…Fields can also be related to one another.
For example, the magnetic field is
related to the electric field because electricity can be used to
create a magnet and a magnet can be used to create electricity.
For this reason, the two fields are actually considered to be
aspects of the same field - the electromagnetic field…
[One] important question in modern
physics is whether all fields are, in fact, interrelated and
aspects of a single underlying field - a unified field. If so,
this field would form the foundation for all the others. And one
interesting thing about the existence of such a field is that,
for the various physics equations to work out mathematically, at
least ten spatial dimensions would be required.1
So how does consciousness fit into all of this?
If you think about it, consciousness
might also be viewed as a field - a region in which the force of
consciousness is exerted.
For example, when we become
"conscious" of something - when we feel aware, when thoughts pop
into our minds - perhaps we are receiving and processing
information arising from the field of consciousness. Just as we
perceive the gravitational field as a feeling of weight or as
the sensation of falling, perhaps "awareness" is our sensation
of the consciousness field.
Things might go in the other direction as well. Not only may we
feel the effects of the consciousness field, but we might also
be able to exert our own forces upon it. In other words, not
only may we be receivers of consciousness, but we may also be
generators.
Just as a magnet can both create a
magnetic field and be influenced by the forces of other magnets,
consciousness may be both a field we are affected by and an
active force that we can exert. Instead of being puppets
buffeted about by the field of consciousness that surrounds us,
we may all be active participants in a grand ballet of energy,
exerting our own active forces of consciousness into the mix.
Of course, from the standpoint
of quantum physics, much of
this is old hat.
It is already accepted by physicists
that, at the subatomic level, everything is a set of
probabilities or potentialities affected by awareness. Even a
simple act of observation - or, indeed, an intention to observe
2 - can cause changes in the subatomic realm.
A quantum particle in several
simultaneous states of "possibility" becomes jelled into a
single reality when we exert the power of our gaze. In fact, if
particles behave in a certain way once we decide to measure
them, it is almost as if we are creating them or as if they are
cooperating with our desires.
But few of us believe that the mere
act of forming an intention could have an observable effect on
our day-to-day lives.
Perhaps we are wrong… Experiments with random event generators…
support the possibility that our thoughts and intentions can
cause observable changes in the world. 3, 4, 5, 6
Another set of experiments,
conducted by researchers on the effects of transcendental
meditation, found that if enough meditators work collectively,
the amount of violent crime in a city can be lowered for
extended periods of time. 7
The truth may be that our beliefs
and intentions do affect our collective reality in profound ways
all the time; we just don't realize it.
Researchers have found, for example,
that when doctors dispense pills that they believe will work,
the pills work better; and when they dispense pills that they do
not believe will work, they don't work as well.
This is true whether or not the
pills are placebo or medicated, whether or not the doctors know
what they are actually dispensing or have come into contact with
their patients, and even whether or not the patients are human.
It's often the intent or belief of a doctor that matters the
most.8
…So if we do accept the possibility of an active force of
consciousness, how might it operate? That's where higher spatial
dimensions might come into play.
The Fourth Dimension
Let me begin by saying that when I say "higher dimensions," I'm
not talking about figurative realms populated by mysterious
beings.
I'm literally talking about
higher spatial dimensions.
Just as a two-dimensional universe
can be understood as a flat surface, and just as we ourselves
live in three-dimensional space with objects possessing length,
width, and height, a four-dimensional universe would actually be
a space with one extra spatial dimension.
While it's easy to visualize other
ways of adding a "dimension" to our reality - for example, a
dimension of time would add a timestamp to each object, and a
dimension of color would add a color - getting our brains to
wrap around an extra spatial dimension is quite difficult.
…It turns out that a fascination with the fourth dimension was a
fad of the late 1800s.
This was the era in which mediums,
like today's television medium John Edward, were quite
popular. It was also the era in which spiritualism emerged, an
American religious movement focused on communicating with the
spirits of those who had passed away.
Scientists of the time proposed the
fourth spatial dimension as a way of explaining spiritist
phenomena.
