We All are Chemicals

Last week I introduced you to my 1983 concept album, Alcohol and Other Drugs. This month I'm going to show you some of the songs from that album, starting here with a video for side one cut one (hey, it was 1983 and although CDs had been invented by then almost nobody had bought a player yet): "We All Are Chemicals".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLQ5DqWyaSk

I wrote the songs on this album to accompany a live show called The Good Life, sponsored by the Saskatchewan Alcoholism Commission, which Regina's Globe Theatre toured through the high schools of Saskatchewan that year before over 30,000 students. Each song looks at different attitudes towards drugs and alcohol, which for me brings to mind this pervasive meme:

Throughout human history, and even back to the various tales of animal intoxication (birds that enjoy fermented fruit being a commonly cited example), living creatures have always seemed attracted to finding ways to enter altered states.

A google search for "animal intoxication" turned up this Erowid book review about that topic as the top result, and on YouTube this Mike Jay documentary came up, which is a serious look at the history of mind-altering substances called "High Society".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qty8BjzpXwo

In The Good Life, "We All are Chemicals" was sung by a character who (predictably enough) has a meltdown by the end of the show, and of course his recipes for what drugs to never take together are deliberately ludicrous. Still, even though the "living creatures are drawn to altered states of consciousness" meme has proved to be a powerful one, it can also be used as an excuse for drug abuse, and the slippery slope from the desire for novelty or enlightenment to abuse and addiction makes this meme one that should always be accompanied by education. As preachy as it may sound, know what you're putting into your bodies, kids!

Here's the lyrics to the song:

WE ALL ARE CHEMICALS - words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

When I wake up in the morning
And I get out of my bed
And I need a little something
To wipe the sleep from my head
No, no, no I don’t go to the kitchen
And I don’t go to the store
I just go up to my closet
Up on the second floor
Where there’s a world of wonders locked inside a little chest
There’s a thousand chemicals, I love them all the best

We all are chemicals, so don’t you be surprised
We all need chemicals to survive

It’s a difficult decision
You know it always was
Tryin to find the chemical
For my day’s first buzz
I’ve got little magic mushrooms
Or the very finest smoke
I’ve got uppers and downers
Acid or coke
I am a scientist, my body is the lab
Workin with my chemicals, what fun I have had

We all are chemicals, so don’t you be surprised
We all need chemicals to survive

It’s a question of balance
It’s a question of control
And knowing when to give the go ahead
And when to tell yourself no
So I never mix tequila with my sensimilla weed
I don’t put sugar in my coffee if I’m on heroin or speed
This is the good life, don’t you throw it all away
Careful of which chemicals you take every day

Next: Gimme a Beer!

Alcohol and Other Drugs

Last time we talked about Novelty, and the idea that an interest in "what happens next" is what separates life from the basic thermodynamic chemical reactions that we derive our energy from.

So what about the use of mind-altering substances to increase our sense of novelty? Surely, the warm glow and shared laughter of friends having a bottle of wine together can be thought of as an innocent way of making the world seem more "novel" to them, at least for a little while? Don't the many other kinds of "systematic derangement of the senses" , whether they be the act of a lone participant or part of a large group's shared experience, and whether they be substance-induced or achieved through other trance-based or ritualistic means, speak to our desire to break out of the limited here and now, to be plugged into something larger, more novel?

But of course, the subject of alcohol and other drugs is a complex and sensitive topic. I remember a science fiction story by Bruce Sterling in which a near-future person marvels at what a "sledgehammer drug" alcohol is, leaving them mystified as to its popularity back in the twentieth century, and preferring other much more subtle substances to alter their minds. It's interesting that even the phrase "alcohol and other drugs" could seem designed to place alcohol at the "less dangerous" part of the equation, when it's no secret that alcohol is a habit-forming and potentially lethal drug: much more so, in a number of people's opinions, than marijuana, for instance. We might ask why alcohol is even legal, when we look at the damage it does every day.

