10-10-10: Look Before You Leap

More and more people are becoming convinced that we are perched on a precipice, a tipping point, a convergence, an approaching singularity, a break from the old into the new. Back at the start of the year I posted this poll question: "With which prediction do you more agree? 1. 10/10/10 (October 10th 2010) is going to be a very significant date for our planet. Or 2. 10/10/10 will be an unremarkable day."

In March we discussed the results of this poll in an entry called "Will 10-10-10 Be Significant?".

Now, as we're only ten days away from this curious date, I'd like you to think about setting aside a moment at the tenth hour, tenth minute, tenth second, on the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year of the century, to contemplate how much has changed, and how different our lives are now from ten years ago. Is your life better or worse now? Regardless of your evaluation, change is a significant part of our lives, more so all the time.

Nova Spivack has been talking lately about "The Now" becoming an increasingly dense and increasingly narrow focus in our collective experience. I've talked before about Nova's groundbreaking work in the semantic web and providing tools to help us navigate through the potentially overwhelming Stream of information entering our lives. Is the amount of information in the world really doubling at an exponential rate? Read this article featuring Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who says we are currently creating an amount of information every two days that equals the entirety of information created from the dawn of civilization until 2003!

How much longer can we keep up this acceleration? Where is this acceleration taking us? My song "The End of the World" suggests that people have always been suggesting that something significant is just about to happen, and in my book and this blog I've played with the idea that Everett's Many Worlds allows for the possibility that there are parallel worlds where those people turned out to be right, they're just not the version of the universe we currently happen to find ourselves in.

What do you think?

Do you believe we're approaching a tipping point? As more and more people become connected together like a gigantic "hive mind" of a tightly focused Great Big Now (as Nova Spivack calls it), will we collectively ascend to something greater? I would say that's the hope we all have to share. On 10-10-10, take a moment to think about whether you're helping to move this world to be better or worse than it was before you got here. And enjoy the journey!


A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Rob Bryanton

P.S.: The picture we saw at the start of this entry is part of a collection called "(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos", check them all out at Smashing Magazine. The description attached to the picture when it was posted at Pixdaus says the shot was taken on Norway’s cliff Prekestolen (also known as Preacher’s Pulpit), but according to other people commenting on the picture it's actually found at Odda, Norway, and it's called Trolltunga (The Troll's Tongue). Either way, people insist this is not photoshopped, and is an actual geological formation found in Norway. How far out on the Troll's Tongue would most of us be willing to go?

Next: New Animation - The Forest

Polls Archive 57 - Will 10-10-10 be significant?

Poll 57: "With which prediction do you more agree? 1. 10/10/10 (October 10th 2010) is going to be a very significant date for our planet. or 2. 10/10/10 will be an unremarkable day."
Poll ended January 30th 2010. 26% said that date will be significant, and 74% said it will be unremarkable.

:-) I just noticed that this poll ended on the 30th day of 2010, a nice little countdown, purely unintentional. But that's what our brains are designed to do, isn't it - look for the patterns within the noise, find the concealed meanings, see which is the approaching predator and which is just the waving grass.

Some people have remarked that 101010 in binary equals 42, a number familiar to Douglas Adams fans as "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything". The idea that October 10, 2010 - 10/10/10 - could be significant, a day when we all find some answers, is an entertaining one to consider. After all these years of talking to people about the tenth dimension, having some sort of climactic event like this occur on that date would certainly be amazing, wouldn't it?

Let's ignore for a minute that 10/10/10 as a date is quite arbitrary - there are any number of counting systems and calendar systems that would assign a completely different set of numbers to that particular rotation of the earth that we're thinking of as October 10, 2010. A quick search on the net showed a few dire predictions, and a few optimistic ones. I like the approach of this hubpages.com web page by paradigmsearch: it leaves things fairly open-ended, and provides some interesting information. It also gets more specific with its poll-question than I did, asking us to predict whether 10/10/10 will be good, bad, or an unremarkable "nothing". As I'm writing this their poll has "good" slightly ahead of "nothing", with a comparatively small number of votes for "bad". Paradigmsearch also provides us with these interesting takes on the 10/10/10 number set:

101010 (base two (binary)) equals 42 (base ten). Oddly enough, this is evenly divisible by the number of days in a week (7 (lucky)); and equally oddly, is also evenly divisible by the number 6 (which is generally designated as being unlucky). Both a Ying and Yang situation seem to be incorporated into this date.