Ultimately, however, nearly all the
mediums of the 1800s were debunked as frauds and as a
consequence, speculation about the fourth dimension fell into
disrepute as well. But perhaps we should not have been so hasty
to throw the baby out with the bath water.
As mathematician Rudy Rucker
points out in his book,
The Fourth Dimension,
9 the first philosopher to discuss the
possibility of a fourth dimension was Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804).
The idea of spirits as
four-dimensional beings was then popularized by Johann Carl
Friederich Zollner (1834-1882), an astronomer at the
University of Leipzig.
The first true theoretician of the
fourth dimension, however, was British mathematician Charles
Hinton (1853-1907), known for his work on visualizing the
geometry of higher dimensional space.
In addition to his mathematical
work, Hinton also wrote a series of science fiction books, such
as
What is the Fourth Dimension?
and
A Plane World, which focus
on realms with different dimensionality than our own. He also
believed that higher spatial dimensions could be used to prove
the inherently unified nature of the universe.
Hinton came up with a variety of
ways to help us understand the fourth dimension and its
properties. One was… [examining] the difference between two and
three dimensions and then, by analogy, grasping the difference
between three and four dimensions.
Here's [an] illustration of this
technique.
If you take two flat two-dimensional surfaces and intersect them
in the context of three-dimensional space, what do you get? The
answer: a line, which is a one-dimensional object.
To understand this, just imagine
taking two sheets of paper and intersecting them. By analogy, if
you take two three-dimensional spaces and intersect them in the
context of four-dimensional space, what will you get? The
answer: a two-dimensional space - a flat surface.
That means, if there were another
three-dimensional world floating out there and it happened to
overlap and intersect with us, the region of overlap between our
two worlds would appear to us like a flat, impossibly thin sheet
of paper.
Could this be an explanation for the
phenomenon of ghosts? Are ghosts simply ephemeral
two-dimensional visions of beings in another three-dimensional
world?
That's what Zollner proposed in the
mid 1800s…
Physics and Higher Dimensions
Of course, speculation about higher dimensions is nothing new to
physicists; they have considered the possible existence of four
or more spatial dimensions for a long time.
For example, between 1907 and 1915,
Einstein developed the theory of general relativity,
which states that gravity exists because a large mass causes
three-dimensional space to bend within the fourth dimension.
This is easy to visualize if you drop down into two dimensions.
What if the mass of a large Circle
caused the flat world of two dimensions to bend around it in
three-dimensional space? Just imagine bending a large piece of
paper around the edges of the Circle.
That would cause everything near the
Circle to fall toward it. In the same way, bending
three-dimensional space around massive bodies like planets would
cause nearby objects to fall toward them. Voila! Gravity...
And what about wormholes?…
Physicists believe that
three-dimensional space might be bent so heavily by the mass of
a black hole that the fabric of
the universe folds back on itself, causing one part to intersect
with another, thereby creating a portal between them.
To see how this could happen, just
imagine bending a sheet of paper so much that two distant points
on it touch.
…One question that still begs to be answered, though, is:
-
What kind of access can we
have to the fourth or higher dimensions?
-
Even if our bodies are stuck
here in three-dimensional space, is there a
four-dimensional aspect of ourselves that we're simply
not aware of?
Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's
student and chronicler, thought so.
In fact, he felt that the primary
goal of Gurdjieff's teachings was to help us access our higher
dimensional selves.
As Rudy Rucker writes,
"For Ouspensky, the fourth
dimension was not only a spatial concept but a type of
consciousness, an awareness of greater complexities and
higher unities." 10
Thus, rather than trying to contact
other beings in the fourth dimension, perhaps our real goal
should be to tap into our own four dimensionality.
Indeed, I believe it is from this
higher dimensional perspective that we may be able to exert the
deep power of active consciousness - the ability to navigate and
influence the unfolding of our three-dimensional lives.
The Branching Tree
… [It turns out that] from the perspective of the fourth
dimension, …a complete human life - every activity of the inner
and outer physical body - would simply appear as an eternal
shape or object in four-dimensional space.
…[But] what determines [its] shape?
