I entered the meeting room and sat down across from an old friend and business associate, Jacob. He looked at me and smiled. Then he started laughing. He composed himself and pointed at me. “What is up with your hair?” I glanced over at the mirror on the wall and smiled. My unruly hair was at it again and the cowlick in the back of my head was standing straight up. As I pushed the hair down as best I could with my hand, I told Jacob to wait for a second, then I turned off my camera and ran to find a comb - the entire conversation was virtual. I was sitting in Cleveland. Jacob was sitting in London.
Was I really meeting with Jacob? I wasn’t actually seeing him (endless physical barriers were between my eyes and his face) - I was actually looking at a computer that had created a digital representation of his face using a lot of ones and zeros and whatever chemistry goes into making a computer monitor. I wasn’t really hearing him (the vibrations from his vocal chords faded a few feet from where he sat) – I was hearing the vibrations from my computer speaker that had recreated his voice. So in what way did I meet with my friend Jacob? We met in cyberspace.
Is cyberspace a real space? On one hand you could say, no. Physically, I wasn’t in a different space. I was sitting in my office. But most people would say that we really met. Somehow, all the 1’s and 0’s, cables, cords, and electronics, generated something real and in – at least some sense – a different dimension.
Long before virtual meetings, the occult had a practice of remote viewing or more classically known as telesthesia or travelling clairvoyance. There have always been people who claim to be able to exit their body, travel through the aerial realm and observe things far away. While most will find this implausible, it is worth noting that at least some controlled experiments have given credence to the claims. Notably, in the post World War II era, the CIA conducted extensive research on the paranormal (to read more check out this article) including a large study on “remote viewing” and then concluded the experiments were successful. But the point of this chapter is more to help us think about the concept of other dimensions and how the other dimension created by cyberspace has interesting overlaps to those typically associated with religion.
One of the reasons that this subject is difficult for modern people to think about is because most people (even among the religious) have a materialist view of the world. We don’t quite know what “spiritual means. When we think about the spiritual we tend to put it in a category of unlikely if not impossible (at least until after death). But our modern mental separation between some other dimension and our familiar three spatial dimensions should not seem as foreign or farfetched as it does. Perhaps instead of thinking material versus spiritual, it would be helpful just to think in terms of dimensions. In The Grand Design, atheist Stephen Hawking speculates that there may be up to ten dimensions based on quantum theory.[1]And while Hawking describes the other dimensions as “small,” he does so with the analogy of looking at the end of a straw — that is, they only appear small thanks to our perspective, not based on their actual size.[2] Other scientists such as astrophysicist Paul Sutter speculate that “dark matter” — a substance thought to account for more than 80% of the universe's mass, yet invisible to us — could potentially be explained by forces and matter being present in other dimensions.[3] While this research is new and still highly speculative, it should at least provide an intellectual foundation for holding that these other dimensions contain attributes that are not yet known to us.
And so there is overlap between secular ideas of the cosmos and dimensions and Christian theology that also speaks of other dimensions. When most people think of Christianity’s heaven, they think of a place and time. Heaven is a place you go when you die, but few have formed hard opinions on what it actually is. Some imagine a cloud somewhere. Some imagine a state of mind. But Oxford New Testament scholar N.T. Wright argues that the biblical understanding of heaven must also be described in terms of “dimension.” In Surprised by Hope, Wright writes, “Heaven in the Bible is not a future destiny but the other hidden dimension of our ordinary life — God’s dimension, if you like.”[4]
And while, I am sure some people are both atheists and deniers of the quantum claim that there are more than our three spatial dimensions, most are not. Most people believe in one or both. Therefore at least at an intellectual level, most people believe that there exist dimensions that live along side of us. The only question is whether those dimensions can be accessed by us and if any entities exist within them.
In my book, The Return of the Dragon, I discussed how when atheists take psychedelics such as DMT, they often cease to be atheists. They report experiences that convince them that there is more to this universe than the three-dimensions we see. These people who are not spiritual─ and who in fact reject the existence of the spiritual ─ take psychedelics, and then get a glimpse of a world that convinces them there is more than what their material assumptions have led them to believe. Sometimes these former atheists join traditional religions, but often they simply adopt an informal spirituality. The experiential evidence is enough for them to discard a previously held materialistic view of the universe in favor of something that looks more religious to outsiders.