10 (base ten) = 1010 (base two)

(base ten): 10 x 10 = 100

(base two): 10 x 10 = 100

The binary attributes of 101010 lends itself to use by the sciences of fractals (recursive geometric shapes) and chaos theory (the butterfly effect).

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we've talked a lot about predictions. One of the very first poll questions I ran at this blog, Poll 4, asked about predictions of the end of the world and how that fits in with Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation. Does the fact that a prediction has not come true before prove that it's not going to happen this time? In my discussion of that poll question, I quoted from chapter 6 of my book:

...But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

Which returns us to one of the more popular songs from the 26-song collection attached to this project. This is a song about how all predictions may come to pass in some part of the multiverse, or in some sliver of the multiple parallel universe landscape predicted by Everett's Many Worlds interpretation: "The End of the World".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

So what's my prediction for 10/10/10? I predict that a large number of people are going to wake up on that day with a feeling of well-being and heightened awareness. And if you wake up that day feeling tired and grumpy does that disprove my prediction? Not at all. It will just show that you are observing your own version of the universe, one that is different from all the people who woke up that day feeling better. So if you're not enjoying the journey, ask yourself: why not?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 58 - Finite But Unbounded?

Song 12 of 26 - The End of the World

The twelfth of the 26 songs is called "The End of the World". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.



A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY


THE END OF THE WORLD
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone

Looking back through history
We oft encounter prophecies
Of end times so very very near
Next year, five years, ten from now
A state of flux, some way somehow
The process of postponement never clear

The end of the world…

With space and time a continuum
Of everything that is to come
And might have been, in one infinite ball
Multiple timelines, now I see
Apocalyptic destinies
Prophets proven prophets after all

The saucers?
Already landed
Our star bodies?
Already attained
Y2K? The global pandemic?
Huge disasters
The big freakin’ asteroid?
Destroyed the world

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone
The end of the world has come and gone

This song, which is more of a tongue-in-cheek show tune, could be thought of as a companion piece to the song we just looked at, "The Anthropic Viewpoint". Here are song blog entries that talk about the ideas within this song:
FAQ 13 - Is this about The End of the World, the Mayan Calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity?
The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension
How to Make a Universe
Addictive Personality
The End of the World
The End of the World 2
Spirituality, Connections and the Tenth Dimension

One thing that should be clear from all this is that we're not necessarily talking about an apocalypse or an environmental catastrophe (or whatever) here: any of the other big shifts people are currently talking about qualify just as much as, let's say, World War III would, for creating an end to the world as we know it now. This is why I'm happy to lump the Mayan Calendar's accelerated world consciousness, or Kurzweil's Singularity, or everyone attaining their star bodies (and so on) under the general heading of "That End of the World". Again: no matter what prediction you care to look at, eventually it will either come true, or we will still all be here asking the people who made the predictions "how come nothing happened?". With songs like Everything Fits Together, The Unseen Eye, and The Anthropic Viewpoint, we have now arrived at a place where we can see that all of those other timelines may continue to exist as potential within the multiverse: they're just not part of the spacetime tree we're currently on.

Or, even more amazingly, some day we may well find ourselves on one of those timelines where one of these transcendent or frightening predictions do actually come true. This song shows us that a long history of failed predictions that the "end-times are nigh" should not leave us sitting smugly, saying to ourselves that it will never happen: after all, in the multiverse of all possible parallel universes for our universe, those predictions have already come true - somewhere, somewhen. Really, we have no way to prove one way or the other (until we get there!) which predictions will end up being true, and which ones will end up being hot air and much ado about nothing.

Next song: 13 of 26 - Blind Faith

The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Since it's the holiday season, here's a blog entry to lighten the mood: "The End of the World, Death, and the Tenth Dimension". :-) The songs in this blog entry are from the 26-song collection attached to this project, in this case these are songs recorded very simply with me sitting at my beat up old piano.