That's when things get interesting. At each point in time we
make choices. Do we walk left or right? Does our body repair
itself or does it descend further into disease?
At each instant, we choose one from
a potentially infinite number of possible futures that lie
before us. And while it may seem that only one future is chosen
at each point in time, perhaps all of the other possible choices
and futures exist in four-dimensional space too. If so, then our
many potential lives - from a four-dimensional perspective -
would look like a vast branching tree of possibilities.
Interestingly, this idea was hypothesized by physicist Hugh
Everett in 1957.11
In the quantum realm, particles
exist in many simultaneous states until they are observed and
become "solidified" into a single state. To us, these quantum
choices seem random. Everett proposed, however, that there
really is no randomness at all.
Each and every one of the possible
choices for a particle actually exists - in another parallel
world. We ourselves perceive only one choice - the one that
takes place in our world.
But Everett asserted that the others
choices exist too - in other worlds. Indeed, parallel versions
of ourselves exist in those other worlds too, and they witness
the particle resolving into other possible states. Mind
boggling! It sounds like science fiction, and indeed, many
science fiction stories have been written based on this idea.
But what if it's science fact?
I believe that this conception of
our universe may also be the basis for how active consciousness
might operate.
FIGURE 1
Let's begin to consider this mind-bending idea by simply
imagining a single point of branching.
Consider the world of a
three-dimensional ball, depicted in Figure 1. The ball begins,
at time t1, at the bottom of a road. When it arrives at point C
(which occurs at time t2), the ball must make a choice.
Does it move along the branch moving
to the right, or does it continue moving upward?
In one future reality, the ball has
moved up at time t3. In another future reality, it has branched
to the right at t3, creating a fork in four-dimensional space.
Let's call C a choice point - a point in space and time at which
the Now splits into two or more possible futures. In order for
this split to occur, some force must be exerted. If this does
not happen, there may be only one possible future - the one that
would play itself out according to the mechanistic laws of
nature.
For the ball, this might be the
future in which it continues moving upward, in a straight line.
But if some kind of force, intention, or will is brought to bear
at point C, the Now will split into more than one possible
future, like a branching tree.
And when we humans exert such a
force upon our own lives, we experience the sensation of free
will.
Of course, people usually make rather mundane choices at choice
points. We might choose to move our arm or walk to the grocery
store. But at times the actions we take can be much more subtle
- like when our thoughts affect the behavior of a random event
generator. What I would like to propose is that this more subtle
kind of force is what underlies the power of active
consciousness.
I'll call it the C-force. And just
as the experiments with random event generators showed, a
person's use of the C-force can influence not only his or her
own life, but can also affect the unfolding of the greater
reality around us.
As a result, each and every one of
us helps to create a much greater collective reality - an
infinitely complex shape in four-dimensional space. Indeed, even
if we took into account every tiny mechanism already understood
by conventional science, the influence of our collective use of
the C-force would be beyond our imaginations!
In fact, it might even be possible
that our influence extends beyond four dimensions. If so, we
humans - seemingly three-dimensional creatures - may have
creative potential that we have only just begun to tap into.
The Process of Active Consciousness
…When I chose the term C-force, I used the letter "C"
intentionally - because it serves as a reminder of several
important aspects of this force:
-
Consciousness
-
Choice
-
Creativity
Using the C-force - the force of
active consciousness - you can make beneficial choices that take
you down desired paths in life.
You can create new and unlikely
paths as well. Either way, harnessing the power of active
consciousness will enable you to make the improbable much more
probable and become an active creator of your own destiny.
Let's examine this process now in
more detail.
…One way in which the C-force might be used is through the
process of manifestation. In this case, you enable an unlikely
combination of otherwise mundane events to occur so that a
desired goal comes about. For example, let's say that you would
like to get a desirable parking spot near a restaurant.
The restaurant might be in the
middle of a busy city where parking spots are hard to find, but
finding the perfect spot at just the right time could definitely
happen.
Everything just needs to be
coordinated correctly: the choices made by the person who parked
in the spot before you, the route you choose to drive, the
timing of the lights as you are driving, and so on.
