3

Levels of Consciousness

“I think, therefore I am,” said the philosopher,1 and this is now a common expression. But what does this mean? How do we think? We probably don't give it much “thought.”

We're all conscious. But what is consciousness? Are there different kinds? How do animals think? Do they? And if they don't, does that mean they don't exist? Why should we care how a dog thinks? Or a snail? What does this have to do with the paranormal or space and time? They obviously live in the same space-time world we do. It seems logical. But they don't! We all live in different ones, and yet the same, larger one. Illogical? Yes, but true. I'll show you. In the largest, extra-dimensional world, our logic becomes absurdity, absurdity becomes higher logic, and the paranormal becomes the normal.

In 1872, Richard Maurice Bucke, a prominent Canadian doctor, was visiting friends in England when he had an experience that would forever change his life and his outlook on consciousness. The event is described here by Bucke, writing of himself in the third person.

He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom. His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive, enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around, as it were, by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city. The next [instant] he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards there came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of the Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all…He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return, that night or at any other time, of the experience.2

This account is fairly typical of the mystical or religious experience. Bucke, a student of the human mind, reasoned it had nothing to do with mysticism or religion as such. He considered it, psychologically, as a new mental state yet unrecognized by science.

He searched through available literature to find signs of the same state in others, and found them in the writings of the Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, Edward Carpenter, William Blake, Walt Whitman, and others. What struck him was that all of these men, living in different times and cultures, had basically the same vision of reality when endowed with this new sense, even though it was given various names such as nirvana, ecstasy, Christ, the Spirit, the Father, and Gabriel. Bucke concluded that these experiences of illumination were initiations to a higher, distinct form of consciousness—a new faculty. He eventually wrote a book, Cosmic Consciousness, published in 1901, in which he set down what he believed to be the meaning of it all. Bucke's theory, as outlined in his now classic work, is as follows:

There are four grades or levels of mental function in our world, lower gradually evolving into the higher. The first is sensation, found in lower animals; the second is simple consciousness, found in higher animals; the third is self-consciousness, possessed by humans; and the fourth is a state Bucke called “cosmic consciousness” a level as far above Man's self-consciousness as that is above the animals' simple consciousness.

Bucke argued that consciousness is a sense constantly evolving in all life, and this evolution is marked by spectacular leaps at key points. When a species reaches a certain threshold in its mental development, a distinctly higher form of consciousness will spontaneously manifest itself in a few individuals—the best of the lot—and with the passing of generations it will become more and more frequent until it is finally possessed by the entire species. Thus our descendants as a race will at some point reach cosmic consciousness, just as our ancestors progressed from simple to self-consciousness.

The main feature of cosmic consciousness is its completely different way of knowing, by direct union with the life and order of the cosmos. Bucke said: “Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception [a vision] in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe.”3 This knowledge is so profound and so sweeping that just the briefest flash of it gives one a perspective which never can be obtained by ordinary means; those who have seen it feel compelled to share it, pass it down as best they can in the form of teachings and writings, and in this way accelerate the progress of the race toward the same end. Bucke wrote:

The trait that distinguishes these people from other men is this: Their spiritual eyes have been opened and they have seen. The better known members of this group, who, were they collected together, could be accommodated all at one time in a modern drawing-room, have created all the great modern religions, beginning with Taoism and Buddhism, and speaking generally, have created, through religion and literature, modern civilization. Not that they have contributed any large numerical proportion of the books which have been written, but they have produced the few books which have inspired the larger number of all that have been written in modern times. These men dominate the last twenty-five, especially the last five, centuries as stars of the first magnitude dominate the midnight sky.4

Though not as famous as the others from this group, Bucke may well have written just such a book. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, in my opinion, is another. Together they helped inspire my own work. Bucke's genius was to put higher consciousness, and the mystical and religious experience, in a simple evolutionary context, that of a fourth stage of normal conscious function. Ouspensky's was to begin to add frameworks of space and time to these stages. Now let's put their views and mine together.

