by Gregg Braden
Just as a movie screen reflects without judgment the image of whatever or whoever has been filmed, the Matrix appears to provide an unbiased surface for our inner experiences and beliefs to be seen in the world. Sometimes consciously, oftentimes not, we “show” our truest beliefs about everything from compassion to betrayal through the quality of relationships that surround us.
In other words, we’re like artists expressing our deepest passions, fears, dreams, and desires through the living essence of a mysterious quantum canvas. However, unlike a conventional painter’s canvas, which exists in one place at a given time, our canvas is the same stuff that everything is made of—it is everywhere and is always present.
Let’s carry the artist/canvas analogy one step further. Traditionally, artists are separate from their work and use their tools to convey an inner creation through an outer expression. Within the Divine Matrix, however, the separation between art and artist disappears: We are the canvas, as well as the images upon it; we are the tools, as well as the artist using them.
The very idea of us creating from within our own creation brings to mind one of those Walt Disney cartoons that were common on black-and-white television back in the ’50s and ’60s. We would first see the hand of an unidentified artist sketch a well-known cartoon character such as Mickey Mouse on a drawing pad. As the image was being formed, it would suddenly become animated and lifelike. Then Mickey would begin to create his own drawings of other cartoon characters from within the sketch itself. Suddenly, the original artist was no longer needed and out of the picture … literally.
With the hand nowhere to be seen, Mickey and his friends would take on lives and personalities of their own. While everyone in the make-believe house was sleeping, the entire kitchen would become joyously animated. As the sugar bowl danced with the saltshaker and the teacup rocked the world of the butter dish, the characters no longer had any connection to the artist. While this may be an oversimplification of how we function in the Divine Matrix, it also helps anchor the subtle and abstract idea of us as creators, creating from within our own creations.
Just as artists refine an image until it’s exactly right in their minds, in many respects it appears that through the Divine Matrix we do the same thing with our life experiences. Through our palette of beliefs, judgments, emotions, and prayers, we find ourselves in relationships, jobs, and situations of support and betrayal that play out with different individuals in various places. At the same time, these people and situations often feel hauntingly familiar.
Both as individuals and together, we share our inner-life creations as a never-ending cycle of moment layered upon moment, day after day, and so on. What a beautiful, bizarre, and powerful concept! Just the way a painter uses the same canvas again and again while searching for the perfect expression of an idea, we may think of ourselves as perpetual artists, building a creation that’s ever-changing and without end.
The implications of being surrounded by a malleable world of our own making are vast, powerful, and, to some, perhaps a little frightening. Our ability to use the Divine Matrix intentionally and creatively suddenly empowers us to alter everything about the way we see our role in the universe. At the very least, it suggests that there’s much more to life than chance happenings and occasional synchronicities that we deal with the best we can.
Ultimately, our relationship to the quantum essence that connects us to everything else reminds us that we’re creators ourselves. As such, we may express our deepest desires for healing, abundance, joy, and peace in everything from our bodies and lives to our relationships. And we may do so consciously, in the time and manner that we choose.
However, just as the initiates in Christopher Logue’s poem at the beginning of this Introduction needed a little “nudge” to get them to fly, all of these possibilities require a subtle yet powerful shift in the way we think about our world and ourselves. In that shift, our secret desires, highest goals, and loftiest dreams suddenly appear within our grasp. As miraculous as such a reality may sound, all of these things—and much more—are possible within the realm of the Divine Matrix. The key is not only to understand how it works; we also need a language to communicate our desires that’s recognizable to this ancient web of energy.
Our oldest and most cherished wisdom traditions remind us that there is, in fact, a language that speaks to the Divine Matrix, one that has no words and doesn’t involve the usual outward signs of communication we make with our hands or body. It comes in a form so simple that we all already know how to “speak” it fluently. In fact, we use it every day of our lives—it is the language of human emotion.
Modern science has discovered that through each emotion we experience in our bodies, we also undergo chemical changes of things such as pH and hormones that mirror our feelings.9 Through the “positive” experiences of love, compassion, and forgiveness and the “negative” emotions of hate, judgment, and jealousy, we each possess the power to affirm or deny our existence at each moment of every day. Additionally, the same emotion that gives us such power within our bodies extends this force into the quantum world beyond our bodies.
It may be helpful to think of the Divine Matrix as a cosmic blanket that begins and ends in the realm of the unknown and spans everything between. This covering is many layers deep and is everywhere all the time, already in place. Our bodies, lives, and all that we know exist and take place within its fibers. From our watery creation in our mother’s womb to our marriages, divorces, friendships, and careers, all that we experience may be thought of as “wrinkles” in the blanket.
