Names and their Reverberations

The more earthy, the more real. The realms of Matter and of Spirit. The transcendental. Trans-? Across, beyond. My own immediate association comes from that word, not transatlantic travel, thus trans- means above; the air, for instance. We consider air sort of insubstantial in everyday language—unless we find that we can’t breathe. Airy, therefore, has a reverberation of insubstantiality although, technically, air isn’t. Our thinking is earth-rooted. Language is always challenged when it attempts to grasp what can’t be physically held.

Different languages, different twists, but the fundamentals are the same. In German, for example, the word Geist principally signals intelligence although it also means “ghost”; it is “mind” which also appears to be insubstantial, like a ghost; but Germans have adapted ghost for mind and also for the spiritual, a word that we take from Latin, where it means “breath,” so there you are: airy.

I am reading Malcolm Moncrieff’s book, The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. There he juxtaposes three-dimensionality and four-dimensionality, in effect attempting to give an earthy sort of foundation to the elusively transcending real by going from 3- to 4-. It’s a tough row to hoe. He emphasizes the words’ endings, those -itys, and says that he doesn’t mean the actual three dimensions of space nor yet the kind of fourth dimension mathematicians can and do project. He means something I would call “orders,” the 3D being the physical, the 4D being meaning. And since meaning is a common experience here in 3D-Land, he sees the two orders interpenetrating.

So why doesn’t he simply call it the spiritual order? Here culture shows its influence. Moncrieff published his book in 1951 hoping to make a contribution to the understanding of paranormal phenomena. But paranormal studies then had, as now they still have, aspirations of being viewed as sciences, and in that realm the spiritual is heterodox. Orthodox science is monistic. In quantum physics and such places it more and more resembles idealism pure and simple; the greater mass of science is still materialistic (physics is too hard to master); but both are monistic. Whereas, by contrast, the spiritual strongly suggests a dualism. Had Moncrieff written in the 1990s, he might have called his fourth-dimensionality quantum-mechanicity. That sort of thing is almost a reflex among people captured by the enormous fascination of the transcendental while wishing to stay on the reservation. The problem is that no matter how hard you strum the material strings, you don’t actually produce spiritual music, just the same old d‑itty entitled “Me too.” I think I’ll stick with the ghost.

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.