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email: Kurt
Leland
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
FAQs about Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-of-Body Traveler
Q: What is Otherwhere?
A: Otherwhere is my name for nonphysical reality--a locale beyond the physical universe that we’re familiar with that is sometimes accessible in out-of-body states.
Q: Why do you call it Otherwhere?
A: My first acquaintance with the word occurred in high school when I was an avid reader of fantasy and science-fiction. There was a series of books by Andre Norton that used it in their titles. The only one I can recall right now is Ordeal in Otherwhere. Otherwhere seemed to be an appropriate description of nonphysical reality because it was a locale (where) that was quite different from any that we experience here in the physical world (other).
Q: How is Otherwhere different from physical reality?
A: Time and space as we know them don’t operate there. For example one of the apparent laws of Otherwhere, is that thought creates experience more or less instantly.
Q: The subtitle of your book claims that it’s a Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality--what do you mean?
A: Many of the currently available books about out-of-body experiences provide information about how to have an out-of-body experience. Few have been written to prepare readers for what they might experience beyond their initial introduction to the out-of-body state. I wanted to give them some idea of the “scenes, dwellers, and phenomena” that they might encounter.
Traditional labels for the kinds of beings that might be encountered in an out-of-body state run the gamut from demons to angels--even extraterrestrials. I believe that such labels are limiting. They tend to promote fear and awe, which prevent people from understanding what such encounters might mean or what their purpose may be. So I’ve tried to develop a system of identifying such beings on the basis of their function: a being who guides is a Guide; one that helps the dead adjust to their new nonphysical abode is a Facilitator; a being that limits access to some portion of Otherwhere to those properly prepared to experience it is called a Gatekeeper; and so on.
The identities of various regions of Otherwhere, which I call zones, may also be determined by their functions. Thus the area of nonphysical reality accessible to people who are asleep and dreaming is the Dream Zone; whereas that to which the souls of the dead retire is the Afterdeath Zone.
Q: Some accounts of your encounters with nonphysical beings in Otherwhere contain detailed conversations. I have a hard time believing that anyone could remember such conversations word for word in such detail.
A: You’re right that I don’t remember such conversations word for word. However you should also keep in mind that in Otherwhere conversations don’t take place in words. What I’ve recorded in conversation form in Otherwhere actually occurred as an exchange of information-carrying energy. Such exchanges are telepathic in nature--not a word is spoken. Instead I receive from the being that is communicating with me a “packet” of information which I understand immediately, intuitively, and as it were simultaneously.
Sometimes such information is highly nuanced, so that in the process of translating it into words what I was immediately able to grasp while in Otherwhere takes hours to record here. The detail of these conversations is the result of my trying to reach to the bottom of each concept that was communicated to me, exploring and recording all of its nuances. When I’ve achieved a complete emptying out of one of the information packets I’ve received, I’m able to move on to the next one.
The idea of information packets is not unique to me. Robert Monroe in his book Far Journeys coins the term rote to describe the same nonphysical dynamic. His experiences seem to be every bit as detailed as mine and often include conversational interchanges with nonphysical beings.
Q: In reading your book I’ve sometimes wondered how much of what you were writing was fiction--an attempt to dress up your own views on life in story form.
A: I think it would be impossible to write a book in which one’s own views on life were entirely absent. Furthermore, I’m sure that some of the information I’ve recorded in Otherwhere has been influenced by my views on life, if not actually distorted by them. But my experiences in nonphysical reality have also shaped my world view or refined it in unexpected ways.
I struggled for a long time with the format of Otherwhere. There was a period when I thought of turning what I considered to be real experiences in an alternate reality into fiction because I thought that readers might have an easier time with them--thinking of them as mere teaching stories cast in a fantastic framework.
I considered inventing a character who was a stand-in for me and describing his bizarre “dreams.” But then I thought I’d end up losing one of the fundamental messages of such experiences--which is that such things are possibilities of consciousness worth exploring and I believe available in some degree to everyone.
I finally decided to let readers decide for themselves whether I was using the metaphysical framework of out-of-body experiences to tell teaching stories that I’d consciously invented, or whether I was using the teaching-story format as a mold into which I poured information experienced in actual out-of-body states and visits to Otherwhere.
