The Divine Matrix Page 3

  Through the power of our nonlocal, holographic consciousness, each of these seemingly insignificant choices has consequences that extend well beyond the places and the moments of our lives. Our individual choices combine to become our collective reality—that’s what makes the discoveries both exciting and frightening. Through these understandings, we see:

  • Why our good wishes, thoughts, and prayers are already at their destination

  • That we aren’t limited by our bodies or the “laws” of physics

  • How we support our loved ones everywhere from the battlefield to the boardroom—without ever leaving our home

  • That we do have the potential to heal instantaneously

  • That it is possible to see across time and space without ever opening our eyes

  Part III, “Messages from the Divine Matrix: Living, Loving, and Healing in Quantum Awareness,” delves directly into the practical aspects of what it means to live in a unified field of energy, along with how it affects the events of our lives. With examples of synchronicities and coincidences, powerful acts of intentional healing, and what our most intimate relationships are showing us, this section serves as a template to recognize what similar experiences may mean in our own lives.

  Through a series of real case histories, I share the power, irony, and clarity of how seemingly insignificant events in our lives are actually “us” showing ourselves our truest and deepest beliefs. Among the examples used to describe this relationship, I include a case history of how our pets can show us with their bodies the physical conditions that have either gone unnoticed or are still developing in our own.

  The Divine Matrix is the result of more than 20 years of research, as well as my personal journey to make sense of the great secret held in our most ancient, mystical, and cherished traditions. If you’ve always sought to answer the questions “Are we really connected, and if so, how deep does that connection go?” and “How much power do we really have to change our world?” then you’ll like this book.

  The Divine Matrix is written for those of you whose lives bridge the reality of our past with the hope of our future. It is you who are being asked to forgive and find compassion in a world reeling from the scars of hurt, judgment, and fear. The key to surviving our time in history is to create a new way of thinking while we’re still living in the conditions that threaten our existence.

  Ultimately, we may discover that our ability to understand and apply the “rules” of the Divine Matrix holds the key to our deepest healing, our greatest joy, and our survival as a species.

  — Gregg Braden

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  DISCOVERING THE

  DIVINE MATRIX:

  THE MYSTERY THAT

  CONNECTS ALL THINGS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Q: WHAT’S IN THE SP ACE

  BETWEEN?

  A: THE DIVINE MATRIX

  “Science cannot solve the

  ultimate mystery of nature.

  And that is because, in the

  last analysis, we ourselves

  are … part of the mystery

  that we are trying to solve.”

  — Max Planck (1858–1947), physicist

  “When we understand us,

  our consciousness, we

  also understand the universe

  and the separation disappears.”

  — Amit Goswami, physicist

  There is a place where all things begin, a location of pure energy that simply “is.” In this quantum incubator for reality, all things are possible. From our personal success, abundance, and healing to our failure, lack, and disease … everything from our greatest fear to our deepest desire begins in this “soup” of potential.

  Through the reality makers of imagination, expectation, judgment, passion, and prayer, we galvanize each possibility into existence. In our beliefs about who we are, what we have and don’t have, and what should and shouldn’t be, we breathe life into our greatest joys as well as our darkest moments.

  The key to mastering this place of pure energy is to know that it exists, to understand how it works, and finally to speak the language that it recognizes. All things become available to us as the architects of reality in this place where the world begins: the pure space of the Divine Matrix.

  Key 1: The Divine Matrix is the container that holds the universe, the bridge between all things, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.

  The last thing I expected to see on a late October afternoon hiking in a remote canyon of the Four Corners area in northwestern New Mexico was a Native American wisdom keeper walking toward me on the same trail. Yet there he was, standing at the top of the small incline that separated us as our paths converged that day.

  I’m not sure how long he’d been there. By the time I saw him, he was just waiting, watching me as I stepped carefully among the loose stones on the path. The low sun created a glow that cast a deep shadow across the man’s body. As I held my hand up to block the light from my eyes, I could see a few locks of shoulder-length hair blowing across his face.

  He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. The wind carried the sound of his voice toward me as he cupped his hands on either side of his mouth. “Hello!” he shouted.

  “Hello,” I called back. “I didn’t expect to see anyone here this time of day.” Stepping a little closer, I asked, “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Not long,” he replied. “I come here to listen to the voices of my ancestors in those caves,” he said, as one arm pointed toward the other side of the canyon.

  The path we were following wound through a series of archaeological sites built nearly 11 centuries before by a mysterious clan of people. No one knows where they came from or who they were. With no evidence of their skills evolving over time, the people that modern natives simply call “the ancient ones” showed up one day in history and brought with them the most advanced technology that would be seen in North America for another thousand years.

