SYNCHRONICITY

SUPER SYNCHRONICITY

I’m currently reading Dr. Gary E. Schwartz’s new book SUPER SYNCHRONICITY, Where Science and Spirit Meet, a book which is, in my opinion, a very important contribution to human thought, science and our understanding of reality in general. In Chapter 5, Dr. Schwartz talks about the synchronous occurrences involving ravens in the life of Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, and in his life just before and after he met Dr. Powell. The story is an excellent example of how what seems like a unique random occurrence can trigger sequences of seemingly unrelated events that have one thing in common …in this case, ravens.

At the first meeting of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences, at Canyon Ranch near Tucson, Arizona in August 2017, before I had read Super Synchronicities, I was seated next to Dr. Powell. She and I had never met before.  It turns out that Dr. Powell and I are both alumni of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland. At this meeting, including the founders of the Academy, there were 12 members seated in a circle. As we went around the circle, introducing ourselves and expressing our interest in the hypothesis that consciousness may be fundamental, or even primary in workings of the universe, the raven connection, detailed in Super Synchronicity, was mentioned. It struck a resonating chord with me immediately.

THE GREAT PYRAMID

In February and March of  2010, I was part of an expedition to the Middle East to film a documentary about the Frankincense Trail, an ancient caravan trail that stretches from what is present-day Oman, at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, to the Holy Land, Syria and Egypt. We filmed in Egypt and Jordan. While filming in the desert south of Cairo in Egypt, we were able to have the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau to ourselves for a few hours one day. After visiting the Sphinx, we walked up the hill to the great Pyramid. And, after taking a few pictures with friends in the expedition, I looked up at the great Pyramid. To my surprise, there were three large black birds circling the apex of the pyramid. They were ravens.

This may not have been too strange, but I had never seen ravens, or any other birds circling like that in any pictures, videos or films of the pyramids, and a very unusual experience that occurred in the “Queen’s Chamber” a short time later, convinced me that seeing those birds was no accident. Were they a warning? Or an important portent? You decide.

A SPINNING BALL OF LIGHT

Shortly after a group of twenty of us had entered the Queen’s Chamber, the lights were turned off. We were told ahead of time that this would be happen. It was done, they said, so that we could experience the complete darkness in the heart of the Great Pyramid. As an experienced spelunker (I had explored hundreds of caves) I knew very well what absolute Darkness was like. Someone began chanting Om, and soon, it sounded as if everyone had joined in. The sound swelled and reverberated sharply from the bare stone walls of the Queen’s Chamber. It was very pleasant. But then, a few seconds before the lights were turned back on, something happened that I will never forget: 

A spinning ball of light came out of the southeast corner of the chamber and struck me on the forehead. I immediately lost all sense of balance, and began to feel the turning of the earth on its axis, the orbiting of the earth around the sun, and a third rotation: that of the galaxy whirling in the blackness of space, and then, sick with extreme vertigo, I lost consciousness”.

Two men who happened to be on either side of me, seeing that I was falling, grabbed me by the arms, preventing me from falling headlong onto the stone floor, and helped me to the entrance of the passageway between the Queen’s Chamber and the Grand Gallery, and one of them went for help. My body was carried out of the Pyramid by our Egyptian guide Fergany, and one of his assistants. When we reached the juncture between the low passageway into the Queen’s Chamber and the Grand Hall leading up to the :”King’s Chamber, we were met by Josef, the youngest son (I think about 7 or 8 years old at the time) of Gary and Mary Young, the organizers of the expedition, who placed his hand on my chest and prayed for my recovery. I threw up, and passed out again,

I was in and out of bodily awareness several times before they deposited my body on the stone just outside the entrance known as the “Robber’s Tunnel” created by force around 820 AD. What happened between periods of sickened consciousness was remarkable: One time, I seemed to be out of my body, far above the Great Pyramid, as if I were seeing it from a point near the peak, hovering in mid-air. But, the bus parking lot had disappeared, and there were trees and green grass all around, and the pyramid was blazing white with a gold capstone! Another time, I was seeing the faces of many people, coming and going, speaking to me in a mixture of languages, interspersed with lights and symbols of many kinds. And, at one point, there were bird symbols, and I remembered seeing the ravens.

