Reality’s lenses: science, spirituality and the paranormal dimension

To read previous installments, click HERE

6. Books: some doorways to the Source

Although it may seem unusual to offer a booklist at the end of a memoir, I decided to do so for the particular benefit of those readers who may just be embarking on an investigatory journey of those dimensions I have been exploring, and are looking for accessible and inspiring reading to start them off. I have confined my recommendations purely to selecting a few personal favourites from my own reading  since 2002.

“ The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives ” I found to be a succinct, accurate and invaluable guide to  – Worldview, Science, Spirituality and Esoteric Thought, Psychology, The Paranormal, Medicine and Health and Society, Environment and Technology – to use Stuart Holroyd’s own categorisation of his very useful reference book. At the end of it is an extensive and wide-ranging bibliography which will further advance the journey!

Archie E. Roy is the Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Present member and past-President of the UK’s Society for Psychical Research, also the Founding President of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, he is an internationally known and respected psychical researcher. His two books included here will provide those seeking  thoroughly researched case material on various facets of the paranormal with all they need to come to their own conclusions.

The booklists and references given in Professor Roy’s books, as well as offering a broad spectrum of contextual literature, give entry to an immensely well researched and detailed body of international evidence, validating the existence of paranormal phenomena, which has been accumulating world-wide since the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 in Cambridge, England, UK by a group of eminent Victorian scientists and academics.

Enjoy your reading!

Considering the Meaning of Life - Mediaeval style

www.jillrogoff.com/education.html

 

Medieval woodcut; from Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens, published in Augsburg about 1475-6

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Abram, David  “The Spell of the Sensuous”
Armstrong, Karen  “A Short History of Myth”
Benson, Herbert  “Timeless Healing”
Berry, Thomas  “The Great Work”
Cranston, Sylvia & Williams, Carey  “Reincarnation”
De Duve, Christian  “Life Evolving”
Dillard, Annie  “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
Dossey, Larry  “Healing Beyond the Body”
Eliade, Mircea  “The Sacred and the Profane: the nature of religion”
Friedman, Norman  “Bridging Science and Spirit”
Grof, Stanislav  “The Holotropic Mind”
Holroyd, Stuart  “The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives”
James, William  “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
Jung, C.J. “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”
László, Ervin “Science and the Akashic Field”
Lorimer, David (Editor) “The Spirit of Science” and “Science,Consciousness & Ultimate Reality”

McTaggart, Lynne  “The Field”
Moody, Raymond  “Life before Life”
Morse, Melvyn M.D  “Parting Visions”
Roy, Archie “A Sense of Something Strange” and  “The Archives of the  Mind”
Russell, Peter “From Science to God”
Sheldrake, R, McKenna, T & Abraham, R “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic     Consciousness”
Smith, Gordon “Spirit Messenger” and “The Unbelievable Truth”
Swimme, Brian “The hidden heart of the cosmos”
Targ, Russell & Jane Katra “Miracle of Mind”
Tarnas, Richard “The Passion of the Western Mind”
Tilby, Angela “Science and the soul”

CONTACTS

As a spur to developing the reader’s own perspectives on the new world-wide paradigm emerging, out of the many contacts which could be listed I feel that the Wrekin Forum UK provides a major point of entry to become ‘part of a world-wide movement towards personal and planetary transformation at a time of  major social change’ as their mission statement puts it. To explore the range of resources and contacts which Associateship provides, email

info@wrekinforum.org,or phone 01452 840 033.

Website : http://www.wrekinforum.org/wrekin_forum/

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600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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What is Reality? Can reductionism really tell us?

To read previous installments, click HERE

5. What, if anything, do paranormal experiences mean? Are they of any value?

All our perceptions of the world are ultimately subjective – never more so than when addressing questions of meaning and value!

With that in mind, here goes….

Paranormal experiences mean that we are more complex beings living in a more complex universe than our current reductionist paradigm can explain.

At a personal level, I now feel gratitude for the tiny glimpses mine have offered regarding the diverse and probably multi-dimensional nature of our existence.

