I have been listening to the Yale philosopher Christopher Noёl on the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel and have had my mind blown away. With all the years of research I’ve been doing, I had pretty much ignored where our souls/spirit selves go when leaving this mortal realm. It’s kinda over there in the corner somewhere and then in another dimension, perhaps. Or, it’s a pocket universe that makes it hard for people of that realm to communicate with us, or we’re simply downloaded into an information field.
Rather, I have become more excited about the latest Journal of Parapsychology paper about how parapsychologists could create an overarching theory of psi as those early biologists did the theory of evolution (“Toward a “Parapsychological Synthesis”: Proposals for Integrating Theories of Psi” by Michael Nahm). It goes into detail about the sundry and various hypotheses that were finally wrangled into a cohesive and coherent theory that could be accepted by science at large. When parapsychology as a science does this with the theory of psi, it will be one step closer to an accepted scientific endeavor. What Christopher Noël says about dark matter might be another option.
When I saw Christopher Noël’s interview on his most current book There Is No Veil: At Play in the Vast Here and Now, I was intrigued. He is a philosopher, which means he looks at life from unusual perspectives, pushing us out of the boundaries of our current modes of thought. I am an autodidact philosopher and can respect that trait in others even if it can be frustrating for the paradigm-thinkers. He begins with a story almost typical in American teenage society pre-social media: with an Ouija board. I cringe inwardly at this because it isn’t a particularly safe tool to use. It’s akin to leaving the front door of your house wide open after having sent invitations to strangers to come on in. Of course, that’s what happened to young Christopher and his companions, a low spirit who felt too guilty to move on to the next realm came into the house for a little tête-a-tête. They were lucky that this weighty soul had no ill intent toward them, he simply needed them to get married and have a girl child to replace the daughter he’d killed. You can’t make this stuff up guys. Of course, Christopher didn’t marry his friend and have the child, which frustrated the dead guy no end, but it did open up a mental door in Christopher’s mind. He, like I, did not have a cultural impediment preventing him from contemplating what this visitation meant.
Later, he read Vera Rubin’s hypothesis about why galaxies behave as they do, that the speed of the outer solar systems within those galaxies was the same as those closer to the galactic center. This shouldn’t happen unless there is invisible matter using gravity to move them along to the tune of ten times more invisible matter than visible. What did this mean to Christopher Noël? That we’re swimming in dark matter, it’s all around us and more pervasive than the matter we can perceive. Imagine going down to the bottom of a deep ocean trench with movie director/producer James Cameron and you photograph a fish. That fish has spent its entire life miles below the surface in pitch-dark, cold, high-pressure seawater. That fish never goes to the surface and only knows this environment. To us, it appears to be the harshest and loneliest place on earth, but this creature knows no different. Not to mention, this fish does not perceive James Cameron in his high-tech bathysphere as he tries to get its attention for a photo op.
Christopher takes a leap of logic and hypothesizes that this dark matter may be the stuff of our next life evolution. Let me take you along the trajectory of that leap so you might understand better what he’s thinking. Dark matter and dark energy are not visible to us nor to our measuring devices. We can only see their effects on the matter in the universe. This is akin to circumstances before the invention of the microscope where instead of bacteria, viruses, and fungi causing disease, something called “bad humors” was the culprit and leeches were the cure. We can frequently see effects before we understand the cause in science which pushes us to make better devices for perception and measurement. Now, through the use of microscopes, we know that it’s single-celled organisms causing us so much trouble.
Why is dark matter currently impossible to perceive even with our advanced telescopes and spectrophotometers? It may be that it exists at a different frequency than our visible matter does. It may be less dense with its atoms having more space between nucleus and electrons. Perhaps the only perception device able to handle the presence of dark matter is the human brain. Every once in a while, something made of dark matter may be able to consciously lower its frequency to our level of visible matter and voila: ghost.
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, a number of physical mediums were given credit for creating a mysterious substance that was later called ectoplasm. Noises, shapes, the sudden appearance of objects (apports), movements, all of these things were attributed to the medium. Perhaps the truth is that the spirits could condense their atoms, attune their frequencies to match our own, and create matter from what appeared to be thin air. They could manipulate our matter from their realm to make things happen for us to perceive. It may explain, Christopher states, why it tends to feel cold around ghost events because of the rapid deflation necessary for the ghost to manipulate our environment (e.g. dry ice or liquid nitrogen) or apported items feel hot to the touch when they first appear (rapid increase in density).
I had the pleasure to listen to Laura Lynn Jackson who has a cameo appearance in my first book (under a different name). She is one seriously talented psychic medium who has the infectious joy of a saint. When asked where the other side might be, she said, “It’s right here” pointing directly in front of her. She told us that our spirit guides and soul family are present all around us all the time. They are trying to make contact with us but it’s difficult because we’re not paying attention. She said that they find it easier to manipulate things that have energy flowing through them or are affected by electromagnetism. They may cause lights to flicker or they may change the T.V. channel while you’re watching a show. All of those little glitches we tend to put down to mechanical failure. It sure does sound like something an entity from a higher frequency realm might do to get our attention.
Christopher mentions that Fredrick Meyers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research (1882), visited famous medium Geraldine Cummins thirty years after his death. He described his new home to her:
It is a structure so fine, it is invisible to the mortal eye and the finest instruments of the scientists. Ether is a bad term, but I cannot find another word to define it. This is a kind of air or as I would like to say, a fluid or an emanation. It is the ancestor of matter as we know it.
Noël states further that the etheric body that inhabits our physical body may be why we have evidence of out-of-body and near-death experiences. The etheric body just goes on a walkabout and then reinhabits the corporeal body once more. It could also be why psychokinesis works. People may have the ability to manipulate the dark matter/visible matter ratio within an object to make it move the way they want (e.g. table levitation). Or spirit knocks which are measurably different from rapping on an object with a knuckle or tool. They have a noise spike like pressure has built up in an object and then is suddenly released.
This is where my mind went blewy. I’ve been spending time considering that our matter was being controlled by a complex set of software, that or we’re living in a holographic universe as avatars. His hypothesis never even computed before, but makes so much sense. Not only that, but it means that with the advent of better measuring and perception devices, we humans might be able to bridge the gap between our perceived universe and that of the spirits.