I see dead people: Don’t you?

2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR I see dead people: Don’t you? James E. Beichler , Ph.D. Abstract: It is fairly common to refer to our use of the paranormal aspects of consciousness as a sixth sense, but the idea of a sixth sense comes much closer to the truth of our physical situation in the universe-at-large than we might imagine. The universe in which we exist is commonly thought to be a four-dimensional space-time continuum. All five of our normal senses evolved within this common four-dimensional environment. Each individual consciousness interacts with the fourdimensional world via our five normal senses. However, our universe is actually five-dimensional so it would be safe to assume that human evolution has also taken the fifth dimension of the spacetime continuum into account and given humans a sixth sense. According to all indications in modern science, this assumption would prove true. Our sixth sense actually represents the manner by which we gather information about the universe in which we exist via the fifth dimension, just as our normal five senses allow us to gather information about our physical environment within the four normal dimensions of space-time. Even when our four-dimensional material bodies die, we still continue to exist, communicate and gather information via this five-dimensional connection with the rest of the universe, and sometimes show ourselves and communicate with the living. The normally unseen universe The popular movie The Sixth Sense is about a small boy who sees dead people. He sees these apparitions as they appeared at the time of their deaths and considering that many of them suffered violent deaths, these apparitions, quite naturally, terrify the young boy. The movie was characterized by the key phrase I see dead people, which was uttered by the boy when he decided to confide his secret with his special psychologist, who was dead but did not realize it. The boy s secret only came to light after the psychologist admitted his own story to the boy, confessing why he was so intent on helping the boy overcome his fears. This pair of admissions unified the two in a common struggle to understand why they were bound to each other and how they could help each other to freedom from the fears that bound them to their paranormal futures. The phenomenon of seeing and communicating with apparitions, as the boy does, is not unknown in the annals of history and science, but it is rare among all of the various apparition (or ghost) related paranormal phenomena. The fact that these and similar phenomena are known at all, recorded throughout the history of the paranormal, raises several questions that need to be addressed; For example, How is this possible? What is so special about those individuals who see and communicate with apparitions? And, alternatively, why don t we all see apparitions, i.e., dead people? A living person is a material construct (being) within space and time, our physical universe. So, 1 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR when a person dies life ends such that the chemical interactions which maintain life in the body are disrupted and thus cease. While these chemical interactions normally maintain life, many scientists and scholars have come to believe that the chemical reactions alone are not life itself, that there is more to life than just the chemistry, electrical impulses and mechanics of the material body. This extra-something is LIFE and has been known in the past under various names, such as elan vital, the life force and more currently as the biofield. Whatever this biofield or LIFE is, it exists as a component within our space-time continuum, and, as with any continuum, no endings or empty places are allowed. That is why it is called a continuum, i.e., a physical field in scientific terms. So, if LIFE is a field phenomenon then that science which deals with physical fields such as the spacetime continuum should be able to explain LIFE and death, and that science is physics. Physics is the science that deals with our physical reality and there is only one modern theory in physics which deals with continuous physical fields, the theory of relativity. So it is to relativity theory that a theory of continuity of something, from life through death, would allow a scientific explanation of what part of us survives material death and could possibly appear as apparitions. Science has only rarely delved into the possibility of an afterlife, survival or the survival of consciousness as it is now called. Science has instead chosen to either ignore the possibility completely or relinquish any serious consideration of an afterlife to religious speculation and beliefs. However, a few brave physicists have, in the past, tried to either explain or account for an afterlife. The two most notable cases came during the late 1870s, and both were related, either directly or indirectly, to the modern spiritualism movement. In their popular book The Unseen Universe, Peter G. Tait and Balfour Stewart of England attempted to account for survival based upon the Principle of Continuity and the Laws of Thermodynamics. Science, at that time, would never have accepted the possibility of a physical discontinuity in either space or time and developed the concept of a luminiferous aether, which was continuous with all matter and filled all of space, to fill the voids of space. Continuity implied that something, some part of a person, was also continuous at the death of the material body. Whatever life was, at least beyond the individual chemical reactions and mechanical systems of the body, it was assumed to continue after death. According to thermodynamics, energy is never lost or destroyed, but merely dissipated into the environment. On the other hand, life was associated with the collection and concentration of energy and thought to produce and control energy, so Tait and Stewart claimed that life