Twenty years ago I was writing the music for a play about the end of the world. Placed twenty thousand years in the future, it was probably ahead of its time: its premise was that our ongoing environmental abuses had destroyed all plant and animal life and made our planet so unstable that the last remaining inhabitants were being forced to leave the Earth forever.

Let's think back to twenty years ago. The 80's, quite frankly, were not a real great decade for environmental consciousness. The "Me" Decade, as it's sometimes called, was looking back at the horrific environmental warnings of the sixties and seventies and saying "Look! Nothing happened! We're all fine! Relax!". This got me thinking that no matter what time in history you're looking at, there's always been a small contingent waving their arms and saying the "end is nigh"! In the 80's, trying to get the audience to imagine that the end was coming as a result of our pollution of the environment seemed to me to have some difficulties: but eventually, I reasoned, there's going to have to be a time when one of those end of the world predictions come true, whether that be tomorrow, or twenty thousand years from now. Was there a way, I wondered, to make those predictions seem more real to the audience right now?

I should mention here that (as I describe in my book) I had been pondering the ideas of branching timelines and important "cusps" that each of us experience as far back as the age of seven, and a wonderfully subversive book by Madeleine L'Engle called "A Wrinkle In Time" that I read a number of times as a child definitely had already caused these ideas to have started brewing way back then.

I should also mention here that I was really worrying about things that were none of my business: I was the composer, and the playwright creating the text for this project had already come up with a story rich in metaphor and texture. But there was still something about the environmental catastrophe angle that, for me, seemed to need a little bit more. So I kept thinking.

This is when the way of imagining reality that became the tenth dimension project first became locked in for me. The first three dimensions are easy: think of a line, that's the first dimension, draw a second line that crosses the first (which creates a plane), that's the second dimension, bend those lines and you're in the third dimension. I was reading an article about quantum physics, and trying to imagine how our reality could be so strange: down at the quantum level, everything is a wave until it's observed, at which point its wavefunction is collapsed into one state or another. How, I asked myself, can the act of observation be what causes subatomic particles to stop being waves? It was just too weird. The way I decided to explain it to myself, then, was that this must mean that those waves exist in the fifth dimension, and that it is us moving down our 4D line of time, picking one part of the waveform out from the other, that gives us the quantum observer effect. But what, I asked myself, if this was also happening not just at the quantum level, but also within our physical reality of spacetime? If we think of our timeline as being in the fourth dimension, then that would mean that there are other parts of the fifth dimension where end of the world predictions had already come true, and that if you wanted to get to those other timelines you would have to jump through the sixth dimension to get there.

I remember sitting in a coffeeshop with the playwright, excitedly drawing little diagrams of lines and branches on a napkin and showing how you could fold the napkin to jump from one reality to another. This, I said to him, is how you can explain how the end of the world is constantly coming: because if it had already come, we wouldn't be around anymore to ask why these end of the world predictions never seem to come true. This would mean, I reasoned, that at the end of the play the characters were waiting to be rescued by someone from one of these other realities where the end of the world hadn't happened yet: some place out there in the fifth or sixth dimension. And the clincher, for me, was that once we got to the seventh dimension that was as far as the logic could be taken, and the fact that so many spiritual and mystical systems also assigned a special significance to the number seven seemed to add to the impact of what I was imagining.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I may not have explained these ideas back then as well as I could have, but the upshot is that the playwright looked at me like I was crazy and the conversation was dropped. So. Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea about a way to imagine how our reality is constructed, out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, and that was where the idea and I stayed. Over the following two decades I showed these concepts to a number of other people, trying to get them interested in working on projects that explored these ideas: some people seemed to get what I was talking about but there were also quite a number who gave me that "you're crazy" look.

Still, for me, the idea never went away, and about five years ago I decided to write some songs about the ramifications of all this: let's just say my obsession was still strong, because in my spare time I ended up writing over forty songs in about two months surrounding the ideas that sprang for me from this way of imagining reality. In the back of my mind I was planning that some day these songs would end up on a CD with a little booklet explaining the ideas. As it turns out, that CD project ended up flipped on its head, because I ended up with a 220 page book about these ideas, and the lyrics to 26 of those songs I wrote back then are printed at the end of the book.