 

Picture this idyllic scene: It's a sunny spring day in New England, and a young boy, Mark, sits in his backyard with his favorite playmate, a little terrier incongruously named Samson. But Samson is preoccupied; he too has a playmate, a snail he has excitedly discovered. Each of these three creatures represents a separate stage of mental evolution, the first three as described by Bucke: sensation, by a lower animal—the snail; simple consciousness, by a higher animal—Samson the dog; and self-consciousness, by Mark, a human. As you picture this scene, it is obviously in three dimensions of space plus time, as it would be for Mark. But how would it be for Samson or the snail? Entirely different.

The snail lives in a world of one dimension of space plus time. Like the very first creatures on Earth capable of receiving information of the outside world, the snail receives all such information as sensations—and these lie along one axis, pleasure-pain. Every input registers somewhere along this scale, with those at one end of it exciting him to one set of instinctive reactions, and those at the opposite end to others. Everything else in the world exists for him in time.

It is obvious to us as we picture the snail crawling along the ground, and to Mark as he watches it, that the snail is a three-dimensional creature in a three-dimensional world. But the snail with his sensation is only aware of one dimension, and even this one he senses as just one point at a time. The space on the ground he has already covered does not exist for him anymore because it as it can no longer impart sensation to him; similarly for the space ahead of him. They belong to his past and future; they exist only in time. The space above, below, and to the sides of the snail will never exist for him, as it can never excite his sensation. That is, though there are three dimensions of space around him, the snail's idea of space, like a being in a line world, is only along the one dimension where sensation occurs for him.

Samson plays with the snail. He touches it with his paw, then his snout, and the snail recoils in pain. Mark reaches out with a stick and touches it; again it recoils the same way. The snail can't tell the difference in the causes. If Mark and Samson touch it at the same time, he will feel only one sensation—the most intense one. How limited its world is. For the snail as subject must find any object (that which imparts sensation) indistinguishable from the sensation itself. At least this lowly creature has no problem with cause and effect as they are one and the same for it.

The snail may not be traveling in a straight line, but his space is as straight a dimension as his linear method of apprehending it. The other two dimensions of space are presented to him in time, sensed as a fragment when motion through them, such as a paw, snout, or stick, intersects his dimension of sensation. Motion in two- and three-dimensional space are translated by his limited mental faculty into either sensation or time.

Now imagine that the snail were somehow able to formulate a worldview. What could it be? Only this: Space is the one dimension or line where all sensations or objects exist. Sensations vary in intensity along this axis as pleasure or pain; only this distinguishes them from each other. Time is the separation between these sensations and the intervals by which they change.

Such was the world of the first creatures on Earth, which the snail still represents. But, gradually and painstakingly, over eons and many generations, the central nervous systems of these lower animals grew more refined. More cells were added to their sense organs and nerve ganglia, and finally their capacity to register sensations became so broad and so defined that they could perceive several sensations at once and combine them into a larger reception.

What this means is that, by the sense of sight, smell, and hearing, several impressions or images could now be combined at one time into one picture, as in a composite photograph. As these animals continued to evolve, more impressions could be included, simple sensation now openly blossoming into consciousness. These animals, instead of experiencing the world as a series of points along a line, could now clearly apprehend lines and surfaces and the difference between them. They have, by virtue of this new and higher faculty, mentally extracted another dimension of space from what was previously time, extracted by perceiving from the transcendental part of reality another perceived part.

Such animals can now sense two dimensions of space instead of one and can see at once that which before took time to see. For example, Samson relents, the snail reaches its hole, and decides to inspect it. But he must do it point by point, and this takes time. Not for Samson though. He sees the hole, its lines, angles, the whole surface of it as it is, at once.

Let's keep the animals on hold and for comparison see how Mark thinks. Then we'll have a better idea of what Samson and other higher animals' worldview might be, and why.

Mark, like all humans, is self-conscious. Yet he wasn't born that way. In his first few years he actually had just simple consciousness, much like Samson. But at about age three, something remarkable happened. Suddenly, he became aware of something different, apart from, his environment. He became aware of himself, an “I” separate from everything else in the world. This is the foundation of self-consciousness, the concept of self, after which all other concepts are gradually added. The animal senses and knows things; in fact, his senses are usually more acute than ours. But he does not know that he knows; he is aware of his surroundings, but not of himself. Call Samson's name and he responds emotionally to the recognizable tone, the inflection of the voice. But he does not know that he is Samson or that he even “is.” He is immersed in his simple consciousness like a figure in a portrait, a fish in the sea. But Mark, with the onset of self-consciousness, can mentally step outside his environment, become aware of distinction and self, and utter those words, “I am.”

