[THEME MUSIC]
GREGG BRADEN: Hello.
My name is Gregg Braden.
And I'd like to welcome you to this very special presentation
of "Missing Links, Simulation by Design,
Are We Living in a Virtual Reality?"
Well, in the last episode, we identified the laws
that govern our virtual world, the basic laws of physics
and what it takes to master those laws in our lives.
When we consider these understandings
and we merge them with everything else
that we've learned throughout this entire series,
well that's enough to make our head spin with possibilities.
And suddenly we have a new way of thinking
and a new vocabulary to describe our relationship to the world
and the life itself.
The implications are staggering.
And the questions are endless.
So in this final episode of "Simulation by Design,"
we'll answer many of those questions.
And by doing so, we will come full circle
to where we began this series.
Only now we have the vocabulary to make
sense of our virtual reality.
In this program, you've seen the evidence
that tells us it is more likely than not that we
are living in a simulated world, in a virtual universe.
And you've seen the evidence that is telling you
that you have the potential to interact with this universe,
to interact with this reality in ways that have seemed mystical
in the past, and reserved for the monks, and nuns,
and the abbots, and the shamans living mystical lifestyles.
Now we know we don't need to live on a monastery halfway
around the world and leave everything familiar to us--
our loved ones, our jobs, our families; to embrace
these seemingly mystical powers.
Because when we understand the relationships,
we demystify the experience.
In the contemporary language of science
we are now talking about mystical connections
and we are marrying those connections
with the best science of the modern world
to give us a new view, an evolutionary edge,
to understand what's happening in our world
and beyond that how we may direct the events of our lives
and the events of the world in a positive, powerful way.
So, as you've seen, the parallels
between the laws of physics as we know them today
and the rules of the simulation, are absolutely clear.
They're unmistakable.
And the evidence is showing us more likely than not,
we are, in fact in the simulation.
So what I'd like to do in this last segment now,
is pull all of this together.
Let's get down to the nuts and bolts
of what this experience means.
Let's jump right into what it means to be in a simulation--
the implications and the questions that
invariably come up.
Questions like, where is heaven; where is heaven?
When we think about our simulation
and we think of the descriptions of heaven, the word
itself was left to us about 2,500 years ago.
What does that mean to us in terms of the simulation?
Well, the simulation is a localized experience.
But it tells us, we're not really here.
You're not really here.
We exist somewhere outside of the simulation and we are
projecting our energetic body, what we call our spirit
or our soul or our avatar, into this experience so that we can
learn something here that apparently we cannot learn
where we've come from and that apparently we're going to need
wherever we are going.
Now this is a really, really powerful concept.
The idea that we are not here-- and the biology
actually supports it.
What the biology is showing us is
that our cells receive information
that defines who we are.
The surface of the cells, the receptors,
receive this information.
And that's why when we take our cells
and we put them into the body of another person
through an organ transplant, for example,
that person rejects the cells.
Because it's not them.
We have an identity and that identity begins somewhere
beyond our simulation.
And in terms of the ancient text that is what was called heaven.
When we leave our simulation, we shift our consciousness.
We go back to where it is that we came from.
And for me, I believe that.
And I think it's really good news.
It means that we will see our friends and our loved ones
again on the other side, what is called the veil,
on the other side of that veil.
And I hope that there's a time on that other side
that we can look back and review everything
we've done in this world and hopefully laugh about some
of the mistakes that we've made, that we've
made while we were trying to learn about ourselves
in this simulation.
So heaven, heaven I believe is the ancient word for the world
that we live in that exists on the other side,
outside of the simulation that we find ourselves in right now.
So the next question, what does that mean for death?
Where do we go when we die?
If this simulation theory works the way
that the science suggests and the way that I
believe that the evidence is directing us,
it's really good news.
Because it means when we die, what
we call death is the end of this representation of us
in this limited simulation, what we would call our avatar,
just as we're seeing portrayed in the films, in the media.
Again consciousness reminding us of ourselves,
communicating with us, informing us of the reality of our world,
consciously and subconsciously.
