Other Planes of Existance, Alternate Realities, etc

stormkeeper

I was talking to Steven about this earlier on in the week and this came up... partly because I was/am currently reading a book called Parallel Worlds.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this topic to see what you guys think about it all? From a scientific pov, I certainly believe it is possible, as do I in a spiritual sense too. I'll start elaborating a little later on, but I wanted to get the topic out before I forgot!

Sapien

Kennett wrote:

I was talking to Steven about this earlier on in the week and this came up... partly because I was/am currently reading a book called Parallel Worlds.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this topic to see what you guys think about it all? From a scientific pov, I certainly believe it is possible, as do I in a spiritual sense too. I'll start elaborating a little later on, but I wanted to get the topic out before I forgot!

Not much of a response on this, I see. Pity.

'Tis a bit heavy, to be honest. Perhaps you could start us off. Do you mean "astral planes", or something more akin to an afterlife?

Nevyn

The thing is where to you start.
Yes I believe in such realms there are many what ones specfically are you intrested in.

stevenmu

It's a very interesting subject. It's also a very confusing one because we have a limited ability to percieve other planes of existence, and also because of the false impressions people have of 'other dimensions' thanks to a mass of bad sci-fi (possibly some good sci-fi too).

Taking the astral plane as an example, from reading various sites and forums about it, many people seem to be of the impression that the astral plane is 'another dimension' which is seperate from 'our dimension', i.e. it's a completely different place. People even remark that the astral plane contains 'copies' or everything our plane does. What many don't seem to realise is that a dimension isn't a place, it's more of a direction. For example visualise a sheet of paper sitting on a desk, this represent 2 dimensions, back/forward and left/right, with no up/down which'd be the third dimension. Now visualise a little 2 dimensional guy living on the sheet of paper who only has any concept of the 2 dimensions occupied by the paper sheet, up/down would be as foreign to him as 4th, 5th or 6th dimensions would be to us. Now imagine that somehow this little guy got lifted a few cm above the sheet of paper. While it may seem like it to any other little 2 dimensional guys on the sheet of paper, he hasn't been whisked off to some magical 3rd dimension, it's clear to us with our understanding of 3 dimensions that he simply moved up a few cm. He's still in more or less the same place he started, he's just moved slightly in a direction he doesn't comprehend.

I've read a bit on how the astral plane and similar 'higher dimensions' and while trying to squish all the ideas into my tiny little brain I've somehow mashed together a theory on how I think it might work. There's a lot of talk about how altering you consciousness through meditation or trances (or 'other methods') can let you leave your body, this is generally accompanied by mentions of raising energy and frequency. I've come to the conclusion that when talking about the astral plane, natural frequency can be treated as another dimension. I believe that all matter as we know it has a particular natural frequency. The most common example of what I mean by natural frequency is when a singer sings a note approaching the natural frequency of a glass, it will start to vibrate and the closer the singer gets to it's natural frequency the more it will vibrate, this is known as resonance. If we consider our spirit (or whatever term suits you best) to be an energy which vibrates (maybe fluctuates is a better word for an energy) at a particular frequency, and when this frequency is in line with the frequency of matter it too will resonate with it and interact with it, in effect binding us to our bodies. If we can change the frequency our spirit is operating at, our spirit becomes less bound to our bodies, and is more open to the energies around it. The energies around it being the things percieved in the astral plane, which are in fact the energies of everyday things here on the 'regular' plane.

I still haven't quite figured out how this type of mind-body interaction works (or at least how my own interpretation of it works) but here are some more thoughts.

Supposedly, according to astral-plane-ologers we can't ever fully disconnect from our bodies (except for when we die) and we can't enter another body or another entity can't enter ours, implying that there's something there's something which implicitly binds our own spirit to our own body. I suspect that the spirit-body resonance I talk about above must be much more complicated, working on more levels (more dimensions ?) than the simple singer-glass resonance. It's possible that our own particular spirit resonates with our own particular body because of something like the unique and complicated structure of our brain, or that that old favourite of new-agey pseudo-scientific ramblers like me, our DNA. It's also possible that there is only one large 'spirit energy' which interacts with us all differently (again possibly to do with unique brain structure/DNA) which gives the impression of us all being seperate and distinct.

...erm... what was the topic again ?