I've remarked before that I find it fascinating that even though I have no personal experience with psychedelics, I hear regularly from people who feel my approach to visualizing the dimensions helps them to understand the visions they experience while under the influence of these substances. To which I've sometimes added, I also find it interesting that I never hear from people that my approach to visualizing the dimensions helps them to understand what they saw after drinking a case of beer. The conspiracy-minded observer of this situation might ask how these decisions as to which mind-altering substance is legal and which are not came to be made. After all, drugs like opium, heroin, and cannabis were legal in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Coca-Cola, for instance, quite famously contained 9 milligrams of cocaine per glass up until 1903! And the use of psychoactive substances like peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca is well-documented back many thousands of years to the dawn of civilization.

Last summer, Wired Magazine published an article about the controversy over Alcoholics Anonymous and how it works, and an editorial about alcoholism that showed how alcohol messes up the brain's ability to predict bad consequences (including the addict's inability to predict what will happen if the abuse continues), and how it suppresses neuroplasticity, an important part of our mental processes we just looked at in Changing Your Brain.

Am I saying alcohol should be abolished? No. Prohibition, like the current war on drugs, only makes criminals of innocent people and provides a healthy profit for organized crime. And for me, the point of using the phrase "alcohol and other drugs" is that it points out that alcohol, like any other mind-altering substance, needs to be treated with respect, because over-indulgence can have serious consequences.

One of the running themes for this project has been that my approach to visualizing the dimensions can provide persons who are trapped in self-destructive cycles a way out: this is the subject of songs like Addictive Personality, Positive Vibes, and See No Future. Which takes us back to my 1983 concept album, Alcohol and Other Drugs, which I want to show you some of the songs from this month. Sponsored by the Saskatchewan Alcoholism Commission, these songs were part of a show which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan during the 1983 to 1984 school year, and the show was presented live by the Globe Theatre's touring company before over 30,000 Saskatchewan teenagers back then. We're going to start with Side One, Cut One: We All Are Chemicals.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Here are links to all of the songs I created videos for:
We All Are Chemicals
Gimme a Beer!
Just a Shy Guy
Trying to Escape
Livin on the Edge of the World
Courage
Insidious Trends

Novelty

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_ANS2k97IM

Novelty. Is the desire for change the basic craving that drives life forward?


In his marvelous book "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin makes the point that even eight month old babies have a well-developed sense of melody and rhythm, and enjoy predictable music (read "pop" music here if you like), but they are particularly likely to notice predictable music which then breaks out of the established mode of what their sense of melody will lead them to predict. Regular readers of this blog know that I became a grandfather last year, and little Cadence turned one last week. Whether you're playing peekaboo, or watching her laugh at a musical game where an established pattern is changed, you can see the joy she takes from moment to moment in what happens next.

This is a phrase I've used before in my book and my blog: "life is any process which is interested in what happens next". This applies so nicely to the idea of music as opposed to random noise: in fact, our brains tend to suppress noise, as we talked about in Ringing in the Brain. Sure, you could say music is noise, but it's noise that has been organized in certain ways: and most of us like music which has repeating patterns which allow us to predict at least somewhat what is going to happen next. But the most interesting music of all is the music which solidly sets up an expectation, and then takes us someplace else instead - that's the musical events that we remember, that's the music that we're more likely to fall in love with. This relates very easily to the memory-creation processes we discussed last year in Entangled Neurons.

"What happens next": we like novelty, we prefer pleasant surprises over boredom (and the ongoing popularity of horror films would indicate that a number of us crave any kind of surprises, pleasant or not!). In this blog we've talked a number of times about writer/philosopher/psychedelics activist Terence McKenna, who died in April 2000. His "Novelty Theory" (also known as "Timewave Zero") project suggested that our planet regularly sees repeating cycles of higher and lower novelty, but that we will be approaching a point in 2012 where the number of novelty events climbs exponentially, eventually causing some sort of a tipping point and transition to a new form of worldwide consciousness. This year we've been talking about how light is at right angles to spacetime - this exponential curve that McKenna (along with many others) envisions could be another way of thinking about a new quantum observer system which is at "right angles" to our current existence. How much more novel can we get than that?

