Chapter 4
Hyperdimensional Reality

Hyperdimensional Space - The Realm of the “Gods”
The Question of Time in Myths

In numerous tales of the Grail, the description of the castle of the Fisher King includes some interesting time anomalies: it is a place where time slows down or stops altogether. This is also the case with the ancient Celtic legends of the Head of Bran the Blessed, in which presence his warriors feast and make merry with no awareness of the passage of time.

This theme occurs with great regularity and suggests a deep and ancient significance that will become apparent as we proceed. The most ancient conception of time was associated with the “Goddess” and was cyclical - like women. Everything was “real” only insofar as it was connected to an archetypal gesture - illud tempus - from the beginning.

Every hero repeated the archetypal gesture, every war rehearsed the struggle between good and evil, every fresh social injustice was identified with the passion of a divine messenger, each new massacre repeated the glorious end of the martyrs. ...Only one fact counts: by virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history. ⁴⁶

46 Eliade, op. cit., pp. 151-152.

This reflected the idea that the world in which we live was a “form,” or reflection, or “double” of another cosmic world that existed on a higher level. These were Celestial Archetypes.

Plato gave an explanation that is still unsurpassed in its simplicity:

“And now,” I said, “let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.

 

Behold!

 

Human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them over which they show the puppets.

 

...And do you see,” I said, “men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? ...And they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave... how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads... and of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows ...And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? ...And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? ...To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. […]

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision - what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them - will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows, which he formerly saw, are truer than the objects, which are now shown to him? […]

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes, which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things, which are now being shown to him? […]

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. ...He will require growing accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day? […]

 

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. ...He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold? […]

And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them? ...And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, ‘Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,’ and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? […]

Imagine once more such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? ...And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went up and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.

 

This entire allegory you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed - whether rightly or wrongly, God knows. ⁴⁷

47 Plato, Republic: Book VII, trans. B Jowett.

When we consider a semi-physical realm that projects itself into our reality, we also have to consider the factor of Time. In our geometry we define a point as an infinitesimal section of a line. A line is an infinitesimal cross-section of a plane and a plane is an infinitesimal section of a solid. Thus, our three dimensional reality must be defined as a series of infinitesimal sections of a four dimensional body.

Conceptually, this means that our entire reality is a section of a four-dimensional body - a realm of potential dimensions beyond three-dimensional contemplation.

We usually consider the past as no longer existing. The future does not exist, either, and the “present” refers to the momentary transition of non-existence into non-existence!

But, if it is true that only Now exists, then the logical conclusion is that, as wave reading consciousness units, we are, in some way, responsible for our perception of time. We regard time as linear, long or short, an endless line, a progression from past into future. But this creates an insurmountable problem. On a line, NOW is a mathematical point of infinitesimal smallness - it has no dimension!

By scientific logic, it does not exist!
 

Mathematical Dimensions

The first mathematician to explore the fourth dimension, William Rowan Hamilton, was born in 1805. Hamilton was so precocious that he was reading the Bible at the age of three, at which point he also began learning Hebrew characters. By the age of ten he could read Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Bengali, Latin, and Greek, as well as several modern European languages.

Hamilton was so was skilled in mental arithmetic that he was entered in a competition against a boy from Vermont who toured as a calculating prodigy. Hamilton was disappointed, however, when he found that his opponent seemed to have no knowledge apart from his unusual math abilities.

While studying at university, Hamilton joined the Tractarian movement, a religious organization, of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a member. Coleridge had the notion that algebra was the science of time, and apparently this idea had a profound influence on Hamilton who discovered a four-dimensional manifold of numbers, the “quaternions”. Though he was a genius mathematician, Hamilton seemed to be unable to think beyond the strictly material world, and though he was reaching for a fourth dimension, Hamilton could not consider the fourth dimension as “real”.

The next phase of development of the concept of fourth dimensional space was the work of Ludwig Schlaefli, a Swiss schoolteacher. He understood that four dimensions was the conceptual continuation of the first three spatial dimensions.

As a schoolteacher, Schlaefli was not in the company of “academics” and this may have played a part in the fact that he was able to develop this new geometry during his early career, before he joined the mathematics department of the University at Bern. It is interesting that Grassmann, who also explored an ingenious algebra of higher dimensions, was another schoolteacher whose writings were ignored for many years.

