by Gregg Braden
THE DiViNE
MATRIX
Also by Gregg Braden
Books
Awakening to Zero Point*
The God Code
The Isaiah Effect*
Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer
The Spontaneous Healing of Belief (available November 2007)
Walking Between the Worlds*
CD Programs
An Ancient Magical Prayer (with Deepak Chopra)
Awakening the Power of a Modern God
The Divine Name (with Jonathan Goldman)
The Gregg Braden Audio Collection*
Speaking the Lost Language of God
The Spontaneous Healing of Belief (available November 2007)
Unleashing the Power of the God Code
*All the above are available from Hay House
except items marked with an asterisk
Please visit Hay House USA: www.hayhouse.com
Hay House Australia: www.hayhouse.com.au
Hay House UK: www.hayhouse.co.uk
Hay House South Africa: [email protected]
Hay House India: www.hayhouseindia.co.in
THE DiViNE
MATRIX
BRIDGING TIME, SPACE,
MIRACLES, AND BELIFE
Gregg Braden
HAY HOUSE, INC.
Carlsbad, California
London • Sydney • Johannesburg
Vancouver • Hong Kong • New Delhi
Copyright © 2007 by Gregg Braden
Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com• Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au• Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: [email protected] • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com• Published in India by: Hay House Publications (India) Pvt. Ltd.: www.hayhouseindia.co.in
Editorial consultation: Stephanie Gunning • Editorial supervision: Jill Kramer Design: Suzie Bergstrom
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Institute of Heart Math for permission to reprint the illustration in Figure 2, to Christopher Logue for permission to reprint his poem “Come to the Edge” in the Introduction, and to Alvin Lee and Chrysalis Music Group for permission to reprint the excerpt from “I’d Love to Change the World” in Chapter 8.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.
The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Braden, Gregg.
The divine matrix: bridging time, space, miracles, and belief / Gregg Braden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4019-0570-5 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4019-0573-6 (tradepaper) 1. Spirituality. I. Title.
BL624.B632 2007
299’.93—dc22
2006019660
Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-4019-0570-5
Tradepaper: ISBN: 978-1-4019-0573-6
10 09 08 07 4 3 2 1
1st edition, January 2007
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: DISCOVERING THE DIVINE MATRIX:THE MYSTERY THAT CONNECTS ALL THINGS
Chapter 1:Q: What’s in the Space Between? A: The Divine Matrix
Chapter 2: Shattering the Paradigm: The Experiments That Change Everything
PART II: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY: HOW THE DIVINE MATRIX WORKS
Chapter 3: Are We Passive Observers or Powerful Creators?
Chapter 4: Once Connected, Always Connected: Living in a Holographic Universe
Chapter 5: When Here Is There and Then Is Now: Jumping Time and Space in the Matrix
PART III: MESSAGES FROM THE DIVINE MATRIX: LIVING, LOVING, AND HEALING IN QUANTUM AWARENESS
Chapter 6: The Universe Is Talking to Us: Messages from the Matrix
Chapter 7: Reading the Mirrors of Relationship: Messages from Ourselves
Chapter 8: Rewriting the Reality Code: 20 Keys to Conscious Creation
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
About the Author
I have one small drop
of knowing in my soul.
Let it dissolve in your ocean.
— Rumi
“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force….
We must assume behind this force the existence
of a conscious and intelligent Mind.
This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
— Max Planck, 1944
With these words, Max Planck, the father of quantum
theory, described a universal field of energy that
connects everything in creation: the Divine Matrix.
The Divine Matrix is our world.
It is also everything in our world.
It is us and all that we love, hate, create, and experience.
Living in the Divine Matrix, we are as artists expressing
our innermost passions, fears, dreams, and desires
through the essence of a mysterious quantum canvas.
But we are the canvas, as well as the images upon the canvas.
We are the paints, as well as the brushes.
In the Divine Matrix, we are the container
within which all things exist, the bridge between
the creations of our inner and outer worlds,
and the mirror that shows us what we have created.