This month, there was a New Scientist article written by Katharine Sanderson about a new experiment with the lofty goal of creating "Life, but Not as We Know It". The experiment is being conducted by a team at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lee Cronin. Here's a quote from Dr. Cronin that relates nicely to our discussion:

Stripped down to its barest essentials, life can be seen as a struggle against thermodynamics and its drive towards ever more featureless uniformity.

This is another way of phrasing Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life, which we looked at in entries like Conscious Computers and Logic vs Intuition: life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.

Life is what makes us more than just a set of thermodynamic chemical processes. Life is engaged with spacetime in a way that keeps it wanting to move forward in our 4D hyperspace, not just through its own life, but through nurturing the generations that come afterwards. And ultimately, life is part of patterns which exist outside the narrow limits of our 4D reality. This has been a running theme through a number of the 26 songs I attached to this project, including Burn the Candle Brightly, What Was Done Today, Change and Renewal, See No Future, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Connections, and Thankful.

Speaking of songs, I've talked before about how for me Imagining the Tenth Dimension really started out as a "concept album", a collection of songs about the nature of reality. Coming up, I'd like to show you some of the songs from a somewhat-related concept album I released way back in 1983: "Alcohol and Other Drugs".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Language and the Mind

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO-F3OVWO4k



"Research has been uncovering how language shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human experience: space, time, causality and relationships to others."

- Lera Boroditsky, writing in the February 2011 issue of Scientific American, article "How Language Shapes Thought".

Last time, in Changing Your Brain, we explored whether it's possible for Imagining the Tenth Dimension's "new way of thinking about time and space" to actually re-wire people's brains. This time, let's explore the idea of how each of us have brain structures that make us unique individuals, and how those structures are influenced by our experiences, and by our language.

In entries like The Map and the Territory, Jumping Jesus, and Nothing is Real, we've looked at the ideas of Alfred Korzybski, who developed the science of General Semantics, which explores the relationship between our observed reality and the abstract constructs of language. There have been a number of articles I've come across which show some interesting tie-ins to these ideas, today we'll be looking at some of those links.

First, here's an article published last summer in the Wall Street Journal, about how different languages cause people to see the world differently: for instance, people who speak Japanese versus Spanish have a different sense of the concept of "blame".

A New Scientist article from around the same time talks about the notion advanced by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s that the brain is naturally wired for communication, and that language works as an extension of that ability. After five decades of pursuing that paradigm, researchers are now coming to terms with the fact that the opposite is true: language shapes the way the brain communicates, and different languages create different connections within the brain.

The current issue of Scientific American has an article on this subject as well, "How Language Shapes Thought", and that's where the illustration and quote that started off today's entry come from. Here's the opening paragraphs from that article, which was written by Lera Boroditsky (Lera is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Her lab conducts research around the world, focusing on mental representation and the effects of language on cognition).

I am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—winners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible directions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.

A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language.

Reading these articles makes one appreciate the gargantuan task Google Translate is attempting to tackle - being able to correctly translate one language to another, interpreting and even using idiomatic phrases, is so much more than just saying "this word in this language equals that word in that language". And yet, here's an article published last month about the latest demonstrations of Google Translate's "Conversation Mode", which will allow a person to speak into their phone and have the phone speak their words in another language, or to have the other person they want to speak with be able to use the device to translate their sentences into English.

Discussions of what happens when the brain is damaged add to the texture of this conversation. Here's a news article from a few years ago about people who suffer brain traumas and suddenly start speaking their native language with an accent. I've remarked before (in You Have a Shape and a Trajectory) that I thought it was interesting to watch my son Mark learning to speak different languages - the timbre of his voice changes, even his face changes somewhat, because of the different ways he positions his mouth and tongue whether he's speaking English, French, or Serbian. In a sense, he becomes a different person as he speaks these different languages.

