Metaphysical Paradox
My brain stopped filtering, allowing me to perceive a suddenly revealed external reality. This happened more than forty years ago and I have never shared it because it is like describing being abducted by aliens. Had I heard it from anyone else, I would doubt their credibility. It was the most significant event of my life, so out of sync with anything before or after. This is a metaphysical paradox I never shared.
Who can say that beyond this world a super-world does not exist? Just as the animal can scarcely reach out of his environment to understand the superior world of man, so perhaps man can scarcely ever grasp the super-world, though he can reach out toward it in religion, or perhaps encounter it in revelation. A domestic animal does not understand the purposes for which man employs it. How then could man know what “final” purpose his life has; what “super-meaning” the universe has.Victor Frankl’s “The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy”
Dostoevsky and Frankl describe an experience I had. It was like stepping from the third dimension out into the bright clarity of a higher dimension. What I was seeing was out there, what had already been out there before I perceived it, not something in my head.
During the school year of 1967-1968, I was a high school dormitory counselor on an army post in Pusan, Korea. My job was virtually stress-free since I could relate to the kids as a counselor rather than as a teacher or parent. And since I was dorm counselor, I had my days free while they were in class.
Crystalline Lucidity
Most days were spent wandering about the local village snapping photos and developing and printing black and white blow-ups in the photo lab back on the army post. An ideal life for me. One day I wandered out the back instead of the front gate and in a matter of minutes, I was out in open countryside. After a short walk, a curtain opened and closed in my mind and I found myself on the other side. It was unlike anything I had known. No words to describe it. The Narrator was absent without a trace.
I had never known the world from this perspective. It was clear, vivid, pellucid. This was the true world that had been hidden from view. Truth existed everywhere on this side of the curtain. How could this truth exist so clearly and yet be hidden? All around in the hills, rocks and trees, fields, everywhere, there was what I can only put into words as a spiritual presence. I saw this with crystalline lucidity. No doubt of what I was seeing. Not to be able to see this world is blindness. I remember thinking I could give up all my possessions. I needed nothing.
How could truth be all around and I could not get a glimpse of it before this? And how can I be like a blind man now back on this side of the curtain? How could I return to a material life where everything is a noisy story; thoughts and thoughts about thoughts. Devoid of reality; devoid of truth.
Do not keep saying to yourself if you can possibly avoid it, but how can it be like that? Because you will get down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. (Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist)
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Albert Einstein)
Hyperspace
For centuries, mystics and philosophers have speculated about other worlds in higher dimensions. An ant has no cognizance of the world all about and we may not be aware of higher dimensions existing around us. This is not farfetched mysticism or science fiction. Superstring theory predicts the number of dimensions to be ten. There is a growing acknowledgment among physicists worldwide that dimensions exist beyond the commonly accepted space and time. Thousands of research papers relating to hyperspace have been published in scientific journals by modern physicists. Michio Kaku attempts to make this knowledge base of theoretical physics accessible to the lay audience in his books, including his 1995 book “Hyperspace.”
realities–Reality
Out of the millions of bits of information, our brains process each second, 45 bits give or take are devoted to conscious thought. We can give our total conscious attention to around of one millionth or 0.000001 of the sensory input available to our brain.
Objective reality is the reality we all agree upon that enables us to communicate with each other. Apart from this subjective and objective reality, there is a third reality with a capital R. This is the Reality that is out there whether or not it is perceived.
Most of the reports by those who have had mystical experiences say it is as if the brain opens up and the other ninety-nine percent suddenly comes online. It is like stepping out from a two-dimensional picture book into the world of three dimensions.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
