Friday, October 30, 2009

Einstein's probability bundles


When we go dreaming, we travel through the curtains of our everyday understanding, beyond the walls of our physical reality; we get out there. Through synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, the powers that live in that deeper reality come probing or poking through the veils, and sometimes this brings us awake to the hidden logic of events and the reality of a world-behind-the-world.
     Since posting my recent dream of the Synchronicity Beast, I've been thinking of other dreams that have influenced my understanding of these things. I recorded one of the most important at the end of 2003. In this dream my mentor is Einstein. He has appeared in a number of my dreams, talking in a stage German accent, sometimes at machine-gun speed, about such things as the physics of time travel and the code of the I Ching. 
    I have retained a healthy skepticism about whether my dream Einstein could possibly be connected to the great scientist, since I have a hard time wrapping my head around the simplest principles of physics. Whoever my dream Einstein may be, behind the familiar mask, he does have interesting things to reveal and to teach about the nature of multidimensional reality. Here is my 2003 report, exactly as I recorded it in my journal:


December 30, 2003
At Play Among the Manifestations of Time


A passage opens, like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods, angling up into the sky. As I speed up through it - shooting up effortlessly - I become aware that I am about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future. I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure, something like a Ferris wheel on its side. At the end of each spoke is a different object, or rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I notice that the spokes go up and down at all angles, making the general shape of a sphere.
     At the hub of the wheel is "Einstein". He appears with his wild fluffy hair, in rumpled clothes, as he has appeared in other dreams. From the center, he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips, another rises, producing a seesaw effect. As the bundles fall to earth, Einstein instructs me that this is how the unfolding of events in time actually takes place: not in the serial fashion that is a concession to the limited human mind, but in the releasing of probability bundles, packages of time + energy whose contents will be unfolded over a certain period. The unfolding of events will be influenced by the dropping of subsequent probability bundles.
    When I notice a riff of coincidence - things popping up that you know are connected, though there is no causation involved on the physical plane - I think of those probability bundles, fired from another world into this one, to burst across our space and time like multidimensional pinatas. The world "quantum" means "bundle" or "packet", so this image may be a clue to how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.
     What I like best about the dream image is that the machine that fires the probability bundles closely resembles something you might find in an amusement park, evoking a game greater than the ones we spend most of our lives playing. Heraclitus said (fragment XCIV) that life in time (aion) is governed by a child at play (pais paizon) moving pieces in a game (pesseuon) on another level of reality. The child is also a king. Classical scholars wrangle over how to translate the word pesseuon in this tricky text. Are the pieces in play something like dice? Dream Einstein has the solution: they are probability bundles.

18 comments:

lee said...

Hi, Robert,
Interesting dream. Do you know any physicists?
The ferris wheel reminded me of the many wheeled machine in Revelations, though this machine did not feel ominous.
Coincidentally, this morning I watched the film trailer for "Avatar" on my computer. There appeared a wheeled flying machine that reminded me of Revelations, as well.
Perhaps your dream is just that: a revelation!
Laura

Justin Patrick Moore said...

reality packets
arrive in the mail
bundles probably
of probability
as time streams slipstream
blurring boundaries
& waking dreams

the wheels of ROTA turn
circus spokes of spinning steel
nudges from another world
in the play of chance and free will

roll the dice
and throw the bones
spin the dial of the sun
pierce the world of the Carnal Veil
into a fairground of magic fun

Robert Moss said...

Hey Laura - Yes, I do know some physicists and sometimes turn to them for explication of terms (from "muons" to "Calabi-Yau bridges") and phenomena that appear in the multidimensional jungle gym of my dream life. A growing number of working scientists, from many disciplines, are coming to my workshops, some in quest of EXPERIENTAL knowledge of the deeper universe they are trying to figure out.

As you noticed, the spirit of my Einstein dream is completely foreign to that of Revelations. No dire prophecy or religious wrath here. Rather, a semi-humorous invitation to look at the game behind the game of the world. More a "thought experiment" (to borrow Einstein's language) than a "revelation".

Diana said...

Hi Robert,
Probability bundles (energy + time) certainly speaks strongly to the importance of timing and being present in the now, so as not to miss these opportunities.

Also, reminds me of a journey I had last weekend in Mystic at your workshop. It involved finding myself in a large multi-pillared golden building with a pool in the center and a very tall domed open to the sky (also golden) ceiling. As I explored this environment, I gazed into a room where a good number of women were seated on the floor in colorful attire sewing/working on what appeared to be a huge mandala. At various points, they would arise and shake it out the window. When they shook it, little aparkly bundles dropped off into the universe that somehow influenced things on earth. When I read your posting, I immediately sensed that these could be "probabilities" (time + energy).

Diana said...

In my posting, "aparkly" should be sparkling!

Robert Moss said...

Hi Diana - I love your vision of the weaving women shaking out their own version of the probability bundles. This distantly evokes both the Greek myth of the sisters working the Loom of Fate (but no cutting here :-) and the legends of Spider Woman weaving webs of possibility, yet comes fresh and spontaneous, golden and glowing from the journey.

