Saturday, May 29, 2010

Three Becomes One


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcTK7Mnu70

Image from wikipedia: "Borromean Rings".
With my approach to visualizing the ten spatial dimensions, I group three dimensions together, call that a "triad", and condense it into a single entity so that it becomes a point in the next dimension up. By the time I've done that three times, I arrive at ten, the same number which Pythagoras also defined as the ultimate number encompassing all possible expressions of our reality. Let's look at some of the ways that ancient wisdom ties into all this, starting first with this mystical insight from the current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America:


In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change. If you’re a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.)

When I came across the above text I was struck by how strongly it seemed to relate to the triads from my approach. Here's another quote, this one from a site dedicated to Chinese martial arts:

Then the link between the qi of the earth and the qi of the sky can be formed, causing the practitioner to shape the unity of heaven, earth and person; three becomes one.
The Dynamics of Creation
In Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, I summed up the dynamics of creation like this: "One thing pushes against another, and out pops a third thing". Is this a schoolboy description of sex? Sure, why not! Long before sex came along, there's been single-celled fission, mitosis, a dividing apart: that's one kind of creation, binary and asexual. The other is sexual reproduction, a more robust form of creation because it takes elements from two sources and combines them to create something new. Hegel's dialectic is often summed up in a similar way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Monad, Dyad, Triad
Pythagoras taught that odd numbers are masculine and divine, and even numbers are earthly and feminine. While such a conclusion might seem misogynistic, it's worth noting that Pythagoras welcomed females into his discipline, and his wife and daughters were accomplished mathematicians. In chapter four of my book, "The Binary Viewpoint", I suggested that the desire to catalog things into yes/no, right/wrong (and so on) tends to be a more masculine approach, while the holistic "yin/yang/both together" tends to be a more feminine one. Does this mean I would disagree with Pythagoras and say that odd numbers are more feminine, because they're less dualistic, less binary? It's an interesting thought.

"One state/an opposing state/both simultaneous" is also, of course, the basis of quantum mechanics, science's most-proven description of the foundation of our reality, and something which I've insisted will eventually be shown to be just as connected to our macro reality as it is to the quantum: it's all part of the same continuum. The June issue of Scientific American has just published an article about the first demonstration of quantum superposition on an object large enough to be seen by the naked eye! This demonstration is a major leap forward: while scientists have previously demonstrated superposition with atoms and molecules, this new experiment shows quantum superposition in an object made out of roughly ten trillion atoms. Suddenly, Schrödinger's cat, usually portrayed as nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment, moves a little closer to being something connected to our actual physical reality.

The Law of Threes
So. Two is a dynamic push and pull, while three is more stable, more balanced. In jokes and in fairy tales, it seems more satisfying when something happens three times. Lots of superstitions gravitate to this number: good luck, bad luck, celebrities dying, and so on are seen to come in threes. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - entire belief systems are built on threes. To be sure, the phrase "Law of Threes" means a number of things depending upon who you consult, but here's the most popular answer as provided by "Galeanda" at Answerbag.com:
The Law of Threes states "every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes".
In the final chapter of my book, I reached the conclusion that three systems are interacting, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns, or waveforms.

It's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology. Philosopher Karl Popper made a similar proposal that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information. And imagine my surprise to be told that there are branches of Kabbalah which also teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual.

Three Threes

Here's an interesting version of my approach to visualizing the dimensions, using ideas connected to the point-line-plane postulate: which, as we've said before, can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions.

Start with a point. Choose a second point. Join those two points with a line, you're in the first dimension.

How far away are those two points from each other? Now find an additional point that is the exact same distance away from those first two points but not on the line. What have you created? An equilateral triangle, and you're in the second dimension. The fact that such a triangle can be created with nothing more than a compass and a straight edge is well known to students of sacred geometry and the vessica piscis, concepts we've looked at before in this blog.

Now find an additional point that, again, is the same distance away as those first three points are from each other. What have you created now? This four-sided pyramid is called a tetrahedron. As you can see, it's made from four equilateral triangles, and now you're in the third dimension.

An article published last week in New Scientist magazine suggests that the tetrahedron is the most efficient shape for packing a large number of items into a 3D space. When we're thinking about how three becomes one, imagine collapsing this tetrahedron's outlying points towards any single point. This gives us a useful mental image for seeing how the underlying structures of our 3D space could be connecting to the fourth dimension, as we enfold all of our 3D universe in its current state -- its current "now" -- into a planck-length-sized frame which then becomes a "point" on our 4D line of time.


