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Author : Heron John
Title : Living in two worlds
Year : 2006

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Foreword. This book is a personal account of my experience of the subtle dimensions of existence, the lower subtle and the higher subtle realms, as these are defined by contemporary cartographers of transpersonal states (e.g. Grof, 1988). A lot of my reports are about ways in which the subtle realms interact with ordinary life, so that one is effectively living in two sorts of world at once, the subtle ones and the physical one. In running workshops in this field, I have been struck by how many people need legitimation for subtle experiences which they have had, but which cannot be categorized in terms of the belief-systems of our dominant culture. In support of this need, it is useful for sensitives to report such experiences in a way which helps to clarify both the nature of them and the issues involved in having them. Hence this book. In order to be an effective witness, I deal almost exclusively with personal experience. I have sought to give a clear account of it, a basic phenomenology which is true to what seems to have occurred. Alongside this I have tried to develop some kind of simple conceptual framework that makes the whole thing intelligible without falling foul of either excessive scepticism or excessive credulity. There is intermittent theory along the way and it becomes more elaborate in the last four chapters. I have not wanted to criss-cross the text with references to the diverse experiences and explanatory concepts of others. This comes at a later stage. First and foremost is the need for a sustained and coherent personal statement with which the reader can compare and contrast his or her own experience; and this is what I seek to offer. It seems to me that the brain with its nervous system faces two ways, like Janus, the Roman gods of doors, who looked both in and out, commanding entrance and exit. The brain normally mediates perceptual experience of the physical world, but it can also under suitable conditions refract awareness of a subtle world that is within and beyond the physical world. It is as though the brain has a double code within it. One code enables us to organize and make sense of the external physical environment. The other code, more deeply buried and guarded within the cortex, empowers us to makes sense - although intermittently and much less systematically - of another kind of universe altogether: an unseen universe that both interpenetrates and transcends the defining parameters of physical existence. Experience of this other universe is still subject to considerable cultural repression, which typically operates in several interlocking ways, all of which reduce awareness of the subtle realms to something else. There is reduction to the material: all experience, whatever it appears to be about, refers when properly analysed only to matter in motion in the physical world. There is reduction to the psychological: encounters with another world are really nothing but subjective mental events. There is reduction to the pathological: claims to extrasensory perception are the hallucinations of a sick mind. And there is reduction to the demonic: impressions from the subtle realms are all the work of the devil. ...