The Truth About The God Code

I was going through my email the other day when I ran across an article that mentions Gregg Braden and promotes something called "The Science of Miracles and the Power of Prayer."

Well, I'm always interested in checking out what's going on in the New-Age Spirituality and stuff but I never heard of this guy, so I did some looking around and thought I'd share it with you.

Before we get to the "goodies", let me build some context, K?
First of all, you might occasionally run across something that sounds like this: "Everything that exists is connected by a subtle web of energy. It responds to human emotion. Are miracles possible?" Sheesh, I'll admit it got my attention, but it's just an attention grabber. Speaking of "grabbing", right now, Braden's "out there" grabbing attention with pleas like: "The World Is In Crisis, You Can Help!"

Braden & Co. appear to be ramping up for some 'global initiatives', like:

Quote from: _http://www.greggbraden.com/home/the-world-is-changing-you-can-help/

A Call To Conscious Evolution: In September of 2008, a group of Evolutionary Leaders (including in alphabetical order, Michael Beckwith, Joan Borysenko, Gregg Braden, Deepak Chopra, Gordon Dveirin, Duane Elgin, Debbie Ford, Ashok Gangadean, Jean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Lynne McTaggart, Marianne Williamson and many others!) Completed a collective Call to Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice. It is now being circulated throughout the world, giving a voice to our role in the changing world, and an invitation to declare your support for key initiatives!

The Global Coherence Initiative is the first-of-its-kind science-based initiative uniting millions of people in heart-focused care and intention, to shift global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace! This project is designed to help individuals and groups work together, synchronistically and strategically to increase the impact of their efforts to create positive global change.Together we will

* Increase personal coherence for the benefit of ourselves and the planet
* Help shift the planetary consciousness baseline from self-centeredness to wholeness care
* Increase connection and social harmony
* Empower our ability to navigate through global changes with less stress and more ease
* Empower environmental responsibility and stewardship of the planet

Next Two Events:

20 November:
I Can Do It Tampa
November 20-22, 2009
4 December:
ConferenceWorks! presents:
Gregg Braden in Cincinnati, OH
December 4-5, 2009

...and that's not all that's going on, but it seems the most important thing is to understand that all of this hoopla is based on Quantum Scientific studies that demonstrate a relationship between observer and the observed. Those studies have been around for quite some time, it's just that the concepts are being re-translated into a vague new agey generality that "we are affecting our world" as a basis for all this New Age activity that Braden is pushing.

So, who is this Gregg Braden? Gregg Braden is at the forefront of the New Age movement with his books, Awakening to Zero Point, The Isaiah Effect and Walking Between The Worlds. An ex-computer programmer, Braden presents himself as a scientist and modern-day prophet at the cutting edge of research into our collective destiny and the science of prayer.

His 'About' page on his website says:

New York Times best selling author Gregg Braden is internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality. Following a successful career as a Computer Geologist for Phillips Petroleum during the 1970s energy crisis, he became a Senior Computer Systems Designer for Martin Marietta Defense Systems during the last year of the Cold War. In 1991 he was appointed the first Technical Operations Manager for Cisco Systems where he led the development of the global support team that assures the reliability of today’s Internet. For more than 22 years, Gregg has searched high mountain villages, remote monasteries, and forgotten texts to uncover their timeless secrets. To date, his work has led to such paradigm-shattering books as The Isaiah Effect, The God Code, The Divine Matrix and his 2008 release, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits. Gregg’s work is now published in 17 languages and 27 countries...
Quote from: _http://www.greggbraden.com/about/

New York Times best selling author?? Well, let's take a look at some books he has authored from the point of view of someone who has, in his own words, "always given Braden the benefit of the doubt and overlooked the obvious scientific BS because I personally share much of Braden's worldview."

Andrew P:
Recently, however, it has been pointed out to me that Braden was never a scientist: he was actually a software engineer who had worked in the scientific arena. This does not make him an "earth science expert" as he claims, or indeed a "scientist" at all.
"I am throwing my hands up in despair because it now appears that the foundation of Braden's writing and lectures is pure fiction."
Continuing, I first heard of Gregg Braden when he published his book, Awakening to Zero Point back in 1995. To myself and to many others interested in New Age spirituality and science, this book was a revelation — one of the most exciting contemporary books on spirituality and our collective destiny to have been published. What is more, Braden presented himself as a scientist and geologist, with access to the very latest research findings and "inside" scientific opinion from around the world, so the information he presented seemed to be corroborated by the leading-edge scientific community.

Braden's next book, Walking Between The Worlds, explored the science of compassion, emotion and prayer, relating to 2000 years old Essene texts. I found the book hugely inspiring and it certainly established Braden as a modern day prophet and spiritual teacher.

