The Divine Matrix

by Gregg Braden

  In words that brought a new meaning to our perception of time, Einstein described its mysterious nature by simply stating the obvious: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”1 With this powerful assertion, Einstein forever changed the way we think of our relationship to time. Consider the implications … if the past and the future are present in this moment, can we communicate with them? Can we travel in time?

  Even before Einstein’s bold statement, the possibilities that these questions posed intrigued scientists, mystics, and writers. From hidden temples in Egypt dedicated to the experience of time to the thrill of H. G. Wells’s classic 1895 novel The Time Machine,the prospect of having an ability to somehow hitch a ride on the flow of time has captured our imaginations and filled our dreams. Our fascination with it is as old as our existence, and our questions about it seem endless.

  Is time real? Does it exist without us? Is there something about consciousness that gives time its meaning? If so, do we have the power or the right to interrupt its forward flow long enough to glimpse the future … or perhaps visit or communicate with people in the past? Can we contact other realms and even other worlds with which we share the present?

  In light of accounts such as the one in the following section, the boundary between “here” and “there” becomes less clear, inviting us to reconsider just what time really means in our lives.

  A MESSAGE FROM BEYOND TIME

  In the powerful book Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidences from Everyday Life, Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal share an amazing story of the power of forgiveness.2 While I’ve done my best to capture the essence of this awe-inspiring account, I encourage you to experience it in its entirety in the original text. What makes this story so interesting, and the reason I offer it here, is that in this case forgiveness is so powerful that it transcends time.

  The news of his father’s death came as a shock to Joey. They hadn’t spoken since he’d turned 19 and had questioned his family’s traditional Jewish beliefs. To Joey’s father, there could be no greater disgrace than to doubt such a time-honored philosophy. He threatened to end their relationship unless his son accepted his roots and stopped his questioning. Joey found that he couldn’t meet his dad’s demands, so he left home to explore the world. He and his father never spoke again.

  It was in a small café in India that a friend found Joey and shared the news of Joey’s father’s death. This was the first that Joey knew of his passing. He immediately returned home and began to explore his Jewish heritage. Deeply moved by new insights into his background and his father, Joey found himself making plans for a personal pilgrimage to the land where the roots of his family’s traditions began: He was on his way to Israel.

  This is where the story takes a deep, mystical turn and offers us insight into the power of the Divine Matrix.

  Joey found himself at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the portion of an ancient temple enclosure that remained following the temple’s destruction nearly 2,000 years ago. It’s here that Orthodox Jews go to worship each day, repeating the words of the same prayers that have been spoken for centuries.

  Joey had written a note to his father, declaring his love and asking forgiveness for the pain that he had caused his family. Following the custom, he’d planned to leave his note in one of the many cracks and crevices that were formed when the original mortar fell away from between the stones. It was when Joey found just the right place to leave his note that something amazing happened—something that has no rational explanation in the eyes of traditional Western science.

  As Joey put his note in the wall, another paper suddenly fell from between the stones, landing at his feet. It was a prayer that someone else had written and placed in the wall weeks or possibly even months before. As Joey reached for the rolled-up paper, an odd feeling came over him.

  When Joey opened the note and began to read its contents, he recognized the handwriting—it was his father’s! The note that Joey held was one that his dad had written and left in the wall before his death. In it, he had declared his love for his son and asked God for forgiveness. At some time in the not-too-distant past, Joey’s father had traveled to the very spot where Joey found himself at that moment. In an ironic twist of synchronicity, his father had placed his prayer in that same precise location within the wall, where it had remained until Joey walked by.

  What a powerful story! How could such an extraordinary thing have happened? Obviously, there must be some kind of communication happening between realities and worlds. Joey lives in the realm of the present that we call “our world.” Although his father was no longer alive, Judaism believes that he still exists in another realm, the ha-shamayim, or heaven, which lies beyond our world. Both realms are thought to coexist in the present and to be in communication with one another.

  While the mechanics of precisely how the message from Joey’s dad reached him may remain a mystery, one thing is certain: For Joey to receive an indication that his father is still in touch with him, there must be something that connects both of them, a medium that provides the container for both realms of experience. The Divine Matrix is that medium—it fits the description of the place the ancients called heaven: the home of the soul that’s the container for the past, present, and future.

  Through the bridge of the Divine Matrix, something beautiful and precious transpired between Joey and his father. Transcending time, space, and (in this story) even life and death, a communication occurred that brought healing and closure between a father and his son. We must look even deeper into our relationship with the space that creates here and there and the time that allows for then and now to understand how this happened and why.

