INTRODUCTION

A LEAP INTO THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

A whole array of psi capacities just bloomed in my life when I started meditating at eighteen years old and soon experienced transcendent states of consciousness. In brief, it was for me a tremendous leap to a higher spiritual state and, as it happened, this leap opened the gates of several types of psi. Among these was the ability to see and communicate with the deceased souls as well as with nature spirits. I could also perceive the energy of consciousness, which I now call syg-energy—meaningful energy, as opposed to matter energy. I could see it not only around people (as auras), but also as rays darting from sacred monuments, syg-energy fields (or syg-fields) bathing sacred places, or imprinted on sacred objects. In contrast with this sudden new perception, some precognitive abilities did appear but developed slowly, emerging in flashes or in dreams; and I had a still-crude telepathic hearing.

From what I observed in many countries I visited at length, telepathy is the most widely distributed of all psi phenomena, being practically innate in some cultures and countries. In India, for example, it stems from the people’s natural ability to enter into high meditative states—fruit of millennia of tradition; just as it is innate for the people of Sub-Sahel Africa to see and talk to the spirits of their deceased parents and relatives and to recount it to their kin. Telepathy is also widespread and developed to a sophisticated level in the United States, but it would be more fair to say that it’s on the rise all over the planet. We are, collectively, in the process of making a leap in consciousness, and sensitive people everywhere are developing all kinds of talents in the range of spirituality, psi, mind-body integration, and self-development.

Call it a leap for us—undergoing that change in our lifetimes—but still, as far as humanity is concerned, it takes a few generations. As it is, the first wave of this leap struck in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it raised the consciousness of all sensitive individuals, irrespective of their age, culture, education, social conditions, and milieu. The awakening process, the trigger, may take as little time as a strong experience, or a few weeks. And it suffices for a person to set for oneself the aim to discover more of their own inner Self and psi capacities, for them to launch their inner path of knowledge. What generates the leap is in fact our own higher Self or soul, and what facilitates and sustains our inner path is to become more and more connected and in sync with our Self and its innate purpose of self-betterment and permanent learning.

In our times of global awakening, and more so with each new generation, it’s often enough to sense that such and such deed or mind feat is possible, for it to emerge spontaneously in our lives. As I came to understand it, you don’t need to believe in anything—you just need to be curious and give it a try, and then you’ll know for yourself. Keep the intent like a polar star in your mind and, when things start happening, test yourself in all kinds of ways you may imagine. Keep the tests and yourself safe, knowing that you could meet success, failure, or else incomprehensible results. Note all the details in a journal, and then try another test. The more fun the test, the more enthusiastic and carefree your mindset (while still remaining focused), and the more chances you’ll have to succeed.

What’s strange in my case is that I had practically no gift, and just a few anomalous experiences, before I started to read ancient spiritual texts and to practice meditation by myself. I would meditate, invent or try some practice on the spur of the moment, only when I felt it to be the perfect thing to do at that moment. (As far as meditation or self-development techniques are concerned, I’m allergic to practicing at precise times and with a preset program.) Not that everything worked out right, but even in the failed tests, or the hardships in my life, there was enormous matter for learning.

The primary focus of this book will be on communicating with the souls of the deceased, and I’ll recount my own experiences as they happened to me, not by chronological order, but by their type. This will allow us to bring in the pertinent research done in this domain, often by notorious psychologists, through field studies and surveys of real-life experiences in the general population, some dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. We’ll discover astonishing data; for example that a 1971 survey found that nearly half of the widows interviewed in several U.S. towns had seen or heard an apparition of their deceased spouse.

Now, there is a new understanding about the Beyond, or soul dimension, that emerges out of the real-life experiences in seeing and communicating with the deceased (we are talking about tens of thousands of cases, most of them well documented and checked by careful investigators). And this is what I’m most interested in discussing and presenting in this book, starting with my own intrusion into that realm of the spirit. In fact, these real-life experiences are literally lifting the veil on the mysterious reality of the dimension of souls—whether that of the deceased living in the Beyond, or that of our own Self able to travel out of our body, or ascend in meditation, and penetrate the hyper-dimension (see fig. I.1).