The latter is what I myself believe that I’ve been doing. But everything was given to me--plot, character, message. There was nothing to invent but the particular succession of words that would contain it.
Perhaps this is a case of unconscious inspiration in operation. If so, I can only be grateful for the power and richness of imagination that my unconscious is capable of. And yet I would also insist that these are experiences. I went through them. They seemed to be happening to me--and afterwards I merely recorded what happened.
I call my experiences in Otherwhere adventures in consciousness because, while I assume them to be a type of out-of-body experience other mechanisms could be involved. These mechanisms are somehow active in our consciousness, which I believe makes them worthy of exploration, even if they may eventually be traced to some less-developed portion of the brain that tends to think in mythic rather than purely rational terms.
Because adventures in consciousness like mine occur without witnesses and are highly subjective, I could never prove their reality or validity to anyone but myself. So I merely offer them to the public and let people decide for themselves what they mean about life, spirituality, the possibilities of consciousness, the powers of the imagination, and me as an individual or a writer.
And yet I must admit that aspects of my adventures are indeed fictions. Because time and space as we experience them in nonphysical reality don’t seem to operate in Otherwhere many of the details of my adventures are “fictionalized” simply by turning them into narratives.
Using any verb tense--past or present--to describe what seems to be happening in a reality in which time is simultaneous is automatically going to distort things. Furthermore, how can I say such a simple phrase as “Look over there” about nonphysical reality when there are no eyes in Otherwhere, there’s nothing to be “seen” in conventional terms, and no physical location for someone to point to?
And yet my attention can be directed toward something I wasn’t previously considering at the suggestion of a Guide. So I write “Look over there” instead of “My Guide’s consciousness expanded to encompass and entrain mine, gently directing my attention toward an aspect of our shared energetic reality that I hadn’t previously noticed”--which might have been more accurate, less “fictional,” but which in some ways may also have been less intelligible.
Thus the lengthy conversations I’ve recorded in Otherwhere are also fictions--in that they didn’t occur in the way I recorded them. But I would prefer the word realizations to describe how they came into being. I didn’t simply make them up.
Theoretically, each information packet I receive while in nonphysical reality could be realized in a variety of ways without losing its essential meaning--by me or someone else who has had a similar experience.
Q: I’m disturbed by what seems to me to be an anti-Christian bias in your book Otherwhere.
A: I like to make a distinction between the teachings of Christianity as recorded in the Bible--which I believe to be a part of the universal spiritual heritage of humankind, along with The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the sayings of the Buddha, and other such scriptures--and the teachings of the Christian church, in any of its many denominations. The latter it seems to me are often influenced by political considerations that may have little to do with genuine spiritual truths.
Some of my visits to Otherwhere have provided me with information that goes against the teachings of the church. I do not believe that they go against the teachings of Christ. Some of those teachings, it seems to me, have been recorded by individuals of lesser spiritual understanding who have distorted them. Others may have been translated in ways that accidentally or intentionally distort their meaning.
The content of the Bible itself was a result of decisions made by the church fathers about what to keep in and what to leave out. Such decisions, I believe, were political in nature and may have distorted or at least obscured some of the spiritual truths contained in it.
Because my modus operandi in exploring Otherwhere is to see for myself what truth there may be in anything I’ve read or heard about spiritual matters, I tend to question some of the church’s teachings or to interpret the Bible in unconventional ways when my experiences over there lead me to do so. I don’t ask others to believe what I’ve come to understand as a result of those visits --only to consider the possibility that what I’ve written about them might bear some thinking about.
Nor should people conclude that because I’ve taken the church to task for what I consider to be certain of its misconceptions about the Afterlife that I am rejecting or debunking Christianity itself. I was brought up with and still believe many of the tenets of Christianity--although not in ways that many present-day Christian denominations would accept.
There may be times when personal biases that I’m unable to recognize because they’re so deeply ingrained in me may have distorted what I’ve perceived in the Afterlife or my record of it. In such cases I would welcome the corrections of other out-of-body explorers who may have seen certain truths more clearly than I have.
--Kurt Leland
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