would not dissipate but settle into some ultra fine form of the aether upon death, and there continue to exist on its own. While this was not a theory, per se, and Tait and Stewart denied any relationship between their speculations and the modern spiritualism movement, the book became an overnight success among scientists and spiritualists, who both found benefit from it. The same historical trends that gave rise to modern spiritualism among the educated and common public also affected the scientific community and The Unseen Universe was one form of scientific response to that trend. At nearly the same time, J.K.F. Zöllner of Germany believed that the performances of the spiritualistic mediums were experimental and observational evidence of spirits who dwelt in the fourth dimension, an extension of our common three-dimensional space of experience. For example, a medium would take a complicated tightly tied knot that was hidden in a sealed box and return it 2 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR untied without ever opening the box or touching the knot. It was known in mathematics, and proven, that a knot in three-space, no matter how complicated, would appear as a straight untied rope in the corresponding four-dimensional space and an enclosed volume in three-space would be completely open in four-space. So Zöllner and his colleagues assumed that spirits dwelling in the fourth dimension extension of our three-dimensional space had gotten into the box and united the knots that the scientists had prepared. Zöllner depended rather heavily upon the mediumship of the American Henry Slade, who accomplished seemingly magical and impossible acts under the guidance of Zöllner and like-minded scientists, to supply the main body of his experimental evidence. Unfortunately, Slade was caught cheating by skeptics on one occasion and Zöllner s four-dimensional hypothesis as well as his career as a scientist was ruined. In spite of the severe criticisms of his methods, by both skeptical scientists and scholars, Zöllner continued to write about the experiments that he and others had conducted with Slade and published his research on the subject in the book Transcendental Physics, with an English translation published in 1881. In both of these cases, no theoretical model or other precise explanation of the death state, apparitions, or the method of communication was attempted. Tait and Stewart merely made a general argument for the possibility of survival from known physical laws and Zöllner s work never went beyond the hypothetical explanations that he gave to explain the observed phenomena. Quite simply, these scientists did not attempt to answer how the reported phenomena were accomplished. In any case, the second scientific revolution of the first decades of the twentieth century seemed to have rendered both attempts irrelevant and they both disappeared from science about this time. Until recently, as research in the science of consciousness has again become popular, bolstered by new phenomena such as NDEs, EVPs, and other modern recording methods applied to hauntings, little attention has been paid to any science of death and the possibility of survival. But the study of death has again opened to legitimate scientific inquiry and survival can now be explained from a theoretical basis using recent advances in physics and the physics of consciousness. The fifth dimension While four-dimensional space theories (with time as a separate dimension) were popular in the late nineteenth century, they essentially disappeared from science in the early twentieth century when time was found to be the fourth dimension in Einstein s theories of relativity. However, the hypothesis of a higher-dimensional reality quickly reappeared in another form when a fivedimensional extension of relativity was developed by Theodor Kaluza in 1921. Kaluza’s theory unified the electromagnetic and gravitational fields in a single five-dimensional structure. Yet once again, the concept of a higher-dimensional reality virtually disappeared for several more decades. Kaluza’s five-dimensional theory was largely ignored by scientists who were far more interested in quantum theory and the structure of the atom and nucleus. Except for a few instances, including Einstein’s work in the late 1930s, Kaluza’s theory remained largely forgotten until it was rehabilitated in the 1980s and 1990s by the supergravity and superstring theorists. Oskar Klein’s 1926 extension of Kaluza s theory became the basis of both 3 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR supergravity, which utilized an eleven-dimensional space-time, and superstring theory, which relied on a ten-dimensional space-time. The superstring theories have, in turn, been superseded by various forms of brane (membrane) theory, up to and including the possibility of a four-dimensional brane stretched and curved in a five-dimensional bulk. (Hawking, 2002) Other scientists have developed eight-dimensional theories (Tiller, 1997, 2001; Rauscher, 1979; Targ, Puthoff and May, 1979; Rauscher and Targ, 2001) that are geometrically equivalent to the five-dimensional theories, while the previously mentioned ten-dimensional theories can be represented as either double fourdimensional branes held together by a thin two-dimensional brane (Moyer, 2004) or doubled fivedimensional structures, and the eleven-dimensional theory is equivalent to a double five-dimensional model in a six-dimensional bulk. Several purely five-dimensional models have also been developed by other scientists (Beichler, 1980, 1999; Wesson, 2001) and even David Bohm’s theories of hidden variables, the implicate order and a holographic universe imply a fifth dimension. In other words, the consensus in the most recent theoretical work in physics seems to be moving toward a single five-dimensional model of our universe. Given a five-dimensional theory, such as the type developed by Einstein and Peter Bergmann in the late 