During that period, anyone who worked in these directions was thought to be a bit mad when actually, what they were really doing, was following an ancient tradition of relying upon pure thought to take them beyond what could be confirmed in the sensory world.

The Magic of Abstract Thought

Many New Age Gurus teach that “higher knowledge” can only be accessed “directly”, through the “heart”.

To this end, they produce endless techniques and rituals designed to stop thought and induce “feeling”. This is simply another variation of the “blind faith” routine that teaches a person that only knowledge brought directly by God is “true”, and all human knowledge is basically “bunk”.

What is interesting about this is that it is another example of disinformation - a lie wrapped in truth to make it easier to swallow. As we have already pointed out, most of what passes for “techniques of ascension” amounts to little more than stimulating chemicals in the body which results in a “feel good experience”, but which does nothing to increase the level of Being.

As already mentioned, there is a “gravity” to the realm of Non-being which is the Thought Center that “creates” matter. Matter constitutes the predominate nature of our reality. What this suggests is that our “field of expression” is dipolar - gravity vs. consciousness.

The “field of consciousness” is a primary field like gravity, but we can see that it is very little manifested in our world. This means that to move from the gravity field of matter, one must act against a rather strong force.

The field of consciousness is that of thoughts, feelings that are not chemical, ideas, motivations, attitudes, and such that acts on our minds/consciousness as gravity acts on objects and masses. Just as there is gravity and anti-gravity, so must there be consciousness and anti-consciousness as we have already described in our discussion of Thought Centers.

The consciousness field is a mirror image of the gravity field of matter. As above, so below.

And just as in the case where great effort must be made to move a stone uphill, so it takes great effort to move one’s motivations and attitudes and emotions from the influence of matter into the realm of the consciousness field. When such an uphill movement of motivation occurs, a specific effort of consciousness needs to be made. Thoughts and ideas and concepts that are based on material interpretations of reality require little effort. It is the reaching into the higher realms of thought that enables us to discern when our emotions are “material” or pure and belonging to the soul. To approach this problem without working to create the vessel of thoughts, concepts, ideas, is again, the process of believing lies and binding to “spiritual drugs”.

Understanding this permits us to distinguish when we are working toward higher consciousness. Going “downward” in the field of consciousness is like going downhill in the field of gravity: no work of lifting need be involved. Thus a downhill motion in the field of consciousness is easy, effortless, and pleasurable. When we go uphill in any possible field, including the consciousness field, we need to put a significant effort (work) into this motion. This leads to the logical conclusion that those things that increase consciousness are also difficult and go against the gravity of the material world explanations.

There is, of course, much more to this that will be introduced in a later volume. For now, the important point is that developing the intellect so that it can be used as an instrument of perspicacity is one of the first requirements of spiritual development.

So, for those New Age and fundamentalist teachers who denigrate thought, consider the following written by another schoolteacher:

Isn’t it amazing that Newton couldn’t discover universal gravitation until 50 years after Descartes created the mathematical method of analyzing geometric data in an algebraic equation? It would take about 50 years for the method to disseminate, become second nature, raise a new generation immersed it, and who then began noticing phenomena that these new mathematical expressions did a really good job of modeling. It was more than 40 years after Hamilton created quaternions that Maxwell discovered how well they fit for formulating the equations of electromagnetism. It was 50 years after Riemann created his general, curvilinear, non-Euclidean geometry that Einstein, with help from Minkowski, noticed how well it expressed the relations of special and general relativity.

 

My theory is that people can’t notice something until they have the reference point to understand what it is they are observing. Specifically, scientists can’t notice, “hey, these new patterns fit together” until they have a mathematics that describes this kind of relationship as being a pattern, rather than random marks on a graph. Think about what it would be like to discover that all of your data fit into a parabolic shape, but you don’t know what a parabola is.

 

How disappointed you would be to realize it doesn’t make a straight line, when straight lines are all you know. “I guess there was nothing to that hypothesis after all”, you say as you discard the data. Tomorrow some brilliant mathematician will create a method of graphing quadratic equations thinking he has invented the perfect pure math, which couldn’t possibly have any practical application.

