The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden Book Review

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The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief

After reading The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden, I feel inspired and empowered. However, if you are not open to spirituality and/or don’t like science, then this book is definitely not for you. This book is not intended to be a definitive work on the history of science, nor religion and spirituality. It is intended to be a guide or tool that everyday people can use to bring hope and peace into their lives, which is what I really need right now. Braden is able to explain really complex scientific theory as understandable takeaways for those who find dense scientific material challenging. Readers don’t have to be extremely left brained to get something out of this book, but Braden does reference scientific sources if you want to follow up with deeper inquiry. Braden believes that there is an intelligent field that is a container that holds the universe. This field acts as a bridge to create, and also acts as a mirror to show us what we have created. Emotion is the language that this field understands and through our beliefs and certain meditation techniques (the Feeling Prayer), we can focus our consciousness and communicate the positive changes that we desire. Gregg Braden is a New York Times best-selling author and has been a featured guest for international conferences and media specials for taking scientific discoveries and contextualizing them within ancient spiritual teachings like the Vedas and Dead Sea Scrolls. Gregg Braden’s 20 year exploration has brought him to remote monasteries and ancient temples to sift through forgotten texts and rediscover their spiritual meanings. The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief, has three parts:

1. Discovering the Divine Matrix
2. The Bridge Between Imagination and Reality
3. Messages From the Divine Matrix

In the first part, Braden goes into why he solidly believes that this field that he calls the Divine Matrix exists. He cites many well respected and renowned scientists, ancient religions, and experiments that already recognize this field as a legitimate force in our world. In the second part, he describes his interesting travels to Tibetan monasteries to ascertain how we use and intentionally create with the Divine Matrix. The third and final part of this book, goes into questions of what it means to have a unified field of energy, how it affects the events in our lives, how we can recognize key changing moments, and how we can learn and grow from them. This is the most enjoyable section of the book for me because Braden shares many of his life events as examples where the Divine Matrix speaks to us, providing life lessons and challenges for spiritual growth. The thing that I most admire about this book is the hope and optimism that it brings during these times where people sometimes feel hopeless in a world that has lost all its morals. Understanding how the Divine Matrix works has improved my meditation work. I feel more empowered in my meditations knowing that my work not only has an inner effect, but also an outer effect. In this book he gives many empowering accounts of how we can change our life and this world into what we want it to be. Braden shares an experience he had with a woman who was documented on video to have miraculously healed herself from cancer within minutes by using the methods he describes in this book. This account helps reinforce my belief that we have a powerful technology within to heal ourselves and that we don’t have to rely on the pharmaceutical industry to solve our problems. Braden also shares scientific studies where meditation practitioners were able to consistently and accurately create peace at specific times and specific locations. In fact he goes on to share a formula defining the minimum amount of people needed to jumpstart a change in consciousness as equal to the square root of one percent of a population. These kinds of accounts help reinforce my belief that we have the power in ourselves to change the world. As I watch and listen to the news of how those in power continually make choices that benefit those in power, I am reminded that I cannot wait for them to make the right changes. The change has to happen in me so I can join those who already have peace in their hearts and help influence those who do not, as well. I am beginning to realize that when you hurt someone you actually hurt yourself–that every war is actually a war against ourselves. Fighting for peace is like shouting for silence. As I continue my pursuits of peace and meditation, I continually find those who share the same belief that if more people regularly practiced meditation that the world would be a much better place. There is something powerful about the nature of introspection, something that seems to be evaporating in our modern society as our focus and energy is constantly being drawn out from ourselves by the capitalist machine through its tools of media and technology. I feel as if this machine has raised us to become dependant on material things to feed our egos instead of cultivating our spiritual growth, because spiritual things have no monetary value other than the means of spiritual control. In the later chapters of this book, I was intrigued by The Fourth Mirror: Reflections of Our Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night of the Soul is defined in this book as life’s reflection of our fears and acts as a rites of passage to experience and heal our own great fears. I began to think about my own past and look within myself if I have had any Dark Night of the Soul experiences. I would like to share a story from my life to you.

