Wow is all we can say about this interview which combines information on the most recent developments in string theory with far-flung, but deeply scientifically grounded speculations into the nature of thought, the subtle human bodies, astral travel and more.
In the last two issues we have peered into the unseen realms, exploring the mysterious world of dark matter and dark energy, “a completely transcendental, unmanifest form of energy and matter” which can be equated to the biblical Void. Now, as a final interview in the series, we will investigate something in the manifested realms called hidden sector matter.
How hidden is hidden sector matter? Ah… pretty hidden. You have to be well versed in string theory to have even heard about it. Fortunately, as we were sifting through the hundreds of pages of transcripts we compiled for the new movie, we ran across a brief mention of hidden sector matter as a potential “thought universe” in one of Dr. John Hagelin’s interviews. It peaked our interest enough to get back to him to ask some more questions – and are we ever glad we did!
This interview is a little technical starting out. But hang in there. It definitely goes to some interesting places.
WTB – Is hidden sector matter the same thing as dark matter? Is it related to dark energy? Or is it entirely different?
Hagelin – They are three totally unrelated things.
WTB -- So how does superstring theory open up the possibility of a domain of thought, which I gather is called hidden sector matter?
Hagelin -- Well, I must say from the start that this exploration of hidden sector matter being related to the world of thought is speculative and is principally my work. Having said that, superstring theories - virtually all predict the presence of hidden sector matter, which in many respects is similar to the familiar matter, comprised of particles and forces, and in other minor respects, may be different. But what makes hidden sector matter hidden, is that, at least the conventional understanding is that it only interacts with observable sector matter or normal matter, via its gravitational influence.
If that were really the case, hidden sector matter would be almost irrelevant to our world of ordinary matter, because the gravitational interaction between anything is ordinarily too weak to be of any interest. There are exceptions to that statement in quantity. If hidden sector matter aggregates into planets and stars, they could have a strong gravitational effect on us. Or, if hidden sector matter clustered around the sun because of the Sun's own gravitational pull, or clustered around galaxies because of galaxies’ own gravitational pull, that hidden sector matter would add to the gravity of the sun; it would add to the gravity of galaxies.
So there are circumstances in which the interaction with hidden sector matter through gravity might be of interest. But apart from that, when hidden sector matter really becomes of interest is when we recognize that the early assumption that it interacts with us only gravitationally is usually false. In addition to its gravitational interaction, hidden sector matter may have, and often does have, a weak electromagnetic influence on us. And even though as a weak electromagnetic influence, perhaps a thousand times weaker than the normal electromagnetic influence, that’s still billions of times more powerful than gravity. In the presence of its electromagnetic interactions between hidden sector matter and normal matter, hidden sector matter becomes much more intriguing.
WTB - Why did you call it the domain of thought? Or refer to it as the domain of thought potentially?
Hagelin - It provides a very good candidate for a thought world, or a world of thought because of its detailed properties number one, which is a big topic we can return to. And number two, because we need a physical explanation for thought. We need something, when you look deeply into it, to connect the physical brain with the unified field of consciousness. And the unified field of consciousness exists at the super-unified scale of 10 to the minus 33 cm, far beneath the nuclear dimension.
WTB - You're referring to the Planck scale?
Hagelin - Yes. And if that's the domain of consciousness, and there's mounting research to suggest that it is the ultimate seat of consciousness - the unified field, the Planck scale. We need something to connect consciousness to our physical brain and physical neurons; to provide a link between what is a very macroscopic organ, the brain, and even the neurons and DNA within the neurons … in comparison to the microscopic Planck scale.
WTB – Are you referring to Roger Penrose’s work with Stuart Hameroff?
Hagelin - There is a link, yes. Because Roger Penrose was among the first to suggest that the phenomenon we call consciousness may ultimately be a Planck scale phenomena. So that's the link. He's been working on some mechanisms to help make that plausible. I don't think he's aware of superstring theory and hidden sector matter. He might get quite excited about it. Hidden sector matter provides, in many ways, a link between consciousness and the physical brain, and that again will require some discussion. And it is the properties of hidden sector matter that make it a very natural link between the physics of very small and the domain of consciousness, and the macroscopic physics of the brain.