In Our Universe as a Dodecahedron, we looked at what happens when you rotate five superimposed tetrahedrons so that all their points are equidistant from each other, which took us to the discussion of the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture, and the proposal that the slight curve of our spacetime gives rise to the fifth-dimensional Poincaré Dodecahedral Space that our universe resides within. But once again, if you look at these beautiful symmetrical shapes, can you imagine how all of those points could easily be converged to a single central point?

In that same entry we talked about fascinating fellows like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein who are showing us ways of visualizing how everything is connected through points or point-like structures. With "Three Becomes One", what we're trying to head towards is a way of imagining an underlying symmetry, and how that symmetry can be enfolded to eventually arrive at the unobserved whole, the big beautiful zero that our universe is moving towards and springing from within timelessness. Pull those points apart symmetrically and you get beautiful shapes like the vessica piscis, the triangle, the tetrahedron, and the dodecahedron. Allow the points to converge and you end up back where we started, at a point of indeterminate size.

Since gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, that pushes or pulls, it must factor in here at a fundamental level. Let's continue to explore this idea more in our next two entries, Gravity and Free Will, and Gravity and Entrainment.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S.:
Pictured at left: diagram showing congruence of null lines from Twistor Theory.
Pictured at right: diagram of Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil.



According to the June issue of Scientific American, there's new excitement about Twistor Theory and String Theory being united by the highly respected theoretical physicist Ed Witten. A number of people have asked me to talk about the work of Marko Rodin, I wonder what he would have to say about this latest development?

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - May Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.
1. Our Universe within the Omniverse (new)
2. Vibrations and Fractals (new)
3. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (new)
4. Vibrations (new)
5. Our Universe as a Dodecahedron (new)
6. Our Universe as a Point (new)
7. Theatre of the Mind (new)
8. Augmented Reality - Faceball (new)
9. Audiobook Part 2 - Introduction on YouTube (new)
10. Tenth Dimension, the Audiobook, on YouTube (new)

And as of May 26th, 2010, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (3)
4. Mandelbulbs (6)
5. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (7)
8. Augmented Reality (8)
9. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (9)
10. The Holographic Universe (10)
11. Slices of Reality (11)
12. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (12)
13. Alien Mathematics (13)
14. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (15)
15. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (14)
16. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (16)
17. The Big Bang is an Illusion (17)
18. How to Time Travel (new)
19. Beer and Miracles (18)
20. Monkeys Love Metallica (22)
21. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion?
(20)
22. Consciousness in Frames per Second (23)
23. Urban Garden Magazine (19)
24. Norway's Reverse Deja Vu (21)
25. Dancing on the Timeline (new)
26. Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers? (25)

Which means that these worthy submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

Modern Shamans (24)
The Long Undulating Snake (26)


By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Three Becomes One

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Changing Reality


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

Edit: If you go to this link now you can listen to my conversation with Kerrace Alexander. We had a great chat (we talked for almost an hour and a half!) and she offered some wonderful insights. Thank you so much for having me on your show, Kerrace!


Tomorrow I'm going to be interviewed by Kerrace Alexander of Bigfish Strategies. Kerrace is the host of Bigfish Radio: to quote from her website, her program is "an interactive, live Internet talk-radio show that focuses on helping individuals learn to live and love without fear. This show features authors and Holistic Healing Arts practitioners of Cosmic Science, Metaphysics, Evolutionary Consciousness, Astrology, Spiritual Awakening, Ascension and Empowerment."

This seemed like a great opportunity for me to step back and look at what has happened with Imagining the Tenth Dimension since I launched it almost four years ago. The tenth dimension website has now had six million unique visitors and almost 100 million hits since July 2006! I'm continually amazed and thankful for the audience that keeps growing for this project.

Why, people have asked me, did I create this project?

I remember one of the very first negative comments I saw about Imagining the Tenth Dimension was from someone who said "I haven't read the book but it looks like this is yet another get-rich-quick scam from someone saying woo-woo, change your life with the power of the tenth dimension" (italics mine, but I feel sure they were imagining a spooky echo on those last words for added emphasis).