The Dishwasher

My parents owned a Chinese restaurant in Astoria, Oregon where I went to high school. During those formative years of high school, my life was divided between school, being a juvenile delinquent, and being paid by my parents as a dishwasher. Soon after high school I enrolled in the community college and started to take school seriously. Most of my previous “partners-in-crime’ moved on to out of state colleges, so instead of causing trouble I found in myself the ability to learn and earn good grades for the first time in my life. In the middle of my community college experience I also found a relationship with a girl who was supportive in my new ability to get good grades, but sooner or later the relationship fell apart and it became really hard for me to focus on work. I decided to transfer to the University of Oregon. My experience at the U of O provided a lot of personal growth. I took a lot of business classes as that was what my dad wanted me to pursue. I quickly found out that business was not what I wanted to do, so I got a major in Fine Arts. This was not favorable in the eyes of my dad, but he did not protest. In the U of O art program I felt a powerful and meaningful way of self-exploration of my identity as a first generation Chinese-American. I was very passionate about my work and was given a lot of encouragement by my peers and from the faculty, which had a profound effect on my self-esteem. I also found an amazing circle of supportive friends whose positive influence realized in me a strength of character and self-worth that I didn’t know I had in me. Soon after I graduated my parents asked me to come home and help with the shop because it wasn’t doing very well and they were looking to sell the restaurant. I came back home to the small coastal town and realized how my life had changed, but returning to live in my parents’ basement and wash dishes in the restaurant made me feel like I hadn’t made any progress, like I was back in high school again and didn’t experience that growth. I reached a shameful level of depression and became an all around jerk. I think I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder. I was so miserable that I had with me a dark cloud that become problematic for those around me. I was even asked on a few occasions to leave by my parents, but I stayed until they were able to sell the restaurant. Looking back on it now, I had failed to recognize it for what it was. It was an opportunity for me to show my parents that I had a positive transformation while I was gone and no longer identified with the juvenile delinquent days of selfish and destructive pleasures. Instead of showing them I had become a new, more self-confident person, I showed them that I had regressed from what they had thought of me from before I left for the U of O. My rite of passage into adulthood did not fulfill itself this time, but I think the experience had emboldened me to understand that I am the master of my own circumstances and I had the strength and power to do both great and not-so-great deeds. I think because of my failure to resolve my previous rite of passage with my family, life gave me another chance in resolution in a much more stark and brutal way. After moving to Portland and away from my parent’s house I applied to several grad schools to get into a Master’s in Fine Arts program. I was thrilled when I learned I had been awarded a full scholarship for the University of Illinois! Before I left, I found myself in a doctor’s office with my dad waiting to hear what was wrong with him. In the waiting room with my dad, I shared my good news about the scholarship, but he did not receive it warmly, saying, “…they must not have had a lot of participants.” Shortly after, the doctor had came in to tell me that my father had advanced liver cancer and there was not much that they could do to cure him. That episode of my life was very quick for me, and I don’t recall what kind of emotions circulated within me. I don’t really recall with any great clarity the time from when I learned about my father’s condition to when I moved to Illinois for school. Grad school in itself is a rather long and different story that I will have to set aside and deal with at a later date. It wasn’t until the end of my first semester at grad school before I got a phone call to come home as my father’s health had worsened. I decided I should cut my long hair that dad hated so much and left school to see my father on his deathbed. I was with my father from the beginning of being home in their newly built house in Portland, Oregon, to that night when my father would not wake up and we had to call for the ambulance in the middle of the night. From the hospital night when my father spoke to me for the very last time in Cantonese, which I didn’t understand a word of, to the very end when we cremated him. I was with him from the beginning to the end of his last days. I didn’t have much to time to mourn. My father had another business which he shared with a business partner. We had to involve lawyers. It was nasty, but in the end we severed ties with the business. In a very brutal way life had forced me into adulthood by dealing with the death of my father, the collapse of his business, protecting my mother and the rest of my father’s assets. The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden, has helped me gain greater insight into a time of my life, which I would have had liked to have forgotten about, but by unmasking my fears I can attain a greater appreciation of it. Also… I suppose this gives me another opportunity, to repay my karmic debt with my mother and resolve some past suffering that I caused. Thank you for allowing me to share my experiences with you. I wish you the kindest success!  

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