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When I look up into the heavens today I oftentimes wonder just how much of the universe we can ever explore, seemingly bound as we are by the speed of light and existing energy sources. It would, after all, take billions of years to reach the most distant galaxies and several thousands just to explore our own. In our time alone, however, we have become a spacefaring civilization. So we dream the impossible dream, hoping to make more sense of reality, and just possibly to discover that the dream wasn’t impossible after all.1
Our desire to explore is really our desire to reveal, and perhaps alter, the structure of the universe. We secretly hope to find our place in the vast scheme of things. This has been the larger purpose of every mission into space; it is also the larger purpose of both science and religion. Meta- phorically speaking, we want to one day touch the face of God.
When we explore, whether the journey is into space or into the nucleus of the atom, we construct mental models of what we have found. Much of the scientific and mystical literature of our time speculates about the exist- ence of a multidimensional universe, unseen spirit realities, Many Worlds interpretations, and the like. What the scientist is looking for is some kind of grand theory of everything, a theory that encompasses the universe in one consistent symmetric mathematical treatment that makes the universe knowable. A proposed multidimensional universe has been one result of the search. Speculations as to the world disappearing when no one is look- ing is another.
If existence and knowing are equally fundamental faces of our uni- verse, as this dyadic model proposes, then existence and knowing are interacting processes, not independent and absolute as previously believed. In such a universe we will eventually discover whatever there is to know about what we experience.
What is wholly amazing (yet the wonder of it rarely occurs to us) is our ability to imagine things that don’t even exist. We can create mental images of unicorns and centaurs, we can harbor hopes and beliefs that may or may not be realized, we can dream dreams that are literally absurd yet metaphorically meaningful. This ability alone imparts a clue that we are more than just deterministic matter on the one hand or creative mind in an infinitely malleable universe on the other. We are, rather, something of both elements. The scientific theorist hopes that the Platonic ideal of beauty and perfect form will be revealed with mathematical simplicity and symmetry, where it lurks behind the messiness of the physical world.
The mystic, in his or her search, is simply looking for an explanation of where the spirit world goes when one opens the eyes, and finds the beauty, ecstasy, and eternity of the Creator in unseen dimensions that are acces- sible only through the mind. Considerable popular thought suggests that it is in these unseen realms where science and religion meet. The scientist, the futurist, the mystic, and the UFO chaser all look to other dimensions as a way to explain the unexplained.
There is no intrinsic reason, however, why the universe should be el- egant, beautiful, simple, symmetric, ecstatic, or multiple, except that those qualities arise from the experiences, labels, and desires of the beholder. To a warthog, beauty rests in other warthogs; to a hammer, the whole world is the nail. The meaning of our experiences lies in the interpretation that we give them based on the memory of prior events and learning.
The multidimensional worlds of the scientist and the mystic seem to arise from different realities, but in truth the ideas of both arise from the same source—the creative thought process that seeks to know, and from the flawed assumption that mind and matter are completely different things. The creation of a thought, any thought, is merely the process of turning energy into information (in other words, patterns of energy), and then becoming aware of it. Yet it is a magical process, one that was taking place long before we gained self-reflective awareness. Unfortunately, most hu- man thought is little more than static; turbulence in the tangled hierarchy. In the undisciplined brain, it amounts to a kind of idle chatter followed by emotional reactions. Turning the creative turbulence into coherent struc- ture is the essence of knowing. A student of a meditative discipline can learn to quell the static and enhance all brain functions, particularly those believed to originate in the right hemisphere and the prelinguistic brain. Students trained in the thinking disciplines tend to enhance left-brain func- tions, which are dependent upon language. Those trained in both develop greatly enhanced benefits that add up to more than the mere sum of the two. In either case, when the mind is stoked with new information, and questions are allowed to gestate for a time, additional creative thought surfaces in magical fashion to solve problems and express meaning by way