The Divine Matrix: The Field That Connects Everything

In 1944, Max Planck stood before an audience in Florence, Italy, and said something that should have rewritten every textbook on Earth. The father of quantum theory — the man whose work on black-body radiation cracked open the atomic age — told the crowd: “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

The matrix of all matter.

Not energy. Not force fields. Not mathematical abstractions. A conscious and intelligent mind. The man who gave us quantum physics spent the last years of his life pointing at something physics still refuses to look at directly: that consciousness is not a byproduct of the universe. It is the fabric.

Sixty-three years later, in 2007, a former senior computer systems designer named Gregg Braden published a book called The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief. In it, he took Planck’s insight and wove it together with a series of experiments conducted between 1993 and 2000 that most people have never heard of — experiments that suggest we are not passive observers of reality. We are participants. And the field that connects our inner world to the outer world is not metaphorical. It is measurable, testable, and profoundly personal.

The Container, the Bridge, the Mirror

Braden frames the Divine Matrix through three roles it plays simultaneously.

First, it is the container that holds the universe. Everything that exists — every star, every atom, every thought — exists within this field. It is not empty space with objects floating in it. It is a living medium, and every point within it is connected to every other point. The old model of the universe as a mechanical clock with separate gears has been obsolete since the early twentieth century, but most of us still carry it in our bones. The Divine Matrix is Braden’s term for what physicists have called the quantum field, the zero-point field, the quantum hologram, or simply “the field.” Different names, same territory.

Second, the matrix is the bridge between our inner experience and the outer world. This is where things get uncomfortable for materialist science. If consciousness exists only inside the skull, then there should be no mechanism by which a feeling, a belief, or an intention could influence anything outside the body. But the experiments Braden cites suggest otherwise — that human emotion, directed with clarity and coherence, can alter the physical structure of DNA, influence the behavior of photons, and remain connected to biological tissue across distances that should make such influence impossible.

Third, the matrix is the mirror that reflects back to us what we have created through our beliefs. This is the most provocative claim and the one most easily misunderstood. Braden is not saying the universe is a cosmic vending machine. He is saying that the field responds to the quality of our inner state — not to our words or wishes, but to what we genuinely feel and believe at the deepest level. The world we experience is, in a very real sense, a reflection of the consciousness we bring to it.

Three Experiments That Changed Everything

Braden builds his case on three specific experiments, each addressing a different aspect of the DNA-consciousness-field connection.

Experiment One: The DNA Phantom Effect (1992)

In 1992, Russian physicist Vladimir Poponin and his colleague Peter Gariaev at the Russian Academy of Sciences designed an elegant experiment. They created a vacuum inside a specially designed tube and measured the distribution of photons (light particles) within it. As expected, the photons scattered randomly. Then they placed a sample of human DNA inside the tube. The photons immediately rearranged themselves, aligning along the axis of the DNA as if the molecule were exerting an organizing force on light itself.

That was interesting but not shocking — DNA is a complex molecule and might interact with photons through known electromagnetic effects. The stunning part came next. When the DNA was physically removed from the tube, the photons remained in their organized pattern. The DNA was gone, but its influence persisted. Poponin called this the “DNA phantom effect” — the ghost of a biological structure continued to shape the behavior of light even after the structure was no longer present.

Think about what this implies. A molecule of life leaves an imprint on the fabric of space that persists after the molecule is removed. The field remembers.

Experiment Two: The Military Distance Experiment (1993)

The second experiment was conducted by the U.S. military and never received the attention it deserved. Researchers collected white blood cell samples (leukocytes) from a volunteer and placed them in a chamber equipped to measure electrical changes. The donor was then placed in a separate room and subjected to emotional stimuli — video clips designed to provoke strong emotional responses.

When the donor experienced an emotional peak, the DNA in the separated sample showed a simultaneous electrical response. The two were in sync. The researchers then began increasing the distance between the donor and the DNA sample. At 50 miles of separation, with no measurable lag time, the DNA continued to respond instantly to the donor’s emotional state.

No lag time. At 50 miles. The signal — whatever it was — was not traveling through space. It was not electromagnetic radiation, which would show delay proportional to distance. The donor and the DNA were behaving as a single system regardless of the space between them. This is precisely what quantum physicists call nonlocality, or what Einstein famously dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.”

Experiment Three: HeartMath and the Shape of DNA (1995)

The third experiment was conducted at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California. Researchers Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty asked trained volunteers to hold vials of human DNA while generating specific emotional states — coherent emotions like love, gratitude, and appreciation.