  From the four-story-tall buildings and perfect stone kivas (round ceremonial structures) buried in the ground to the vast irrigation systems and the sophisticated crops that sustained the people, this place seems to have just appeared one day. And then those who built it were suddenly gone—they just vanished.

  The ancient ones left precious few clues to tell us who they were. With the exception of the rock art on the canyon walls, no written records have ever been found. There are no sites of mass burials or cremations, or weapons of war. Yet the evidence of their existence is there: hundreds of ancient dwellings in an 11-mile-long, 1-mile-wide canyon in the remote corner of a desolate canyon in northwestern New Mexico.

  I’ve gone to this place often to walk, immerse myself in the strange beauty of the open desolation, and feel the past. On that late October afternoon, both the wisdom keeper and I had come to the high desert on the same day for the same reason. As we exchanged our beliefs about the secrets still held there, my new friend shared a story.

  A LONG TIME AGO ...

  “A long time ago, our world was very different from the way we see it today,” the wisdom keeper began. “There were fewer people, and we lived closer to the land. People knew the language of the rain, the crops, and the Great Creator. They even knew how to speak to the stars and the sky people. They were aware that life is sacred and comes from the marriage between Mother Earth and Father Sky. In this time, there was balance and people were happy.”

  I felt something very ancient well up inside of me as I heard the man’s peaceful voice echo against the sandstone cliffs that surrounded us. Suddenly, his voice changed to a tone of sadness.

  “Then something happened,” he said. “No one really knows why, but people started to forget who they were. In their forgetting, they began to feel separate—separate from the earth, from each other, and even from the one who created them. They were lost and wandered through life with no direction or connection. In their separation, they believed that they
had to fight to survive in this world and defend themselves against the same forces that gave them the life they had learned to live in harmony with and trust. Soon all of their energy was used to protect themselves from the world around them, instead of making peace with the world within them.”

  Immediately, the man’s story resonated with me. As I listened to what he was telling me, it sounded as if he were describing human beings today! With the few exceptions of isolated cultures and remote pockets of tradition that remain, our civilization certainly places its focus more on the world around us and less on the world within us.

  We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year defending ourselves from disease and trying to control nature. In doing so, we have perhaps strayed further from our balance with the natural world than ever before. The wisdom keeper had my attention—now the question was, where was he going with his story?

  “Even though they had forgotten who they were, somewhere inside of them the gift of their ancestors remained,” he continued. “There was still a memory that lived within them. In their dreams at night they knew that they held the power to heal their bodies, bring rain when they needed to, and speak with their ancestors. They knew that somehow they could find their place in the natural world once again.

  “As they tried to remember who they were, they began to build the things outside of their bodies that reminded them of who they were on the inside. As time went on, they even built machines to do their healing, made chemicals to grow their crops, and stretched wires to communicate over long distances. The farther they wandered from their inner power, the more cluttered their outer lives became with the things that they believed would make them happy.”

  As I listened, I saw the unmistakable parallels between the people I was hearing about and our civilization today. Our civilization has become steeped in feelings of being powerless to help ourselves or make a better world. So often we feel helpless as we watch our loved ones slip away from us into the clutches of pain and addictions. We think that we’re powerless to ease the suffering from the horrible diseases that no living thing should ever have to endure. We can only hope for the peace that will bring those we care about safely from the terror of foreign battlefields. And together, we feel insignificant in the presence of a growing nuclear threat as the world aligns itself along the divisions of religious beliefs, bloodlines, and borders.

  It seems that the farther we stray from our natural relationship with the earth, our bodies, one another, and God, the emptier we become. In our emptiness, we strive to fill our inner void with “things.” When we look at the world from this perspective, I cannot help but think of a similar dilemma portrayed in the science-fiction movie Contact. The President’s science advisor (played by Matthew McConaughey) explores the fundamental question that faces every technological society. During a television interview, he asks if we are a better society because of our technology—has it brought us closer together or made us feel more separate? The question is never really answered in the movie, and the topic could fill an entire book unto itself. However, the point that the advisor is making when he asks how much of our power we give away to our diversions is a good one.

  When we feel that video games, movies, virtual online relationships, and voiceless communication are necessities and they become substitutes for real life and face-to-face contact, this may be signs of a society in trouble. While electronics and entertainment media certainly seem to make life more interesting, they could also be red flags telling us how far we’ve strayed from our power to live rich, healthy, and meaningful lives.

  Additionally, when the focus of our lives becomes how to avoid disease rather than how to live in a healthy way, how to stay out of war rather than how to cooperate in peace, and how to create new weapons rather than how to live in a world where armed conflict has become obsolete, clearly the path we’re on has become one of survival. In such a mode, no one is truly happy—nobody really “wins.” When we find ourselves living this way, the obvious thing to do would be to look for another route. And that’s precisely what this book is about and why I’m sharing this story.