This is how it happened in an evolutionary scheme as well. Over many millions of years animals with simple consciousness evolved and became capable of ever sharper, more distinct impressions. Eventually, a breakthrough was made. The best specimens of the most advanced species—primitive apish creatures—finally acquired the ability to hold an impression of something in mind even when it was no longer there. Now it could be labeled and communicated to another by a sign or gesture. Of course the first one was “I” then “you,” and after this probably the elements of most immediate concern, such as food, water, danger. These are all concepts that represent something in the outside world, mental images formed from sensory images. Bucke describes a concept as “a recept (impression) marked with a sign which stands for it—just as a check stands for a piece of baggage or as an entry in a ledger stands for a piece of goods.”5

Of course with concepts comes language, a natural consequence of self-consciousness. Language is the expression of concepts by means of mutually understood sounds or symbols, while thought is the silent evaluation of them. Over the course of time, these concepts are organized into logic, mathematics, philosophy, religion, science, and worldviews.

Conceptual thought and communication are made possible by the fact that each concept or sign relates to something different, as opposed to other concepts. Of course by being aware of degrees of difference, we are also aware of degrees of likeness. All concepts, in fact, signify what they do by virtue of their difference from and similarity to others, and when two or more objects seem sufficiently similar, we can fashion them into a more generalized concept—plurals.

Now, back to Samson and his world with, first of all, no plurals. He perceives differences between objects, but here with the sense of first impression his classification ends. He cannot mentally group any of them together, i.e., one man and another are completely different and he can never imagine that they have a general similarity as men. Ouspensky spoke of this in Tertium Organum.

The logic of animals will differ from ours, first of all, from the fact that it will not be general. It will exist separately for each case, for each perception. Common properties, class properties, and the generic and different signs of categories will not exist for animals. Each object will exist in and by itself, and all its properties will be the specific properties of it alone.

This house and that house are entirely different objects for an animal, because one is its house and the other is a strange house.6

Ouspensky then imagines animals beginning to dimly sense our logic, and how completely absurd and ineffable it would seem to them.

Let us imagine that to the animal with the rudimentary logic expressing its sensations: This is this.

That is that.

This is not that.

Somebody tries to prove that two different objects, two houses—its own and a strange one—are similar; that they represent one and the same thing, that they are both houses. The animal will never credit this similarity. For it the two houses, its own, where it is fed, and the strange one, where it is beaten if it enters, will remain entirely different. There will be nothing in common in them for it, and the effort to prove to it the similarity of these two houses will lead to nothing until it senses this itself. Then, sensing confusedly the idea of the likeness of two different objects, and being without concepts, the animal will express this as something illogical from its own point of view. The idea, this and that are similar objects, the articulate two-dimensional being will translate into the language of its logic, in the shape of the formula: this is that; and of course will pronounce it an absurdity, and that the sensation of the new order of things leads to logical absurdities. But it will be unable to express that which it senses in any other way.7

A snail, with just sensation, lives in a world of one dimension of space plus time, even though there are three all around him. A dog, with simple consciousness, lives in a world of two dimensions of space plus time, even though there are three all around him. That is, the dog, though constantly in contact with and actually able to sense a third dimension of space, can deal with only two at once; the third is sensed by him in time.

For example: Mark walks through his yard to a wooden box, and Samson, the snail now gone, follows. Samson wants to inspect it, yet he must do so in much the same way that the snail inspected his hole, bit by bit. Samson starts with one side, the front, let's say, and sees a two-dimensional surface. But as he moves around it to the side, and sees another one, the idea of the first surface has left his mind; it is now in his past. He hasn't the faculty to keep the first one in mind in its absence as a concept and thus be able to combine it mentally with the others into a three-dimensional image of a box. To mentally grasp any one surface, he must mentally let go of the last one. Without conceptual thought, Samson's world is one of constantly changing surfaces.

