​The God Within

Have you ever wondered who you really are?  How did you come to be in this lifetime on Planet Earth, where were you before you were born, and where will you be after you die?  And more fundamentally, what is the essence of this “you”?  Intuitive answers to these questions are put forward by the author.  Read this book slowly, look deeply within, and reflect if the reality presented resonates with your own intuition. 

​You can read this book for free below in its entirety.  It is available at Amazon in either Kindle or Paperback version, should you wish to have a physical book copy. 

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Preface
 
I am a scientist by profession.  I spent most of my adult life attempting to understand aspects of the physical world around me within the context of established scientific paradigms.  That’s how I made a living and for many years that was my perceptual viewpoint on the nature of the way things were.    
 
So how did I come to write a book about what is certainly a very spiritual topic?  It is a fair question for the reader to ask.  Why does a scientist choose to write a book about spirituality?  It may seem incongruous to you given the fact that most scientists are considered to be, at best, disinterested in anything spiritual and, at worst, antagonistic to the concept of spirituality in general.  What is the background and motivation for my expressing these present thoughts in written form so that others can ponder them in the light of their own beliefs?  Let me try to give you some insight into what has caused me to perform this task.   
 
I had written three other books in the past.  My first book, published in 2008, was titled “The First Principles:  A Scientist’s Guide to the Spiritual”.  In this book, I outlined evidence for a spiritual reality as the foundation of my First Principles:  Love God, Love Neighbor, Live Spiritually.  This first book was motivated by a spiritual awakening that began for me in 1997.  It caused me to think deeply about what was really important in life and, because of my scientific background, I did a considerable amount of intellectual searching to identify significant evidence that a spiritual reality actually exists.  The bottom line from my first book can be summarized by the equation Spirituality = Reality, which serves to define the fundamental principles of life in this three-dimensional physical existence that we are presently experiencing.     
 
My second book, entitled “Exploring Death:  What You Should Know About Dying” was published in 2010.  This book was driven by the fact that I had a fear of dying which was basically associated with the idea that my consciousness could completely cease to exist when I died.  This thought terrified me and so I decided to learn everything I could about the nature of death.  I explored the topic of death in as much depth as was possible from a variety of sources.  And by doing so, I completely eliminated my fear of death, although I must say that I still have a certain fear of the dying process itself.  The summary of the book is this: “The day of your death is more joyous than the day of your birth”.
 
The third book, published in 2012, was given the title “Dreams of Reality”.  In it, I examined the different forms of reality that we experience.  There is conscious reality which is what we wake up to each day.  Then there is unconscious reality, the reality that we experience in our dreams and the reality that exists for us during deep, non-dreaming sleep.  We have the scientific reality that combines logic with observations of the three-dimensional world in which we presently exist.  But there is also the unexplained reality that is associated with things we observe but cannot presently explain with our current scientific paradigms.  And finally, there is the reality of our consciousness which leads us to the conclusion that the three-dimensional physical world is but a subset of a much larger non-physical reality.  It is this last that has motivated the writing of the present book.
 
My previous three books employed the application of scientific logic to try and understand aspects about reality that do not fit into our current deterministic, reductionist scientific approach to the comprehension of things.  I cited a great many references to back up what I was saying in those books.  But there is a point where scientific logic can only take you so far.  In order to proceed further toward ultimate truth, one must rely on a spiritual intuition, an intuitive understanding of the much larger non-physical realm of which this three-dimensional existence is but a small part. 
 
This book puts forward my spiritual intuition.  I have been practicing transcendental meditation on a regular basis for more than forty years and it is my belief that this has allowed some amount of information about the spiritual, non-physical reality to filter down to my conscious mind and produce my intuitive thoughts about the true nature of things.  In addition, there are thoughts put forward by other people based on their experiences of the non-physical that I intuitively resonate with and thus feel are a correct aspect of the larger picture of our true reality. 
 
I specifically relate to the primacy of consciousness concepts of Peter Russell, the scientific paradigm challenges of Rupert Sheldrake, the out-of-body experiences of Robert Monroe, the conversations with God of Neale Donald Walsch, the hypnotic regressions performed by Dolores Cannon, the near-death experience accounts of Andy Petro and Nanci Danison, the spiritual insights of Eckhart Tolle, and the Theory of Everything (TOE) of Thomas Campbell.  In addition, I resonate with the information provided from a non-physical source, namely the multidimensional being Seth as channeled through Jane Roberts.   I have provided a list of books by the above authors at the end of this book and would highly recommend that you read what they have written.   
 
I will not be citing any scientific, paranormal, metaphysical, religious, or spiritual reference materials in this book as I have done in my previous three books.  However, being a scientist, I will on occasion employ scientific examples for analogy purposes to try and provide the reader with an insight into spiritual aspects.  While I have endeavored to keep these scientific discussions as understandable as possible for the reader, please forgive me if they should become too tedious.    
 
In this book, I am writing about what I feel to be ultimate truth.  I will not try to prove that this is the case.  What I write is truth for me.  When you read my words you then need to reflect on them, look deeply inside yourself, and see if they relate to the truth that you intuitively feel within. 
 
Read    this    book    slowly.

 
Veritas
 
Veritas is the Latin world for Truth.  What is the truth of your existence?  Have you given any thought to this question?  I know I have.
 
But I have not always been a seeker of truth.  In my youth I simply accepted the reality that was around me.  That was my truth and I did not question it.  Things just were as they were.  Then as a young adult I sought to experience the “undiscovered country” and discover as much of it as I could.  I wanted to seek out and understand the truth wherever I could find it in each new experience.  Some truth was found but the greater part was not, largely due to a youthful lack of discernment.  As an adult I was caught up in my scientific career and the responsibilities inherent in being an adult.  The realities of life were my truth then.  They had to be dealt with and they were my focus.  But now as an older adult, having imbued at least some measure of wisdom over the years, I look to understand my present lifetime in a larger context, a more truthful context.  This is the way it is with many people, perhaps yourself as well. 
 
And what is truth?  That is a very good question indeed.  It has been asked over the ages.  Pilate asked this question of Jesus at his trial, following Jesus’ statement that he had come to testify to the truth.  The dictionary definition of truth is: That which is in accordance with fact or reality.  The problem with this definition is that fact and our perception of reality change with time.    
 
Because I am a scientist, let me present an example of how scientific truth has changed over the course of recorded history.  I will do this for the science of astronomy, the oldest of the sciences.
 
In early Mesopotamian times, the Earth was considered to be flat with perhaps a dome over it along which the sun, moon, planets, and stars moved.  The motions of these celestial bodies in relation to the flat Earth were observed and in Sumeria recorded to a limited extent.  These astronomical observations were used to predict the timings of the seasons and also for early religious purposes.  The people of that time also interpreted certain star patterns in symbolic ways.
 
With the arrival of the classical Greeks, this changed dramatically.  Plato and Aristotle clearly thought the Earth to be a sphere, although how they arrived at this conclusion is a bit unclear.  They considered the spherical Earth to be the center of the universe.  The Earth was stationary and the sun, moon, stars, and planets all moved in circular orbits in a firmament around the stationary Earth.  The Greeks considered circles to be “perfect” geometrical forms and thus all orbits of the Earth had to be circular.  This geocentric astronomical paradigm lasted for 2000 years.
 
It fell to Copernicus in 1543 to reveal that this was not the truth.  Copernicus put forward two very startling new concepts.  The first was that the Earth is not a stationary sphere but rather a rotating one.  Consider how radical this concept must have seemed to the people of his time.  Common sense told them that they were not rotating, since they could not see or feel any rotational movement.  How could they possibly be living on a rotating Earth.  If the Earth was rotating, wouldn’t they lose their balance or wouldn’t the seas slosh about over the dry land?  The rotation of the Earth was not an obvious concept to people in the 16th century, but it did explain why the sun and moon rose and fell, and why the background stars seemed to move with time.
 
But Copernicus’ second concept was even more radical.  He said that, rather than the sun moving around the Earth, it was the Earth (and the other planets as well) that actually revolved around the sun.  This was certainly an extreme game-changer for astronomy.  It was a very radical departure from the old Greek geocentric paradigm.  However, Copernicus still accepted the idea that the orbits of the Earth and the other planets around the sun were circular ones.  Copernicus’ heliocentric concept was personally dangerous to him because the Church regarded such an idea as heretical.  And for this reason, Copernicus waited to publish the heliocentric theory until shortly before his natural death.
 
But what was the mechanism by which the Earth revolved around the sun?  What was responsible for producing such behavior?  This was explained by Isaac Newton in his remarkable work Principia published in 1687.  The answer was gravity and the laws of motion.  This explained the elliptical orbits of the planets and their celestial clockwork movements in relation to the “fixed stars”, and it also explained why an apple fell from a tree on Earth and the trajectory followed by a cannon ball.  However, there was one question Newton could not answer.  Newton could not put forward any explanation as to what produced the force of gravity.  He simply had no idea as to the “why” of gravity.
 
Newton believed that the solar system bodies moved in an all-pervading stationary substance called the “aether”.  The aether was considered to be a fixed frame of reference through which all celestial bodies moved.  Aether was also the medium through which light propagated.  The aether was a paradigm of science for two hundred years until the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which showed that the speed of light was independent of the direction of light in relation to the surmised relative motion of the Earth through the stationary aether.  The Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the aether theory and set the stage for the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
 
With the aether theory disproved by experimentation, science was in a conceptual quandary.  What was there that could replace it?  Something radically different did.  In the early part of the 20th century, Einstein put forward his theory of relativity, first his special theory of relativity in 1905 and then his general theory of relativity in 1915.  Einstein’s theories did away with the aether completely.  In his special theory, he showed that the speed of light was constant regardless of the relative motions of observers and illustrated the implications that this had for mass, time, length, and energy.  The constancy of the speed of light with the relative motion of the observers was definitely counter-intuitive given the way that sound waves were observed to behave.   And in his more comprehensive general theory, Einstein showed that the “force” of gravity was actually a curvature in spacetime, a new quantity produced by the melding of space and time.  The presence of mass curves spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime attracts one mass body to another.  Newton’s paradigm was thus replaced by Einstein’s.
 
But Einstein’s theory of relativity was not immediately accepted by the scientific community due to its seeming strangeness.  Acceptance had to wait until 1919 when Eddington experimentally  measured the curvature of starlight that resulted from the presence of the sun’s spacetime distortion, which could only be observed during a full solar eclipse.
 
In the 20th century, the availability of powerful telescopes began to yield more and more information about the characteristics of the “fixed” stars.  A very significant observation was that they were not fixed at all, they were actually moving away from each other at great speed.  And most of them were clumped into concentrated areas called galaxies.  Einstein had believed that the universe was static, but these observations showed that it was actually expanding.  The fact that the universe was expanding meant that it must have occupied a smaller and smaller volume with time as projected into the past.  This lead to the concept of the creation of the universe from essentially nothing in a “Big Bang” that happened approximately 13.7 billion years ago.  The heat remnant of the Big Bang was the cosmic microwave background that was discovered almost by accident in the 1960’s.
 
Because the universe was expanding, by looking farther and farther out with more and more powerful telescopes, we can see what the universe looked like in very ancient times.  Exotic phenomena such as black holes, pulsars, gamma ray bursts, and neutron stars were discovered.  The clustering of galaxies into even larger structures was observed.  
 
But in the latter part of the 20th century, science has shown that the matter and energy which we can presently observe with our telescopes accounts for only 4% of the overall universe.  The rest of the universe is composed of scientifically unknown quantities call “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”.  At the present time, science has no idea what these dark quantities might be.  Dark Matter and Dark Energy beg for scientific explanation.  Without such an explanation, the vast majority of the universe is currently a complete unknown.
 
Up until the dawn of the 21st century, there was no scientific evidence for the existence of any planets other than the Earth in the universe.  For all we knew until then, the Earth was unique in the firmament.  But a new paradigm has arisen with the astronomical observations that almost all the stars have planets associated with them.  This means that there are probably just as many planets in the universe as there are stars.  And some of them undoubtedly harbor life, as we may or may not know it.
 
This discussion of astronomy makes it clear that astronomical “truth” has changed dramatically over the course of five thousand years of time.  And with the passage of more time it will change even further.
 
So how does one define truth?  Even the dictionary definition of truth possesses a disturbing vagueness. 
 
My definition of truth is the following:  Truth is that which does not change with time.  Only if it is unchanging can it be ultimate truth.  What is your definition?
 
 
Meditation and Intuition
 
Meditation is a superb methodology that may be employed to develop a spiritual intuition yielding greater elements of ultimate truth.  For this to happen, one must practice meditation on a regular basis over long periods of time.
 
Meditation as a human activity is very old, possibly beginning with early hunter-gatherers who may have stared into their fires to induce meditative states.  The established practice of meditation dates back to the early beginnings of Hinduism in about 5000 BCE.  Perhaps the greatest meditative master was Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.  It is said that he discovered the fundamentals of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, on the way to his Enlightenment during a succession of increasingly deeper meditative states.
 
There are a great many different meditative techniques but they all fall into four general categorical types.  The first type is concentrative meditation.  In this practice, the objective is to cultivate a single-pointed attention on some object, such as a sound, an image, the breath, or a flame. Through the training of consistently returning to the object of focus, the mind develops the capacity to remain calm, stabilized, and grounded. 
 
The second meditative type is called open awareness.  The objective of this form of meditation is to open the mind into a panoramic awareness of whatever is happening without a specific focus. Often this awareness is compared to the spacious sky or a river with objects floating by. The capacity to be present with whatever arises is developed through this practice.
 
The third type of meditation is referred to as mindfulness meditation which is a combination of concentration and open awareness.  The practitioner focuses on an object, such as the breath, bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, or sounds. But the focus is not as narrow as in concentrative meditation, for there is a simultaneous awareness of other phenomena. This mindfulness practice is often extended to daily actions, such as eating, walking, driving, or housework.
 
And the fourth general type is called guided meditation.  All forms of meditation can be guided, and many are often practiced with recorded or in-person guidance at first, and then later with a decreasing need for explicit guidance. In one form, called guided imagery, the practitioner follows auditory guidance from a teacher or recording that elicits certain images, affirmations, states (such as peacefulness), or imagined desired experiences.  
 
Although there are many different types of meditative techniques, they are all targeted at providing a focus for the mind on something, whether that something is the rhythm of your breathing, the repetition of a mantra, the concentration on an object, or only the detached acceptance of what is in the Now. 
 
Yet the focus is not what is important.  Rather, it is the underlying experience of Being, of simple awareness-without-content, that is the goal of all meditation.  Once this awareness-without-thought state is reached, the meditator has attained the level where spiritual intuition may flow into the meditator from higher levels of reality, and where some of this intuition may be retained in the conscious mind.
 
This meditative state of awareness also represents the closest a human being can come to confronting the essence of their consciousness in its purest form.  There is no thought associated with pure consciousness.  Pure consciousness simply Is.  It is present as Being and is associated with the essence of reality.  You can be aware of it, but you can never really describe it in any conceptual way with the thoughts of your mind.
 
I have been practicing transcendental meditation on a regular basis for more than forty years now.  I sit in a comfortable chair, close my eyes, and relax my mind with the objective of eliminating all thoughts.  As my mind relaxes, so does my body.  My heart rate slows down to a relatively low level and my breathing becomes shallow.  Initially, I am still aware of the feeling of my body and of the sounds that I hear around me.  But as I move into a deeper meditative state, I begin to lose conscious contact with both my body and my immediate environment.    
 
Having meditated regularly for such a long period of time, I now find it relatively easy to still my mind and effectively minimize almost all thoughts.  If some thoughts do come, I recite a mantra in my mind and the thoughts quickly dissipate.  I then reach a very peaceful and tranquil no-thought state which is difficult to describe because there is no intellectual content associated with it.  It is simply a state of Being, awareness of existence in its most fundamental form.  Where am I (or perhaps I might say what am I) when I reach this no-thought state?  The answer to this question resides in the content of this book.

 
Reality
 
There is a famous statement about reality that goes this way:  “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to observe it, did the tree really fall?”  What is being posed here in an arboreal context is this:  Is there an objective physical reality independent of any human observation?  This is a very insightful and thought-provoking question.
 
How do you define reality?  Most people will tell you that if they can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell something, then it is real.  For them, the information supplied by their senses defines their reality. 
 
But there are a great many things not detected by the five human senses that are considered to be real in our scientific age.  For example, in our current technological society your body is constantly being bombarded by all manner of radiation, from very low frequency sound waves to very high frequency electromagnetic gamma rays, yet the only radiation that you can see with your eyes is in the visible spectrum.  While you cannot see it, your skin can still feel infrared radiation through your sense of touch, and your ears can hear sound waves, but only in a very limited range.  You are blissfully unaware of the vast array of microwaves and radio waves that constantly rain down upon you.
 