In my blog entry New Book Reviews at Amazon, one of the reviews I quoted was from Australia's Richard Ruff, who had this to say about my book:

In an easily readable style he has boldly taken us past the fourth dimension through to the tenth employing an understandable logic based on geometric considerations. There is no mind-boggling mathematics and there is a distinct absence of the crank/crackpot style; each step along the way is carefully developed in a sequential manner accompanied by readily understandable diagrams. Again, without being too technical, he correlates properties of the unfolding dimensions with predictions and outcomes of modern physics, especially quantum mechanics. Philosophical implications are explored along the way.
Thank you Richard for those kind words! I work hard with this blog and with this project to present these ideas without sensationalizing them. My willingness to talk about such a wide range of topics, including out-of-body experiences as we did last blog entry, ghosts, or predicting the future, does make it easy for mainstream scientists to dismiss my ideas if they wish. But with this project I've also talked often about serious theories and studies that tie into these discussions very easily: epigenetics, the doubled effectiveness of the placebo effect over the last few decades, the holographic universe theory, retro-causality and the biocentric universe theory: these are examples of the mind-blowing new concepts which I've been pleased to show to the many people who are fans of this project, and which show there is much more to our reality than the physical world of atoms and molecules that we see around us.

Up, Up and Away!
In The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, we looked at how my project's central idea -- that our reality, our "now" is really being created in the fifth dimension from a fifth-dimensional probability space -- was recently presented in a display created by Jon Ardern and Anab Jain and supervised by scientists from Oxford University. Near the end of my Theatre of the Mind interview with Kelly Howell, we talked about how this important idea of the fifth dimension was accepted by Einstein almost a century ago, and yet never seems to have entered mainstream consciousness: lots of people my age still think The Fifth Dimension is a pop group from the sixties, nothing more.

When talking with Kelly, I suggested that there could be reasons why this information has been suppressed: after all, this shows a way of understanding that free will is not an illusion, and it shows that we each have access to many more possibilities in our life than most of us have been led to believe. As I said in my article for Urban Garden Magazine, this could be why for those in power over the last century, and for those who have been trained to take a grim satisfaction in saying our existence in the universe means nothing, the Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea.

But for a person who has no hope, or sees no way out of the negative loops they're currently stuck within, this project can represent an awakening: and I hear from people every day telling me that Imagining the Tenth Dimension has changed their life and the way they view the world!

As I've said before, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic. I believe the fifth dimension represents a constantly changing probability space of multiple pasts and futures that are logically, causally connected to our "now", which is a planck-frame-sized point in the fifth dimension. That means there's already a version of "you" that exists within that probability space ten years from now who is living the most happy and fulfilled life possible. I believe, as Dr. Philip Zimbardo's studies revealed in The Time Paradox, that visualizing that person as already being part of your future can create a strong pull towards that "best possible you" that already exists. Next week, we're going to look at Dr. Vernon Woolf, who has some powerful visualization techniques for actually consulting with that "best possible you" to help you get there.

How Much Control Do We Have?
That's the gigantic question that became Chapter Nine of my book. It's really the trickiest part of this discussion: as we discussed in Beer and Miracles, there are already some stunningly unlikely things about our reality which could lead us to conclude that anything is possible. Recently I came across this uplifting video created by Bryan Walton, who has two websites: Oxygen for the Mind, and Dancing in the Mirror. You'll see that Bryan has lots of podcasts and web materials that relate to the ideas in the following video, as well as focusing on ways for people to remove stress from their lives.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfHjkKmmz0A

In this video Bryan arrives at a way of visualizing the fourth through sixth dimension as a probability- and intention-based manifold encompassing all possible pasts and futures for our universe: I'm pleased to see him advancing this idea since it is central to my own project as well. We've talked a number of times about this in my book and in such entries as Time in Three Dimensions, The Forest, You Are the Point, and What's Around the Corner?.

My animation shows that the quantum wave function for our universe can be thought of as having three dimensions (four through six), just as space has three dimensions (one through three). This can be extended even further by the time we're in a third "triad" that encompasses the Information Equals Reality paradigm and the multiverse landscape of possible universes that can be accessed via the seventh through ninth dimension. We'll talk about a number of different approaches to understanding reality that connect to this idea next time in Three Becomes One.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Saturday, May 22, 2010

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

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Entangled Neurons

One of the questions that came up during my Theatre of the Mind interview with Kelly Howell last week was "how do we know when we're actually choosing different paths in the fifth dimension"? While quantum randomness means that small outcomes are being selected for us at every instant, one planck frame after another, those are virtually always going to be inconsequential to us out here at the macro world (unless you're unlucky enough to be the subject of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment!). During the interview, I suggested that any event that we have a memory of represents an important fifth-dimensional "cusp" in the spacetime tree of our lives. Speaking of trees, the tree-like image pictured here represents a map of the brain's neurons and was found in an article published in New Scientist Magazine earlier this year: written by David Robson, the article was entitled "Brain 'entanglement' could explain memories".