That is, although his world is three-dimensional, the dog sees only two at any given time—surfaces—and the third is represented to him as motion. How do we know this? Because this is exactly what we see. We see only surfaces with the eye, but our minds, by practicing from infancy, can visualize three-dimensional solids in the brain. Look around you. If you see a box, table, chair, or house, the reflected light from them forms two-dimensional images in the eyes, that are then combined into a three-dimensional image in the brain. John Ross of the University of Australia said in Scientific American, March 1976: “The visual system in effect constructs three-dimensional scenes from the two-dimensional images formed on the retinas by fitting the visual information into a conceptual framework.” ⁸

The key word is “conceptual,” for it is the faculty of self-consciousness that makes this possible. It allows for the refinement of a skill that has developed so gradually and naturally we take it for granted. You probably don't remember that as a baby you constantly reached out to feel any and all objects around you. A picture of a ball and a real ball, a surface and a solid, were the same at first. But you groped for and felt its third dimension and started to acquire an idea of how such objects must be, must look. That's how you began to see them. The animal, however, lacking this ability to mentally compensate for distorted two-dimensional images, sees everything just as it appears to be. Just as to see the third dimension requires a higher function of mind, to see an extra one requires a still higher function.

The animal learns much of what it does know by attaching emotional colors or tones to situations and objects. It is gradually able to function in the world by building up a large inventory of such associations, one for every object, person, or event. Many animals display remarkable prowess in certain physical acts, which makes it appear that they possess depth perception, but this is due to their primal instinctual programming and is not a mental assessment of the situation.

So, just what kind of mental assessment of the world would an animal like Samson have? He would think that the world consists of surfaces encountered in space plus time. And what surfaces! For only when he is at rest and there is no motion around him do these surfaces stay put. But if he or anything around him moves, the surfaces begin to display all kinds of bizarre and complicated motions: twisting, turning, expanding, contracting, narrowing, appearing, and disappearing. Take Samson for a ride in the car and he is mesmerized. He sees the surfaces of houses twisting about, trees turning around, and the panorama in a whirl of motion we know to be illusory.

Back on solid ground, a cube, plane, sphere, or circle look the same to him; only upon approaching them do they seem different, as their surfaces spin differently. To Samson, the motion of lines and surfaces is hopelessly complicated and incomprehensible. He must take each situation as it comes and rely on his instincts and store of emotional responses for guidance. The third dimension of solids is sensed by him as motion, completely embedded in his idea of time.

His idea of cause and effect is just as strange, based on conditioning. If Mark always rings a bell before he serves Samson his food, Samson will associate the bell as the cause, like Pavlov's dogs. If the bell accidentally falls to the floor and rings (with no dinner to follow), Samson will be perplexed but ignore this violation of causality. If the sequence of events is abandoned, Samson's previous idea of cause and effect will dissolve and eventually reform with new information.

The limited space-time worlds of the snail and the dog are direct consequences of their limited levels of mental function. It may not be easy to accept that our space-time world is likewise limited by our level of consciousness, or that our laws (based on observed consistencies) likewise represent a sort of conditioning, but to understand the paranormal we must, or else we will be just like Pavlov's dogs: when violations of our laws happen, we will ignore them; they can't be, so they aren't.

We have mentally extracted a third dimension of space from time with self-consciousness, and since the third dimension is that which connects two-dimensional surfaces, we can connect these surfaces mentally with depth perception. With self-consciousness we also have concepts. We start with only one—self—but accumulate them throughout our life; in fact, our mind becomes a kaleidoscope of concepts. When we store them, it's memory; compare them, it's reason; communicate them, language; make a science of them, logic; and quantify them, mathematics. Of course, everyone's conceptual mind works a little differently. Bucke says: “The large intellect is that in which the number of concepts is above the average; the fine intellect is that in which these are clear cut and well defined; the ready intellect is that in which they are easily and quickly accessible when wanted, and so on.”9

Yet overall, as humankind has progressed from generation to generation, our minds encompass an ever growing number of concepts, more complex ones, and sometimes entirely new ones. In fact, in an evolutionary scheme, it seems the mind has built up concepts in much the same way as lower forms of life built up brain cells and impressions. These concepts are continually broadened and unified in the subconscious, which is not particularly concerned with space and time, cause and effect, or logic. It is here that the mind's evolution toward a higher state takes place.