We can trust those who had such experiences, because these are often at odds with their own beliefs. Practically all researchers stressed that fact. For example, W. F. Barrett, a physicist at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, in his 1926 book Deathbed Visions, had cases of terminally ill children who were astonished to see angels without wings. We can certainly trust the children to express truly what they are perceiving (see for example Dyer and Garnes’s 2015 book, Memories of Heaven). As the renowned psychologist Frederic Myers noted as well, some percipients saw the apparition of a person they didn’t know had died, and believed they were there for real while talking to them, before they just evaporated inexplicably; then they would get the sad news afterward. In other cases, several people present other than the terminally ill patients themselves, such as nurses or parents, had perceived the apparitions of the deceased. Also, we have cases by the thousands of apparitions of living persons, sometimes doing an ad hoc experiment of appearing in their etheric body to a friend far away without having told them beforehand about it; this was the stuff of the monumental collection published as Phantasms of the Living.

Fig. I.1. Unveiling the mystery of the dimension of souls, Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee

Photo by Adarryll Jackson Sr. (www.instagram.com/adarrylljacksonsr)

The most telling information we get from real experiences is that we live in two dimensions at once; we do have, as humans living on Earth, a part of our being that is immaterial and appears mostly in a human form—called etheric body, astral body, energy body, or dreamtime body—and that is able to exit from our biological body and travel or just move instantly through space. And it is also as an immaterial body that the deceased appear most of the time to their living friends or relatives. However, it has been my experience that they appear to us in several ways, and that they choose to do so. We’ll see in my conversation with physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli that he appeared to me as a blob of energy in an apple tree during an hour-long discussion. But then, on introducing his long-term friend Carl Jung, he took suddenly the appearance of a full but small body still within the energy bubble, which became an elongated oval. At the very moment he mentioned Jung and pointed with his hand behind him, Jung appeared at a distance, also as a full but tiny human silhouette within an oval bubble. My father and several visiting scientists appear as a head only, hovering near the ceiling, or near my desk. Whereas some others enter walking by (or through) the door, in a fully dressed dream body, and even sit down on a chair and behave like friendly guests. From this, we can deduce that the etheric body is only an appearance they take so that we may recognize them—and in fact, surveys show that they often don the very clothing they had on the day of their death, or that they used to wear at home. Their real form, in fact, is a field of energy, a syg-field, and they can choose to appear in whichever form they want.

As the most knowledgeable and dedicated researcher in this domain, Frederic Myers, concluded, and as we’ll see throughout this book, the amount of evidence and its astonishing variety point to the deceased being complete personalities, extremely mindful, displaying all the signs of intelligence, reasoning, precise memory, intention, and more often than not, humor. They are full of attention for their loved ones still living, showing love, caring, and often easing things for them (like the example of a deceased mother prodding and helping her daughter to acquire a new medical degree). Their mental capacities encompass the domain we would call supraconscious, because they display a knowledge of the far past and of the future, and a keen understanding of spiritual growth. Yet, as underlined by Myers, their apparitions far outstrip being explained by the psi of the percipients (such as a hallucination just for the sake of becoming conscious of a future event).

However, understanding that yes, after death we keep on living in our very individuality and mindfulness, yet in an immaterial body or form, is far from enough for me.

The nature of this soul dimension that obviously is somehow shared by our etheric body and by the deceased as well, is what I always wanted to understand. And along my very serpentine path of research, I finally came to fathom this soul dimension as a hyperdimension in the universe—the famous 5th dimension featured in the movie Interstellar. The still-rare physicists who have modeled this 5th dimension see it mostly (or solely) as a 4th dimension of space—as a tesseract or hypercube. My own research in cognitive sciences, psi, and transcendental states led me to envision it as a full-fledged cosmic consciousness, on top of being a hyperspace and a hypertime. The conception and the writing of the core of the theory came as an intense visionary and creative state and was completed in eighteen days and filled about a hundred and twenty pages (practically unchanged in the published version). However, two years later, I spent nine months of arduous intellectual work in order to connect my cosmological theory to other physics theories, until its publishing in 2015 as Cosmic DNA at the Origin. And it is during these nine months—and that’s indeed extremely meaningful—that I had very frequent visits from scientists while working at my desk, and we would converse for ten to twenty minutes. They were clearly interested in such a work and theory that could bridge the two dimensions—that of the living (in our 4D matter world) and that of the souls (in their hyperdimension of consciousness).

It was a breakthrough for me when I fully understood that we, the people living on Earth, have a part of our being that is constantly connected to this hyperdimension. And there is more: our Self—the higher consciousness we gain access to in deep meditative and altered states—is bathing and dwelling in it; we also access this soul dimension during the sleep state, and that’s how we get dreams that give us guidance, strength, and an inkling of the future.

The knowledge displayed by the deceased—of world events, of the advancement of their own domain of research, of future events, and about a science and facts still unknown to us—has led me to get, with time passing, a clearer idea about what occupies them in the soul dimension. That, and my curious questions to some of them.