You've got to have such a link, because consciousness is intimately involved with sensory perception, and our organs of action, and the activity of the human brain. And yet consciousness fundamentally isn't created by the brain. It may be reflected by the brain, modulated by the brain, but not created. Not according to my understanding of consciousness, and not according to the direct experience of what consciousness is throughout the ages, especially now in this generation with the renaissance of meditation. And the abundance of research on meditation, the experience of consciousness, is that it is fundamental in creation and has its ultimate source in this unified field of intelligence at the basis of mind and matter. That's the direct experience.
A growing body of evidence strongly supports that fundamental role of consciousness in the physical universe. Now that we understand consciousness as the unified field, we have to understand mind. We have to understand thought, which is the link really between pure abstract consciousness and the physical brain.
Hidden sector matter has marvelous properties that lend themselves to providing such a link between the very small domain of consciousness and the more macroscopic domain of the brain. One of the key of properties to achieve this is called scale invariance. And scale invariance is an interesting property of hidden sector matter. The scale invariance basically means size doesn't matter. That's not true of ordinary physics. And it's not true of massive particles in general. Anything made of normal matter is not scale invariant.
You can take a human being and blow us up to 10 times our height, 10 times our width and 10 times our depth, and you might think that, well, how do we ever know [it happened]? Provided we expanded the trees, and we expanded our house and we expanded our beds, how could we ever know we were 10 times larger? Well, we would know. The bottom line is we would crush ourselves under our own weight. Because our weight - a basic explanation here - our weight grows as the cube of our length. But the strength of our bones only grows as the square of the length of the bone and width of the bone. So, things don't scale that way. Human beings have their characteristic size, we couldn't be much larger, we couldn't be much smaller, we just wouldn't work. The same with insects. They have a characteristic size, and you can't just make a giant insect like you could on a horror movie in the 1950s and expect the poor bug to survive.
So things have a natural size or scale in our world of massive particles. But in the hidden sector world, that's not the case. And hidden sector physics, hidden sector mechanisms, mechanics are all scale invariant. Which means the size of things just is irrelevant. Now what that means is, you could have a mechanism or phenomenon in the hidden sector that interacts with the brain, and is of brain size or neuron size. You can have an interaction between the hidden sector matter and brain matter. That same mechanism could literally, indeed it would, shrink itself to nearly point size. That same mechanism could occur at point size, as opposed to this more macroscopic size and provide this sort of scale invariant bridge between large-scale physics in the brain and microscopic physics of the Planck scale. So it provides a natural link between the large and the small by transcending scale completely.
That's a little technical, but it's an important point about hidden sector matter. It helps to describe why size doesn't matter. And the other thing is, for meditators and others who have experienced, or even experience regularly, that we have a special subtle physiology; sometimes it is called a mental body, sometimes it is called a subtle body, sometimes it is called an astral body. But we do have a subtler physical vehicle attached to us that can move independently of the body under certain circumstances. And that vehicle holds our consciousness. It's like a vessel of consciousness, a vessel or vehicle of thought. And you can travel in it. You can learn to develop this ability of leaving behind your physical body and moving into your subtle body - it's not something I recommend. It's something that typically happens spontaneously under certain circumstances. It's not a particular skill that's worth culturing, and it does even have its own slight risks. But it is a widespread experience, and certainly an experience of my own as well. And that's why I can talk with empirical confidence based on experience, or experiment, that there is a body subtler than what we call the physical body that is intimately associated with what we call thought, or mind. And the moment you have that experience, especially if you're a physicist or an engineer, you've got to ask yourself “What is this made of?”
And you can quickly rule out the conventional possibilities. Is it made of light? No. That would be a natural first guess because it is, in a sense, a luminous and translucent vehicle. But light doesn't hold together. You can't have a sticky ball of light. Light just flies off in every direction. It doesn't have the ability to bind itself together, into what's called a soliton, or lump, or vehicle of any kind. So it's not light - and certainly not gravity, and certainly not the strong or weak nuclear force, because those are very, very short range forces. And you quickly run out of possibilities, and you realize that we need something new. And something new, that's pretty complicated. It's probably not just one type of particle or one type of force, but a bound state of forces and particles…just like atoms are bound states of photons of light and electrons and protons and neutrons and particles.
So a relatively elementary examination of the basic features of this subtle body, or thought body, reveal that it is made of unconventional matter. And then physics at that point steps in and limits the possibilities to one. That possibility is hidden sector matter. Because it's not anything else. When it comes to observable sector matter, when it comes to the world of forces and particles that comprise observable matter, we know what they are. And we know there are no more.