1930s, life, mind and consciousness can easily be explained as a natural consequence of the space-time structure, paving the road for a theory of death and the survival of consciousness. On the one hand, our four-dimensional space-time would be a uniformly dense portion of a single field that fills all of the five-dimensional space-time. This dense portion of the single field forms a fourdimensional sheet with an effective width or thickness in the fifth direction that is extremely small. This extremely small thickness guarantees that we cannot normally sense or detect the fifth dimension. The elementary particles from which atoms and molecules are composed are no more than bends and wrinkles in the sheet. In the mathematical model of the five-dimensional space-time, each point in the sheet is extended continuously in the fifth direction in a loop that closes back into that same point on the other side of the sheet, so the five-dimensional space-time takes the form of a five-dimensional sphere that is completely beyond our ability to picture in our minds, but still amenable to mathematical analysis for explanatory purposes in science. LIFE, MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS Energy and matter are related by Einstein’s formula, E = mc2, which means that they can be converted from one to the other, or each can be represented by the other. In other words, matter and energy are equivalent at some level of reality. So the more matter or energy associated with a particle or physical body, the steeper and higher the curve into the fifth dimension of the sheet that represents the particle or body. On the other hand, chemical reactions are engines of energy exchange between material particles, atoms and molecules. So a simple chemical reaction would cause a simple pattern of rising and falling bumps or wrinkles in the sheet. However, an equilibrium reaction would cause a wavy repeating pattern of wrinkles in the sheet as time passes. If you could put together a large number of different equilibrium reactions, in such a way that they would continually exchange energy and thus form a cohesive self-sustaining entangled group, the result would be a constant, but very complex, repeating lumpy pattern in the sheet as time passes. Since 4 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR the pattern is continuous over time and self-sustaining, we would say that the pattern itself is LIFE or rather the biofield. The chemical reactions themselves are not LIFE, but the entangled pattern that they form through their mutual interactions and exchanges of energy is LIFE. We can picture this process by a simple analogy to a white linen sheet or table cloth lying on a flat surface. Our four-dimensional world is contained inside the cloth. We live in that cloth and are confined to always stay inside and even think inside of it by our gross materialness. The inside of the cloth represents the total of our four-dimensional space-time continuum. But there are curves, bumps, folds and wrinkles in the cloth that we cannot detect from within the cloth. We sense these distortions in the single field as something else within the sheet or cloth; gravitational fields, electric and magnetic fields, and solid matter. In a simple chemical reaction, these bumps and wrinkles rise and fall due to changing energy as the chemical reaction goes to completion, but an equilibrium reaction will cause a constant undulating pattern of rising and falling bumps and wrinkles, as time passes on. If we add different mutually self-sustaining equilibrium reactions, the undulating pattern in the cloth becomes more complex, but it is still a recognizable pattern that moves to and fro across the cloth as time passes. This pattern is LIFE in its simplest manifestation, a self-sustaining fivedimensional single field density variation pattern, visualized as a continuous complicated wavy motion across the cloth. As we move up the scale of living organisms, we encounter ever more complicated patterns, finally coming to a point where new smaller patterns form within the overall LIFE pattern. The smaller internal patterns are functional organs within the living organism. These organs perform the various specialized functions that are necessary to maintain and sustain the overall pattern of LIFE. But as we move onward to still more complicated higher life forms, the relationship between the organism and its internal organs becomes more tenuous so that a specialized organ has evolved to control and direct the interactions between the other organs, coordinating their maintenance and life-sustaining efforts. This last organ is the brain, a four-dimensional electro-chemical device. Yet, with the development of the brain a further refinement occurs within the five-dimensional field density LIFE pattern. This field refinement represents MIND. MIND corresponds to the whole body, as a refinement of the more general pattern of LIFE, but operates primarily through the brain. In our simple cloth analogy, MIND would correspond to the woven pattern of threads that make up the curved cloth. The weave itself would not be uniform, but would vary from point to point in space and time. It would be stretched and distorted to different degrees depending upon the curvature corresponding to the different organs in the organism body. The brain also serves to collect and interpret information from our four-dimensional world as collected by our five normal senses. The brain receives this normal sensory input as electromagnetic signals and patterns. In turn, these electromagnetic patterns in the brain are imprinted as new variations in the five-dimensional field pattern within the MIND, what we call memory. The MIND grows ever more complicated with new sensory input until a new level of complexity is initiated. Through further experience and contact with the organism s environment, MIND eventually becomes aware of spatial location beyond its immediate sensed environs