I'd like to quote from that article shortly, but let's look at this idea of memory and the fifth dimension a little more first.

Our long-term memory of past events is most often really only in tiny visual snippets, although the practice of telling and re-telling the story of an important event can give us the feeling of it being more movie-like, of being more than just a few visual images or actions. One of the experiences most of us have had is of dangerous or intense moments when time seems to slow down: in Time is In the Mind, we looked at the work of neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose research indicates that the "slowing of time" experience is related to the formation of many more memories during that event - if the event had not been as intense, we wouldn't have formed as many sequential memories, so we wouldn't remember an experience of time slowing down.

"But Rob," some people have said to me, "the time slowing down effect wasn't something that occurred to me afterwards. It's something that happened to me during the event". And that's absolutely right. This is an instantaneous process we're talking about. The reason time didn't slow down for me while I was eating lunch today was because nothing remarkable happened, no specific memories were formed, and a month from now I will almost certainly not be able to tell you what I ate for lunch today.

Which returns us to the idea that any important choices or outcomes that stay in our memory represent fifth-dimensional branches, where our probability space shifts, and some new outcomes become possible while some other outcomes are rotated into the sixth dimensional "you can't get there from here" list. That's true for each of us individually, but it's also very true for us a population of humans sharing planet Earth: there are cusps where our world and the universe it's part of branches in important ways. Those branches are our shared experience, our consensus reality: for instance, on September 11 2001 our reality shifted, for almost all of us not through our choice but through the actions of others. But now, as people around the world find more and more ways to connect to each other, those branches are starting to be formed through shared intent, and we've talked about the acceleration that is taking place because of that a number of times now.

Last time, we looked at The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, which was based upon my ideas of the fifth dimension as the explanation for quantum entanglement and Everett's Many Worlds, and which used a number of professors from Oxford University as consultants. Is the fifth dimension as our probability space finally gaining mainstream acceptance from the scientific community now? That's my fond desire.

Interestingly, the cover story of the issue of New Scientist magazine that arrived in my mail yesterday is a compendium of some of the most mind-boggling quantum effects that seem to be so unfathomable when we believe there is nothing beyond the fourth dimension: the article as published online is called Seven Wonders of the Quantum World. As the magazine cover pictured here says: "Quantum theory is stranger than you can ever imagine". To which, of course, I would add "unless you're willing to accept that quantum effects occur within the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension".

Now let's quote a bit from that New Scientist article I mentioned previously, about "entanglement" in the brain:

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.
The article then describes the neuronal activity patterns studied by Dietmar Plenz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They found surprisingly complex coherence patterns being formed almost instantaneously between different parts of the brain: physically separate groups of neurons would display the same pattern within a few milliseconds, and each of these uniquely complex patterns appeared to be associated with different memories. Here's one more brief quote from the article, please do go to the New Scientist website to read the full piece:
"The precision with which these new sites pick up on the activity of the initiating group is quite astounding – they are perfect clones," says Plenz.
Memory and the Fifth Dimension
Like M.C. Escher's image of the ants on the mobius strip (or the flatlander we looked at in the original animation), we are twisting and turning within an additional dimension but feeling like we are traveling in a straight line.

If these ants were 2D flatlanders, they would travel in what feels like a straight line on the 2D surface of the mobius strip, unaware that they are really rotating through the third dimension. In our reality, we feel ourselves to be riding the arrow of time, moving in a straight line forward in the fourth dimension: but actually we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space. If we are forming memories only at branches in our spacetime tree, it doesn't seem so astonishing that neurons in the brain could be synced up so quickly during that activity - after all, the fifth dimension makes seemingly difficult-to-imagine functions like quantum entanglement easier to visualize, and these "entangled neurons" may be providing further evidence of our connection to the fifth dimension and the constructive interference that is happening there to create our observed reality.