Decades of hearing other people’s stories, many of them in the peace and confidentiality of my consulting room, others in pubs, at bus stops, on holidays, in class with a great variety of mature students, chance encounters with people on trains, launderettes, etc etc, added to my extensive reading in physics and cosmology, have certainly convinced me – and I have been hard to convince, the sceptical rationalist being very strong in my makeup!– that the solid material world we think we inhabit truly is only a thin slice of a much richer and more complex multi-dimensional Reality.

Most of it is entirely beyond our ken most of the time. But there are times, neither predictable nor within our control, when some kind of Otherness appears, challenging our conventional view of what reality and/or consciousness actually is.

Their value lies at least partly in their ability to point out this truth to us. Through them, we are being invited to enlarge our world view which is currently disjointed, fragmented and incomplete.

In view of my lifelong preoccupation with the Meaning of Life, I often mildly regret the restrictions my younger self unknowingly imposed on my older and slightly wiser self in not choosing Physics and Chemistry as major school and university subjects !

But even with those limitations, and very poor spatial ability which makes certain concepts in physics impossible for me to visualise and get my mind round, I have managed to arrive at a rooted understanding and appreciation that the world created for us by our limited sensory equipment does not represent the world we live in as explicated by quantum physics.

 

 

Meaning of Life? The answer at last....

 

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/spiritual_leaders.asp

The quantum world emerged gradually over the 20th century as paradoxical, contingent, bizarre and only partially predictable. This being the case, it is hard to understand from a rational point of view why paranormal experience seems so difficult for some people even to consider, far less to accept as valid.  I spoke earlier of one of the great driving forces of humankind – curiosity. Two further ancient driving forces are greed and fear.

I can only conclude that the main reason for resolute closed-mindedness in the face of overwhelming experiential evidence is – fear.

Allowing an expanded paradigm to emerge which embraced paranormal experience by bringing both experimental and experiential evidence together, might well involve the erosion and gradual collapse of a whole way of life rooted in that rational materialism which has driven our increasingly ubiquitous Western culture since the Scientific Revolution of the eighteenth century.

However, a movement is slowly gaining momentum and influence across the world which is evolving just such a paradigm. It is bringing the insights of mysticism, paranormal experience, cosmology, quantum physics, religion, philosophy, in-depth astrology, ecology, feminism and social justice together in ways which are slowly creating a new world order.

This should in time replace the outgrown perspectives of the three hundred year old Scientific Revolution, which has vastly enlarged the scope of our knowledge, brought huge material benefits to a small proportion of humanity, but left so much destruction in its wake.

It has also failed, despite strenuous efforts in some quarters, to weaken that part of being human which has a powerful intuitive sense that we are all part of a vast reality which our five senses simply cannot map.

Along with the paradigm, given especial urgency  from 2005-7 onwards as the scientific evidence of human impact on our environment has become so compelling that we can no longer ignore it, has emerged an accelerating realisation that we really are one world on planet Earth. We cannot ignore its subtle levels of interplay and balance any longer. Working on the holographic principle, the subtle levels of interplay and balance existing within the Sun-Moon-Earth system may well be mirrored at all levels within the total energy field of the entire Universe and beyond that the Multiverse.

We need to become more tuned to subtlety, to those dimensions which paranormal experience has informed us exist but which the crude measuring standards of materialist science cannot elucidate. We need to develop culturally a way of balancing the wonderful worlds revealed by rational observation and experimentation, with those equally valid but very different worlds revealed through paranormal experience. One of my favourite quotations comes from writer Gary Zukav:

‘Proof of non-physical reality does not exist in the dimension that the rational mind seeks it” 24

We humans need to become bolder voyagers into the mysterious and compelling territory of ‘non-physical reality’, whilst greatly respecting that rational dimension which has taken us further into appreciating the grandeur of which we are part than our ancestors could have envisaged in their wildest dreams.

Well, maybe they did! Perhaps we are only now beginning to catch them up….

TO BE CONTINUED

Footnotes

24 Gary Zukav “The Seat of the Soul” p 92

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900 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
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Quantum physics, astrology and paranormal experience: why not?

To read previous installments, click HERE

4. Why do we have paranormal experiences?

My impression as a reasonably well-educated, well-read and thoughtful person is that one of the main forces by which human beings have been driven throughout our relatively short tenure on planet Earth is – sheer curiosity.