Respected neuroscientist Dr. Adrian Owen, formerly of Cambridge and recently recruited to the University of Western Ontario (along with five of his research staff), headed up a team who were the first to communicate with patients in a persistent vegetative state using brain imaging. He also made a stir last year when he published a study showing that the popular "brain training videogames" do not, in fact, make people smarter. Dr. Owen is one of the most respected neuroscientists in the world, please keep that in mind as you watch him in this video called "Science of the Soul".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fD7Pu40qeI

So. Becoming fluent in another language gives us a window into another way of interfacing with reality, a different one from our own. Learning new things isn't just about broadening our horizons: it's about re-awakening our sense of wonder, which enhances our enjoyment of life. We're going to talk more about this next time with an entry called Novelty.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Temporal Mass

Is everything about our reality accelerating? What do the impressions of childhood, that time moves very slowly from month to month, and our impression that time moves much more quickly from year to year as we get older, tell us about our reality? In Jumping Jesus, we looked at Robert Anton Wilson's ideas on the exponential growth of information and innovation that we are all now having to deal with. Over at the tenth dimension forum, Daniel McQueen recently submitted this thought-provoking post:

If you take a gravitationally-attracted body (IE, something with mass), and let it freely move about in 3-dimensions, it will tend to move with ever-increasing speed towards the strongest gravitational pull. Any child who has played the wood-box game of Labyrinth can attest to it. Furthermore, if there is only one such source, the object will move in a straight line.

In our observations, the three arrows of time all point from past to future. Without explaining the physics of each arrow (Pick up Michio Kako's book "Hyperspace" to read about time's arrows in detail), it is our observation that objects moving at non-relativistic speeds move in a constant velocity towards time(future) and away from time(past). Limiting the timeline to 1d (and ignoring alts or forbids), I pose this question.

Do we have temporal "mass"?

To a child younger than 3 years, minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days, and days seem like weeks. Any kid put in 5 minutes timeout or "quiet time" will tell you its an eternity. Birthdays seem to take forever to come around.

I am a few months away from my 29th birthday. I can remember most of my life, and I have to admit, the 1980s went by really slow (1981-1989), the 1990s went a little faster (my freshman year of high school seems like a long time ago, even though it was 1995), and the 2000s seem to have flown.

At the same time, my younger cousin, age 9, from my p.o.v. has grown up really fast. From her p.o.v., it seems to have been forever since she was in pre-school.

The point is this: My age in seconds (days, fortnights, or whatever time units you want to use) is quite higher than hers. I have more temporal "mass" one could say. Perhaps this is why I seem to move faster through the days than my cousin does? And even though this is purely a perceptional issue, I think it is an interesting one. Each week seems to go by faster to me than the last. Either I am imagining things, or I am incessantly rolling down a shallow hill towards my ultimate resting place (death).

That's an interesting idea, Daniel, thanks for posting it! The question, for me, becomes this - if everything about our reality is accelerating, then these questions all become relativistic. Someone born 9 years ago has been part of the most accelerated development in all of recorded history, in a universe that is continuously accelerating its expansion, and in a world where people are instantaneously connected together in ways that were science fiction a decade ago... and yet to that 9 year old person this time has taken an interminably long time. Is it the observer or the observed who are accelerating? Does the universe have more "temporal mass" now in the same way that each of us as individuals do, and that's where the impression that time and space are both accelerating is really coming from? And if the Biocentric Universe theories are correct, then does this tie into the idea that our observation is what creates spacetime, rather than the other way around?

Gevin Giorbran described our spacetime reality as being pulled at either "end" by two organizing forces: grouping order and symmetry order. If Information Equals Reality, then everything about our reality can be divided into two lists: "this is the way our universe is right now" and "these are the ways our universe isn't". Obviously, when we think about the remarkably unlikely configuration of mass and energy, organizing patterns and information that represents our universe at this instant, this means the second list is much much larger than the first. But time's arrow tells us that we are moving away from the highest grouping order (the past), and the traditional view has been that what we are moving towards is some gloomy kind of high entropy soup where all of that information becomes meaningless noise.