Are the unique memories that each of us carry within us really nothing more than a map of the branches and cusps, the "splitting apart" moments where our journey through the fourth dimension took another branch in the spacetime tree of our fifth dimensional probability space? We'll talk more about that idea next time with Entangled Awareness and OBEs.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project

"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."

- Albert Einstein


If you listened to the Theatre of the Mind interview we looked at last blog entry, you'll notice that I brought up the fifth dimension quite a number of times. Today, let's look at a very good reason for doing so.

The above picture comes from a project created by Jon Ardern and Anab Jain as "Superflux" in collaboration with scientists at Oxford University: go to http://superflux.in/blog/?p=910 to read more about the 5th-Dimensional Camera Project. I noticed David Deutsch's name on the list of distinguished persons consulted for this presentation: regular readers of this blog will know that I mention Dr. Deutsch's important work regularly, but it's always been my disappointment that in conversation with him three years ago he was not willing to embrace my fifth-dimensional approach to understanding Everett's Many Worlds and the "spooky" world of quantum mechanics.

Here's some info I received back from Jon and Anab:
Hi Rob,

We found your 'Imagining the Tenth Dimension' project very inspirational in the research and design of the Fifth-Dimensional Camera.

The designers of the project were myself Jon Ardern and Anab Jain as Superflux. We worked mainly with Dr. Andrew Briggs, Dr. John Rarity, Dr. Simon Benjamin from QIP IRC ( Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration ) based at Oxford University. They were our main point of contact for understanding the Science, and the people we went to when we needed clarity on a concept or idea. This is the link to their website: http://www.qipirc.org/

The project was also backed by the EPSRC and the Royal College of Art, London.

In our conversation with Dr. David Deutsch we did not directly talk about fifth dimension as probability space, the conversation ended up being more about interpretations and misinterpretations of scientific investigation.

We did however show the first part of your introductory video to the scientists we were working with. This was in relation to our initial concepts for the project, but there was no objection in any way to your description of the 5th dimension.

All the best,

Jon & Anab
Here's another illustration from their Superflux blog. It shows a visualization of the branching timelines representing the parallel universes resulting from chance and choice, which are at the core of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, and which I've been insisting make more sense when we see that these branches occur in the fifth rather than the fourth dimension.


As I mentioned recently in The Forest, I hear regularly from teachers thanking me for the thought-provoking discussions they've had in the classroom after showing students my animation. I've remarked on a regular basis since the 2006 launch of my project that my "new way of thinking about time and space" seems to be moving closer to the new theories being advanced by mainstream physicists about the underlying structures of our reality, and I do hear regularly from people with a physics background who like my ideas. But having respected professors from the University of Oxford now willing to examine my concept that quantum superposition and Everett's Many Worlds can be much more easily understood if we accept that these events take place in the fifth dimension is definitely a major step forward for my project. So I am grateful to Jon and Anab for undertaking to create this demonstration, and for their work in helping to get my ideas out into the world.

Here's an entertaining video they made to help promote what this fanciful 5th-Dimensional Camera might be like if it is actually built some day.

The 5th Dimensional Camera: An Introduction from Superflux on Vimeo.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Edit: Here's a youtube video to accompany this blog entry now:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87TkFOR_Js

Next: Entangled Neurons

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Theatre of the Mind

Edit: The show is now posted on Kelly's site at this link, and available as a free downloadable podcast if you subscribe to Theatre of the Mind through iTunes. Or you can listen to it right here with the embedded player below. Thank you Kelly for making this such a great experience, and to the callers who helped to steer the conversation into various interesting tangents. The hour went by so fast! I'd love to find other ways to work with Kelly and her hard-working Brain Sync team.


Today at 5 p.m. Pacific Time I'm going to be on Kelly Howell's Theatre of the Mind. Theatre of the Mind is the most-downloaded self help podcast on iTunes! I'm a subscriber to these podcasts myself, and I'm really looking forward to speaking with Kelly.