in three-dimensional space. MIND thus builds an awareness of non-locality in space and begins to differentiate itself from the rest of its physical environment. Next, MIND realizes the non-locality of time, the passage of time 5 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR from past, to present, and finally to future. The MIND thus differentiates itself, the organism, as occupying the present moment, locally, within the overall passage of time. When this occurs, the MIND becomes aware of its self as distinguished in space-time from the rest of nature and the universe and CONSCIOUSNESS emerges as a further refinement in the fivedimensional single field density pattern of MIND. So, while LIFE is a pattern of wrinkles in the cloth, four-dimensional curves into five-dimensional space, and MIND corresponds to the woven threads that constitute the cloth, and CONSCIOUSNESS corresponds to the even finer fibers of cotton that constitute the threads that are woven into the fabric of the living host, the cloth. With this structure, we now have a simple model of LIFE, MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS, so we can at last look at death and answer our questions regarding apparitions, survival and why some people can sense apparitions and others cannot. Survival A person dies when the material body dies and life completely ceases for all intents and purposes, or so it is thought. Quite simply, either a single crucial chemical or mechanical interaction in the body ceases or is severely disrupted, such as poisoning or heart failure, or sufficient number of different minor chemical or mechanical systems fail, such as a mass trauma resulting from an accident or even some diseases, to irreparably disrupt the LIFE pattern. Upon bodily death, the LIFE complexity pattern returns to a chaotic state, in that the chemical reactions that sustain and maintain the organism no longer exchange the energy necessary for life to continue. The previously coordinated chemical and mechanical actions in the organs fail to work in concert with each other. In our table cloth analogy, the pattern of bumps and wrinkles undulating over time ceases and the cloth evens out. The cloth begins to flatten out. In the worst case scenario of complete material destruction of the body, the cloth just goes flat. Yet the cloth itself cannot be destroyed because it still represents the complete four-dimensional space-time continuum. On the other hand, the MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS, which are actually imprints or field density patterns in five-dimensional space, still remain, just as the weave and fiber remain after the bumps and wrinkles in the cloth disappear. The MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS complexities complement and reinforce each other to protect and sustain each other from the disruption to the body chemistry. Also, LIFE acts as a buffer between the four-dimensional body and MIND in such a way that LIFE totally absorbs the material disruption of dying and thereby protects the MIND from the disrupting process of death. In more general scientific terms, LIFE decoheres due to the chemical-mechanical disruption within the material four-dimensional body. But LIFE acts as a buffer between MIND and body, so MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS are left intact. MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS are mutually cohering in that they essentially reinforce either others continued stability and begin to interact independent of the dead body as well as independent of fourdimensional space-time. The surviving entity, the MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex, is a purely five-dimensional being. This complex is the portion of the person that survives more-or-less cast loose in five-dimensional space. It is a self-cohering field density variation pattern. During the lifetime of the individual, normal information about the environment and all of the 6 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR body s interactions with its surroundings were transmitted to the brain via the five normal senses as patterned electrical impulses, then to MIND as memory, acted on and interpreted relative to the rest of the universe by CONSCIOUSNESS. When the body ceases to function, death ensues and LIFE decoheres, the MIND continues to seek information input to form new memories as it has always done, still expecting further input from the brain and normal senses, but receives nothing. If the MIND does not realize its new state of being, isolated from the brain by death, all that it can sense is blackness or darkness. This lack of new input, sensed as darkness, blankness or just emptiness, could be interpreted by the CONSCIOUSNESS in several different ways, such as Hell, a dark tunnel, or just maddening nothingness. On the other hand, CONSCIOUSNESS is and has always been connected to the whole of the universe by the continuity of the single field and it has been receiving input from throughout the single field for all of its existence as subtle influences. These influences were previously drowned out by the normal overwhelming four-dimensional clatter in the brain. While LIFE still existed, input from the five-dimensional continuum was masked by the overriding and overwhelming amount of stimulus and data from the four-dimensional world, which we call normal sensations. But CONSCIOUSNESS had always received input paranormally through the five-dimensional single field. Simply said, normal exists in four-dimensional space-time and paranormal exists in the fifth dimension. Our five senses operate in four-dimensional space-time while the sixth sense operates solely and completely in the fifth dimension. If the MIND is aware of its new state of being, that the body has died and LIFE has been disrupted, it then turns to the CONSCIOUSNESS for data input from the five-dimensional single field. At least three possibilities can occur; (1) MIND