 

Fifty years from now, your grandson will review your data, or recreate your experiments. He will get the same data points that you did, but now he recognizes the pattern as a parabola. It was a parabola all along, but you didn’t know it, because parabola hadn’t been invented yet when you plotted the data.

If you don’t recognize the pattern, then your brain interprets it as random - no pattern at all. This means you pay it no attention. In this way, mathematicians create the world we live in. What an outrageous statement! No Physicist would admit the validity of that, after all, they are trained to observe the real world, not confirm some dreamer’s fantasy! Yeah, right. Only problem with that is, history tells us that over and over, Physicists were unable to see the patterns in front of their eyes until someone had invented a mathematics that made this kind of pattern recognizable and distinguishable from random noise.

Therefore there is a very real sense in which the only reality we can recognize is that of the patterns for which we have a mathematical template. Therefore we can only observe that part of infinite reality for which some enterprising mathematician has invented the pattern. The mathematician does NOT describe an objective reality, which he observes; he instead creates relationships, which he considers “beautiful”, or “elegant”, or perhaps “entertaining”. He doesn’t think his creation has any practical application, but it always does. Because any time somebody describes the template for a new pattern, now (in about 50 years) people will begin noticing those parts of the infinite universe, which fit into to this new pattern.

 

Before they just seemed random, but now that we recognize the pattern, it’s so obvious we don’t understand how Aristotle overlooked it. And a new generation of historians will write books about how Archimedes was actually on the verge of inventing this himself just before the Romans killed him.⁴⁸

48 Gordon Clason, private correspondence with the authors.

In exactly the same way, it is by gathering information and making unprejudiced observations while at the same time stretching the mind into the field of consciousness, that we develop the vehicle for the Soul, which can then “know” things by virtue of the gift of God.

Each adventurer into the world of these ideas of hyperdimensions, which now concern us profoundly, found the trail easier to navigate as a result of the simultaneous expansion of other branches of knowledge. For example, in geometry it was noticed that the lines in ordinary three-dimensional space could be regarded as elements of a manifold of four dimensions.

Connections of this kind soon made the fourth dimension acceptable to mathematicians.

Dimensional Thinking in Western Spirituality

It is at this point that something truly strange occurred. The idea of the “fourth dimension” was adopted by spiritualists and occultists as the “realm of the ethers” or the afterlife, the place of the dead.

Séances of the nineteenth-century attracted spirit beings that produced physical effects as well as peculiar psychological states, and disappeared again - like the UFOs of our time. It was as convenient then (as it is now) to assign them a home in the inaccessible dimensions of space, and to make absolutely certain that everyone was convinced that these dimensions were ethereal.

The nineteenth-century astronomer Zollner set out to demonstrate scientifically that the ethereal beings attracted to spiritualistic séances were from the fourth dimension. Even though his demonstrations were never successful, at this point, the fourth dimension became a means of conceiving of mysterious phenomena in a non-materialistic way.

In the final phase of nineteenth-century thought, the fourth dimension became a subject for meditation and was taken up by the Theosophical Society, and later by Rudolf Steiner, who gave reportedly brilliant lectures on the subject based on the work of Howard Hinton.

Hinton’s work was the outcome of the ideas of his father, James Hinton, whose philosophy was based on the ideas of the Kantian noumenal world that lies behind phenomenal experience. This higher world was feminine, nurturing, free of social and legal restraint; virtue consisted in “harmonizing one’s intentions with the noumenal world”, and could not be captured by merely regulating behavior. The person who acts selflessly for the greater good of humanity was as likely to break the law as the brutish criminal.

Howard Hinton was inspired by Hamilton’s writings to adopt a materialistic form of Kantianism. When he began work as a schoolteacher, he came to doubt that knowledge could ever come from an external authority. In an effort to find some knowledge about which he could feel certainty, he made himself a set of colored blocks that he rearranged in various ways to make larger cubes. Using these blocks, he felt he could acquire knowledge of spatial position that was beyond all doubt. As he looked for patterns in the rearrangement of these blocks, he began to investigate the fourth dimension, which he saw as governing sequences of transformation in three dimensions.

By the time of Hinton’s death in 1907, his writings had inspired theosophists in India and England to investigate the fourth dimension for themselves. Steiner, following the theosophists, continued to view the fourth dimension as a “spiritual” realm, though he had some fascinatingly insightful comments to make about it, keeping in mind his “esoteric” approach.