Oh yeah, so anyway, why do we have to change our spirit's frequency to percieve this astral plane, when all the other things we percieve on itare energies going about their business at their normal frequencies ? In theory we don't, and shouldn't, because our own energy should be much more sensitive to them and percieve them better at similar frequencies. This leads me to wonder if meditating, or whatever means we use to get our altered state, is actually not changing our spirit's frequency at all, but somehow changing our body's frequency so that it can communicate with our spirit better and recieve all this information it's picking up in it's normal state. Or something slightly more plausible would be that our spirit doesn't directly interface with our physical body, it does so by resonating with our bio-magnetic (or bio-electric or bio-something) field, which in turn is what we actually alter when we enter a state or altered conciousness.

I think I better stop now before I can confuse myself any more.

Sapien

I hesitate to venture into this topic at all. Ultimately this question, or questions like it, cut to the very heart of ones spiritual understanding of the universe, ones personal metaphysical construct, ones synthesis of all ideas regarding the meaning and nature of existence. Far too much to casually throw around on an internet forum, I think. As a scientist and a magickian, this is doubly intimidating for me. I have two entirely separate modes of thought through which to approach this issue, and, far from making it more difficult, the multitude of ideas and theories that spring forth, the dizzying panoply of possibilities that open up make any intelligent investigation impossible.

Just a few ideas. Aleister Crowley said that every man and every woman is a star. He might just as well have said that every man and every woman is a universe. The overriding result of intellectual endeavour over the last century has been the replacement of the human being firmly back at the centre of the Universe. The Copernican revolution prior to the Twentieth Century, and the hard, cold simplicity of Newtonian Determinism, the ineluctable fact of Darwinian Evolution, along with the moral absoluteness of Transcendentalism had relegated the human person to an incidental residence on an insignificant outer swirl of an ordinary, unremarkable galaxy. The Universe, it was thought, would get along just as well, and just the same without us, and a firm, immutable truth underlay all aspects of human existence. Then... Nietzsche and his Genealogy, Einstein and his Relativity, Schroedinger and his waves, Heisenberg and his Uncertainty, Foucault and his Post-Modernism, shattered that strangely comforting disinterest that the Universe was supposed to have in us. Suddenly the Universe is once again merely a thing defined by its relationship to human observation. Nothing is absolute. No two people live in the same world.

Every human being lives in his or her own plane of existence. My blue is your red. My saffron tastes like your vinegar. My left is your North. My good is your bad. My bad is your evil.

But some planes of existence are bigger than others. Some encompass others. Some are stronger than others. Some are more consistent than others. Some planes of existence bear no relationship to each other and can coexist without any interaction. Others overlap, contradict and are in conflict. When this happens, both planes will be tested. This is what magick calls Will.

It is the supreme project of each intelligent life to perfect its own plane of existence, so that it transcends all subjectivity, and converges upon Truth. It is the highest attainment of power to live in a plane in which all other planes can exist, or to which all other planes must surrender. It is the final conquest of another intelligence to force it to live in ones own plane.

If every human being, each with a very similar mind, arising from a very similar biological brain, and arising from a very similar set of circumstances, results in a unique plane, then how very different must be the planes inhabited by consciousnesses completely alien to the human condition? What we would call spirits, or angels, or demons, or gods, or elementals - creatures of pure thought - living ideas. Their existences are implicit and emergent, and so must be the planes in which they can be found. If we can change ourselves, and the way in which our minds work, then we alter the universe in which we exist. If we change it in a specific way, we can cause it to coincide with the universe inhabited by another consciousness. And, standing on their own ground and existing according to their own rules, we can communicate. Or, by the strength of our own plane, and the completeness of our personal universe, developed over lifetimes of consideration of Truth, we can force that consciousness into our own plane, and to behave according to our own rules.

There is indeed an infinity of universes. Consider though, that in the course of your lifetime, you have already passed through a countless number of them.

Zillah

If anyone here has played Mage the Awakening (Thaed?), Sapien's post just struck me as a perfectly playable paradigm.

That is to say, internally consistent and logically viable.

Nevyn

Yes, I have Zillah a lot of magic and occult stuff in fiction has a bases taken from else where even the map of the planes from D&D.

stormkeeper

Anyone ever heard of Planescape at all?

Nevyn

Planescape the setting on the world of sigil or Planescape : Torement the pc game ?

stormkeeper

All of it, though I mostly know the game...

stevenmu

And there was me thinking this was going to turn into an endlessly circular philosophical debate over the ins and outs of subjective versus objective realities.

Sapien

stevenmu wrote:

And there was me thinking this was going to turn into an endlessly circular philosophical debate over the ins and outs of subjective versus objective realities.