Even though we cannot sense the full range of radiation that our body is exposed to, we can detect these larger ranges through the use of scientific instrumentation that can reveal them.  Science has greatly expanded our perception of reality past the limiting regions of our five human senses.  Let me expound on this a bit.
 
The two current overarching theories of science are the theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics.  These two primary theories serve to define what scientists view as our physical reality.  The theory of relativity describes the very large, the vast universe in which we find ourselves. The theory of quantum mechanics on the other hand describes the behavior of the very small, the smallest physical particles that make up the matter in our universe.  What do these two overarching theories tell us about our reality?   
 
Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that, instead of three-dimensional space and independent time, the fabric of the universe is actually a four-dimensional spacetime.  Large mass bodies in space have the effect of distorting spacetime and it is this distortion that produces the effects that we call gravity.  Thus, matter traveling through space will be attracted to other pieces of matter as a result of this distortion.  In effect, the gravitational field attraction between two objects of mass is really a distortion of spacetime. 
 
Einstein’s theory of relativity also makes some rather startling predictions about the nature of reality.  The first is that reality has a fundamentally relative nature.  This means that what we observe depends on how we are moving in spacetime in relation to how the object we are observing is moving. 
 
One unusual aspect of this is called time dilation.  Time dilation says that a clock on a spaceship traveling at a very high velocity relative to an observer who is stationary in relation to the spaceship will move significantly slower than an identical clock in the observer’s hand.  According to the time dilation prediction of relativity, if one twin traveled close to the speed of light in a spaceship and then returned to Earth, he would discover that he had aged very little compared to his aged (or perhaps even long dead) twin who had remained on the Earth.  Quite strange, isn’t it? 
 
But Einstein’s prediction of time dilation has been confirmed by experiments comparing highly precise atomic clocks in orbit around the Earth to atomic clocks on the ground.  An additional prediction is that a clock will run slower in a large gravitational field as compared to one that is in a smaller gravitational field.  Again, this has been verified experimentally. 
 
Another prediction of Einstein’s theory is that a moving object’s length will appear shorter to an observer who is not moving relative to that object.  This is called Lorentz contraction.  Such an observed change in length only becomes appreciable at speeds close to the speed of light.   
 
A further prediction is that the observed mass of a moving object will increase as determined by an observer who is relatively stationary.  This means that as an object moves faster and faster, its mass becomes greater and greater and it takes increasing amounts of energy for the object to increase its speed. 
 
Since relativity theory predicts that the mass of an object becomes infinite at the speed of light, this dictates that no object can ever be accelerated to the speed of light, since this would require infinite energy.  Einstein’s reality says that the speed of light is the maximum speed that can ever be achieved in our material universe.  It is our cosmic speed limit.  
 
How did spacetime and the universe begin?  The currently-accepted scientific theory is that the universe began approximately 13.7 billion years ago in a “Big Bang”.  At the very first infinitesimal fraction of a second of the Big Bang, all energy and all matter were contained within an infinitesimally small volume of spacetime.  But before the Big Bang, there was nothing, no energy, no matter, no spacetime.  Absolutely nada.  So where did everything in the universe come from?  The reality is that no one has the answer to this most fundamental question.
 
As Terence McKenna has so nicely put it:  “Modern science is based on the principle:  ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest’.  The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”
 
Let us now consider the reality presented by the theory of quantum mechanics.  Quantum mechanics is the field of science that deals with descriptions of the very tiny.  It describes the behavior of sub-atomic particles, the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms, and the molecules made from atoms.  It also describes the interactions of these species with electromagnetic radiation.  Scientists consider quantum mechanics to be the basis for our understanding of how very small bits of matter and energy behave.
 
In quantum mechanics, matter can behave either as a particle or as a wave, depending on the conditions of the observation that is made of it.  This is called particle-wave duality.  Let’s consider the electron and the double-slit experiment, which is considered to be the best illustration of the particle-wave duality nature of quantum mechanics. 
 
The experiment is as follows.  You have two fine parallel slits that electrons can pass through.  On one side of these slits you have a source of electrons and on the other side a detection screen that tells you where an electron that passed through one of the two slits was located.  Once an electron passes through a slit, it strikes the screen and leaves an image of where it struck.  If the electron acts like a particle, then you will have only two slit-like images on the detection screen, since some of the electrons will pass through the left slit and some will pass through the right slit.  That’s what you would expect if the electrons behaved as only particles.  However, that is not what you observe experimentally. 
 
Experimentally, you see more than just two slit-like images on the screen.  What you see is an array of multiple parallel lines, with the intensity of the lines decreasing as you move away from the central two lines.  This pattern is called a diffraction pattern and is characteristic of waves that are passing through a double-slit configuration. 
 
So what does the double-slit experiment tell you?  First it tells you that the electron was a particle when it struck the detection screen.  But second it tells you that the electron seemed to be a wave when it actually passed through the double-slits.  Confusing, isn’t it?
 
It gets weirder.  If you put detectors at each of the two slits so that you can now directly observe which slit an individual electron actually passes through, then the experimentally observed pattern is that of just two slit lines, as would be the case if electrons were only particles. 
 
So if you don’t make an observation of which slit the electron actually passes through, you get a wave pattern on the detection screen.  But if you make an observation of which slit the electron passed through, then you get a particle pattern on the detection screen.  Such experiments have conclusively shown that the type of observation you make determines what kind of electron reality you will observe.  Reality is determined by the act of observation!
 
Finally, consider quantum mechanical action-at-a-distance.  Under certain conditions, two particles of light, two photons, can be emitted simultaneously from an atom, but traveling in opposite directions.  Such photons are said to have quantum mechanical properties that are “entangled”.  Quantum mechanics predicts that by measuring a particular quantity of one of these so-called “entangled” photons, then the same quantity of the second photon is also determined instantaneously! 
 
Effectively, the two photons are linked together even though they are physically separated.  And it doesn’t matter whether the two photons are separated by a fraction of an inch, one foot, 100 feet, 1 mile, 1000 miles, 1 million miles, or 100,000 light years when you make your measurement on the first photon.  The properties of the other photon are also instantaneously determined, even if the other photon is across the galaxy! 
 
Instantaneous means much, much, much faster than the speed of light.  The physics community calls this phenomenon “nonlocality” and it has been experimentally verified.  Thus, this reality of quantum mechanics seems to fly in the face of the speed of light limit reality of relativity theory.
 
So the three major mysterious aspects associated with quantum mechanics are:  1) particle-wave duality; 2) the role of the act of observation in creating reality; 3) nonlocality (spooky action at a distance).  But the fact is that these quantum phenomena are observed experimentally.  Particle-wave duality is a reality of our universe.  Observation affecting outcome is a reality of our universe.  Spooky action at a distance (nonlocality) is a reality of our universe.  How can the reality of these phenomena be explained?
 
What is the physics interpretation of the reality associated with quantum mechanics?  The one accepted by most physicists is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation put forward by the founder of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr in the 1920’s. 
 
Basically, this interpretation says that no microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property.  In other words, the microscopic world has no intrinsic reality.  Only that which is observed is real.  Kind of hard-to-swallow, isn’t it?  But that is the essence of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
 
The problem with the Copenhagen interpretation that observation creates microscopic reality is this:  Who is the observer?  Is the observer the piece of experimental equipment that makes the observation? 
 
The famous mathematician John von Neumann, in his 1932 comprehensive treatise on quantum mechanics “The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” (considered by many to be the “bible” of quantum mechanics), argued that no equipment could be the observer since any piece of experimental equipment can be considered as part of a larger quantum mechanical system.  He argued that only a conscious human observer could make the actual observation that led to the observed outcome.  In other words, consciousness creates observed reality. 
 
Yes, the role of observation in creating reality has given physicists major heartburn since the beginnings of quantum mechanics.  In 1957, the physicist Hugh Everett put forward a concept  called the “many worlds” interpretation that did away with the act of observation. 
 
The “many worlds” interpretation says that all the possible outcomes of a quantum event occur in reality, it’s just that each of them happens in a distinct, separate universe.  So the act of observation is replaced by an infinite number of co-existing universes, the so-called “multiverse”.  Stated another way, there is no single reality but rather an infinite number of realities.  Mindboggling, yet physicists are increasingly attracted to the “many worlds” interpretation because of the difficulties associated with explaining how observation creates reality.
 
In summary, the quantum phenomena of particle-wave duality, observational reality, and nonlocality are firmly established by experimental physics.  These phenomena are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of our physical existence.  However, according to quantum mechanics the reality that forms the basis of these phenomena either does not exist (Copenhagen interpretation) or consists of an infinite number co-existing universes (many worlds interpretation).  At its root, quantum mechanics seems like a bizarre dream.
 
Let us take another step into the physical reality framework and consider what physicists call “fundamentals” of nature.  These fundamentals are physical quantities that cannot be described as combinations of other physical quantities.  Such fundamentals apply to all of the physical “stuff” in the universe. 
 
Spacetime, Energy, and Charge are fundamentals of nature as conceived by our present science.  All of these fundamentals came into existence at the event of the Big Bang which is thought to have taken place 13.7 billion years ago when “Everything” popped out in a single point from “Nothing”.
 
Spacetime is the framework in which all the physical “stuff” in the universe exists.  It is conceived as a continuum, meaning that it changes smoothly from point-to-point.  Each point in spacetime is characterized by three dimensional coordinates and one time coordinate.  Spacetime is the basis of Einstein’s theory of relativity. 
 
Energy is the next fundamental.  Physics textbooks will tell you that the definition of energy is “the ability to do work”.  However, this is not a very satisfying definition because it states what energy does, but not what energy is.  In fact, no one really knows what the essence of energy is.  There are many different forms of energy such as kinetic energy, potential energy, heat energy, electrical energy, electromagnetic energy, nuclear energy, and also physical matter.  For unknown reasons, it is a law of nature that energy is never created or destroyed when it changes form, it is always conserved.   
 
Physical matter is just a form of “condensed energy”.  All matter has a quantity called “mass”.  What is mass?  The most basic way to define it is as the “rest (or invariant) mass”.  The rest mass of matter, m, is related to the energy contained in the matter by Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2, where c is the speed of light in a pure vacuum.  This relationship shows that mass and energy are fundamentally the same.  In a nuclear bomb, a small amount of mass is converted into a tremendous amount of energy because the speed of light is such a large number.  In a nuclear accelerator, the energy of two protons colliding can be converted into a very small mass of subatomic particles. 
 
In his theory of general relativity, Einstein showed that the presence of large amounts of mass can warp the fabric of spacetime, thus producing the apparent force of gravity.  Although all matter has mass, photons of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light have no mass.  They are massless entities.  Despite being massless, photons do possess energy through the famous Planck equation E = hn, where n is the frequency of the photon radiation and h is a fundamental constant called Planck’s constant.  
 
Charge is another fundamental of nature. Charge is a property of matter that causes the matter to experience a force when in the presence of other pieces of matter that contain charge.  Charge comes in elementary units that are given the symbol “e”, and can be either positive or negative.  Charged particles of the same sign repel each other, while charged particles of opposite signs attract one another.  The charge on a proton in the nucleus of an atom is +1, while that of an electron in an atom is -1.  Unlike matter, photons of radiation such as visible light have a zero charge.
 
So there you have a brief (and as non-technical as I can make it) summary of the foundations on which our current physics rests.  These form the basis of the present scientific explanation of physical reality.  As you may have noticed, the fundamentals themselves are just “there” because they allow the current scientific theories to explain the results obtained from scientific experiments.  However, they are themselves essentially metaphysical, because we can go no further in understanding the “why” of them with our present science.
 
I am sorry to disillusion you about the ability of science to adequately define the reality of our physical world.  Our current science is nowhere even close to this, as evidenced by the fact that science has been unable to merge the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics into a single physically-based Theory of Everything.   
 
My intuition tells me that we are actually just a portion of a much larger non-physical reality.

 
The Illusion Of Physical Reality
 
Have you ever awakened in the morning and wondered if the world you have woken to is nothing but an illusion?  For most people such a thought never enters their mind.  The alarm clock rings and they are back to their everyday reality without a second thought.  But for some people, myself included, it definitely does.  How do you know that the physical three-dimensional existence you perceive around you is real or not?  You make the assumption that it is, but what is the proof for that assumption?
 
How do you know if what you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste around you is actually real?  It certainly seems real during your waking moments.  You always seem to awaken to the same consistency of everyday things. 
 
Everything appears in order to you and there are no questions in your mind as to whether or not the whole thing is actually an illusion.  The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west each and every day.  The sun is a daily reality to you.  Everything seems right.  Everything is in place  and where it should be.  There are no awkward inconsistencies that might cause you to doubt what you perceive with your physical senses.
 
Plato was the first to discuss these ideas in the famous Cave allegory in his treatise The Republic.  He describes a group of people who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave so that they can only see the wall of the cave opposite them.  Behind them is a fire and there are people walking around the fire.  But all the chained people can see is the shadow reflection of the real peoples’ movements illuminated on the cave wall that they can observe.  They never are able to see the real people and their movements. 
 
So the chained people assume that the shadows they are seeing on the wall is their reality.  Why should they assume anything different?  But, of course, this is far from the real truth.  Once the chained people are freed, they are able to turn around and see what the true reality actually is, namely the real people and the fire.
 
The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant expanded upon the truth of reality.  Kant presented the significant difference between the noumenon and the phenomenon in our experience of reality.  When we observe something outside of ourselves, what is it that we are actually observing?  How do we know that what we are seeing is what is actually there? 
 
The noumenon is taken to be the “thing in itself” and the phenomenon is the “thing as it appears to the observer”.  Kant argued that the noumenon can never really be known by the observer.  The only thing the observer can know is how the noumenon appears in his mind, which is the phenomenon.
 
Kant correctly assessed that what we know of our physical reality is actually what is perceived in our brain.  The brain takes the inputs from our five senses about the nature of an object external to us and combines these sensory inputs into a brain construction of that object which appears in our mind.  We do not know that this brain construction, the phenomenon, is a true description of the object as it actually is, the noumenon.  Basically, we can never really know the noumenon of anything that surrounds us and that we have interactions with.  We can only perceive what our brain conveys to our consciousness.
 
How does the brain experience the reality of the sensory inputs it receives?  It seems to our experience that our sensory vision of the external world is immediate in nature.  When something happens to us, we believe that we see it or feel it in real time.  But is this actually true? 

This question has been explored in considerable detail by the seminal work of Benjamin Libet.  Libet was a neurophysiologist at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.  In the late 1950’s, he began collaborations with a brain surgeon who had developed a surgical technique to control the tremors, tics and spasms caused by Parkinson’s disease.  This technique involved the implantation of electrodes directly into the brain to stop the tremors at their source. 

Since the brain feels no pain, the surgery was done under local anesthetic and the patients were fully conscious during the surgery.  A coin-sized hole was drilled through the skull to expose the motor centers of the brain that control the sense of touch.  With the consent of the patients, Libet inserted an extra electrode through which he could introduce a small amount of electrical current and then have the patients describe what sort of stimulus they felt. 
  
What Libet found was that he could only generate a sensory reaction from the fully awake patients if he induced a pulsed current.  The frequency of these electrical pulses or their polarity had little influence.  With gentle pulsing current, the patients reported relatively specific feelings, such as a drop of water trickling down the back of their hand.  However, if the magnitude of the current was increased, these specific feelings turned into just a tingling sensation. 

Libet observed that the length of time of the electrical pulse train was key to the patient being able to report any sensation at all.  If the pulse train was less than approximately 500 milliseconds (one-half a second), the patient would report no induced feeling, but if it were greater than 500 milliseconds, then the patient would “feel” it. 

This is a very intriguing result because it seems to indicate that we experience real-world events in our consciousness about one-half a second after they actually occur in real time.  Such a result is counter-intuitive to our common sense experience of things.  When we touch something with our finger, it does not seem to us that there is a half-second delay in our awareness of the touch.  Rather, it seems that our awareness is essentially simultaneous with the actual touch.

Libet realized that he needed to reference his time results to a base time and for this he chose the technique of “evoked response potentials” (ERPs).  The evoked response potential is essentially an electroencephalographic (EEG) methodology that isolates individual sensory brain wave signals.  Normally, evoked response potentials are recorded by placing electrodes on the surface of the scalp, but since he had access to the brain, Libet placed his ERP electrodes directly on the surface of the brain, where these signals are exceptionally sharp and well-defined.

For an ERP stimulus, Libet employed a brief electrical shock induced on the back of the patient’s hand.  In the ERP, he noted an initial large spike at approximately 80 milliseconds which was the result of the nerve signal from the hand traveling to the brain location being monitored for the ERP.  However, after this spike the ERP signal did not drop to zero but instead continued at a lower level for approximately 500 milliseconds. 

