Seeing into the Unseen: A Personal Journey of Discovery

He has been very ill and that afternoon he realizes he is dying.

He’s confused for a moment as he is plucked up and out of his pain-racked body. He looks down and can see his body lying there a couple of hundred meters below him.

When he looks upwards he finds himself inside a small cabin, a monorail car perhaps. Eight or ten others sit comfortably side-by-side. A black man, opposite him, is gently playing a trumpet. It comes to him that this little group are all dying at the same time.

A bright, yet not blinding, light appears to his left, at the end of the cabin. There is a suggestion of a form within the light. A male voice comes to him, intimate and entirely nonjudgmental. He doesn’t know whether it is inside his head, or whether the others have heard it, too. The “voice” assures him that he is indeed dying, however in this case he is being given the choice to continue, or to return to his previous life. Then, to his continuing astonishment, he is told that he has completed what he has come to do. He is 33 years old. He is free to choose.

After a few moments of deep lucidity he decides to return to life. Upon which the cabin dissolves until his whole visual field is filled with singing, celebrating angels. He is escorted by his two companion angels, across a wide plain and taken into a large structure to be healed.

Sometime later, after being shown around and told that he’d not recall what he is seeing, he is returned to his body to find himself fully healthy once again.

He is walking on a beach in Israel as dusk is starting to fall. Sitting for a moment on a large rock, he stares into the surf. It is at that point during sunset when the air can turn almost violet. The waves roll in with the surf throwing up sheets of spray that hang in the air before the next wave replaces them.

His mind is empty as he gazes idly into the violet haze. Yet his whole body jolts when he suddenly becomes aware that he is watching a group of ten or twelve beings, very tall--about twice the height of humans--with a couple of children amongst them, plodding slowly in single file up a slight incline.

This strange scenario, as real as anything he has ever seen on a cinema screen, persists in the violet mist as long as the waves replace the spray. As the light changes and the spray no longer refracts a violet glow, the figures dissolve and disappear.

It is no more a hallucination than the moving images of a film. The beings move. They walk slowly and deliberately for at least 20 seconds.

He is lying in his bathtub after a physically strenuous day. Looking up he sees two figures standing in his bathroom, just inside the door.

The taller of the two is definitely female, dark-haired, well over six-feet-tall, and very beautiful. In front of her is a far more curious affair. He can’t tell what gender it is. It’s bipedal, certainly, small, perhaps four feet tall and seemingly more crystalline than organic.

The tall one speaks. He learns the pair are extraterrestrials and that they have a large mothership parked in the fifth dimension over the mountains he can see out of his bathroom window. She explains how very different intergalactic races will often adopt one another, and she gestures at the small angular figure, when they are ready to move into the larger Universe community. She speaks of the star-system Arcturus, again gesturing at the small figure in front of her, and tells him how a planet in that system is a couple of thousand years in advance of Earth and wanted to be here to observe and advise when asked.

The language she uses is correct, fluid and sung more than spoken. A detailed and lucid 20-minute conversation follows before the pair appear to fade before his eyes.

Three encounters with unseen worlds. All entirely unproveable, with no evidence whatsoever, except how they might have influenced the consciousness of the protagonist. And isn’t that just the problem with this kind of anecdote? Until something like that happens to us individually, these experiences can seem outlandish or self-delusional. Might they simply be made up? Perhaps our poor protagonist is crazy? Anyone who has tried to tell the wrong person of their encounters with the unseen worlds will have come across these reactions. Try writing about them publicly!

Well, crazy perhaps in some peoples’ eyes, yet I pay my bills; I’m debt-free, earn a perfectly adequate living and have never needed prescription drugs to preserve my sanity. So, yes, at least I can vouch for the authenticity of all three events. They happened as reported. They were amongst the encounters I’ve had with the unseen worlds over the years which have led me to believe there is much more going on, as it were, than meets the eye.

Like many others who have had these sorts of experiences I’ve never felt any need to prove to others that these strange events happened. They did. I know. I was there. And for the scientific materialist, who might dismiss a near-death-experience (NDE) as some random firing of dying neurons, I can only say, wait until you have a full-blown NDE! Whatever a near-death-experience is, it is not random. It’s can be an astonishingly lucid affair.