Okay. Now let's move on from the cheery topic of the End of the World, to talk about Death.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Four years ago, in 2004, I almost died. I went in for routine laparoscopic surgery to have my gall bladder removed, and the surgeon accidentally sliced open a large (and unusually positioned, apparently) vein on my liver. My entire chest cavity quickly filled with blood, making it impossible for them to see exactly where the bleeding was coming from, so they jammed some packing into the general area and closed me up. I woke up the next day blown up like a large balloon with almost half of my blood not flowing in my veins, but pooled in my chest and gut. The surgeon explained that this was the best option, because the blood was pressing on my vital organs from the outside, and that if they had drained the blood off, my blood pressure would have dropped to the point where I most likely would have gone into shock and died.

The internal bleeding took several days to stop completely, and it took almost three months before all of that blood in my gut had been absorbed back into my system and I stopped looking (and feeling!) like I was very pregnant. So there I was, lying in the hospital, with my family putting on a brave face for me but knowing how close it had been. Within a day or two of this disaster, my eldest son was at my bedside, and I again started trying to tell him about this way of imagining reality: although he didn't give me the "you're crazy" look (bless him for that), he did confess later on that he presumed this was just the ravings of a man stoned on morphine.

But that's not where our story about death ends.

About two and a half years ago, in 2005, I went on a trip to Australia. Up to that point in my adult life I had been reading mostly science fiction novels and Stephen King thrillers for my entertainment, and of course the never-ending stream of equipment manuals I was constantly poring through as part of my day job as a composer and studio owner. But it was around this time that I had decided to start reading more "serious" science books, and that's why the light reading I took with me to Australia was by physicist Michio Kaku, an eye-opening book called "Hyperspace: a Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension".

Now, some people will tell you that my way imagining reality is not the one that's currently taught in physics classes, but what kept happening for me as I read Kaku's book was that I could see ways that string theory and cosmology could quite easily be pasted onto what I had been thinking. More importantly, what that book showed me is that my way of imagining didn't go far enough, because it accounted only for the universe we live in, as a point in the seventh dimension. What, I reasoned, if the other different-inital-conditions universes Kaku was talking about were other "points" in the seventh dimension? My immediate inspiration was that this meant the line, branch, fold pattern I had already imagined to get to the seventh dimension could be repeated a third time, leaving us with absolutely every possible expression of reality up there within the tenth dimension.

But we're still talking about death here. So on my way back from Australia to Canada I developed blood clots in my legs (a not uncommon problem from sitting too long on the plane), which gradually migrated to my lungs. Feeling increasingly weak and short of breath in the weeks that followed, I finally got to the point where I couldn't even fall asleep because I kept having to gasp for breath, and I ended up in the hospital's Cardiac Surveillance Ward for almost two weeks, hooked up to heart monitors and that lovely oxygen tube.

For someone looking for a two week holiday, I highly recommend the Cardiac Surveillance Ward (just make sure you're in there with nothing actually wrong with your heart!): the nurses are friendly and work very hard to keep you calm and peaceful. The beds are comfortable, and once the blood thinners they put me on started to work and the clots in my lungs started to clear, I actually felt pretty good.

So there I was, with this recent insight about how my way of imagining reality could interface with leading-edge theories about cosmology and extra dimensions. I had my wife Gail bring in my laptop and during my two week stay in the hospital, I wrote the first draft of my book. I've been asked more than once what drugs I was taking when I wrote all my unusual ideas down: but lots of people still think I'm kidding when I say I was on "oxygen"!

During the following year, I took that ninety page first draft I had written in the hospital and did a lot more reading about physics and cosmology. I was thrilled to discover that my way of blending quantum waves and branching timelines from twenty years before was in fact a real and recognized scientific theory, first advanced by Hugh Everett III, and it was commonly known as the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics. Everett went to his grave in 1982 largely unrecognized for the significance of his work, but over the past ten years or so his theory has been increasingly embraced by the modern physics community.