  “How does the story end?” I asked the wisdom keeper. “Did the people ever find their power and remember who they were?”

  By this time, the sun had disappeared behind the canyon walls, and for the first time I could actually see who I was talking to. The sun-darkened man standing in front of me smiled broadly upon hearing my question. He was quiet for just a moment, and then he whispered, “No one knows because the story isn’t finished. The people who got lost are our ancestors, and we are the ones who are writing the ending. What do you think … ?”

  I only saw the man a couple of times after that in various places throughout the land and communities that we both love. I think about him often, though. As I see the events of the world unfold, I remember his story and wonder if we’ll complete the ending in this lifetime. Will you and I be the ones who remember?

  The implications of the story that the man in the canyon shared are vast. The conventional wisdom of history is that the tools of past civilizations—no matter how ancient—were somehow less advanced than modern technology. While it’s true that these peoples might not have used “modern” science to solve their problems, they may have had something even better.

  In discussions with historians and archaeologists whose livelihoods are based on interpreting the past, this topic is generally the source of passionately heated emotion. “If they were so advanced, where’s the evidence of their technology?” the experts ask. “Where are their toasters, microwave ovens, and VCRs?” I find it very interesting that in interpreting the development of a civilization, so much could hinge on the things that the individuals built. What about the thinking that underlies what they made? While to the best of my knowledge, it’s true that we’ve never found a TV or digital camera in the archaeological record of the American Southwest (or anywhere else for that matter), the question is why?

  Is it possible that when we see the remains of advanced civilizations, such as those in Egypt, Peru, or the American Desert Southwest, we’re actually witnessing the remnants of a technology so advanced that they didn’t need toasters and VCRs? Maybe they outgrew the need for a cluttered and complex outer world. Perhaps they knew something about themselves that gave them the inner technology to live in a different way, knowledge that we’ve forgotten. That wisdom could have given them everything that they needed to sustain their lives and heal in a way that we’re only beginning to understand.

  If this is true, then perhaps we need look no further than nature to understand who we are and what our role in life really is. And maybe some of our most profound and empowering insights are already available in the mysterious discoveries of the quantum world. During the last century, physicists discovered that the stuff that makes up our bodies and our universe doesn’t always follow the neat and tidy laws of physics that have been held sacred for nearly three centuries. In fact, on the tiniest scales of our world, the very particles that we’re made of break the rules that say we’re separate from one another and limited in our existence. On the particle level, everything appears to be connected and infinite.

  These discoveries suggest that there’s something within each of us that isn’t limited by time, space, or even death. The bottom line of these findings is that we appear to live in a “nonlocal” universe where everything is always connected.

  Dean Radin, senior scientist for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has been a pioneer in exploring just what it means for us to live in such a world. “Nonlocality,” he explains, “means that there are ways in which things that appear to be separate are, in fact, not separate.”1 There are aspects of us, Radin suggests, that extend beyond the here-and-now and allow us to be spread throughout space and time. In other words, the “us” that lives in our physical selves isn’t limited by the skin and hair that define our bodies.

  Whatever we choose to call that mysterious “something,” we all have i
t; and ours mingles with everyone else’s as part of the field of energy that bathes all things. This field is believed to be the quantum net that connects the universe, as well as the infinitely microscopic and energetic blueprint for everything from healing our bodies to forging world peace. To recognize our true power, we must understand what this field is and how it works.

  If the ancient ones in that northern New Mexican canyon—or anywhere else in the world, for that matter—understood how this forgotten part of us works, then it makes tremendous sense for us to honor the knowledge of our ancestors and find a place for their wisdom in our time.

  ARE WE CONNECTED—REALLY CONNECTED?

  Modern science is hot on the trail of solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time. You may not hear about it during the evening news, and you probably won’t see it on the front page of USA Today or The Wall Street Journal. Yet nearly 70 years of research in an area of science known as the “new physics” is pointing to a conclusion that we can’t escape.

  Key 2: Everything in our world is connected to everything else.

  That’s it—really! That’s the news that changes everything and is absolutely shaking the foundations of science as we know it today.

  “Okay,” you say, “we’ve heard this before. What makes this conclusion so different? What does it really mean to be so connected?” These are very good questions, and the answers may surprise you. The difference between the new discoveries and what we previously believed is that in the past we were simply told that the connection exists. Through technical phrases such as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (or “the butterfly effect”) and theories suggesting that what we do “here” has an effect “there,” we could vaguely observe the connection playing out in our lives. The new experiments, however, take us one step beyond.