By the way, you can hear the show online from anywhere in the world at: http://www.contacttalkradio.com/
If you live in the Seattle area you can listen on the radio at: 106.9 HD Channel 3. And this is more than an interview, this is a live call-in show. Want to participate? The number is: 1-877-230-3062

Kelly Howell is the founder of Brain Sync, a company which specializes in CDs and mp3s for meditation and self improvement. Here's a quote from the brainsync.com website about the underlying theories behind her work:

Brainwave Therapy, developed by Kelly Howell is based on extensive biofeedback research. This remarkable, clinically proven technology creates new neural networks that literally change your brain, and allow it to operate with greater efficiency, productivity and functionality.
We've talked before about entrainment, meditation, and the mind's ability to change itself, its probability space, and even the people around it! Thinking about this in terms of the discussions we've had over the last couple of weeks in Our Universe Within the Omniverse, Our Universe as a Dodecahedron, and Our Universe as a Point, we return again to the conclusion that each of us is at the center of our own version of the universe, our own "o-region", as our observations choose one reality over another from our current planck-frame-sized window into the fifth dimension.

Why is the information that our reality comes from the fifth dimension not widely known? Einstein embraced this idea after it was proposed to him by Theodor Kaluza way back in 1919. And yet there are still many out there who have been taught to believe there is nothing more to our reality than spacetime: three dimensions of space plus a limited "arrow of time" which drives our universe towards a meaningless heat death of maximum entropy. We are each inconsequential specks, and our existence in the universe is at best a fluke of statistics, an unlikely event which may happen from time to time but which means nothing.

With this project, I've tried to show how understanding our place within the omniverse of possible multiverses and parallel universe versions of our own universe presents us with hope, and with the power to change. There is not a day that goes by that I don't hear from people thanking me for my new approach to visualizing the dimensions, because of how it helps them to see how everything fits together.

Which takes us back to the 26 songs I attached to this project (26 being a dimensional number from an early form of string theory, as a little inside joke). Today, let's look at videos for the first song and the last song from that collection.

Everything Fits Together is a really interesting song to play on the piano. The right hand (left brain) plays a linear step-wise part, while the left hand (right brain) plays a part with wider, more varied steps, most of which are in the opposing direction to the right hand. For me, there is a certain trance-like feeling which comes from just playing this part on the piano, enjoying the symmetry that arises from the way these two parts work together. As the song builds, there are various percussive/melodic elements that help to energize the listener, and some of my favorite YouTube comments are from people who say how deeply this song touches them.

Lyrically, this song talks about a form of peace and enlightenment that can come from feeling connected to the whole, from seeing where we fit into the grand scheme of things. Put some headphones on, close your eyes and give this song a listen: see if you don't feel more energized by the time the song is over.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7aRH0imFe0

Here's a blog entry that shows a video for every one of the 26 songs. Each of these songs are connected to specific concepts from my book, and they give an idea of the wide-ranging scope for how this way of visualizing the dimensions can be applied to physics and metaphysics, to science and spirituality.

The last of the 26 songs is called Thankful, and below is a video of the song as sung by my friend Ron Scott. I don't care if you are a spiritual person or a scientist, if you don't feel amazed at the world you see around you, at the universe we are a part of, at the omniverse of which our universe is only a tiny slice, then you need to wake up and smell the coffee! Expressing gratitude for the unlikely universe we find ourselves to be in is a great way to keep a bit of our childlike sense of wonder alive in each of us.

One of my favorite mindfulness meditation practices involves finding some time each day to focus your intent on deliberately appreciating all the sights and sounds, the textures and aromas, the beautiful details of whatever is around you right at that moment. Finding ways to become a more energetic and engaged you, appreciating the flow, enjoying the synchronicities, moving within your probability space towards the version of you that you know already exists within the multiverse is the goal of this project. That's why I try to end each and every blog entry with the same phrase: enjoy the journey.


Are you?


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Here's some of the other blog entries where we've talked about entrainment, meditation, empathy, and the mind's surprising abilities to change our observed reality:
Information Equals Reality
Song 19 of 26 - Positive Vibes
The Comedian
The Musician
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
Changing Your Genes

Changing Your Genes 2
The Placebo Effect
The Shaman
Where Are You?
Placebos and Nocebos
Placebos Becoming More Effective?
Jumping Jesus

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Fifth Dimensional Camera Project

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Our Universe as a Point


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4EwA6BhBdc.

"We start with a point" - the first phrase of the animation that vaulted this project to worldwide popularity four years ago.

"We end with a point" - the conclusion that is reached at the end of the same animation. If the tenth dimension in its unobserved state is indeterminate, then it's just like the point we started from.