A few years later Braden brought out a third book called The Isaiah Effect which is based around one of the documents among the Dead Sea Scrolls called the Isaiah Scroll. What was remarkable about this scroll is that it was the only one among the 25,000 fragments of papyrus, parchment and hammered copper, collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that was completely intact. Braden's suggestion is that Isaiah, the first Old Testament prophet, left precise instructions to the people of the future, us, on how to effectively pray. Once again, this book was a huge hit in the New Age community, and by this time, Braden had become one of the leading lights on the New Age lecture circuit, with his work regarded as an important bridge between the scientific and spiritual worlds.

Then, he made a mistake: in January 2004, he published a new book, The God Code, in which he claimed to have found a secret message in our DNA from the Creator Herself: "God Eternal within the body." My introduction to this book was actually a lecture that he gave in London a few months after publication. The mistake he made was to present evidence for his theory that was so obviously contrived that it broke the spell for many of us that had previously regarded him as a modern day prophet. I wrote of my experience at that lecture in an article that I published.
[My note: Here is the article]:

A critique of Braden's latest work: The God Code

I HAVE JUST GOT BACK from a lecture at Alternatives in London given on the 29/3/04 by Gregg Braden, which covers the material of his new book, The God Code. I had been looking forward to this lecture for many months: I am a HUGE fan of Braden's work, and it is very rare to see him in this part of the world. So it was with absolute delight that I went to hear him speak… and ended up almost walking out.

This was the biggest load of pseudoscience I have heard for a long time, and it was delivered in a thoroughly patronizing manner (his target audience when preparing this material can only be imbecilic). I cannot understand this because none of this comes through in his previous work — although I have never heard him lecture before, I have read his previous books, some of which were fantastic and are recommended on this site. I have also listened to one radio interview, which was great.

Braden prides himself on being a scientist, and in his other material he presents the right balance between scientific fact and "spiritual" interpretation of those facts. But his latest work, The God Code, seems to be fantasy masquerading as science, and actually ends up discrediting his previous works. Throughout his lecture he keeps trying to reassure the audience with "this is proved scientifically" or "scientists do not doubt this", when in fact nobody with any scientific understanding could accept what he is claiming on the evidence that he presents. It just isn't science, period.

The crux of The God Code is that our DNA sequence, when read by assigning Hebrew characters to the base sequence, spells out the words of our Creator. His mystical justification for this comes from the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation) which is one of the central texts in the Kabala tradition. Braden gives us a quote from this mystical text which says, "Within the letter is a great, concealed mystical exalted secret… from which everything was created."

From this he looks at DNA and questions whether the DNA base sequence lettering could be the lettering referred to in the Sefer Yetzirah. Perhaps our DNA is the "great, concealed mystical exalted secret" because, after all he reasons, it also contains letters and it is universal to life. He then presents his theory that our DNA is a library of information (nothing new there… even orthodox scientists would agree with that), that each chromosome is a book (if you want to call it a book Gregg… that's fine) and that each gene-length is a sentence (yes… DNA is the language of our Biology so the analogy is obvious and has been made many times before). But his next step is to say that code is literally translatable into Hebrew! And he bases this grand hypothesis on just single and very dubious 4-letter correlation. (There is exciting new evidence suggesting that the 90% "junk DNA" in our cells actually has grammatical structure and so may well be a language of some sort, but this is a far cry from Braden's puerile reasoning.)

To justify this revolutionary claim, Braden appeals to numerology: he states that because the base molecules in our DNA — the language codes of thymine, adenine, cytosine and guanine — are made up of the elements hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon, with respective "atomic masses" 1, 5, 6 and 3 [these are wrong], they actually correspond with the 1st, 5th, 6th and 3rd letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. Therefore, they spell YH VG which means "God/Eternal… Within the Body". Braden is blown away by this… although the audience seems less sure of the connection or have been bamboozled by his pseudoscience build up.

So this is the big secret that he has discovered (at least I presume it is his discovery): within each cell of our body is God's signature in Hebrew (and because Hebrew is a Semitic language, this supposedly works for Arabic as well). From this tiny numerological connection he bases his entire case and claims a whole new science. He tells the audience that it has taken ten years to translate this "introduction to the DNA" or "first level" but that subsequent translations should now be much faster. (Quite why such a basic numerological calculation would take 10 years is beyond me.) It is easy to play around to get just 4 letters to fit, but to then state that this implies the entire DNA is a library that will shortly be read in Hebrew with the right translation is absurd.

Just in case there are doubters in the audience thinking along these lines, Braden then makes the point that the chance of getting this by accident is 1 in 234,256… a figure calculated by "a statistician at the University of Los Angeles." But is this statistic really accurate? Braden repeatedly gives the audience the impression that this is bona fide science, that scientists are welcoming his work or at the very least cannot deny it, but anyone with scientific training knows immediately that this is not the case.

