CHAPTER 1
The Theory
A young couple take a moonlight walk along a private beach. They stop, gaze upat the night sky, and see something they will never forget. From out of nowhere,a strange, spherelike object radiating a brilliant white light appears directlyoverhead. To the couple's astonishment it changes to a triangular shape in afraction of a second; then moments later, like the Cheshire cat, it justvanishes. But how? Where did it come from, and go? And how can a solid objectchange into a completely different shape instantaneously?
UFO sightings like this, though this one is of the stranger variety, are notrare. They demonstrate the most startling aspect of the entire phenomenon: UFOsviolate—transcend—the world of space as we know it, leading some of the world'smost 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, manyphysicists now also suspect there are more than three dimensions of space. Infact, extra-dimensional theories are the hottest new topic to emerge intheoretical physics in over fifty years.
A high-school girl has a terrifying dream the night before a field trip. In itshe sees a bus full of classmates in a bad accident in which one of her friendsis injured. Shaken by the realness of the premonition, she refuses to go on thetrip 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, butour idea of time itself. How can this be? Can our time also be just part of alarger world of time? It seems that to understand the paranormal at its deepestlevel, we must first acknowledge, as many researchers now do, that we need anew, broader framework of space and time—a new worldview.
Amazingly, only about five hundred years ago the standing worldview was stillthat of a flat Earth. Only about four hundred years ago, it was that the Earthwas the center of the universe, that all the stars and planets revolved aroundit. By now you can see that our problem has always been underestimating the sizeof the universe and overly exaggerating our place in it. But a revolution, ofsorts, followed. About 350 years ago, Newton had it all figured out. Theuniverse was like a giant machine of three dimensions of space plus time, theworkings of which he described in breathtakingly precise terms. But then in theearly 1900s, Einstein showed that there was another variable that must beincluded 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 explosionof consciousness, the effects of which will transform the world forever. Herealizes, knows directly with a new kind of consciousness, that everyone andeverything in the world, indeed the world itself, is just part of a largerreality, a virtual "kingdom" by comparison with ours. He begins to teach, as allreligious giants have, that beyond our space and time, beyond the limitations ofnormal consciousness, exists a vaster reality, which can only be known withanother, expanded consciousness. Yet the real significance of this has beenignored ever since. For Einstein clearly demonstrated that space, time, andconsciousness are interwoven, in effect dependent on one another. But even withthe recent interest in expanding our space-time structure, the fact thatconsciousness 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 gonehaywire. But as his consciousness slowly fades, suddenly it is lifted up out ofhis body, then through a kind of tunnel to another place, another world. Hisconsciousness now somehow enlarged, he "knows" with a new type of sense. Hebecomes aware of a larger self and reality, one his normal state had neverallowed him to see. Stranger still, here old ideas of space and time aresuspended, 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 notyet his time. Suddenly, the expansion of consciousness halts, begins tocontract, and he descends back to his original state. He will recover, but neveragain think of the world in the same way.
And neither must we. For every time our worldview has changed—been expanded—ithas been for the same reason. There are conflicting data that cannot beincorporated into the old model, which must then be broadened to accommodatethem. The conflicting data now are reports of the paranormal. We either need astill broader model that can include them, or, as the diehard defenders of everyworldview always propose, we can simply ignore them and maintain the status quo.But that is becoming harder to do; reports of paranormal experiences havereached astonishing proportions. There are now over 100,000 UFO reports on fileworldwide, and a 1998 Gallup poll showed eight percent of Americans, about 20million 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 experienceshas been estimated at over 50 million worldwide. Another Gallup survey (1999)found 46 percent of subjects reporting "an unusual or inexplicable spiritualexperience." Just a few profound mystical experiences have given birth to everyreligion 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-deathexperience.
Einstein pointed out that it takes only one contradictory fact to demolish ascientific theory. So if just one of these accounts is true and our currentspace-time framework cannot explain it, we need another, broader framework thatcan. 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 anextra dimension of space. We do not detect this extra dimension because it ishidden and included in our concept of time. But it can be detected, naturallyand effortlessly, by expanded consciousness. Let me explain.
There are three distinct levels of consciousness on Earth: sensation, simpleconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The first two have, over the course ofmany millions of years, evolved to the third, higher level. Each has its ownframework of space-time. Take a snail as an example of the first. It lives in aworld of one dimension of space plus time. The other two dimensions of space allaround it are translated, by its faculty of sensation, into one dimension ofspace or time.
But a higher...
