THE HIDDEN REALITY   Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos By Brian Greene Published by Alfred E. Knopf 383 pages, hardback

Following up his two previous bestsellers, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, Columbia University Professor of Physics and Mathematics Brian Greene has carried on in his attempt to enlighten the lay reader to leading edge developments in scientific research into the deepest mysteries of both the micro-world and the macro-world of not only our own universe, but other universes that may exist beyond our current ability to contact them.

Including 30 pages of notes, mostly for the more technically inclined, an extensive index, and using metaphor, analogy, historical anecdotes, and a touch of humour, Professor Greene looks at the latest theoretical thinking and experimental analyses to give, as he says in the Preface, “…a broadly accessible account of some of the strangest and, should they prove correct, most revealing insights of modern physics. Many of the concepts require the reader to abandon comfortable modes of thought and to embrace unanticipated realms of reality.”

What spurred Greene to give us an up-to-date account of developments in fundamental theoretical physics is that they have led investigators to the serious consideration of different types of parallel universes. In the book, he identifies 9 varieties of what are called “multiverses.” And, what is so amazing to Greene and to his colleagues around the world is that “…all of the parallel-universe proposals that we will take seriously (in the book) emerge unbidden from the mathematics of theories developed to explain conventional data and observation.”

Proceeding like a class in the conceptual, non-technical overview of contemporary physics, displaying his knack for making difficult concepts easy to understand by relating them to common, everyday examples from life, and ascribing nomenclature generally used in the field of cosmology, Dr. Greene first examines what is known as the Quilted Multiverse. He begins the discussion with a review of the Big Bang and Einsteinian relativity to illustrate “…that basic physical principles establish that if the cosmos is infinitely large, it is home to infinitely many parallel worlds – some identical to ours, some differing from ours, many bearing no resemblance to our world at all.”

Because astronomers have calculated that we can only see out from earth about 41 billion light-years (called the cosmic horizon – an enormous distance, but certainly less than infinite), if the universe itself is infinite, there must be an infinite amount of other regions of space that have their own cosmic horizons. If those regions are sufficiently distant from each other, such an array would look like a patchwork quilt of an infinite number of finite regions that are individual universes themselves. Such a scenario is called a Patchwork or Quilted Multiverse. In such a multiverse, there would be endless doppelgangers – exact, repetitive reproductions of everything we experience, even ourselves.

Greene’s second type of multiverse is called the Inflationary Multiverse. This one is based on the continual expansion of our universe that would eternally produce bubble universes, and only one of those would be the one we see. We can think of the bubble universes in the Inflationary Multiverse as the holes in an ever-expanding Swiss cheese cosmos.

Professor Greene’s third and fourth types of multiverses derive from String theory and from the braneworlds of M-theory. In Chapter 4, he reiterates from his previous books a clear explanation of various aspects of quantum mechanics resulting in String theory, extra spatial dimensions, singularities, and black holes that lead us into Chapter 5’s discussion of the Brane Multiverse and the Cyclic Multiverse. The former consists of three-dimensional branes (don’t worry – Greene explains what branes are) that float in higher dimensions with other branes, and the latter derives from the collisions of those braneworlds that result in new universes with their own big bangs.

We are next introduced to something called the Landscape Multiverse. It derives from a combination of the Inflationary Multiverse and String theory.

In 1998, two separate teams of astronomers measured a positive but tiny number for Einstein’s cosmological constant – a value that gives us the amount of dark, invisible energy thought to be existing uniformly throughout space. Dark energy governs the repulsive gravitational force that drives our universe’s inflation. Contrary to what we would expect – that after the Big Bang the inflation of the universe would gradually slow down – the measurements indicated that for approximately the past half of our universe’s life its rate of expansion has been accelerating.

String theory tells us that each of the ever-increasing number of bubble universes in an Inflationary Multiverse contains a different configuration of extra dimensions “…providing a cosmological framework that realises all possibilities.” It also tells us that different values of the cosmological constant in each bubble universe give rise to “…bubbles inside of bubbles inside of bubbles…” When combined with accelerating expansion, this bubble tunnelling process provides an entire “landscape” of different universes. Hence, the totality is called a Landscape Multiverse.

50-page long, Chapter 8 describes what’s called the Quantum Multiverse – a multiverse that emerges directly from quantum mechanics. Greene reminds us of the double-slit experiment and its consequential interference pattern in order to guide us through his explanations of a particle’s probability wave and Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation which dictate that the act of measurement/observation results in the collapse of the wave function locating only one position for a given particle – one definite, observed reality outcome.

