To see reality is as simple as to see one's face in a mirror. Only the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all the levels, is needed to reflect the reality. Be clear and quiet, alert and detached, all else will happen by itself.
—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That
There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.
—Deepak Chopra
On a daily basis, we are bombarded with news stories about people hurting other people, destroying the environment, and doing harm to other creatures. Greed, selfishness, narcissism, and violence are the order of the day. It often seems that it is each man for himself. We live in a bubble of our own separateness, groping and grabbing for what we can get before the other guy gets it all.
Over the last year and a half, both authors of this book lost loved ones. In Marie's case, her father passed away after a long battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). In Larry's case, both his father and mother left this level of the Grid within months of each other. Through our grief and mutual attempts to understand and recalibrate our lives after such significant losses, we both realized something important: We were receiving messages from our loved ones on the other side.
In Marie's case, Larry knew the exact moment of her father's death and actually tried to call and text her at that very same moment, asking her if she was OK. It was approximately 12:30 in the afternoon, and Marie wouldn't find out until hours later that her father had died at that very time. How did Larry know, at exactly 12:30, to try to call and text Marie? Why did he feel an overwhelming sense of doom and a “disturbance in the force,” enough so that Marie actually was prompted to inquire about her father's health and discover that he had indeed died?
Larry's parents died within months of each other. His experiences since then have given him the firm conviction that his beloved mother and father not only are still around on some level, but are also letting him know that on a regular basis through signs and deeds that only he can identify.
Of course, these personal experiences alone are not proof of the existence of life after death or anything else, but for the authors it was enough to go on and begin the healing process. Sometimes enough circumstantial evidence finally changes your mind and reconciles your beliefs with your experiences. That personal experience is what changes you, not the scientific journal articles and reports from clinical lab experiments that prove fact from fiction. When it happens to you, you know.
The Grid is real. And not only is it real, but we are an intrinsic and important part of it.
Much of the suffering we experience as humans comes from a feeling of separation from the bigger picture—oftentimes even from ourselves. War, murder, rape, abuse, poverty, torture, neglect . . . these actions and behaviors would be mostly eradicated if we understood that everyone is connected at this deeper, implicate level, and that we never end, and therefore death is not something to fear but rather celebrate as another part of the continuum. Who would care who was a liberal or a conservative, Jew or Christian if we knew that we were on a deeper level the same person, made of the same stuff? Why would we waste time fighting and railing against other people, even our environment, if we truly realized that we were a part of everyone, and everything?
How much more peace would we feel in our hearts if we knew that no one ever perished and that life went on, albeit somewhere other than our level of reality, and that our loved ones who have passed on would be there waiting? How much more happiness could we achieve if we slowed down the frantic grab for more, more, more, knowing that this life is just one among many that we get to experience? How much more love would we give if we knew other people couldn't really be taken from us?
Knowledge of the Grid could change not just how we see our world, but how we see ourselves. Reality, dear friends, would never be the same again. The Grid concept isn't by any measure the first or the last to suggest this, but we feel that giving a powerful visual context to the theory of connectivity and multileveled realities helps people to wrap their minds around something far too intimidating otherwise. Like infinity. Or love . . .
We know that we are immersed in these other realities. Too many signposts point to such a conclusion. Think of the microcosmic world of microbes and the teeming life that is visible only with the aid of a powerful microscope. Invisible to the naked eye, there is a reality that has its own rules and laws and order and we cannot see it until we specifically do something to perceive it, such as look through the lens of a scope. This applies as well to the macrocosmic reality of the universe beyond our visible eye, where black holes are churned out and fiery galaxies form and planets and stars are birthed. We see none of this, unless we look through the “eyes” of the Hubble Space Telescope or other such devices that allow us to see what we cannot unaided. And even our most amazing telescopes can barely glimpse into the farthest distances of the known universe, so we must then only imagine what lies beyond its confining boundaries.
What of other worlds? Other realities? Can we say they are not there because we cannot see them or prove their existence? Humans are not able to see many levels of the visual spectrum of light, such as X-rays or gamma rays, or hear levels of the audio spectrum, such as infrasound and ultrasound. We don't see what other creatures see, or hear what they hear, yet do we deem their experiences “unreal”? Because it is not a part of our daily routine, we shun it as being less than real to us, yet it is still real whether we like it or not.
Maybe it's an innate human arrogance that keeps us holding on to the sense of being special and separate from everything around us, even the unseen. If so, this arrogance certainly does not serve our best interests. It keeps us in fear. Fear of our own greatness, fear of others, even fear of death itself. Our level of the Grid has become our personal and collective comfort zone. But only when we get those glimpses of other realities are we able to grow and expand our vision of what is possible not only for us, but for humanity, for the planet and everything on it as well. Imagine knowing that we have access to worlds where we can speak to the “dead” or see creatures and life-forms that do not exist here on Earth, or possess the ability to know a person's thoughts and see things from great distances. Imagine knowing that nothing is permanent, but only in this level, and that people we love live on forever as they travel about the Grid.
