(Continued from Part 1.)
No Fixed Boundaries Between Dimensions or Planes
Added to the problem is that fact that dimensions do not have fixed boundaries as we might expect and may even have transitional zones which are in effect mini-dimensions.
As Archangel Michael reminds us, “there is no firm demarcation between dimensions, for they ebb and flow in a wave pattern and interpenetrate each other to a certain degree.” (13) A. Farense elaborates:
“It is not very important that [the planes] should be all divided by the same standard, since these divisions are very similar to mapping out a country where the boundaries melt so imperceptibly into one another that it is not very essential to have the limits defined with perfect exactitude, since the changes in the countries and the people will of themselves mark their different states as you progress on your journey.” (14)
Silver Birch
Spirit guide Silver Birch explains that “the astral world is part of the world of spirit. It is one life in many varying grades, from the lower reaches to the highest stages. It is not divided into watertight compartments.” Describing it to Third-Dimensional beings is hard, he says: “We have to give you terms that you can understand.” (15)
When people take a walk to another plane of existence, they find the planes shading off into each other. Here Arnel describes how the landscape changes gradually as he approaches the dark planes.
“So we took the path downwards and, as we went, the gloom became more gloomy and the chill more full of fear. But we knew we went to help and not to fear aught and so we did not hesitate in our steps, but went warily.” (16)
On various occasions, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson descended into the lower planes and testifies to how the gradation is gradual.
“When one draws near the boundaries of the lower realms, the pavements become heavy in appearance, they begin to lose their color until they look leaden and opaque, and they have the semblance of extreme solidity – almost like the granite of the earth-plane.” (17)
“When we paid our visit to the boundary [between the Summerlands and the Lower Planes], we made our way there directly and rapidly, and we had no consciousness of the intermediate states through which we passed. … Had we made our progress slowly we should have perceived the gradual decline of all those pleasant and enjoyable features that constitute the heaven of this realm.” (18)
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson
“As we proceed slowly from our own realm towards these dark lands, we shall find a gradual deterioration taking place in the countryside. The flowers become scanty and ill-nourished, giving the appearance of a struggle for existence. The grass is parched and yellow, until, with the last remnants of sickly flowers, it finally disappears altogether, to be superseded by barren rocks. The light steadily diminishes until we are in a grey land.” (19)
“The light steadily diminishes until we are in a grey land, and then comes the darkness – deep, black, impenetrable darkness; impenetrable, that is, to those who are spiritually blind.” (20)
“The light rapidly dwindled, dwellings were fewer and fewer, and there was not a soul to be seen anywhere. Great tracts of granite-like rocks stretched out before us, cold and forbidding, and the ‘road’ we followed was rough and precipitous. By now, darkness had enshrouded us, but we could still see all our surroundings perfectly clearly.” (21)
Here Julia Ames explains that lack of clearly-demarcated borders:
“Heaven shades off into Hell, Hell shades off into Heaven. Hell shades off to heaven by a million imperceptible gradations. Between the two there is no great gulf fixed…. For the Borderland which divides the two is crossed by innumerable paths.” (22)
Moreover some places are really transitional zones rather than discrete planes. The best-known transitional zone is the Borderlands, etheric planes, or “Blue Island,”” as William Stead called it, where we go to rest and relax before travelling on to our destination in the Astral Planes. (23) Here Raymond Lodge calls it the “Vestibule.”
“The purpose of the time spent in the vestibule is to give the transition from the outer planes to the inner planes more continuity. Even though any given person lives more of his lifetime on the inner planes than on the physical, the transition of death is still very abrupt. It can be almost as frustrating as the transition involved in entering the physical plane; in that case, the frustration is being unable to function as you’ve been used to because you are now a tiny baby.
“But in the transition at the time of death, the vestibule experience permits you to continue your patterns of thought about life and afterlife – until you begin to see that these beliefs are all made out of tissue paper and smoke, as it were.” (24)
This lack of fixed boundaries and the existence of transitional zones further complicates the mapmaker’s work.
Willingness to Communicate
Another complicating factor for the dimensional cartographer is that higher-dimensional; beings may only be willing to communicate with us while they are in planes closest to our own. That means that we may not often hear the testimony of beings from the higher regions.