Trying to enlarge our perspective to encompass that which we do not understand, or know how to use – eg fire, so that it can become an aid to our survival and/or an addition to the joys of living – has led us to the complex, sophisticated and comfortable way of life to which those of us living in the West have grown accustomed. We are now going to have to channel our curiosity in the direction of surviving the consequences for our planet of that very lifestyle, which has begun to consume us all….

From this perspective, it may be that the purpose of paranormal experiences – since the eighteenth century dawn of the Age of Reason – is to challenge our curiosity to take us beyond the world of the evidence of the five senses, which conventional science tells us is the only world that exists, into an understanding and appreciation that reality, whatever it may be, is vaster, richer and more complex than our Earth-bound brains are probably ever capable of comprehending.

Some paranormal experiences can be deliberately induced by going into meditative or trance-like states. For example, whether one believes or not that mediums relay information from the ‘Other Side’ via the communicative spirits of those who have died, there is no doubt that the phenomenon of mediumship exists, through which information can be transmitted paranormally. This has been comprehensively researched and thoroughly documented for well over a century.

However, even the best mediums have occasions when, try as they might, the ‘Other Side’ is simply not co-operating. Even although humans can induce states favourable to the paranormal manifesting itself, there is no guarantee that it will.

Other paranormal experiences simply descend without warning. This  has been the case, for example, with every single one I have ever had. Far from trying to induce such occurrences, had I known how to block them I certainly would have done so! Life in its ‘ordinary’ register is quite complicated enough, in my view, without seeking to make it more so….

There is undoubtedly a ‘tricksterish’, tantalising, highly unpredictable element to paranormal manifestations across the board. This is one of the many reasons why the measured, sensible, thorough and logical procedures of reductionist science simply cannot fully come to grips with the paranormal.

Furthermore, although such experiences are common enough to be provocative of a range of responses from outright credulity to outright, rage-filled denial, vast swathes of the population across the world have never been troubled by such occurrences. I am sure not to be the only person to think at times that, as Shakespeare so memorably put it in King Lear:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods…” 21

Provoking our curiosity by tormenting our species, unpredictably but persistently, with experiences clearly outwith our current common consensus of what reality is, strikes me as a pretty good way of enabling the evolution of human consciousness at this stage in our development. Whether one considers that this provocation is driven by blind chance, or by some form of divine teleology, is a matter of opinion or belief. How could one ever prove it, one way or the other?

From a personal point of view, the drive to understand why we are here and what our lives are for, allied to a profound curiosity about just about everything, has certainly powered my journey through life. I am basically a rational pragmatist in my approach. But I got to my fifties, a time when anyone with any reflective capacity begins to look back at their life experiences and patterns, in an attempt to make some sense of it all.

I had to face the fact that a series of experiences had accumulated over the course of thirty years which I had largely kept to myself. Why? Because they did not fit the parameters of what our culture defines as normal. But memories of these experiences did not go away because I had tried to ignore their existence. They simply lurked, permanently provoked by my refusal to attend to them.

Furthermore, a career I had never aspired to in my wildest dreams, ie that of being a professional astrologer, had been correctly predicted for me in my twenties – following a chance encounter with a complete stranger – when I was not at all receptive to, or welcoming of, that type of information.

 

My first Horoscope

 

Through my studies of astrology I discovered a universe replete with correspondences, and saturated with meaning. I embarked on those studies for one major reason: the notion that you could read the significant patterns of a person’s life from marks on a piece of paper set my innate curiosity, and my rational pragmatism, a challenge I simply could not resist.

By deciding properly to investigate a subject which I couldn’t believe could have any value, but which in practical terms had demonstrated great accuracy about me and my life, I opened up a great adventure for myself and for many students and clients who joined me on the road. Dismissing the whole thing, with the kind of closed minded fundamentalist prejudice which gives true science a bad name, would have closed the adventure down before it ever began.

The conclusion I came to, long before my 2001 health collapse stopped my
career in its tracks, was that astrology is another form of physics, revealing as quantum physics does the dance of universal energies of which we are all part. But astrology causes grave offence to conventional minds, by moving from mapping the movement of patterns of energy through space/time within our solar system – via mathematical calculations no astronomer could fault – to ascribing meaning to those patterns….