Don't let's abandon "aparkly" altogether. In this typo we can hear "sparkly", "sparking" and something about "parking". There's always something showing in our slips. One of our most dedicated dreamers kept referring to synchronicity as "synchronOcity" until someone pointed out her erropr. I begged her to keep saying "synchronOcity" because every time I hear that word I see a soft, snuffly little rhino-type beast padding and sniffing around the room :-)

Justin Patrick Moore said...

typos...
SynchronOcity sounds to me like
Chrono City... a city of time, maybe made up of entire streets and neighborhoods of House(s) of Time.
Time City is also a place in the book "Tales of Time City" by Diana Wynn Jones. It is a place outside of normal space/time. Time City is there to make sure history runs its course without paradox.
Writing this I get the feeling that maybe I've written this before. Wisps of Deja Vu around the corners of my perception.

Robert Moss said...

Hi Justin - I relish your wordplay and am (almost) grateful for your bibliographical notes - only (almost) because there is no way one pair of eyes can keep up with all the reading assignments I give myself. Good thing I am constantly reading in my dreams as well. I have never been able to fathom those claims by some otherwise knowledgeable dream researchesrs that we can't read text in our dreams.

Worldbridger said...

T (E) = Art

Time factored by energy equals art.

Lou Hagood said...

Hi, Robert, The ferris wheel reminds me of David Bohm's explicate order arising from the implicate. The quantum theorists were more comfortable with "probability bundles" than Einstein, who doubted that"God plays dice with the universe".

Robert Moss said...

Hey Lou - Don't you think that Einstein may have expanded his views now that he resides in the multiverse? God may not play dice but MY Einstein is most willing to play with probability bundles? By the way, I am quite familiar with Bohm's implicate/explicate ordre terminology. But did Bohm come up with visual imagery as vivid as my Dream Einstein's - the kind that helps us begin to SEE into the workings of his "implicate order"?

Unknown said...

hi robert : ) i heard you on forum with michael krasny months ago, and have really enjoyed reading your entries here. yesterday i took an impromptu trip downtown to browse a bookstore for ideas.. the last thing i picked up off the shelf was the latest issue of the columbia poetry review- it had some wonderful cover art that caught my eye, and reminds me of what you wrote here: http://english.colum.edu/cpr/arch/no22.htm

Robert Moss said...

Good to hear your voice. Yes - the cover art of the current issue of that poetry review is terrific and evokes the way that events that manifest in our world may be "stepped down" from a subtler order of reality.

Anonymous said...

Robert-
I had a dream last night in which a bubbly, energetic young woman gave me a little bit of an energy healing (which unfortunately got interrupted). Can you give any advice on how to maintain contact with her - and perhaps go to her as a source of guidance? On dream reentry, I think she told me she was a spirit guide. I just don't know how best to honor both the dream and the spirit, if in fact she was one.

For what it's worth, I did awake from the dream feeling happy and even a little energized (most unusual - I usually feel so sluggish when I wake up).

Thanks! Ginta

Robert Moss said...

Labas Ginta - I think you have learned our dream reentry technique. If I enjoyed this experience as you did I would try simply putting myself back in the dreamspace - in active imagination - and letting things go on and deepen. Maybe this would work most easily if I put my body in a space that supports and recollects the dream energy exchange. That might be a bubble bath, or a shower, or simply relaxed time in sunlight. Many people use my drumming CD to help facilitate, focus and deepen the dream reetry experience.

fran said...

Hi Robert,

I love this dream report, thanks for sharing it.

The description of probability bundles reminds me of the descriptions of how "mental enzymes" create phenomena from the early Jane Roberts works. Some of that is really hard to grasp but you do get a sense that there is a higher order physics at play.

Diane, that domed pool seem very familiar to me and your weavers remind me of a painting by Remedios Varo titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre" or "Embroidering Earth's Mantle", and here's a link to a rather smallish version of it:
http://www.honmex.com/eros/varo/wallpaper/rv008.jpg

--fran

Unknown said...

Hi Robert - I love this dream and yet I am still left with an enormous curiosity about who decides to launch these "bundles of probabilty".In the dream it is Einstein. But are we each, perhaps, at the center of our own Multiverse Ferris Wheel? I want to go play in that Adventure Park for sure!!
Likewise I am curious about a previous dream post of yours with the shaman teacher "Andrew Pachenko". I played pachinko as a kid and it seems to me that its yet another version of launching probabilty packets in the guise of pinball-like game.
Karolyn

Robert Moss said...

That's an excellent question, Karolyn. I like the idea that we may each - in a self distinct from that of the "daily trivial mind" - be at the hub of our own multiverse ferris wheel. If we can develop the ability to travel, in consciousness, nearer the hub, can we participate in firing out those "probability bundles" and choosing what each contains? Why not try?

I have yet to identify the "Andrew Pachenko" from my dream. Others came up with the association with "pachinko" but you are the first to inspire me to look at that game as another model for how things may operate in a greater game. Thanks!