Everything we do here is simply a symbolic representation of the higher worlds. […] Only developing new possibilities for vision can attain what lies within these higher worlds. Human beings must be active in order to reach these worlds.⁴⁹

Howard Hinton and the ideas of the fourth dimension also had a profound influence on P.D. Ouspensky who produced a very simple illustration of the concept of our relation to the fourth dimension, which actually gives a more “physicalized” aspect to the concept.

In this illustration, he speaks about a snail on a journey across a garden.

Its movements are governed by pleasure/pain. It always advances toward the one and retreats from the other. It always moves on one line, from the unpleasant towards the pleasant. And, in all probability, it senses and knows nothing except this line. This line constitutes the whole of its world. The snail on this line of motion senses all the sensations entering from the outside. And, these come to it out of time - from potentiality they become actuality. For a snail, the whole of our universe exists in the future and the past, i.e., in time.⁵⁰

The snail is probably not self-aware - that is, aware that it is surging across the landscape - all of which exists simultaneously, of which the snail could be aware if it were possible to expand its awareness through some process of metamorphosis, lifting it high above the garden to expand its scope. But, it only perceives the various phenomena - the leaf, the grass, the twig, the sand, the walkway - at the moment it interacts with them - and then only a little at a time. They are events of long or short duration, past and future, which come to pass as the snail inches along.

Ouspensky suggests that this is the way we experience our world relative to the fourth dimension. Our five sense organs are merely feelers, our means of touching and interpreting the world, through the mathematical constructs of our brains and in the limited terms of three-dimensional consciousness.

Scientific gadgetry only lengthens our feelers a bit.

Imagine a consciousness not limited by the conditions of sense perception. Such a consciousness can rise above the plane on which we move; it can see far beyond the bounds of the circle illumined by our ordinary consciousness; it can see that not only does the line along which we move exist, but also all the other lines perpendicular to it which we cross (in our series of nows.)

 

Rising above the plane, this consciousness will be able to see the plane, make sure that it actually is a plane and not only a line; then it will be able to see the past and the future living side by side and existing simultaneously.⁵¹

49 Steiner, Rudolf, The Fourth Dimension, Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics, a six-lecture series held in Berlin from March 24 to June 7, (Anthroposophic Press 1905).

50 Ouspensky, P.D., Tertium Organum, 1920, pp. 84-85.
51 Ibid., p. 28.

There are several important considerations contained in the analogy of the snail. First, if our true perception is as limited, relatively speaking, as a snail’s, why is this so if we do, in fact, possess inner knowledge and capabilities unknown to our waking, ordinary consciousness which often manifest spontaneously, or which can be developed through long and difficult training? Second, we must note the implications of a consciousness of this type that DOES exist on the physical, three-dimensional plane.

But, before we endeavor to deal with those questions, let’s return to the question of time.

The past and future cannot be non-existent. They must exist together somewhere; only we do not see them. The present, as opposed to the past and the future, is the most unreal of unrealities. We must admit that the past, the present and the future do not differ from one another in any way, that the only thing that exists is the Eternal Now of Indian Philosophy.⁵²

52 Ibid., p. 29.

The Alpha and Omega. But we do not see this - at least very few of us do. And then we only see imperfectly, “through a glass darkly”. We are snails crossing the fields of flowers of the universe, aware only momentarily of the earth, the leaf, the flower, or the raindrop before us. At any given moment we are only aware of a small fragment of the universe, and we continue to deny the existence of everything else: namely the coexistent past and future, and the possibility of perceiving it.

There are two main theories of the future - that of a predestined future and that of a free future. The theory of predestination asserts that every future event is the result of past events. If we know all the past, then we could know all the future. This is linear time. The idea of a free future is based on quantum “probabilities”. The future is either only partially determined or undetermined because many of the varied interactions are possible at any given point. This probable future posits the idea of true free will and suggests that quite deliberate volitional acts may bring about a subsequent change in events.

Those who support predestination say that so-called “voluntary” actions are, in fact, not voluntary. Rather, they are but the results of incompletely understood causes, which have made them imperative acts - in short, nothing is accidental.