Most of the members of the expedition, with the possible exception of the filming crew and the Egyptian guides, were practitioners of traditional and alternative health care modalities, and several of them came to my aid, for which I am eternally grateful. A doctor and a nurse accompanied me back to the hotel, were I had to be transported to my room on a golf cart, because I still could not walk.

THE ANCIENT CITY OF PETRA

The next day, we flew to Amman, Jordan and then traveled by bus to the modern city of Petra, located at the entrance to the narrow canyon leading into the ancient city of Petra, about 150 miles south of Amman. I was able to walk, but each time I closed my eyes, I would experience vertigo and begin to see more faces and hear voices. Fearing that I would become violently ill again, I ate nothing on the trip and struggled all day to keep my eyes open. I told no one what I was experiencing.

One of the men who kept me from falling in the Pyramid, sought me out in Petra and asked me if I had seen the flash of light that occurred just before I passed out. I had told no one about the experience of the light, or anything else, except to explain that I definitely had not suffered from claustrophobia or heat exhaustion, which was what most of the people in the group theorized. I had felt fine before and after entering the Pyramid, and all of the time up until I suddenly passed out. Later, another member of the group also mentioned seeing the ball of light hit me. So, I knew that the experience was not totally subjective.

As a scientist, I had to ask: What was the meaning of this strange experience? There were aspects of the experience that were very hard to explain or understand. Why had this happened to me? Had I traveled back in time several thousand years, and seen the Pyramid as it existed then? Was I seeing the faces and hearing the voices of the people who built the Pyramid? Did anyone else have such an experience?

I did a survey of the expedition members after we got home, and found that while a few had unusual experiences, no one else reported experiencing anything similar to what I went through. While I had been excited about going into the Pyramid, I certainly had not expected anything like that, and would not want to experience it again, because it was very unpleasant. Was it just a freak discharge of static electricity, and I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it a meaningless random event?

WHAT IS RANDOMNESS?

As a physicist and mathematician, I have long known that there is no such thing as a random event. We exist in a mathematically ordered universe, and an event that seems to be random only appears so because we are not seeing the whole picture. Statistical analysis and probability theory are designed to enable us to handle things that appear to be random, in a logical manner, but scientifically, they are no more than theories, and theories that are built on very shaky grounds at that!

But what about things like flipping coins, opening a book without thinking about it and reading a random passage? No, sorry, not random. Just because you are not thinking about what you are doing, doesn’t mean the universe isn’t. What about random number generators? A sequence of numbers produced by a program is not random, because the program was created by someone thinking about how to avoid the value of number n+1 being related to number n or n+2.

What about numbers generated by a natural process like radioactive decay? No, they’re not truly random either, they are effects of a complex process that we can’t readily predict. What about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Is there true randomness at the quantum level? With the discovery of gimmel, the third form of reality, we can answer no, that does not introduce true randomness either.

The current dictionary definition of a random number generator, found online, is instructive: 

“A random number generator is a computational or physical device designed to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that cannot be reasonably predicted better than by a random chance.”

Notice two things: 1) First, a  definition that uses a word that is in what it is supposed to be defining is no definition. 2) Something that is “designed” to generate randomness, cannot produce a truly random sequence. The sequence is non-random by virtue of the fact that it was produced by design.

RANDOMNESS AND FREE WILL

My grandfather used to say: “What is to be will be, if it never comes to pass”! When I was about 9 years old, I asked him what it meant. He said:

“Well, boy, I reckon nothing ever happens by accident. After something happens, however unlikely it might have seemed before it happened, you can always see why it happened after it happens.”

This gave me something to think about for days. But, after the experience in the Pyramid, I eventually came to understand that time is not what we think it is. When identified with a physical body, we have only the moment at hand. The past exists for us only as memories stored in the brain, and the future exists only as imagination. We only have direct access to the present. But this is because the body, with its very limited physical senses, is a super reduction valve. 

When freed of the bodily limitations, and awake in pure consciousness, we can experience past, present and future, all at the same time. 

Do we have free will? Yes, but not as much as we sometimes think we do.

Did I travel back in time to the time of the Pharaohs? No. The nature of time is such that no traveling is necessary; it is all present in the multi-dimensional eternal now.

EDWARD R. CLOSE BACKGROUND

March 2010 on the Frankincense Trail in Petra

Edward R. Close, PhD, PE, DSPE, PDCF 

At an early age, I had experiences that, I found out later, were considered to be very unusual. They included memories of other lives, and what are now called out-of-body experiences, - OBEs. Also considered unusual, by most people, I have vivid memories of events that happened before I was one year old. I did not have to learn languages and mathematics, I remembered them. I was speaking complete sentences at nine months. My grandmother said I was “too smart to live.” - I didn't know it, but apparently I was not your normal average child.

Later in life, a world-renowned authority on intelligence identified me as a “child prodigy” and included me in a study to determine how child prodigies do later in life. But, at the time and place where I grew up, there were no programs for the gifted, and I was allowed to enjoy a reasonably normal childhood. But, different than most of my classmates, by the age of 14, I was engrossed in the works of Albert Einstein and knew that I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. Also at about that age I enrolled in a home study course offered by the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC) and read books on many different metaphysical belief systems. But my strongest interest was science and I went on to earn scholarships and degrees, knowing full well that what I was being taught in the classroom could not explain my OBE experiences.

Raised in a family of mixed backgrounds and beliefs, ranging from devout Judeo-Christians to atheists, I tended to be skeptical of religious claims and was agnostic concerning metaphysical beliefs, a position consistent with what is required of a scientist. But, while applying the scientific method and pursuing a practical career in science and engineering, I could not deny the reality of the experiences that produced verifiable information by means that could not be explained in the scientific paradigm of academic physics, chemistry and biology.

Many people have experiences that defy explanation by the current materialistic scientific paradigm, but most tend to forget, or ignore such experiences. Scientists, especially, tend to deny them and try to explain them away with elaborate rationalizations, because scientists are ostracized from the mainstream scientific community and denied grants and tenure, and even in some cases lose their jobs if they even talk about such experiences. Also, it appears that for most people, strange childhood experiences tend to fade away after puberty, but my “unusual” experiences did not fade away with age. In fact, they continued, and even intensified, prompting me to leave the mainstream and pursue independent research, that eventually led to the publication of three books: “The Book of Atma”, 1979, “Infinite Continuity”, 1990, and “Transcendental Physics”, 1997; books that posit that consciousness, not matter, is primary.

In 2008, I was admitted to the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) based on documented IQ test scores well above the society’s entry level. As I advanced rapidly to the highest earned level in ISPE, Senior Research Fellow, I became acquainted with Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD and we began to work together on a consciousness-based model of reality. This work intensified after we met in person in Amsterdam in February of 2010, resulting in the production of a number of technical papers and our first book together, “Reality Begins with Consciousness”..

As I mentioned above, my experiences challenging conventional scientific explanation have not subsided. In 2010 in the Great Pyramid in Egypt and in the Ancient City of Petra, in Jordan, I experienced a series of OBEs during which a lot of interesting information was downloaded into my brain. Much of it was visual and mathematical, but when it was verbal, it seemed to be a mixture of ancient Egyptian and Aramaic. I find it very interesting that my DNA, analyzed recently, while from mostly European gene pools, contains traces from the Middle East and Northern Africa. 

Update November, 2019
Since writing this, Dr. Vernon Neppe and I were blessed by receiving several awards, including the Whiting Award from the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry for our work, and I was elevated to the rank of Diplomate by the largest vote on record of the membership of ISPE .

Because of my writings and my work with Dr. Neppe, I was invited to be part of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Science (AAPS Global) and attended the first meeting of the founders at Canyon Ranch near Tucson AZ in August, 2017. I was asked to contribute a chapter to the academy's first published volume, Is Consciousness Primary? which was published in 2019. My wife of 43 years ascended to the subtle realm of higher dimensionality December 15, 2018, after writing much of the material that went into our third book together, Secrets of the Sacred Cube, A Cosmic Love Story, published in September, 2019, just before my interviews on New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove.

Links:

Information on how to get Secrets of the Sacred Cube, A Cosmic Love Story

http://www.erclosetphysics.com/2019/10/autographed-copies-of-secrets-of-sacred.html

Is Consciousness Primary? [my contribution is Chapter 4 and Appendix A]:

Http://www.Amazon.com Search for “Is Consciousness Primary?”

New Thinking Allowed ERC Interview No. 1: The Delayed-Choice Double-Slit Experiment Scheduled for release October 11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXqRnad00dI&t=1161s

New Thinking Allowed ERC Interview No. 2: The Constancy of the Speed of Light 

Scheduled for release October 21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHliZ8ezu1s

New Thinking Allowed ERC Interview No. 3: Spiritual Practice and Scientific Inquiry 

Scheduled for release November 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYAkX4-LsR8

New Thinking Allowed ERC Interview No. 4: The Mysterious Component of Reality 

Scheduled for release November 11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWN0rM88bUg&list=UUFk448YbGITLnzplK7jwNcw

Links to all six of my interviews with Dr. Mishlove are posted on this blog under New Thinking Allowed.

ER Close, November 30, 2019

THE GOD MATRIX

Dr. Vernon Neppe and I have been working together for nearly seven years to develop a comprehensive scientific paradigm that will serve as the basis for the scientific exploration of every legitimate type of human experience, both physical and spiritual, now excluded from serious study by the current materialistic paradigm. We are publishing most of our findings in peer-reviewed papers published in professional journals under the heading of the Triadic Dimensional Distinction Vortical Paradigm (TDVP) with bylines of either Neppe and Close or Close and Neppe. Those papers and articles are written for scientists, mathematicians and philosophers with careful adherence to professional standards, and they contain many technical details not readily understood by readers without considerable scientific and technical training.

On this blog, on the other hand, I am attempting to present much of the same material in an easier to understand format. That means that most of the math, and technical jargon are left out, and it also means that I have more freedom to include personal observations and experiences. In this venue, I can include more details that would be considered too subjective by peer reviewers and the editors of professional journals to get published. Examples include early life experiences like that briefly described in the post entitled “My Story - The Vision” and the personal OBEs I experienced in the Great Pyramid, and in the ancient city of Petra, described in the post entitled “Egypt Trip Out-of-Body Experiences”.

Many brilliant men and women of the recent and distant past have known that eventually the quests for knowledge of the nature of physical reality and the nature of spiritual reality would have to be integrated into a single search for truth. I believe the time for that integration is NOW. We are at the point in human history where it is critical that this integration must be accomplished. Without it, humankind may self-destruct. The loss of meaning and purpose in science due to equating objectivity with materialism has filtered down to the general populace and is responsible for much of the increase in crime and violence in the civilized world. It is high time to get science out of the dark ages and dead end of materialism! Today, more and more people are waking up to this danger. And an increasing number believe that there should be no conflict between real science and real spirituality.

The concepts of “gimmel” and “TRUE units” presented here are of great importance to the future of science and human civilization because of their inescapable implication: They make it clear that the physical universe as we know it through the current scientific paradigm is just a small part of a much larger physical and spiritual reality that proceeds under natural law. They reveal the existence of a primary form of consciousness that has existed from the beginning of space and time as the intelligent organizer of meaningful pattern and order. I am presenting the Paradigm of Conscious Reality that we’re metaphorically referring to as the “God Matrix” here in an effort to promote the realization in as many people as possible that the purpose of life on this planet and across the multi-dimensional universe is to grow in the understanding of the truth of Primary Consciousness. We are calling the paradigm that is revealed by gimmel and TRUE analysis the God Matrix because it proves that a pervasive primary form of consciousness had to exist before the first atom of the physical universe could form from any big-bang-like origin event. We will explain how a mass-less, energy-less third substance (gimmel), impacts physical reality as an extended form of consciousness, and influences our very existence and everything in the cosmos, from the tiniest subatomic particle to the largest cosmological system.

These concepts, and the comprehensive paradigm shift we call TDVP, embody a new, more consistent way of understanding reality that encompasses and integrates the fundamental ideas of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Gimmel and TRUE units are fresh new ideas that dispel what mainstream physicists have called the ‘weirdness’ of quantum physics. They are carefully derived by logically analyzing what we know about mathematical physics and the role of Primary Consciousness and human consciousness in creating and sustaining the reality we experience.

What the God Matrix does is re-connect science with its metaphysical roots and re-unite science and spirituality, two approaches to truth that never should have been separated. TDVP includes three new, more comprehensive mathematical/logical systems called the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions, Dimensional Extrapolation, and the Consciousness Conveyance Equations. Their application to known laws of nature have resulted in the discovery of the nine dimensions of reality and gimmel and TRUE analysis, which have produced answers to conundrums that have puzzles materialistic science for decades. The God Matrix is the beginning-less, end-less source of both physical and spiritual reality.

EGYPT TRIP OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES

OBJECTIVITY AND OBEs EGYPT 2010

I have edited my last post on the existence of consciousness outside the physical body. I have removed the brief descriptions of personal experiences and promised to write more about them later. My partner in life, my sweetheart Jacqui, who supports me in everything I do, and, perhaps even more importantly, is a very sharp editor and critic of everything I write, pointed out that the mention in the post of personal experiences as part of proof that consciousness can and does exist outside of living bodies was too superficial. She suggested that, even though I mentioned that I had verified of some of the information obtained, some readers, especially scientists, would dismiss personal experiences as subjective, and thus of no scientific value. Realizing that her criticism is valid, I will expand on the subject of objectivity in relation to personal experiences in this post.

In the previous post, I characterized science as the effort to understand reality beyond what is revealed by the physical sense organs, by developing equipment like telescopes and microscopes, to extend the range of the physical senses. I observed that for the past two or three centuries, science in general, and physics in particular, has been primarily the study of the ‘out-there’, the ‘other-than-self’.

Before quantum experiments revealed - as physicist John Wheeler (a student of Einstein’s) put it: “There is a strange sense in which this is a participatory universe”, the objects of study were considered to be totally separate from the consciousness of the observer. In spite of this ‘quantum weirdness’ suggested by experiments in quantum mechanics, most mainstream physicists still consider the separation of the observer and the observed to be the definition of objectivity. The brain, capable of constructing images representing out-there reality from incoming streams of energy, is also capable of constructing images by mixing and altering remembered images in ways that may or may not be representative of reality. These images are called imagination.

In trying to understand the nature of reality, care must be taken to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Everyone, the scientist included, has an internal conceptual working model of reality of his or her own, built up from experience and memory. To some extent, depending on how grounded in reality our individual models are, we each live in a world of our own. But, if we are trying to build an accurate scientific model of reality, a model capable of predicting real events, it is desirable to have as complete a knowledge of reality, as possible. However, no physical brain has infinite capacity, so we generally fall short of such certainty, and indeed, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Gӧdel’s incompleteness theorems tell us that our knowledge of reality will always be uncertain and incomplete to some extent. It is the responsibility of science to push the boundaries of knowledge as far as possible, while being as objective as possible. I pointed out in my book “Transcendental Physics” first published in 1997, that objectivity needs to be redefined. In addition to outer objectivity, we need to define the requirements of an ‘inner’ objectivity that can be used to evaluate personal experiences. This is critically important in the study of quantum phenomena and consciousness.

Out-of-body (OBE) and near-death (NDE) experiences, if real, become powerful evidence that the belief that consciousness arises solely as an epiphenomenal function of the physical brain is wrong, and that the current scientific understanding of consciousness is, at best, very incomplete. Recognition of this incompleteness opens the door to the consideration that consciousness may exist in forms currently unknown or unrecognized by mainstream science.

So how do we define objectivity in a way that allows us to examine profoundly personal experiences like the trance states of religious mystics, and the OBEs and NDEs experienced by ordinary people, to determine whether or not they are real? Until a few serious studies of OBEs and NDEs began to appear, most people having such experiences refrained from discussing them for fear of being branded a liar or a crazy, psychotic person. Even now, many scientists believe NDEs are hallucinations produced by the brain when a person believes he or she is dying, in a desperate effort to cling to life, and they consider other OBEs reported by yogis, shamans and religious mystics as dreams, hallucinations, or self-indulgent fantasies.

If you are an individual who has had, or thinks you have had real experiences of being consciously aware out of your physical body, I believe it is important that you try to develop reliable inner objectivity criteria to avoid getting lost in imagination and fantasy. This may even be crucial to maintaining sanity. In the previous post, I suggested that there are at least three types of OBE experiences:

1.  Involuntary, under life-threatening or very stressful circumstances

2.  Spontaneous, under normal relaxed conditions

3.  Intentional, i.e. invoked by drugs, specific methods or rituals, e.g., religious, yogic, shamanistic, or other mystical practices

  

According to many people who believe they have OBEs, i.e. real excursions of consciousness outside the body, they may be distinguished from dreams, hallucinations and fantasies in a combination of several ways: They may exhibit brighter and more vivid colors than the images of everyday surroundings rendered by the physical senses, they are generally reported to be more coherent than most dreams, and sometimes the experience changes the OBEer’s view of reality and life in general. But, even if you believe you have OBEs, and can establish inner-objectivity criteria of your own that convince you that they are real, science must consider them to be subjective if no one else witnessed them. And, as subjective experiences, they have no scientific value. If, however, they produce phenomena observed by others, or information that is confirmed, or repeatable, measurable results under controlled conditions, they must be accepted as having scientific value just like any observations with the same level of control and confirmation.

A number of books, at least 30 or 40, have been written by people claiming life-altering OBE experiences, ranging from seeing deceased loved ones to having guided tours of the universe! I am not going to discuss or attempt to evaluate any of these here. My intent is simply to present evidence that I am personally aware of through direct investigation and experience.

In general, most scientists, especially physicists, have spent their lives investigating ‘out-there’, objective reality, and avoiding discussing any ‘inner’, subjective experiences like the plague, because even suggesting that such experiences are real can destroy careers. I have personally known two physicists who were brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to investigate paranormal phenomena during their academic careers, and they were ostracized by the scientific community for their efforts. Scientists who have successfully studied and reported on paranormal phenomena as part of their careers are most often trained in psychology, sociology or anthropology, not the so-called ‘hard sciences’.

During my lifetime, the mainstream scientific paradigm has become increasingly materialistic, making any serious attempt to raise the study of OBE phenomena to a credible science more and more difficult. Evidence of the direct involvement of consciousness in quantum and relativistic experiments is labeled as “weird’ by mainstream scientists. The handful of physicists who have followed up on such evidence are considered as misguided, and their results are viewed as suspect, and they have great difficulty in getting their work published if they use words like ‘non-physical’ extra-sensory, psychic, or paranormal. And the words spirit and God are strictly taboo.  

I believe that in spite of the institutionalized political-correctness barriers to scientific exploration of OBEs, the truth will eventually emerge, and I am hopeful that this presentation will contribute to that goal. It is in that spirit that I present the following account of a personal experience.

In 2010 I was in Egypt with a Young Living Essential Oils group to participate in the filming of a documentary about frankincense. A few minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, February 27^th, I hiked up the hill from the Sphinx to the Museum housing Khufu’s Solar Boat, the boat said to be built for the purpose of carrying the Pharaoh Khufu to the afterlife. This is a large cedar-wood boat constructed at or before the time of Khufu’s death in 2566 BC, at least 4576 years ago. Unfortunately, they were closing the museum as we arrived and would not let us enter. But we had special permission to enter the Great Pyramid, so we proceeded to the entrance on the north side of the pyramid.

I was feeling great, and in good spirits as we prepared to enter the Great Pyramid. I had no feeling of expectancy, and was fully in the moment, inspecting the huge stone blocks of the pyramid, noticing what appeared to be two or three large black birds flying around the apex of the Great Pyramid, and enjoying the camaraderie of the group. We entered the pyramid through a rough-walled tunnel, known as the Robber’s Tunnel, blasted through the ancient masonry about 820 AD. I remember thinking as we entered that it was a shame that the Great Pyramid had been violated in this way.

I was in a group of about twenty-five people entering the Pyramid. Another group of about the same size, had gone up the Grand Gallery to the King’s Chamber ahead of us. Our group took the lower, nearly horizontal passage to the Queen’s Chamber. The passage was a little over three feet high, with a step down near the end. When I entered the chamber, it was nearly filled by the group, so I crossed the room and stood in the corner opposite the entryway. Shortly after the lights went out, someone started chanting “OM”, and soon it sounded as if everyone had joined in. The effect was very peaceful and uplifting. It was pitch black and I think I had my eyes closed most of the time, but a few seconds before the lights came back on, I looked up to see a ball of light coming straight at me from a point near the ceiling in the opposite side of the chamber. The ball of light was white, about the size of volleyball, with five smaller lights spinning around it.

The ball of light struck me on the forehead, but there was no feeling of impact. Instead, I immediately experienced extreme vertigo. It was as if I could feel the spinning of the Earth on its axis, rushing through space in a spiral around the Sun, as the Sun moves through the Milky-Way Galaxy, and the Galaxy spins its way through the universe. There was no up or down, only the sensation of an accelerating whirling motion. I remember thinking: “I can’t stand up!” and someone on either side of me grabbed my arms to keep me from falling to the stone floor. We struggled to the low passageway, and about halfway along it, I became violently ill, threw up and left the body.

I had the sensation of moving in and out my body several times, as our tour guide and one of his men literally carried me out of the Pyramid. I remember thanking them in Arabic. They placed my body on the stone blocks just outside the “Robber’s Entrance” and several Young Living healers began working on me. I threw up several more times. What was unusual about this, was what happened between the episodes of violent regurgitation.

When the ball of light struck me and the world went spinning and spiraling out of control, I began to see lights, hear sounds and see symbols and faces. When the spinning got too intense to bear, I left the body. While out of the body, I felt no spinning, no vertigo, and the lights, sounds, symbols and faces became clearer. When I turned back toward my body, I began to experience extreme vertigo again, increasing to the point that I was forced to throw up again. Each time I threw up, I was propelled out of the body again. While out of the body, I experienced a series of vivid visions which I described in writing as soon as I was able, trying to record the experience as clearly as I could. What follows here is a copy of some of what I wrote:

The first images were of an infant being dipped into the clear groundwater of a well in the Lower Chamber of the pyramid.  Next came a stream of faces, laughing, shouting torrents of words, neither English nor Arabic. Then symbols, long scrolls of hieroglyphs, containing the sun, hawks or eagles with spread wings, small birds, and strangely enough, snails, scenes of someone teaching, someone learning, images of arrows, thin wooden shafts with sharp metal points, chariot wheels, bright sunny days, forays into the countryside that was surprisingly lush and green, much more humid and tropical than today’s Egypt. Among the voices, I heard the words “amun”, “aten-ka”, and “k-met”, over and over.

After this vision, I returned to the body, recognized that I was lying on the stone just outside the “Robber’s Entrance” with several people, including a nurse and a doctor, working over me.  I was drenched with sweat. They poured water on me and tried to get me to drink water and electrolytes. I felt that I was in good hands and that everything would be OK. But my head began to spin again, and I threw up violently and left the body again.

This time, I saw a procession to the King’s Chamber, which I only perceived dimly. At the end of the ceremony, I suddenly saw the Great Pyramid from above. The first thing that struck me was that there were no buses in the parking area. Then I saw that the Pyramid was covered with smooth white stone shining in the sun. When I opened my eyes again, the world was still spinning. An Austrian friend, a member of the group, handed me some dried Japanese seaweed which I managed to eat. It seemed to help.

