Spontaneous transcendental awakenings have been reported throughout history (75). The Canadian physician Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., published a book in 1901, titled "Cosmic Consciousness" (76). In it he describes elevated states of mind and brings fifty examples of specific personalities. Bucke assumed that humankind is at the verge of developing a new kind of consciousness, because he observed an increasing rate of occurrences. The same thought was expressed by W.T. Stace (77). This is also supported by the "New Age" trend, that is driven by individual spontaneous spiritual or psychological transformations (78). Marilyn Ferguson describes the increasing trend towards enlightening transformation and lists nineteen "intentional triggers" in her book "The Aquarian Conspiracy" (79).

Throughout the discussions in this paper, well known, long standing philosophical concepts come to mind. One is compelled to identify the All-Entity concept with "pantheism", the doctrine that the divine is all-pervasive. This writer feels uncomfortable with this term, because any theism, pan- or otherwise, tends to have a certain limiting connotation. The system described herein is neither theistic nor atheistic. All-Entity simply IS, and it encompasses everything else that IS. Any description of reality fails to convey true direct experience. This applies also to this paper. However there is an intuitive knowledge that goes with it and existing philosophical terms tend to divert attention from this knowledge. They have attained a reality of their own in the human psyche, and name recognition of them may be confused with understanding the underlying reality. The whole is basically simple, as any whole is, being only a single one. So this paper will use philosophical terms very sparingly, asking experts to be forgiving.

The Nature of Time

As already stated, our concept of time does not correspond to higher reality. Time is an aspect of 4-D space-time (Sect. 2). Following our holistic logic: past, present, and future are parts of space-time. They exist in it simultaneously (HP5). Past, present, and future are present in space-time, now and at any other moment of our time (HP9). We experience sequentially in our time what exists actually simultaneously in transcendent reality. It is like the light spot moving on the TV screen, going through the picture one point at a time, because the TV transmission system cannot handle all points simultaneously. Or it is like driving in a car through a landscape. At any one moment we experience the immediate environment around the car as the present event. We do not see the stretch that we have already travelled, or the one before us. Yet the entire route exists simultaneously, in parallel, if seen from above. In fact, the landscape does not only exist behind and in front of us, but stretches out to all sides. Our decisions are like turns that we take at intersections, choosing a particular future course of events out of many possible ones. Instead of a landscape with features such as trees, houses, etc., the space-time landscape is composed of probable events, the closest ones being most probable.

This concept of space-time is emerging from modern science. John Gribbin describes in his book the hypothesis that many worlds exist in parallel to, and intersect with ours, with options to branch out (80). Gribbin also describes the work of Feynmann, who showed mathematically that subatomic particles can travel backward in time (81). "Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously" (82). Capra quotes Lama Govinda about Buddhist meditation experience: "In this space- experience the temporal sequence is converted into simultaneous coexistence, the side-by-side existence of things . becomes a living continuum in which time and space are integrated" (83). David Bohm believes that time is enfolded in the whole, that time is an aspect of the implicate order (84) (Sect.2). Professor Hawking talks about "imaginary time" in his book "A Brief History of Time", with a well defined mathematical meaning. He suggests "that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations" (85).

The assumption of an M-D landscape that holds all events, including the ones that in our view were in the past, would explain why scientists cannot find where in the brain memories are stored. They are most likely not stored in the brain, instead the brain has the function of reading information that exists in a timeless M-D environment. Photographic memory can be understood that way, also the reports that people with near death experiences (NDE's) see their entire lives in an instant. This understanding of space-time may explain the character of dreams pursuing a psychological tale with utter disregard of space and time. Holistic time and space could perhaps also explain clairvoyance, precognition, and readings of past reincarnations (86).