The problem is that such an experience doesn’t fit into the current scientific or materialist paradigm. There is no language to accurately describe what can’t be easily sensed and measured. Thus, science has little time for the possibility of other realms of existence. The creeping realization that there may be other inhabited planets in the universe is only now starting to impinge on the leading-edge thinkers.

Physicists have flirted with the concepts of multiple worlds and parallel universes; the different String theories suggest the existence of other dimensions; and quantum mechanics, if nothing else, shows us that the nature of matter is a lot weirder and more improbable than we had any idea.

Yet little of this has opened up the contemporary scientific mind to the possible reality of other realms of existence. Apart from the CIA’s faltering explorations of remote viewing and some more detailed psychic research in the Soviet Union, there has been little advance in the study of parapsychological phenomena over the course of the last half-century. Apparently it hasn’t been cost effective. Besides, it’s a little scary.

Since this stultified approach so clearly denies the persistent reality of the transcendent in human experience, we are left to work it out for ourselves - if we are so inclined. Movies, TV and horror novels titillate us with imaginative stories of ghosts and vampires. Some find themselves turning to astrology, numerology or the I Ching; perhaps it’s Tarot cards or crystal balls, or any other system of divination, to peer for a moment into the unseen realms. Just as people from the dawn of the historical record have attempted to talk to the dead through mediums and sibyls, flick on a cable channel in the US on any evening and you will find the medium, John Edward, apparently passing on messages from dead relatives to a thrilled audience.

Others, throughout history and in many cultures, have sought to speak with their angels, their ancestral spirits, or spirit guides. Whole systems have been created categorizing and attempting to order the angelic realms. These were no fly-by-night operations. Kabbalah – Jewish mysticism - for example, traditionally doesn’t allow a person to study angels unless they are mature males over 50 years old. In Sufism – Islamic mysticism – as well, angels came to play an essential part in the spiritual lives of its devotees.

While we can be grateful to much of modern scientific skepticism for clearing away the superstitions of earlier eras, there is no denying that throughout human history there has been, and continues to be, a deep intuitive acceptance of other levels of reality.

A brief history of the unseen

There is little doubt that early humans must have been a jittery lot. If it wasn’t a tiger behind every tree, it was thunder and lightning or the terrifying and unexpected darkness of a total eclipse. Evil spirits lurked in the flickering darkness, outside the safety of the fire. Natural events had to be controlled somehow; invisible forces behind them needed to be mollified. Ghost worship surely emerged to placate the evil spirits.

Then, as the millennia passed into recorded human history and humanity started to cluster into larger communities and then cities, it can be seen in their records that something profound was changing. As if the ghosts and spirits of earlier eras had resolved into the more defined pantheons of Sumerian and early Egyptian cultures, gods and goddesses became the central feature of the peoples’ lives.

Easy, of course, to dismiss as mere superstition, as hallucinations, or as some sort of internally generated archetypes. But hold on a moment. Our forefathers and mothers weren’t stupid. They had to make their way through life just as we do, facing and dealing with many of the same issues. If we are to credit our ancient forebears with any reasonable degree of intelligence, we have to admit that whoever these gods and goddesses were, they were very real indeed to our ancestors. They profoundly influenced the lives of individuals as well as whole cultures. They gave men their identities and appear to have had children with mortal women. Cities rose and fell as warring quasi-divinities goaded their human worshippers into vengeful killing sprees.

Gods and goddesses, we are told, came and went at will. One moment they were visible - the next, they had disappeared. They demanded worship and sacrifice. They were cunning, often cruel and uncaring and, to the modern mind, all too human in their attributes.

It is condescending to dismiss our forebears’ concern with these apparent divinities as delusional. Or, as merely the hallucinated “voices” of their non-dominant hemispheres, as Julian Jaynes attempts to show in his elegantly written, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Dr. Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, bases much of his reasoning on observations made of the hallucinations of schizophrenic patients and yet never quite makes the case as to how an individual’s personal hallucination can manifest to whole groups of people. And while his research is encyclopedic and his writing is gorgeous and persuasive, Jaynes never appears to consider the possibility that the non-dominant hemisphere of the brain may be where we process telepathic input, rather than it simply being the generator of hallucinated voices.