Professor Greene then takes us to the realm of the Holographic Multiverse where reality takes place on a universe’s distant boundary surface and projects its information into the 3D world we know and experience as a kind of holographic movie. We can think of this as we would think of the information in an architect’s blueprints being translated into the actual physical realisation of a building. In other words, the boundary surface of a universe can be thought of as a physically equivalent parallel universe.

Greene adds, “That familiar reality may be mirrored, or perhaps even produced, by phenomena taking place on a faraway, lower-dimensional surface ranks among the most unexpected developments in all of theoretical physics…. Looking to the future, I suspect that the holographic principle will be a beacon for physicists well into the twenty-first century.”

The 8^th and 9^th multiverses identified in the book involve both actual and computer simulations. The 8^th variety is called a Simulated Multiverse. Here, Greene takes a bold step in contemplating universe creation by future humans in the possession of very advanced technologies. There are two types of these we can think of: (1) usual, physical universes, and (2) virtual, computer-generated universes. The first involves artificially producing a white hole that spews out matter. The second is akin to the conceptual presentation in movies like The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Vanilla Sky.

The 9^th and final multiverse discussed is what Professor Greene calls the Ultimate Multiverse. It is his own rationalisation for the existence of a multiverse, independent of being a by-product of quantum mechanics, inflationary cosmology, String theory, or any other such applications that led indirectly to the previous 8 types of multiverses. He surmises, “Maybe math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.” Perhaps, “Different collections of mathematical equations are different universes. The Ultimate Multiverse is thus the by-product of this perspective on mathematics.” (M.I.T.’s Max Tegmark calls this the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.)

Greene further posits, “Mathematical existence is synonymous with physical existence. And since this would be true for any and all math, this provides another road leading us to the Ultimate Multiverse.” It’s another way of saying that every possible universe we can imagine, and therefore describe with a mathematical equation, is, somewhere and at some time, a real universe.

Greene ends with questions like, “Can scientific theories that invoke a multiverse be tested?” And, “Should we believe mathematics?” In fact, he admits that math is central to all he discusses. The multiverse theories examined in his book “rely on a belief that mathematics is tightly stitched into the fabric of reality.”

He adds in conclusion, “It’s only through the rational pursuit of theories, even those that whisk us into strange and unfamiliar domains, that we stand a chance of revealing the expanse of reality.”

– Reviewed by Alan Glassman in New Dawn 132

BREAKTHROUGH POWER   How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World By Jeane Manning & Joel Garbon Published by Amber Bridge Books 286 pages, paperback

Breakthrough Power was a surprising read for me. I’ve known about past and present attempts to gain usable energy through tapping alternative sources – alternative, that is, to fossil fuels, bio-fuels, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal. I have studied some of Nikola Tesla’s inventions and those of some others who have extended his work in attempting to extract energy from the vacuum, so-called “zero point” or “background” energy.

However, Manning and Garbon have put together the most extraordinary and extensive accounting of “free energy” or “over unity” technologies I’ve yet seen. And, they admit, this collection of mostly independent inventors is just the tip of the iceberg.

Jeane Manning is a sociologist who has authored a number of books, including The Coming Energy Revolution: The Search for Free Energy (1996), and Joel Garbon is an industrial scientist who is president of the New Energy Movement (NEM).

Over the past few years they have interviewed dozens of inventors, and this book documents the results of their search in a very non-technical and easily readable manner.

Even if you are unfamiliar with the concept of “free energy from the vacuum,” you do not have to first spend a lot of time researching what it is. In reading this book you will be introduced to the basics of what may be the answer to our energy problems – an answer that is invisible but exists all around us.

The authors begin by recounting the mystery of how magnets work. They tell us that mainstream science cannot explain what force perpetually maintains the field of permanent magnets. They know it has to be at the subatomic level, but, then, what gives atoms their continuous spin? Some very credible physicists claim the cause is “quantum gravity” – a force within spaces as small as 10ˉ²³ centimetre – far smaller than the nucleus of an atom.

“If magnetism triggers a weird or seemingly magical portal for accessing energy from this field,” say Manning and Garbon, “scientists do not yet understand the process. In places ranging from garage workshops to more sophisticated laboratories, people do appear to be accessing the field, but how is not completely understood.”

The book goes on to present a variety of new energy source choices for powering homes, industries, and vehicles.

We go back in time to learn about Tesla tapping the universal energy field, T. Henry Moray’s “radiant energy” research, Viktor Schauberger’s “vortex mechanics” and “implosion energy,” John Keely’s “liberated ether,” Walter Russell’s “Optical Dynamo Generator,” Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone motor,” Floyd Sweet’s magnetic solid-state energy generator with no moving parts, Wesley Gary’s fuel-free magnetic motor, Hans Coler’s “Magnetic Current Flow Apparatus,” and Ed Gray’s “cold electrical energy.”