Another reason for psi/paranormal experiences may be that, especially in some cases, they compellingly demonstrate the relationship between the micro world of individual humans and the macro energy field of which we are all part.

The intuitive experience of mystics through the ages and the experimental data of contemporary scientists converges in the understanding that all things are connected, each tiny particle part of and interacting with the One, – or the Quantum Vacuum / Zero Point Field if you prefer the terms of quantum physics.

On surveying all my paranormal experiences, there are three which stand out as the most powerful.

These are the first, in July 1970 when I was  visiting my paternal grandparents’ grave for the first time. From this arose an experience of universal grief at the pain of the human condition, channelling through the personal. (Part Four: Grief – personal and collective (i))

Then there was the mystical experience I had in autumn 1971, newly in love and responding to the timeless sound of the pipes in a beautiful natural setting at dusk, making me feel a blissful, fearless part of all Creation. (Part Six: Mystical Experience)

And most recently, in September 1999 the seeming attempt by my mother-in-law’s spirit to communicate something of great urgency for her to my husband, startled me even more by giving rise to the collective ‘babble’ of apparent spirit voices attempting to use me as their channel. (From the Beyond: Mediumship (v) )

Their collective nature is what makes those three so striking. 22

At the time one is too caught up in the power, drama and sheer unexpectedness of such events to have any perspective at all. It is only on reflection – and I have reflected on those episodes intermittently for a very long time – that the full impact of  their very strange, alien and disturbing nature registers, and the ‘why me?’ question arises. The only answer I can come up with after thirty years is ‘why not me?’.

(My horoscope provides me with a very clear answer, symbolically. But you wouldn’t want to know about that, now, would you?!)

I am left with the somewhat unsettling sensation that my small person, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, functioned briefly in those episodes as some kind of collective instrument. Despite the unnerving nature of two out of the three, and their disturbing effect, they also left me over time, especially through the mystical experience which was a great comfort and inspiration, feeling clearly that I was a tiny but unique part of something vast.

This feeling, despite all my struggles with a naturally sceptical bent, has never left me. I have thus been able to draw on it for comfort in some very bleak and painful times in my life. It has also helped me to come to terms with one of the central paradoxes of all our lives : “I  am special, and I am not.” At every level in nature, the minute can provide us with glimpses of the vast – in which everything, no matter how small, has its unique part to play.

Those experiences, which I have come to regard as precious, have shown me that, as journalist Lynne McTaggart, author of ‘The Field’ (2003), puts it:

“We are not isolated beings living desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe. What we do and say is critical in creating our world. You are and always were part of a larger whole.” 23

TO BE CONTINUED

Footnotes

21 Act 4 scene.1, line .36

22 These three are the only ones so far which I have submitted for publication: all have been published in the UK and the USA..

23 Lynne Mc Taggart’s ‘Living the Field’ course –  on cutting edge science and spirituality – Lesson One p 4

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1600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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Paranormal intrusion: a step beyond reductionism?

To read previous installments, click HERE

3. What causes paranormal experiences?

It is important to emphasise that I was what one might call sound in body and mind at all times when those experiences occurred!

I had no mental health problems, and was leading a productive life, holding down responsible jobs and earning a steady living, with normal relationships and friendships.

It would thus be inconsistent with the overall conditions of my life to put any of my paranormal experiences down to mental health difficulties, which can produce delusions or psychotic episodes. For five years during the 1980s, I worked in psychiatric hospitals as part of a mental health team, so am conversant with the conditions which can trigger mental illness and what its manifestations can be.

I do not know the primary cause of paranormal experience any more than anyone else does. But I have come to some conclusions regarding the more obvious, immediate triggers by reflecting on my own thirty-seven experiences and finding that almost all of them, and in particular the most dramatic, had clearly identifiable common factors.

Those were that I was in transitional states in my life and/or away from home in the UK, or abroad in unfamiliar environments. In Part Five: Mediumship – Lagos, Portugal 1992 and Funchal, Madeira 1999 - I had additionally been under considerable stress prior to departing on holiday.

Intriguingly, eighteen of them, and the vast majority of the ones I experienced as the most powerful, occurred in the autumn. Perhaps as the light of day recedes in the Northern hemisphere, the light of rational consciousness weakens, making the intrusion of other types of consciousness into one’s ‘normal’ reality more possible….?