Most spirit communicators communicate with the Earth during their stay on the Astral Planes (Fourth Dimension). By the time they reach the Mental Planes (Fifth Dimension), they’ve settled into life there and are much less interested, or not interested at all, in communicating with us. So the people in higher dimensions may not send us back the information we need to know about the higher planes. Julia Ames describes how this situation comes to be:
William Stead, spiritualist and medium for Julia Ames
“It is with us as with immigrants to my former country. When they arrive their hearts are in the old world. The new world is new and strange. They long to hear from the old home and the post brings them more joy than the sunrise. But after a very little time the pain is dulled, new interests arise, and, in a few years, sometimes in a few months, they write no more.
“With us here the change is even more rapid. For the new life is more absorbing and the survivors constantly recruit our ranks. When the family circle is complete, when those we loved are with us, why should we trouble to communicate? The whole planet with its 1,500,000,000 inhabitants is full of strangers, our life lies on our own plane.” (25)
By a similar process, those who move on to the Buddhic and Nirvanic Planes have almost no interest in communicating with us unless they are instructed to as part of a divine mission. Imperator speaks of spirits passing ” beyond the sphere whose denizens operate directly with man.” (26) After his work with Stainton Moses was complete, Imperator says he would pass into one of those spheres:
“I come from the seventh sphere to work out the will of the Almighty; and, when my work is complete, I shall return to those spheres of bliss from which none return again to earth. (27) But this will not be till the medium’s work on earth is finished, and his mission on earth exchanged for a wider one in the spheres.” (28)
Now this eighth sphere that Imperator refers to is undoubtedly not the eighth sphere that the Boss referred to. Imperator, formerly the prophet Malachi, is a great ways down the road from us Starseeds.
Can’t Name all the Planes or Dimensions
Therefore, we 3D humans can’t name very many planes. Even if we rely on higher beings to do that, they may not or, as with Suzan Carroll, use a set of names or numbers that make much sense to us. And we can’t set out to corroborate or disqualify those names. Climbing the ladder of dimensions is not like flying to France. We’re not able to visit higher dimensions unless special precautions are taken and even then we can’t go very high.
Michael Tymn, editor of a spiritual magazine, interviewed me in 2008 and asked me if I could name all the planes of life.
Michael: “How many planes are there? Can you name them all?”
Steve: “No, I cannot name them all. No classification scheme I’ve seen so far takes them all in – not those of the Theosophists or the Rosicrucians or anyone else. A comprehensive map would have to include the Buddhic and Nirvanic Planes, the two planes above them that the Theosophists refuse to discuss, and the realms of the Manus, Buddhas, Builders, and Lipikas that Annie Besant mentions in the Ancient Wisdom, as well as the nine orders of angels. No cartographical scheme that I’ve seen shows where they all fit in or even names (or numbers) them in a consistent manner.
“Most descriptions go no farther than the Second Heaven or second subplane of the Mental Plane. There may very well be no words to describe higher planes even if they were named or numbered.
“Moreover, there are no maps that I am aware of that also include the life streams parallel to but independent of humans, such as fairies, sylphs, etc. I have not concerned myself with these or, for that matter, with the spiritual planes that are associated with life forms on other planetary and star systems. (Yes, they exist as well.)
“Not only can I not name all the planes, but I am faced with a plethora of names which appear to point to the same region while lacking spirit confirmation that they actually do. Thus, the Borderlands are called the Near-Earth Plane, Kamaloka, Hades, Purgatory, the Vestibule, and the ‘Blue Island.’ That would be well and good if someone like Annie Besant did not come along and extend the word ‘Kamaloka’ to the whole of the Astral Plane. There is frighteningly little agreement on matters of prime importance in surveying the Heavens.” (29)
So annoyed did I become that I presumed to lecture the spirits in that interview:
“I know that spirits listen to us as much as we listen to them. While drawing maps, I’m also trying to convey to them the message that we need them to tighten up the process of communication. One way would be to ensure that all communicators are required to tell us specifically from which plane (and subplane) they are communicating. Location on the other side is of critical importance to us who are trying to fit the pieces together.