We have to look elsewhere for a deeper understanding as to what might have been going on in those early days of human history.

The Urantia Book, transmitted, we are told, by the angels in the early years of the last century, because accurate information was apparently so badly needed, presents a rather different point of view. They tell us that these “gods and goddesses” were very real indeed. Except they weren’t divine. They were, according to the book, a group of beings, neither human nor angel, but as the Urantia Book calls them, Midway Creatures, or more colloquially, Midwayers, since they are said to inhabit the frequencies midway between mortals and the angelic realms.

This isn’t the place to describe what these Midwayers were doing here, except to say their presence on this world, according to the book, is a perfectly normal part of the gradual upstepping of conscious intelligence that every inhabited planet goes through. However, because this world has had such a troubled early history, most of the resident Midwayers had apparently spun way out of control. It was these beings who I believe were masquerading as divinities, subsequently coalescing into the pantheons of the ancient religions.

Saying that most of the Midwayers had lost their way, of course, covers a large swathe of prehistory, so it’s something of a relief to know that their continuing abuses of power ultimately led to their summary removal.

If we are to believe the Urantia Book this has left us with less than nine thousand of these beings currently on the planet - a much reduced number than was originally intended. And since it is this group of beings who have the ability to interact with our dimension and whose function it is to further the work of the Celestials on this level, it’s perhaps little wonder this world also appears to have become so troubled.

The reason I’m focusing on the Midwayers is that it is these beings whom we first encounter when we venture out of our limited terrestrial playpen. Occult literature speaks of the Guardian of the Threshold, and Beings of the Violet Flame, entities that can be fearsome or welcoming, dependent on our state of mind. And since they can manifest in our dimension, if you are fortunate, it will be a Midwayer who plucks you out of the car window just before it crashes, as it was a Midwayer, according to the Urantia Book, who rolled aside the millstone in front of the Master’s tomb.

In the light of this, I have come to believe it was indeed a small group of Midwayers of whom I was privileged to catch a glimpse, trudging along in their own dimension, and refracted in the ultraviolet spray on the beach in Israel. If I put myself in their immortal - and very large - shoes I can appreciate that the ones remaining here, the few who weren’t removed, have served on the planet for so long they probably think it belongs to them. Little wonder there was so much sadness in their trudging steps.

Returning to Julian Jaynes’s book. He makes a solid case that it was indeed the removal, or at least the gradual absence, of the hallucinated voices of these gods and goddesses that directly threw the great civilizations of the second millennium before Christ into such chaos. Humans, always vulnerable to giving away our power to those we think of as more powerful, had apparently come to rely on their deceitful divinities for every decision, large and small.

Then, gradually, the gods no longer spoke to them. It must have been a desperately confused time.

Thus we move into the modern era, with the racial memory of these Midway creatures as very real and demanding of worship and obedience. The disappearance of the gods and goddesses then led to the worship of empty thrones and statues that no longer spoke; then again, in an increasingly desperate attempt to stir up the absentee voices of the gods, there was more and more emphasis on diviners and auguries, on oracles and astrology.

By the Sixth Century BCE, human beings were starting to replace the unavailable voices of the Midwayers. Prophets and priests, kings and queens, all claiming to represent God, or the gods, contributed directly to Western culture swinging wildly between dark ages of superstition and brief times of enlightenment.

As the major Western religions became more formalized, they all claimed an omnipotent, invisible Deity at the center of their creeds and theologies. With priests taking over as interpreters of Divine will and the voices of the gods no longer guiding the way, human beings were left on their own to puzzle out the mysteries of the Universe. Inspired individuals, men and women who have themselves peered into the unseen worlds and returned, emerged over the next two millennia to remind humans of a transcendent reality.

Over the last two centuries we have prided ourselves on having explained away the superstitions of the previous eras. Yet for all our down-to-earth materialism, it is somewhat ironic that it is these same inspired individuals, with their claims of the unseen dimensions of life, who we most revere.

Challenging human senses

Dolphins perceive sound up to 200,000 Hz, whereas the limit of human hearing is a mere 20,000 Hz. Dr. John C. Lilly’s research has led him to calculate that a dolphin’s sense apparatus works from 10 to 20 times faster than ours.