We keep returning to the idea that our universe, as stated in a Scientific American article by physicist Sean Carroll, is a "temporary deviation from symmetry". Symmetry is perfect balance, a natural process that happens all the time - things have a way of evening out. Starting from the work of physicist David Bohm, Gevin Giorbran showed how the highly-ordered beginning of our universe is one way of ordering the information, or showing perfectly-balanced symmetry, and the "ending" of our universe is not meaningless noise, but the other most balanced way of representing that information. To use an absurdly simple representation, let's say the information representing our universe is like a big handful of coins tossed on a table. With H for heads and T for tails, it's like the beginning of our universe would be where we threw HHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTT, our current position in spacetime would be some random-looking collection of results (THHTTHTTTHHTTTTHTTTHTHHHT), and what we're moving towards is HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT. The beginning and the end, then, are two ways or representing the same thing, a perfectly balanced order, and what looks like a random assortment in the "middle" is really a causally-connected representation of one frame from within a process of gradually moving from the first set to the last set, from grouping order to symmetry order.

(Let me remind you, though, that when we're thinking about concepts like "past" and "future" and "before" and "after", these are useful for thinking about how things relate from one state to another, but we're not really thinking about the whole picture until we are visualizing how these events really already exist simultaneously within the timeless omniverse.)

Gevin suggested that gravity is a force that comes from the "past", from that highest grouping order, since gravity is what draws things together into groups. With his Timewave Zero and Novelty Theory, Terence McKenna suggested that what we are moving towards now is the highest "novelty". He proposed that we're on an exponential curve where eventually our timeline becomes so filled with possibilities that we jump to another level, where we can see the place where all of those potential states that we could now be moving towards exist simultaneously: and in my way of visualizing the dimensions that would be viewing our reality from the extra dimensions. When we get to that highest degree of novelty, we'll be at the highest symmetry order - absolutely every bit of information will have been appreciated along with its unique opposite, within that ultimate state of highest symmetry order which all enfolds together into a big beautiful zero that is not empty, but full of all those possibilities.

Thinking about Robert Anton Wilson's Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero", and Daniel McQueen's idea of a "temporal mass", then, might be different ways of thinking about the very same thing. Is the future pulling us towards it at an increasingly accelerated rate? Signs point to "yes".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: O is for Omniverse A and B


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txe4psJ6pVw


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99oMQvccar0

In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.

Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.

Here's what I say in my book about meditation:

Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?

This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.

When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".

In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".

This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Boredom and Consciousness Part Two

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8bDBmPlVg


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

Are you bored with your life? One of the ideas I've been promoting with this project is an all-encompassing definition of life as being "any process that is interested in what happens next".

As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have come to believe that there were certain organizing patterns and forces that can be seen to have influenced the creation of our universe right from its beginning, and that each of us is a participant in the ongoing act of creation that was set in motion back then and which continues to this day. In Boredom and Consciousness Part One, we talked about the respected physicists like John Wheeler have even suggested that the quantum observer could change not just the present or the future, but the past right back to the big bang! Still, no matter what perspective you approach this idea from, we have to recognize the name that is given to those organizing patterns and forces is contentious: and since some people are uncomfortable with words like "God", I have tended to call these the "big picture memes" that we can see were a part of the narrowing-down processes that caused our particular universe to be the one selected out of all possible universes within the multiverse.

Most of us (but not all of us!) believe that we have free will, which implies that we have some degree of control over "what happens next" as we travel down our 4D line of time, twisting and turning in the fifth dimension down at the planck length. What this means, then, is that very simple truths like "attitude affects outcome" have profound implications if in fact the parallel universes that are created by the branching choices of our actions really do exist, and we have talked in previous blogs about some of the modern cosmologists who say that this is indeed the case. Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these.