From a quantum perspective, everything from the atoms of matter and a blade of grass to our bodies, the planet, and beyond may be thought of as a “disturbance” in the smooth fabric of this space-time blanket. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that ancient spiritual and poetic traditions describe existence in much the same way. The Vedas, for example, speak of a unified field of “pure consciousness” that bathes and permeates all of creation.10 In these traditions, our experiences of thought, feeling, emotion, and belief—and all the judgment that they create—are viewed as disturbances, interruptions in a field that is otherwise smooth and motionless.
In a similar fashion, the sixth-century Hsin-Hsin Ming (which translates to Faith-Mind Verses) describes the properties of an essence that is the blueprint for everything in creation. Called the Tao, it’s ultimately beyond description, just as we see in the Vedic scriptures. It is all that is—the container of all experience, as well as the experience itself. The Tao is described as perfect, “like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.”11
According to the Hsin-Hsin Ming, it’s only when we disturb the tranquility of the Tao through our judgments that its harmony eludes us. When this inevitably does happen and we find ourselves enmeshed in feelings of anger and separation, the text offers guidelines to remedy this condition: “To come directly into harmony with this reality, just simply say when doubt arises, ‘Not two.’ In this ‘not two’ nothing is separate, nothing is excluded.”12
While I admit that thinking of ourselves as a disturbance in the Matrix may take some of the romance out of life, it also gives us a powerful way to conceptualize our world and ourselves. If, for example, we want to form new, healthy, and life-affirming relationships; let healing romance into our lives; or bring a peaceful solution to the Middle East, we must create a new disturbance in the field, one that mirrors our desire. We must make a new “wrinkle” in the stuff that space, time, our bodies, and the world are made of.
This is our relationship to the Divine Matrix. We’re given the power to imagine, dream, and feel life’s possibilities from within the Matrix itself so that it can reflect back to us what we’ve created. Both ancient traditions and modern science have described how this cosmic mirror works; in the case of the experiments that will be shared in later chapters, we’re even shown how these reflections work in the language of science. Admittedly, while these studies may solve som
e mysteries of creation, they also open the door to even deeper questions about our existence.
We clearly don’t know all there is to know about the Divine Matrix. Science doesn’t have all of the answers—in all honesty, scientists aren’t even certain where the Divine Matrix came from, and we’re also aware that we could study it for another hundred years and still not find all the answers. What we do know, however, is that the Divine Matrix exists. It is here, and we may tap its creative power through the language of our emotions.
We can apply this knowing in a way that’s useful and meaningful in our lives. By doing so, our connection to one another and all things cannot be denied. It’s in light of this connection that we may realize just how powerful we really are. From the place of strength that such a realization offers, we have the opportunity to become more peaceful and compassionate people, actively working to create a world that mirrors these qualities—and more. Through the Divine Matrix, we have the opportunity to focus on these attributes in our lives, applying them as our inner technology of feelings, imagination, and dreams. When we do, we tap the true essence of the power to change our lives and the world.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In many respects, our experience of the Divine Matrix may be compared to the software that runs a computer. In both, the instructions must use a language that the system understands. For the computer, this is a numerical code of 0s and 1s. For consciousness, a different kind of language is required, one that uses no numbers, alphabets, or even words. Because we’re already part of the Divine Matrix, it makes perfect sense that we would already have everything we need to communicate with it, without the need for an instruction manual or special training. And we do.
The language of consciousness appears to be the universal experience of emotion. We already know how to love, hate, fear, and forgive. Recognizing that these feelings are actually the instructions that program the Divine Matrix, we can hone our skills to better understand how to bring joy, healing, and peace to our lives.
This book isn’t intended to be a definitive work on the history of science and the new physics. There are a number of other texts that have already done a wonderful job of bringing this kind of information to our awareness today. Some of them I have even referenced here—Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, for example, and David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Each of these represents a powerful new way to see our world, and I recommend them all.
This book is intended to be a useful tool—a guide—that we can apply to the mysteries of our everyday lives. For this reason, there are places where I’ve chosen to focus more on the radical and unexpected results of the quantum experiments, rather than getting bogged down with too many technical details of the experiments themselves. For us to understand the power to manifest healing, peace, joy, romance, and partnership, as well as to survive our time in history, it’s important to emphasize what the results tell us about ourselves, rather than the fine points of how the studies were performed. For those who may be interested in the technical details, I’ve included the sources as endnotes.
For so many people, the breakthroughs in the world of quantum physics are little more than interesting facts—things to talk about at conferences or workshops or over a Starbucks latte. Yet, as deep as the implications go and as high as the philosophy carries us, the discoveries seem to have minimal relevance in our everyday lives. What good does it do, for example, to know that a particle of matter can be in two places at once or that electrons can travel faster than Einstein said they could if this knowledge doesn’t add to our lives in some way? It’s only when we can connect these mind-boggling discoveries to the healing of our bodies or to what we experience in the malls, living rooms, airports, and classrooms of our lives that they become important to us.
