Don DeGracia
New
Hi DavidDon,
I am still working my way through your book, "Beyond the Physical", and I noticed that at one point you suggested that the occult planes might be related to the extra dimensions of String Theory. In view of the lack of evidence for String Theory (as we discussed earlier) I wonder if you still take this view?
Furthermore, planes and dimensions are rather different concepts geometrically.
Do you envision these planes as having actual dimensions - even dimensions that relate to the physical location of a person? That would seem a bit hard to believe - because a man standing on another's shoulders would share his piece of the planes!
Until I got to that remark, I had assumed that the planes couldn't really work like that.
David
Thank you for taking the time to plow through BP. That is very kind of you to put up with my ramblings from 20 years ago!
I have enough of a background in physics that I do not dismiss string theory. It is a very complicated situation and statements that it has no evidence are just not appropriate to the situation. It emerges from the need to unify the math of relativity with the math of quantum mechanics. The approach has been around for almost 100 years. Klein (of the Klein bottle fame) was the first to use "compactified dimensions" to model unified forces back in the 1920s, and even Einstein was okay with what Klein did (with a fellow named Kaluza).
However, the problem is pretty much unchanged from when I wrote BP. Physicists simply cannot access the string energy scale to directly test the model. The energies required are greater than what the Earth can produce (at least with respect to what we know about making energy today). That is how small strings are. The one development since then is the possibility to use cosmological phenomena that occur near these energy scales to test string theory. That was not known when I wrote BP (astronomy has grown massively since BP was written). So, in spite of what you may hear, string theory is a legitimate part of physics. As Smolin contends, it may have garnered disproportionate resources in the past, but that seems to be working itself out naturally.
The idea that the compactified dimensions of string theory may actually be the occult planes is not my idea, but is the idea of Stephen Phillips, the man who explained Occult Chemistry in terms of quarks. I wrote Dr. Phillips back in the 1980s and even then his thinking was beyond my capacity. Now, he has progressed even farther, and I am not capable of judging the validity of his work over the years. Nonetheless, it is still the most plausible place to link modern physics to classical occult teachings of the planes of nature. So in short, yes, I still take this view, although I am perhaps more wary to rigidly advocate it than when I wrote BP, which is true in general about a lot of ideas, just because I have matured a lot since then.
The term "plane" as used in occultism is unclear as to the geometric significance (it does not refer to a plane from geometry). They are "spaces" certainly, and they do have more spatial dimensions that the physical world. I have directly experienced this in my lucid dreams. Time is also different. I have recently been in contact with a fellow Philip Carter who is pursuing this issue. I have not yet had time to read his stuff closely, but in talking to him it sounds like he is trying to tackle this head on.
I do envision that the occult planes must somehow be continuous with or an extension of 4D space time. If they manifest via the compactified dimensions of string theory, that would be one possible means of how they relate. It is also possible that 4D space time is like an atomic ground state, and that some type of "quantum jump" is required to access the inner planes which could then be thought of as analogous to excited states of atoms.
The issue has mostly sat all these years until relatively recently when I really began to study yoga and came to understand that they have a theory of how we move from plane to plane. That theory has geometrical (or more generally, space-time) implications. I am half thinking about the link between the yogic theory and our modern theories in physics, but my main focus is if it is possible to use the yogic means of moving amongst the planes apart from the rest of their methods. In a way it is, because it is the same methods I describe in DO_OBE. But the remainder of the yogic methods provide a type of control over the inner planes not possible to achieve if you use only traditional lucid dream methods.
So yeah, it still floats around in my mind. It is a hard problem. By the time you finish BP, you will see the range of ideas I had about it back then, but there has not been any major developments over the years, just small little tweaks here and there when that was possible.
Again, thanks for asking, David. Best, Don.