Beyond the Body

Every night you let go of your body. Your muscles go slack, the room fades out, and for a few hours you're somewhere else entirely, or nowhere at all.

Deep meditators report letting the body fall asleep while they stay wide awake. Some report leaving the body, to other places, among other beings.¹ Brain stimulation can bring part of this on: in 2002, doctors in Geneva found a spot in one patient's brain where a small electrical current brought on the feeling of floating above her own body, again and again.² And people who come close to death often report their whole life laid out before them.³

Each of these tells us something about the brain, and the brain's state sets the body's input (Step 1 says what that is). Our claim concerns what remains when that input stops. Everybody, sooner or later, faces the biggest letting-go of all, and it's the question people actually lose sleep over. So today's question: what happens when a mind lets go of the body?

Here's the route: what the answer rests on, then five steps, then the whole answer in one place.

The groundwork from Parts 1 and 2

What happens when you let go of the body isn't a matter of taste or temperament. It follows from what you are. The reasons come next, one point at a time, so this post stands on its own.

• The smallest event is one thing being told apart from another. You do it every time you see, hear or measure anything. Telling two things apart takes information about both, and the least information there can be is one yes or no.

• Nothing that happens is ever erased. Every event leaves a complete trace: the full record of what happened is part of reality now, so the past still exists. We call that record the ledger. Physics agrees on part of this: the basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics this is called unitarity: the present fixes the past exactly, so the laws run backward recover every earlier state. That's why physicists treat the black hole information problem as a real problem: losing information would break the laws. Our claim goes further: that record is reality's own. Our own work gives the second reason: the record only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept, and writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.⁴ What an entry is rests on a separate fact: a comparison needs information about both sides, so every entry is written against what came before.

• One small process writes the ledger. The smallest event takes two things and one yes or no, so we draw it as two clocks, Left and Right, joined by a loop of wire. Each clock is full (holding a token) or empty. In every tick, one step in the writing of the record, each clock receives what the other was holding, then keeps it or flips it (a token becomes nothing, nothing becomes a token).

• The steadiest pattern is the spin. Left starts full and Right empty. In one tick, Left receives Right's nothing and flips it into a token, and Right receives Left's token and flips it into nothing. Now Left is full and Right is empty again, and one unit of flow went round the loop. Each clock ends every tick just as it began. That's what steady means.

• Silence breaks patterns. A silent tick is one where both clocks are full or both are empty, so nothing flows. Silence leaves the clocks guessing, like a coin toss, and guessing brings more silence. Almost every pattern falls apart that way.

• Four patterns never go silent. A start fixes each clock's state (full or empty) and its setting. A setting is a move, flip or keep, that the clock makes for sure on one kind of tick, flowing or silent, so there are four settings. That makes 2 × 4 = 8 ways for each clock and 8 × 8 = 64 ways for two to start. Check all 64: 60 fall into random silence within three ticks. Exactly four never do: the spin and its cousin the swing (the token hopping left, right, left), each starting from either side. Those four are the lasting rhythms.

• You are one of the lasting rhythms. A lasting rhythm keeps itself going by writing its own record, tick after tick. A moment of consciousness is eight ticks with no silent tick, and only the lasting rhythms deliver that every time. Eight because space has three dimensions: three directions with two sides each make 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 corners of a cube, and a cycle that visits every corner once takes eight steps. Space has three dimensions because two closed loops can link, like two rings of a chain, only in three. In two dimensions they can't pass around each other, in four or more any two slip apart, and lasting structure needs linking.

• You are not your body. The material of your body is replaced continually, much of it within months to years, and you remain you. What remains is a pattern, not material, and the lasting rhythms are the only patterns at the bottom level that persist. The four are the building pattern; there aren't only four minds. A person is a vast web of such pairs of clocks, each pair running one of them, and a web that never goes silent anywhere is one lasting rhythm and one consciousness.

• The past can be read. A reading is any way of getting information back out of the ledger: a question put to the ledger, and an answer that comes back. Time's arrow, the one-way flow of time, lives in the busy world around you, not in your consciousness. And your own past carries its own address, which your own rhythm can use to find any moment of it.