“I also ask the help of spirit teachers in correlating the different terminologies that spirits currently use. For example, I don’t know what planes names like the ‘Christ Sphere’ or ‘Empyrean Plane’ refer to or how they correlate to numbering systems like ‘the seventh plane,’ etc. …
“In my view it’s time to pick up the pace and get serious about cross-border communication. We’ve passed through the evidential phase quite some time ago, without having necessarily moved to much more intensive communication. I’m saying that the time has now arrived to begin the next phase.” (30)
And of course it is time to get serious about cross-border communication and, with Ascension, we’ll not only do that but we’ll get serious about intergalactic communication as well.
Footnotes
(1) Mike Swain in Jasper Swain, From My World to Yours: A Young Man’s Account of the Afterlife. New York: Walker, 1977., 77.
(2) Stainton Moses, More Spirit Teachings. Electronically published by Meilach.com. https://www.meilach.com/spiritual/books/morest/mspteach.htm, 17.
(4) A. Farnese, WSL, https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/wsl/wsl14.htm.
(5) Stewart Edward White in Robert Leichtman, The Psychic Perspective. Columbia: Ariel press, 1978, 213.
(6) Archangel Michael in “Starseeds: The Leaven in the Loaf,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/the-2012-scenario/lightworkers/starseeds-the-leaven-in-the-loaf-2/
(7) “Suzan Carroll: Multidimensional News August 2011,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2011/08/suzan-caroll-multidimensional-news-august-2011/.
(8) Frederic W.H. Myers through Geraldine Cummins, medium, Beyond Human Personality. Downloaded from https://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/cummins/cummins2.html, n.p.
(9) Claude Kelway-Bamber in L. Kelway-Bamber, ed., Claude’s Book. New York: 1919. Downloaded from https://www.spiritwritings.com/claude1.pdf, 18 Feb. 2008, 41.
(10) Ibid., 70-1.
(11) Arnel in G. Vale Owen, G. Vale Owen, medium, The Life Beyond the Veil. Book III: The Ministry of Heaven. New York, 1921, 92.
(12) John Heslop through F. Heslop, medium, Further Messages Across the Border-Line. A Continuation of “Speaking Across the Border-Line.” London: Charles Taylor, n.d., 10.
(13) Archangel Michael, Sept. 27, 2009, through Ronna Herman, https://www.ronnastar.com/latest.html.
(14) A. Farnese, ibid.
(13) Silver Birch, Silver Birch Anthology. Ed. Wm. Naylor. London: Spiritualist Press, 1974; c1955, 58.
(16) Arnel in LBV3, 170, quoted in Dowding, MM, 61.
(17) Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson through Anthony Borgia, medium, Life in the World Unseen. M.A.P., 1993,
108.
(18) Ibid., 62.
(19) Loc. cit.
(20) Loc. cit.
(21) Ibid., 134.
(22) Julia [Julia T. Ames] through W.T. Stead, medium, After Death. A Personal Narrative. New York: George H. Doran, n.d.; c. 1914., 167-8.
(23) William Thomas Stead, The Blue Island. Experiences of a New Arrival Behind the Veil. Estelle W. Stead and Pardoe Woodman, eds. London: Rider, n.d.
(24) Raymond Lodge in Robert R. Leichtman, M.D. through medium D. Kendrick Johnson, Sir Oliver Lodge Returns. Columbus: Ariel Press, 1979, 68.
(25) Julia Ames, ibid., 175-6.
(26) Spirit leader Imperator in Moses, MST, ibid., 63.
(27) Spirit leader “Imperator” (Malachi) speaking through Stainton Moses. Spirit Teachings. London: Spiritualist Press, n.d. (Prior to 1883), 22.
(28) He means that he will no longer need to reincarnate on Earth, which shows how high that dimension must be (if only I knew what the Eighth Sphere was!). But it is also a dimension from which most spirits no longer communicate with Earth.
(29) “No Humdrum Heaven, No Hellfire Either, Says Afterlife Cartographer,” April 9, 2008, at at https://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/humdrum1.html.
(30) Loc. cit.