In my book I talk several times about what happens when we stop being interested in what happens next:

...many of us are painfully familiar with the experience of watching a loved one who, due to illness, extreme depression, or simple old age, have had their soul material gradually dissipate or be ground away. This can reach the point where we can see that the person that used to occupy that body is no longer there, even though the body continues to function. Where did they go? Perhaps they really did lose coherence and drift away. Or, more likely, most of the meme-set that made up that person lost interest in the diseased and tired body they were in and has already freed itself from its confines.
Witnessing the death of any living creature shows us one of the great mysteries of the universe: what leaves the body?

For our planet, every living thing is based on water. To quote from Paul Davies' article on alternate lifeforms on earth in the December issue of Scientific American:

...even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water.

A couple of blog entries ago we looked at the relationship between music and creativity, and not long before that we looked at a song of mine ("Change and Renewal") which proposes that creativity and water may be more closely tied to each other than any of us realize. In a sense, this is because the opposite of creativity is death: with no water, there's no life, and therefore no creativity. So, as I say in the song: "take a drink of water and find a new idea". :-)

We could also say that the opposite of boredom is novelty. But boredom and novelty are much more subjective terms, because they are based upon the way that our conscious minds perceive reality: in other words, one person's boring is another person's novelty. In part one I talked about synchronicity: the joyous connections our brains can make from seemingly unconnected bits of information, and how that can make it feel like the universe is trying to tell you something. I had been planning last week to write about Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind, but then two magazines arrived in my mailbox the same day and I saw so many connections to what I was thinking about that I felt it was important to explore them.

The first of the two magazines is the new special issue of Scientific American "Mind": the cover story is dedicated to the study of boredom, and there are quite a few articles within that issue that relate very nicely to what we're talking about here. The other magazine was the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which has as its cover story "The Smart, Strange World of the Subconscious".

The article in New Scientist makes the point that neurobiologists sometimes prefer to use terms like "non-conscious", "pre-conscious", or "unconscious" in these discussions about the subconscious. This is because it's much easier to define what is a conscious activity for our minds, than it is define all of those other processes which are bubbling beneath the surface, some of which are operating at much higher operations per second, and some of which are stretched out into much slower processes. We have already talked in this blog about how consciousness is thought by modern science to be a process that, for most people, operates at between thirty and ninety "bings" per second.

One of the studies discussed in the Scientific American "Mind" issue concerns persons with long-term substance abuse problems: an ongoing study of 156 addicts at a New York methadone clinic revealed that the only reliable indicator of whether an addict is about to relapse was their reported level of boredom. My song "Addictive Personality" talks about the pitfalls that can happen when people are trapped in repetitive loops that lead them to believe that "what happens next" will always be the same as "what happened before", a sure-fire recipe for boredom:


Julian Jaynes, in his epic masterwork "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", proposed that our current mode of operation, with a conscious part of the brain that is "narrating" our activities from moment to moment, and a subconscious (or non-conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious) part of the brain that is processing data "behind the scenes", is a fairly recent development. He proposed that only a couple of thousand years ago humans lived in a more integrated form of consciousness, where conscious and subconscious processes were not divided. This seems to imply that everyone existed in a semi-dreamlike state, a state which modern society has taught us to be suspicious of: which is strange, because there are still many activities that we perform much better when we are not "Thinking" about what we're doing. Athletes talk about being "in the zone": the place where they become one with their activity, rather than thinking about all of the component parts, is how they achieve success. Be it musicians, public speakers, or a teenager on their first date: the times that we become self-conscious about what we're doing or saying, we are much more likely to not be at our best. Here is another video with me in discussion with master musician Jack Semple where we touch upon some of these ideas:




Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - We wrap up this exceedingly long entry in part three. Click here to read part three now.

Your Sixth-Dimensional Self

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

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

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

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

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

"The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension."

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

"And in The End..."
What does timelessness mean for me? Because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey, and see how everything fits together.

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

Rob



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