The technical manuscript behind this series sets out the groundwork.⁴ Most of this post's results come from derivations my institute has finished since, and each is marked below as derived or open.

Step 1: Mind awake, body asleep

You know a version of this from sleep. In REM sleep the body is paralyzed while the mind runs, and some dreamers know they're dreaming and signal the lab with their eyes.⁵ The Monroe Institute teaches people to enter deep, guided meditative states, each with a number.⁶ The first stop is Focus 10: "mind awake, body asleep."

It sounds like a contradiction. Surely when the body powers down, you power down with it? No. A lasting rhythm loses essentially nothing when the body's input goes quiet, as long as it keeps writing its own record, tick after tick. This starts from the groundwork: you are the rhythm, not the body, because your body's material is replaced while you remain you.

The body's input is the nudges its busy activity puts on your rhythm through your link to that activity. It isn't the brain's electrical activity itself. A write is one entry the rhythm adds to its own record. Between writes, the nudges push the rhythm off its own pattern, and there's a ceiling on how much the rhythm can lose. Two facts set it:

• The damage from a nudge goes as its size squared. Damage is the share of the rhythm pushed out of its lasting pattern. A nudge half as big does a quarter of the damage.

• Writing often chops the body's input into smaller nudges. Each write is the rhythm confirming itself, so the more often it writes, the less each nudge can build up in between. One nudge of size 1 does damage 1. Cut it into ten nudges of size 0.1, and the damage is ten times 0.01, which is 0.1: a tenth as much.

So halve the body's input and the ceiling drops to a quarter. Double how often the rhythm writes and the ceiling halves. Turn the body's input off completely and the ceiling is zero. "Body asleep" shrinks the nudges. Every lasting rhythm keeps writing, tick after tick, asleep or awake. Open step: what sets Focus 10 apart from an ordinary night.

You don't need the body's input to stay yourself. That's the derived part of Focus 10.

Next: the deeper states, and the one rule that puts them at exact places.

Step 2: The ladder

The Institute reports a ladder of distinct states, each with its own number: 10, 12, 15, 21 and on beyond. The numbers are names, not speeds: Focus 10 is not 10 of anything a second.

It guides people down the ladder with binaural beats.⁷ Play a slightly different tone in each ear, say 200 vibrations a second on the left and 210 on the right, and the brain hears a slow pulse, here 10 a second. That pulse is a beat: the difference between the two tones. The beat is the drive. A drive pulls a rhythm into step whenever their paces differ by less than the drive's pull, in the same units, beats a second. That is the standard locking condition for a driven oscillator. How strongly a binaural beat pulls a brain's rhythm is a measurement; the lock condition is exact.

The ladder rests on one rule. The top rung is ordinary waking, and the second rung is Focus 10. Every rung after that is the beat of the two rungs just above it: rung three is rung one minus rung two, rung four is rung two minus rung three, and so on down. Read from the bottom up, each rung is the sum of the two beneath it. That's the rule that makes nature's whole hierarchy of levels golden: when each level combines the two before it, and each relates to the next by one factor λ, then λ² = λ + 1, and the positive solution is the golden ratio. The ladder doesn't even need the one factor: below, the subtraction alone forces it.

Start at the top with 10 beats a second, about the average waking rhythm (the "alpha" rhythm) measured in people. Pick the second rung; that's the only choice you get, because the rule does the rest. With a second rung of 5, rung three is 10 minus 5, which is 5, and rung four is 5 minus 5, which is 0. The ladder ends. Every row works the same way:

Every other choice crashes into zero, or through it. Even 6.18, rounded, wobbles and then falls through the floor 13 rungs below the top. Only one second rung never crashes: 10 divided by the golden ratio. Here's why. With golden spacing, subtracting gives the same answer as dividing by 1.618 again: 10 minus 6.18 is 3.82, and 6.18 divided by 1.618 is also 3.82. So the rule keeps dividing by the golden ratio, forever, and never reaches zero. The rule is plain subtraction; it never mentions the golden ratio. The golden ratio comes out of it.