If the waking consciousness, self-consciousness, with all its habits, desires, attachments, and predisposed views of the world, is caught temporarily quiescent and off guard, the subconscious may superimpose a new vision of reality over and above it by extracting an extra dimension from time. Of course this would happen at first only sporadically, in the best specimens of the race, and when they are at their best, in the prime of life. Bucke proposed that the humans with the best prospects to achieve cosmic consciousness are those with exceptional mental, physical, and moral development. In fact, he rates the moral aspect as most important, and a balance of the three next.

Now it comes, a flash of cosmic consciousness and those feelings of peace and joy, the light, that staggering sense of oneness, that higher way of knowing that supersedes our normal conceptual thought, logic, and mathematics, rendering them obsolete. What is this higher way of thought? Can we imagine it? Can we conceive of a logic where 2 + 2 does not equal 4? Ouspensky could—he called it “transfinite” logic and mathematics.

Imagine it's the first day of school and there are two different classrooms on two different planets. Here on Earth, Mark is ready for his first lesson on basic arithmetic, while on another planet, one where everyone has the higher, extra-dimensional faculty, an alien youth (whose name we can't pronounce) is likewise ready for his first lesson on the same subject. Mark's teacher says: “Now, pay close attention, class. This may seem very simple but it's very important. Here are some fundamentals of mathematics:

“Each and every number, or quantity, is equal to itself.

“Two different numbers cannot be equal.

“Two numbers, equal separately to a third, must be equal to each other.

“A part is always less than the whole.”

 

Mark is already bored. He's a bright kid; he knows this. And who wouldn't? It's so easy.

In the other classroom, the teacher begins: “Now, pay close attention, class. This may seem very simple but it's very important. It is well known that everything in our world, in fact everything in the whole universe, is dynamic and infinite, so this is our foundation and point of departure for all mathematics—infinity itself, which we shall express as i~. Every number begins with this. Thus, if we take any two numbers, such as i~ + 1 and i~ + 10, we see that although different, they are also equal. They both equal infinity. And if we add, subtract, multiply, divide, square, etc., any numbers, the values will change accordingly, but still remain equal at the same time. They will all equal infinity. Consequently, any and all parts of the whole are equal to the whole and, though different, are still and always the same. So, here are some fundamentals of our mathematics:

“A number can be not equal to itself.

“Two numbers, equal to a third, can be different from each other.

“A part may be less than, equal to, or more than the whole.

“All different numbers, in spite of apparent differences, are equal.

“And most important of all:

“Each and every part contains and is the whole.”

But this kid is smart, too, and he knows this. In fact, nothing could be more obvious to him, it all comes with his natural mental faculty, acquired at about age three, when his simple “I am,” changed into “I am this, and that, and everything.” This conception, that of the dynamic, inseparable and infinite whole, is the root of cosmic consciousness, just as the conception of self is of self-consciousness.

It is just this conception and logic that Ouspensky illustrates in his transfinite mathematics. It may seem absurd, but doesn't our logic—“this is also that,” i.e., plurals—seem absurd to the animals' simple consciousness? Transfinite logic is the foundation of higher consciousness and the unifying principle of higher space. It's the whole contained in each and every part; and it's unmistakable to anyone who's tasted cosmic consciousness (for now, through the mystical experience).