Then, we are taken right up into the present with a look at the work of Zlatco Loncar, Milo Wolff, Nassim Haramein, the late Eugene Mallove, Thomas Valone, Roger Stringham, and, of course, Pons’ and Fleischmann’s “cold fusion” work carried on by John Dash.

An entire chapter is devoted to the work of medical doctor Randell Mills. Because Mills hails from the same Pennsylvania town I now live in and went to college a few blocks from my home, I was most intrigued to learn about his company, BlackLight Power, Inc.

Mills’ story is followed by Andrija Puharich splitting hydrogen out from water as fuel, Stanley Meyer’s “Water Fuel Cell” and its follow-up work by Filipino engineer Daniel Dingel, Russian physicist Philip Kanarev, and others. We learn about England’s John Searl and his magnet-powered, saucer-shaped aircraft. And, we wind up the current-day examples with sections entitled “Energy from pulsing plasma” about the work of Canadian’s Paulo and Alexandra Correa, “Chukanov’s ball lightening” in Bulgaria, and the work on “Resonating crystalline materials” by another Canadian, John Hutchison.

While the first 186 pages of Breakthrough Power taught me a lot about what has been and is being developed in the area of truly new alternative energy, I found the most startling part of the book to be the final 50 pages.

Under the parts titled “Who Hijacked the Energy Revolution” and “You Can Help Reclaim Choice,” I was given not only a mind-opening view of just what has impeded the progress of many of these new technologies, but I became a witness to their systematic squelching and, in some cases, their deliberate destruction by the large corporate interests that cling to their incomes from the extraction and use of fossil fuels.

Careers have been stifled, the media and the public have been misled, and even lives have been ended in order to stop the progress of methods to harness “breakthrough power.”

Electrical and systems engineer Moray B. King is quoted for his list of “eight ways that revolutionary energy inventions have been blocked before they had started on the road to the marketplace: academic suppression, blocking of funding, blocking of patents, litigation, threats to the inventor, property destruction, framing the inventor with a crime, and assassination.”

Many of the inventors cited in the book have been dealt one or more of these blows. Obviously, their efforts are deemed dangerous by those interests that stand to lose their current monopoly on the world’s energy supply. “Resistance to change,” say the authors, “is in proportion to the size of the entity that must learn to deal with such change. In this case, the entity is colossal – a world economy based on fossil fuels. It is a formidable entity, with an outlook weighted toward military-industrial alliances.”

But, Manning and Garbon end on a hopeful note. The last chapter of the book, “What You Can Do,” gives us practical advice on how we can personally influence a change. It reminds us not to underestimate people power by starting locally to learn and help others learn about the New Energy Movement organisation, by alerting decision-makers to the possibilities of breakthrough energy systems, and by drumming up financial support for the efforts of new energy inventors and educators.

What is emphasised throughout the book is the crisis situation the Earth is in at the present time and how global energy policy and use are resulting in an increasingly polluted planet that is unhealthy for us to live on. Perhaps the first line of attack on current energy institutions and their policies is to see to it that as many people as possible read this book.

– Reviewed by Alan Glassman in New Dawn 131

THE BASIC CODE OF THE UNIVERSE   The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine, and Spirituality By Massimo Citro, M.D. Published by Park St Press 288 pages, hardback

Dr. Citro is an Italian psychotherapist and originator of a system of vibrational medicine known as Pharmacological Frequency Transfer (TFF). He is also founder and director of the Alberto Sorti Research Institute, and he lives in Turin, Italy.

In my mind, this book could be thought of as a companion book to David Wilcock’s The Source Field Investigations [reviewed in New Dawn 129.]

After a short but well-written Foreword by Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Dr. Citro maintains his thesis that behind all the manifest universe is a hidden, universal field of information that forms a basic code governing what we detect with our senses and our measuring instruments. He says it is responsible for producing the hologram we call reality, with all its many facets of development, behaviour, and communications – not just for living things, but also for all inanimate objects, from the domain of the microscopic to the world of the macroscopic.

Citro ties together ancient classical ideas of the aether with more modern concepts such as Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, Jung’s collective unconscious, and Cayce’s and Laszlo’s “Akashic Record.” Called by different names at different times in history, Citro describes this un-manifest existence as “the other side of things,” “the living vacuum,” and “pure matter.” Pure matter is continuous, without mass, still, and non-temporal. What it produces, “combined matter,” is discontinuous, coalesced into mass, and moving in space-time.