Libet interpreted this extended ERP signal as the brain processing required to produce a conscious sensation of the stimulus.  What was quite remarkable, however, was that the awake patients actually reported feeling the stimulus after only an 80 millisecond period, rather than after a 500 millisecond period.  In other words, the patients said that they felt the stimulus almost simultaneously, while the ERP results indicated that the stimulus really came into their consciousness only after a much longer 500 millisecond time period.

How could this be resolved?  Libet’s interpretation was that the brain was artificially antedating the conscious recall of the event time from the actual 500 millisecond delay time to the 80 millisecond delay time, and he conducted a series of experiments that seem to confirm this explanation.  However, he offered no mechanism by which the brain could produce such an unusual effect.
​
So does reality actually take place one-half of a second before we are consciously aware of it?  Libet’s data are compelling, but a number of other researchers have questioned his interpretation of the data.  Until a mechanism is clearly identified to show how the brain could antedate these time events, the jury is still out on this important reality question.
 
Now let’s consider another view of reality.  I’m reminded of a social event I once attended at a restaurant.  The restaurant was crowded with people and so I had to share a booth with a stranger, a man I didn’t know at all.  We began a conversation and eventually it drifted into a discussion of the nature of reality.  At one point, the man told me “You’re just a figment of my imagination”.  This statement took me by surprise and after being taken aback for a moment I retorted by saying “No, you’re actually a figment of my imagination”. 
 
But this did give me pause.  There is a philosophical category describing this viewpoint of reality and it is called solipsism.  Metaphysical solipsists maintain that the self is the only existing reality and that all other reality, including the external world and other people, are representations of the self, and have no independent existence.
 
In the 18th century, the philosopher George Berkeley (also known as Bishop Berkeley) put forth this solipsistic philosophy.  After hearing Berkeley expound on the philosophy at a church service, the English writer Samuel Johnson was famously observed to kick a large stone dramatically with his foot while at the same time saying “I refute it thus”. 
 
If someone has this viewpoint, how can you prove to them that they are incorrect.  It’s impossible.  But I knew that I definitely existed independent of this man, I just could not prove it to him to his satisfaction given his solipsistic perspective.
 
The next thing to consider with regard to the nature of reality are dreams.  The dreams you dream at night certainly provide an illusion of reality while you are in the dream state.
 
Here is what I know from my first-hand dreaming experience.  I know that when I am dreaming, the dream experience seems just as real as the waking experience.  I know that I am usually the primary character in the dreams I dream and that significant elements of my dreams are associated with some of my waking long term memories. 
 
Many of the narrative aspects of my dreams do not make logical sense, yet I accept these illogical aspects without question while in the dream state.  There is usually a tension in my dreams.  I need to get somewhere or do something or achieve some goal.  Sometimes there is fear in them.  Never are my dreams of a calm nature, there is always some form of action.  On rare occasion, I have moved my physical limbs in association with physical actions taken in the dream state (e.g. moved my arms and legs in a violent manner). 
 
There are people who I know in my dreams, but there are also characters that I do not recognize at all.  I know that I dream in color.  When I awaken, I can only remember the most striking elements of my dreams, and then only for a short time.  And finally, I know that I have never experienced waking lucidity while I am in my dreams.
 
Lucid dreamers are able to consciously realize that they are dreaming while they are still in the dream state.  They are effectively awake while they are dreaming.  Many of the people with this ability report the phenomenon of false awakenings.  They will awaken from their dream only to discover through various inconsistencies that their so-called awake state is really just another dream.  One lucid dreamer reported that this peculiar condition happened to him seven times in one overall dream sequence before he actually woke up for real.  Imagine how disconcerting that must have been!
 
There is a well-known childrens’ song that goes:  “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”  Great truths are often conveyed through simple words.  What if physical life is indeed only a dream, only an illusion.

 
Death Of Illusion
 
Our own death is something we do not want to dwell on.  We think such thoughts are morbid and depressing.  Unless we have a terminal illness, we push these thoughts into the furthest recesses of our mind.  We hope that we will not die today – or tomorrow.  However the thought of death is nevertheless with us all the time, lurking in the background.
 
But there is a point in time when you will certainly die.  When you were born, your eventual death became an absolutely unavoidable event.   
 
Have you thought about the day that you die?  For many people, this will have crossed their minds at least on rare occasion.  People see that day in the hopefully far future, although in actual fact it could be tomorrow.  Will it be a sunny day or a cloudy one?  A hot summer day or a cold winter one?  Will it be in the spring with the birds singing and new growth all around?  Some people wonder what the next day will be like with them not in the world any longer.  I know that I have had this thought.
 
People may also occasionally dwell on the manner in which they will die.  Some say that they would like to die quickly such as in an airplane crash or an automobile accident.  Others say that they want to die peacefully at home surrounded by their relatives and close friends.  Some people wish to drift away during their sleep, going from a dream state to the spiritual state in a relatively continuous process.  Still others wish to go out in a blaze of glory, such as done by the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. 
 
Almost no one wishes to die in a sterile hospital environment after a long and painful illness.  And almost everyone seems to view the day of their death as a very bad day, one to be regarded with total dread.  Your last day on physical Earth.
 
Why do people fear death so much?  There are a number of reasons.  First, there is the fear of being wrenched from existence into non-existence.  If this were actually true, then what is the meaning of life at all?  What’s the point in all the joy and suffering, all the highs and lows, all the beauty and creativity of life.  There would seem to be no point at all.  Life would seem meaningless. 
 
Fear of the unknown is another reason that many people fear death.  There is a distinct tendency for human beings to fear things that are mysterious to them.  And death is, of course, perhaps the ultimate mystery. 
 
Then there are people who fear death because they dread God’s judgment and retribution for the evil they believe to have done in life.  They fear being damned to hell forever, as some religions say will happen to evildoers.  People say that ghosts are motivated to stay in the earthly plane after death for this reason.  They do not want to move “into the light” because of their fear of judgment and punishment.
 
Finally, there is the fear of the dying process itself, the pain and suffering that may be associated with death.  People do not want to entertain the thought of being shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned in a violent death, or mangled or burned beyond recognition in an auto or aircraft accident.  Nor do they want to think of the prolonged suffering and pain as a result of a terminal illness such as cancer.  Most people will say that they hope their own death will be quick and painless. 
 
One way to think about death is to consider a situation where you die quite suddenly, say from an auto accident, heart attack, or gun shot.  One minute you are fully functional in the physical world, and the next minute you are - Where?
 
Now there are those who say that when this happens, it is the end of everything since nothing of you continues to exist.  You are simply gone forever.  Physical death is the absolute end of things.  But I am not one of those persons.
 
My intuition tells me that when your physical body dies, the real “you”, your consciousness, continues to exist in another, more expansive level of reality – the true reality.  At the moment of death your consciousness leaves your physical body behind.  You experience quite directly and definitively that “you” are not your physical body at all.  You never were.  The “you” is your consciousness that is now remote from your body but still quite alive and aware. 
 
But what then is this “you”? 

 
What Do You Think You Really Are?
 
What are you?  What am I?  You will notice that I did not pose this question as:  Who do you think you really are?  There was a reason for this difference in formulation.  I am trying to take the question out of the frame of reference of three-dimensional, physical human existence.  Most people go through a lifetime without ever asking this question of themselves, but they should. 
 
I know intuitively that the essence of what I am exists.  But what is the nature of this essence?  Descartes famously stated “cogito, ergo sum”, I think, therefore I am.  He could not dispute his existence given the fact that he could think about it. 
 
But perhaps a better way to state something like this is:  I am, therefore I think.  In other words, existence precedes thought.  Being is there before the thought of Being. One wonders if Descartes ever pondered on this relative juxtaposition of the words.
 
And what is Being?  Being is the innate sense of awareness, but awareness without any thought content.  Being is the feeling – the knowing  if you will – of the reality of existence.  Being is just the fact of Being.  It is the knowing that you Are.  There was a book written with the wonderful title “The Lightness of Being”.  Indeed, Being is a very light thing, a very intangible, inscrutable thing.  You cannot define it through thought.  It just Is. 
 
But are you only your physical body and your personality ego in this relatively short lifetime on three-dimensional physical Planet Earth?  Is that the sum total of your Being?  My answer to this is an emphatic NO.  You are infinitely more than that.
 
Consider the makeup of your physical body.  Your body is essentially just a complex composition of water, chemicals, molecules, cells, and bacteria.  The body is composed of 57% water and the major chemical elements making it up are oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium.  These constituents (in addition to trace elements) make up the approximately 40 trillion human cells that compose the various aspects of your body. 
 
However, in addition to this, your body also contains 100 trillion bacterial cells that reside all over, but primarily on the skin and in the intestines.  These bacteria have DNA that is different from the DNA of your human cells.  They are essentially “visitors” that live on and in your body.  So your physical body is actually a combination of both human and bacterial DNA.
 
Your body changes dramatically with time.  Most of the cells in the human body replace themselves over the course of time.  For example, fat cells replace at about 10% each year while heart cells are replaced about 1% per year.  However, neurons in the cerebral cortex are never replaced during a lifetime.  So, except for neurons, the body that you had as a two-year-old child is not the body that you have when you are a seventy-year-old adult.  It has been almost entirely replaced on a cellular level.
 
In my office I have a portrait of myself taken when I was a two-year-old.  It shows a happy, bright-eyed, bushy tailed, fat-cheeked little boy.  But this photo does not show the prominent forehead scar that I, as a five-year old child, received when I was hit by a car.  Luckily, the only permanent thing I received from this accident was the scar, which has lasted a lifetime.
 
When I look at old photos of myself as a young adult, I see a lean body with a full head of hair that was wearing black-framed glasses most of the time.  In actual fact, I look rather nerdy in these photos.  Yet the vitality of youth is there.    
 
Now when I look in the mirror today as a seventy-year-old man, I bear little resemblance to that little boy or the young adult.  My face is now a mature looking face, with somewhat wrinkled skin, prominent bags under the eyes, and noticeably thinning hair in front and a bald spot on the back of my head.  My body has indeed changed dramatically over the years.  It no longer possesses the energy, strength, and stamina that it once had.
 
So your body is in a constant state of change with time during your lifetime.  Well, what about your ego, your physical conscious personality.  Does your ego stay the same with time?  Again, just as your body changes your ego also changes with the passage of time.  This is because your ego is the sum total of your interactions with others and your life experiences. 
 
The best way for me to give you a feel for the change of the ego with time and events is to take you on a brief tour of a few vignettes from my own personal ego trip. 
 
The ego I had as a child in the earliest stages of self-awareness is certainly not the ego that I now possess as a seventy-year-old man. 
 
The first experience of my ego that I can recall is when I was three years old and is essentially associated with my first remembered memory.  I recall looking down at my younger brother who was sitting in a box.  And in that moment I knew that I existed as the ego that was recording this event.  Why I have kept this rather nondescript scene in my memory for all these years is a mystery to me.
 
Back when I was five I knew that I existed, and my major goal in life was to obey and please my parents (at least most of the time) and to experience the things that were thrown my way.  I have a memory of my first day at kindergarten, talking to my cousin before leaving with my mother to the school, and then lying down on the floor at the kindergarten class during a rest period. 
 
My ego remembers the first time I was given a two-wheeled bicycle.  My father helped me learn how to ride it with training wheels and then the training wheels were off and I was on my own.  There was a tremendous feeling of freedom and the new ability to explore a larger section of my old neighborhood than had been possible with small legs alone.  It was a definite rush.
 
I remember going to see a movie at the movie theater in my old neighborhood.  At that time one of the great advantages of going to the movies, especially in the summer, was the fact that it was air conditioned, something that all the homes people lived in at that time were not. 
 
I specifically recall seeing the movie “Them” which was about giant radiation-mutated ants that were discovered in Alamogordo, New Mexico not far from the very first atomic bomb test.  It made a great impression upon my young ego.  I found it both scary and fascinating.  Little did I know that as an older ego I would live in New Mexico and visit the town of Alamogordo in person.
 
My early ego was shaped by the new technology of television.  In the 1950s, I watched the show “You Are There” hosted by a younger Walter Cronkite.  There was also the suite of baby boomer shows – The Mickey Mouse Club, The Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett, Zorro, Superman.  I remember one show in particular, Science Fiction Theater, which made a distinct impression on the ego of a future scientist.
 
When I was ten, our family moved from the ethnic inner city neighborhood and second floor apartment where we had been living, into a single family home in the suburbs.  The suburbs were so spacious compared to my inner city life.  When we arrived in our new neighborhood, my brother and I had a great time playing in the wood frame construction detritus of new homes that were in the process of being built.  I still remember the smell of the freshly cut wood.
 
This was a time of considerable expansion of my exploration via longer bike trips to various other parts of the suburban environment.  My brother and I ranged relatively far and wide throughout the surrounding neighborhood, to school, to the playgrounds, to the swimming pool,  to little league baseball fields.  It was great fun.  We especially enjoyed the wooded tree and grass areas which had been much scarcer in the old inner-city neighborhood.
 
At that time, my participation in the Boy Scouts had a major impact on my ego development.  It instilled a love for the outdoors, discipline, a striving for achievement, and the lifelong motto of “Be Prepared”. 
 
My sexual awakening began in the eighth grade when I first began to notice that the most intelligent person in my class (although smartness-wise I thought I was a close second) was starting to fill out in the chest.  I later took this girl to my high school junior prom and she was the first girl I ever kissed.
 
My parents sent me to a Catholic boy’s school during my high school years, so girls were not a distraction for me during classes.  I often wonder what high school would have been like with their presence.  The only thing I distinctly remember from the high school teachers there was my physics teacher asking us “What is a watt?”  For some reason this has stuck in my head over the years.  I recall being in German class when Alan Shepard became the first American in space.  This fueled my interest for science. 
 
I also distinctly remember going into the chapel at my high school in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and praying to God that there not be a nuclear war.  I was only sixteen and much too young to die by nuclear incineration back then.  Fortunately, that did not happen but it was a close call.  One should not have to have such a memory. 
 
During my high school years, the reading of science fiction became important to me and I was enthralled with it.  I always sought out the science fiction section in the libraries that I visited. For some reason, I felt very comfortable in libraries.
 
My favorite TV show in those years was Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone”.  I never missed an episode and I found in each episode a fascination with the unusual, the ironic, the mystical.  They piqued my imagination.  “The Twilight Zone” still runs on TV to the present day and I very much enjoy seeing these segments again even though I already know the story. 
 
I was the first in my family to attend college and so a felt a great responsibility to do well there.  I basically spent the four college years commuting between my home (I still lived with my parents) and the college near my home, and burying my nose in books preparing for tests.  Tests were what drove my college years and I developed a dread of them.  I prayed for the day when I would never have to take another test.
 
After college I began graduate school with the goal of obtaining a Ph.D degree in science.  At this time I also moved out of my parents’ home.  I felt a considerable amount of freedom in doing so since I’d felt constrained there in terms of my own life development.  I was motivated by what I now consider to be a somewhat selfish desire to live my own independent life.
 
But I have to say that much ego development began to occur when I moved out and started graduate school.  I was now living and working daily with people who were not my family and who had widely different backgrounds.  My point of view was undergoing a rapid expansion into new areas of experience and thought.  It was an exciting time.
 
I met my future wife at a graduate student party.  When I first met her, I asked where she was from and she said she was born on the island of Zanzibar.  At the time I didn’t have the faintest idea where Zanzibar was located on the world map.  For a person who had not left his hometown through college, this was really quite exotic.  Yet she was a girl with similar values to mine even though her background was so very different (her parents were born in India and had migrated to Zanzibar) and we very much enjoyed being with each other.
 
We knew each other for seven years before we made the decision to marry.  We were married in Vancouver, Canada where her parents had moved after leaving Zanzibar.  Then we headed to New Mexico where I had just started a new job at a government lab.  My geographical ego was distinctly on the increase.
 
After a little more than one year of marriage our first and only child, a girl, arrived.  This definitely had an effect on my ego, perhaps even more so than the effect of being married.  We were now a family and I had responsibilities to love and support them. It was now not just me or me and she, but us.  These responsibilities weighed heavily upon me.  I took them very seriously.
 
There were a number of trying times during the years that followed but there were many good times as well.  The trying times revolved around some serious health issues for my wife, my daughter, and myself that the three of us had to face together.  Those were tough times indeed, but we got through them by supporting each other.  They bonded us together in the way that only hard times can.  They contributed to building our egos and our characters.  And they continue to bond us today.
 