Imagine realizing that our mundane existence means so much more than we thought it did, and that the world we have boxed ourselves into is actually much grander and more diverse than we could have ever imagined.
Better still, imagine that we are the Grid and the Grid is us, all of us combined, and we can access parts of it at will any time we want with a little knowledge, practice, and understanding of how these other levels intersect with ours, and what the triggers and mechanisms are that allow us to connect to them.
As stated in the introduction of this book, the Grid is a concept, an idea, a theory awaiting validation from our own continued research and that of countless others. We don't pretend to truly have valid proof of our version of reality, let alone the many other levels that likely exist. We don't have the mathematical ratios that will describe the physics behind it all, or the laboratory results of hundreds of experiments. But we do have the foundation of a collective body of ideas that affirms the one stunning conclusion that there is a hidden order to things. What we do believe is that we have presented an intriguing case of circumstantial evidence and valid ideas that provide food for thought. Actually, not just food, but a feast, ready to be consumed and digested.
The concepts that we have presented align with so many other concepts and theories, both metaphysical and scientific, and yes, even paranormal, that all seek to define and describe an infrastructure for what cannot yet be seen, yet is sensed and known and experienced by so many people throughout the ages. Our hope is to continue looking for the connectors, triggers, and mechanisms and discover how it all works together to create the Grid, and our role in its evolution. Each week, exciting new discoveries add to the discussion and dialog as more scientists look for the same connective web, whether those discoveries occur at the most cutting-edge particle physics labs or out in the field in nature. Every field of science has its share of clues to offer, its pieces of the puzzle of what reality is and how it might operate. From quantum physics to biology to neuroscience to geology, the world we live in is teeming with clues which all seem to point to similar conclusions.
Religion, spirituality, metaphysics, and the new emerging science of noetics are also seeking to define this until-now indescribable fundamental truth that reality is not a singular thing and that it actually has a form, albeit a hidden one, and a method to its madness. That method is evident in the effects we experience all around us, even if we cannot yet see the cause. It's like gravity, as we said before. We feel the effects of gravity every moment of every day, but we can't see it or hold it in the palms of our hands. And yet, we know that it exists.
The infrastructure of reality is like gravity. It leaves tons of clues for us to piece together, but we have to open ourselves up to perceiving those clues and not brush them under the rug of “junk science” or “pseudo mysticism” simply because nobody can tape them up on a wall or duplicate them at will in a controlled, clinical setting.
Many people reading this book have seen the Grid, even experienced a few of its many levels. Well, maybe they haven't “seen” the Grid in the way we are used to seeing things. It's almost as if, when it comes to the Grid, we have to sense our way around it using modes of perception that go far beyond our eyes, ears, and other body parts. Even our brains are not enough. Something more points us to the evidence of these other realities, and something more experiences them and processes them as something incredibly important, yet utterly frustrating in their subjectivity. And if you ask anyone who has been out Gridwalking, they will tell you this. In fact, some even see an actual grid-like structure in their visions, dreams, and mind's eye! Several people reached out to us to inform us of their visions during the writing of this book, citing imagery of an actual three-dimensional grid they envisioned in a dream or altered state of consciousness.
This intricate, connected thing that keeps us all bound by hidden web strings, this amazing multidimensional field of all matter and form and ideas and information and possibility and potential, this entirety of structure seen and unseen, this holographic image of which we are each a complete yet separate piece, this massive skyscraper with its many floors and staircases and elevators, this thing we call the Grid, we believe it is real, and we are part of it, and we are walking it every day during our waking state, our sleep state, and all states in between. We are all the Grid, swimming like fish in an ocean so vast we cannot even sense the scope of its magnitude.
We all too often believe only what we can see. Maybe all it takes to see the Grid is a slight shift in perspective, that one day very soon might reveal the hard evidence needed to close this case once and for all and release us from the limiting belief that “this is all there is.” Sometimes we have to believe it first in order to open up the part of us that can see it. We cannot put the cart before the horse.
Faith. It's a funny word, as it usually implies a religious connotation. But when it comes to the invisible order of existence, even the most brilliant scientists have had the faith to accept the possibility that the small piece of knowledge that we humans can lay claim to is in no way the extent of the knowledge itself.
Just because you are one piece of the puzzle does not mean that you know the vastness and expansiveness of the entire puzzle. Not until you find your place in the interlocking scheme of things will you, or any of us, truly understand what the bigger picture truly is.
Happy Gridwalking!
Figure 15. A version of the gridmap we used to look at the infrastructure, connectors, triggers, and mechanisms of the Grid. Courtesy of Larry Flaxman and Marie D. Jones