The holes in his theory are very easy to spot and as wide as the Grand Canyon. Braden links the elements hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon to the Hebrew Alphabet with "atomic mass". But the respective atomic masses of these elements, which he gives as 1, 5, 6 and 3, are actually 1, 14, 16 and 12. To make the evidence fit, he has resorted to a numerological trick: 14 becomes 1 + 4 = 5; 16 becomes… well 6 (it does have 6 valence electrons though!); and 12 becomes 1 + 2 = 3. Also, the 1st letter of the Hebrew Alphabet is actually alep. Yod, the Y in his YH VG translation, is Hebrew letter number 10. But Braden justifies calling 10 a 1 because 10 = 1 + 0 = 1.

The problem with this sort of fiddling, to get the evidence to fit the theory, is that it invalidates the "statistician's probability" above. If unscientifically adding numbers together is okay, which he has done with nearly all his "evidence", then the following must be valid: nitrogen, with atomic mass 14, could equally pertain to Hebrew letter 14 (1 + 4 =5), or even letter 15 by just getting rid of the 1 as he did with oxygen; oxygen, with atomic mass 16, could also be Hebrew letter 15 (5+1=6) or Hebrew letter 16; and carbon with atomic mass 12, could also be Hebrew letter 12 or even 21 (2 + 1 =3). The link between these "alphabets" now seems more tenuous, and the 1 in 234,256 statistic starts to look a bit optimistic.

But if the link is valid, as he says it is, then it must be valid both ways. So Y, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, could be relating to neon which has atomic mass 10 or manganese with atomic mass 55 (5+5) or silicon with atomic mass 28 (2+8) or fluoride with atomic mass 18 (1+8) or even radium with atomic mass 226 (2+2+6). And that is just one letter and just some of the transitional elements. Try doing it with the other three letters and you come up with loads of other elements. Also, why put the elements in the particular order to give YV VG? The "introduction to our genetic code" could just as well have been YG VH (which, as any linguist from Los Angeles will tell you, means "Yo, Gregg Vas Here"). There is HUGE room here to cook the facts, which is exactly what Braden seems to have done.

So his revelation is is just a clever numerological trick that is faintly entertaining. 4 letters? Big deal! But to base a whole scientific theory on such contrivance is pure fantasy. Braden may well be right in that the DNA is a message from our creator, and it is entirely possible it is related to ancient alphabets — who knows — but the way that he has tried to justify this with very selective and subjective "evidence" with just a 4 letter "fit" is nothing short of astonishing. And the fact that his book is selling so well is a testimony to the credulity and scientific illiteracy of the New Age community (although it has no doubt also sold on the strength of his previous work).

But how does he cover up the lack of scientific or logical justification for his assertion of DNA being a transcript of the Hebrew alphabet? It was simple: he continually played the "I don't have the time to go into all the science" card whilst rushing through a padded out explanation of his theory in 30 minutes. The truth is that one and a half hours was way too long for him to present his theory, let alone 30 minutes (5 minutes on a Post-It note would have sufficed - seriously). So what does he do to fill the time? He shows two "touchy feely" videos which, although great watching (no words, just music to pictures of people of different religions and pictures of people's faces), have little relevance to this sort of lecture except as a time filler and to trigger in his audience sentiments that he feels his theory deserves. Braden wasn't in a rush, he was actually desperate to fill up the time slot! His theory is so weakly supported that, although he was forced to pad it out ad nauseam to fill up time and to make it seem a substantial theory, he was also forced to rush through the little he had.

His actual lecture, outside the videos, is supported by a slick Power Point presentation, and mixes genuine science with pseudoscience in a way in which the authority of the former all too easily rubs off on the latter. This is deceptive to the non-scientific and, I am afraid, intellectually dishonest (if he is indeed a genuine scientist he must realize what he is doing). I had the distinct impression during this lecture that I was in the presence of a preacher, and not a scientist or even a spiritual teacher. "Am I going to fast?" he would continually ask, to which I would mentally reply, "Yes you are Gregg, but if you go any slower the audience will see how contrived and vacuous your theory really is."

So what has happened to Gregg Braden? Why is he now so firmly on the pseudoscience track? His sentiments are admirable: he wants the whole world to be as One and for humanity to forget its differences and live in peace. We all want this. But in his effort to get across this very valid message and goal, Braden tries to justify it with numerology (and even then the "evidence" doesn't quite fit), which he parades as frontier science. In the process of this scientific charade, he not only damages his own former works, but also the credibility of genuine frontier science so excellently reported by authors such as Lynne McTaggart, Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Talbot, who have a genuine understanding of what science is and what it can and cannot justify.

Braden seems confused on this issue, but believing him to be sincere, I can only conclude that he can't really be a scientist. It would be better for him to keep entirely away from science and just speak about prayer, which he is excellent at, as evidenced by his book, The Isaiah Effect. But Braden seems caught up in the role of a scientific New Age prophet, and he is now compelled to dredge up pseudoscience if no real science is there to back up his claims. In The God Code, I feel he has jumped on the "Bible Code" bandwagon, and in the process has morphed from scientist to preacher.

If you want to read more, visit this website:
http://www.energygrid.com/science/2004/03ap-godcode.html