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The Theory
A young couple take a moonlight walk along a private beach. They stop, gaze up at the night sky, and see something they will never forget. From out of nowhere, a strange, spherelike object radiating a brilliant white light appears directly overhead. To the couple's astonishment it changes to a triangular shape in a fraction of a second; then moments later, like the Cheshire cat, it just vanishes. But how? Where did it come from, and go? And how can a solid object change into a completely different shape instantaneously?
UFO sightings like this, though this one is of the stranger variety, are not rare. They demonstrate the most startling aspect of the entire phenomenon: UFOs violate—transcend—the world of space as we know it, leading some of the world's most renowned researchers to conjecture that UFOs come from beyond our space, from a larger space-time continuum, of which ours is just a part. Moreover, many physicists now also suspect there are more than three dimensions of space. In fact, extra-dimensional theories are the hottest new topic to emerge in theoretical physics in over fifty years.
A high-school girl has a terrifying dream the night before a field trip. In it she sees a bus full of classmates in a bad accident in which one of her friends is injured. Shaken by the realness of the premonition, she refuses to go on the trip and warns her friend. But her warning is not heeded, dismissed as silly, and the accident happens just as she saw it.
Psychic phenomena such as this not only violate our normal idea of space, but our idea of time itself. How can this be? Can our time also be just part of a larger world of time? It seems that to understand the paranormal at its deepest level, we must first acknowledge, as many researchers now do, that we need a new, broader framework of space and time—a new worldview.
Amazingly, only about five hundred years ago the standing worldview was still that of a flat Earth. Only about four hundred years ago, it was that the Earth was the center of the universe, that all the stars and planets revolved around it. By now you can see that our problem has always been underestimating the size of the universe and overly exaggerating our place in it. But a revolution, of sorts, followed. About 350 years ago, Newton had it all figured out. The universe was like a giant machine of three dimensions of space plus time, the workings of which he described in breathtakingly precise terms. But then in the early 1900s, Einstein showed that there was another variable that must be included in any depiction of space and time, and on equal footing: consciousness.
Two thousand years ago, a lonely figure in a distant land has a sudden explosion of consciousness, the effects of which will transform the world forever. He realizes, knows directly with a new kind of consciousness, that everyone and everything in the world, indeed the world itself, is just part of a larger reality, a virtual “kingdom” by comparison with ours. He begins to teach, as all religious giants have, that beyond our space and time, beyond the limitations of normal consciousness, exists a vaster reality, which can only be known with another, expanded consciousness. Yet the real significance of this has been ignored ever since. For Einstein clearly demonstrated that space, time, and consciousness are interwoven, in effect dependent on one another. But even with the recent interest in expanding our space-time structure, the fact that consciousness itself must be likewise expanded has been completely overlooked, until now.
A New York City police detective lies dying amid the carnage of a drug bust gone haywire. But as his consciousness slowly fades, suddenly it is lifted up out of his body, then through a kind of tunnel to another place, another world. His consciousness now somehow enlarged, he “knows” with a new type of sense. He becomes aware of a larger self and reality, one his normal state had never allowed him to see. Stranger still, here old ideas of space and time are suspended, transformed into a different, larger structure he cannot quite grasp. where am I? Is this what it's like to die? he wonders. Not bad. But it is not yet his time. Suddenly, the expansion of consciousness halts, begins to contract, and he descends back to his original state. He will recover, but never again think of the world in the same way.
And neither must we. For every time our worldview has changed—been expanded—it has been for the same reason. There are conflicting data that cannot be incorporated into the old model, which must then be broadened to accommodate them. The conflicting data now are reports of the paranormal. We either need a still broader model that can include them, or, as the diehard defenders of every worldview always propose, we can simply ignore them and maintain the status quo. But that is becoming harder to do; reports of paranormal experiences have reached astonishing proportions. There are now over 100,000 UFO reports on file worldwide, and a 1998 Gallup poll showed eight percent of Americans, about 20 million people, claim to actually have seen one.
Furthermore, there are now thousands of people who claim to have been “abducted” even taken beyond our space-time, by aliens. The number of psychic experiences has been estimated at over 50 million worldwide. Another Gallup survey (1999) found 46 percent of subjects reporting “an unusual or inexplicable spiritual experience.” Just a few profound mystical experiences have given birth to every religion known to Man. The International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) reports that 14 million people in the United States may have had a near-death experience.