After a few years, our child left home for college in a far distant state.  My wife and I were left with an empty nest but this allowed us to get to know each other again, just the two of us.  It was during this period of time as a fifty-year old adult that I experienced what I will call a spiritual epiphany which I believe was triggered by a medical condition that I had encountered.
 
I found myself compelled to try and understand myself and my place in reality.  I began to delve into who I really was.  I, my ego, started a journey of seeking to evolve into the true I.  I began voraciously reading books on religions, spirituality, and the paranormal, and strove to combine my scientific logic with my developing spiritual intuition.  I think that the spiritual intuition part of all this was related to the fact that I had been practicing transcendental meditation on a regular basis for many years.  Perhaps this was allowing spiritual intuition to permeate into my conscious mind.  My ego was beginning to be subsumed by my I. 
 
This brings us to the end of my brief ego trip and the point in “time” when I am writing this book.  I hope I haven’t bored you too much with it.  My present ego found it enjoyable to reflect on some of the things I have experienced in the past.  Perhaps you recalled some of your own ego experiences while reading mine.
 
What do you think you really are?  As discussed above, you are certainly not your body nor your ego since both of these change significantly as you proceed through your lifetime on Earth.  You  are something infinitely greater than either of these.
 
You are actually a spiritual Entity formed from the essence of God that is having a human life experience.  I am really a spiritual Entity that is experiencing the lifetime of the human ego John Joseph Petrovic.  That is what we truly are.
 

God Is All
 
Does God really exist?  There are those who say that it is absurd to believe in the existence of God because there is no shred of convincing scientific evidence that an all-encompassing fundamental such as God is actually a reality. 
 
To those I reply that the evidence is all around you.  Every physical thing that you can detect with your human senses is contained within God.  Everything both physical and non-physical is a manifestation of the Thoughts of God.  I cannot prove this to you, but I know this to be true in the very depths of my Being.
 
What is my personal concept of God?  The way I think of God is as Universal Consciousness.  God is an infinite, all-encompassing field of consciousness that possesses intention and which manifests Its creative thoughts through the use of consciousness-directed energy.  When God thinks of something, that something is created, on both physical and non-physical existential levels.
 
God is the only genuine Reality, the only Being that truly exists.  There is nothing other than It (I use a non-gender specific descriptor for God because clearly God has no gender).  There are so many names for God, both religious and non-religious.  We are all familiar with the religious names, some of which are Yahweh, Allah, and Brahman.  There are also the non-religious names such as All That Is, The Source, The Light, The Oneness, or Being.  Despite all the religious and cultural baggage associated with it, I choose to use the name God in this book because it is a short and familiar term for both myself and the reader.
 
Where did God come from?  I believe that God has always existed.  It is the “I am Who Am” as expressed in the Bible.  God has always existed and God is changeless.  God does not change with time because, for God, time is non-existent.  Time is something that exists in our present three-dimensional universe, but God is timeless.  And God is also truth because truth is that which never changes, and the only thing that never changes is God. 
 
We conjecture that God is non-physical in nature.  What does this mean?  We only know our physical three-dimensional universe.  But I believe that God resides in the overarching non-physical reality that encompasses everything.  Our physical reality is merely a subset of this all-encompassing non-physical reality.  One thing we can do to try and grasp in an admittedly very limited way the non-physical nature of God is to consider Its descriptor as The Light. 
 
Our physics says that light is composed of photons, little separate bits of far-field electromagnetic energy that have no mass or charge, and that exist essentially outside of space and time.   One can say that the photon exists outside spacetime as we know it because photons always move at the speed of light, so from the perspective of the photon there is no time and no distance or movement.  From the photon’s perspective, it is a stationary entity in the “void”.  It comes into existence at a “place” and goes out of its existence at the same “place”.  
 
Essentially, all light is actually non-physical in nature in terms of our current scientific understanding.  From the perspective of light, there is no space, no time, no charge, and no mass, things that we associate with physical reality.  This is a useful analogy for attempting to grasp in some very limited way the non-physical nature of God.
 
It is quite impossible for a three-dimensional human being to fully comprehend the total nature of God.  The best we can do is to approximate this nature from our finite vantage point.  In addition to the light analogy, one might, for example, attempt to conceive of God in terms of what physicists call the zero point field. 
 
The zero point field is essentially the ground state of all quantum mechanical systems at absolute zero temperature in a perfect vacuum.  It consists of the energy field of all waves of all possible wavelengths, and is thus infinite in extent and infinite in energy content.  Can God be conceived of as an all-encompassing zero point field that also possesses consciousness?  This might be another type of approximation.  
 
Does God exist in a higher dimensional realm?  Our physics tells us that there may be dimensions much higher than just our three-dimensional existence (the string theory of physics talks about 11 dimensions).  How can we comprehend such higher dimensions?  In fact, although they can be conceptualized mathematically with relative ease as mutually orthogonal unit vectors, it is impossible for a three-physical dimensional being to visualize even a four-physical dimensional reality because that is completely outside our comprehensional limits. Score one for mathematics in comparison to the physical world.
 
Just consider if you were a two-dimensional being living in a two-dimensional Flatland.  You would know and experience left-right and forward-back, but you would have no concept whatsoever of up-down.  Up-down would be completely outside of your two-dimensional reality framework.  There would be absolutely no way you could conceive of an additional up-down that would constitute a three-dimensional reality.  You are stuck in Flatland with no way to experience a three-dimensional existence.  There is no way to overcome your Flatness.
 
Now we in the three-dimensional physical realm have no problem experiencing left-right, forward-back, and up-down.  But how could we ever extrapolate to a four-dimensional world that has an additional physical dimension of, say, “in-out”?  We cannot conceive of nor can we experience the fourth-dimensional “in-out”.  But that does not mean that it does not exist somewhere in a spectrum of higher dimensional states.  The only way to comprehend a four-dimensional reality would be to exist in it.
 
People who have had near-death experiences report things that they strongly feel are associated with the nature of God.  One aspect is that God radiates Unconditional Love.  What they say is that God does not judge any of the actions that you have done in your present lifetime – that is what Unconditional Love means. 
 
As hard as it may be for we physical human beings to accept, there is no good or evil with God, only Unconditional Love.  There is no hell or damnation even for what we perceive as the most heinous actions in our world, only Unconditional Love.  The feeling of Unconditional Love radiated by God is the most joyous feeling that they have ever experienced, much greater than any joy they have known on the Earthly plane.
 
Another thing they report is the feeling of Oneness with God.  Their perception is that they are an intimate part of God.  They say that they feel like both a distinctly separate “little bit” of God while also One with God.  This is a very hard concept for us to fathom, but that is what they bring back with them. 
 
And the final thing the near-death experiencers report is that they have now come back “Home”.

 
Universal Consciousness
 
Consciousness is awareness of Being, of existence.  It is the “I am”.
 
Consciousness is something that our current science has been unable to deal with in any meaningful way.  This is best exemplified by the difficulty in accounting for the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness.  The “hard problem” can be stated as follows:  How do physical processes in the brain account for our subjective inner experiences and feelings?  How does the intricately interconnected array of neurons in the brain produce the mental impression of the redness of the color red?  How does it lead to our appreciation for a piece of fine art?  And how does it produce our awareness of existence?
 
Scientists know they are conscious beings, this is something they cannot deny as being part of physical reality.  But they have failed to describe the nature and operation of consciousness in terms of any deterministic physically-based paradigms associated with the functioning of the brain.  They cannot establish how and where in the brain our individual consciousness is formed.
 
There is a very good reason for this.  It is because consciousness is inherently non-physical in nature.  It does not reside in the physical brain.
 
I believe that consciousness is the underlying Fundamental of our physical reality.  It is the basis on which all of our presently conceived scientific fundamentals of the physical universe rest.
 
I also believe that Universal Consciousness is the all-encompassing Being that contains our physical reality as a subset of a much, much larger non-physical reality.  You can call Universal Consciousness the God Field if you like.
 
Everything that exists in both the physical and non-physical realms is created by and contained within Universal Consciousness.  There is nothing that is outside of Universal Consciousness.  It is the essence of true reality.
 
How does Universal Consciousness influence our physical reality?  What does it do?  My intuition tells me that Universal Consciousness creates existence and awareness of existence.  Universal Consciousness is the source of the awareness, the consciousness, for all things that exist, even at the most rudimentary levels. 
 
At higher levels of consciousness (such as ourselves) this awareness has the abilities of self-awareness and abstract thought.  Perhaps we can “think” of Universal Consciousness as an all-encompassing “awareness field”. 
 
There is no speed limit for the transmission of awareness and thought through the Universal Consciousness “field”.  Transmission of these things is absolutely instantaneous.  In other words, it is “spooky action at a distance”, something that has been actually observed in quantum mechanical experiments on the borderline of our physical reality.  The speed of awareness and thought is instantaneous. 
 
My intuition is that Universal Consciousness can create simply through the transmission of Its Thought of awareness.  God thinks and so it becomes.
 
Timelessness
 
Near-death experiencers say that there is no time as we know it in the reality that is God.  There is no past, present, and future as time seems to flow in our physical universe.  Rather past, present, and future all exist simultaneously in an eternal Now.
 
For a physical human being, this no-time aspect is extremely hard to fathom.  We are so immersed in the arrow of time and its associated cause-and-effect of our common sense as well as our current science, yet no-time is what is reported.
 
Let us try to come to grips with this by first considering what we mean by the “present”.  It would seem that the “present” is a very fleeting and subtle thing.  What is the time extent of the “present”?  Is the “present” moment defined by the shortest conscious attention span that is possible for a human being?  What is the physical Now?  The physical Now is a most transitory thing, a thing that changes constantly from moment to moment.
 
Because the “present” is so fleeting, it would seem that the main constituents of our flow of time are really the past and the future.  So how are these melded together into an eternal Now?
 
With regard to the past, this would suggest that the past is never actually gone from reality.  Past events continue to exist in the eternal Now and can be accessed by simply thinking about them.  Evidence for this comes from the life reviews that near-death experiencers describe.  In these reviews, all past events are available in the same detail as if they were occurring in the “present”.
 
The main conceptual difficulty for me comes from the presence of the future in the eternal Now and the complications this implies for God’s gift to us of free choice.  Now, I believe that we indeed have the freedom to choose between different avenues in both our physical and non-physical lives.  We can decide to go down one path or the other, and which path we choose determines our future.
 
But if the future is already part of the eternal Now, how can we possibly make free choices since our choices are already known by God.  For years, I have had a difficult time coming to grips with the logic of this in my own mind.  Here is how I reconcile it to myself via the maze analogy.
 
Picture yourself walking into the entrance of a large and complex garden maze composed of tunnels, the sides of which are large, high hedges that you cannot see through and cannot see over.  All you can see is the path that you are on between the hedges and what is at the end of your particular path segment location.  Your task is to bring yourself to the other exit of the maze which is different from the one you entered.
 
When you get to the end of the path segment you are presently on, there is an intersecting, blocking path, and you have the choice of going either left or right.  For you, whichever direction you choose is a completely free choice.  Going left may be the next step in getting you out of the maze, or it may lead to a blind alley or worse, may get you hopelessly lost in the maze.  You have no idea which.  But you must choose.  And so it goes, with repeated free choices required at the various future path intersections.  You have no idea what the future may hold.
 
Now consider that there is an observer located in a stationary position in the air above the maze.  From this vantage point, the observer can see the entire extent of the maze and your position in it.  The observer can clearly see the route decisions that will lead to a successful exit, and the ones that will not.  In other words, the observer will know the many different futures that result from your free choices made in the maze.  For the observer, the various potential futures are all known to him in the present, the Now.  And all the various potential futures that result from the free choices made in the maze exist in the Now.
 
So you are allowed to make free choices, while at the same time the observer, God, knows the many futures in the eternal Now that can result from the choices you will freely make.

Unconditional Love
 
Near-death experiencers say that in the presence of God they feel the most intense unconditional love they have ever experienced.  They say that this love is unimaginably greater than any form of love they have ever felt in this physical existence.
 
And what is unconditional love?  It is the love of one being for another simply because of the existence of that being and for no other reason.
 
The closest thing to unconditional love in our Earthly realm is the love of a mother for her child.  The bond between mother and child is so strong, so intense that the mother will never cease to love her child, regardless of anything the child does or achieves in life.  The mother loves the child unconditionally because she, in a very intimate way, brought that child into its physical existence.  She and the child are bonded together for life.  One can clearly understand the unconditional love of mother for child. 
 
But Jesus said “love your enemies”.  That is a much, much more difficult goal for the vast majority of us. How can you love someone who is your enemy, who you perceive as having hurt you in some way or hating you for some reason.  How can this be done?
 
Yet it is possible.  I’m reminded of the murders of Amish children that occurred a few years ago.  A man walked into an Amish school with a gun and slaughtered six young Amish girls for absolutely no reason before killing himself.  Amazingly, the parents of these children forgave this man for killing their children and also helped the family of the gunman.  This is an example of loving your enemy, and of unconditional love.  Could you do the same?  
 
For God, there is no such thing as an enemy.  God has no enemies because all things are creations of the Thoughts of God.  Its creations are all from God and nothing they can do will ever change God’s Unconditional Love for them because they are essentially a part of God in their essence.  In other words, God has Unconditional Love for them because God has Unconditional Love for Itself.

Oneness
 
God is One.  There is nothing else but God and everything that we might perceive as seemingly separate from God, including ourselves, is contained within Its infinite expanse.  This separation is an illusion created by God for the perception of the separated beings.  The spiritual essence of a human being is a “little bit” of the infinite Universal Consciousness. 
 
One analogy here is with a drop of seawater lying on the beach in comparison to the vast ocean.  The drop of seawater seems distinct and separate from the ocean, but in fact it has exactly the same chemical composition as the ocean.  In its essence it is precisely the same.  However, the drop of seawater does not possess the vast expanse and power of the ocean because it is temporarily separated from it.  But when the tide comes in and the drop is returned to the ocean, it now shares again in that expanse and power.
 
Another analogy is the breakup of white light into the different colors of the light spectrum when it is passed through a prism, the experiment done by the great scientist Isaac Newton.  The white light is composed of an infinite number of distinctly different light color frequencies that can be viewed separately by using a prism.  All these different colors are in their essence electromagnetic radiation, just the same essence as white light.
 
Some near-death experiencers report that they see themselves as distinct from God but also as the entirety of God, with both of these occurring simultaneously.  How fantastic is that!  And they say that they possess all the knowledge of both the physical and non-physical while they are in this simultaneous state.   
 
One near-death experiencer said that as she was returning to the physical human state, the total knowledge that she possessed while in the near-death state was being forgotten like the pealing of layers from an onion.  She struggled to retain at least a shred of this knowledge but was only able to retain the following important concept:  Everything is All and Everything is One.
 
What she retained clearly says that All is One.  We are all interconnected.  Everything is part of the Universal Being that we call God.  If human beings could only recognize this interconnectedness with each other and with their surroundings, how much better our world would be.

Home
 
Where is home?  When we are young children, home is where our parents are and the house that we are living in.  But physical homes change with time as the family moves from place-to-place in pursuit of better jobs or greener pastures.
 
Eventually, the child grows up and leaves his or her parents’ home.  Then the young adult has a new home which might be an apartment in a town far away from the parents’ place.  The young adult may have a number of different homes before he or she meets someone and they get married.  Then home becomes the place where the new family resides.
 
I have lived in 11 different homes in my life thus far.  Are any of these what I would consider to be my true “home”, even the ones that I lived in for longer periods of time?  The answer is No.  I have never considered any of these physical places to be my real home.
 
During this lifetime, I have always thought of my home as the place where my loved ones were.  First this was my parents and then it was my own family.
 
But near-death experiencers report that after they have gone into the Light, they feel that they have finally returned to their true “Home”.  They left “Home” to live the physical lifetime that they have just experienced, and now they have returned “Home”.  It is a wonderful feeling for them to return to the place where they truly belong.

 
The Creative Action Of God
 
God, the Universal Consciousness, creates things in both the physical and non-physical realms through Its Thought.  God wills something into existence and it comes to be.  How does this happen?  I think that God uses energy for Its creative purposes.  
 
What is energy?  There are many forms of energy that occur in our three-dimensional world.  There is kinetic energy – the energy of a bullet when it is fired from a gun.  There is potential energy – the energy released when water falls over a cliff.  There is gravitational energy – the energy of attraction between two large bodies of mass.  There is electromagnetic energy – the energy that is propagated by photons, an intimate mix of electric and magnetic fields.  There is electrical energy – the energy produced when electrons flow through a conducting wire.  There is nuclear energy – the energy released for example by an atomic bomb. 
 
These various forms of energy are all characterized by the type of work that they do.  But what IS energy?  If Universal Consciousness is the Fundamental of everything, then perhaps energy is directed consciousness.  Energy is the action of consciousness.  That seems to be a very good definition for the fundamental of energy.
 