So when we die this avatar no longer
exists in the physical realm.
But our essence that we've projected
continues in the realm outside, perhaps
in another physical body.
So once again, we think back.
What is the purpose of the simulation?
Simulation is to learn a new way of being in a realm that
is relatively safe, because we need that way of being
when we go to another place.
So if we are individually, collectively,
outside of our simulation, we're in a control room somewhere,
we're in some kind of a technological environment.
And we'll talk about this in just a few minutes, where
whatever has happened in our world is telling us
that we need to learn a new way of being.
Here we are in this situation and we are
learning what we're learning.
One of the things that I find really interesting
is the concept of time.
You know, I think you know that astronauts,
for example, when they travel they age differently.
Their bodies age differently than we do here on Earth.
This is about Einstein's theory of relativity.
So, the thinking is that in the future when we have astronauts
that leave the earth, leave the moon
and go deep into the solar system and maybe even
beyond, that they will age slower than their husbands,
wives, families, their children here on Earth.
And if they should ever return, they would actually be younger,
and those that they'd left behind would be older.
That tells us that our simulation, the relationship
with time in our simulation, what
seems like a lifetime to us, what seems like a hundred
years, may only be a few moments of time in the control room
outside of our simulation.
That it's all relative in terms of the way we think about this.
The idea of God comes up a lot when we talk about simulation.
And once again, I just invite you to think about this.
We are now talking about this very, very deep concept
in this contemporary language.
But those who understood this simulation, those
who understood that we're temporarily learning something
and that we're going to go to another world; how in the world
would they have shared this with the people of their time
2,000, 2,500, 3,000, 5,000 years ago?
When we look into the ancient texts,
and I've spent much of my adult life
searching not only the contemporary texts, but also
the mystical texts and the texts that have been relegated
to mystical texts, because they were
deleted from the contemporary canon of the Bible,
for example.
And not only the Christian, Bible but the Hebrew Bible,
beyond the Torah, beyond the first five books--
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy;
there are other Hebrew texts that
were also edited and relegated to mystical texts.
They're not part of the contemporary canon.
So, when we go back and we look at those deleted texts
and the way that they were condensed, we see a story.
And the story tells us that in the beginning,
so whether you think the natural beginning of the Big Bang
or you think the beginning of our simulation.
In the beginning, there was a prime creator
and that is the idea of God.
But the texts also tell us that God did not create us.
God created the environment.
God created the universe.
But when you go into those mystical texts.
It says that humans were created by groups, they.
It says when they created the first humans.
And it goes on to describe in the book of the Haggadah,
for example, one of the gnostic texts of the Mandaeans,
they created.
And when you go into the deleted texts in the Christian Bible,
they created the first humans.
And what I find even more interesting
is that when those texts talk about the creation of humans
they say that a very specific formula of human
had to be created to hold the energy of the soul
or the spirit in this realm.
Now what does that mean?
When we think now about a simulation,
we know that it takes a certain genetic makeup
to hold the energy of the spirit or the soul, the consciousness
that we bring into this world.
And apparently not any old formula of DNA
was up to the task.
So, when we look into our past and we find forms of life that
were perhaps not as conscious, not as evolved as us;
in the simulation idea, these are the forms
of life, the first forms.
They were the early attempts to create the avatars
in this simulated world.
But their genetic makeup was not strong enough
to hold the energy of the soul.
You and I are the product of a genetic formula,
a very specific form of DNA.
And apparently it is this form that's
required to hold the energy of the soul in this simulation
experience so that we could have the experiences,
learn what we're learning, and maintain
the consciousness that we have as we
go through our experience.
So, once again, what we're doing is
we're taking these very ancient ideas
and we're rethinking them with a contemporary language,
based on what the best science of the modern world
is now suggesting is the realities
that we're experiencing.
So, heaven, where do we go when when we die, what is God;
all of these now take on a new meaning.
God, whoever god is apparently is
the architect that was a primary designer of this simulation.
And I'm looking forward to getting to the other side
in meeting that architect at some point in our future.