This book is written for those of you who long to awaken
the power of your greatest passions and deepest aspirations.
In the Divine Matrix, you are the seed of the miracle,
as well as the miracle itself.
INTRODUCTION
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE
And they came.
and he pushed.
and they flew.
With these words, we’re shown a beautiful example of the power that awaits us when we allow ourselves to venture beyond the bounds of what we’ve always believed to be true in our lives. In this brief dialogue from the contemporary poet Christopher Logue, a group of initiates find themselves in an experience that’s very different from what they had originally expected.1 Rather than simply being at the edge, through their teacher’s encouragement, they find themselves beyond it, in a way that’s both surprising and empowering. It is in this uncharted territory that they experience themselves in a new way—and in their discovery, they find a new freedom.
In many respects, the pages that follow are like coming to the initiates’ edge. They describe the existence of a field of energy—the Divine Matrix—that provides the container, as well as a bridge and a mirror, fo
r everything that happens between the world within us and the one outside of our bodies. The fact that this field exists in everything from the smallest particles of the quantum atom to distant galaxies whose light is just now reaching our eyes, and in everything between, changes what we’ve believed about our role in creation.
For some of you, what you’re about to read is a new and very different way of thinking about how things work in life. For others, it’s a comforting synthesis of what you already know, or at least suspect, to be true. For everyone, however, the existence of a primal web of energy that connects your bodies, the world, and everything in the universe opens the door to a powerful and mysterious possibility.
That possibility suggests that we may be much more than simply observers passing through a brief moment of time in a creation that already exists. When we look at “life”—our spiritual and material abundance, our relationships and careers, our deepest loves and greatest achievements, along with our fears and the lack of all these things—we may also be gazing squarely in the mirror of our truest, and sometimes most unconscious, beliefs. We see them in our surroundings because they’re made manifest through the mysterious essence of the Divine Matrix, and for this to be the case, consciousness itself must play a key role in the existence of the universe.
WE ARE THE ARTISTS AS WELL AS
THE ART
As far-fetched as this idea may sound to many people, it is precisely at the crux of some of the greatest controversies among some of the most brilliant minds in recent history. In a quote from his autobiographical notes, for example, Albert Einstein shared his belief that we’re essentially passive observers living in a universe already in place, one in which we seem to have little influence: “Out yonder there was this huge world,” he said, “which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.”2
In contrast to Einstein’s perspective, which is still widely held by many scientists today, John Wheeler, a Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, offers a radically different view of our role in creation. In terms that are bold, clear, and graphic, Wheeler says, “We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, [author’s emphasis] and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass.” Referring to the late-20th-century experiments that show us how simply looking at something changes that something, Wheeler continues, “Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter that plate glass: we have to reach in there… . So the old word observer simply has to be crossed off the books, and we must put in the new word participator.”3
What a shift! In a radically different interpretation of our relationship to the world we live in, Wheeler states that it’s impossible for us to simply watch the universe happen around us. Experiments in quantum physics, in fact, do show that simply looking at something as tiny as an electron—just focusing our awareness upon what it’s doing for even an instant in time—changes its properties while we’re watching it. The experiments suggest that the very act of observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating. These findings seem to support Wheeler’s proposition that we can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world that we’re observing.
To think of ourselves as participating in creation rather than simply passing through the universe during the brief period of a lifetime requires a new perception of what the cosmos is and how it works. The groundwork for such a radical worldview was the basis for a series of books and papers by another Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, David Bohm. Before his death in 1992, Bohm left us two pioneering theories that offer a very different—and in some ways, a nearly holistic—view of the universe and our role in it.
The first was an interpretation of quantum physics that set the stage for Bohm’s meeting and subsequent friendship with Einstein. It was this theory that opened the door to what Bohm called the “creative operation of underlying … levels of reality.”4 In other words, he believed that there are deeper or higher planes of creation that hold the template for what happens in our world. It’s from these subtler levels of reality that our physical world originates.