The Buddha said: “This unity alone in the world is boundless in its reality, and being boundless is yet one. Though in small things, yet it is great; though in great things, yet is small. Pervading all things, present in every minutest hair, and yet including the infinite worlds in its embrace; enthroned in the minutest particle of dust…it is one with Divine knowledge.”10

Eastern mystic Sri Aurobindo said: “Nothing to the supramental (higher) sense is really finite; it is founded on a feeling of all in each and of each in all.”11

Plotinus: “Each part always proceeds from the whole, and is at the same time each part and the whole.”¹²

Chinese philosopher Fa-Tsang: “Each one again contains the others, includes the others—each contains infinitely multiplied and remultiplied delineations of objects.”¹³

And of course, just as in transfinite mathematics, no matter how any part is multiplied or divided, it is still one, infinite Whole. The Upanishads: “Indivisible, infinite, the Adorable One.”¹⁴ The Bhagavad-Gita: “Entire amidst all division.”¹⁵ Indian Yogi Shankara: “The Atman is one, absolute, indivisible.”¹⁶ Plotinus again: “The One, possessing no (geometrical) magnitude, is indivisible in its power.”¹⁷

It is the apprehension of an extra dimension of space, extracted from time, that makes this possible, for this new medium connects and is that which connects everything in our three-dimensional world, that which we normally see as separated by space and by time. Lama Govinda makes both these points: “This space, however, is not the external ‘visible’ space, in which things exist side by side, but a space of higher dimensions, which includes and goes beyond the three-dimensional one. In such a space, things do not exist as separate units but rather like the interrelated parts and functions of one organism, influencing and penetrating each other.”¹⁸ And regarding time: “…the ‘one-after-another’ is transformed into ‘the-one-within-the-other’…Thus the universe and the experiencer of the universe are mirrored in every phenomenon…” ¹⁹

Ouspensky offers a simple way to picture how things that are different and separate in lower space can be connected and be parts of one body in extra-dimensional space; he uses a plane world analogy:

If we imagine our plane being to be inhabiting a horizontal plane, intersecting the top of a tree, and parallel to the surface of the Earth, then for such a being each of the various sections of the branches will appear as a quite separate phenomenon or object. The idea of the tree and its branches will never occur to him…Yet in our space, from our standpoint, these are sections of branches of one tree, comprising together one top, nourished from one root, casting one shadow.20

The corollary to this is that it applies to mental things (concepts), as well as physical things (objects). That is, concepts that are different and even opposed to each other in lower space may be parts of one larger concept in higher space, as in transfinite logic. Therefore, the logic and purpose of beings on a higher level than us, as in UFO phenomena, will seem inexplicable, absurd, and illogical, just as our logic seems that way to the animals' simple consciousness.

But there is another aspect, at first just as illogical, to the apprehension of the infinite whole that we can all understand; it is not merely dynamic—it is alive. On this point, Bucke wrote:

He does not come to believe merely; but he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the self-conscious mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise—is in truth a living presence. He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of nonliving substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life….²¹

This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self-consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true.²²

Note also here the hints of transfinite logic (where what we normally think of as separate becomes one): “the universe is God and God is the universe” and though all this is “undoubtedly true,” it is from our standpoint “absurd.” Absurd to us because ours is the consciousness of self only; but the higher consciousness is the consciousness of consciousness, within a broader tapestry of life; this life in turn is within an infinitely expanded scope of time—eternity. Isn't this the focal point of all the world's religions which are based on experiences of cosmic consciousness? For example, in the East, Mohammed says: “Allah! There is no God save Him, the Alive, the Eternal.”23 And Christianity—the first Epistle of John: “I write…of the Word of Life. And the Life was made known and we have seen, and now testify and announce to you, the Life Eternal which was with the Father, and has appeared to us.”²⁴

Life after death? For eternity? Not in our world of three dimensions of space plus time. In the larger, extra-dimensional one, may be. Yet if so, what kind of life? One with our memories and identities? For if not, is it really life or just mindless existence? We'll see which in chapter 8.

The snail lives in a world of one dimension of space plus time. Samson, by virtue of his higher mental faculty, lives in a larger one that includes the snail's. Mark, with self-consciousness, lives in a world of three dimensions of space plus time. There's a larger one still—an extra-dimensional one that includes ours, just as ours includes the others. It's accessible by a higher faculty of mind, the faculty that all mystical and near-death experiences spring from, that all psychic phenomena derive from, and on at least one other planet (as we'll see in chapter 7), that a whole race possesses as naturally as we possess self-consciousness.