So on the one hand we have “cold predestination”: come what may, nothing can be changed. On the other hand, we have a reality that is only a point on some sort of needle named the present, surrounded on all sides by the Gulf of Non-existence - a world which is born and dies every moment.

Ouspensky unifies these views:

At every given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing, but it is predestined conditionally, i.e., there must be one or another future in accordance with the direction of events of the given moment, if no new factor comes in. And a new factor can come in only from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.⁵³

In other words, the snail can choose to change his direction if he increases his knowledge and becomes more aware.

The snail may be following the scent of food or a need for warmth, and he may crawl into the path of a car, or into a field full of birds that wish to eat him. In practical terms, this means that snails and human beings, who are crawling through the universe very often, without knowledge, find themselves in the path of destruction. Quite often this destruction can only be overcome by mastering our instinctive urge for pleasure and avoidance of pain.

This can only come about by becoming aware of the probable course he is on. If his natural tendencies were leading him to an abyss, which will plunge him into a blazing inferno below, then it would behoove him to learn exactly what it is he must do to avoid it. And therein lies the rub. In order to do that, a being must achieve a more aware higher state of consciousness, not a more intense state of feeling!

In the past, what is behind us lies not only in what was, but also in what could have been. In the same way, in the future lie not only what will be but also what may be.⁵⁴

In other words, motion in space is merely an illusion of the brief illuminating light of our consciousness upon a given construct of consciousness. If it is so that All exists simultaneously, then it is only we who, singly and collectively, can change the focus or development of our consciousness.

In time events exist before our consciousness comes into contact with them, and they still exist after our consciousness has withdrawn from them.⁵⁵

53 Ibid., pp. 30-31.
54 Ibid., p. 31.
55 Ibid., p. 33.

Now we come back to the questions: Why can we not perceive reality as it is? Why can we not enlarge our perception - why are we chained in this painful existence we call “life”?

We come back to the idea of the Cave of Plato - or what is popularly known nowadays as The Matrix.

What we are facing is the fact that the limited way we perceive our world is actually a sort of defect - the effect of the “fall” – the “ritual fault” that brought the Golden Age to an end. At the present time, many physicists have suggested “hyperspace” has explanatory value in terms of bridging the gap between the physical and ethereal worlds. The New Age market took such ideas up with fiendish glee, producing endless ignorant variations on “Sacred Science” of millions of words, few of which are comprehensible to the layperson, much less the scientist.

Those who read this drivel and who say, “oh, it sounds so true, but what is it saying?”, are contemptuously told that only “initiated understanding” can grasp such lofty ideas!

The fact is, the realities of our world in terms of any connecting principles between matter and consciousness are not helped by any such philosophical discussions. What we need is further empirical study and experimentation. What’s more, it needs to be done by those who are qualified to do it - not charlatans and con artists.

There are physical scientists of the highest caliber who are open to the possibility of other forms of matter and other dimensions. They understand that such hypotheses would have explanatory value in their own fields as well as in parapsychology.

Thus it is that, while the subject matter of parapsychology and physics is significantly different, their fundamental insights curiously coincide.

Getting a Handle on Psi Phenomena

There is similarity between the two basic paths of fundamental research in modern theoretical physics, and the two realities we are considering: matter and consciousness. Just as in psi research there have been attempts to reconcile, or unify, matter and consciousness, the same has been true in advanced physics where although serious attempts have been made during the past two decades to find a Unified Theory that incorporates both a quantum approach (“matter”) and the field approach (“consciousness”), no single theory which incorporates both has been successful as yet in either set of problems.

Quantum mechanics deals primarily with the sub-microscopic world of elementary particles. It is based upon probabilities of events taking place non-deterministically, rather than a deterministically known state, which can be calculated using the classical equations of motion.

When you have an infinite number of possible states, any of which can be solutions within certain boundary conditions, you run into certain problems when you try to transfer these concepts to classical realities. The state vector is the collection of all possible pre-collapse states and represents the system in which the event exists in all states simultaneously.

Once the event happens, or what is called “measurement” occurs, the system collapses the state vector into a single, probabilistically determined state. Until this collapse occurs, the state vector that has developed in time deterministically specifies the system collectively. This interpretation of quantum mechanics is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation and is dominant, with minor variations, in the quantum mechanics used today. It is characterized by a direct break with classical physics where a cause leads to an effect.

