An Interview with Gregg Braden

Mary: You have said that there are two false assumptions of science that have set modern understanding of the universe back 100 years. What are these two assumptions?

Gregg: When we say science, it’s important to know what we’re talking about. Science and the scientific method is a relatively new way of looking at ourselves, our relationship to the universe, to each other and the world around us. It is accepted that science began about 300 years ago with Isaac Newton when he formalize the laws of physics that describe how things work. So for the last 300 years up until early in the 20th century, the laws that Newton put into place are the laws that govern all of our scientific exploration, and they work well enough in the world in general to have gotten us where we are today. Well enough to put a man on the moon, and to calculate the trajectories of airlines going from city to city. They have worked well enough to build the technology to the point where we are now exploring realms where those laws do not work. This is what these two assumptions are all about. Modern science is based on two assumptions that were made during the time of Newton that we know now are absolutely false. The first assumption is that the space between things is empty. The belief has been that whether we’re looking at the first electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom or if we’re looking at the space between the stars or the person next to you in the subway, that when we see nothing between us, that is truly empty space. The second false assumption is that our inner experience of thought, feeling, emotion and belief have no affect upon the world around us because, if the space is empty, there’s no conduit to carry them from our body to anywhere else. Now we know both of those are absolutely false. Our own science in the last couple of years has found that there is something that occupies what we previously thought of as empty space, and we’re giving it different names and still exploring what it means. Some are calling it dark matter and dark energy, the quantum hologram, the mind of god, the field, the matrix, the divine matrix - they’re all names for a field of energy that peer reviewed research papers now agree exists. However, this information is so new that it will not make it into our textbooks for another 8 to 10 years. So our children in school are still studying and basing their beliefs of our world, and we’re still solving the problems of the world, from the perspective that everything is separate from everything else and that what happens in one place has no effect on what happens somewhere else. While on the other hand our own science is telling us that is not true.

Mary: If there’s no space between things, what happens to time? Isn’t time thought to manifest from the space between things?

Gregg: I’m working on some other projects where we’re dealing with precisely this. Up until the 20th century we thought of time more or less in a poetic sense. John Wheeler, Princeton University Physicist, said it best. He said that time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. I love that quote because it’s so profound yet so simple. Early in the 20th century when the theory of relativity was proposed, it did something that no other system or theory of thinking had ever done in that it viewed time as linked to the space that it happens in. In other words, the things that occur are intimately linked to the time that they happen within. And from that perspective they cannot be separated. Then there was a new essence - and the term that was coined was called space-time - and this is the stuff that everything is made of in our universe. So time is believed to have begun the instant of creation when the big bang happened, and space began filling the emptiness. Time began traveling with it in an outward expanding direction in what we call the forward march, or arrow, of time. So time and space, in that way, are seen as intimately connected. What makes it really interesting is what scientists have found when looking at smaller and smaller particles and subparticles that there is a realm where time apparently doesn’t exist. It’s at a very small scale, called the plank scale - 10 to the minus 43 is how small these things are. What they’re finding is that the essence of the quantum stuff that everything is made of, in the place where everything begins, time doesn’t really exist. In physics it’s actually called the "problem of time". We’re obviously dealing with time in the big world and we have to account for it in our equations. However, when we get into the world where everything began, what everything’s made of, time drops out of the equation. It’s not even a factor. So that’s the mystery - why we would be affected by time.

Mary: So our consciousness is probably creating time along with everything else.

Gregg: That’s exactly where they’re going. It seems that consciousness and time, as well as everything else, are intimately related. And that brings us right into to my new book, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief. Our own science is showing us that we really have the ability to create conditions inside of our bodies through our feelings and emotions that influence not only our physical bodies in terms of seemingly miraculous healings, but that influence the world around us in ways that we are only beginning to understand, in modern science. On the other hand, our most cherished spiritual traditions have always told us that this relationship exists, in nonscientific terms, and we simply did not believe them until the 20th century. So now the wisdom of our past married with the best science of today is showing us that we, in fact, are powerful architects of our lives and our reality if we choose to speak the nonverbal language based in the human heart - the language of healing and emotion. This is interesting because what our science has finally evolved to is where ancient traditions began. For the ancients, this knowledge was a given. They said, "Sure everything’s connected and sure we’re part of it." Rather than trying to prove or disprove the connection, they were exploring how we apply that in their lives. And the context for all this - where we begin with all this - is that this generation is unique in 5125 years of human history. We’ve never before faced a time where so many different challenges all face us at the same time, and each challenge has the potential to forever end civilization and maybe even life as we know it on the earth. And all of them must be solved within the next 8 to 10 years. So while we’ve had generations in the past that faced abrupt changes in the weather or depletion of resources or war or disease, we’ve never had a generation where the magnitude of all those problems was so great it could destroy everything. And it is within that context that the best minds of our time are telling us that in order to solve these problems we have got to think of ourselves and our world differently, and I cannot help but believe that one of those differences is going to be a new world view, a new paradigm, where we recognize that we are part of, rather than separate from, our world and that we truly have the ability to influence the outcome of the healing and the health of our bodies, the peace between nations, the abundance in our personal and collective lives, because all of those things are being demonstrated through this relationship that we’re talking about and it all comes back to this nonverbal language of feeling based in the human heart. So when I share this with live audiences, one of the first things that the western mind will ask is how can a feeling in our bodies possibly influence the physical world around us. And it’s a really good question. And it’s important for us to understand this because our left brain needs to understand why it’s possible for us to affect our world. We know that the world around us is energy and made of electrical and magnetic fields. What our own science has found within the last two or three years is that the human heart is the strongest generator of electrical fields within the human body, about a hundred times stronger than the brain, and it’s the strongest generator of magnetic fields in the body - about 5000 times stronger than the brain. So when we create a feeling in our hearts the way the ancients told us to - feelings of appreciation, gratitude, healing, love and compassion - what we are really doing is creating very powerful waves of electrical and magnetic energy inside our heart that floods our body with these fields and it extends beyond our bodies into the world around us. And that’s how we influence the physical world around us - we can literally rearrange the atoms of physical matter through these fields if we learn to focus and hone this language.