Perhaps the biggest question that
comes up when I have conversations
with other scientists and people about what you and I are doing
right now, considering the possibility of this simulation,
this virtual environment; the big question
is how long could this simulation possibly last.
How does it end?
What could cause it to end?
And to answer this question, this
is precisely why I took a little bit of time
in the previous episodes to talk about the fractal patterns,
for example, and the fractal codes, the Koch snowflake,
showing us about the complexity of the parameter
and how it can change while the space
that the snowflake actually occupies
remains relatively constant.
All of those ideas now I'm going to bring them together
to answer the question, how long can our simulation last.
What would cause it to end?
In a simulation environment, when
we ask ourselves what could possibly
end this virtual reality, this world that we know,
the end would be the same as it is for any computer program.
When one of two possible conditions exists,
the end of the program occurs.
Number one is when the system runs out
of space to store the information that is generated.
Number two is when something unexpected
happens that corrupts the entire system.
So let's take a look at these two
very well-known possibilities for conventional computer
programs.
And let's see how they might apply
and what they may mean for our simulated environment.
Before his death in 2008, Princeton University Professor,
John Wheeler, a physicist, he was a contemporary of Albert
Einstein's.
But he and Albert Einstein had very, very different ideas
of our relationship to our physical reality.
Nothing could have been more diverse than the way
that these two men, looking at the same information,
the same data, the same formulas;
fought about our relationship to the world.
And they came up with very, very different perspectives.
Albert Einstein, brilliant man that
was, he did not like the idea that we could be so deeply
connected with our environment that we could actually
influence our environment and especially at a distance.
Albert Einstein did not like the idea of entanglement.
These theories were just being developed during his lifetime.
And when he heard that it may be possible
for us to influence from where we
are one part of the world to what's happening
in another part of the world, he actually
have a term for that kind of influence.
He called it spooky action at a distance.
Einstein didn't like that.
And he went to his grave with a frustration
of never being able to unify the laws of physics,
because he did not allow for this relationship,
this entanglement that we see in our world.
This is on the one hand.
On the other hand, John Wheeler came up
with a completely different view of the universe.
Wheeler said the universe could not exist without us.
He said that we are part of an ongoing process.
He said the universe isn't finished yet.
He said it is continually being built.
We are continually adding to the universe
and we're doing it through consciousness.
He said, we live in what he called--
and I'm going to quote-- "a participatory universe that
continues to build itself."
Well, the implications of what John Wheeler said
have a direct impact on the answer
to the question, how long can our simulation last.
And here's the reason why.
What John Wheeler said to us about living
in a participatory universe suggests the following.
It suggests that we will probably never find
the smallest particle of matter, because every time we
peer deeper and deeper into the fundamental nature
of our reality--
and this is what's important here--
the act of us looking is an act of creation in our simulation.
And it puts something there for us to see.
So, the deeper we look, every time scientists
think they've got the smallest particle,
then they build new equipment and they
find that they can break that particle
and there's something underlying that particle.
And then they do it again, and they do it again, and again.
Now think about what this means in terms of our simulation.
Every time we look and consciousness puts something
there for us to see that something is energy.
It is information.
And we are constantly adding information to the system
through the act of looking, searching,
to find the limits of our experience.
So, the deeper we look into the atom, the more information
we're putting out there.
The further we look into the cosmos,
scientists are looking for the edge of the universe.
And they thought they found it twice.
They thought they found the boundary that
marks the edge of our physical universe.
Here's what happened.
They built new equipment.
And the new equipment looked differently
at that boundary and lo and behold,
they found that there was something else
beyond the boundary.
I can't emphasize this enough.
Our act, the act of us looking with the expectation
that we will see something, is an act of creation
within our simulated universe.
And the more we create, the more information we are generating.
And that information has to go somewhere.
We are living in a finite environment of our simulation.
And this is what the Koch snowflake was telling us.
So the question is, how much can we explore?
How much information can we create?
How much energy can we generate until our environment
is full and can hold no more?