cannibalizes its own memories in its expectation of receiving new input, much the same way that the body will begin burning stored fat if no new fuel (food) is introduced into the body. The MIND turns to that with which it is most familiar, its own past memories, and the life review begins. The life review is instantaneous, or seems so, since the laws and rules of space-time no longer apply. There is no time, as we know it, in the fifth dimension; (2) Again the MIND turns to what it is most familiar with in its own memory patterns and that would be the patterns representing the memories of people. The people most easily remembered would be friends or family since they evoked the most intense chemical reactions (emotions) in the body during life, making their patterns stronger and the most persistent of the memories stored in MIND. This action essentially calls or sends out a signal, bringing those who have already died to greet and help the newly arrived (in the fifth dimension) MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex. Religious figures who also evoked strong emotions in, or had special meaning to, the person while living might also appear; and finally, (3) Light waves in fourdimensional space-time stretch into and disperse throughout the five-dimensional single field. So, when the MIND becomes aware of its new five-dimensional environment, a single field that is literally filled with dispersed or diffuse light, it senses pure light. In the common four-dimensional world, white light is a combination of all frequencies or colors of visible light, and this sensation of white light would still exist in the memories stored in MIND, so coming into first contact with the rest of the universe via the single field would invoke a new sensation in MIND of going into the light. Still under the influence of four-dimensional 7 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR experiences, this turn of events would be interpreted as a superbly more brilliant white light than ever before experienced, a mixture of all colors of light, visible and normally beyond the range of vision, experiencing all of the frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously. At first, when the light is sensed, it could be interpreted as closing in on the MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex from equal distances in all five directions. Since the MIND would still interpret everything that occurs within the context of its past four-dimensional experiences, it would seem to be inside a sphere with pure light on the sphere s surface. The complex could also feel a sense of motion or movement in time, one of those five directions. Together, the light sphere and linear motion would be interpreted as the infamous tunnel of light. Any combination of these three events could occur, depending on the level of CONSCIOUSNESS or the psychological disposition of the MIND before death occurred. A more enlightened person during life would surely just move into the light without the trappings of the other phenomena. During the act of en-light-enment while living, the CONSCIOUSNESS of the person had already become aware of its five-dimensional nature to some degree, depending on the level of the initial enlightenment. The fact that this would be the case is actually provided by direct observation, even though these three cases were logically deduced from the five-dimensional model of physical reality. All of these cases are characteristics of NDEs. So, in a sense NDEs confirm this model and it can be assumed that an NDE is actually a preview of the afterlife. And finally, when the complex or surviving entity enters the light, it is just accepting its new state of being, its new existence within a greater expanded physical reality, by realizing it is part of the five-dimensional single field. Apparitions With the new understanding of life and death afforded by this theoretical model, it should now become possible to answer our questions regarding apparitions. First of all, seeing apparitions is not what really occurs. Seeing is merely how the MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS of the living person deals with or justifies the unusual five-dimensional sensory input from the dead person. Since nearly the entire MIND’s previous experience has been four-dimensional, the brain interprets or places the new sensory input into a four-dimensional mold, i.e., seeing. However, this sensory input comes from the five-dimensional survivor of death, the MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex of the person who died, rather than a living person who would actually be seen in fourdimensional space-time. Apparitions of loved ones, friends or anyone whose memory patterns are stored in the five-dimensional MIND of the observer would be the easiest to sense, and the event would be legitimized within the four-dimensional brain as seeing. But actually a resonance, or better still a pattern matching, is established between the dead person’s MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex in five-dimensions and the five-dimensional CONSCIOUSNESS and MIND of the living person, the young boy in the case of the movie The Sixth Sense. This resonance or pattern matching actually occurs in many normal as well as paranormal phenomena. It is the basis of simple recognition of everyday objects. When a person sees an object for the first time, the electromagnetic pattern that the act of seeing imprints in the brain is stored in 8 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR the person’s MIND. When the person sees the object at a later time, the electrical input signal from the seen object enters the brain where its pattern in the brain is pattern matched to the stored pattern in MIND and the object is recognized. Some circumstantial evidence of this model of recognition already exists. Suppose you see a telephone from some angle and store the memory in MIND. When you see the