What is an energy field?  Let’s consider electromagnetic fields.  Physics says that an array of electrical charges produces an electric field.  So if you have an assembled array of static, individualized electric charges and you then place an electric charge unit into a location within this array, the force on the electric charge will be the sum of the electrical forces produced by the array of point charges.
 
And what is an electric charge?  Basically, electric charge is a fundamental characteristic associated with subatomic particles like the electron and the proton.  An electron is taken to have an electrical charge of -1 and a proton has an electrical charge of +1.  Charges of opposite sign produce an attractive force while charges of the same sign produce a repulsive force.
 
So what then is the electric field?  It is essentially a way to describe the force action-at-a-distance that is observed to occur between electrically charged particles.  Current science attempts to describe the force action that is produced by electric fields, but it fails to describe the intrinsic -  the true - nature of the electric field.
 
Magnetic fields are produced by the motion of electrons.  If you have electrons moving down a wire, then the wire will be surrounded by a magnetic field.  Magnetic fields, like electric fields, are a way to represent force action-at-a-distance.  But, like electric fields, their intrinsic nature is presently unknown by science.  Magnetic fields begin and end at magnetic “poles”, arbitrarily designed as the “north” and “south” poles.  There seems to be no magnetic equivalent of electric charge, referred to as a magnetic monopole.  Science has not yet detected fundamental “north” and “south” magnetic monopoles.
 
And what is electromagnetic radiation?  Electromagnetic radiation is presently thought of as little distinct packets of far-field, coordinated electric and magnetic fields called photons that propagate through space at the speed of light and carry field energy from one place in space to another.  They are called far-field because these force-carrying field packets have become independent of the electrons and electron motion that created them in the first place.  In electromagnetic radiation, the electric and magnetic fields are arranged perpendicular to each other.  These photon field packets do not have any mass or any electric charge associated with them. 
 
Electromagnetic radiation is characterized by wavelength and frequency, the frequency being inversely proportional to the wavelength.  Smaller wavelengths have higher frequencies.  Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, c, which has a value of 299,792,458 meters per second and the velocity of electromagnetic radiation is the product of its wavelength and its frequency.  The shorter the wavelength and the higher the frequency of a photon, the greater its energy will be.  Electromagnetic radiation is associated with an electromagnetic spectrum that encompasses electromagnetic radiation of low-to-high frequency ranges. 
 
The electromagnetic spectrum is open-ended on both the low and the high frequency ends.  At the low end of currently detected waves are the extremely low frequency waves that have frequencies of the order of 3 Hz (1 Hz = 1 cycle per second) and associated wavelength of 100 million meters.  It should be noted that the delta brain waves of human non-rapid-eye-movement deep sleep are about 4 Hz in frequency. 
 
The highest frequency electromagnetic waves observed thus far are gamma rays of cosmic origin.  The frequency of these cosmic gamma rays is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Hz, with wavelengths of 1 picometer (1 picometer = 0.000000000001 meter = 0.000000000039 inch).  By way of a comparison of scale, the diameter of a human hair is approximately 25,000,000 picometers. 
 
The only electromagnetic waves that we can sense directly with our physical senses (our eyes) are the visible light waves, which have frequencies in the range of 430-790 THz and wavelengths in the range of 390-700 nanometers (1 nanometer = 1000 picometers).  The visual color range is red to violet.  We can also indirectly feel near-infrared radiation (300 THz, 1000 nanometers) on our skin by the heat it produces.
 
So the vast majority of electromagnetic waves currently known to exist are essentially invisible to our physical senses.  Our bodies are constantly being permeated by radio waves, microwaves, infrared waves, and ultraviolet waves that we are essentially unaware of consciously.  Our science tells us that they are there but our consciousness cannot perceive them.  They are real but invisible.
 
Since the electromagnetic spectrum is open-ended, there may exist ultrahigh frequency waves that science is not yet able to detect.  The smallest length that our science can presently conceive of is the so-called Planck length.  The Planck length is an exceedingly small length indeed.  A Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meter, which is approximately 0.00000000000000000001 the size of a proton.  To put this into conceptual perspective, if a dot one-tenth of a millimeter in size (which is about the size that the human eye can distinguish) were magnified to the size of the observable universe, then a Planck length would be a dot one-tenth of a millimeter in size!  That’s how small a Planck length is.
 
An electromagnetic wave that would have the Planck length as its wavelength would have a frequency of 1.88 x 1043 Hz.  Such a frequency is 10,000,000,000,000,000 larger than the highest frequency cosmic gamma rays that have been detected by science to date, and the energy of these Planck length waves would also be 10,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than the highest frequency cosmic gamma rays.
 
So the universe contains what is from our perspective an infinite amount of energy.  How does God use this energy to create with Its Thoughts?  One way to conceive of this is the following.  
 
Einstein showed the equivalence of energy and matter in the famous equation E = mc2.  Basically, matter is nothing more than a condensed form of energy.  
 
Now, humans have discovered how to use this equation to transform a small amount of matter into a very large amount of energy via the thermonuclear reactions that occur in atomic bombs.  Unfortunately for mankind, human technology has made this relatively easy to do.
 
However, the reverse reaction, the conversion of energy into matter, has been much more difficult for our present science to achieve, but it has been possible to demonstrate this on an extremely small scale in high energy particle accelerators. 
 
For example, it has been shown that high energy gamma ray photons can be transformed into electron-positron pairs of matter under highly constrained conditions.  The basic problem that humans have with the production of matter from energy is the fact that it takes an extremely large amount of energy to produce only a tiny amount of physical matter.
 
But since God has an infinite amount of energy to create physical matter using Its Thoughts, the creation of our physical universe from non-physical energy is not inconceivable to the human mind.   
 
 
God’s Physical Creations
 
Where is God?  My answer is that God is Everywhere.  Everything exists within God and God is in everything because everything is a creative manifestation of the Thoughts of God.  There is nothing that is outside of God. 
In Saying 77 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:  “I am the Light that is over all.  I am the All.  The All came forth out of me.  And to me the All has come.  Split a piece of wood – I am there.  Lift the stone, and you will find me there.”
Why did God create our physical universe?  We humans cannot know for sure while existing in this physical, three-dimensional state.  Some people say that God created these things in order for It to experience Its grandeur.  That seems as good an explanation as any.
 
God is Universal Consciousness and creates through Its Intention and Thought.  God thinks all things into existence.  One might say that everything that exists is a virtual creation of the Mind of God.  God’s creation is the ultimate “Matrix”.  Everything is a Thought, a manifestation, of the Mind of God.
 
Let us pursue the “Matrix” analogy a bit further.  What if our physical reality is really just a cosmic computer virtual reality designed, built, and operated by a Being we call God.  In other words, we might really only be computer characters in a vast cosmic “Sims” program.  It’s interesting that such an idea can actually account for a number of the current difficulties with explaining the fundamentals of the physics in our physical world.  Here are some examples.
 
Our physical world is thought to have been created in a “Big Bang” 13.7 billion years ago when everything (time, space, energy, matter) appeared from nowhere.  But one could argue that a cosmic virtual reality could also come into existence from nothing when the virtual reality was booted up on the cosmic higher dimensional computer.
 
Then there is the physical observation that energy comes in the form of little packets, or quanta, as originally observed by Max Planck.  In the virtual reality, energy equates to information.  Virtual matter is simply condensed information.  And in the virtual world, information is in a digital form in our computers.  The “quantum” of digital information is a “1” or a “0”.  So the virtual approach has no difficulty explaining the existence of quanta.
 
Next consider the speed of light.  The speed of light is the maximum speed that anything can travel in our physical world.  Why do we have such a speed limit and what determines the speed?  The virtual explanation is that rates in the virtual world must necessarily have an absolute maximum, this maximum being the processing speed of the cosmic computer.
 
We have shown that the phenomenon of nonlocality is a mystery of quantum mechanics, the spooky action at a distance.  How is nonlocality possible in our physical world?  After all, nonlocality is a connectivity that occurs instantaneously regardless of the distance between the interconnected species.  The virtual reason is that a computer processor is equidistant from the computer screen pixels, so that its effects are essentially nonlocal to the screen effects.
 
In our physical reality, energy is always conserved.  In the virtual reality, information, which is the virtual equivalent of energy, is always conserved.  If this were not the case in a virtual reality then that reality would become unstable.
 
Finally, consider that all quantum mechanical objects in our physical reality are absolutely identical to each other.   All electrons are identical to one another, all protons are identical, and all photons of the same frequency are identical.  In the virtual reality, every digital object that is created by the cosmic computer software is identical to every other similar digital object. 
 
The above illustrates it is conceivable that we could be virtual characters in a vast computer-like matrix of God’s design, God’s conscious digital creations if you like.  It’s certainly an interesting computer-analogic concept.
 
Everything created is a part of God and because God is Universal Consciousness, every creation from the largest to the smallest has some level of consciousness.  There is a philosophical term for this.  It is called panpsychism.
 
Panpsychism argues that everything that exists in our physical universe possesses some degree of consciousness.  This includes both living as well as non-living (inert) things.  The concept of panpsychism was put forward by the Greek philosophers Thales and Plato, and more recently by the modern philosopher William James.
 
What then is consciousness?  Philosophers have been asking this question for a very long time.  Basically, for human beings consciousness is self-awareness of existence.  A human being knows that he or she exists.  Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”.  I personally prefer the following version:  “I am, therefore I think”.
 
Consciousness can be considered to be composed of two aspects:  form and content.  In the final stage of his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha found that at the root of all things was consciousness and that form was a necessary part of consciousness.
 
Form may be thought of as the complexity of an existing thing.  There are a vast number of forms in the material universe that we currently know, ranging from subatomic particles, photons, atoms, molecules, gases, liquids, solids, viruses, bacteria, single-celled organisms, multiple-celled organisms, plants, insects, animals, and human beings.   
 
The most rudimentary content of consciousness is the ability of a form to sense and interact with its immediate environment.  The highest form of consciousness that we currently know in our physical world is the self-awareness and abstract thinking ability of the human being.
 
When God creates something, Its thoughts give that creation both a consciousness form and a consciousness content.  An electron is created as a unit with mass and charge.  A photon is created as a unit with no mass and no charge.  These things are aspects of the form of these creations.  The consciousness content of the creation gives it a range of interactive ability.  Conscious content can vary over extremely vast limits.  For sub-atomic particles, their consciousness content permits them only to sense and interact with their very local environment.
At the other end of the spectrum, the consciousness content of human beings allows humans to be able to think abstract thoughts such as why they exist, the nature of reality, and the contemplation of Universal Consciousness. 
 
Starting with the smallest things that science currently knows, this argues that protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons all possess a fundamental consciousness, however vanishingly small.  An electron has a fundamentally simple form in the spectrum of our physics.  The consciousness content of an electron knows when it encounters another electron since their negative charges repel one another.  Similarly when the electron encounters a positive proton, it is attracted to it.  A photon also has a fundamentally simple form and a fundamental content of consciousness in that it can interact with other photons and also with electrons and atoms.
 
An atom has a consciousness form that is more complex than a sub-atomic particle since it is composed of more than one sub-atomic particle.  A hydrogen atom is the combination of a proton and an electron.  The consciousness content of an atom is also more complex than that of a sub-atomic particle because an atom can interact with other atoms as well as protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons.  Thus, an atom has a higher consciousness level than that of a sub-atomic particle. 
 
One might ask the question:  Is the consciousness level of a large atom like uranium greater than that of a small atom such as hydrogen?  I expect not. The form of the uranium and hydrogen atoms are the same since they are both combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons.  And the consciousness content of the two types of atoms are the same; they can sense and interact with protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and other atoms in their immediate vicinity.
 
Let’s now consider molecules.  Molecules are made up of atoms, so their consciousness form is greater than that of individual atoms.  The water molecule H2O contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  Is the consciousness content of a molecule larger than that of an atom?  It would seem so.  Molecules can interact with other molecules in addition to atoms and sub-atomic particles.  As with atoms, the consciousness level of molecules does not increase with their size.
 
The perception of non-living things such as fundamental particles, atoms, and molecules as being totally inert things without consciousness is incorrect according to panpsychism.  Anything composed of matter has some level of consciousness, however rudimentary.  In nature, rocks have consciousness, air has consciousness, water has consciousness. 
 
Do the things that humans manufacture from matter also have consciousness?  My computer certainly has a form, but it is not a form that occurs naturally in nature.  It is a form that is a construction, a creation if you will, of human beings.  My computer was created by humans.  But the various elements of my computer are all composed of atoms and molecules.  The brain of my computer, the microprocessor, controls a vast and elaborate flow of electrons from one place to another.
 
Because the constituents of my computer all possess consciousness, this would logically argue that my computer also has consciousness, at a form and content at least as high as that of its highest consciousness constituent which in the case of the computer would be a molecular consciousness.  But one might argue that the computer’s consciousness level should be higher than this because its consciousness content is higher.  The computer takes input information, coordinates the vast movements of electrons to process this information, and then provides output information.
 
This poses the issue about the possibility of self-aware artificial intelligence.  Clearly, present day computers can perform some selected tasks much more rapidly and extensively than the human brain.  And with time, computers will undoubtedly excel humans in a great many other brain-related tasks. 
 
Is there the possibility that at some point a seemingly inert computer system could someday achieve self-aware consciousness?  It is a very intriguing question.  Yet, if everything that exists is within God and God is Universal Consciousness, then logic must dictate that such a thing could happen. 
 
Let us now proceed into the realm of so-called living things and begin with the DNA molecule.     
 
The DNA molecule contains the molecular codes for the formation of all living things.  Human DNA is composed of 3 billion molecular base pairs configured in the double helix structure.  Rather interestingly, the human DNA molecule is not the largest found in nature.  The largest known DNA molecule is associated with a flower called paris japonica which has 152 billion base pairs.  However, the consciousness levels of all DNA molecules are the same, regardless of their size.
 
But the DNA molecule has something that other molecules do not possess, the ability to code and transmit information to other molecules.  One might argue that this higher content level of DNA gives it a consciousness level that is higher than all other molecular species.
 
We next consider viruses, the boundary between non-living and living things.  Viruses are essentially a DNA (or RNA) molecular core encapsulated by a protein molecular shell.  A virus is an integrated assembly of molecules.  Yet a virus particle can be born (i.e. chemically formulated), reproduce itself (it needs to do this by invading a bacterium or cell), and die (i.e. be disrupted in chemical configuration).  The consciousness level of a virus is greater than that of an individual molecule because the consciousness form of a virus is made up of more than just one type of molecule.  In addition, the consciousness content of a virus is greater than that of a molecule because the virus can reproduce itself within bacteria and living cells.
 
What about bacteria and individual living cells?  Bacteria and individual living cells are similar in consciousness form.  They are composed of a nucleus of DNA, surrounded by other molecular structures of various specialized functions, with everything contained inside a cell wall.  The consciousness level of bacteria and individual living cells is greater than that of a virus because the consciousness form and content are greater.        
 
There is a gradient of consciousness levels for living things just as there is a gradient of consciousness levels for non-living things.  The consciousness of a virus might be said to be the bottom level of living things.  The consciousness of a bacterium is larger than that of a virus and the consciousness of a single-celled amoeba is greater than that of a bacterium.  The consciousness of a multi-celled plant is higher than that of an amoeba, the consciousness of an insect is larger than that of a plant, and the consciousness of an animal is more extensive than that of an insect. 
 
There are certain animals that appear to possess a self-aware consciousness.  Animals such as orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, elephants, orcas, monkeys, and magpies have all been observed to pass the mirror test.  In the mirror test, a mark is placed on the face of these animals and then they are allowed to view themselves in a mirror.  Self-aware animals are seen to recognize in the mirror that there is a mark on their faces, so they know that they are seeing their own face in the mirror.  It’s interesting that domestic animals such as dogs and cats do not pass the mirror self-awareness test.  This is rather surprising given that these domestic animals interact so extensively with their human owners.
 
My own personal feeling is that all animals have a self-awareness nature of consciousness, even if they do not respond to the mirror test.  Is my pet dog self-aware?  Yes, I’m certain that he possesses that level of consciousness.  He knows he exists, he expresses his needs, he seems to dream during sleep, he feels pain.  I think this is the case for all animals, even the lowly rat.
 
Now what about the human animal?
 
The human body is composed of approximately 40,000,000,000,000 (40 trillion) human cells.  Each of these cells has a life cycle, interacts with its environment, and undergoes reproduction.  Each individual cell has an extremely small level of consciousness as compared to the consciousness of the overall human.
 
One might be tempted to ask the question:  Is the human body consciousness equivalent to simply the sum of the individual consciousnesses of the 40 trillion human cells in the human body?  Definitely not.  If this were true, it would imply that smaller humans have a lower consciousness level than larger humans just because of the differences in the absolute number of cells in their respective bodies.  This is patently absurd.   
 
The human body form is indeed composed of the vast array of cells that constitute it, but the human body consciousness content is vastly greater than that of individual cellular consciousness because the extent of sensing and evaluating interactions with the environment via the human brain is so much greater for the human body as compared to an individual cell.    
 
Humans certainly possess the consciousness level of self-awareness, but much more than this they are able to think in the abstract, to think about advanced concepts and to construct things in their imagination.  Human beings can think about why they exist.  They can think about the existence of God.  I do not believe that the lower self-aware animals have this consciousness capacity.
 
But let’s put this into perspective. God has probably created physical forms that have higher consciousness levels than humans.  In the physical universe it is highly likely there are physical beings that possess consciousness greater than that of humans.  For example, there may be self-aware beings on other planets who have a greater number of senses than just the human five and also have larger and/or more sophisticated brain structures with which to process the increased amounts of information provided by these additional senses, as well as perform more extensive abstract thinking.
 
Astronomical observations have shown that there are probably as many planets in the universe as there are stars.  And there are approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the visible universe that we can currently observe with our telescopes.  So it is inconceivable that intelligent life does not exist somewhere else in the universe and it probably occurs a great many places.
 
God has created many intelligent physical beings and many of these have consciousness levels higher and probably much higher than those of humans.  Perhaps they were created this way or they may have evolved to higher levels of consciousness in the longer span of time they may have existed in comparison to human beings.
 
One final supposition on the consciousness of God’s physical creations.
 
Perhaps consciousness can best be thought of as related to a vibrational consciousness frequency.  The lowest consciousness levels are those with the lowest consciousness frequency and this frequency increases as one proceeds up the form level from sub-atomic particles, to atoms, to molecules, to viruses, to bacteria and cells, to plants, to insects, to animals, to human beings, to non-human physical beings.
 
Are these consciousness frequencies associated in some way with ultra-ultra-high-frequency electromagnetic waves that are past the detection limits of our present scientific equipment?  Recall that the highest possible waves conceivable with our current science, waves with a Planck length wavelength, have a frequency that is 10,000,000,000,000,000 higher than the highest frequency cosmic gamma rays that can presently be detected by scientific measurement.  So there would appear to be plenty of room in the spectrum for consciousness waves.  But of course this is just a bit of speculation on my part.
 
 
God’s Non-Physical Creations
 
I believe that God has created myriad non-physical “little bits” of Itself, and I will refer to these “little bits” as Entities.  Perhaps God decided that in order to actually experience Its physical universe rather than just having the creative knowledge of it, it was necessary to create Entities that possessed the illusion that they were separated from God.  Because of this illusionary separation, they would then be able to experience God’s creations from the illusionary perspective of “not-God”.
 
Here is an example that may perhaps allow you a level of appreciation of what I am saying.  Since I enjoy the mountains, let me use a mountainous allusion.  You can read a book about the Rocky Mountains in Colorado which will inform you in great detail about the Rockies.  You will read about their mountainous structures, their elevations, their rivers, streams, and glaciers, their trees, and the animals that roam them.  The book will give you all the information and knowledge that you might want to know about the Rocky Mountains. 
 
However, reading a book about the Rockies is clearly not the same as being there in person.  In person, you can take in all their grandeur at one time with your multiple senses.  You see a three-dimensional perspective view of their vast expanse.  You feel the cool mountain wind, experience the diminished level of oxygen at the higher elevations, see the mountain trees and how they sway with the wind, smell the vegetation odors, hear the sounds of a flowing mountain stream, taste the pure mountain water, touch the mountain earth.  You experience the mid-day sunshine in the thin air, the suddenness and ferocity of mountain thunderstorms, and the vastness of space in the clear mountain air at night.  Yes, the personal experience of the Rocky Mountains is so much more than just the knowledge of them.
 
God has given each of Its created non-physical Entities the following key attributes to allow these Entities to fulfill their experiential purpose. 
 
The first is a self-awareness of separateness from the entirety of God.  Each Entity is aware that it is somehow distinct from the full majesty of God, yet at the same time is a part of the Oneness of God.  The Entity has the illusionary perspective that it is a distinctly defined being with its own separate consciousness.  The Entity knows that it is a separated drop in the ocean of God, of the same essence but not possessing the full power and majesty.
 
A chemical analogy may useful here.  An emulsion is a dispersion of fine droplets of a liquid that is immiscible with the liquid it is dispersed into.  An emulsion of oil droplets in water is an example of this.  But now consider the possibility that the droplets could be of the same liquid as the dispersing liquid, but are immiscible because they have an immiscible coating on them.  In such a case, one might conceive of an emulsion of coated water droplets in water.  These water droplets are of the same essence as the dispersing water, but each droplet possesses only a “little bit” of the overall qualities of the liquid water in which they are dispersed, such as the mass and volume of the water that surrounds them and in which they are contained.
 
Entities might also be conceptualized as individualized cells in the body of God.  Your human body contains 40 trillion individual cells and these cells make up the physical structure of your body.  They are part of the essence of the physical body, and each of the individual cells perform a function that is necessary for the optimum functioning of the body.  Blood cells, skin cells, muscle cells, intestinal cells, and brain cells (to name only a few of the specialized cells in your body) all have their roles to play.  But the consciousness of an individual cell can never comprehend the consciousness that is you, the human being.  Your human consciousness is vastly greater than that of an individual cell, so it is impossible for an individual cell in your body to understand the life that you are living as a human being.  An individual cell in your body can never surf the internet or drive a car or watch a movie or think a thought.  It is not able to experience any of the aspects of your life or participate in any way in the decisions that you make each and every day. 
 
So it is with Entities and God.  Entities are of the same essence as God, but they can never experience the full power, majesty, and completeness of God while they remain as individualized units of consciousness.  The consciousness of an Entity, while vastly greater than that of a human being, is at the cellular level of God’s Universal Consciousness.                
 
The second attribute God has given the Entity is the freedom of choosing what experiences it will have.  Why did God give the Entities the attribute of freedom of choice?  Perhaps God has allowed this in order to help the Entity maintain the illusion that it is “not-God”.  Or it might be because God wishes to experience the myriad possibilities that result from the Entity decision process.  No one can know for sure.  But the Entities are free to choose what they wish to experience.
 
There are so many questions one can ask about the nature of Entities.  Let me entertain some of these questions and speculate a bit about the answers. 
 
When did God create the Entities?  One can conjecture (but this is only pure conjecture) that when God created the physical universe, It also created untold numbers of non-physical Entities.  One might conceive of the creation of such Entities as innumerable sparks given off by the flame of God, each spark a “little bit” of the essence of God.  How many non-physical Entities are there?  Probably countless numbers in order to experience an entire universe.
 
If the Entities did have a beginning at the creation of the physical universe, what was their consciousness level at that beginning?  As has been discussed before, consciousness level depends on both form and content.  The Entities have a non-physical form so this non-physical nature dictates that their baseline consciousness level must be much, much higher than any physical entities and thus very much greater than that of human beings.  The consciousness level of a human being is minuscule in comparison to that of an Entity.
 
Now it is also possible that the content of an Entity’s consciousness increases with the extent of its experiences.  As the Entity accumulates more and more experiences, then its consciousness content increases and its consciousness vibrational level increases.  Is there a hierarchy of Entities in the non-physical realm?  Do Entities who have attained greater levels of experiential wisdom serve as counselors to lower conscious level Entities?  The above would seem to be within the realm of possibility.
 
Are physical reality experiences the only types of experiences Entities can have?  After having acquired enough experiences in the physical realm, does for example an Entity then move up to higher consciousness level experiences in the non-physical realm?
 
And are there Entities that have never had any physical realm experiences, but only non-physical ones?  Are such completely non-physical Entities similar to or different from Entities whose experiences have been shaped to some degree by the physical dimension?
 
And what about an end?  Does an Entity have an end to its illusionary existence as a seemingly separate being from God?  Does an end come when the Entity has accumulated enough experiences during its extremely long existential journey?  At such an end, perhaps the Entity is absorbed back into the entirety of God from whence it came and ceases to exist as an illusionary separated consciousness.  And finally, if Entities are eventually absorbed back into God, does God then continue creating new Entities to replace the old ones?
 
There are so many questions that may be asked about the nature of Entities.  I wish I had the answers, but I can only ponder.
 

You Are An Entity
 
Close your eyes and try to experience what you are on your most fundamental level.  What you will find is that you can identify your “I”, your ego, because it is the sum of your interactions and experiences in this physical life.  Your “I” is always associated with these things.  All of your thoughts revolve around the activities and experiences of your ego “I”.  You cannot separate your thoughts from your ego no matter how hard you might try.
 
But when you close your eyes and are able to drift into a state of no-thought (as one does in meditation), then you will experience your Entity, which is the awareness that you exist, your Being.  This awareness is independent of any physical aspects.  It exists outside the physical and simply Is.  It is the real you and it is much, much more than the physical body and conscious ego of your Earthly existence.  Your Entity is your Being, your awareness, the consciousness that exists in the space between your thoughts.  The Entity never changes with time in the physical dimension.  My Entity as a five-year-old child is the same Entity as a seventy-year-old man.  The Entity does not change because it is outside of time and non-physical.
 
Now you may be thinking to yourself that this writer is making a real stretch here in surmising that there is an Entity that is much greater than the ego “I” which you possess as a human being.  This may seem foreign to your experience, even inconceivable to you.
Yet, there is evidence for this concept contained in the ancient literature of Christianity, the Nag Hammadi documents that were discovered in Egypt in 1945.  With Nag Hammadi, we have a collection of early Christian religious writings that can be firmly dated to the year 325 CE.  These documents are to Christianity what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to Judaism. 
The premier document of the Nag Hammadi collection is by far the Gospel of Thomas.  Prior to Nag Hammadi, only fragments of the Gospel of Thomas had been discovered by Christian historians.  But here we had a complete copy.  It was in the form of a codex, a primitive book made of papyrus pages tied together. 
 
Unlike the synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the Gospel of Thomas does not describe the life of Jesus.  It is merely a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus.  Here is how it begins:  “These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.”  Who was Didymos Judas Thomas?  This person is taken to be the Apostle Thomas, the so-called Doubting Thomas.    
 
Saying 3 in the Gospel of Thomas had a very powerful effect on me when I first read it.  Here  Jesus says:  “If those who lead you say to you:  ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you.  If they say to you:  ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you.  Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you.  When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.  But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are poverty.”
 
The Gospel of Thomas is saying that the kingdom of God is within you and you must look within to find it.  At some point in time, your physical body will die.  When this happens, you will realize for certain that the true you is actually the Entity, your awareness, your consciousness.  And you will also come to know (to remember really) that the Entity is a “little bit” of Universal Consciousness, a “little bit” of God if you will.
 
Realization of this while you are still living this lifetime might be called Enlightenment.  It changes everything. 

 
Your Entity
 
A human being is the intimate combination of a human body and mind with a small portion of a non-physical Entity.  This small portion of the Entity is often called the soul.
 
The consciousness associated with the Entity is at a very high frequency in the consciousness frequency spectrum of Universal Consciousness.  Because the consciousness level of the Entity is so much higher than anything existing in the physical, in order to participate in physical world experiences it is necessary for the Entity to lower its consciousness frequency quite substantially, to a level that is compatible with that of a physical human.  
 
The Entity is the consciousness that is really you.  At death, the physical body ceases to function but you, the non-physical Entity, continue to exist and exit the body and the physical dimension to return to your true non-physical home.
 
Essentially the Entity is a Thought that has emanated directly from God’s Consciousness.  Let this sink in.  The Entity that is truly you is a “little bit” of God.  What a wonder of wonders!  You are intimately connected to God. 
 
I am a “little bit” of God.  How can one believe something as grand as this?  In actual fact, there are over a billion people on Earth who believe this and even more. 
 
The root of Hinduism is the following statement:  Atman is Brahman and Brahman is All.  Atman is the spiritual essence of you, essentially the Entity.  Brahman is the Godhead, the Universal Consciousness.  Brahman is All, everything is created by the Thoughts of Brahman and everything is contained within Brahman.  And Brahman is One and cannot be divided.  Thus Hinduism believes that the Entity is the entirety of God.
 
So which is it, a “little bit” of God or the entirety of God?  I have had a near-death experiencer tell me that what he perceived in the near-death state was being an individualized distinct “little bit” if God as well as the entirety of God, both simultaneously!  If this is true, how can one attempt to rationalize such a difficult paradox?
 
Actually, there are some phenomena in our physical three-dimensional experience that can perhaps provide some insight.  These are the things called fractals, holograms, and ferrofluids.
 
What is a fractal?  A fractal is a geometrical form that exhibits the property of self-similarity.  This means that it looks the same in form no matter at what length scale you observe it, from the coarsest scale to the finest scale.  At whatever level of scale you examine a fractal, it looks exactly the same.  One example of a fractal is the so-called Koch curve. 
 
A Koch curve is constructed as follows. It begins with a line. In the first step the middle third of the line is replaced by an equilateral triangle and the baseline portion is removed. This procedure is applied repeatedly to all the remaining lines. In the limit, one has constructed a strictly self-similar structure. Each fourth of this structure is a rescaled copy of the entire structure.  This can be done ad infinitum and the structure will always be the same at both the smallest and the largest scales. 
 
Another example of a self-similar fractal structure is the geometrical pattern constructed using a simple complex number equation called the Mandelbrot Set.  If you look at the Mandelbrot Set structure at a specific point, it will be self-similar at all observational scales, from the extremely tiny to the extremely large.  So the self-similarity characteristics that occur in fractal structures provide a way to conceive of something being a “little bit” and the entirety of something in a simultaneous fashion.
 
What is a hologram?  A hologram is a three-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object that is recorded as an optical interference pattern on a two-dimensional plate.  Holograms are produced as follows. 
 
The three-dimensional object to be imaged is irradiated by a monochromatic laser beam.  The beam is split into two parts using a beam splitter.  The first half of the beam strikes the object and the scattered light from the object then proceeds to a flat two-dimensional plate.  At the same time, the second half of the beam bypasses the object and proceeds directly to the flat two-dimensional plate.  When these two beams arrive at the plate, they interfere with each other, producing a two-dimensional diffraction pattern on the plate.  This diffraction pattern looks somewhat like TV screen “snow” when there is no channel being received. 
 
Now for the magic.  If you take the same type of laser beam used to create the two-dimensional diffraction pattern and shine this laser beam through the diffraction pattern on the plate, like magic a three-dimensional image of the original object will appear floating in space on the other side of the plate. 
 
And now for more magic.  If you cut the two-dimensional diffraction pattern plate in half and then shine the laser beam through the one-half plate, you will still reconstruct the entire three-dimensional image, not just one-half of it.  In fact, if you cut the plate into many small pieces and shine the laser beam through just one of these small pieces, you will still get the entire three-dimensional image, but with a somewhat lower resolution of features.
 
What is a ferrofluid?  A ferrofluid is a liquid that becomes magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field.  A ferrofluid is essentially a stable colloidal suspension of nanosized particles that contain iron, such as magnetite or hematite, in a fluid which can be water or some other non-aqueous liquid.  Because the magnetic particles are so small and usually stabilized with surfactants, they do not settle out from the liquid, but remain suspended in the liquid in a stable way.  Ferrofluids typically appear as black, oily-looking liquids.
 
If you pour a ferrofluid into a large flat tray, after a short time it will settle down into a flat  liquid surface, such as one might see the surface of a lake appearing on a calm summer day.  But if you now suspend a strong magnet above the flat surface of the ferrofluid, something remarkable happens.  A spike of fluid nucleates from the calm, flat liquid surface and rises from the fluid surface in an attempt to attach itself to the magnet, because the magnetic field of the magnet has magnetized the iron-containing particles in the fluid.  This happens because the ferrofluid can lower its energy by a portion of it being in closer physical proximity to the magnet. 
 
So the presence of the magnet causes a distinct, individualized spike to appear, yet this spike continues to be joined at the base to the overall ferrofluid liquid bath.  Essentially, an individualized feature has been created from the ferrofluid by the presence of the magnetic field of the magnet above it.  If the magnet is taken away, then the individualized spike collapses and returns to the body of the ferrofluid liquid.  And the ferrofluid does not retain any residual magnetization when the external magnet is removed.
 
With ferrofluids and more complex external magnetic fields above them, it is possible to create very beautiful, multiple-faceted structures arising out of the flat liquid that can change, move, and seemingly interact with themselves as the external magnetic fields are varied.  Yet these complex three-dimensional structures that are created from the two-dimensional flat ferrofluid surface are still part and parcel of the bulk ferrofluid liquid.
 
