the WIE article about my project, I have been constantly surprised at the number of people who tell me that what I have portrayed can easily be made to fit with their own belief system and their own experience: from physics teachers to long distance faith healers, from excited kids to  deep-thinking philosophers, from people of various spiritual backgrounds, to people who have taken various hallucinogens who tell me their visions are easily explained by my way of imagining reality.

Will my intuition one day be confirmed by science?  That would be the most wonderful bit of synchronicity ever. I'm a composer, not a physicist! While I am an avid reader of a wide-reaching number of books and magazines, what drove me to create my tenth dimension site and its accompanying book was the feeling that I had stumbled upon something unique twenty years ago: the idea seemed so self-evident to me that I knew it was just a matter of time before other people would be talking about the same ideas. Three years ago, when I was forced to face the possibility of my own mortality (I almost bled to death on the operating table during a routine surgery gone wrong), I found the spare time and the resources to begin putting my ideas to paper; and, beginning last summer, to send them out to the world through the web. Twenty years ago I was a person out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, with no hope of being heard. Now, with virtually no advertising other than word of mouth, the beautiful social networking world of the internet has drawn over one and a half million visitors to my website. Web 2.0 is waking up to this new way of imagining reality, and I am no longer just some dude in the middle of nowhere with a crazy idea.

Once you have my way of imagining the dimensions in mind, you can see a way to combine free will and determinism, and how multiverses could exist "just around the corner". But this is not just about our universe of matter and energy, it is also about the "quantum observer": I propose that the universe of memes and spirit are interacting with the physical universe across these same ten dimensions to create forms of order, life, and the desire for continuance. Being interested in "what happens next", I propose, is one of the basic dividing lines between inanimate molecules and the first building blocks of life, but it can also seem self-evident that our unlikely universe has been interested in its own continuance since the very beginning.

Every minute of every day, we avoid doing the things that will stop us from continuing along our line of time, and I wonder how many accidental death victims would tell you from the afterlife "I just didn't see it coming", or "it was too late for me to get out of the way": if you can see your own impending death, there might be a way for you to stop it from happening.

A few weeks ago I read an article about research conducted by scientists (including nobel laureate Brian Josephson) into our ability to see into the immediate future. If our future already exists as possible branches in the fifth dimension, then isn't that what we are sensing every moment we refuse to step off the curb in front of the vehicle speeding by? If I didn't have a sense of what is happening next, how could I carry on a conversation, or finish typing this paragraph? Even a goldfish can see far enough into the future to get out of the way of danger.

Likewise, I was reading this month's Wired magazine this morning, which has a great article about the research being done into athletes who seem to be able to predict the future and sense outcomes long before their teammates: could Wayne Gretzky's legendary ability to be able to make plays be borne in part from an enhanced ability to see the future?

Then tonight I saw the new blog entry here at zaadz by CP, "No One Likes You in the Future", and I felt once again that the world is connected together in ways behind the scenes that we can only begin to imagine.

My song Everything Fits Together is about the same idea.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

I am a new member of zaadz. As I become familiar with the community here, and see what I can add to the discussion, I plan to start blogging here as well. My archive of blog entries I have created surrounding my tenth dimension project so far can be found at

imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton
Imagining the Tenth Dimension