telephone some time later from a different angle, you still recognize the telephone even though it was not originally seen from that angle. For years, scientists have been trying to develop programs for computers to recognize three-dimensional objects, but they have failed because of this single feature of the brain. However, for humans the image or memory of the telephone is stored in the five-dimensional MIND, and just as knots in a rope in three-dimensional space are just straight lines in four-dimensional space, the telephone is rotated in the fivedimensional memory pattern, remembered as seen from all angles, so that we recognize it from different angles even though the original sighting of the telephone was only from a single angle. Further evidence of this model comes from the paranormal phenomena called remote viewing. In remote viewing, the observer is expected to view an unknown object which is not present, but at some distant locale. The observer has no previous knowledge of what the object is and probably only knows where it is, or the observer may know what the object is but not where it is. In either case, the observer or remote viewer must see or view something unknown at a great distance. The remote viewer is placed in a simple sensory deprivation environment so that he or she can tune into the signals picked up five-dimensionally by their CONSCIOUSNESS. The process is actually similar to the process by which apparitions are seen. However, in this case the remote viewer knows nothing of either the local context or the object itself. So the remote viewer begins with the very simplest memory patterns in MIND, such as squares, triangle, circles, lines, and other simple geometric figures and slowly builds up an image of the object or place to be observed. The remote viewer is merely pattern matching with simple patterns that are common to all of the physical objects that we normally see since he or she has no previous memory of the complex pattern that they are viewing. These simple patterns are then put together and thus progress to a more complicated image that can be more easily recognized. Remote viewing clearly fits the five-dimensional model of physical reality and illustrates how apparitions can be seen even though they have no material reality. However, the case is still different from the movie where the boy who sees dead people does not initiate the five-dimensional contact as in the other examples cited, at least not consciously as mediums normally do. The boy s viewing of dead people seems completely spontaneous, which may well be the case in other forms of apparition phenomena. Perhaps there is something in the boy s psychological background whereby he subconsciously initiates the contact or sighting. Perhaps even the surviving MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complex of the dead person initiated the contact, but that would pose new problems since the dead person had not yet entered the light, i.e., the dead person does not yet know that he or she is no longer a four-dimensional being so would not suspect the possibility of such a five-dimensional contact. However, the cause of the person s death may have been so traumatic, or blatantly unjust, as in the case of the young girl who was poisoned by her mother, that a pre-death desire stored in the MIND may have initiated the contact after she died. It would seem that the apparitions had unfinished business and perhaps chose to stay out of the light (five-dimensional reality) and connected to the four-dimensional world to finish that business. 9 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR Also, their unfinished business could also have a power of a sort over them and actually hold them away from the light. In other words, their surviving MIND/CONSCIOUSNESS complexes somehow intuitively sensed a need to stay attached to four-dimensional space-time. But these speculations based on the theoretical model imply still other questions. For example, why the boy and not other living people? In other words, how or why did the apparitions come to this boy out of all the people in the world? There must be something special about the boy’s CONSCIOUSNESS pattern that allows him to see apparitions, or rather sense them in the continuum through fivedimensional space. There must be some general characteristic of the boy’s CONSCIOUSNESS pattern in fivedimensional space that renders it amenable or predisposed to pattern matching (resonance) with the patterns of people with whom he had no previous contact and thus no previous memory patterns stored in MIND. An example of how this can be accomplished comes from the scientific method itself. In science, we discover or develop new theories and laws by finding the most general descriptions of observed phenomena through a reliance on the most basic, fundamental and commonest of properties that are shared by all of the observed phenomena or events. In a sense, this almost sounds like the above description of how remote viewing works. Something similar to this process must occur in the boy’s CONSCIOUSNESS. The CONSCIOUSNESS pattern of the boy could contain a special general pattern, i.e., less specific to any single individual, which matches with a greater number of people with whom he has had no previous experience. All people are already connected via the five-dimensional continuity, so the model only needs to explain how this boy, in the movie, or other people in non-movie reality, is able to establish the communication link with apparitions. But then, maybe this generality pattern lies dormant in everyone’s CONSCIOUSNESS and is just a general feature of consciousness which has become activated for some unknown reason in the boy. Perhaps this feature of CONSCIOUSNESS can be activated by some people with practice, which would account for mediumship and similar practices. There could actually exist a standard human pattern in the CONSCIOUSNESS of each and every human being that