And while I was adding all this research into my book, I also created the audio soundtrack for an eleven-minute animation I was envisioning, that would more clearly illustrate those concepts I had been drawing on napkins in coffeeshops twenty years before. The talented folks at OH! Media here in Regina Saskatchewan Canada worked with me to turn my simple hand-drawn sketches into the interesting visuals which are seen in the book and the animation, and in the accompanying website which was launched at the end of June 2006. Within a few days, the website vaulted to popularity, and this project became known all over the world.

If anything, the project continues to gradually become more popular now because of the growing fascination people are having with the middle ground I'm trying to portray: a place where science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics can be shown to all be talking about the same thing. The website is currently averaging almost two million hits a month, and my little book, written as I lay in a hospital bed wondering if my heart was about to do me in, has been sold all over the world.

Why has this project been so popular? Because it isn't just about physics: it's about creativity, and inspiration, and souls, and memes (which are ideas that can be transmitted across time and space). It's about the place where information equals reality (a quantum physics idea that applies to many other things), which in our modern accelerated world of information, means people with shared beliefs are connecting to each other more quickly than ever before.

And, with the increasing fascination these days over the Mayan Calendar's predictions of the "end of time" happening in 2012, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil predicting a rapidly approaching "Singularity" where humans and technology merge, the fact that this project began as a way of thinking about the End of the World adds new resonance (but to be clear, both Kurzweil and promoters of the Mayan Calender are not talking about an apocalypse, they are instead talking about a great leap forward in the way our conscious minds interface with space and time... so, not an End of THE World, but an end to the antiquated ways of our current world).

Twenty years ago I was a guy with an unusual idea in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Now I'm a guy with an idea that millions of other people around the world have seen and enjoyed, and which more and more people are becoming convinced is not crazy at all, and just may be the truth about the nature of our reality. Perhaps most amazingly, all of this happened with almost no advertising or promotion, just through the power of shared ideas in our modern hyper-connected world. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: to close, a song about hope for the future.


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

The End of the World 1

I’d be curious to know how many cultures there are in the world where it’s appropriate to yell “shit!!” when one sees impending death approaching. The phrase might also have been “dirt!!”, or “dust!!”, or the more florid “oh no, the impending doom I see potentially laid before me is going to remove me from this life and return me to the eco-system as my component parts!!”… in other words, I am about to become shit.

Throughout history, there are always doomsayers who are predicting that we are all about to become shit. The end of the world is upon us! The end is nigh! Here’s what I say in the book about this idea:

Usually it’s some conveniently distant amount of time away from the present to be a cause for concern, but not so close as to immediately leave the person spreading the news with egg on their face (as I write this in 2006, the Mayan calendar’s December 21 2012 looks like a good upcoming contender for an end-of-the world focal point some portion of the public are likely to become caught up with).
But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?
From the anthropic viewpoint, then, it seems we become like Schrödinger’s Cat, simultaneously alive and dead. The fact that we don’t actually perceive ourselves as being dead is because if we were dead we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

Which brings us back to one of the reasons I first conceived of this model for Imagining the Tenth Dimension – as a child, I was trying to explain to myself why some moments in our lives seem so heavily significant, so deeply ingrained in our memories, while other moments quickly fade. I came to the conclusion that it was because those moments were when important “cusps” occurred: moments when our possible future paths diverged significantly. My friend Ron Scott told me of a moment he once had where he stood on an empty street, and absolutely nothing significant happened, but the moment seared itself into his memory. Perhaps, I would suggest, that was the moment where, in a number of the fifth-dimensional branches available to him at that instant, something bad happened… a drunk driver careened around the corner and mowed him down, or a nearby building exploded, or a satellite fell from the sky and took him out (a trivia moment for my fellow Northern Exposure fans).