Holistic logic tells us also that time has no beginning and end. The limitations that we perceive in our order do not exist in higher dimensional orders. A beginning of time implies a separation from non-time. Separations do not exist at the level of a whole (HP5). Physicists postulate that space-time runs back into itself in 4-D space, like the surface of our earth in 3-D space (87). Parts tend to be symbolic for the whole they represent, because the whole is immanent in the parts. The celestial bodies are likely to be 3-D symbols of the M-D reality whence they come. If there is no beginning and end of time, then our notion of a beginning of time with a "Big Bang" must represent a distorted view of true reality, caused by our "prejudice" that events occur sequentially in time, while in the actual and more fundamental M-D reality everything exists simultaneously in parallel. We have great difficulty visualizing this, but our common sense cannot be trusted in such matters. In this writer's opinion, the real "Big-Bang" is All-Entity, and our 3-D physical world is constantly being created out of the timeless M-D environment. In fact, we are the ones that create it. It is our limited view of the multidimensional reality that carves our aspect out of it. We are the ones that settle for a subset of the total. Without us, that narrowing-down to our reality would not exist. Of course the same goes for cats, dogs, fleas, etc., with their own worlds.

The Human Psyche

We can draw also some interesting conclusions about our own psyche. As we have already seen, it includes all source entities, including humankind-entity and All-Entity, with untold M-D layers in between (MHP4). They are all immanent in us. We must assume that there are intermediate entities between us and the humankind-entity, given the different races, nationalities and character types that we observe. We can draw a simplified map of the human psyche that corresponds to holistic thinking (Fig.5). We shall bypass psychological definitions, such as id, ego, and superego for the reason given for philosophical terms (All-Entity, last paragraph). Figure 5 depicts the view from our own, our sub-entity's position, with all higher entities in series according to MHP6. From All-Entity's point of view, all these entities appear in parallel (MHP5).

We call the M-D entity of our body and mind the "self". According to holistic reasoning, our self is in turn an aspect of a more complex entity of an even higher order. We shall call this next higher entity our "soul", disregarding existing meanings implied by this word. The soul must have other aspects besides the self that we identify with. We may call these the "multiple selves". The concept of multiple selves is not alien to psychologists. H. Kohurt, for instance, discussed them in his paper "The Search for the Self", as reported by Louis Zinkin (88)(89).

The Soul is immanent in each of the multiple selves as it is in ours (HP9). Thus each self refers to it as "my soul", although the soul includes more selves than one (MHP8). Our soul is within our self, and our self is in our mind and body. This means of course that our Soul is immanent in our mind and body. The soul in turn is a part of an even higher order entity unknown to us. It in turn is part or subpart of the humankind-entity. This proceeds through entities of higher and higher order, through earth-entity all the way up to All-Entity. All are immanent in "us", in our bodies, minds, our Selves, and our Souls. If we could proceed in our consciousness to peel off the outer layers of us, one by one, starting with our body, we would recognize higher and higher entities as our "real I", eventually experiencing All-Entity as our ultimate true identity. In this sense, and with the appropriate state of mind, it is no blasphemy to state that "I am God". This is exactly the path to enlightenment taught by Yoga, Buddhism, and other mystic philosophies. They all seek the awakening to one's innermost reality, which turns out to be the holistic reality of the whole universe. The ancient scriptures of Hinduism, for instance, the Vedas, call the innermost personal reality "Atman", and the ultimate reality of the universe "Brahman". The wisdom to be understood and to be experienced is that Atman and Brahman are one and the same (90)(91)(92)(93).

The described concept of the human psyche provides also an explanation why long distance runners get their "second wind", "third wind", etc., until they experience a psychic "high". They draw on deeper and deeper immanent reserves, thus experiencing higher levels of their psyche. For the same reason, frightening experiences can have an exhilarating effect.