Einstein pointed out that it takes only one contradictory fact to demolish a scientific theory. So if just one of these accounts is true and our current space-time framework cannot explain it, we need another, broader framework that can. This I shall bring forward as the extra-dimensional universe theory.
Our world is part of a larger, extra-dimensional one; that is, our world has an extra dimension of space. We do not detect this extra dimension because it is hidden and included in our concept of time. But it can be detected, naturally and effortlessly, by expanded consciousness. Let me explain.
There are three distinct levels of consciousness on Earth: sensation, simple consciousness, and self-consciousness. The first two have, over the course of many millions of years, evolved to the third, higher level. Each has its own framework of space-time. Take a snail as an example of the first. It lives in a world of one dimension of space plus time. The other two dimensions of space all around it are translated, by its faculty of sensation, into one dimension of space or time.
But a higher animal like the dog, with a higher faculty and simple consciousness, mentally extracts from time another dimension of space and lives in a larger world of two dimensions of space plus time. Get the picture? Time is a collection of extra dimensions of space either not apprehended, or imperfectly apprehended; each level of consciousness sees them bit by bit, moving constantly past, fused with time. So it is with the dog and the third dimension. His simple consciousness translates the third dimension of space into either one of the other two, or time.
But we have a higher mental faculty still, self-consciousness. By virtue of it we've extracted yet another dimension of space from time, or put another way, extracted from the transcendental or paranormal aspect of reality yet another normal aspect. We live in a world of three dimensions of space plus time. The question is: is there still a higher faculty, one that can extract another dimension of space from our time? And if so, would our paranormal, in this expanded framework, then become the normal?
There is such a fourth level of consciousness, evolving slowly in our race, tortuously so over eons, as all other faculties have before it. It goes hand in hand with the apprehension of a fourth dimension of space extracted from time. A brief taste of this faculty is the mystical experience in which one's consciousness expands into and realizes a broader continuum of space and time. Lesser glimpses of the faculty, just a bit of it at any one time, are psychic intuitions such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. (How one can then “see” the future will become clear shortly.) This higher faculty conceives in a fashion beyond sensation, simple- and self-consciousness, logic, concepts, and even language. This is why those who have paranormal experiences have such a hard time describing how they “know” All they can say is, “I just know.” And still other traces of this higher faculty are responsible for other kinds of psychic phenomena, such as psychokinesis, poltergeists, healings, and apparitions.
Now what if a race of beings on another planet has acquired this faculty completely? They would be like gods to us, as far above us as we are above animals. They would live in a different, larger world of space-time. Using that extra dimension, they could perform feats that seem like magic to us, coming and going into and out of our space at will, and abducting humans into that realm as easily as we, by using the third dimension, could snatch a bug from the surface of a pond. This is the alien consciousness behind the UFO mystery, which we'll meet face-to-face in the abduction phenomenon.
Finally, if our world is just part of a larger world, then each of us in turn must have a larger self that resides in that world. This becomes apparent in the near-death experience, when normal consciousness, all but faded out, awakens to the realization of its larger self in extra-dimensional space. These people know there is an existence beyond our normal space and time. They have been there. This is also why they no longer fear death: they know it is not the end.
The point is this. There are no UFO phenomena per se, no psychic phenomena, no near-death phenomena, and no mystical phenomena. There is just a reality phenomenon. Our world is enveloped in a larger one, the workings of which are beyond our senses and level of consciousness, and so these workings when encountered are treated as paranormal. But in the broader scope of extra-dimensional theory, they are in fact quite normal. To clearly see how this is so, we must first examine all our preconceived notions of space, time, and consciousness and put them to rout. We'll look at the building blocks of our scientific worldview and watch them quiver, shake, and give way under the glare of the new light. Then, these obstructions removed from our view, we can see at last the true vastness of the universe, the supernatural laid bare as the natural, and our old world and selves as just shadows cast by the greater world and life beyond.
The history of Man shows that we have continually overstated our position in the universe, not only by underestimating its size, but also by regarding our location as its absolute focal point. It was at first a tremendous blow to our ego to accept that the Earth was not the center of the entire cosmos. What we must now accept is that Man is no more the center of the conscious or psychical world than he is of the physical world. Our world may appear to have three dimensions of space plus time, but watch what happens….