At the same time, field theory, (Einstein’s general theory of relativity) plays the leading role when we are considering real world physical realities. Field theory seems to follow from the classical view of cause and effect and determinism. Classical mechanics deals with equations of motion that can be solved for specific events when initial conditions, such as position and velocity, or initial and final conditions, are known. So it is that the field represents a deterministic interrelation of mutually interacting forces between different events (i.e. particles), which can be found by substituting values into the field equations.

Both the field and quantum theories have special characteristics which are useful in physical theories of psi. However the same problems pop up in trying to combine quantum theory with (relativistic) field theory: no such system has yet been devised which can account for all phenomena.

At the present time, however, it seems that quantum field theory has been by far the most successful attempt at this endeavor. Many of the speculation about physical theories of psi deal with quantum field theory, rather than pure field theory.

Whiteman notes:

“It seems therefore that any attempt to unite parapsychology and physics should adhere, substantially at least, to the language of quantum field theory, in terms of ‘as if’ fields at a level of creative-potentiality.” ⁵⁶

The older theories of psi described transfers of energy in several different ways, but newer ideas have gone beyond such approaches. One argument against the idea of psi and a physical theory of psi based on energy (or particle) transmission has been that the energies would be far too subtle to be received by the brain. John Eccles has shown that the cerebral cortex acts as a sensitive detector of small influences.⁵⁷

Using a probabilistic quantum mechanical argument, it is possible to show that the neurons can be fired by these subtle influences, thus exciting the brain in a normal cascading effect of neurons. In this way, the brain may act as a receptor of small influences such as what might be exhibited by carriers of psi. Among other attempts to unite biological functions with quantum theory, W.Elsasser has speculated on certain biotonic laws operating exclusively in living beings and drawing upon “accumulated quantum-mechanical and information theoretic uncertainties”.⁵⁸

56 Whiteman, J.H.M., “Parapsychology and Physics”, in Wolman, Handbook, 1977.

57 Dobbs, Adrian, “The Feasibility of a Physical Theory of ESP”, in Smythies, Science and ESP (New York: Humanities Press 1967).
58 Chari, C.T.K., “Precognition, Probability and Quantum Mechanics” (Journal of the ASPR 66, 1972) pp. 193-207.

All such approaches represent a convergence of bioelectronics and quantum theory to explain psi abilities, including PK (psychokinesis, the movement of objects by mental effort alone). There are so many interpretations of quantum theory that may be relevant to psi and that may assist in gaining an understanding of how consciousness interacts with matter. Most of the new theories are based upon the introduction of a new level of duality in nature in that consciousness has a separate and distinct wave function from that of the normal wave function representing matter and physical reality in quantum theory, a sort of three wave system like biorhythms, where when all the lines cross, something happens.

The issue I would like to emphasize here is that we desperately need a scientifically acceptable conceptual framework within which Parapsychological phenomena make sense as part of nature and human life in its entirety.

I believe that such ideas were known to an ancient civilization, that they did develop the “Holy Grail” of physics: The Grand Unified Theory, and that in point of fact, the Holy Grail of physics may have a great deal to do with the Holy Grail of legend.

Einstein and Hyperdimensional physics

In considering the general theory of relativity, science usually utilizes a fourdimensional space-time continuum. In classical general relativity, the metrical properties of the continuum are intrinsic to the continuum, but a fifth dimension in which our normally sensed space-time is embedded can also be used to account for the curvature and properties of physical space. In the space-time continuum, one can say that all parts of the four-dimensional world exist simultaneously, in the sense of a mathematical formalism, and this would naturally lead to a complete collapse of the philosophical ideas of causality.
 

However, many scientists who work with these ideas do not think that this continuum is ‘real’ in a physical sense, such that physical entities could move back and forth at will in and out of time as easily as changing direction in three-dimensional space. We, on the other hand, think that it is not only possible, but also extremely likely based upon certain observations.

In relativity theory, time intervals between events are not completely fixed relative to moving systems or frames of reference. This has led to some speculation that there may also be analogies between precognition and anomalies. However, “time dilation”, the contraction of time intervals between moving reference frames, is too small to account for precognition and would still require any information transfer to travel faster than light, and the special theory of relativity, when narrowly interpreted, does not allow for physical travel backwards in time, but relegates this concept to an imaginary mathematical formalism.