And when we reach that point, and I
don't know if it's in the near future
or in the distant future.
But what the fractal code tells us is that at some point--
remember the Koch snowflake.
It said we can generate complexity.
But when it comes to the actual space
that the snowflake takes, it levels out.
It doesn't go on forever.
When we reach that level that suggests that our simulation
would come to an end.
And this is really interesting, because scientists
are telling us now that we are doubling--
doubling the amount of information that comes to us.
And at least every year we are doubling what we have known.
It took 5,000 years for the first doubling.
And now the second and third and fourth
we're doubling every year.
So it means that we are generating more information,
more energy than we ever have in the past.
How long can we do that before our simulation is full?
Before the storage device--
I don't think it's a hard drive.
I think we will have transcended the hard drives by the time
the simulation is understood.
But whatever it is that's generating this information,
how much energy can it hold?
So, for the first time in human history,
we have a reason to question how much information can we
generate and store in the field that connects all things
before that field actually reaches capacity.
I don't know the answer now.
But I think we're going to find out within our lifetimes.
The very fact that we are in a simulation
tells us something very, very powerful.
It tells us because we are here that we are either near
or that we've already reached a place
in our evolutionary process where we need a simulation.
We were already at a place where we
need to find a new way of being, a new way of living,
a new way of thinking.
Now it may be because of a climate change.
Maybe we are an advanced civilization.
We are an advanced society living right here
on planet Earth or maybe some other world.
And we've experienced climate change.
And we did not know how to address it.
And the planet is no longer hospitable for that reason.
Or maybe we've had a pandemic disease or maybe
we've had an atomic war.
Maybe we're close to one of these and we are searching.
We are simulating environments, searching for ways
so that we can avoid these great crises in our lives.
And when I've said this to people in the past--
I've had this conversation--
I've said it to a large audience, I've said one on one.
And when I suggest these possibilities of actually
seeing scientists look at me, and they tear up
and they cry when they hear this possibly.
Because it touches something very deep and very real
within each of us.
I think we all know that we're here for a reason.
We all know that there's something much, much bigger
happening then what we've come to understand
and what we've been led to believe.
So I'm sharing the possibilities that the evidence suggests.
The possibility of running out of space
in our simulation that was only one possibility of what
could end this experience.
The second is an unexpected event, a tremendous release
of energy of some kind.
And that thinking coincides with the theme
of what our simulation is all about to begin with.
The theme of life on Earth for the last 5,000 years
has been primarily a theme of war and conflict.
For over 5,000 years, humans have almost continuously been
in conflict to one degree or another in one form or another.
And the consistency of that experience
suggests that it must play a powerful role in our simulation
and why we're here to begin with.
Now the archaeological record preserves that history.
And it tells us of different kinds of global conflict.
And for me, this is the value of looking at the past.
Yeah, sure it's interesting.
You know, it's interesting to look at ancient civilizations.
It's interesting to see what people have done in the past.
For me as a scientist, the value of looking into the past
is to recognize the patterns, the trends, and the cycles
of those who have come before us;
and to compare those to where we are today and ask ourselves,
are we repeating those trends?
Are we repeating the patterns?
Are we repeating the cycles?
And it would make sense if the answer is yes.
Now that we understand the fractal code
and Newton's laws of energy.
Because the fractal code says that we
will continue those patterns until something-- something
in the variable changes.
And Newton's law tells us that once
the energy is set into motion that same energy is
going to continue until something changes the energy.
So if there is a thinking of conflict,
if there is a fear that there's not enough, of scarcity,
if there is a fear of the unknown, a fear
of other people, a fear of what those people's lives mean
to us; and if that fear is so ancient and so primal
that it is played out in every civilization for the last 5,000
years and beyond, then it makes sense
that this idea of conflict and war
would be a primary reason for us to be in this simulation.
And the archeology supports this.
If Bostrom's mathematic arguments are correct,
the fact that we're here today asking these questions that's
good news.
Because it implies that we have the wisdom to recognize
we're at a point where we need to ask these questions.
It tells us there is a need for this simulation.