So the use of drugs brings a rare case where the two worlds collide; no longer is the “spiritual” world “out there” and the natural world “here.” Instead, you have people doing something very much in this world (taking a drug) and experiencing something in that spiritual world so profoundly that they change their whole way of viewing both worlds. Putting aside any theology of biblical angels or demons, one could ask: is it possible that psychedelics do something to our brain chemistry that enables us to come into contact with bodiless beings that can manipulate our minds? The language of the spiritual sounds more like fairy tales than real life so perhaps quantum dimensions is a better way to think of these observations in a way that might make more sense to a materialist.
But either way, the possibility of other dimensions that could interact with us is uncomfortable. In his excellent novel, Perelandra, C.S. Lewis on touches on an aspect of human nature that is as true as it is insightful. His narrator, who is about to meet an ghost like alien, states the following,
"It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one's mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one a sort of shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we label "scientific" and "supernatural" respectively. We think, in one mood, of … Martians…In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognize a creature in either class as real the distinction begins to get blurred…."
For Lewis, the modern man uses the word “spiritual” as a way of thinking it is not real. And once we think of something as real, the distinction between spiritual and material sort of disappears. Our brains do not like the distinction. There is something very reassuring about living in the three dimensions we can see. Whether we are talking about ghosts or religious beings like angels and demons, there is something disorienting about discussions of the spiritual world. But when we start to think of it as a real space with real things contained within it discomfort follows.
It is disconcerting to think that the myths of old might not be all fiction. What if the apparitions of gods, spirits, demons, and angels were not always or necessarily based on pure human imagination? What if some of them represent true interactions between humans who live in the three visible dimensions with entities that live in some other dimension? What if the stories of old are, in part, accounts of people being able to see into the other dimension via drugs, meditation, prayer, music, etc.?
As I discussed in The Return of the Dragon, an answer in the affirmative would provide much explanatory power in human history. It would explain why so many people in so many places have experienced such similar things. It would explain why people seem to gain genuine insights about things they should not otherwise know. It would explain why almost all human civilizations have been so religious. As physicists speculate on other dimensions to explain dark matter and the workings of the universe, we can also explain quite a bit about the human experience using other dimensions.
So perhaps we need to, at least for the moment, put aside the categories of atheism and religion. Perhaps all this time we have simply been using different terms. Perhaps atheists use words like aliens and inter-dimensional beings, dark matter, and alternative dimensions, while the religious use words like gods, angels, demons, spirits, and heaven? Atheists might find it helpful to view these new discoveries as similar to when we found new species in new frontiers — something like when we first went into the depths of the ocean floor and discovered otherworldly-looking sea creatures that resembled monsters from myths. Perhaps atheists need to put ideas of the occult or the religious in such a category. What if the out workings of these ceremonies simply represent a discovery of some new frontier that has heretofore been invisible to us?
Let’s bring this discussion back to my conference call. It is not my argument here that something magical is happening every time we talk in a teleconference. My claim is instead that the ideas of the occult (that there is another accessible dimension that can be used, manipulated, and employed as a tool) are not something that can be easily dismissed and the actions of technology often look like they are doing the occult. Remote viewing in its ideal form would be a teleconference. And other tech gives the same perfect occult activities. Video games offer the opportunity to shape shift. Wikipedia gives us the ability to divine the entire world’s collected knowledge.
What I have been exploring in this recent series of posts is whether this apparent overlap between the two has any actual overlap. I hope to learn whether the strange fascination of the titans of science and technology had with seeking the other dimension didn’t represent two separate compartments of their thinking but one compartment manifested in two ways. Whether, like with a drug, things in this world have any ability to take us to the other.
[1]“There will be a quantum probability amplitude for every number of large space dimensions from zero to ten.”Hawking, 2010, 141.
[2]Hawking, 2010, 141.
[3]Sutter, 2021.
[4]Wright, 2008, 19.
Thank you Lewis. I continue to find your articles challenge my conceptions of the world. It is refreshing to have such thoughtful examination of these topics. Keep going.
-Phil
Yes thank you. I am concerned about the possible and probable "overlap". This is such an important discussion in our day. In the west we think 'just because we can means we ought to, or should' without thinking about the outcome or possible consequences.
Tie into the conversation the searching for power in ancient history: like Hitlers search for artifacts. Are those artifacts occultic? Are they religious? And why are 'scientific' atheists looking for this? And then operation paperclip happens. Hitler took an impoverished country into power with likely advanced 'technology downloads'. And the new powers wanted access, all disguised as 'science'. Such a good discussion Lewis and very important in my opinion. Are we playing with fire everyday?