"You are the point": that was the title of a blog entry I published early this year. If our reality is defined across ten dimensions, then the fifth dimension would be the half-way point, the node of strongest harmonic resonance for all the vibrations and energy that combine together to create the unique "now" that we are each witnessing at this moment. As we've discussed in entries like The Holographic Universe and Holograms and Quanta, realizing that our reality is created through constructive interference at the fifth dimension is the key to understanding all of the wide-ranging ideas that we have been exploring with this project. Einstein believed our reality is defined at the fifth dimension. Do you?

By itself, a point is of indeterminate size and dimension. As we discussed not long ago in One to the Power of Infinity, it's important to realize that indeterminate is not the same as undefined: things that are indeterminate can also be thought of as being true for any value you care to assign to them. What does this mean?

By the time you use a point to indicate a position within a multi-dimensional space, as you imagine all the sizes that the point could be within its indeterminate range of sizes, a circle (2D) or a sphere (3D) is the shape it takes for anything between the infinitely large or the infinitesimally small versions of that point. This logic continues with the additional dimensions: but while we've spent some time in past blogs looking at rotating hypercubes (a hypercube being the 4D equivalent of a 3D cube), we've never looked at the 4D equivalent of a 3D sphere: the hypersphere. Check out these two mind-bending YouTube animations created by WildStar2002.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27af6000k9I


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X6aaqDOtv0

In entries like An Expanding 4D Sphere and Finite But Unbounded? we've talked before about these connections between hyperspheres and visualizing the extra dimensions of our reality.

Two entries ago, we discussed our universe within the omniverse, in which we looked at some new scientific theories advanced in the last couple of months suggesting that all possible universes are connected to each other by point-like black holes.

Then last entry we looked at our universe as a dodecahedron. In that blog we returned to the work of Dan Winter, and showed this simple animation from his gigantic goldenproof web page:

After I published my look at the dodecahedron last week, Dan sent me this note:

Nice to have a general intro there. Now you need to add this simple essential statement: after the limited number of axes of rotation which can be contained in cubic lattice (3D),the ONLY way rotating axes of charge can be superposed WITH the necessary constructive wave interference is the way a (5) cube rotates into a dodecahedron, the so called hypercube producing the golden ratio edge is the ONLY next dimension... 4 there. Then by ratcheting that down a helix - precisely mapping dna you have the 5 axes of rotation superposed (5D). Recursive braiding adds spin axes superposed (and longer wavelengths) to that, where thus DNA is the only biologic structure with access to 10+ dimensions.
See how 7 plus 5 makes 12 in dna
: goldenmean.info/dnamanifesto
The 7 / 5 spin is the essential symmetry recipe (slip knot)
of hydrogen, heart muscle and solar core, as well as dna.
Other interesting pages from Dan's huge body of work include this one on the cause of gravity: goldenmean.info/selforganization , and this one on the source of life: www.goldenmean.info/newscienceoflife/ . And finally, if you have 48 minutes you will find an interesting movie on this page showing Dan speaking at a retreat in Spain: www.goldenmean.info/phaseconjugatevisuals.

On Dan's goldenproof page, he ties the golden ratio in not just with the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space (which we looked at last time as the underlying shape of our universe), but with other topics we've looked at in the last year or two: Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation (pictured at left), which is a bold framework for showing how all the possible particles and forces of our universe are organized, and which Dan explains also incorporates the golden ratio. On the same page Dan also relates his work to the ideas of Nassim Haramein. I've remarked before that Nassim is fond of dismissing ideas of extra dimensions (including his insistence that the first and second dimension don't exist), which could seem to tell us that his ideas are completely incompatible with mine. Nassim tells us that there is only one dimension, and that our observed universe is connected by "points" to all other realities by fractal patterns that can be infinitely divided or infinitely expanded. Where would such an idea tie in to what we're talking about here? In the fifth dimension, which I've been saying all along is really where our reality is defined, one planck frame at a time, to create the fourth-dimensional "line of time" we look back upon from our vantage point as creatures made of 3D atoms and molecules.

One of the things I've been fond of saying is that "life is any process that is interested in what happens next". With Dan's idea of DNA being the only pattern that connects us to the extra dimensions, we have another interesting way of seeing how our "now" is not riding on the single, constrained train track of our linear one-way arrow of time, but is being created one point after another from a fifth dimensional probability space. Visualizing the extended possibilities of this "now" is something we're going to talk more about next week with something called the Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project.