This apparent chasm between the mysteries of the quantum world and our everyday experiences is where The Divine Matrix offers a bridge. In addition to describing the findings, this book takes us one step further: It gives meaning to how those discoveries can help us become better people and build a better world together.
I’ve written this book for one reason: to offer a sense of hope, possibility, and empowerment in a world that often makes us feel small, ineffective, and helpless. And my goal is to do so in a conversational style that describes the awesome insights of the new science in a way that’s easy to understand and interesting.
My experience with live presentations has shown that in order to reach an audience in a way that’s meaningful, it’s important to honor the way the listeners learn. Regardless of how “left-brained” we think we are or how “right-brained” we feel we are, the fact is that we all use both sides to make sense of the world. And while some people certainly do rely more on one hemisphere or the other, it’s important to honor both our intuition as well as our logic when we invite people to make a huge leap in how they see the world.
For this reason, The Divine Matrix is written in much the same way that the fabric of a tapestry is created. Throughout these pages, I’ve woven the “right-brain” descriptions of personal accounts and direct experience into the “left-brain” research and reports of discoveries that tell us why these stories are important. This way of sharing information makes the data seem less text book like, while still keeping enough of the leading-edge science to make it meaningful.
Just as all life is built from the four chemical bases that create our DNA, the universe appears to be founded upon four characteristics of the Divine Matrix that make things work in the way they do. The key to tapping the power of the Matrix lies in our ability to embrace the four landmark discoveries that link it to our lives in an unprecedented way:
Discovery 1: There is a field of energy that connects all of creation.
Discovery 2: This field plays the role of a container, a bridge, and a mirror for the beliefs within us.
Discovery 3: The field is nonlocal and holographic.
Every part of it is connected to every other, and each piece mirrors the whole on a smaller scale.
Discovery 4: We communicate with the field through the language of emotion.
It’s our power to recognize and apply these realities that determine everything from our healing to the success of our relationships and careers. Ultimately, our survival as a species may be directly linked to our ability and willingness to share life-affirming practices that come from a unified quantum worldview.
To do justice to the huge concepts implied by The Divine Matrix, I’ve written it in three parts, each covering one of the key implications of the field. Rather than creating a formal conclusion at the end of each part, I’ve highlighted the important concepts as an in-line summary, noting such an idea as a “Key” designated by number (as in Key 1, Key 2, and so forth). For quick reference, a listing of the 20 Keys may be found at the end of Chapter 8.
A brief description of each section will help in navigating the material and in finding the information that’s useful for everything from important references to deep inspiration.
Part I, “Discovering the Divine Matrix: The Mystery That Connects All Things,” explores the enduring human sense that we’re united by a field of energy that connects everything. In Chapter 1, I describe the single experiment that set scientists back over 100 years in the search for such a unified field. It is in this section that I also share the 20th-century research that led to advances in quantum physics forcing scientists to revisit the original experiment that told us everything is separate. This includes three representative experiments showing the latest scientific documentation of a previously unrecognized field of energy. Briefly, these findings demonstrate the following:
1. Human DNA has a direct effect on the stuff that our world is made of.
2. Human emotion has a direct effect on the DNA that affects the stuff that our world is made of.
3. The relationship between emotions and DNA transcends the bounds of time and space. The effects are the same regardless of distance.
At th
e end of Part I, there can be little doubt as to the existence of the Divine Matrix. Whether we’re describing it from a spiritual or scientific perspective, it’s clear that there’s something out there—a field of energy that connects everything we do, as well as all that we are and experience. The logical questions then become “What do we do with this information?” and “How do we use the Divine Matrix in our lives?”
Part II, “The Bridge Between Imagination and Reality: How the Divine Matrix Works,” explores what it means to live in a universe where in addition to simply being connected (nonlocal), everything is linked holographically. The subtle power of these principles is perhaps one of the greatest discoveries of 20th-century physics—and at the same time, it’s quite possibly the least understood and most overlooked. This section is intentionally nontechnical and designed to be a useful guide to the mystery of experiences that we all share yet rarely recognize in their fullest capacity to teach us.
When we look at our lives from the viewpoint that everything is everywhere all the time, the implications are so vast that for many they’re hard to grasp. It’s precisely because of our universal connection that we’re empowered to support, share, and participate in life’s joys and tragedies anywhere, anytime. How do we make use of such power?
The answer begins with our understanding that there really is no “here” and “there,” or “then” and “now.” From the perspective of life as a universally connected hologram, here is already there, and then has always been now. Ancient spiritual traditions remind us that in each moment of the day, we make the choices that either affirm or deny our lives. Every second we choose to nourish ourselves in a way that supports or depletes our lives; to breathe deep and life-affirming breaths or shallow, life-denying ones; and to think and speak about other people in a manner that is honoring or dishonoring.