For one, all souls in the hyperdimension are intent on learning and rising to higher domains of frequency/quality of their souls.

The persons who have recently died are mostly busy reviewing their life, sorting out their good and bad deeds, learning from their mistakes, and caring for their loved ones on Earth. Some, more elevated and/or more knowledgeable, are definitely helping the newcomers to go through that preliminary phase of reckoning, more or less prolonged depending on their past life and their willingness to do so. It seems that there are sub-realms in terms of their elevation, or soul-frequency, or depth of understanding and knowledge.

The souls are also interconnected within vast networks according to the domain and path of their quest; just like, through the internet, we form networks of minds connected to specific themes and topics. This would correspond to the alchemist concept of egregore—a collective consciousness field of like-minded persons, with common values and practices. This has been recognized as far as religious creeds, or brotherhoods, or communities or systems of knowledge are concerned (such as the egregore of the Templars). But I believe it’s the way the hyperdimension is organized: around meaning, domains of interest, of research, or of activity.

This was made clear to me on several occasions, especially when, at the end of our conversation, I asked Pauli if he was still in contact with Jung—that’s when he introduced Jung by pointing to him. While gesturing so, Pauli explained, “Of course! We’re always connected. In fact we’re working together!” By this and other discussions, I learned that, at a certainly high level of consciousness, the souls or Selfs are forming vast communities involved in a given frequency-domain^*1 of knowledge and action or dedication.

I came to understand, through my communications with ascended scientists, that the quest for an integration of science with an inner path of spiritual knowledge—what would be in effect a new scientific paradigm generating a new golden-age civilization—was such a vast network in which deceased scholars were in synergy with living researchers and experiencers.

The work of ascended souls is twofold: one, to keep on learning and accessing higher syg-frequencies (and in doing so, interact with alien civilizations having shared values); and two, to steer and support the consciousness leap now happening on Earth. Interestingly, the whole of nature (and not only humanity) is undergoing some type of leap to a higher sentience or consciousness. The leap is reverberating in all the living, not only in animals, but also in all natural systems on Earth, including rocks and crystals.

Thus, according to their specific domain, for example psychology or physics, the ascended souls would befriend the Selfs of the researchers who are the most promising in their own judgment and give them support, guidance, and help. And the same would go for the souls dedicated to saving the environment, for musicians and artists, and so forth.

This picture of a hyperdimension—in which the souls of the deceased are not only individualized but supraconscious, intent on pursuing their own research and spiritual path—is what some skeptics as well as some conservative religious authorities would too readily dismiss as an afterlife rosy tale. But it’s not the case. Not only does this outlook on the spiritual dimension stem from numerous real-life experiences, but it is further supported by several domains of scientific investigation that we’ll also explore—beyond the apparitions of the deceased, the out-of-body experiences (OBE), the near-death experiences (NDE), and memories from dead-brain episodes; finally, it is also corroborated by psi capacities (totally anomalous as to the 4D matter laws), by the visions of mystics, and by heightened states of consciousness.

Let’s just remember that Christian priests, along the centuries of the Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth century, were mostly intent—in their religious teachings—on raising the fear of hell and on stressing in minute details the torments endured by the “sinners” (a category that included all non-Christians); and theirs was also a belief in the saints enjoying paradise for eternity in such a way that I wouldn’t consider it anything but horrendously boring even for an afternoon.

My approach is not bound to a specific belief system but rather to real experiences that I and other authentic questers have lived. In fact, my path of knowledge, since I was an adolescent, has been, through extensive immersive travels, to tread many cultural and spiritual paths and learn as much as I can from these different world-visions and practices. My approach is as much a yogic one as a phenomenological one: learn from real experiences, strive to attain glimpses into the soul dimension by meditating and self-development techniques; then analyze and compare various occurrences, sort out their common traits, and only then look for the more global picture.

As I said, it’s often enough to know that something is possible, and how someone else has achieved it (ongoing mistakes and failures included), to open for you a path of exploration and to make it a new potential in your life. This is why I want to share with you some of my real-life experiences, and how we can weave them into a coherent framework. I confess that I also love to ponder these anomalous happenings that befell me and I delight in recounting these stories, because often, when I do that, another facet of these experiences is illuminated, especially when comparing them. Expect from me no lies, no embellishment, and no masking of failures, that’s all I can promise. I can’t promise to tell you all, even in this specific domain, for a whole range of reasons. But I hope to make inroads progressively. As for what I can’t tell clearly at the moment, the most productive way to ponder these weird domains at the fringe of our collective knowledge is certainly through science fiction, in a casual and imaginative way.

Have fun and don’t restrain yourself from a bit of experimentation.