(That's kinda what I was going for )

SkepticOne

Sapien,

Every human being lives in his or her own plane of existence. My blue is your red. My saffron tastes like your vinegar. My left is your North. My good is your bad. My bad is your evil.

But some planes of existence are bigger than others. Some encompass others. Some are stronger than others. Some are more consistent than others. Some planes of existence bear no relationship to each other and can coexist without any interaction. Others overlap, contradict and are in conflict. When this happens, both planes will be tested. This is what magick calls Will.

You can replace the word "plane" with the word "perspective" or "point of view" in your post (with a few grammatical changes) and it still works. Obviously we all have our unique perspective on the world. Our experince of the world is coloured by our physical makeup as well as prior experience. Some animals have more than three colour receptors; others have none etc.

These points of view often contradict each other and clash. The person or group with the stonger will gets to impose their point of view on others. And so forth.

Is this what you are saying, albeit using different terminology?

Sapien

SkepticOne wrote:

Sapien,

You can replace the word "plane" with the word "perspective" or "point of view" in your post (with a few grammatical changes) and it still works. Obviously we all have our unique perspective on the world. Our experince of the world is coloured by our physical makeup as well as prior experience. Some animals have more than three colour receptors; others have none etc.

These points of view often contradict each other and clash. The person or group with the stonger will gets to impose their point of view on others. And so forth.

Is this what you are saying, albeit using different terminology?

Yes, SkepticOne (hello again!). But my choice of terminology isn't merely vague obscurantism. I sought to connect the idea of relativistic nihilism with kennett's question of multiple planes of existence in a very real way. Please excuse my windy, allegorical approach, but these are very difficult ideas to express, even for the relatively articulate, and I am, after all, informed prejudicially by mystical philosophy.

Instead of theorising wantonly, or examining the possible implications of fringe physics that few of us here are in a position to understand, I have tried to demonstrate ab intitio that the concept of a singular, common, shared reality is weak. The hope was that one might be able to grasp the possibility of other planes by extension of these ideas. The mention of "spirits, or angels, or demons, or gods, or elementals - creatures of pure thought - living ideas" is important in this regard.

If I were to summarise this thesis it would be as follows: We are unable to perceive or measure objective, noumenal reality - and so, empirically speaking, we can assume that it doesn't exist. Any consciousness is confined to experience within its own field of perception, which is framed by the make-up of its own mind. So it is more useful to talk about the nature of the mind than the nature of the world - to consider that the world emerges from the mind, and not vice versa. It is one of the most basic Hermetic Principles that: "The Universe is Mind" (The Kybalion).

In other words, instead of talking about different planes of reality, which is semantically somewhat oxymoronic, we can talk about different planes of consciousness, which is more rational but can mean exactly the same thing.

SkepticOne

But in my view, your argument for different plains of consciousness is exactly the same as the argument for different "points of view". What is the reason to get rid of the idea of a shared reality?

It seems also that physics is based on the metaphysical notion of objective reality. A subtle reality in modern physics, sure, but if you throw out objective reality you can't then use physics to support the idea that shared reality does not exist.

Nevyn

How shared is it to begin with ?
There are certainly things in my reality that are not in those of other people.

SkepticOne

Thaedydal wrote:

How shared is it to begin with ?
There are certainly things in my reality that are not in those of other people.

If a botanist discovers a new species of plant on some island and hasn't yet communicated that discovery, would you say that this plant species is part of his or her reality but no one elses?

Sapien

SkepticOne wrote:

But in my view, your argument for different plains of consciousness is exactly the same as the argument for different "points of view". What is the reason to get rid of the idea of a shared reality?

I'm not so much getting rid of it, as suggesting that it was never a particularly convincing concept to begin with. Consciousness is, by definition, a solitary experience. I refer you to the philosophical problem of Solipsism. It is not merely an exercise in mischievous sophistry, but a genuinely troubling proposition - that nothing exists beyond ones own consciousness. If you have not already, I would suggest reading something on it - this Wiki article is okay.

I do not propound solipsism - for one reason, because I don't believe that it can lead to anything useful, and also because it would necessarily mean that I'm talking to myself . I quote it to demonstrate a chink in the persuasiveness of the idea of a shared reality, and to suggest that we should, perhaps, occasionally look to other things, other fields of awareness, to inform ourselves about the nature of the Universe.