The soul dwells in an environment where our limited notions of space and time do not exist. For the soul, its constituent selves exist all simultaneously. However to our mind, time differences do exist, and the selves of the same soul appear in different time periods of human history. This has been interpreted as reincarnation, however it is not a matter of the soul jumping from body to body. It is the creative expression of life by the soul into many different dimensions, so that it can grow through experiencing life in a multifaceted way far beyond the scope of a single self. What we perceive as one particular incarnation of our soul is one specific aspect of natural, creative unfoldment into its constituent parts. Unfoldment occurs at any level, be it the spreading of a flower's petals, of a tree's branches, different races, or different selves of a soul. It is only our limited common sense, our distorted sense of space-time, that prevents us from seeing the true greatness of our souls as they unfold their existence into seemingly separate selves, as any holon does. Our souls do not need to be saved. They are securely imbedded in the folds of All-Entity, as are our selves. Where time does not exist, death cannot be.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, has performed thousands of scientifically documented case studies of apparent reincarnation. At least five volumes with case histories have been published by the Virginia University Press (94). The university's decision to publish this "controversial" material was based on Dr. Stevenson's impeccable professional credibility and on an independent in-depth check into the scientific viability of his studies. A summary of Dr. Stevenson's studies is given in a book titled: "Reincarnation", authored by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams (95). Dr. Stevenson focussed his studies on children, because he observed that the reincarnational recall tends to fade after a certain age. Also, children's spontaneous recalls are less suspect because they are less influenced by prior knowledge. Furthermore, children's stories can often be more easily verified, because witnesses of their former lives may still be alive. According to Cranston and Williams, for each case investigated Dr. Stevenson and his staff taped interviews with an average of 25 people. They checked out documents, letters, medical records, etc., and compared character traits between the child and its claimed former personality. In about 200 cases the child could point to a birthmark where it claimed to have been wounded or killed, and the position of the wound could be verified through witnesses or records of these events. For instance one boy claimed that he was formerly a Turkish bandit who took his life when he was cornered by authorities. He shot himself from below through his jaw. The boy had a huge mark there, and hair was missing on his scalp where the bullet supposedly had emerged in his former life. A witness of the shooting was still alive and verified these details. Other cases involved people who could fluently speak foreign languages, although they had never learned them in this life.

It is appropriate at this point to redefine the term "mind". We distinguish here between "conscious mind" and "unconscious mind" and we shall define as "unconscious mind" all the mind-substance in our psyche, up to All-Entity. There are really no divisions. In any multiple holon there are no divisions between its order levels. The source-entities and the sub-entities at all levels are one and the same, only seen from different points of view (HP6&MHP1). The word "psyche" means then the total of conscious and unconscious mind.

Holistic thinking leads to the belief in mind over matter. According to HP10, a change in any part is associated with changes in the whole and the other parts. Therefore, conscious thoughts change the self and through it the body. Any intense and persistent thought pattern does affect the body, positively or negatively, depending on the type of thoughts. Depending on how strong and persistent the thought patterns are, they affect deeper or shallower layers of the psyche, causing more or less permanent effects on the body.

Therefore the prevailing medical practice of repairing the body as one would a complex machine appears inappropriate. Instead the growing trend of a holistic approach to medicine addresses the whole personality and is likely to be more effective and less costly in the long run. Of course a change in the body also affects our mind, as we all experience when we are sick. The effect in that direction usually happens much faster. Probably this is because our mind is much more flexible than our body, the former being less locked into space and time than the latter. Thus it takes the body longer to change in response to a new blueprint from the inner self, as seen in our time perception.

So far we have viewed the M-D hierarchy like the organization of a corporation, where managers have an open door policy to all people working for him or her, down to the lowest rank. However, as everybody knows who has participated in corporate life, organization diagrams are crude abstractions of how an organization really functions. In actuality, there is a multitude of cross-communications and informal working relationships. So it is with the M-D hierarchy. Different levels are not distinctly separated, even seen from below, because consciousnesses usually grow across them gradually. Parallel entities melt together to form partial holistic unions, others disintegrate. Furthermore, parts belong to more than one whole, as individuals belong simultaneously to a family, a work organization, a church, a club, and (God forbid) to several partners. While this complicates the issues, the holon principles still apply to whatever situation one considers. Also remember that the hierarchical organization appears rigid only when viewed from the bottom up, while from the top down everything is one harmonious, homogeneous evolving union (HP6).

Now, is the reader confused about who he or she really is, the daily-life-person, the self, the soul, or the entire string to All-Entity? And how do the multiple selves relate to us? The answer can be obtained again with our trusty crystal model. Pointing to one of its planes one can ask whether this is a plane or whether it is the whole crystal. It depends on our point of view (HP6). The more we live from our heart, the deeper we feel the joyful union with the rest of the world, the more we identify with our higher source-entities (MHP7). Each individual sets his or her own place by the attitude towards life, by the scope of mind. The other selves are not separate, competing entities, viewed from the soul (HP6). Any action, any thought of our self affects our other selves and vice versa, whether one is aware of them or not (HP10). It is unconscious teamwork across space and time.