I recall the first time I witnessed dolphin telepathy firsthand, standing waist-deep in Clearwater Bay and wondering just how long it would take for a dolphin to cover the intervening distance between us. It wasn’t simply the dolphin’s telepathic sensitivity, but the extraordinary speed of its response, that astonished me. It was almost too fast to be noticed.

Since dolphins use a sound-based echolocation to literally “see”, it could be said that dolphins “see into the unseen”, at least as far as our limited human sensorium is concerned.

However, the implications of this are more profound than merely the speed of their senses.

It’s been my own experience, and that of many others who have been open to it, that dolphins possess some form of telepathic ability. How they do it remains a mystery and it is impossible to pin down, let alone replicate, since almost all the evidence is anecdotal. Besides, if it were true it would fly in the face of the contemporary scientific paradigm.

Possibly that is why an article which I recall appearing briefly in the late eighties, disappeared just as quickly. It was an account of a US Naval research project in which two dolphins were held in separate laboratories many miles apart. The labs were linked electronically and tests were devised and given which demonstrated the two dolphins were reacting, in the moment, to one another. There’s a tone of reserved astonishment in the statements of the scientists quoted. The final paragraph has the scientists speculating about a matrix of some sort, perhaps telepathic, that links up all intelligent sea creatures, no matter the distances involved.

Even within our own human sensorium events occur in the course of a life that appear to happen at the edge of our ability to perceive them. People will often know, for example, the precise moment a loved one dies when they are far away. Authentic crop circles question our understanding of how the material world works. The alien abduction phenomenon, with its reports of floating through walls, pushes at the very limits of our assumed relationship to physical reality. An out-of-body-experience, if it doesn’t occur in a dream state and thus can be easily dismissed, challenges what it means to be in a physical vehicle. A near-death-experience will not only convince the subject that consciousness survives death, but also that the Multiverse is peopled on its many levels and dimensions with other intelligent beings. Angels have appeared in virtually all cultures throughout recorded history, under different names, yet with surprisingly similar characteristics. The very continuity of these reports down through time suggests they are more than mere superstition.

All these reports and experiences likely will be explained away, or dismissed as fantasy, by the skeptic or the scientific materialist, and yet the conviction that life has a spiritual dimension continues, with personal experience increasingly becoming the yardstick of belief.

A working model of the unseen dimensions

No one can say with any degree of evidential certainty how the mysterious unseen worlds actually function, or even how they come to be. All that has really emerged from the probing and testing is that human potential is far more substantial than anyone had thought. Scientists risk the derision of their peers and a sudden dearth of funding if they attempt to seriously research these enigmatic areas of human reality.

I suspect that this level of excessive skepticism cloaks not only a terror of ridicule, but perhaps a more legitimate fear that there might be something to it. If angels actually exist, if mediums really do talk to the dead, if dolphins are telepathic, if extraterrestrials are visiting our planet, if Midwayers are actively involved in shaping our lives - if all these things are true, then what ever would it mean for way scientists conduct their research?

Consider the research of the celebrated professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, Gary E. Schwartz, and his associates. Reported in The Afterlife Experiments, they have demonstrated in double-blind studies, that selected mediums can often achieve an 80% to 90% accuracy rate when passing on messages from deceased relatives or friends, or describing their personalities to the subject. Yet, however consoling it might be for a person to know that Granny lives on and still loves them, almost nothing of general, or lasting, value has been communicated through the mouths of mediums. For researchers, what little information has surfaced over the years has been rendered arbitrary by its very unproveability.

All of which throws us once again back on our own resources. There really is nothing to trust but our own intuitions and that inner sense we all possess, of knowing the truth if we experience it.

In trying to get a handle on how these unseen worlds - or more literally, frequency domains - might all fit together, I have found amongst Western thinkers that Itzhak Bentov’s holographic model of the universe, and the subsequent more detailed work of the quantum physicist, David Bohm, gives us a general model that includes a wide spectrum of frequency domains.