  WHEN HERE IS THERE

  If our universe and everything in it are truly held within the container of the Divine Matrix, as the experiments suggest, then we may soon find ourselves redefining our ideas of space as well as time. We could even discover that the distances that seem to cut us off from one another and our loved ones only separate our bodies. As we saw in the story of Joey and his father, something within us isn’t bound by distance or limited by the traditional laws of physics.

  While these possibilities may sound like the stuff of science fiction, they’re also the subjects of serious scientific investigation—so serious, in fact, that during the last years of the Cold War, both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union devoted tremendous amounts of money and research to understanding precisely how real the Matrix that connects everything actually is. Specifically, the superpowers wanted to know if it’s possible to navigate great distances through the Matrix by using the inner sight of the mind—the psychic abilities of a certain kind of telepathy known as remote viewing. The results might sound surprisingly similar to some popular movies of recent years and may very well be the precise basis of their plots. The experiments also make the already blurred line between fact and fiction fuzzier than ever.

  In 1970, the U.S. officially began investigating the possibility of using psychic methods to “surf” the Matrix and see into distant lands and enemy targets. It was then that the CIA funded the early experiments using psychically sensitive people such as empaths (individuals who have the ability to sense the experiences of others without the need for verbal or visual cues) to focus their minds on classified locations.3 Once they did so, they were trained to describe what they found with increasingly greater detail. Given the acronym SCANATE, for “scan by coordinate,” this program was one of the precursors that led to the now-famous studies at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) on remote viewing.

  Although in some respects remote viewing may seem a little “out there,” it’s actually based on sound quantum principles, some of which have already been explored in this book. Even the experts acknowledge that no one knows precisely how remote viewing works. In general, its success is attributed to the idea from quantum physics that while things may look solid and separate to us, they exist and are connected
to everything else as a universal field of energy. For example, while we may hold a beautiful seashell in our hand, from a quantum perspective, there’s an energetic part of the shell that’s everywhere. Because our shell exists beyond the local place where we hold it in our hand, it is said to be “nonlocal.”

  A growing number of scientists accept the experimental evidence that the universe, planet, and even our bodies are nonlocal. We are everywhere already and always. As Russell Targ stated in Chapter 4, even though we may be physically separated from one another, we can still be in instantaneous communication—and that’s what remote viewing is all about.

  In effect, viewers in the SCANATE program were taught how to have a waking, or “lucid,” dream. In their altered state, they gave their consciousness the freedom to focus on precise locations. These sites could be in another room of the same building or on the other side of the world. Clarifying the connectedness of our universe in the quantum realm, Targ states, “It’s no harder to describe what’s happening in the far reaches of the Soviet Union than it is to describe what’s happening across the street.”4 The trainees received as many as three years of instruction before they were deployed on secret missions.

  The details of the U.S. military’s remote-viewing projects, which have been made available to the general public only recently, describe at least two kinds of sessions. The first, called coordinate remote viewing, involves viewers’ descriptions of what they find at specific geographic coordinates, as identified by latitude and longitude. The second, called extended remote viewing, is based on a series of relaxation and meditative techniques.

  Although the specifics may vary by method, in general, remote-viewing procedures begin with viewers entering a mild state of relaxation, since it’s in this state that they appear to be more open to receiving sensory impressions of distant locations. During the sessions, another person is generally involved as a guide whose role is to help the viewer by prompting him or her to look at specific details. Through a series of protocols that allow the viewer to distinguish which impressions are important for the particular “mission,” the person is able to describe what he or she sees with increasingly deeper levels of detail. The prompting of the guide seems to separate this form of controlled remote viewing from the lucid dreaming that often happens spontaneously during sleep.

  The implications for secrecy were immense and opened the door to a new era of intelligence gathering with fewer risks to people on the ground—fewer risks, that is, until the remote-viewing programs were shut down in the mid-1990s. With intriguing code names such as Project Stargate, the last one was “officially” terminated in 1995. Although the process was considered by some to be a “fringe” science and even discounted altogether by military skeptics, a number of remote-viewing sessions were validated through successes that couldn’t be attributed to coincidence. Some may have even saved lives.

  During the first Gulf War in 1991, remote viewers were asked to search for enemy missile locations hidden in the deserts of western Iraq.5 The project successfully pinpointed specific missile sites and eliminated other areas from consideration. The advantages of such a psychic search are obvious. By narrowing down the possible locations where the weapons could be, everything from time to fuel and money was saved. The greatest benefit, however, was to the lives of the troops themselves. The remote search for deadly missiles reduced the risk to soldiers who traditionally would have had to perform such a mission on the ground.