Sure, everybody remembers where they were when they first heard about the planes striking the towers in New York. No question, on that day everyone on the planet had their fourth-dimensional timeline wrenched into a new direction from the available fifth-dimensional paths, and as a significant cusp moment each of us will remember that day for the rest of their lives. But each individual life has such moments, and important branches need not be nearly as devastating as that one. Why do so many of us like to look at the picture of the latest lottery or big game show winner? It’s not that different from craning your neck to see the car crash as we drive by - we recognize and are drawn to the cusp moments in other people’s lives. And perhaps some of our most cherished memories are ingrained because of the bad cusps which our fifth-and sixth-dimensional selves recognize that we managed to avoid in this particular version of reality.

This takes us back to the anthropic principle and the multiverse, as my version of the tenth dimension portrays these concepts. So now, here, for your viewing pleasure, is another video for my song “The Anthropic Viewpoint.”



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE


On a side note, the Google Books listing for Imagining the Tenth Dimension has now become active. Clicking on this link allows you to search for any word or phrase that interests you within this book, or within all books participating in the Google Books program. Since the index for my book is also listed there, this gives people an easy way to browse. Finally, for anyone who is confused about my background or my intentions with this project, I would invite you to read the introduction to my blog, linked here, as well as the "About Me" over to the right of this blog.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension

This week an excerpt from chapter three of my book was released in the online magazine CRAM, check it out.

The very first issue of this magazine caught my eye when I saw the following three tidbits at the top of the very first page:
“+ About 2500 people in the United States have the last name Cram, accounting for .001% of last names. + Card Random Access Memory (C.R.A.M.) was a type of magnetic storage device used in the early 1960’s. + The 1940 twelve-inch Cram’s Terrestrial Illuminated Glass Globe is notable for a few reasons…”

Aha!, I said to myself. It’s clear to me that this magazine understands the points I have been making with the tenth dimension project: that there are systems of belief, collections of memes, and shared consensual reality that connect us all across time and space. Those 2500 people with the last name CRAM, even though they represent only .001% of the last names in the US, would represent a random access database that would be surprisingly representative of the many ways of looking at the world that all of us share, and would also allow us to quickly find some of those in the world who have unique points of view.

I’ll be the first to admit that I may have been reading more into the connections between those three tidbits than was intended by the editors of Cram. But I stand by the interpretation: as this project (the 11-minute animation, the website, the book, the songs, the videos, and this blog) have found their way into the world, I am continually surprised at the new connections people find to my way of imagining the ten dimensions and their own systems of belief.

In the past week I have been contacted by a number of people with strong Christian beliefs, thanking me for giving them a way to describe a reality which seems connected to science and cosmology but leaves room for there to be creator, or a force in the world that is working towards an ultimately positive outcome. In the book I approach this idea several different ways – from the anthropic viewpoint, our universe seems to have already been selected from a multiverse of universes, the vast majority of which would have been inhospitable to life as we know it. From the role of the quantum observer collapsing/observing reality from an indeterminate wave of possibilities, we already seem to be on a trajectory established at the big bang which is moving us along on a timeline towards a version of our universe which will last much longer than the many less stable configurations which could have been selected. I also touch on ideas of how the voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels, spirit guides and even alien presences could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality.

What I try to be very careful to do in the book is not force one way of interpreting all this upon the reader: whether one chooses to believe in a Creator who drives this whole impossibly complex mechanism forward, or if one believes in a Blind Watchmaker of chance and natural selection, what we our now experiencing as our reality is the same. As I say in Chapter Two:

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.


There are many more interpretations of my way of imagining the dimensions which people have brought to me – I was immediately surprised, for instance, at the number of people who had taken various hallucinogens and felt that what they had seen and experienced could be interpreted through the filter of what I’m presenting. As I’ve said a number of times in the tenth dimension forum, I don’t have any experience with hallucinogens myself, but I find such suggestions fascinating.

In the past week I’ve also received several emails from people convinced that the end of the world is coming in 2012, another topic I explore in the book. In the book I said that I expect that this is a rising tide of belief that will become increasingly popular over the next few years. The End of the World is also one of the 26 songs I have written for this project, and this idea will no doubt be a recurring theme in future blogs.

I should also point out that the Amazon “Search Inside this Book” function is now activated for my book, so that any ideas explored in the blog can also now be typed into Amazon’s search function to read excerpts from the book. Referencing the Index for the book will also provide you with search terms for further exploration.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob