Truth is a Stranger Thing Than Fiction

Are parallel worlds and Heaven the same thing?

Image: etsy.com

There’s an iconic scene in the first season of Stranger Things when Joyce cleverly discovers how to communicate with her missing son, who has (unbeknownst to her at the time) become lost in a dangerous alternate dimension known as “the Upsidown.” In thick black letters, she paints the alphabet on her 60s floral living room wall and hangs Christmas lights by each letter, thereby allowing her son Will to (somehow) illuminate them and spell out words. 

Joyce: Talk to me. Where are you?

Will: R.I.G.H.T H.E.R.E

Joyce: Right here? I don’t know what that means. 

Now, Stranger Things is just a TV show—a product of the fertile imaginations of Matt and Ross Duffer. But as is often the case, art may imitate life. From time immemorial, humanity has held a special fascination with “the other side.” Seers, shamans, and spiritualists attempted to contact it, and to this day, there are a host of methodologies available to those who would like to attempt to break through to it. Oftentimes, those who claim to have been there were brought against their will.

For instance, actress Sharon Stone had a near-death experience. Here’s how she described it in an interview with Oprah:

Sharon: It’s just a lot of white light, and you see people who have passed on, and they talk to you…I had an incredible sense of well-being and a sense that it [the other side] is just so near. It’s not a far away or scary thing…

Oprah: It’s just a breath away.

Sharon (gesturing around her): Yes, it’s just right there. 

Then there is the case of James Leininger, the young boy profiled in the Netflix series “Surviving Death” (and in more detail in Dr. Jim Tucker’s book “Before”). At age four, James developed a fascination with airplanes and began describing strange and remarkably detailed memories of being a fighter pilot in WWII. You really need to read about it to absorb just how intuitively unlikely it would be for a kid to have such precise descriptions of a life that he could not possibly have known anything about. This is the crux of Dr. Tucker’s work and that of Dr. Ian Stevenson before him at the University of Virginia.

Image: midnight.fm

In James’ case, as profiled in Dr. Tucker’s book, his mother, Andrea, asked him “if there was really a heaven. When he said yes, she asked where it was, and he spread his arms out and said, ‘it’s right here.’”

If all of this sounds very far-fetched, one has only to peruse some of the theories of modern physics to draw the conclusion that they actually take this stuff very seriously. Consider Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of Quantum Physics “in which quantum effects spawn countless branches of the universe with different events occurring in each.”

Or physics.org’s description of the Sixth Dimension according to String Theory:

In the sixth, we would see a plane of possible worlds, where we could compare and position all the possible universes that start with the same initial conditions as this one (i.e., the Big Bang). In theory, if you could master the fifth and sixth dimension, you could travel back in time or go to different futures.

The other dimensions, they say, are “compactified” within the four that we know.

Combining the latest scientific and philosophical discoveries with the lived experience of many thousands of people, it would seem at this point in human awareness that it is actually stranger to disbelieve a transcendent reality than to believe it. And as to its location? It’s right here.

Suggested reading:

Before by Dr. Jim Tucker

Children Who Remember Previous Lives by Dr. Ian Stevenson