His second theory was an explanation of the universe as a single unified system of nature, connected in ways that aren’t always obvious. During his early work at the University of California’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Bohm had the opportunity to observe small particles of atoms in a special gaseous state called plasma. Bohm found that when the particles were in this plasma state, they behaved less like the individual units that we typically think of and more like they were connected to one another as part of a greater existence. These experiments laid the foundation for the pioneering work for which Bohm is probably best remembered—his 1980 book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
In this paradigm-shifting volume, Bohm proposed that if we could see the universe in its entirety from a higher vantage point, the objects in our world would in fact appear as a projection of things happening in another realm that we cannot observe. He viewed both the seen as well as the unseen as expressions of a greater, more universal order. To distinguish between them, he called these two realms “implicate” and “explicate.”
The things that we can see and touch and that appear separate in our world—such as rocks, oceans, forests, animals, and people—are examples of the explicate order of creation. However, as distinct as they may appear from one another, Bohm suggested that they’re linked in a deeper reality in ways that we simply cannot see from our place in creation. He viewed all of the things that look separate to us as part of a greater wholeness, which he called the implicate order.
To describe the difference between implicate and explicate, he gave the analogy of a flowing stream. Using the different ways we can see water flowing in the same stream as a metaphor, Bohm described the illusion of separateness: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such.”5 Although the water’s disturbances may look separate to us, Bohm viewed them as intimately linked and deeply connected to one another. “Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence [author’s emphasis] rather than absolutely independent existence,” he stated.6 In other words, they’re all part of the same water.
Bohm used such examples to describe his sense that the universe and everything in it—including us—may, in fact, be part of a grand cosmic pattern where all portions are evenly shared by every other. Encapsulating this unified view of nature, Bohm simply stated, “The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement.”7
In the 1970s, Bohm offered an even clearer metaphor to describe how the universe may be thought of as a distributed yet undivided whole. Reflecting on the interrelated nature of creation, he became more convinced that the universe works like a grand cosmic hologram. In a hologram, every portion of whatever the object is contains that object in its entirety, only on a smaller scale. (For those who may be unfamiliar with the concept of a hologram, a detailed explanation is provided in Chapter 4.) From Bohm’s perspective, what we see as our world is actually the projection of something even more real that’s happening at a deeper level of creation. It is this deeper level that’s the original—the implicate. In this view of “As above, so below” and “As within, so without,” patterns are contained within patterns, complete in and of themselves and different only in scale.
The elegant simplicity of the human body offers us a beautiful example of a hologram, one that’s already familiar. The DNA from any part of our bodies contains our genetic code—the entire pattern of DNA—for the rest of the body, no matter where it comes from. Whether we sample our hair, a fingernail, or our
blood, the genetic pattern that makes us who we are is always there in the code … it’s always the same.
Just as the universe is constantly changing from implicate to explicate, the flow from the unseen to the seen is what makes up the dynamic current of creation. It’s this constantly changing nature of creation that John Wheeler had in mind when he described the universe as “participatory”—that is, unfinished and continually responding to consciousness.
Interestingly, this is precisely the way that the wisdom traditions of the past suggest that our world works. From the ancient Indian Vedas, believed by some scholars to date to 5,000 B.C., to the 2,000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, a general theme seems to suggest that the world is actually the mirror of things that are happening on a higher realm or in a deeper reality. For example, commenting on the new translations of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments known as The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, its translators summarize the content: “What happens on earth is but a pale reflection of that greater, ultimate reality.”8
The implication of both quantum theory and the ancient texts is that in the unseen realms we create the blueprint for the relationships, careers, successes, and failures of the visible world. From this perspective, the Divine Matrix works like a great cosmic screen that allows us to see the nonphysical energy of our emotions and beliefs (our anger, hate, and rage; as well as our love, compassion, and understanding) projected in the physical medium of life.