Mary: In your book, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief, you use an analogy that the nature of the connection between ourselves and our world is like the workings of a computer. Can you explain this?

Gregg: My background is in computer, earth and life science and they all come together in this book. A growing number of mainstream scientists are now suggesting that the universe, the world around us, and our bodies work like a computer. Rather than being based on electronic circuits, however, it is a computer based in consciousness. Everyone knows that for an "electrical" computer to work, to get things done, it has to have programs. In our "consciousness" computer of the universe and our world, our beliefs become those programs. When we believe something in our hearts, and we’re defining beliefs now as the certainty of something that we experience in our minds coupled with the acceptance of the feeling that that something is trues in our hearts. When that happens for us, what we know is that we’re creating those patterns that we just spoke of and in that way programming the consciousness of the world around us. And it removes us from being victims in a world where things appear to happen at random for no apparent reason. And it helps us to recognize that there is a direct relationship between the world around us and the world within us and what we expect to happen in our lives - what we believe, is true about ourselves in our relationship to the world. In one sense, we’ve got 5000 years of spiritual traditions that have told us that this is the way things work, and we have always kept that understanding somehow separate from our world of science. Now in our own laboratories, beginning in 1909, scientists began finding that the expectations - the feelings about an experiment in a room, - actually influenced how that experiment came out, and they began realizing that the world of quantum physics and the role of consciousness in that world cannot be discounted. This has taken us almost 100 years now to understand and is one of the reasons why physics has failed to arrive at a unified field theory - a theory that connects everything together into one beautiful story of how we work in the universe. This has been the great struggle of physics for 100 years. Einstein confessed on his deathbed how frustrated he was that he was not able to arrive at that unified understanding. And the reason is that we’ve written ourselves right out of the equation. We’ve left consciousness out of the theory, discounting ourselves and our relationship to the world around us because, for 300 years, based on the laws of Newton, we’ve believed that we were separate from our world and have no influence on the world around us. Now all that’s changing.

Mary: Another aspect of your computer analogy that I find fascinating is that in one of your earlier works, you had said that the technology we create through our science, mimics the technology that we individually possess but have forgotten. Do you think that our development of the computer is the culmination of this?