Put it this way. We are all trapped within our respective minds. Our minds can leave shared reality under certain circumstances, and in some cases, at will. Why is shared reality so special? The answer, of course, is in the question - shared reality is the one we have in common with everyone else, the common ground. We need a grounding in it in order to communicate with other people and participate in daily life. But those drawn to the spiritual experience value their ability to access unshared realities.

Another philosophical device useful in this context is Hermeneutical Realism, which states that, through experience, one builds a system of rules of interpretation by which one judges what is real and what is not. The magickian, by exposing himself to unshared realities, allows the rules by which he achieves hermeneutical cohesion to become more complicated than one who cleaves to what he or she understands to be shared reality.

SkepticOne wrote:

It seems also that physics is based on the metaphysical notion of objective reality. A subtle reality in modern physics, sure, but if you throw out objective reality you can't then use physics to support the idea that shared reality does not exist.

There's some confusion here, and it's probably my fault. Let me clarify what I believe. I reject the idea that shared reality is absolute - by definition - I think, however much we may think we share a common reality or would like to, it is an illusion made impossible by the solitary nature of consciousness. I do not reject the idea that there exists an objective reality, I merely say that we do not know it, may never be able to know it, and certainly don't share it. Physics is a hugely powerful hermeneutic construct, and is undoubtedly the most robust and advanced intellectual endeavour ever to have arisen in human civilisation. I would be happy to say that it converges on an objective reality, that is shared. But I do not think that this is the objective reality, or that the fact that people share common rules of physics means that they share realities. I believe that there's much more to it all than can be pinned down by reductionism, and the Hermetic mode of though is an accretion of those methods neglected because of the irresistible success of the scientific method. I believe we are tethered to our shared reality more than we need to be, and that those who loose themselves from it now and again know amazing dividends.

Sapien

SkepticOne wrote:

If a botanist discovers a new species of plant on some island and hasn't yet communicated that discovery, would you say that this plant species is part of his or her reality but no one elses?

Yes. Of course, this is semantic. In this sense what I would mean by "reality" is consciousness or field of awareness or something like that; whereas presumably you would putatively intend "reality" to mean objective reality. This is because I think consciousness is more significant and you, probably, believe objective reality is more important - and so we award the word "reality" to our favoured basis for argument.

It's something like Schroedinger's cat. To the person on the mainland, his or her reality contains the possibility of any number of new flowers existing - of any variety of sizes, shapes, colours and smells. But they are all uncertain, shifting, potential and eternal. The botanist merely finds one of them.

stevenmu

Sapien wrote:

(That's kinda what I was going for )

Yeah, I kinda guessed that, but I already have a pretty good idea where this kind of discussion always goes. So for the sake of my already somewhat loose grasp on reality I tried not to bite.

I'll feel like I want to add something worthwhile to the discussion, but I'm not sure if possibly can. Both 'sides' of the discussion, objective and subjective realities, are neither completely true or completely false. Both are simply usefull mechanisms, applicable within particular contexts. While it's true that the only reality (or realities) we can experience are those that we can percieve and interpret through subjective means, it is also true that there is an objective reality which exists in it's own right unaffected by any perception of it. I suppose the key to making anything usefull out of this whole area of thought comes from gaining an understanding of the interaction and relationships between the objective and the subjective.

SkepticOne

stevenmu, my motivation in this is not to argue the superiority of one viewpoint over another but to find out how people think. To do we need to see what is meant by the various terms. Perhaps there is a valid mapping between my. concepts and those of Sapien and others. It is important however to move on when that is done.

From what I can gather so far, the use of the word reality here corresponds to my use of the word "worldview". The only difference is that "worldview" contains within itself the idea of the world or objective reality even though it doesn't strictly imply it. However, it also allows for beliefs and pure subjective experience. These also inform your worldview. If you believe in a god for example, this is part of your worldview. It does not imply the existence of a shared objective reality because it is possible to have a worldview that does not contain it.

That's enough of semantics for me.

Sapien wrote:

I do not propound solipsism - for one reason, because I don't believe that it can lead to anything useful, and also because it would necessarily mean that I'm talking to myself . I quote it to demonstrate a chink in the persuasiveness of the idea of a shared reality, and to suggest that we should, perhaps, occasionally look to other things, other fields of awareness, to inform ourselves about the nature of the Universe.

I agree with this. It is possible to adopt the position of solipsism and not meet with any contradictions. No experience will come along which will force you to believe otherwise. However, your interpretation of these experiences will of course be different.