Learning to open up to and to identify with our inner self and our soul opens the access to their greater power, potential, and harmony. This is why deep muscle relaxation exercises used by psychologists for anxiety desensitization are so helpful. One puts the conflicting currents of daily life on hold and allows the soul to do its job: to implement peace and harmony. Conflicts are seen at this level with a detached, sovereign, and much more knowledgeable point of view. With some practice, one can sense answers and suggestions from there. The prerequisite is, of course, that one accepts the existence of M-D reality to begin with. This is also the reason why obsessive-compulsive behavior, such as alcoholism, can be much more effectively cured if the treatment involves a spiritual approach. Inner conflicts are already resolved at a deeper level within us, there being a harmonious whole of opposing parts. It's a matter of opening up to it.

M-D reality is called "spiritual", but this term has connotations for many people that do not well reflect the true nature of M-D reality. Many believe that the spiritual world lies beyond our world, unreal compared with ours, separated from us, and only to be reached after death. Holistic knowledge tells us instead that transcendent existence is more real than physical reality. Spiritual and physical reality are one and the same, seen from different points of view. We are living in the spiritual M-D world right now, always, dead or alive. It is better to think in terms of laws of nature that permeate all reality. Only with this understanding shall we use the term spiritual here, synonymously with M-D reality.

Multiple Worlds

A holistic model of the multidimensional universe is not complete without addressing the utter immensity, the mindboggling and seemingly hopeless vastness and complexity of it all. If we think that we cannot grasp our physical cosmos with its myriad galaxies and endless space, wait till you hear the rest. Imagine that the cells in your body form a society of living individuals, like a microscopic human society. You are a single cell and you try to understand all of reality. Through some communication you may have a vague idea of the organ in which you dwell. However, to understand the whole body is impossible. This corresponds roughly to our understanding of the physical cosmos. Now realize that your scientists have not even discovered yet that there is a mind associated with the body, your cosmos. Worse yet, there are other body-cosmoses with minds in addition to yours, billions of them. And these live on one relatively insignificant planet, with the entire universe still beyond, with untold galaxies. This may be an apt description of our situation. It demonstrates also why we must not reject the following considerations as unrealistic. What is possible for one holon, the cell, is possible for any holon, including ours. If such conclusion is logical, our common sense is not qualified to reject it just because it is so overwhelming.

Let us revisit our 2Ds. Our crystal has a number of planes with different orientations in 3-D space. The 2Ds of any one plane cannot perceive any of the other planes, because they lack a sense for a third dimension. The crystal in our example is a rather simple structure. Potentially, there can be an unlimited number of 2-D aspects of the same 3-D object. Think of a tree. One can take virtually an unlimited number of different (2-D) photos of it. Thus one can create an unlimited number of 2-D aspect/parts of one 3-D whole (HP2). As far as analogies go, it is not possible to find one that explains all holistic situations simultaneously. One must combine mentally the aspect-parts vs. whole relationship of the crystal (HP1-13) with the aspects of the tree. In other words, for an accurate analogy, the photos would have to be organically integrated with the tree (HP6).

So there are potentially an infinite number of parts in the holon of any entity, and there are potentially an infinite number of worlds in the holon of any higher order world. Inhabitants of a lower order world do not perceive the fellow-worlds of the same order, as the 2Ds in one crystal plane don't see the other planes. In the same manner, we do not perceive the other 3-D worlds. They are differently oriented in 4-D space. Higher order M-D worlds are even much more diversified. The 4-D world to which we and other worlds belong is itself only one of many. There are potentially a limitless number of 4-D worlds, each one having a limitless number of 3-D worlds, and so on up the M-D hierarchy. All-Entity has an infinite number of sub-entity worlds at all order levels, spreading out into more and more diversification at lower orders.

Another analogy may help to visualize this situation. As mentioned in Section 3, white light contains a range of colors. It is possible to choose different colors from pure white light, corresponding to the infinite number of electromagnetic wave frequencies that comprise white light. So in the world of colors, the single whole, white, potentially spawns an infinite number of "color worlds". This concept applies to every holon on all M-D order levels.