Gregg: I’ve lived most of my adult life in the southwest surrounded by many indigenous peoples, many different Native American tribes and the people that I speak with and the writings of our most cherished traditions in the past tell a story about this. It says that a long time ago, we were much closer to the earth, we knew who we were, we were connected with the world around, but something happened that led us to feel separate. No one knows what happened but we began to feel isolated and alone and separate and powerless in our world on the one hand, and on the other hand there was something within us that longed for that connection again. So in the world around us, in our physical reality outside our bodies, we began to build the technology that mimics what it is that we are and that we do from within. Every cell in our body is a transmitter, a receiver, it stores information, it is holographic, on the quantum level things happen very quickly in ourselves. We began to build machines outside of our bodies to mimic all of the things we do and the way we work inside in an effort to remind us of who we really are. And what those traditions say is that we will continue doing that. We will build a very complicated external world cluttered with a lot of things and gadgets each one mimicking something we do inside. Until one day we wake up and remember that that’s who we are and then we realize we don’t need the external gadgets because we are those things. And the computer may be the epitome of that because the way computers store and transmit information so mimics the way that we connect with one another and we connect with the cells in our bodies and it may be the epitome of that external technology mimicking what we are and the way we work from within; the way the computers work individually and how they work connected through the world wide internet, that connectivity allowing us to be part of a greater organism. I was walking through a field in a valley in northern NM with a friend of mine and the valley was covered with several hundred thousand acres of sweet, high dessert sage. He said, "Look at all of the sage plants -everyone looks like it’s growing separately, but if you look underneath the ground you’d see that they’re all part of the same family connected through a common root system and in communication with one another." Researchers have found that when they spray a pesticide on sage on one part of the field, even though the other plants are acres away, they are affected quicker than what could possibly be occurring through the migration of the chemicals. The key is that they’re all connected. And in that way the computers have connected all of us in a metaphoric sense. Now we’re finding that even without the computers, we’re connected on an energetic level through this field in a way we’re only beginning to understand. We’ve found that only a few number of people are needed to influence the world in very positive ways. So when people in one location are feeling the feeling of peace in their hearts (not merely thinking it in their minds) studies have found that the peace affects a broad geographic area in ways that scientists have found statistically significant. In other words, it’s not a fluke. And this is what the studies were showing with the International Peace Project in the Middle East in the early 1980's during the first Israeli-Lebanese war when 200 researchers were trained to feel the quality of peace in their hearts and during the window of time they were feeling that peace, peace is what happened in the Middle East. And it was shown that emergency room visits declined, traffic accidents declined, violent crimes declined, terrorist activity stopped altogether and each time the researchers would stop their experiment, all those statistics would reverse and they did that again and again and again. They eliminated the possibility that it was just the time of day, or the influence of a full moon, or a holiday or more police on the street. They did this so many times that the effect was proven mathematically and published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution volume 32, 1988 and it was called the International Peace Project in the Middle East. Since that time that affect has been accepted and explored in many empowering ways throughout the world. But the key in the western world is for people to the recognize the difference between having a feeling in their heart and just thinking something in their mind. And I think that’s one of the great challenges of our time because we have been conditioned to be a very thought-based society. The indigenous, ancient traditions have acknowledged that thoughts are powerful but that the feelings are where the action is. And now we know because out heart is 100 times stronger electrically and 5000 times stronger magnetically and we can actually get things done much quicker with much less effort if we learn the language of feeling in the heart rather than trying to think our way into the healing or into the peace or abundance or perfect relationship, or whatever it is. It’s about acknowledging the very powerful language of heart intelligence, heart based feelings.

Mary: Your on the advisory board of an ambitious new initiative called the Global Coherence Project. What is that project and what does it mean to the world?

Gregg: Well since 1991 I’ve worked with an organization in northern California called the Institute of HeartMath and they are a premiere pioneering research organization where people from many disciplines have come together to explore the power of the human heart in non-conventional ways. We all know that the heart pumps blood through our bodies but that may be the least of what our heart does. They’ve been finding and publishing in accredited mainstream medical and scientific and technical journals the fact that our heart has it’s own intelligence.The heart actually has brain-like neural tissue that allows it to have its own intelligence and to create affects inside our bodies. When we feel inside our heart, we send a signal to our brain that tells our brain what kind of chemistry to send to our bodies, whether it’s life affirming or life denying chemistry. And the quality of this conversation is called Coherence. So when we have feelings of gratitude and appreciation in our heart, for example, our heart tells our brain to flood our bodies with high levels of DHEA the life affirming hormone, the precursor to all other hormones. It is a high level of Coherence that creates that. The Institute of HeartMath is pioneering a new project called The Global Coherence Project and what they’ve found is that there’s a layer in the atmosphere above the earth in the ionosphere that pulses in the same range of frequencies that our heart pulses in when we are in this coherent state. This is a beautiful discovery because it gives a whole new meaning to the idea that we are a living organism here - the gaia concept. It means that when we change the way we feel in our hearts, that layer of the atmosphere changes, and when that layer changes, everyone hooked up to that layer changes. With that in mind, that is the premise of what the Global Coherence Project is. It is the first science-based initiative based in two phases that are now making use of this connection. The first phase is that they’re building a series of global sensors that will enable us to measure this layer of the atmosphere and put this up in a real time reading on a website so that at any time, at any moment, any day we can go and see what this layer of the atmosphere is reading. The second phase is training significant numbers of people to create this coherence in their hearts in a moment of time, and in doing so, to influence that layer of the atmosphere. The benefit of all of this is that every human on the earth is at some degree tuned into that layer. When we have coherence, we think better, we solve problems better, we’re less aggressive, our immune systems are enhanced, our cognitive abilities increase - all of those things happen when we are in coherence with that layer of the atmosphere. So a relatively few number of people feeling the feelings that create that coherence can actually influence that layer and the whole benefits from that. And the very first science based initiative to do precisely this is called the GCP and went online June 2008. It’s in the early phases but will continue as more sensors come online and more people are trained. I’m excited because while there have been theories and experiments in the past where at 12 noon on a Saturday everybody feels good feelings, there’s never been a good way to really quantify whether or not we’re actually creating those feelings, or whether they’re really having an effect. And all that’s about to change. It’s a very exciting science based initiative. The reason it’s so powerful is because every human on the earth is tuned into that field. So the people that make the big decisions, the ones designing our future, are influenced by this field and it means we all have a vote in whether or not we have a field of coherence and peace or a field of chaos and disorder.