The Unobstructed Universe

I am wary of “channeled” writings for obvious reasons, and yet I’ve found some extremely interesting ideas in books which claim to contain messages from some person or entity other than the one reporting the messages.

THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE purports to contain communications from the deceased wife of the author, Stewart Edward White, channeled through a friend, a medium named Jane, during the 1930’s. (At least one other witness was regularly involved.) Stewart’s wife, Betty, had for years worked with him on exploring “the other side” psychically, and now she began to report about her existence since dying.

Unless the author was flat-out fabricating the whole story, which I doubt, the evidence of authenticity which he gives is persuasive. Certainly (in the absence of flagrant lying) the participants in the long project believed they were really in contact with Betty.

No matter how often I tell myself that it is impossible to comprehend Existence, much less explain it, I remain curious, and when someone says, “I’ve been there and seen the afterlife for myself,” I can’t turn away without at least glancing at the account . . . sometimes just long enough to realize how irritatingly silly it is.

According to Betty, there is no “heaven” out there beyond our universe. There is one universe, and everything is within the universe we humans know and perceive. The catch is that our abilities to perceive are only a small bit of the possible ways of perceiving. In a darkened room, a human, a cat, an X-ray machine, and a radio are going to perceive different things, and yet the contents of the room are the same. When the lights are turned on, the human perceives the room quite differently from before, and yet nothing about the room has changed except perception. A soul without a solid physical body could be standing right next to you now, and without the ability to perceive that particular kind of thing, you would never know she is there.

Other than varieties of perception, Betty’s main point about the nature of the universe is its range of “frequencies”, which means the same as that overused word, “vibrations”. Everything has its own frequency – and Betty’s universe sounds surprisingly like the “string theory” universe at times. People in Betty’s state function at higher frequencies than people still hauling around the bodies we are familiar with.

It is a commonplace of “spiritual” discussions that those in physical bodies in the familiar material aspect of the universe are in a denser environment and function at lower rates of vibration than the existence experienced by “spirits”. One of the main reasons we cannot usually see or communicate with spirits is the difference in frequencies. Betty gives the example of the blades of an electric fan, which totally obscure our view of things beyond when they are stationary or moving slowly but allow us to see through them as if nothing were there when they are spinning at top speed.

The lower frequency universe which we in denser bodies navigate is the “obstructed universe”, while Betty resides in an “unobstructed universe”. She says it is all one universe, with the same natural laws, but it is perceived and experienced differently. In the simplest terms, in the obstructed universe we are constantly running up against hard objects which have to be dealt with, and our experience of time and space is much more cumbersome than Betty’s. In the unobstructed universe she can move from place to place with the swiftness of imagination. She can move through objects which we call solid.

Her perceptions of space and time are different, but in ways I wouldn’t care to try to describe here. My main problem with White’s book is that it asks of the reader a dedication to learning a special vocabulary and a set of sometimes obscure concepts which challenges my degree of interest. The question frequently came to me, “Is this really worth the trouble?” Well, the same question came to me during a number of college courses, but that’s another matter.

What I most wanted was a nice tidy description of life “on the other side”, and I got something much more complicated. Jane alleged an actual view of Betty and her associates, and said that they were like us except glowing and beautifully colored. Her main impression was that Betty’s world was much more fluid than ours. Betty said that although she can pass through objects which would impede us, she can also “manage” things so that she can, for example, rest on a river bank and admire the flowers rather than sink through it. She drew a parallel with a man in a swimming pool who can at will either float, swim, or sink.

I’ve tried to describe just the basic concepts of our relatively awkward “obstructed” universe and the more flowing and easily negotiated “unobstructed” universe. From these concepts I get some help with the vexed question of defining “spiritual” and “spirit”.

For a start, what I gropingly call “spiritual” would not be “another world”, not a “spirit world” somewhere separate from ours or composed of an entirely different “immaterial” substance from ours, but our world at its higher levels of frequencies, perceived through means which we in these cumbersome bodies do not have. This description comports with my youthful illumination (and the similar realizations of millions of other people, I’m sure) that the universe we humans see and touch is created of and maintained by “something deeper”, which I could only call “spirit”.

Original Beliefs?

Have you ever asked yourself how many of your beliefs were put into your mind by other people, and how many you originated all by yourself?

I’m willing to bet that the number of people in the world who carry around even a few independently generated beliefs is smaller than the number who are over 7 feet tall.

When I say “beliefs”, I am thinking mostly of religious and spiritual beliefs. “Other people” includes parents, teachers, friends, books, newspapers, television, movies, and anything else except your own original ideas based on independent observation and intuition.

It took me a long time even to ask myself a question like the one above. When I did, it was, “If I had grown up alone on a tropical island with no people, no books, no means of communication with the rest of the world, would I ever have thought of the concept of ‘God’”?

I know it’s hard to imagine a lush tropical island today without a luxury hotel and fusion cuisine, much less without people, but try. Based on your isolated experience with Nature and yourself, would you have discovered a concept you would have labeled the equivalent of “God” as depicted in the Bible?

In the unlikely event that you came up with a biblical kind of “God” entirely on your own, we have to wonder what Nature, and your mind, would have revealed to be that God’s characteristics and effects on you in this life and after death.

We also have to wonder if a dozen men and women growing up alone in a dozen other completely isolated places would have come up with similar discoveries.

I was born and raised in the United States, not in isolation, which is why my question refers to the Old and New Testament Gods that were presented to me while I served a term in the Baptist church. From the beginning I felt there was something wrong with the entire system I was taught, and I collaborated and prayed more from fear of God’s plentiful punishments than from positive beliefs. Then I began asking Sunday School teachers and the minister embarrassing questions and getting embarrassingly irrational answers.

So one day, when I was in my early teens, I asked myself a question: Would I ever, entirely independently, have thought of the existence of God if God had not been named and described to me by other people? I concluded that the answer was a definite, “No.” My first original realization: I felt very strongly that there was some single, unseen basis that underlay and supported everything in existence, and that it was nothing like the Christian or Jewish Gods. I soon called this universal creative and animating source “spirit” for lack of a better term – a “spiritual” essence behind the visible world.

Of course I was not the first person in history to come up with such an idea! I was just the first person in my own history to come up with it. When I was later fortunate enough to read the “Upanishads” I felt a burst of light and confirmation.

More about all this next time. . . Thanks for looking.