Ben Bentov was an inventor and a scientist, as well as something of a mystic. In his classic Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, he lays out a very simple scale of frequencies. Just as the electromagnetic spectrum covers wavelengths from thousands of kilometers to a fraction of the size of an atom, so also, Bentov reasons, can intelligence be plotted on an ascending and descending scale of frequencies. The simple orders of life are presented with very few choices and they have sufficient intelligence to deal with them. Ascending the ladder of life, we can see how the higher animals are faced with more choices, and thus have the appropriate level of mental complexity to deal with them.

In Bentov’s model he doesn’t stop at the human level, but makes the logical - and for him, experiential - step of extending his scale of frequencies up into the celestial realms.

If indeed there is a direct relationship between the EM spectrum and inhabited frequency domains, we would expect to find the next frequency domain somewhere within the ultraviolet wavelengths of the spectrum. Beings within these wavelengths would be invisible to us and yet, according to Bohm’s thinking, since higher vibrational domains enfold and interpenetrate lower frequencies, they would be aware of us.

Turning from attempts to understand the unseen from within the Western scientific paradigm, I have found two other invaluable sources that have helped make a little sense of what I was experiencing.

It first came together as I was meeting shamans from different cultures and learning about the chakras and how to work with them. I then found that the angels, in Gitta Mallasz’s profoundly important book, Talking with Angels, had transmitted a teaching called the Seven Levels of the World. Here they lay out a scale divided into seven fundamental realms: mineral first, then plant second, animal third, human as the fourth, angel as the fifth, then what the book calls “Seraph” yet might also be thought of as archangel as the sixth, and the seventh, at the top, what they modestly call “the Seventh.” I quickly understood that these divisions could also be thought of broadly as frequency domains. Then, in another intuitive flash, I saw that these seven realms can be mapped isometrically over the seven primary chakras of shamanism.

Pulling together these two very different sources gave me a down-to-earth, somatic, way of using the chakras as portals to these seven distinct realms. Of course, I soon found I had a lot of work to do to clear out my three base chakras before I could make reliable contact with my own companion angels, located in the fifth chakra behind the throat. In this I was helped initially by the very somatic thought of being able to “listen with the ears of my throat.”

I’ve written about this in considerably more detail in Ask Your Angels, the book I wrote with Alma Daniel and Andrew Ramer. The interested reader can apply the various meditations for themselves.

The unseen: a personal approach

As will have been already made clear we can’t rely on either the religious or the scientific establishment for cogent answers to what they can’t explain or measure. This leaves it up to each one of us to make personal sense of the glimpses we get into the unseen worlds. And perhaps that is as it should be. These are very personal matters, after all.

I now regard it as fortunate that I started off my journey as a skeptic, as hardheaded as they come. As a kid I’d been thoroughly turned off the Anglican religion by the boredom of their services and a priest’s angry inability to answer my perfectly reasonable questions. It set me up nicely as an arrogant young skeptic by the time I was in my teens.

Over the years, however, it was as though the invisible world was provoked by my thick-headedness to break through my shell. A series of powerful entheogenic experiences in my early twenties tore apart my materialist view of the world to demonstrate unequivocally that there was much more going on behind the scrim of reality than I had any idea.

Much of what I saw and felt I found impossible to rationalize, but what I soon understood was these strange experiences that were blowing my rational mind wide open weren’t there to be explained or proved. They were there to be experienced and learned from, not to be overly probed and picked apart.

Trained as an architect, I thought of myself as fairly down-to-earth and practical, so when these experiences occurred I focused on bringing as many of my senses to the events as possible; that, and recording the essentials of the events afterwards as honestly as I could. It’s such a subtle, ephemeral, area of research that I knew that if my accounts were to be of any value to others I would have to record them as perceptively and as accurately as possible.

This approach, I soon discovered, allowed me to appreciate that I had embarked on what I now know were a series of initiations, each one leading on an invisible thread to the next opening.

The near-death-experience I relate at the beginning of this essay occurred at the midpoint of my life to date, and it was that event that initiated what has become an overriding interest in non-human intelligences: in dolphins, nature spirits, angels and extraterrestrials.

So what can be learned from all this? A terrestrial lifetime can seem puzzling and complex enough, some would say, without having to factor in the possibility of unseen realities. However, if these are authentic personal experiences, that happen for a reason and clearly have a spiritual integrity, then surely there is value to be derived from explorations into the unseen realms.