The multiple world concept is not just an unrealistic play with thoughts. Quantum physicists are beginning to believe that this is a correct interpretation of their quantum mathematics. The subject was first seriously addressed in 1950 by Hugh Everett who explored the concept mathematically (96)(97)(98). It appears that multiple worlds are just as real as ours, even though they are invisible to us. As John Gribbin says: "It sounds like science fiction, but it goes far deeper than any science fiction, and it is based on impeccable mathematical equations . . ."(99). The only reason why some physicists have difficulty to accept this is that it goes against their common sense.

We have so much trouble to accept the immensity of multiple worlds because we imagine them as separate. In reality, they are aspects of one whole. In M-D reality there are ultimately no separate entities, there is only one single All-Entity. Our common sense may not be able to cope with the vastness of the M-D universe, but the consoling thought is that our inner psyche can do so. We can trust that it can deal with this because in its deepest immanence it is identical with All-Entity. We can compare this with an individual within a nation. As a single person we could feel hopelessly insignificant, given the total population of the country. Yet, with some spirit of patriotism it can be even uplifting to be part of a great nation. We can adopt a similar attitude towards the entire universe and feel very good about it.

Holistic logic provides some insight into the creation of the worlds, ours and others. The camera in our tree analogy stands for a consciousness that perceives a 2-D aspect of the 3-D whole. It is the act of taking the picture, of paying attention to an aspect, which makes that aspect real as a 2-D entity. In a holon, the potential aspects of the whole become real in the lower order because some consciousness perceives them. If nobody looks at a particular aspect of a 3-D object, that aspect does not exist as a 2-D entity. By the same token, if nobody looks at a 3-D aspect of a 4-D object, that aspect does not exist as an entity in our 3-D world. It is the restricted consciousness that creates entities at its order level out of the unlimited aspects of the transcendent whole. As John Gribbin says: "nothing is real unless we look at it" (100). This is true for the reality that we experience, and we also must assume that it is true for other realities that we don't perceive ourselves. The different realities are "created" by their inhabitants because they look at different aspects of the same transcendent whole. The term "real" means here what is real for us, real in our order. The transcendent whole has always been and still is real, more profoundly real in its own domain (HP7). The multiple world idea is really analog to multiple selves. Holons have the same structure throughout the universe (HP12). We may assume that our multiple selves live in different multiple worlds, not just in different time periods.

The multiple-world view of holistic thinking means that we constantly pick our own reality from an unlimited reservoir of existing probabilities that are already real in the multidimensional environment. Our own reality depends on how we approach the greater, invisible reality around and within us, which aspects we focus on, individually and as a society. It is as if we all wear tinted glasses, each person a different color. We all look at the same objects in M-D space bathed in white light. However, each one of us sees the same world with a different color. We hardly realize this, because we are so used to our own color. Some people see the world in a depressing blue, while others in a cheerful pink. Certain items are not even seen at all by some but by others, because our colored glasses filter out certain aspects. Assuming for a moment that there are enough colors (which is true in terms of psychological diversity), there are as many different worlds as there are people, each picking his or her unique aspect of the M-D world. To change our world, we must change the color of our own glasses. Preferably we want to increase the color range until we see white light. So we want to increase the range of our consciousness. As we do away with the limitations of our mindset, we automatically act more in tune with the greater reality in which we reside. Our world becomes more desirable for us as well as for others. "You create your own reality", this is the message repeated tirelessly by Seth in Jane Roberts' books. He explains in enlightening detail how we can change our lives by changing our beliefs (101). In fact, Seth's entire philosophy dovetails coherently with the holistic system described here. To this writer this is one of the indications of Seth's authenticity. Without the Seth material, the Multiple World section and some other parts of this paper would not have been written with the same confidence. The Seth books provide a wealth of information for the serious student of M-D reality. Philosophers have suggested multiple worlds in the past. Spinoza, for instance, said that God has an infinite number of attributes, of which humans perceive only two: physical extension and thought, humans being themselves of a physical and mental nature (102). Gottfied Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) postulated that ours is the "best of all possible worlds" (103).