Cuban artist Abel Matos
The movie Limitless is about a writer who stumbles upon a drug that enables him to use something like 97 percent of his brain. He has been blocked for months on a novel, but when he takes the drug, he’s able to write the novel in several days. One young woman in the film who had used the drug, delivered a memorable line that describes it: “I read Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality in forty-five minutes.”
Rob and I laughed about that afterward. Wow, 45 minutes? And he wrote a novel in a matter of days? Maybe we need that drug.
I’ve been working my way through Greene’s book for weeks, reading a little here, a little there, and trying to digest and understand the material in between. This evening, I read something about string theory that really resonated for me.
Prior to string theory, Greene explains, the standard view envisioned “nature’s fundamental ingredients as point particles – dots with no internal structure – governed by the equations of quantum field theory. With each distinct species of particle is associated a distinct species of field. String theory challenges this picture by suggesting that the particles are not dots. Instead, the theory proposes that they’re “tiny, stringlike vibrating filaments.” Whether you’re looking inside any elementary particle or inside an electron or a quark, Greene contends you’ll find a string.
The theory argues that even though the strings within different kinds of particles are identical, the patterns of their vibration differ. “Much as different vibrational patterns of strings on a guitar produce different musical notes, different vibrational patterns of filaments in string theory produce different particle properties. In fact, the theory encourages us to think of a vibrating string not merely as dictating the properties of its host particle but rather as being the particle.”
As soon as I read this, I was struck by how similar this sounds to the Seth material and to a lot of what is written in the Abraham/Hicks books. In The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth talks about feeling tones, which he defines as “your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general. They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. You are what happens to you. “ Even though our emotions fluctuate constantly, Seth says that beneath these transitory feelings are feelings that are unique to each of us, “that are like deep musical chords.”
Sometimes, these unique feeling tones surface, “but in great, long rhythms. You cannot call them negative or positive. They are instead tones of your being…they represent the core from which you form your experience.”
In the Abraham/Hicks material, a lot is written about the importance of emotions as a gauge of whether we’re in the vortex – a swirl of vibrating frequencies that represent the best of who we were – or outside of the vortex. When you’re feeling low or depressed, for instance, you’re outside of the vortex. That’s when the Abraham material suggests that you reach for “better feeling thoughts,” which raise your vibration/frequency.
String theory’s argument that particles are strings echoes Michael Talbot’s brilliant book, The Holographic Universe, where he makes an impressive case for the idea that we are all connected or, to paraphrase John Lennon, that we are all one. Greene addresses the holographic idea in a later chapter, where he talks about theoretical physics and the holographic multiverse.
During a conversation in 1998 with the legendary physicist John Wheeler, Greene asked what he thought the dominant theme in physics would be in future decades. Wheeler summed it up in one word: Information. As Greene explains, physics traditionally focuses on things – planets, atoms, rocks, particles – and then investigates “the forces that affect their behavior and govern their interactions.” Yet, Wheeler “believed that information…forms an irreductible kernel at the heart of reality.”
Information, then, possesses its own vibration, its own frequency. “…the universe can be thought of as an information processor,” Greene writes. “It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and then now after that. Our senses become aware of such processing by detecting how the physical environment changes over time.”
Perhaps this explains why synchronicity is more frequent during times of major transitions in our lives: we have new information, a new frequency enters the picture. And at some profound level, that information transforms a root belief that we hold. It might explain a spontaneous remission of cancer, an abrupt rags to riches scenario, a pregnancy that occurs just before an adoption is finalized. It may also explain why some ideas reach tipping points and a new paradigm is ushered in.
I don’t know that Brian Greene would agree with these speculations from a non-scientist, but this book certainly stimulates a lot of what if possibilities.