To compress a great deal of hard-won experiential information into a series of bullet-points risks their being dismissed merely as New Age clichés. So I can only hope my words will resonate with the reader’s experience sufficiently to reaffirm the authenticity of their own glimpses into the unseen world.

Bearing in mind that all true knowledge has to be experienced personally, these are some of the things, and in no particular order, that I have learned for myself from my own encounters with other realms of being. It really helps:

• To deepen and enliven the quality of a terrestrial life to know - to really know - that life continues after death.
• To understand the mechanics of belief and to know that belief systems - to paraphrase Dr. Lilly - are but rungs in the ladder of knowledge.
• To know what it feels like to step outside the ego-centered structure of my personal mind and step into the collective mind.
• To know that all matter is to some degree animate at its most basic subatomic level.
• To know that the Multiverse is teeming with intelligent life, both on the inner and outer realms.
• To know that being in contact with one’s companion angels is to launch out on one of life’s most intriguing and challenging adventures.
• To know I can heal myself by the focused intention to communicate with the organizing principle of my body - my body deva - that which knows intimately how my physical vehicle works.
• To trust my intuition. It’s not always right but at least I make my own mistakes.
• To take into account that in general the world appears to be upside down. Almost everything the world believes is opposite to the truth. This is a convenient formula for deconstructing the many confusions of consensus reality.
• To realize that most of what is forbidden contains essential truths.
• To realize that trusting in the authenticity of a transcendent experience encourages further synchronicities.
• That doubt is healthy in its place; yet to know how to leave it behind in the heat of the moment; doubt can always be picked up later.
• To know that from the angels’ point of view, they regard it as perfectly natural to talk to us. It is our doubt and lack of self-confidence that blocks the communication.
• To understand that emotional intelligence is distributed throughout the natural world, each species possessing it to the extent of its needs.
• To appreciate viscerally that in consensus reality we are all swimming in a sea of fear. To know that every moment presents each of us with the choice of responding to life with fear or with love.
• To know that angels are powerful and intelligent beings and not the whimsical flying babies of Victorian iconography.
• To have observed that surrounding every sacred space there is a ring of demons and to know that demons can be defused by focused love from the heart center.
• To know that we get what we deserve if we don’t listen; and we get what we need, if we do.
• To know if I meet a flaming angel, to embrace him.
• To know that, in spite of appearances, all is deeply well; that what appears to be the chaos of a frantic world is well-understood and guided by unseen hands towards a truly extraordinary destiny.
• To know that for reasons that have little to do with humans, this planet is regarded as being of extreme importance to the larger universe context.
• To know to take the time and attention to delve as deeply as possible into the true nature of dolphins and whales; that they are a key to the nature of non-human intelligences.
• To know the joy of sharing the planet with another species of comparable or higher intelligence.

Not an exhaustive list by any means, yet with few exceptions I don’t believe I would have had a chance to know these things without the access I have been given over the years to the subtle realms.

I don’t believe that as a human being I am out of the ordinary, merely enthused, or curious enough, to have thrown myself wholeheartedly and with as much of an open mind as I could summon into exploring what I was being shown. In fact, I have come to believe that access to these unseen realms is actually our rightful spiritual heritage that was blocked, through no cause of ours. On the positive side this has allowed us, by default, to develop extremely strong and independent spiritual and emotional bodies - much admired and respected, so the Urantia Book tells us, by our angelic counselors.

Times are changing, however.

What I have been shown over the course of my spiritual journey is that we are entering a new phase in our planet’s universe career. The reasons for our planet’s isolation from the rest of the Multiverse have been recently resolved and we are being swung back into normalcy.

Without knowing all the implications of this, it seems to me that the veils separating the worlds are already disappearing. More and more of us are being drawn to the dolphins; environmentalism is opening people to the nature spirits; the Government’s denial of an extraterrestrial presence is looking more hollow by the year; and the angels are as enthusiastic as ever to speak with us.

The unseen realms are there for the seeing. With a little focused intention on our part, and an open heart and mind, they are as close as a heartbeat.

Images by Jesslee Cuizon, used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.