“The backstage,” says Dr. Citro, “the antiworld of our world, is the vast sea of pure matter, the fabric upon which the universe is embroidered. Combined matter is continuously generated from it to renew whatever dies: this is how the universe breathes.” It may be that we will never see pure matter because it is concealed by what we now call dark matter/dark energy.

Lying between pure matter and combined matter is “informed matter,” the field containing the code which facilitates the exchange of information. This would be equivalent to ‘The Matrix’ in the terms we use today.

The book identifies a large body of historical and contemporary work by numerous individuals and teams that concluded there is, indeed, a basic code of essential data that defines the field of substance. It forms a kind of map that sets the parameters of physical existence as well as sensations, emotions, and thoughts.

For instance, it is responsible for the templates that regulate the shapes, sizes, and functions of all things, from subatomic particles to human beings to galaxies. It also facilitates non-local communication and interactions between various entities. And, it governs the limits of those entities via feedback loops.

Dr. Citro gives many examples of experiments around the world that indicate the limits of our perceptions. His own investigations conclude that reality remains veiled to us, and that everything is merely the interpretation within our heads of what is going on both inside and outside of us.

He delves into the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto and others with water, into the latest research on consciousness, quantum physics, DNA, animal and plant intelligence and communication, Kirlian photography, the mysteries of shamans, and a host of other findings related to the concept of fields. He emphasises that what we may call “magic” is just the science of the invisible that is as yet unknown to us.

Citro’s practical work in the effectiveness of using the vibration of medicines rather than the actual medicines themselves offers fascinating and important homeopathic proof of his thesis.

The book builds to the final chapters on the holographic universe (a la Michael Talbot) and the virtual world of “the stage managers.”

Dr. Citro concludes (keeping in good company with such historical figures as Plato, Jesus, the Buddha, Newton, da Vinci, and many others) that, “To human eyes the real (the backstage) seems virtual, and the virtual seems real. If we could free ourselves from the senses, we would discover that things are actually solid holograms produced by the game on the world stage. They exist in other forms. The mind, which in turn belongs to the virtual reality, cannot imagine forms that are different from those apprehended by the senses. These forms are the fields, the essence and true reality of things. This is the secret of all secrets, the secret humans have been chasing after for millennia…. The world is a virtual game in which we have agreed to represent ourselves. We continue to build it while we interact in it. The world is alchemy. What is above is similar to what is below, because everything is virtual.”

– Reviewed by Alan Glassman in New Dawn 130

RATIONALIST SPIRITUALITY An Exploration of the Meaning of Life and Existence Informed by Logic and Science  By Bernardo Kastrup Published by O-Books 125 pages, paperback

For those of us who have been dealing with philosophy, religion, metaphysics, and the meaning of life for a number of years and asking the proverbial questions: “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “Where do I come from?”, and Where am I going?”, this book comes as a refreshing and valuable asset in trying to help us explain our concerns and our interests to others who are more scientific and logically minded.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it almost impossible to broach these subjects with my left brain-oriented friends and relatives. More often than not, they simply don’t want to hear what they term my “way out beliefs.”

Bernardo Kastrup has done us all an important favour in approaching these issues from a strictly rational standpoint. With this book he has carefully and systematically investigated the answers to the universally important questions expressed above.

While many of us “know in our gut” there must be the profoundest of meaning and purpose to the existence of the human species, there are a multitude still clinging to the opinion that the universe in which we live is just an accident – a freak anomaly in space and time without any ultimate objective.

They acknowledge there is, indeed, a possible but an extremely small likelihood that all we experience is set up to have a direction and an end goal but that, statistically speaking, there is only the slimmest chance that what we see should even exist. And so they discount the idea that the cosmos, and all it contains, was consciously created.

What Kastrup has done is postulate that it is consciousness itself which is the causal factor. In a brilliant leap of courage and clarity, he takes us, step-by-step, through his logic, showing us that, unlike most mainstream religious thinking, existence is far from being perfect and complete.

“Completeness,” he says, “is incompatible with movement, yet it is beyond doubt that the universe is dynamic; the universe is certainly ‘doing something’, ‘going somewhere’… Therefore, at some level, in some way, the universe must not be complete.” If it’s not complete, then it must be attempting to enrich and complete itself by becoming more of itself – more conscious.

Kastrup begins by investigating the “unrealised potential of consciousness.” Science, he says, cannot explain how subjective experience arises. However, as Descartes said, the only thing whose existence we can be absolutely certain of is our own consciousness. But, Kastrup asks, is consciousness “locked up” in our heads?