Under these circumstances in which my ‘normal’ context was disrupted, it
would appear that I was therefore more susceptible to ‘jumping’ or eliding from one state of consciousness to another, where I crossed ‘normal’ boundaries and experienced states or events which according to the canon of reductionist science, could not have happened.

It is interesting to note that of those manifestations which could not have happened, over half of them were witnessed or shared by my husband Ian, one of the most reasonable and rational people one could imagine.

In reflecting on what consciousness, apparently capable of level and shape-shifting, could possibly be – not a question which the best minds in history have ever answered either! – I have come to the view, based on reading and experience, that consciousness is a property not of the human brain, but of the universe as a whole:

 

Shape-shifting : solar neutrinos

 

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/3474/full

and there are, as Stuart Holroyd so succinctly puts it:

“….different experiential realities….accessible to different states of consciousness”16

The whole of our history past, present and future is in some way which we do not yet fully grasp, part of this universal consciousness. Quoting Ervin Laszlo again:

“….At the cutting edge of the sciences, a new concept of the world is emerging. In this concept all things in the world are recorded and all things inform one another. This gives us the most encompassing vision we have ever had of nature, life and consciousness….”17

The ancient concept of the Akashic Record states that there is a “cosmic reservoir of information and memories”18 storing records of everything that has ever occurred, which can supposedly be accessed by gifted psychics, for example Edgar Cayce, the ‘sleeping prophet’.

Technological sophistication has now evolved to the point where anyone on Earth with a computer and a phone line, broadband or WiFi can very easily, via search engines, access a vast range of information which is being added to with every second that passes, all over the world.

We cannot see, taste, touch, smell or hear the specific energies which hold this   information, or perceive its location. But it is there, and ‘real’, albeit within a non-sensually detectible reality.

As our consciousness slowly evolves and our technological capacity widens and deepens, we have historically created metaphors and paradigms through which our perceptions of higher realities can become more sophisticated and comprehensible.

Perhaps the computer and internet revolution of the last decade or so has provided us with a tiny ‘chip’ as it were, upon which the light of developing scientific consciousness can be focused to provide us with a more up to date view of the vast hologram which is our universe and/or Multiverse?

Many other people have also realised the similarities which exist between the paranormal concept of the Akashic Record, and the scientific fact of  the internet information bank, easily accessed with the right apparatus.

Within this large context, the human brain can be seen as functioning as a kind of radio, tuning in to different levels and states of consciousness. What we by common consensus call ‘reality’ is the level to which our brains are tuned in the ordinary course of things on planet Earth.

But there are times, in my case usually caused by disruption to my ‘normal’ life pattern,  when the tuning ‘jumps’ or elides into a level or levels which connect us with those kinds of experience which are regarded as impossible from the perspective of the prevailing materialist paradigm.

A wonderful example of this type was featured in the journal Self & Society in 2002. It occurs in a fascinating article titled “A RELUCTANT MYSTIC: God-Consciousness not Guru Worship” by John Wren-Lewis. The author describes how, at the age of nearly sixty, retired and with a distinguished career as a scientist behind him,  he had spiritual consciousness “thrust upon me….without working for it, desiring it, or even believing in it.” 19

 

Science and Non-Duality conference October 2010

 

featuring John Wren-Lewis

http://www.nonduality.com/dazdark.htm

It was 1983. The author was in Thailand, in a hospital bed, hovering between life and death, having eaten a poisoned sweet given to him by a would-be thief.
What happened next, a ‘near death experience’(NDE), he describes as follows:

“I simply entered – or rather, was – a timeless, spaceless void which in some indescribable way was total aliveness – an almost palpable blackness that was yet somehow radiant.”

His return to life, as the medical staff gradually won their battle to save him, was not in any way accompanied by the typical NDE’s classic sense of regret or loss at having to go back to the world of the everyday. It was, in fact, “nothing like a return….more like an act of creation whereby the timeless, spaceless Dark budded out into manifestation”. Furthermore, the experience was “indescribably wonderful.”

Moreover, this heightened awareness did not leave him. A permanent shift, without any effort at all, into what he calls “God-consciousness” caused him to do further reading and research beyond accounts of NDEs into the “once-despised world of mystical literature and spiritual movements”.