  The reason why I mention these projects and techniques here is because they successfully demonstrate two things that are key in our understanding of the Divine Matrix. First, they are yet another indication that the Matrix exists. For a part of us to travel to distant locations and see the details of things that are very real without ever leaving the chair we’re sitting in, there must be something for our awareness to travel through. My main point here is that a viewer has access to the destination, regardless of where it is. Second, the very nature of the energy that makes remote viewing possible shows the holographic connectedness that appears to be a part of our identity. In the presence of evidence of the Divine Matrix, the old ideas of who we are and how we function in space-time begin to break down.

  THE LANGUAGE THAT MIRRORS

  REALLTY

  While Western science is only beginning to understand what our relationship to time and space mean within the context of connectedness, our indigenous ancestors were already well aware of these relationships. When linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf explored the language of the Hopi, for example, he found that their words directly reflected their view of the universe. And their idea of who we are as humans is very different from the way we typically think of ourselves—they saw the world as a single entity with everything in it connected at the source.

  In his groundbreaking book Language, Thought, and Reality, Whorf summarized the Hopi worldview: “In [the] Hopi view, time disappears and space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics.”6 In other words, the Hopi simply don’t think of time, space, distance, and reality in the way we do. In their eyes, we live in a universe where everything is alive, connected, and happening “now.” And their language mirrors this perspective.

  For example, when we look to the ocean and see a wave, we might say, “Look at that wave.” But we know that in reality it doesn’t exist alone; it’s only there because of other waves. “[W]ithout the projection of language,” says Whorf, “no one ever saw a single wave.”7 What we see is a “surface in everchanging undulating motions.” In the language of the Hopi, however, speakers would say that the ocean is “waving” to describe the present action of the water. More precisely, according to Whorf, “Hopi say walalata, meaning ‘plural waving occurs,’ and can call attention to one place in the waving just as we can.”8 In this way, although it may sound odd to us, they are actually more accurate in how they describe the world.

  In a similar vein, the concept of time as we tend to think of it takes on a brand-new meaning in the traditional beliefs of the Hopi. Whorf’s studies led him to discover that the “manifested comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe … with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future.”9 In other words, the Hopi use the same words to identify only what “is” or has already happened. From the previous discussions of quantum possibilities, this view of time and language makes perfect sense. The Hopi are describing the possibilities that have been chosen, while leaving the future open.

  From the implications of the Hopi language to the proven examples of remote viewing, our relationship to space and time obviously has more to it than we have traditionally acknowledged. The essence of the new physics suggests that space-time cannot be separated. So if we rethink what distance means to us within the Divine Matrix, then it’s clear that we must reconsider our relationship to time as well. This is where the possibilities get really interesting.

  WHEN THEN IS NOW

  In addition to helping our kids get to soccer practice while the rest of the team is still on the field and assuring that we’re at the airport to meet our departing flight, what is time, really? Are the seconds between the minutes that make up our day all that keeps things from running together, as stated in John Wheeler’s quote at the beginning of this chapter? Does time exist if no one knows about it?

  Perhaps an even deeper question is whether or not the things that happen in time are “fixed.” Are the events of the universe already inscribed in a timeline that’s simply playing out as our lives? Or is time somehow malleable? And if so, are the events within it changeable?

  Conventional thinking suggests that time only moves in one direction—forward—and what’s already happened is in fact etched into the fabric of time and space. Experimental evidence, however, indicates that our ideas of the past and present may not be quite so neat and tidy. Not onl
y does it appear that time moves in two directions, as Einstein posited, but it also seems as if the choices of today might actually change what took place yesterday. In 1983, an experiment was designed to test just such possibilities. The results run absolutely counter to the way we’ve been led to think about time, and the implications are mind-boggling.

  For this investigation, physicist John Wheeler proposed using a variation of the famous double-slit experiment to test the effects of the present on the past. Here’s a brief summary of the original experiment described in Chapter 2.

  A quantum particle (a photon) was fired at a target that could detect how it arrived—either as a particle of matter or as a wave of energy. Before reaching the target, however, it had to pass through the opening in a barrier. The mystery was that the photon somehow “knew” when the barrier had one hole and when it had two.

  In the presence of a single opening, the particle traveled and arrived at its destination just the way it began its journey: as a particle. However, in the presence of two holes, while it started off the experiment as a particle, it moved as a wave of energy through both openings at the same time and acted like a wave at its destination.

  The outcome: It was determined that since the scientists performing the experiment were the only ones who knew about the openings in the barrier, their knowledge somehow influenced how the photon behaved.