So these are big ideas.
And I know they are.
And I'm bringing them together now
at the close of this series, because we have the vocabulary.
And we have a new context within which to share these ideas.
So, what I'd like to do now is give you a specific example
of what I'm talking about, this pattern of conflict and whether
or not repeating the cycle.
So I'm going to use archeology, contemporary archeology to do
this.
There was an archaeological discovery
that was made mid-20th century, a very mysterious, very
powerful discovery.
It's very controversial today.
And it is in the region that is now called Pakistan.
It used to be India before that the division happened,
and in the disputed areas between India and Pakistan
in the Kashmir area.
There is evidence of an advanced technological society
and advanced technological civilization.
They had hot and cold running water.
They had flush toilets.
They had stained glass windows.
They had advanced mathematics.
They had beautiful, beautiful art.
And this advanced civilization came to an abrupt end.
And we know that because of what was left behind.
Now, when the scientists began finding
this evidence of this civilization,
one of the first things that they found
were walls and floors that were made of natural stone, granite,
for example.
But the term that was used that the stones were vitrified.
Now, what this means--
I'm going to use granite as an example-- granite
is made of three minerals-- quartz, feldspar
which is a clay, and mica.
So, the quartz, the feldspar, in the mica were in place.
However, the quartz in place was melted within the stone.
Now, to melt the courts in place requires
number one, a high amount of heat to do the melting;
but number two, it has to be very fast.
Because it didn't destroy the floors and the walls.
So, it suggest a rapid very high heat,
some point in our ancient past that melted the quartz,
left everything in place.
They also found mysterious little spheres,
little balls of clay.
They didn't know what these were.
And when they began to understand
that the walls and the floors were vitrified
from a rapid intense heat, they found that these little spheres
were clay vases that had also been exposed to the heat
and were simply melted in place.
So, the scientists are asking, what
is it that could have possibly caused
this kind of intense heat, intense enough
to melt the quartz, but so fast that the walls were still
in place?
Well, some of the human skeletons
that were discovered-- and this is very controversial.
Some of the human skeletons may give us a clue.
The skeletons were found primarily in this location.
They were all at one end of this ancient city in what
are called postures of flight.
And these are Russian scientists in the mid-1960s
that were the first to find this, postures of flight.
What does that mean?
It means they were running away from something.
They were all at one end of the city and they were running.
And the giveaway is that some of the skeletons
were actually radioactive.
They were more radioactive than you
would expect from the normal background radiation
that we have from the earth and from cosmic rays.
We're all absorbing radiation.
But the level in these skeletons was higher
than it should have been.
So, the scientists are looking at this.
They're putting this all together
and they're saying, what in the world could happen.
And this is one of those places where
if you look at the evidence itself,
you're never going to solve the mystery.
We don't live in a vacuum.
History does not occur in a vacuum.
And this is where context is so important.
So, the evidence is showing us a mystery.
However in that part of the world,
the sacred text of Mahabharata tells
a story that is believed to have been a fairytale.
It is believed to have been a fairytale because what
it describes is something that is unfathomable up
until the 20th century.
What this text describes makes no sense
until the technology of the mid-20th century.
So, what I'd like to do, I'd like
to read a portion of an English translation
to you from this text.
And then let's take this translation,
apply it to what has been found archaeologically,
and see where that leaves us in terms
of the cycles in our simulation.
So here are passages from the text.
There were two armies that were in a great war
at the end of a cycle.
All right.
The two armies were fighting.
And one of the armies began to lose
and they resorted to a weapon that
had never been used before.
And this is the way the text describes the weapon.
It says "a single projectile charged
with all the power of the universe,
an incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright
as a thousand suns rose in all of its splendor.
A perpendicular explosion with the billowing smoke clouds.
The cloud of smoke rising after the first explosion,
formed into expanding circles like the opening
of a giant parasol."
"It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt,
a gigantic messenger of death which
reduced to ashes the entire race of Vrishnis and the Andhakas.
The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable.
The hair and the nails fell out.