He then takes us into the scientific world of quantum mechanics to illustrate its theories as to how we see the world as it is. He contrasts in very clear fashion the “collapse” of Schrödinger’s wave function (the “choice” of only one possible scenario out of a multitude) with Everett’s “many worlds” parallel universe interpretation to explain the reality we experience. He chooses wave function collapse as the simplest, least complex, and most direct explanation.

But, says Kastrup, “…since no material reality manifests until after collapse takes place, it seems that whatever causes collapse must come from outside material reality. This is what led renowned mathematician John van (sic) Neumann, Nobel-laureate physicist Eugene Wigner, and many others, to postulate consciousness as the causal agency of wave function collapse…. (And, he adds) without conscious observation the entire universe would be just an amorphous, abstract realm of possibilities and potentials with no material reality.”

“Such primacy of consciousness in grounding existence allows us to infer that a process of universal enrichment… should be a process of consciousness enrichment.” All this is reasoned in the first 20 pages of the book. The other 90+ pages tell us the method of enriching consciousness.

Kastrup looks at the human brain as a consciousness “transceiver” (a term he coins as an amalgamation of “transmitter” and “receiver”). It receives consciousness from “outside” or “above” itself causally influencing its functioning. On the other hand, its transmitter function (what I would call feedback) sends information to consciousness outside itself, providing adjustment, modification, expansion, and enrichment.

He goes on to describe philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment to illustrate the role of intelligence, showing us that true “understanding only exists in consciousness, not in intelligence.” Intelligence is a mechanical function of the physical, computer-like brain, which is a “correlation-finding and associative-performing engine” that models with symbols inside itself the reality that may (or may not) exist outside itself.

Kastrup then uses information theory to show us that “the very imposition of limitations on consciousness through material structures is the vehicle for its expansion.” While that seems at first glance contradictory, it is not. “In fact, a boundless consciousness would have been structurally unable to be aware of its own existence, or to know anything about itself.”

By limiting, or “fragmenting” itself (as Kastrup describes it), homogeneous, unified, all pervasive consciousness can separate itself into information containing brains. “Only then could individualised consciousness be able to investigate and study the universe itself, thereby becoming progressively more aware of all its aspects.”

Observing itself being aware of itself is the prerequisite for self-understanding, which, in turn, enriches the general consciousness within which we exist. And, this can only be accomplished by consciousness first breaking itself apart into individual pieces.

The separateness we experience of ourselves in relation to others, and to our material world in general, is really only an illusion provided by consciousness to progressively enrich and evolve itself. “Boundless consciousness could only conceive, understand, and become aware of itself if it could experience limitation.”

Now, that puts the responsibility for the continual development of consciousness (or God, if you will) on each one of us. In other words, we must try each moment of our lives to remember that we are simultaneously both an illusion of fragmentation and a part of the reality of a boundless unity of consciousness.

It reminds me of Socrates’ dictum “know thyself,” but it must be, as Kastrup says, “continuous, uninterrupted, and permanent; it must never go away…” And, there is the challenge to us all for a self-disciplined, personalised method similar to what we read about in accounts of the “mystery schools” of the past, and perhaps, carried on by certain groups in the present.

In the final analysis, says Kastrup, “your body is not you; you are just its user.” You use your body to gain a history of subjective experiences, and those experiences, as Nietzsche put it, may be played out over and over again in what he called eternal return.

In summary, and as the title of the book implies, “Rationality and the pursuit of spirituality do not need to be mutually-exclusive…. Indeed, rationality and logic may be fundamental tools to spirituality, for they allow us to make inferences about things that we may not (yet) be able to verify either objectively or subjectively.”

– Reviewed by Alan Glassman in New Dawn 129

DREAMED UP REALITY Diving into the Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature  By Bernardo Kastrup Published by O-Books 201 pages, paperback

A strong and growing intuition in society today is the idea that our thoughts create our own reality.

Yet it seems obvious that, try as we might, our lives are not quite what we fantasize. Is the intuition thus wrong?

Through a rational, methodic interpretation of meditative insights, the validity of which is substantiated with a compelling scientific literature review, the author constructs hypotheses that reconcile facts with intuition.

Mesmerizing narratives of his expeditions into the unconscious suggest an amazing possibility: just as dreams are seemingly autonomous manifestations of our psyche, reality may be an externalized combination of the subconscious dreams of us all, mixed as they are projected onto the fabric of space-time. Perhaps the laws of physics are an emergent by-product of such synchronization of thoughts.

Through computer simulations, the author explores the implications of these hypotheses, with conclusions uncannily reminiscent of observed phenomena.