Fundamental to this explanation of hidden sector matter being related to thought, or perhaps even being the substance of our thought bodies, is the need for that thought body made up of hidden sector matter to interface, somehow, to be interactive somehow with our physical brain. How does that happen? How do you enhance that connection, or even exploit that connection to develop rare abilities?
Well, because hidden sector matter is electrically charged, although weakly so - let's call it fractionally electrically charged - it doesn't have the electric charge of an electron or proton, but something about a thousandth of that. That means that hidden sector matter will cling loosely, electrostatically, to normal matter. Just as something that is slightly charged like a piece of plastic charged up by static electricity will cling to your hand or sweater.
We eat foods. We breath air, but let's consider foods that are filled with organic matter. And this organic matter itself will probably have clinging to it small amounts of hidden sector matter. And the body could accumulate hidden sector matter. It might even concentrate hidden sector matter in different organs within the brain. And this is speculative, but I'm suggesting, possibly, that what we call subcortical structures or basal ganglia, things like the pituitary gland, hypothalamus, etc. could easily concentrate quantities of hidden sector matter which will glom onto our DNA, or perhaps even glom into the neural synapse.
Once we have hidden sector matter caked onto, or incorporated within our pituitary gland for example, that hidden sector matter, which has been concentrated in our pituitary gland for example, will peer directly into the hidden sector world. Because being made of hidden sector matter, which contains hidden sector charges analogous to the electric charge, it will interact electromagnetically. But not to the normal photon of our observable world, particles, light, the force of electromagnetism - but to a hidden sector photon, which is an analogous force in the hidden sector world which we know is there and must be there.
It's another type of light. And it is essentially exactly like our light, but not relevant to our world. It is a different type of light that is relevant to this world of thought; relevant to the hidden sector world. And if we have hidden sector matter caked onto our brains somewhere, then hidden sector matter again can peer directly into the hidden sector world through the hidden sector photon, which can see anything in the hidden sector world as easily as our physical eyes can see things in our world. So provided our nervous system concentrates and accumulates hidden sector matter, then our nervous system, through the hidden sector matter, has a window into this world of thought.
WTB - So in essence, we would be resonating at its frequency? Because we have it imbued in our own system at that point?
Hagelin – Yes, that's well said. I mean, technically, I could say that the frequencies may be the same as the frequencies in our world. But it's not so much the frequency of the photon, it's the identity of the photon… what kind of photon. A photon that sees normal electric charge? Or the hidden sector type of photon that sees only hidden sector charges? So, what you said is correct. I mean, the word frequency may not be exactly the right one. … It would mean that if our hidden sector bodies were simply attached to our physical bodies through an electrostatic link, you could easily break the link - just as you can peel off a piece of the static-y plastic from your fingers. And it could move independently. And it could certainly reattach. You could essentially take your mind with you and bring it back.
Now these are ideas that are very much in development that are consistent with what we know about physics and what we know about the world of thought. And one of the great motivators for this research to continue is almost a process of elimination; a lack of an alternative understanding of what thought is fundamentally - how to connect the underlying world of consciousness with the Planck scale, and the physical world of the brain and cognitive processes; and also to understand what this universally experienced thought body is made of. And how it is that we could have a vessel that carries our subjectivity or consciousness with it that can move separately from the physical body - an experience that has been reported, really, in every region and in every culture throughout the world. But these sorts of experiences, if you look into them, you cannot ignore – they force a rethinking of what thought it is. You can't sweep these anomalies under the rug forever - although there is a natural tendency to try to do that. And if you want to undertake this project, and you want to understand what thought is in the context of what we feel we deeply understand to be the laws of physics, including the latest developments in super-unification based on the superstring, you're really forced into the direction of hidden sector matter.
One of the reasons the progress has been so slow in this field is that there are really so few string theorists, one that I can think of - I mean people who are actually familiar with what's happened in physics, particularly in the last decade, and people who are interested in phenomena such as consciousness. That overlap of those two communities - let's call it the consciousness community and the physical community - is so small; and by physical community I mean the subset of scientists who are working in the cutting-edge areas of understanding of how the universe fundamentally functions and what it's made of, that overlap is so small that the progress in this field has certainly been hampered. You maybe have very good people like Bill Tiller, who are among this set. Unfortunately, very few who have a current understanding of the universe as it's known today. Most of what we know about the universe today has really been learned in the past decade. That means that they're not many collaborators and progress in this matter now.