By invoking the power of active
consciousness…, these fortuitous choices and events could be
enabled.
Or let's say that you would like to find a new job with better
pay. You've been stuck in a rut for a long time and can't figure
out how to leave your current job situation. Through the process
of manifestation, however, it may be quite possible that a
sequence of events could occur that leads you to your goal.
Perhaps a bout with the flu forces
you to take a couple of weeks off from work. As a result, your
quirky boss decides to lay you off. Now you've been forced to
leave your job. The following week, a long-lost friend calls you
unexpectedly.
She tells you about an acquaintance
who needs to hire someone with your exact qualifications - the
dream job. With this connection, you get the new job with ease.
Another way the C-force might operate is through the process of
creation.
In this case, a bit more magic is
involved because much more unlikely (but still possible)
unfoldings occur. Whereas manifestation is about enabling an
unlikely combination of events to occur, creation is more about
enabling more unlikely choices and events to appear in the first
place.
For example, let's say that you suffer from chronic eczema.
Given the natural tendency of the
body to recreate itself in the same way, it is most likely that
your skin will continue to suffer from this condition. You might
apply some cortisone cream, which chemically forces the body to
suppress the eczema, but the innate tendency for your skin to
develop eczema has not gone away.
The next time you experience a
period of anxiety or come into contact with an allergen, the
eczema flares up.
But remember this: your skin is always sloughing off and
regenerating. The outer layer of your skin (the epidermis) is
replaced every month. There is a possibility that your skin
could regenerate without this problem and that it would never
return again.
It's not very probable, but it is
possible. Similarly, it is possible that a cancerous tumor could
be broken down by the natural defenses of the body without the
use of poisonous chemotherapy or toxic radiation. It's not very
probable, but it is possible.
I believe that the C-force - the force of active consciousness -
can be used to create such improbable but possible choices for
the body.
For example, a patient could use the
power of active consciousness to enable their skin to regenerate
without eczema or their cancerous tumor to be broken down and
absorbed. Such medical cases of "spontaneous remission" do
occur.
Because doctors cannot understand or
explain them, they sweep them under the rug by saying that their
original diagnosis was mistaken or that the cure was an
unexplainable fluke.
But what if more of us could tap
into this kind of healing through the C-force - the Cure force?
It would be wonderful! We could be spared many toxic medicines
and expensive medical bills too.
In fact, "energy"
medicines like homeopathy, acupuncture, and hands-on
healing may make this particular application of the C-force
substantially easier to achieve. That's because they operate not
only on the physical body, but also on a subtler aspect of our
selves - what is often called the "energy body"….
By helping to dislodge problems
within this invisible realm - a realm that most alternative
medical systems view as the true origin of disease - such
treatments vastly increase the probability that the physical
body will be able to create a healthier future.
As a result, they also make healing
applications of the C-force easier to achieve.
FIGURE 2
…So how does this fit within with the four-dimensional model
described earlier?
…In Figure 2, I use circles to
represent choice points and arrows to indicate possible futures
that emanate from them. Let's say that you are currently at NOW.
The circle labeled GOAL is a future that you'd like to reach -
say, one in which you have a new job.
The circle labeled MOST LIKELY
FUTURE is the most likely or probable outcome - the one in which
you stay at your current job.
As the diagram illustrates, you can
reach your goal in at least two ways - either by choosing or
creating a new path right now (branching upward immediately), or
by doing so a little later on.
For instance, right NOW, you might
decide to quit your job. Or you might create an improbable
future - through creation - where a freak accident or illness
ultimately leads to you being laid off.
By using active consciousness to
enable new choices to appear and to help you make the correct
choices over time, you may find that you are ultimately led to
your goal of a new and better job.
…In many ways, it's all about possibilities and probabilities.
Even if something is improbable, it can still be possible.
And if it's possible, the force of
active consciousness - the C-force - can play a part in making
it happen. Using manifestation, you can make the right choices
at the right time and, through an unlikely combination of such
choices, you are led to your goal.
Using creation, an unlikely choice
[may unexpectedly appear] before you; you just need to take it.