Fractals, holograms, and ferrofluids illustrate three types of phenomena in our physical three-dimensional reality where something can seem to be both a “little bit” and the entirety of a whole in a simultaneous way.  If such things can occur in our physical reality, is this perhaps a reflection, albeit imperfect, of what might exist in the higher true reality?
 
My own intuition completely accepts the “little bit” of God concept for the Entity, but struggles with the concept that the Entity is also simultaneously the entirety of God.  It is very difficult for me to conceive that the full power and majesty of God resides within each individualized Entity.  In the fractal analogy that was presented, the mathematical basis of the fractal geometric self-similarity is not contained within the geometrical pattern itself.  Similarly, for the holographic analogy the laser beam that constructs the three-dimensional image is not contained within the two-dimensional diffraction pattern.  The creation of individualized structures from a ferrofluid requires the presence of an external magnetic field.  And in the emulsion analogy for the relationship of the Entity to God that was previously put forward, it is clear that the properties of the individual droplets are significantly less than those of the liquid that contains them.  I wish my intuition would give me a definitive insight into this question while I am still in the physical world, but perhaps this will have to wait until the day of my death.  Then I will surely know, and I look forward to the answer.  
 
Your Entity resides in a non-physical plane or dimension.  The Entity does not reside in the physical three-dimensional plane.  What can one say about this non-physical plane?  Not a great deal from a three-dimensional perspective.  It would seem to be a “place” that is governed essentially by consciousness and thought.  Consciousness and thought create the reality there.  In that plane, your thoughts can create any kind of reality that you like.
 
An analogy for the conceptualization of other dimensions might be the windows that you can project simultaneously on your computer screen.  Each window takes you to a different place in the software of your computer.  One window may take you to the internet, another to a word-processing program, and yet another to the control panel of your computer.  What actions can be performed in these different windows depend on the rules that govern their functionality, and the rules are different in each different window.
 
Let me try to give you a further appreciation of non-physical dimensionality from both scientific and non-scientific perspectives.
 
What does our current science say that our physical three-dimensional universe made of?  The present cosmological Standard Theory says that only 4% of the universe is composed of the matter and energy that we can presently detect!  26% of the universe is “Dark Matter” and the remaining 70% is “Dark Energy”.  An analogy for this is what a person sees when he or she looks at a sparsely populated mountainous region at night.  You can see the pinpoints of light from the residences of the people who live there, but you cannot see the mountains. 
 
Dark Matter, what is that?  No one knows at present, but scientists say that we are all swimming in it.  Dark Matter passes through your body all the time, but does not interact at all with the normal matter (i.e. matter composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons) that make up the atoms of your body.  Science says that Dark Matter exists because of the gravitational effects that it has on ordinary matter.  Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is encased in a sphere of Dark Matter.  And so are all the other galaxies in the universe. 
 
Even less is known about Dark Energy.  Cosmologists describe the effects of Dark Energy as follows.  If you have two volumes of space that are completely empty of matter, then these two volumes of empty space will repel each other, for reasons that are totally inexplicable at the present time.  Essentially, these two volumes of space will exert a negative gravitational effect on each other.  Science says that Dark Energy exists because there is no other way to explain the observational fact that the universe is continuing to accelerate in its expansion.
 
So at the present moment in time, scientists do not understand what makes up 96% of the physical universe that they can observe!  Based on this, one might say that there appears to be a great deal in our reality that seems to be non-physical in nature, as least in terms of our current scientific understanding.       
 
The Entity exists in a higher dimensional non-physical environment that cannot be fully, or perhaps even partially, envisioned by the three-dimensional conception.  One can gain some appreciation for the chasm that exists between the realm of the Entity and our three-dimensional physical world by considering the world of Flatland.
 
Flatland was a two-dimensional world created by the mind of an English schoolteacher in the 19th century.  In this world, the different types of men were characterized by geometrical shapes.  Isosceles triangles were soldiers, equilateral triangles were merchants, squares were nobility, and circles were priests.  Women in this world were depicted as lines because the author of Flatland considered them “pointed on both ends”.  In Flatland, a line was an obstacle to the motion of Flatlanders.  If they encountered a line segment, they could not cross over it but would rather have to go around it in order to move along in a given direction. 
 
At one point, a Flatlander is extracted from Flatland into three-dimensional Spaceland and floats above Flatland so that he can observe it from above.  After overcoming his initial disorientation, he can see the nature of Flatland from the third dimensional “above”.  He can see the actual two-dimensional shapes of the Flatlander beings and he can see inside their two-dimensional “bodies”.  He can see the insides of their homes.  He is not obstructed in any way by the two-dimensional line obstacles that block the paths and the vision of the Flatlanders.
 
But it is totally impossible for the extracted Flatlander to describe the nature of his new three-dimensional existence to the two-dimensional Flatlanders.  They have absolutely no comprehension of what the third physical dimension is.  It is not a part of their reality.
 
So it is with trying to describe a non-physical higher dimensional reality to three-dimensional beings.  The concepts simply are not there. 
 
The people who have been there all say that they have no ability to completely describe the reality of the Entity.  There are no physical three-dimensional terms with which to do so.  They approximate by saying that in that plane there is no time, no space, and no matter.  They say that it is a place made up of consciousness and thought.  Everything that happens in that place is the result of the thoughts of the consciousness of the Entity.  The Entity can create any form of illusional reality simply by thinking it into existence.
 
Time as we know it does not exist in the dimension of the Entity.  The serial flow of past, present, and future is not present there.  In that reality there is only the Now.  And the Now contains what we perceive as the past, present, and future, but all of these co-exist simultaneously with each other.   
 
Your Entity is so much greater than your present physical three-dimensional ego self.  There are many, many parts to your Entity.  The majority of your Entity always resides in the non-physical plane.  What your human soul represents is a “little bit” of the Entity that is temporarily experiencing a physical life on planet Earth. 
 
Other parts of the Entity may be experiencing lifetimes simultaneously both here on Earth as well as in other locations throughout the universe.  There may even be more than just one “little bit” of your Entity living on Earth during your lifetime.  If you should ever meet such a person, you would immediately feel an overwhelming sense of togetherness.  Such a person would truly be a soulmate, regardless of their physical gender. 
 
In a similar vein, there may be “little bits” of your Entity who are presently experiencing lives on other planets or other physical locations throughout the universe.  These soulmates of yours would probably not have a human physical form and would appear considerably different.  But they would still be part of your Entity.
 
Does the Entity experience lifetimes as lower lifeforms than human beings, such as animals, insects, plants, or even as low as an individual bacterium?  Hindus and Buddhists indeed believe this to be true.  The concept here is that the form and content of the “little bit” of the Entity linked to these lower lifeforms conforms to the consciousness level that is associated with that particular lifeform.
                                                                                                                         
What about non-living things?  Is there a “little bit” of an Entity present in a virus particle, a molecule, an atom, or even a sub-atomic particle?  The existence of rudimentary consciousness in these inert entities has been previously discussed.  Can the Entity spend a lifetime as a proton for example?  I wish I knew.
 
Hopefully, this gives you an appreciation for the expansiveness of your Entity in comparison to your current physical, three-dimensional, human self.  Your Entity is much, much more than the human being of your present experience. 
 
Your Entity is the essence of your consciousness.  Consciousness does not reside in the brain.  Rather, your brain is a filter that filters down the little portion of the greater Entity consciousness that can exist in your physical, three-dimensional human reality here on Earth. 
 
One can think of the relationship between the brain and consciousness using the analogy of a television set.  A TV set displays a coherent flow of images and sounds.  However, the source of the images and sounds does not come from the inner workings of the TV set.  One can probe the details of the guts of the TV set ad infinitum and one will never find the source there, because the source is not inside the TV set but rather at the locations that transmit the TV signals. 
 
It is just so with the brain and consciousness.  The source of your consciousness is the non-physical Entity.  Your brain filters your Entity consciousness, which is vast, down to a level that is compatible with the physical three-dimensional location where you, the “little bit” of the Entity, are presently living an experiential lifetime.
 
A portion of the consciousness of your Entity is also the vast subconscious mind that underlies your conscious mind.  One can view the relationship between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind by analogy with an ocean liner vessel. 
 
The conscious mind is that part of the ocean liner that lies below the water, while the subconscious mind is the much larger part of the ocean liner that is above the water.  The part of the ocean liner below water has a very limited and murky viewpoint from that perspective.  On the other hand, the portion of the ocean liner above water can see the vast expanse of sea and sky.  Furthermore, unlike the below-water part, the above-water part can see where the ocean liner is going.
 
Aspects of the subconscious mind can be tapped by the conscious mind under a number of circumstances.  During meditation, I think that intuitional knowledge from the subconscious mind can filter through to the conscious mind.  The source of your original thoughts and ideas is the subconscious mind.
 
Those people who have near-death or out-of-body experiences provide evidence that consciousness does not reside in the brain.  There are a number of very compelling near-death experiences that provide veridical evidence of consciousness outside of the body.  People report seeing and hearing things happening around them that cannot possibly have originated from brain function. 
 
Then there is the phenomenon of savants.  These are people who can do remarkable things with their mind that seem impossible to the rest of us.  Things like remembering all the names and their associated numbers in the phone book, or being able to recite the value of the mathematical number pi to thousands of places past the decimal point.  How do they do this?  I think that they are able to contact their subconscious mind in these specialized situations.
 
We also have the geniuses who appear in the human race from time to time.  One is reminded of the Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was able to write a vast array of important and original mathematical equations, but when asked how he was able to do this, his answer was that they came to him in dreams.  They simply entered into his conscious mind from his subconscious mind.
 
Your subconscious mind is your link to the Entity.  My personal feeling is that you tap into your Entity each night during non-REM sleep.  It is even possible that the “little bit” of Entity that is your soul separates from your physical body every night to help “recharge” itself by drawing closer to the Entity.

 
Your Ego
 
A human ego is shaped by the life experiences that are encountered and the interactions with other human egos that occur during the course of a lifetime.  And in these experiences and interactions, a human ego has the ability to make free choice decisions that are reflective of love as well as those that are reflective of non-love.
 
The portion of the Entity that is your soul is essentially the “experiencer” of the free choice decisions made by your ego in this lifetime.  Love versus non-love choices present themselves every day of the ego’s life, from a very young child just becoming self-aware to an adult at the point of death.  These choices range from the seemingly insignificant to those that appear to be of great import.
 
Your three-dimensional physical life seems very real to your ego, but in fact it is not real to the Entity.  Your current lifetime is actually created by your Entity in order to have the free choice experiences that this level of existence provides.  It can be thought of as a “dream” that the Entity is having.
 
Some analogies are useful here to get this across.  When you are viewing a movie, you experience putting yourself inside the action of the movie and perhaps relating to one of the movie characters.  Your consciousness gets caught up in the sights, sounds, and plot of the movie while you are watching it.  You emotionally connect with the movie and experience the good and bad and happy and sad of it.  But when the movie ends, you come back to the firm reality of the fact that it was just a movie.
 
Similarly, when you have dreams at night they seem so real at the time you are dreaming them.  The “dream you” exists in a dream reality.  Sometimes the dreams are good and pleasant, but sometimes they are dark and scary.  The “dream you” can make free choice decisions about what to do and how to act in the dream.  I have had dreams that were so good that I did not want to wake up, but there were also dreams that were so bad, nightmares really, that caused me considerable mental anguish.  Everyone has experienced this dream gamut.  But when you awaken from your dream, you realize that none of it was real in relation to your physical three-dimensional reality. 
 
In actual fact, your Entity plans key aspects of your current lifetime before your birth in order to set up the flow of earthly experiences that your ego will potentially encounter based upon your free choice decisions.  It selects who your parents will be, your gender, and whether or not you will have any disabilities during the lifetime.  The Entity plans who you will significantly interact with during your life and what major life events you will experience.
 
Perhaps gender is the largest element of ego in a given human life.  We are born into this physical existence as either a male or a female.  As young children, which one we are makes little difference to us.  We live and play together easily with each other. 
 
But as we grow this changes.  We begin to notice both the physical differences and the behavioral differences.  Sexual urges start to come into play.  It almost seems as though there are two different species of humans occupying the planet.  Our ego develops a distinct gender bias.  As it has been so aptly put, “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”.  For a human ego, there are so many choices between love and non-love that revolve around gender aspects.  Gender interactions span the gamut from intense love to extreme hate. 
 
You may consider yourself to be a man or a woman, but in fact your Entity has no gender.  It possesses both male and female characteristics.  Your Entity has been both men and women in the various human lives that it has experienced.  Gender is only associated with this physical human reality.  It has no bearing in the larger reality.
 
Essentially, in your life everything happens for a reason in order for your ego to have free choice opportunities to choose love instead of non-love.  As much as you can with your human ego, you should try to choose love over non-love in all aspects of your life.  Since we are only human, you will not be totally successful, but the more you can do it, the more spiritual growth your ego will attain as a result of this lifetime spent.  Another way to say this is that the quality of your ego’s consciousness will increase the more you choose love over non-love.
 
We are living this life on earth to experience the relative, both good and bad as conceived of in human terms.  Good and bad as understood in human terms are but two sides of the same coin.  You cannot have one without the other.  Good is relative to bad, and vice-versa.  This is another version of the theory of relativity in the three-dimensional physical level of existence.  This applies to everything, hot versus cold, big versus small, smart versus dumb, beautiful versus ugly, and so on.  Every yin has its yang.  The Entity experiences the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of it because God has allowed the Entity to do so.
 
One can define good as those choices and actions that promote love.  Similarly, bad can be defined as the choices and actions that are non-loving.  Does God wish to experience the non-love actions of Its creations?  I feel that God does not seek non-love experiences but instead accepts all experiences that are brought to It by the free choice actions of Its creations.  For God, there is neither judgmental good nor evil.  There is only Unconditional Love. 
 
Hard as it may be for us to accept, God loves the murderer just as much as the person murdered.  But my intuition says that God does not love the act of murder because murder certainly does not constitute an act of love.  As was first put forward by St. Augustine to address this issue:  God loves the sinner but not the sin.  God does not love actions that are not reflective of love.  But God allows such actions to occur because It has granted free choice to the physical, three-dimensional human ego.
 
However, there is no judgment or punishment by God associated with even what appear to be the most heinous of human actions.  Both acts of non-love and love are accepted as part of the human experience.
 
Now you might say how is it possible that someone like Adolph Hitler could not be judged or punished by God for the great acts of hate that he perpetrated during his lifetime.  Millions of people suffered and died as a result of his actions. 
 
Yet, if there had been no World War I, there would have been no Hitler who rose to power.  So some of the responsibility for the results of Hitler’s actions rests upon those world leaders who were responsible for the start of World War I.  And what of all the German people who supported (or at least condoned) Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.  Without their support, Hitler would have been little more than a third rate artist.
 
This is not to say that the ego Hitler should not have striven to choose love over non-love.  Hitler made so many choices in his life that reflected tremendous non-love, tremendous evil.  These choices were Hitler’s alone to make.  He could have chosen differently.  Had Hitler enrolled in  the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna prior to World War I, he might have spent his life as an artist rather than as the diabolical leader of Germany.  God hopes that with the gift of free choice we will seek to make the choices supportive of love.  But God does not judge us if we do not. 
 
It is important to know that when you die, it is only your physical body that dies.  At the time of death, your ego is carried by your soul back to the non-physical Entity.  Your ego does not disappear, but rather is retained as part of the experiential accumulation of the Entity.  So your ego continues to exist as an experiential portion of the Entity.  It becomes a part of the Entity, along with all the other egos that you have possessed in your many previous lifetimes.

 
Experiencing The Entity
 
Near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) allow a human ego to have some level of interaction with the Entity during a physical lifetime.  These experiences demonstrate that your consciousness is independent of the functioning of your brain and is actually associated with your non-physical Entity-ness.
 
Veridical NDEs provide evidence of the larger reality of the Entity.  The word veridical means “truthful and coinciding with reality”.  Veridical NDEs are those in which a person is in a near-death state but still retains the ability to describe what is going on around them, typically in the hospital setting in which their physical body is located.    
 
The most famous and medically well-documented veridical NDE is that of Pam Reynolds.  Pam had a giant basilar artery aneurysm, a ballooned section of a large artery at the base of her brain.  If the aneurysm ruptured, the result would be immediate death.  So she needed a major operation to fix the problem. 
 
The operation she had in 1991 during which her near-death experience occurred was a very radical one indeed.  The surgical team would lower her body temperature to 60o Fahrenheit to induce cardiac arrest, and then drain the blood from her head so that the aneurysm could be safely removed.  At the start of the aneurysm removal procedure, she would be quite clinically dead, with no heart beat and no brain waves or brainstem function.
 