The results were measurable and repeatable. When participants generated feelings of love and gratitude, the DNA strands relaxed, unwinding and lengthening. When participants generated feelings of frustration and anger, the DNA strands tightened and shortened, with many of the coding sites switching off. Human emotion was physically altering the structure of DNA in real time.

This was not visualization. It was not affirmation. It was the quality of feeling in the human heart directly reshaping the geometry of genetic material.

Quantum Entanglement as the Mechanism

The mechanism Braden proposes for how all of this works is quantum entanglement — the phenomenon where two particles, once connected, continue to share information instantaneously regardless of the distance separating them.

In 1997, physicist Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva demonstrated entanglement at a distance of nearly 15 miles. By the 2020s, Chinese researchers using the Micius satellite had confirmed entanglement at distances exceeding 1,200 kilometers. The phenomenon is no longer debated in physics. It is used in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. What is debated is the scale at which entanglement operates — whether it applies only to subatomic particles or whether it scales up to biological systems.

Braden’s argument, supported by the three experiments, is that entanglement operates at the biological level. The DNA phantom effect suggests that biological structures leave entangled signatures in the field. The military experiment suggests that a person and their DNA remain entangled across macroscopic distances. The HeartMath experiment suggests that the emotional state of the heart is the signal that modulates this entangled relationship.

If this is true, then the Divine Matrix is not just a poetic metaphor. It is the entangled web of quantum relationships that connects every particle that has ever interacted with every other particle since the beginning of the universe. And since everything emerged from the same singularity at the Big Bang, everything is, at some level, entangled with everything else.

The Holographic Principle

Braden draws on another pillar of modern physics: the holographic principle. In a hologram, every piece contains the complete information of the whole. Cut a holographic plate in half, and each half still contains the full image, just at lower resolution.

In 1982, physicist Alain Aspect and his team at the University of Paris conducted experiments that confirmed that under certain conditions, subatomic particles communicate instantaneously regardless of distance — as if the separation between them is an illusion. Physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein, interpreted these results through what he called the “implicate order” — a deeper level of reality where everything is enfolded into everything else, and what we perceive as separate objects in space and time are actually expressions of a single underlying wholeness.

Braden takes this further. If the universe is holographic in nature, then changes made at any point in the field propagate through the entire field. A shift in consciousness here affects the whole there. This is not New Age fantasy; it is the logical extension of the holographic principle applied to a universe where consciousness plays a participatory role — which is exactly what Planck, Bohm, and physicist John Wheeler all suggested.

Wheeler coined the term “participatory universe” to describe the idea that observation is not passive — that the act of looking at reality actually brings certain aspects of it into existence. Braden’s contribution is to say: it is not just observation that participates. It is feeling. It is belief. It is the coherent state of the heart.

The 20 Keys

Throughout The Divine Matrix, Braden distills his framework into 20 keys of conscious creation. Among the most significant:

• Key 1: The Divine Matrix is the container that holds the universe, the bridge between all things, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.
• Key 2: Everything in our world is connected to everything else.
• Key 9: Feeling is the language that “speaks” to the Divine Matrix.
• Key 12: We are not bound by the laws of physics as we know them today.
• Key 20: We must become in our lives the very things that we choose to experience in our world.

Key 20 is the pivot point. It echoes Gandhi’s “be the change” — but with a quantum mechanism behind it. If the matrix is a mirror, then the only way to change the reflection is to change what is being reflected. Not through effort or manipulation, but through genuine transformation of inner state.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a civilization that treats the universe as dead matter arranged by accident, consciousness as a hallucination generated by neurons, and human beings as biological machines competing for scarce resources. This worldview is not just philosophically impoverished — it is factually incomplete. It cannot account for entanglement, for the DNA phantom effect, for the instantaneous connection between a person and their tissue across 50 miles, for the ability of coherent emotion to reshape genetic structure.

Braden’s Divine Matrix is not a religion. It is not even a theory in the strict scientific sense. It is a framework — one that takes the hard data of quantum physics, the experimental findings of HeartMath and the Russian Academy, and the ancient intuitions of mystics across every tradition, and asks a simple question: What if they are all describing the same thing?

What if the field the mystics have always spoken of — the Tao, the Akasha, Indra’s Net, the Holy Spirit — is not poetry but physics? What if Max Planck was not being metaphorical when he said “this mind is the matrix of all matter”? What if the container, the bridge, and the mirror are not three things but one thing, and that one thing is what you are made of?

If we are truly participants in a living, responsive, entangled field of consciousness — then what are you participating in creating right now, with the beliefs you carry and the feelings you sustain?