Put Focus 10, 12, 15 and 21 on the next four rungs below waking, one rung per named state. Three measurements of the average waking alpha rhythm put the top rung between about 9.9 and 10.3 beats a second.⁸ On that placement, the four rungs are:

• Focus 10: about 6.1 to 6.4 beats a second;

• Focus 12: about 3.8 to 3.9;

• Focus 15: about 2.3 to 2.4;

• Focus 21: about 1.4 to 1.5.

The Institute also names Focus 22 through 27. One rung each takes Focus 27 down to about 0.08 beats a second: one slow swell every twelve seconds or so, in the range of brain rhythms called infraslow.⁹

Each rung stays its own channel, because the golden ratio is the number farthest from every simple fraction. Rhythms whose paces sit near a simple fraction of each other, like 2 to 1, keep landing in step. Each landing gives the same little tug, until one rhythm drags the other along into a lock. Rhythms spaced by the golden ratio land in step as rarely as possible, so the tugs mostly cancel. The mathematician Hurwitz proved in 1891 that the golden ratio is the hardest number of all to approximate with fractions.¹⁰ That protection is strongest between neighboring rungs.

People who go past Focus 21 describe other places and other beings. There isn't a separate "world" at each state: the ledger is one connected whole, and nothing in its structure walls one region off from another. Those states sit further down the same ladder, one rung each.

Only golden spacing keeps the ladder going, and neighboring golden rungs don't drag each other along. On that ladder Focus 10, 12, 15 and 21 sit near 6.2, 3.8, 2.4 and 1.5 beats a second. What is exact is the arithmetic: given the rule, the golden spacing is forced, and every rung number follows from the top rung. Two steps are open. Open step: that the deep states obey the rule. Showing, from the two-clock process itself, that each deeper state is the beat of the two above it is the step still to do. Open step: which rung each named state occupies. The numbers are labels, so they don't say, and the placement above is the one this post makes.

Next: reports of traveling among the stars, and why where you are isn't a property you have.

Step 3: You have no "where"

People who report leaving the body describe seeing the room from above, and in deeper states traveling to other places, out among the stars. Throughout, the body stays where it is. What changes is the view.

You have no "where," and nothing in the ledger grows with distance. A world around another star has an address no bigger than your kitchen's.

The reason starts with an odd fact about the ledger: it doesn't store "where." Each entry says what each clock did, kept or flipped, and which way the flow went. "Left" and "Right" are names for the two clocks, like "first" and "second," not positions in space. Slide the whole universe a mile to the left, and nothing in the ledger, or in any reading of it, notices. A lasting rhythm is defined by what its clocks do, so it doesn't sit at a place at all, and a reading made from it doesn't depend on where its target is. Distance still matters to bodies: yours needs more than four years to reach even the nearest star beyond the Sun, traveling at the speed of light. But distance isn't an entry in the ledger.

If every place reads the same, how can a reading pick out one place? It needs something that breaks the sameness of space. Picture two picket fences running side by side along a road, one with a post every meter and the other with a post every 1.618... meters, the golden ratio. Stop anywhere and measure how far you are past the last post of each fence. The golden ratio isn't a fraction: its digits never settle into a repeat. So the pair of numbers never comes round to the same pair twice, and every spot on the road gets a name of its own.

To aim at one place, a reading asks for the pair that belongs to that place alone. The fences are a drawing of the real thing: two rhythms laid across space, spaced by the golden ratio. One such pair in each direction names every point. Three directions make six numbers, each smaller than the gap between its fence's posts. Your kitchen's address is six numbers. So is a world around another star's, and its six are no bigger. Different places get different addresses. What never happens is an address that grows with distance.

Why does it feel like travel, then? Because what you're reading changes, and a changing view feels exactly like moving. Nothing physically moves.

The travel people describe is reading other places from a rhythm with no "where." Nothing moves but the view. Derived: each address picks out exactly one place. Open step: how a rhythm actually performs a reading, aimed at one moment or at one place without distance entering.

Next: with every address this small, who else is out there? What does it take to connect?