Even though it is almost forbidden to question Einstein’s restriction on superluminal travel, Einstein did, at one point, propose to consider the hyperdimensional world as “real”.

In 1938, with P. Bergmann, he wrote a paper entitled On a Generalization of Kaluza’s Theory of Electricity:

So far, two fairly simple and natural attempts to connect gravitation and electricity by a unitary field theory have been made, one by Weyl, the other by Kaluza. Furthermore, there have been some attempts to represent Kaluza’s theory formally so as to avoid the introduction of the fifth dimension of the physical continuum. The theory presented here differs from Kaluza’s in one essential point; we ascribe physical reality to the fifth dimension whereas in Kaluza’s theory this fifth dimension was introduced only in order to obtain new components of the metric tensor representing the electromagnetic field.⁵⁹

 

59 Einstein, A, Bergmann, P., Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 38, No. 3, July 1938.

We believe that Einstein was following a path that was later to prove very fruitful. Einstein, however, was somewhat nervous about this idea, but he followed it anyway, writing in his paper:

If Kaluza’s attempt is a real step forward, then it is because of the introduction of the five dimensional space. There have been many attempts to retain the essential formal results obtained by Kaluza without sacrificing the four-dimensional character of the physical space. This shows distinctly how vividly our physical intuition resists the introduction of the fifth dimension. But by considering and comparing all these attempts one must come to the conclusion that all these endeavors did not improve the situation. It seems impossible to formulate Kaluza’s idea in a simple way without introducing the fifth dimension.

 

We have, therefore, to take the fifth dimension seriously although we are not encouraged to do so by plain experience. If, therefore, the space structure seems to force acceptance of the five dimensional space theory upon us we must ask whether it is sensible to assume the rigorous reducibility to four dimensional space. We believe that the answer should be “no”, provided that it is possible to understand, in another way, the quasi-four dimensional character of the physical space by taking as a basis the five dimensional continuum and to simplify hereby the basic geometrical assumptions.[…]

 

The most essential point of our theory is the replacing of …rigorous cylindricity by the assumption that space is closed (or periodic).[…] Kaluza’s five dimensional theory of the physical space provides a unitary representation of gravitation and electromagnetism. […] It is much more satisfactory to introduce the fifth dimension not only formally, but to assign to it some physical meaning.⁶⁰

60 Ibid.

The reader should note that when considering field theory, it is necessary to differentiate between:

1.) Pure field theory such as gravitation, and electrical and magnetic fields

2.) Quantum field theory

Fields such as electromagnetic fields and gravitational fields are continuous and spatial while quantum fields are quantized, broken into discrete sections of particulate substance or energy. The basing of a theory of psi on a gravitational field rests partly on the fact that gravitation is not subject to the maximum velocity of light because it doesn’t travel, but is structural. Evidence from Vasiliev and others suggests that psi is also independent of the velocity of light.

However, general relativity has obliged science to abandon the “action at a distance” idea, causing the ‘distance force’ to be abandoned, and has placed gravity under subjection to a maximum velocity. Nevertheless, Margenau has suggested that general relativity ought to be regarded as a ‘formal’ principle such as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. In this case, gravitation would be non-energetic and subject to no maximum velocity, and would act as a guiding way to "physical phenomena”.⁶¹

61 Forwald, Haakon, Mind, Matter and Gravitation: A Theoretical and Experimental Approach, Parapsychology Monographs, Number 11 (New York: Parapsychology Foundation 1969).

These ideas have been adopted by many “alternative science” writers who have related them to buildings, energy fields, light beings, earth grids and all that, and it does, indeed, seem that there may be locations on the planet where one can “tap” a certain energy with greater or lesser ease.

But the phenomenon that these ideas speaks to more directly is that of hyperdimensional realities wherein mental energies or consciousness energies are amplified and can be interactive with the environment.

There may be a specific technology that suggests not only power for transport that is partly physical, partly “ethereal”, but also that suggests communication that is partly physical and partly ethereal, as well as powers of “manifestation” that might seem impossible to us in our present state of technology.

All of these properties DO belong to hyperdimensional existence, and such a state of being has been reported for millennia as being the “realm of the Gods”.

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