Because this was such a major and radical type of procedure, Pam was extensively monitored during the surgery.  Her eyes were taped shut.  She had a catheter placed to measure pulmonary pressure and blood flow from the heart.  Cardiac monitoring leads were attached to follow heart rate and rhythm, and an oximeter was taped to her index finger to measure oxygen levels in her blood.  Urinary temperature was measured by a thermister placed in her bladder and the core body temperature of her inner body was measured with a thermister placed deeply into her esophagus. 
 
Her brain temperature was monitored by a thin wire embedded in its surface.  She had EEG electrodes taped to her head to record cerebral cortical brain activity, and her auditory nerve center located in the brain stem was tested continuously using 100-decibel clicks at 22 clicks per second (a deep hum as loud as a jackhammer) emitted from small speakers inserted into her ears.  In summary, she was fully loaded with instrumentation and diagnostics for the surgery. 
 
Pam was placed under general anesthesia by the anesthesiologist.  After ninety minutes of deep anesthesia the surgery began with the surgeon cutting out a large section of Pam’s skull with a Midas Rex 73,000 rpm bone saw, which made a loud buzzing noise. 
 
Pam described herself as coming out of her body and observing the operating room and operating personnel with her non-physical consciousness.  She was able to describe in detail the bone saw that the surgeon was using (she said it looked like an electric toothbrush) and its ancillary equipment, despite the fact that she had never seen a bone saw in her life.  She described the appearance of her body and medical equipment around it, and also noted some procedures and discussions that other doctors in the operating theater were performing on her.
 
After the operation, her surgeon was quite astounded that she was able to describe the things she did, given the fact that she was ninety minutes into deep general anesthesia with her eyes taped shut and loud sounds in her ears.  The bone saw that he had used did resemble an electric toothbrush to an uninitiated person.  The fact is that Pam had never seen such a medical bone saw anytime in her life.  And Pam was also able to hear one of the doctors talking about her veins and arteries being small, a conversation that indeed actually took place during the operation.  Yet she had plugs in her ears that were giving out 100-decibel clicks like the sound of a jack hammer.  She shouldn’t have been able to hear a thing. 
So Pam Reynolds’ NDE was dramatically veridical.  She was providing proof that her consciousness was outside her body and aware, while her body and brain were effectively disfunctional.
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are another avenue of contact with the Entity.  The person who had the most extensive and detailed out-of-body experiences was a man by the name of Robert Monroe.  Robert Monroe was 42 years old and president of a large company when his OBEs began spontaneously in 1958.  Prior to that time, he had experienced no OBE phenomena at all.   
 
Monroe was quite a curious person and sought to explore in detail his OBEs, to understand them as best he could.  He adopted a gradual, experimental approach, as a scientist might (Monroe had some level of scientific background in his education), building more understanding for himself with each additional OBE that he experienced.  Monroe described experiencing three different “Locales” during his OBEs. 
 
Locale I consisted of people and places that exist in the physical world.  Monroe could travel out-of-body to different physical locations and observe the activities going on at these locations.
 
Locale II, however, was completely different from Locale I and seemed to be a totally non-physical environment.  Monroe described it as a non-physical place of great immensity where time was non-existent.  There was only the “Now” that contained both past and future.  The primary “law” governing Locale II was that pure thought was the creative force which produces energy and matter as well as perception and communication. 
 
The third locale Monroe described, Locale III, appeared to be physical places on planets other than the Earth with non-human intelligent inhabitants.
 
Monroe described our physical reality as a “holographic dream” that was generated by something he called the “Emitter” which lay behind what he termed an “Aperture”.  He said that our universe did not begin from a Big Bang, but rather from the emanations of the “Emitter”.  Furthermore, there was a closed loop from all the things in the physical universe back to the “Emitter”.  Everything eventually recycled to the “Emitter” and became again one with the “Whole”, the Creator.  Monroe said that the Creator was something beyond our comprehension as human beings, but that we are part of the Creator
 
During his great many OBEs, Monroe came to the realization of the much greater reality of his Entity-ness.  He came to know that his Entity was able to experience many different levels of reality.  He discovered that his Entity had lived many lifetimes on Planet Earth, as well as other places in the physical universe, and that his Entity retained these lifetime egos within it. 
I think it is likely that each of us has some communication with their Entity at night during sleep, particularly during non-REM, or non-dreaming, sleep.  During your dreams, your conscious ego is present within the dream.  But during non-REM sleep, where is your consciousness?  It is possible that your consciousness is in communion with your Entity on a non-physical level during that time.  But you have no waking memory of this.
 
When I dream, I am always a figure in the dream in some way.  I have a dream body but my dream personality is essentially the same as my waking personality, my ego.  The dream scenarios that I dream up are often fantastic and sometimes illogical, but to me in the dream they seem quite real and are typically filled with action and aspects of my human emotions.  My dreams often seem to be a hodgepodge of disjointed aspects of my waking consciousness.  When I awaken from a particularly hectic dream, I am thankful that it was only a dream, but it takes me a few seconds to realize that this is so.  And then I forget the dream scenario very quickly after waking up.  I have never had a lucid dream, a dream in which you realize that you are actually dreaming while still in the dream state.
 
My ego is definitely present in my dreams, but when I am not dreaming, in non-REM sleep, where am I?  My ego is not there.  But I believe that the Entity is.  I had a personal experience that may relate to this question.  I was on travel and asleep in a hotel in a distant city somewhere.  I seemed to be sound asleep and not dreaming at all, when all of a sudden I heard a distinct “shout” in my mind.  It seemed like a person had just made a loud shout inside my hotel room.  Upon hearing this, I became instantly awake!  This was no groggy awakening.  One second I was asleep and not dreaming at all, and the next second I was wide awake with all of my cognitive faculties operating at full capacity. 
 
Upon this dramatic and sudden awakening, I listened intently to determine if I could hear any other noise in the hotel room but there was nothing, it was completely silent.  This event impressed me enough that I still remember it quite vividly.  Perhaps this was my Entity manifesting itself in some way.
 
I believe that contact can also be made with the Entity during periods of meditation.  I first began practicing transcendental meditation more than forty years ago.  I had heard about this meditative technique and its potential benefits, and thought that it might be a useful relaxation and invigoration aid which might also enhance cognitive abilities.  So I decided to give it a try.  I went to a TM center and was given the indoctrination and a mantra.  Then I was free to explore the method on my own. 
 
As I started out, it was difficult to quiet my thoughts, they just kept coming.  But after a while I was able to reach a state where I would observe them being there, but then just let them drift away.  Eventually, I could attain a state of no-thoughts, just Being. 
 
As I said, I have been meditating on a regular basis for forty-plus years now.  I just never gave up the practice.  I have found that it sooths and relaxes me.  But I think that something much more profound has happened .  I believe that my very long practice of regular meditation has allowed me, my ego, to attain some level of contact with my Entity.  This contact has permitted higher level insights and intuition to flow into my conscious mind here in this three-dimensional physical world where I presently find myself.  In fact, I believe this is what has produced the content of the book you are now reading.

 
Your Other Lives
 
There is no death of the part of the Entity that is your soul.  Only the physical body associated with your current ego dies.  It decays and returns to its elemental forms.  After physical death, your present ego does not die, but is rather retained as a part of the Entity.  The ego’s experiential memories become absorbed by the Entity.  So the Entity retains the egos of all the lives that it has experienced.  Essentially, all these egos continue to exist within the Entity.
 
The true you, the Entity, has lived many human lives.  You have lived lives as both men and women.  You have been every race that exists on Earth.  And every religion.  You have been primitive and sophisticated.  You have been rich and famous, but also homeless.  You have been murdered and you have been a murderer.  In other words, you have experienced all the various aspects, both perceived good and bad, of human existence.  One might think of this as a flow of karma.  If you experience the yin, you must also experience the yang.
 
There was one fellow born in California in 1930 who, under hypnosis, was able to recall fourteen past lives.  The first past life recounted was in Egypt around 2000 BC.  Then he was a powerful  high priest, but rather than having religious duties, his primary responsibilities were to expand trade routes and arrange terms with neighboring tribes so as to bring about a peaceful exchange of goods and services replacing the warfare that had previously gone on. 
 
The second reported past life took place again in Egypt around 1300 BC but in this life he was a lowly cart driver who transported grain to a storehouse.  His wife in this lifetime was killed by a pack of wolves.  The third past life was lived as a female with royal connections in Egypt around 400 BC and this courtesan woman conducted intrigues in order to acquire wealth for herself and her family.  The fourth past life was experienced as a male in Lebanon, where his tradesman job involved making cheeses from goat’s milk and selling them on the trade routes that ran through his village.  The fifth past life took place in Greece around 100 AD where he found himself as the male ward of a powerful Roman governor.  The sixth past life reported was as a woman around 1300 AD who lived a very primitive life in a village in Central America and whose favorite occupation was weaving baskets from bamboo shoots. 
 
The seventh past life was also as a woman of modest means in Portugal in about 1450 AD who lived a peaceful lifetime that was relatively short.  In the 1500’s there was a past life number eight as a man, a nobleman in Italy in a village just south of Naples and whose life was rather dissatisfying and unhappy.  The ninth past life was as a female in around 1600 in Wales, who died in the childbirth of an illegitimate child.  The tenth past life was spent as a very poor French peasant who tended fields of millet and whose only possession was a deeply treasured wooden spoon.  The eleventh past life was as a prosperous English merchant whose lifetime spanned the years 1715-1790 and who dealt in woolen products.  Past life number twelve was as a man who supervised machinery in a cotton mill in Egypt and who died of a heart attack at age sixty.  The thirteen past life was as a male cabin boy aboard an English ship that sailed in the South Seas.  And the fourteenth life recounted was as a female who was born in 1900 and died very young in 1902.
 
So what this individual reported under hypnosis were past lives that were both male and female, that were both rich and poor, and that were both powerful and humble.  These lives took place in various different geographical locations around the globe.  And these fourteen past lives were just the ones that he recounted to the hypnotherapist during the hypnotic sessions.  Who knows how many other past lives he may actually have lived.
 
My own intuition about reincarnation is based on vague personal feelings.  For example, I have a long-standing and deep-rooted fear of knives.  If I see a knife lying around in our home, I have the urge to put it somewhere out of the way so that it cannot harm me.  The thought of being severely injured by a knife is something that seems buried in my psyche.  Why?  Where does this fear come from?  There is nothing in my present life that would cause such a fear.  I have never experienced a traumatic event with a knife that I can remember.  I even asked my mother once if I ever had any accidents with a knife when I was a very young child, and she said no there had been none.  Is it possible that I was killed by a knife in a previous existence? 
 
Also, for some unknown reason, I seem to have a fondness for the time period from the 1890’s to the beginning of World War I.  The feelings in my mind of this time period are warm and pleasant, and I have perceptions of bucolic surroundings, slow-moving events, and loving personal relationships.  Perhaps I grew up during this time somewhere in Europe or America, but met an untimely death in the trenches during the First World War.
 
Some people call all of this the Earth life experiential school.  And what happens after the Entity has experienced all that it can on Earth?  Then you might transition to other places in the physical universe to experience non-human lives on other planets. 
 
Perhaps when the Entity has acquired a suitable amount of physical three-dimensional experiences in the physical universe, it then proceeds to lifetimes in other non-physical dimensions.  What is life like in a non-physical dimension?  Maybe the closest we can come to understanding this type of life is as a conscious bundle of energy.  For all we know, there may be a vast number of higher dimensional energy beings that can be experienced.
 
I use the term “proceeds”, but for the Entity all reincarnations already exist in the Now.  Past, present, and future lifetimes are all there simultaneously, as hard as it is for we three-dimensional beings to understand.

 
Me and I
 
There is an old song with the title “Me and I”.  Here is a portion of the lyrics:  “Sometimes when I’m mad there’s a part of me that seems to be a little sad.  Sometimes when I scream there’s a voice in me that says you shouldn’t be so mean.”
 
In this lifetime, one should attempt to separate the Me (the Ego) from the Entity (the Soul) in dealing with any life situation.  How can this be done?  Here is one way.  When the ego is facing an emotionally charged situation, try to mentally “back-off” and observe what is going on from the detached position of the Entity.  If you can get your Entity to observe what your ego is doing from an aloof position, you will be able to assess the situation rationally, calm any emotional passions, and take the right course of action.  The Entity is the observer and the counselor of the ego.
 
Another way for the ego to seek guidance from the Entity is to examine your conscience when you need to make an important decision.  Your conscience is the little intuitive voice inside you that you can only hear when you listen to it in stillness.  If you are facing a difficult decision, consult your conscience for advice.  What your conscience advises you may not be the easiest thing to do, but it will be the right thing.  Always follow your conscience.
 
You should remember that your current lifetime is really only an experiential “dream” that the true you, your Entity, is having.  The dreams that you, the ego, have each night always seem so real while you are dreaming them, but then you wake up to the realization that they were not “real” experiences at all.  But they seemed quite real at the time to the “dream you”. 
 
The Entity has had many dream lifetimes in the three-dimensional past and will have many more lifetimes in the three-dimensional future.  Remember that the Earth-you, the three-dimensional Earth, and the entire physical universe are really only illusions, a “dream” that exists in the Mind of God.  You as a three-dimensional physical human being on Planet Earth are only an actor in a play that allows little pieces of God, your Entity, to experience ego, space, and time, to create beliefs, to experience limitations and relatives, and to make free choices between love and non-love.  Your Entity knows that all of this is just a dream that the Entity is having, and that everything is happening as it should be.
 
We spend so much of our physical lifetimes living in a state of fear.  Many people say that fear is the source of hatred.  We hate what we fear.  I think that there is significant truth to this.  Think about how much better the physical world would be without fear.
 
Fear is something that is associated with our physical existence only.  Perhaps our greatest fear is the fear of death.  And our second greatest fear is to be unloved.  There are so many people who spend much of their lives in a state of fear, fear of things happening in the present and fear of what might happen in the future.  They may be fearful about being ridiculed, losing a job, getting sick, becoming poor, having to face some threat, losing a lover or a loved one, or any of a countless number of other reasons.
 
There have been a number of times in my own life when I have been fearful, those times of trauma and anxiety that I have experienced.  It seems as though fear is an inseparable part of the human ego experience, something that cannot be avoided.  The best we can do is to face our fears and strive to overcome them.  We can fight or we can flee. 
 
But fear does not exist for the Entity.  The non-physical Entity has no fear because it does not die and it exists in an atmosphere of unconditional love.  Fear is something that is not real in the larger reality.  If you can come to the realization that your true essence is the Entity and not the ego of your present physical state, then it becomes clear to you that you have absolutely nothing to fear in the grander level of existence.  And you can then concentrate on working towards the expression of love in all of physical life’s situations.
 
You have nothing to fear despite the worst that life may throw at you during the course of a lifetime.  You often hear the lament “why do bad things happen to good people”.  When bad things happen to you in life, as they do to everyone, and it may seem that life is not worth living, it helps to remember two things.  The first is that “everything happens for a reason” and the second is that “the moment is as it was meant to be”.  What you are experiencing is only a part of your illusional ego existence here on physical Planet Earth.  Your Entity knows that what you are going through is really only just a dream from its larger perspective.  From the viewpoint of the Entity, everything is always as it should be.   
 
In this lifetime, what you need to do is strive to make free choices that promote love through acts of loving kindness and forgiveness.  In the end, there are only two things of real value in this lifetime, Love for God and Love for Others.  Always keep this in view.  Strive to radiate love in all that you do.  Remember the insightful old song lyric “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”. 
 
Practice loving kindness.

 
Recommended Reading
 
 
“Alive in the Light”, Andy Petro, Outskirts Press, Denver, Colorado, c. 2014.
 
“Backwards”, Nanci Danison, AP Lee and Company, Columbus, Ohio, c. 2007.
 
“From Science to God”, Peter Russell, New World Library, Novato, California, c. 2002.
 
“My Big TOE:  Awakening, Discovery, Inner Workings”, Thomas Campbell, Lightning Strike Books, c. 2003.
 
“Science Set Free”, Rupert Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra Books, New York, c. 2012.
 
“Seth Speaks”, Jane Roberts, Amber-Allen Publishing, c. 1972.
 
“The Complete Conversations with God”, Neale Donald Walsch, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Charlottesville, Virginia, c. 2005.
 
“The Convoluted Universe”, Dolores Cannon, Ozark Mountain Publishing Company, Huntsville, Arkansas, c. 2001.
 
“The Power of Now”, Eckhart Tolle, New World Library, Novato, California, c. 1999.
 
“Ultimate Journey”, Robert A. Monroe, Broadway Books, New York, c. 1994.