Pottery broke without apparent cause,
and the birds turned white.
After a few hours all food stuffs were infected,
and to escape from this fire, the soldiers
threw themselves into the streams
to wash themselves and their equipment."
So, the description that you've just heard
is from an ancient text.
However what it describes sounds very
much like a contemporary description of the unthinkable,
of a nuclear explosion happening some time in our ancient past.
Is it possible?
Is it possible that these advanced civilizations
that we now know are cyclic that have risen and fallen
in the past, that had electricity, that
had hot and cold running water, and flush toilets,
and stained glass windows, and advanced
mathematics of the cosmos and of nature itself; is it possible
that they began a path that we are following now?
Are we the first atomic civilization or has there
been one before us?
Well, the father of the modern nuclear program,
Robert Oppenheimer, was asked this very question.
In an interview that he was doing at Rochester University
there was a student that asked it,
and he said, Dr. Oppenheimer, how
do you feel after having exploded
the first atomic bomb on Earth?
And Oppenheimer replied.
And his reply shocked the audience.
It shocked the person who was asking a question.
Because Oppenheimer said, well, he
said not the first atomic bomb, but the first in modern times.
Robert Oppenheimer was a student of the Mahabharata.
He was a student of the Bhagavad Gita, the related text.
And he firmly believed that we are, in fact,
a cyclic civilization and that we are repeating
a pattern from the past.
And if we are within the context of our simulation,
we have to ask, what are the consequences of our simulation
if we were to engage in a large-scale nuclear war?
Now, think about this in terms of this entire conversation.
The release of energy from a nuclear weapon
is information, tremendous amounts of information.
How much information would be released into the system
if we had multiple nuclear explosions in a conflict,
like we've had perhaps in the past on a limited scale?
How long could we continue to produce
that kind of information before we
reach that capacity, that limit that we talked about earlier?
So, this whole idea of the simulation
is giving us new ways to think about us, about what we're
living, about what's happening in our world
and what's happening in our lives.
If the unthinkable has happened in the past,
are we repeating that cycle again in our lives?
And if we are, can we recognize it?
Do we have the wisdom to recognize it
and as Newton's law says, shift the energy.
Move to a new course.
Plug in a new variable into that fractal code,
so that we can avoid the suffering
that obviously would come from such a path.
The common thread that runs through every one
of the possibilities that I've described,
whether we're talking about climate change,
or we're talking about disease pandemics or war;
is that every one of these possibilities
is related to human choice.
It's the choices that we are making within our lives,
now within our simulation, that are resulting
in the very conditions that could end this experience based
upon the way we think.
Now, my sense, personally; my sense
is because conflict has played such a dominant role
throughout history and that that theme is playing out today
and it appears to be coming to a head, again and again this idea
keeps coming up.
My sense is that we are learning to create a world where
war doesn't exist or it's become obsolete.
And we're doing so by developing the potential that
lives within each of us as individuals.
And remember, the better we know ourselves, the less we fear--
the less we fear one another and the less we fear the unknown.
If we're honest with ourselves, we
know that the world is changing.
And we also know that the old ways of thinking
are failing when it comes to solving the big problems
like climate change and war.
We need a new way to think about our world and a new language
to solve our problems.
Simulation by design is an invitation.
It invites us to think differently about ourselves,
about yourself, and what you've been taught when it comes
to our world and our past.
The science gives us rock solid reasons to think differently.
But the events of today's world tell us
that now is the time to do so.
So, as we begin to embrace the possibility that we are living
in a simulated world, we also unlock the deepest mysteries
of our existence.
At the same time we're discovering
what it takes for us to become the best people we can be
and to create the best possible world.
I want to thank you for joining me throughout this very
special presentation of "Missing Links,"
and I hope you've enjoyed watching it as
much as I enjoyed creating it.
And while we have reached the end of this program,
I want you to know that there's more, much, much more to come.
So, be sure to tune in to the all-new "Missing
Links" for the discoveries that reveal the deepest
truths of our origin, history, our destiny, and our fate.
Until then, thank you for watching.
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