A Dimension: What Is the Afterlife Like?

We as humans have six million olfactory receptors. What if you could have 300 million olfactory receptors in your brain to heighten your sense of smell far beyond what it is right now? What if just by smelling you could detect cancer in someone or you could tell when a bomb is present when you are a member of the military or police? How about improving your hearing. Right now, we can hear 20,000 Htz, but what if you could do something to change that ability to hear to 65,000 Htz? We can’t hear sounds between -5 and -15 decibels, but what if we could improve our hearing to hear sounds that are beyond our ordinary ability particularly regarding high pitched sounds? What if you could process visual information 25 times faster than you can do this now?

You can have all of this to improve your awareness of what’s available beyond what we can perceive now. You just must do one thing! Become a dog! Dogs can experience a richer fuller dimension through their senses that is far beyond what we can experience. They also can create a bond with a human being that is easier done than in some cases with another human-to-human experience.

Do I want us to become dogs to get these riches of enhanced experience? Of course not. What I want us to consider is that there are proven dimensions that are beyond human experience. It is a scientific fact. All the above descriptions of what a dog can experience that we can’t is found in a National Geographic Special Edition, The Secret Life of Dogs. Obviously, we humans can do things that a dog can’t do, but that is not my point. There is a dimension that exists that we can’t experience in this life. It is there none the less.

One of the courses I took at Yale was the Phenomenon of Perception based on a book by the father of this science, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book is titled the Phenomenon of Perception. This course was fundamentally about how we experience the world around us. We don’t think about this, but it is a key to understanding that there is a reality that is beyond us. An example is that of an anorexic person who walks through a doorway sideways as that person perceives she or he is too wide to fit through the door.

A second book, and perhaps the easiest to understand this science of perception was written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, a theologian, Anglican priest, and English schoolmaster, called Flatland. He was a man ahead of his time. Please note the emphasis on theology as he explores dimensionality which even then was a question in the hearts of people.

The book explores two dimensions of a world inhabited by people who experience life as two dimensional and have no explanation or understanding of three dimensions. The inhabitants are shown as geometric shapes, squares and circles. But then things changed, and they have a new understanding of the world containing not squares but cubes and not circles but spheres. It is an eye-opening experience where their lives become fuller and more interesting. It is a simple example of dimensions that exist yet are not experienced in full. Mathematicians have proven 10 or 11 dimensions where time is considered a fourth dimension.

We are surrounded by multiple dimensions that we can’t experience just like the experience of our canine friends and as seen in a simple form by Abbott.

The canine example and Flatland are a cautionary tale of our own perceptions and knowledge. All the world religions can be helped with this invitation to see the importance of revelation as a real gateway that was used by mystics down through the ages.

For example, in Flatland there is a Christian allegory with the circle becoming a sphere and the square becoming a cube representing conversion to faith based in imagination and revelation. “This is eternal life that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3) Other religions would have their own essential transformational premises about the afterlife.

There is the old image used by dog lovers. What is dog spelled backwards? God. Maybe there is truth there about the many dimensions and characteristics of the Eternal One.