Put it this way. We are all trapped within our respective minds. Our minds can leave shared reality under certain circumstances, some cases, at will. Why is shared reality so special? The answer, of course, is in the question - shared reality is the one we have in common with everyone else, the common ground. We need a grounding in it in order to communicate with other people and participate in daily life. But those drawn to the spiritual experience value their ability to access unshared realities.

I have two questions here. Do you draw a distinction between what we might call "social reality" and what we might call physical reality? An example of social reality would be money. It exists only because as a community we agree that it exists and we act accordingly. That is a peripheral question but the answer will help me understand you're position. A more fundamental question is: how is your position different to that of solipsism? Do you share something like the view lof Berkely that all that exists are god and our individual minds, for example?

Another philosophical device useful in this context is Hermeneutical Realism, which states that, through experience, one builds a system of rules of interpretation by which one judges what is real and what is not. The magickian, by exposing himself to unshared realities, allows the rules by which he achieves hermeneutical cohesion to become more complicated than one who cleaves to what he or she understands to be shared reality.

Can you shed some light on these rules? I'm not looking for anything too rigourous, just a general flavour. How would they differ from, say, those of a physist or "man in the street"? This gets to the core of the issue for me.

Sapien

SkepticOne wrote:

I have two questions here. Do you draw a distinction between what we might call "social reality" and what we might call physical reality? An example of social reality would be money. It exists only because as a community we agree that it exists and we act accordingly. That is a peripheral question but the answer will help me understand you're position.

I am happy to treat social reality as a subset of physical reality, but they are, of course, distinct. I get the impression you're trying to probe quite how far I take the idea of the subjective experience of existence, so let me come right out and say it: All the way.

SkepticOne wrote:

A more fundamental question is: how is your position different to that of solipsism? Do you share something like the view lof Berkely that all that exists are god and our individual minds, for example?

My position differs from solipsism in that a solipsist literally argues that he has no reason to believe that anyone else exists, whereas I argue that I have no reason to believe that the world I perceive exists for anyone else. I repeat that I have no answer to solipsism, and am unaware of anyone who does, but I choose to overlook it because it is philosophically sterile, not to say depressing.

Berkeley, being a fellow Trinner, is of course an elegant philosopher, but I would tend not to identify with him, as many of his terms are loaded. The hermetic conception of God is much less nuanced - God is the Universe, the Universe is the Mind, and our minds are subsets of that Mind. And, yes, I believe that the physical universe too is merely part of this Mind. It is a system of rules to which those subsets of the Universal Mind that comprise the human mind happen to be bound. So these rules neither arise from physical reality, nor strictly from the human mind - both arise in the Universal Mind. While the rules of physical reality are defined and static, the human mind has the capacity to change with respect to them. It cannot transgress them, but it can transcend them. The human mind can then access aspects of the Universal Mind that are not subject to the rules of physical reality. Something like E.A. Abbott's "Flatland" springs to mind.

I am rapidly reaching the limits of my capacity to express these ideas without resorting to esoteric allegory or sounding like a complete waffler, but I hope this is enough to achieve some of the "mapping" you're talking about.

SkepticOne wrote:

Can you shed some light on these rules? I'm not looking for anything too rigourous, just a general flavour. How would they differ from, say, those of a physist or "man in the street"? This gets to the core of the issue for me.

Perhaps a little too much so In general I don't think hermeneutical systems are meant to be taken as cogitable rules of which the individual, the interpreter, is consciously aware; rather they lie at the basis of the operation of the individuals mind. Perhaps that is not the case in general Hermeneutical Realism, but it is the case in the sense I mean it. Some of these hermeneutical changes, however, do make themselves obvious, and are manifest in as much an intellectual as a spiritual way. For instance, a magickian's conception of causality will be very different from that of one who is wholly complicit in shared reality. I might say that there is no difference between knowing something is going to happen, and making it happen. This would seem the purest nonsense to most people, but it is perfectly obvious to me, and would be to many occultists. Another example. According to my understanding the existence of conscious ideas is not only possible, but ineluctable and emergent, whereas for most people the idea of consciousness unsupported by a physical existence of some kind makes no sense.

These ways of thinking, or rules, differ from those of an ordinary physicist or man on the street, but they are not in conflict with them. I am a physicist, a man on the street, and a magickian. In fact, I would say that physics has influenced my hermeneutical make-up as much as magick, because through it I am better acquainted with the rules of physical reality - the basis of shared reality - than I would otherwise have been, and have found that these rules are so much more complicated, and so much more full of possibility than they seem to be from this narrow Newtonian window in which we live.