But he rejects the notion held by experts in many religious traditions that the path to God-consciousness, or Enlightenment, or Nirvana, or Oneness requires years or even lifetimes of intensive spiritual effort. After all, he’d been handed “the pearl of great price on a plate” without ever seeking it, and found God-consciousness to be quintessentially ordinary and obvious – a feature emphasised by many mystics.

In his case, as in my own, his ‘normal’ life was disrupted at the time of that experience. He had just retired, was abroad, and was poisoned to the point of death.

This intriguing case shows that even atheistic scientists can be pitched from the only reality they think exists, into a dimension outwith ‘normal’ space and time whose eternal existence the mystics of the world have affirmed and documented orally or in written form for milennia.

As the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer wisely puts it :

“These two ways of thinking, the ways of time and history and the way of eternity and timelessness, are both part of  man’s efforts to comprehend the world in which he lives. Neither is comprehended in the other or reducible to it. They are, as we  have learned to say in physics, complementary views, each supplementing the other, neither telling the whole story.”20

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TO BE CONTINUED

Footnotes

16 ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 16

17 ‘Science and the Akashic Field   An Integral Theory of Everything published by Inner Traditions 2004, p 154

18 ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 79

19 Self & Society Vol 29 Number 6   Feb-March 2002 Issue, pp 22-24

20 Stuart Holroyd ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 154, quoting from Lawrence LeShan’s book ‘The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist’

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1400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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Multi-dimensional realities: enter the paranormal!

To read previous installments, click HERE

2. Paranormal experiences: where do they come from?

My view is that we exist as ‘droplets on the wave’ of a vast sea of universal energy which is present everywhere always. Humans could be envisaged as minute packets of energy flashing in and out of existence, contained within the universal matrix. Space, time, matter and energy which allow us to conceptualise our world according to the five physical senses, are features of the dimension in which we think we have our total existence. But this material level is one thin slice of a much more complex multi-dimensional reality.

How complex, has just been theoretically revised yet again! The latest thinking from physics, via M-theory, had been that there may be up to eleven dimensions in all. However, since March 2007, things have taken a newer twist, as mathematicians have revealed, for the first time, the internal secrets of one of the most complicated symmetrical structures ever studied. This 57-dimensional shape, known as E8, has long intrigued academics since it was first devised in the 19th Century. It is suspected that its symmetrical properties might be intimately linked to underlying patterns in creation in some way.

 

 

E 8

 

As reported in the UK’s Sunday Times on November 18th 2007, independent physicist Garrett Lisi “astonished the scientific world” two weeks earlier when he announced he might have found an answer, via contemplation of the newly revealed mathematics of  E8, to the great problem which has defeated scientists including Albert Einstein: that of creating a grand theory of everything. It appears that Lisi’s theories are being taken seriously by the heavyweights of the scientific community. As the Sunday Times’ Steve Farrar so eloquently put it:

“ If Lisi’s calculations are correct, the intimidating beauty of E8 could be the key to uniting all of the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. Science would have an overarching explanation for why the cosmos is the way it is for the first time.”

(Much is made in the article of  39 year old Lisi’s informal career as a surfer and snowboarder. He lives in Lake Tahoe, where California and Nevada meet in the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is clear that the beauty and grandeur of Nature inspires his tireless scientific efforts.)

So there you have it! We may have between eleven and fifty-seven dimensions to play with  – which, to quote William James again,

“…. must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; …. although in the main
their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points……the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘ scientific ‘ bounds. “ 15 (my emphases)

My long time view has been that since paranormal phenomena undoubtedly exist, but cannot be encompassed by the terms of reference of ‘ordinary’ reality, they must take place somewhere, in some space created by the intersecting – for reasons and by mechanisms at present unknown to us – of other levels or dimensions of reality with the material plane on which we live, move and have our being for most ordinary purposes most of the time. I found it hugely helpful to hear Professor Carr express this as his view in his 2007 lecture. Ordinary reality, as he put it, is “a mere slice of a higher dimensional Reality”.

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TO BE CONTINUED

Footnotes

15 “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) Modern Library Edition New York 1994, pp 563-4

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600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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