This Wednesday May 12th I'm going to be interviewed by Kelly Howell on what has become the most downloaded self help podcast on iTunes: Theatre of the Mind. We'll talk more about Theatre of the Mind in our next entry.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Edit: Here's some more info about WildStar2002, the creator of the above Hypersphere animations: his name is Burt Clawson, he's from Salt Lake City, UT, and he's a graphic and web design student. Because of his interest in higher-dimensional geometry, he figured out a way to do these Hypersphere animations using MaxScript in 3D Studio max. Thanks, Burt!

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Our Universe as a Dodecahedron


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu1GD_AifpM

Last time we talked about our universe within the omniverse. Now let's talk about the shape of our own universe.
This is an image of a rotating dodecahedron, from wikipedia. This unique platonic solid incorporates the golden ratio, which is often denoted by the Greek letter phi, usually lower case: φ. When you stack a number of dodecahedra together, interesting things happen with the way the different faces and vertices rotate: they can be seen to enfold one into another, and the resulting hints of rotating helix shapes, fractals, and the spirals found in nature link not just to the broad field of sacred geometry, but to cosmological theories about the structure of our universe.

These next two images come from a mind-blowing visualization tool you can download from http://geometrygames.org/: it's called Curved Spaces.
In entries like Poll 49 and Poll 58 we've talked about how our universe is not really flat and infinite, but rather slightly curved, making it finite but unbounded. In entries like An Expanding 4D Sphere and When's a Knot Not a Knot? we've also talked about the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture. Curved Spaces includes the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space mode pictured here, which lets you fly through the stacked dodecahedra that would form the surface of the 4D hypersphere our finite but unbounded universe resides within. And by putting a planet earth at the center of each dodecahdron, this fly-through gives us one way of visualizing how Everett's Many Worlds could be defined by our observation of the universe as a series of planck frames, one after another, each frame separate but connected to other possible adjacent frames: another favorite topic of this project.

In older entries like Everything and Seeing Eye to Eye, we've touched on the amazing ideas of Dan Winter, who continues to present an ever-growing body of work. As I've said before, Dan's web pages can seem overwhelming, but there's no denying his passionate pursuit of his ideas. The animated images we're looking at here come from Dan's gigantic goldenproof web page, which you'll see does include lots of graphics, animations, and movie clips if you scroll further down that page. The first two animations I've grabbed from Dan's website show the basic idea, which Dan describes this way:
"These visuals are graphed from my original equation of Golden Ratio on the correct conic dodeca stellation of how Hydrogen Radii- nest/embed into the PLANCK LENGTH (field coupling- to MAKE GRAVITY) - using GOLDEN RATIO - successful wave adding and multiplying (non-destructive compression)."

As you know, the different electron shells of an atom are discrete - when an electron moves from one level to another, it doesn't travel through the intermediate space: it simply pops from one to the other, in a manner very similar to the "flatlander ant on a folded newspaper" concept we showed in the original tenth dimension animation. This is yet another example of how our reality, which seems continuous, is actually divided into tiny little "steps", or "frames" that are each one planck unit apart from the next: not just in space, but in space-time as well.

Dan quotes from The Golden ratio, ionic and atomic radii and bond lengths, a paper by Raji Heyrovska written in collaboration with J. Heyrovsky of the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. - The summary of the paper includes the following:

This work arose from the author's finding that the ratio of the radius of hydrogen, estimated recently (C.H. Suresh, N. Koga, J. Phys. Chem. A, 105, 5940 (2001)) by density functional methods, to the ground state Bohr radius is the Golden ratio, which operates in a variety of natural phenomena. It is found that the Golden ratio indeed plays a quantitative role in atomic physics.
Dan cites the above as confirmation of his own ideas about how important the golden ratio is to our fractal, enfolded reality. For me, this all ties back into the idea that our observed universe is being constructed one planck frame at a time by constructive interference occurring in the fifth dimension: which, as I've been saying from the outset of this project, is where our "now" is actually being observed from instant to instant, as it's chosen from a probability space of possible pasts and futures.

Let's look at one more interesting thing about a dodecahedron: it can be constructed from five pyramids, like so:



A tetrahedron is a four-sided pyramid, with each triangular face the same size. At left we see five interlocking tetrahdra. Each one is color-coded so it's easier to tell them apart, and these have been rotated to make all of their outer points equidistant from each other. As you can see in the right-hand image, these points can be joined by pentagons, and when we do so our old friend the dodecahedron emerges once again.

What's the point? We'll continue this discussion next time with Our Universe as a Point.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist