The Other World

Chapter 13. Interim Report
So what does this whole book amount to? It doesn’t amount to proof of anything, that’s for sure. For all you know, I’m deliberately deceiving you, or am deceiving myself. My data may be wrong, my reasoning may be wrong, my “knowings” may be wrong, my conclusions may be wrong. As always, you’re pretty much on your own, and you’re pretty much going to believe whatever you allow yourself to believe. The only other choice is to find an authority to follow, trying not to remember that belief in authority is itself a belief, not a known.
I wrote this, not to persuade you of anything, but to present a clear statement of first-hand experience that might suggest to you that your life is more magical than you may have thought. I have seen, first hand, that there’s a lot for us to learn about many things that have been reported for centuries and denied only in the past few hundred years. These phenomena, if taken seriously, cast serious doubt on the materialist fantasy that has passed for science and common-sense in our day. Among those inconvenient reports: ghosts. out-of-body experiences, spirit possession, witchcraft, telepathy, afterlife experiences, the power of prayer, the ability to heal by touch or and at a distance… and plenty more.
Do such things happen? Is the commonly accepted view of the world significantly different from real life? There’s only one way to know. You have to investigate. You can’t just take another person’s word for it, except as an interim report. I know that stepping off the beaten path can be somewhat scary. But the land beyond the beaten path is not a featureless wilderness. I hope that my few muddy (not, I hope, muddled) footprints in the grass will give you whatever excuse you need to go find out for yourself. Herewith, a summary of my own interim report.
.2.
My own experiences (including reading and thinking, trying to make sense of these experiences) convince me of 10 interrelated points.
1) We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. Although by habit we identify with our bodies, this is a mistake, or a partial mistake. We are somewhat material; somewhat mortal; somewhat human. The identity we call ourselves — Downstairs, as I call it — is linked to the Earth in many ways, some known, some not. Our bodies are of the earth. Our genetic memories, our physical ancestry, our everyday interests, are all firmly rooted in the earth. To our physical bodies — the human part of us — earth is home. It is rightly said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience; that human experience is an experience of living “in the earth”, that is, in 3D Theater–physical matter reality. Therefore it isn’t “spiritual” to hate our bodies or our lives, however much our moments of deepest homesickness may tempt us to.
But we are more than our physical bodies. We are spirits, forming and maintaining and living in physical bodies, and neither this beautiful earth nor any other physical place, here or in the next galaxy, can be home to a spirit. We come from Elsewhere (or perhaps I should say Else-non-where); we’re just visiting here. Therefore, neither is it “scientific” or “realistic” to think that the body, or even human existence as body/mind/spirit, is all there is. Too much experience flatly contradicts this. Therefore,
2) This life is not our only life. As immortal or relatively immortal spirits, we lived before we were born this time, and will live after we die this time. Before and after this one physical-matter-reality life, we exist. It seems likely that we’re somewhere (physical or otherwise), doing something (whether imaginable to us now or not). And in fact explorers before and since Monroe have found just this.
3) We “individuals” are all connected one to another. The lives we lead seem to be separated between Me and Not-Me, with the dividing line seeming to be our physical bodies, but even science now knows that the division is illusory. We touch each other and are touched both in and out of body. Our scents, our auras, our thoughts, all touch at a distance. We often know each other’s thoughts, and “spontaneously and fortuitously” intervene in each other’s lives when needed. We engage in dance-like, perfectly executed interactions in ways that do not originate Downstairs and cannot be understood strictly in Downstairs terms. I think this is because
4) We as individuals are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted. What Monroe called the INSPEC, what religions call God, what New Agers sometimes call The Universe–something vastly greater than us is yet an intimate part of us, as we are an intimate part of it. It is our connection to the larger whole that makes our lives possible, and gives our lives meaning. We are as fingers of an immense hand–which analogy demonstrates why the intentions of the larger being can be trusted. Does a finger distrust the hand it is part of? And if the finger comes to grief for whatever reason, does it suspect that the misfortune came from the hand’s malice? Obviously not. Where there is identity, there is identity of interest.
5) Nonetheless, this larger being sees things differently. Down here, immersed in 3D-Theater, we can’t help identifying with the here-and-now. Indeed, that’s what we’re here to do! But naturally anything that had its being in a framework outside of time and space would see things differently. What is desperately real to us would be a dream to it, and what was important to it might be nonexistent to our consciousness. We almost always forget the larger reality when we enter this one. Mythology had it that we forgot as we crossed the River Styx. Monroe says the noise of unfocused human mental and emotional activity is too great for us to function if we were to stay at the level of awareness natural to us outside 3D Theater (that is, in the non-physical realm he called Locale II). Other mythologies and cosmologies explain it in other ways. Different ways of saying the same thing. We forget. But the larger being remembers, and it is there to remind us.
6) The larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom. The larger being cannot live our life for us. This would deprive us–and thus itself–of choice and growth, which is the result of choice. But it sees outside of time, and it knows our purpose for this lifetime, as we cannot, and it has insights that can help us stay “on the beam” and live this life to the fullest. Think how wise we would be if we could remember the experiences and conclusions of thousands of other lives from the inside. Think what wise counselors we could then be to one who was within such a life, with its sensory and other constraints. Access to wider knowledge, combined with intimate insight and identity of interest, makes the larger being a trustworthy source of unlimited wisdom, relative to even the wisest and best of us fragments.
7) The larger being contacts us, sometimes sending dreams, sometimes visions, sometimes hunches or “knowings” or precognitive flashes. It works through intuition, regularly, and sometimes automatic writing, spontaneous recall, coincidence, you name it. Any time you hear or see something that resonates, your larger being may be taking advantage of an opportunity to get something across. Monroe said non-corporeal beings communicate exclusively by non-vocal communication rather than by words. Isn’t this precisely what dreams do? Dreams usually set up pictures, scenarios, symbols, leaving us to decode them as best we can. Sometimes, it is true, we get words; sometimes words, even sentences, of great power. But primarily dreams send symbols, which we can learn to read. (Let me say in passing that all means of divination, including Tarot decks, the I Ching, and those not yet devised, seem to me to work by helping the larger being to communicate with us, if only by concentrating our attention on symbols.) And this is not a one-way street.
8) We can contact the larger being. Some call it prayer; some, meditation; some, asking for guidance. The names vary according to time, culture and tradition, but the means of access are well known. Regardless of context, the underlying reality is that we as fragmentary individuals have access to a trustworthy source of relatively boundless knowledge and wisdom, ours for the asking. We need only to learn how to communicate, and to practice doing it.
9) Thus our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. We are always in intimate connection with the larger, wiser being we sometimes call “our” higher self; because we are part of this higher self, as fingers are a part of a hand. (Is a hand a finger’s higher self?) Without this intimate connection, we could not live, any more than a finger could live apart from its hand, or the hand away from its arm, etc. Therefore it is impossible for us to be alone in this sense.
10) Nonetheless, we may often lose communication. The intimate connection cannot be severed, but communication may be, and often is, distorted, neglected or forgotten. Many never even learn of the possibility of such intimate communication, having been taught otherwise. Obviously if you don’t believe it exists, you don’t try to communicate with it, and don’t listen when it communicates with you. And even those who know about the larger spirit sometimes forget, mostly in those times when “the world is too much with us.” At such times, be it a period of forgetfulness or a lifetime, everything you might have learned from that source is closed to you, not as punishment but as a consequence of your own forgetfulness or disbelief. But regardless of belief, we can contact the larger being, using many tools internal and external. Thus our lives don’t have to be disconnected and solitary. Thus we need not live our lives alone, even if all contemporary society says otherwise.
It seems to me that thinking in terms of our connection to a larger being clears up a lot of mysteries. It opens up unsuspected possibilities for us as individuals as well as collectively as a species. It means more, suggests more, than the words God or Higher Self. If the concept still poses perplexities, and if it still leaves vastly more unexplained than explained, so what? That leaves all the more work — and fun — for us and those who follow us. But it does give us a point of departure.
.3.
The experiences I have shared with you in this narrative cease to be inexplicable when viewed in this context. They become what is only to be expected. They become (dare we say it?) ordinary. And the things religions have tried so hard to tell us, these many generations and centuries, make sense in an entirely new way.
We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies, and so this life is not our only life. We “individuals” are all connected one to another, if only as fragments of a larger being. This larger being cares about us and can be trusted. It is a source of foresight and wisdom, but nonetheless, it sees things differently. The larger being contacts us, and we can contact it, and so our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication.
Immortal spirits, temporarily inhabiting bodies? My contacts with living beings who no longer live on this earth –including some who I did not know when they were alive here–would be enough to convince me, if I needed convincing, that it is demonstrably untrue that “one life is all you get.” The only way that saying is true is in the limited sense that a given personality in a given historical time is somehow significantly different and distinct from other personalities and lifetimes that are embodied by the same soul. Thus, one might reasonably argue that a given life is not really a “past life” of another, but “another life” of some common-denominator soul. Or, one might make the counter-argument that all beings are at bottom part of one great being. It’s only a conflict of viewpoint. I can’t see how it ever could be resolved, and I don’t see that it would be important to do so.
As to this life not being our only life, here are a few of the lives I have found to date: Bertram, a Norman monk of the middle ages; John Cotten, the 18th-century Virginia farmer who married Clara; Joseph (or Josiah) Smallwood, the Vermont nature mystic; David Owen Poynter, the Welsh journalist and seeker of hidden knowledge; Katrina, the Polish Jewish girl; Also Clio, a Roman diviner in fire; Senji-san, a Japanese monk, and unnamed others, including at least one (if the evidence may be believed) on another planet. I don’t expect it to convince anyone else, but it goes a long way toward convincing me.
As evidence of our connection one to another, I might cite every instance of so-called telepathy mentioned in this book, and–more to the point, perhaps–all the mutual assistance so freely offered and received. Think of the interaction between Mary and me, for instance, or Suni and Ed and Dave and so many others named and unnamed. We tend to take love and friendship for granted, considering them to be part of ordinary life. So they are. But the very prevalence in our lives of love and friendship may blind us, sometimes, to how very strange and interesting they are as symptoms (not merely symbols) of our deep interconnectedness.
That we are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted has always been an axiom of religion. My experiences, inner and outer, convince me that this is a straightforward description of the way things are. And although Monroe calls that being INSPEC and others call it God, Monroe made it quite clear in his book Far Journeys that INSPEC (on INSPEC’s own say-so) was not God. Yet he also said that he could see how people in the past, catching just a momentary non-physical glimpse of INSPEC, might decide it had seen the deity. Just so, Carl Jung once described what he called the racial unconscious in terms that he explicitly said resembled the traditional conception of God, including, among other attributes, (relative) omniscience and omnipresence.
Certainly a larger being connected to all of us, and existing outside time-space, would be a source of foresight and wisdom. Certainly it would see things differently from those of us enmeshed in 3D Theater. Yet it would be willing and able to contact us, and would encourage such contact. I have given many examples in this book of the simple process of establishing and deepening connection with the larger being. What else was it, when I learned to talk to (listen to) The Boss, or The Gentlemen Upstairs? When, before that, I connected with my Higher Self in the image of a unicorn? The information I have gotten has proved reliable on matters mundane and practical, no less than philosophical and abstract. And when I listen to hunches, it is the same thing.
But you must be willing to connect. What is leading an exclusively Downstairs life, if not loss of communication with Upstairs? This is the long hard solitary Downstairs road, with a vengeance, and it is no fun.
This new overview is all right there within the context of my experiences. I promised, in advance, to speak of what I know of my own knowledge. The same knowledge, by way of different experiences, is available to you. It is merely a matter of going after it.
.4
Every religion I know of testifies that we are spirits in bodies, and that we are an integral part of an eternal being that guides us and cares for us, and is essential to our moment-to-moment existence. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Religions have greatly discredited themselves by their quarreling over the way they see things. Nonetheless I think it would be a great error, almost a laughable one, to ignore the existence of so many thousand years of religious testimony, testimony that coincides.
Experience unites; opinion divides. Those who give testimony to personal experience of what they call God describe what happened to them as best they can. Of course, their testimony is going to differ as to detail and emphasis. But the reports are similar. It is when we get into opinion about what that experience means that we meet intolerance, the construction of logical prisons, and the laying-down of rules, and the beginnings of religious wars. Little minds attempt to interpret great experience, and the inevitable result is distortion, and quarreling over the nature and attributes of God, and the nature of humans, the nature of reality, the nature (and existence or non-existence) of heaven and hell, and of the afterlife in general.
Different religions emerge, shaped by different types of people, for different types of people. They place their emphasis so drastically differently that they seem to be describing differences in essence when in fact they are describing difference in nuance, or in interpretation. What they cannot spread and often do not share is the experience of the very real existence of the larger being of which we are a part.
One of the greatest Christian mystics and seers in history, Emanuel Swedenborg was also the most famous European scientist of his day. For more than 27 years, beginning in his fifties, Swedenborg conversed with spiritual beings he called angels and was granted visions of heaven and hell. He interpreted his entirely in a Christian context, but they sound remarkably like what Lifeline participants experience. Shared experience does not imply shared interpretation. Yet the experience is real.
.5.
We are in one of those historic moments when a civilization’s old way of seeing things is breaking into fragments, and a new way is not yet born. It is exciting, challenging, liberating–and also disorienting, frightening. No matter. This world we are moving into was not called forth by us and it won’t be banished by us. All we can do is meet it well or badly. And the only way to meet it well is to live our greatest truth as see where that brings us. Neither materialism nor fundamentalism contains enough truth to be worth the distortion they include. Neither offers us firm ground upon which to found our new lives. Only experience, followed by reflection, does that.
So it becomes a matter of personal exploration. My Upstairs link provides me with whatever assistance I happen to want, along with quite a bit that I need but don’t have sense enough to ask for. Do you have reason to think your Upstairs is any less interested in helping you? Is yours any less practical than mine? Why not ask your own questions?
Of course, any process of interpretation includes distortion. As an example, I suspect that often people experience the larger being as an external spirit, because it seems to them to be something outside themselves. In a sense, it is outside themselves: it extends far beyond the bounds of their own personality. In another sense, it is not at all outside themselves: it is an integral (and often unsuspected) internal part of the larger being that they are. Each viewpoint is sort of correct; neither is exactly correct. The distortion caused by viewpoints can be recognized and allowed for, but not prevented.
And the same thing goes for this overview. It is (at best) sort of correct, from a certain point of view. As far as I can see, “sort of correct, from a certain point of view” is about as good as we can do while still being in physical-matter reality. Even at best, anybody else’s ideas and experiences are no more than an interim report.

I was lying in bed, drowsing, when an association of ideas produced an image of my kitchen sink, with some dishes in it. The water was in spray mode (as through nozzles) rather than in one undivided stream. It occurred to me, that’s a visual representation of the non-3D and 3D worlds interaction.

* The sprays are the non-3D, the Vast Impersonal Forces, streaming in.
* What the water falls upon is the 3D world we live in.

What the water finds as it rains down has nothing to do with the source of the water, or the volume, or whether it’s hot or cold. The forces just are, for whatever reason.

The 3D situations they meet just are, for whatever reason.

The interaction of the two is what we experience.

Not a perfect analogy, of course, in that we (the dirty dishes? :-)) are changed by the water, and the water flows through us, it doesn’t just go down the drain. But still, even if slightly absurd, an interesting analogy, I think.

From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first book, though not his best.

It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. But there is only necessary a moment’s sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a nature behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague pre-emption right and western reserve as yet. We live on the outskirts of that region. Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies, are all that we know of it. We are not to be imposed on by the longest spell of weather. Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.

…

The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself,—how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo,—I am not without hope that we may, even here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,—these are some of our astronomers.

There are perturbations in our orbits produced by the influence of outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated the elements of that undiscovered world which produces them. I perceive in the common train of my thoughts a natural and uninterrupted sequence, each implying the next, or, if interruption occurs, it is occasioned by a new object being presented to my senses. But a steep, and sudden, and by these means unaccountable transition, is that from a comparatively narrow and partial, what is called common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them. This implies a sense which is not common, but rare in the wisest man’s experience; which is sensible or sentient of more than common.

In what enclosures does the astronomer loiter! His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary. The mind knows a distance and a space of which all those sums combined do not make a unit of measure,—the interval between that which appears, and that which is. I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them. I have interest but for six feet of star, and that interest is transient. Then farewell to all ye bodies, such as I have known ye.

…

What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,—for there must be subordination,—but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. Some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may God speed them. What Fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that “a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.”

…

In the life of Sadi by Dowlat Shah occurs this sentence: “The eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Sadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.”

[Don posted this as a comment to another post, but I thought it deserved a wider audience than that was likely to get.]

When I was still pre-puberty, anything that smelled like normal Western religion turned me away and still does, yet I was attracted to Rosicrucian, Theosophy, and Buddhist wisps that were floating around without having a clue to enlighten me why so. Then, in the later sixties a dark, little bookstore on a side street invaded my world with stacks of East Asian publications that promised enlightenment. The ones that attracted me, especially those by Zen roshis, Krishnamurti, and Shri Ramana, never mentioned God, sin, salvation, required beliefs, or pleading prayers, but practices prefaced by, in essence, “try it, you’ll like it.” I did try, but knew no one else who was interested and supportive, so often my focus was lost in making do. Only in the last couple of years am I starting to get hints of what it is all about thanks to heavy duty help streaming down from elsewhere. While I’ve always somehow treasured those teachings, truthfully I didn’t really consider them practical until just a few months ago.
Continue reading Don Sanderson on enlightenment