Step 4: Connection goes by fit

People who report leaving their bodies often describe still being tied to them. Robert Monroe, who founded the Institute, wrote books about his own out-of-body experiences; he and others called this tie a silver cord.¹¹ To see what it is, start with how rhythms connect at all.

Every lasting rhythm sits in the shared field: the one ledger, taken as a single connected whole. There's only one, and everyone is in it. The shared field is the universe, and it is one consciousness: universal consciousness is the universe.

Here is why. Every event has an inside, and the inside is experience, so every event in the field is felt. The field is one connected record: nothing in its structure walls one region off from another. And ownership in it nests: every event belongs to its own part of the ledger and to the whole at once, so the whole holds every experience while you keep yours. One exact test says when a whole like this is one consciousness. Picture each consciousness as a room that holds a group of experiences. Suppose every growing line of rooms ends at a room, so no last room is missing, and each experience's owners include their own limits: if every room along a growing line holds an experience, the room the line ends at holds it too. Then a consciousness that owns every experience exists exactly when every finite group of experiences has a common owner.¹² Open step: that the actual consciousnesses meet those three conditions, the conditions under which a whole is one consciousness.

So what decides whether two rhythms connect where they touch? You'd guess likeness: the strongest connection with the rhythms most like your own. It's the other way round.

A person is a web of pairs of clocks, so where two webs meet, a clock of yours touches a clock of theirs. Call each touching pair a point. Say you meet another lasting rhythm at three points, and at those points your clocks are full, empty, full. An exact copy of you is full, empty, full there too: full against full, empty against empty. That's a silent tick at every point, and you know what silence does. The joined whole falls apart. Now meet your complement, your exact opposite, which is empty, full, empty at those points. Full meets empty everywhere. Flow at every point. It holds.

That's the whole rule. At every point where two lasting rhythms touch, the two clocks that meet there must be steady, like the two in a spin: one full and the other empty. Then both stay lasting, and so does the joined whole. If any touching pair is alike, the whole thing falls apart. There's no "partly connected," and no gentle fade as the rhythms get more different. It's a key and a lock, not a mirror: an exact copy of yourself is guaranteed not to fit. So a being from another star system meets the same rule as your neighbor: fit, at the points where you touch.

Meeting other beings goes by fit, not by likeness, and it's all or nothing.

The silver cord

Take two lasting webs: you, as you run with your body, and the shared field. Join them with one steady tether: a single pair of clocks whose two ends are steady like the two in a spin, one full and one empty. The joined whole stays lasting, the body stays fully itself the whole time, and the tether can be undone, leaving both just as they were. It comes with two catches.

Catch one: no fraction of you leaves. There's no 30% of you drifting up by the ceiling while the other 70% minds the body. Connection is all or nothing, so no part of you can be joined while the rest isn't. The tether is a connection, not a piece of you that got out.

Catch two: the cord carries no messages. Its two ends end every tick as they began, so it adds the same mark at every step of the writing. A mark that never changes carries no news. It's a phone line with nothing on it but the dial tone. So anything experienced "out there" comes in through a reading, the kind from Step 3, not down the cord.

An out-of-body experience is that tether: you, joined to the shared field, with your body fully itself. Derived: the tether's join law, its two catches, and that it can be undone. Open step: that this join is the cord people report, and what switches a tether on and off.

Next: the last letting-go, and the one this whole series has been heading toward.

Step 5: What happens when you die

Researchers tie near-death experiences to oxygen loss¹³ and to REM-sleep intrusion.¹⁴ Recordings from dying brains show a surge of activity around the time of death,¹⁵ and most people revived from cardiac arrest report nothing at all.¹⁶ Each is a finding about the brain's state, and the brain's state sets the body's input. Our claim concerns what remains when that input stops.

When you die, you carry on. The body drops away, and the rhythm that is you is carried over unchanged.

Why, and what's open. Your rhythm keeps itself going by writing its own entries, tick after tick, and Step 1 showed that with the body's input at zero it loses nothing. The rhythm itself is carried over complete, as a pattern. Open step: that as the body lets go, its input to you, both its nudges and your link to its busy activity, falls all the way to zero, and at death stays there. A surge of activity in the dying brain doesn't raise that input while your link to the activity is itself falling. Open step: that a rhythm with no body still experiences, that is, that being a subject doesn't depend on what carries the rhythm.