I vaguely remember being carried down the side of the Pyramid and across the flat area to the bus. Two members of the Young Living entourage, the doctor and the nurse, accompanied me from the Pyramid to my room in the Cascade Hotel. Their attention and support were very much appreciated. During the bus ride to the hotel, every time I closed my eyes, I felt increasing vertigo and saw a stream of faces and symbols. At the hotel, they helped me into a golf-cart and whisked me to my room, where they deposited me on the bed. I still could not stand or walk on my own.

The next day I felt fine. I woke at 5:30 am, skipped breakfast and packed for the trip from Cairo to Amman Jordan. During the entire day, however, I ate nothing and every time I closed my eyes, I began to see the faces and symbols again. At first, I thought that I might be able to understand what had happened to me by focusing on the faces and symbols. However, when I tried to do that, the vertigo began to return, threatening to cause the violent reaction I did not care to experience on the bus or plane! I was careful to keep my eyes open the rest of the trip to Jordan and the rest of the day! By the end of the day, I had decided that I had probably experienced a hallucination. I had eaten some seafood in a restaurant in Giza about two or three hours before we went into the pyramid. Perhaps the whole experience was brought on by tainted food and the closed quarters of the Queen’s Chamber.

Every time I threw up and left the body I experienced unusual sights and sounds. The episodes described here are only two of five experienced in Giza, and I have not included an additional episode experienced in Petra the next day. I wrote all of them down after returning home, and plan to include them in my autobiography, tentatively titled “The Search for Certainty”.

In the hotel in Petra, the two friends who had grabbed me by the arms to keep me from falling head first onto the stone floor in the Queen’s chamber, asked how I was feeling. I felt fine, but a shock went through me when one of them asked: “Did you see that light?” Both of them had seen the same ball of light I saw! It turned out that several others had seen it also. That, in my opinion, changes everything.

Was this the experience of memories of a past life in Egypt? Or had I somehow picked up remnant energies lingering in the stone of the ancient structure? Could it have been “ancestral” memory in my DNA triggered by being physically inside the pyramid? If so, why me? It certainly wasn’t something I wanted. I was violently ill, and none of it was a pleasant experience. For this reason, I classify it as an involuntary OBE, type 1 of the 3 types listed above. Could it still have been a hallucination? Imagination? The fact that the flash of light was seen by others, proves that at least that part of it was real. As a scientist, however, I have to consider all logical explanations. I am inclined to think, based on my memory of the experience, that it was a real OBE, but I have no indisputable scientific evidence to prove that; so the reader may draw his or her own conclusions.

This is by no means the only experience I have had suggesting the reality of consciousness outside the physical body. I have had numerous experiences from the time I was a small child up until the present time that, especially when considered together, strongly suggest that there are real OBEs. I have written about several of them, published some of them, and may publish an analysis of them all at some point. I have been hesitant to openly reveal such experiences as long as I wish to be respected as a scientist, for reasons noted above. I am doing so now only because I think it is time for science to drop its materialistic philosophical bias and stop rejecting evidence of a reality that is far greater than matter and energy interacting in space and time.

The new scientific paradigm introduced by Neppe and Close is a comprehensive paradigm that includes a mathematical treatment of consciousness as part of a multi-dimensional model of our self-referential, participatory, infinite universe. Unfortunately, even after we have published a number of peer-reviewed books and papers with solid mathematics and empirical evidence, there have been a few (apparently threatened and angered by new ideas that are counter to their own) who have denounced our work. Fortunately, is has only been a few.

Perhaps, we have finally learned from the history of modern science, with the persecution of early scientists like Pythagoras, Copernicus and Galileo, that it is wrong, not to mention completely unscientific, to ignore data and information simply because it doesn’t fit one’s belief system and/or the current paradigm. If a paradigm isn’t open to potential falsification, it isn’t actually science at all, it is a belief system.

We look forward to a new era of the new science of TDVP, objectively investigating both the physical part and the pervasive non-physical part of the universe, as well as the mathematics of their interaction. It appears that the part of reality that science has been willing to investigate so far, is only the tip of the iceberg of reality.