would allow humans to distinguish other humans from other species, which would account for the Jungian concept of a collective human consciousness as well as some aspects of human evolution. In the movie, the dead must somehow sense this quality in the boy, or feel the pattern in his MIND and thus either go to him consciously or be attracted to him unconsciously like moths to a light. Where that general pattern comes from, or how it was activated in this boy, would be hard to say. Perhaps it was activated by some psychological need. For example, it could have been activated by the boy s loss of his father. This explanation is the same as that given by the psychologist in the movie, so it could be considered the standard psychological explanation or better yet an excuse for not fully understanding the phenomenon. Or maybe it was just a chance occurrence due to some strange and undefined feature in the boy’s brain structure or brain chemistry. The pattern could even have developed from some inherited property of his brain. Maybe it was a mutation or even a normal occurrence in the human evolutionary path. These last speculations, inheritance of this special gift and evolution, have some validity since the young man who shot the psychologist also had the same ability, as the psychologist eventually discovered in the movie. 10 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR On the other hand, the evolution hypothesis seems to fit the general situation in real life, that human consciousness is still evolving as demonstrated by the fact that a greater number of people in real life seem to be developing similar strange abilities. Yet need and four-dimensional psychology better explain why this boy alone, of all people, had become aware, in his waking MIND and brain, that he had the ability to communicate with and see the apparitions, that he had cognized them. Again, this was the explanation given by the psychologist in the movie, so it is a more standard and accepted explanation independent of the five-dimensional model. However, since each and every one of us is continuously in contact with everything in the five-dimensional single field through each person s individual CONSCIOUSNESS, our ability to contact the dead is not the real question. The real question should be how do we become aware or cognizant of that contact? How do we bring that contact into the waking MIND? Surely, in the case of the boy in the movie, he has somehow made the intuitive leap of cognizing his connection to the dead, and this brings us to the last of our original questions: Why don t we all see apparitions, i.e., dead people, all of the time? Why? Since LIFE, MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS are general features of the five-dimensional structure of relative space-time, and everything is connected by the continuity of the fivedimensional single field, then every living person has the innate ability to see dead people. The same is true for remote viewing, clairvoyance, ESP, and other paranormal abilities, to one degree or another. Now, this proposition is both wondrous and scary. People who are enlightened reputedly develop some of these abilities, to varying degrees, as do people who have had NDEs, to varying degrees. This group of special people have had some form of initial direct contact with our fivedimensional reality, and the awareness of that contact, even if they do not see or sense it as a fivedimensional geometry, gives them special paranormal abilities. Other people may momentarily, through some chance quantum event, through some unusual psychological stimulus or trauma, or when the proper physical and/or mental conditions come together, experience spontaneous phenomena such as seeing apparitions or ghosts. Alternatively, some people can be trained to bring about or induce the right conditions to enhance the probability of such chance occurrences proceeding forward, just as enlightenment can be gained through long meditative sessions, but these methods are not guaranteed to work. When push comes to shove, there are no guarantees that these events will occur with any regularity for any one person. So, a young boy who sees dead people on a regular basis is a very rare person indeed. According to the kabala, we are not meant to see or communicate with the dead. Such practices are strictly forbidden as extremely dangerous. Quite simply, other unwanted and dangerous entities may move into and possess a person attempting to see or communicate with the dead. However, the kabala also predicts that the time will come when we will commonly communicate with the dead. In a sense, a time will come when there will be a merging of the two realms, living and dead. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad turn of events for humans is open for debate. This merging is not a fictional event from the standpoint of this five-dimensional model of CONSCIOUSNESS. As humans gain more knowledge, store more complete information patterns 11 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARPR in their individual MINDs, memories that correspond more exactly to the total extent of our fourdimensional reality and how it works, we will come closer to achieving a new level of CONSCIOUSNESS. With the eventual attainment of this new higher level of CONSCIOUSNESS, we will become completely aware of our five-dimensional reality. This event will occur in just the same way that MIND evolved into CONSCIOUSNESS when we became aware of our non-locality in space and time based on our stored memories and experiences, when we became aware of ourselves relative to the four-dimensional space-time. We will eventually become aware of our-selves within our five-dimensional context in the waking state of our MINDs. This simple fact means that a time is coming when we all evolve, as a group, toward a higher en-light-ened CONSCIOUSNESS and we will all see dead people. 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