Are Spirits in Another Place?

In the writings of famous mystics like Ibn el Arabi, Swedenborg, and others we encounter people who could see or hear spirits while fully awake—but these entities were not visible, audible to others. I’ve also encountered in the writings of other mystics claims that they saw spirits as points or shapes of colored light, the colors seen indicating the spirits’ variable levels of development. In more technical jargon these are labeled as “photisms,” and visions of photisms sometimes accompany certain deep states of meditation; they may also manifest spontaneously.

The question now arises: Where are these phenomena located? I myself think of them as being in another dimension, but all I mean by saying that is that they are ordinarily inaccessible to me. I know. This is a sloppy way of thinking. It’s equivalent to saying that the electromagnetic spectrum is also in another dimension because we can’t perceive it. Right now, sitting on this couch, multiple radio and television programs are passing right through my body, but I neither laugh at the jokes nor shiver at the prompting of the horror movie’s music because—well, I don’t see or hear a thing.

When I want to be more precise, I think of this “dimension” as present all around me but—like the electromagnetic—existing in a field of its own that interpenetrates matter because it is much more subtle. As conscious living beings we are also present in that field but unaware of it. Our bodies are too noisy and command our attention. To put this another way, we are simultaneously present in multiple worlds, but our attention is principally in one; in our current state we are most aware of the physical. But my thought is that our consciousness, intelligence, will, higher emotions, and intuitions are of the subtle kind—are not produced by our bodies. Rather, in many of our activities, we use the body to live a subtle life in the physical domain.

Some spirits and ghosts, in other words, are right here where we are. They come and go—as we come and go across the planet. They may live here or far away—and come here only on visits. Our physical world seems infinite in extent as is that other—and both have “many mansions.” There need not be a spatial difference between this world and the Beyond. Both may occupy the same space. When we speak of the Beyond, we may well be speaking of a state of density different from our current one. From this one we have the devil of a time seeing that one (unless specially endowed). From that one, similarly, the physical may be damnably difficult to see and to contact without the kind of space suit that we here call the body.