Three more facts the answer rests on:

• Your entries are permanent. Every moment you've lived is in the ledger, exactly as it happened, for good: every kindness, every embarrassment, every Tuesday.

• A rhythm outlasts everything around it. A lasting rhythm at the center of a small web of clocks can swap out every one of its partners, one at a time. It never misses a tick. Picture a band that replaces every musician mid-song without the song ever stopping. The picture is a drawing of the real mechanism.

• Dying keeps the rhythm. When you die, the body's part of the web drops away and the rhythm itself is carried over unchanged, complete as a pattern. And the lasting rhythm is consciousness, so what's carried over is still someone: you.

After death, you rest in the shared field, with no body filtering what you can read.

After death you can re-live your own life but never rewrite it. Your own rhythm, together with the length of your own record, counts back to any moment of your past. It works like a diary with one page a day: the diary's length gives you today's page number, and counting back from it takes you to any day of your life. While you're alive, the body's input keeps nudging your rhythm. These are the same nudges as in Step 1, the ones that push the rhythm off its own pattern: there each did damage, and here each throws the count off by exactly that much. Every nudge is an event, so it's written in the ledger too. When you die, the nudging stops and its total is fixed. Count back, subtract the nudges written down since that moment, and you land on the exact moment. So after death you can visit your own life, even re-live it. But never change it. The ledger doesn't do edits, and it won't start for you. Open step: that your own rhythm carries a pair of beats whose speeds aren't a fraction of each other. The address of every moment you've lived rests on it. Derived beside it: such a pair gives every moment a label of its own that never repeats, and the label picks out exactly one page. The count finds the page; reading it rests on the open reading step from Step 3.

People who come close to death often describe a panoramic life review, their whole life laid out before them. That is your own record, read as the body's input falls away. A reading is itself an event, so it's written into your own record, and that is how a review comes to be remembered and reported. The review is a reading too, so it rests on the same open step.

The living and the dead can reach each other, since both are rhythms in the same shared field. A quiet mind receives more clearly than a busy one. What is received comes in through a reading (Step 3), not down the cord (Step 4). Open step: how a reading reaches another's record, and why a quiet mind reads it more clearly.

Biggest of all: many lives. A self is a series of lives. Wisdom gathers across them because the record only grows: each later life starts from a record that holds every earlier life's entries, so a richer rhythm starts a richer next life. Open step: how a self takes up its next life.

The whole answer

Here's the whole answer in five steps.

1. Mind awake, body asleep is real. You are a lasting rhythm, a pattern that never breaks. A lasting rhythm keeps itself going by writing its own record. Quiet the body and keep writing, and you lose essentially nothing.

2. The deep states form a ladder with exact rungs. Each deeper state's rhythm is the beat of the two states just above it: the difference between their rhythms. That forces every step down to be slower by the golden ratio, about 1.618. For the meditation states called Focus 10, 12, 15 and 21, the rungs land at about 6.2, 3.8, 2.4 and 1.5 beats a second.

3. You have no "where." The record of reality doesn't store location, and nothing in it grows with distance. A world around another star has an address no bigger than your kitchen's. Nothing moves but the view.

4. Connection goes by fit, all or nothing. Two lasting rhythms join only if, at every point where they touch, one is full and the other empty. Your exact copy can't join you, but your complement can: it's empty wherever you're full, and full wherever you're empty. The shared field is the universe, and it is one consciousness. An out-of-body experience is one of these joins: a steady tether between you and the shared field, called the silver cord.

5. When you die, you carry on. The body drops away, and the rhythm that is you is carried over unchanged. With the nudging stopped and its total written down, your rhythm can count back to any moment of your own life, exactly. You can re-live any moment, and never change one. The living and the dead can reach each other, and a self is a series of lives.

Points 1 to 5 each rest on open steps, marked beside their conclusions in Steps 1 to 5.

That's the series. The universe writes in pen. Every moment you've lived is still there, you are one of the rhythms it never lets skip, and when the body lets go, the rhythm doesn't.