Welcome to Mysteries Over Martinis!  This blog is a mix of unexplained phenomena and personal encounters served up with a mystery-themed cocktail. It’s a recipe for intrigue!

This week’s entry is a guest blog written by Marie D. Jones! Marie is the author of several non-fiction books that explore the paranormal, science, ancient knowledge, unknown anomalies and consciousness studies. She has appeared on hundreds of radio shows worldwide, and on television, most recently on the “Ancient Aliens” series. She is a regular contributor to FATE Magazine, New Dawn, Intrepid Magazine and Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader. She is also a novelist and screenwriter. Her website is www.mariedjones.com.

Mango Mule Musings:

Mango Mule – Makes four servings

Ingredients:

4 oz of Premium Vodka

24 oz of Ginger Beer, or if not readily available, can use Ginger Ale

2 cups pureed Mango or Mango juice

1 cup water

1⁄2 lime

Stir together the mango puree/juice and water then add in vodka and ginger beer/ale. Can blend with blender or use spoon to desired consistency. Use mango puree for a thicker consistency drink. Add splash of lime to taste. Pour into lowball glasses. You can even make mango puree/juice ice cubes to add in for more mango flavor. Enjoy while pondering your existence!

“Musings on The Grid of Reality”

By

Marie D. Jones

What is reality?

Countless sages, scientists, philosophers and spiritual leaders have asked that question, so I am not alone by any means when I ponder the same question myself. Yet even with all the scientific and technological advancements we’ve made over the last 100 years, we still know little, if anything at all, about the true nature of reality.

But perhaps there have been clues available to this great mystery all along, right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Clues that suggest an actual structure, or infrastructure, that is mirrored in the laws of science, spoken of in the holiest of religious texts, and evident in the construct of our own bodies, brains and minds. A structure that we exist within, and are a part of, and can even move about its many levels to perceive realities far beyond that of our mundane 3D existence. A structure that science, spirituality and metaphysics all recognize, from the alternate dimensions of quantum physics, to the various levels of consciousness and, to the layered worlds of shamans and medicine healers.

A little over six years ago, I was contacted via email by a guy named Larry Flaxman who had read my book “PSIence” about quantum physics and the paranormal. We emailed back and forth a bit, and thus a legendary friendship and partnership was born. Larry and I came together from across the country over a shared interest and passion for finding answers to the biggest questions of human existence. Who are we? How did we get here? Do we have a purpose? Are there other worlds than this one? We combined forces and began working together as partners in a venture called ParaExplorers, a play on words describing a “pair of explorers” journeying into the unknown territories of worlds seen and unseen.

We also wrote a bunch of books together that chronicled our interests in all things science, paranormal, anomalous and just plain strange, including the nature of numbers, how the human mind helps create and perceive reality, time travel, the code of creation found in the trinity, and a host of topics that have secured us as the modern day “Scully and Mulder” from the X-Files. Yet we felt that all the years we were working and writing were leading to something more cumulative, something more “grand” in scope, and we realized we needed to write a book about the one theory we most felt could bring together science, religion and metaphysics, and the paranormal, in a sort of “unified theory of everything.”

In our books “11:11- The Time Prompt Phenomenon,” “The Resonance Key: Exploring the Links Between Vibration, Consciousness and the Zero Point Grid,” “The Déjà vu Enigma: A Journey Through the Anomalies of Mind, Memory and Time,” and “The Trinity Secret: The Power of Three and the Code of Creation,” we began introducing a theory we called “The Grid” that envisioned the infrastructure of reality as a 3D grid-like edifice, with doors and windows that allow for traveling between levels of reality. We even presented the visual scenario of a skyscraper with multiple floors and elevators and stairways leading from floor to floor. These various “connectors” represent the mechanisms by which we may be experiencing The Grid and may, with practice, even strengthen our ability to walk the Grid and experience parallel universes, alternate dimensions and worlds beyond the confines of space and time as we know it.

This concept was so popular with readers, radio show hosts and listeners and attendees at conferences and events, that we felt compelled to expand upon it and create a more detailed and developed scenario of what reality actually may be, and how there are unseen levels that we normally have little or no access to…unless we find the door…the window…the stairwell. The elevators that connect the levels of what we call, The Grid.

All the years we spent researching The Grid, what it is, how it is accessed, and how we can learn to use The Grid to expand our awareness and empower our lives, we ourselves were having numerous “paranormal” experiences that proved to us how valid the concept was. Just a couple of short years ago, both of our fathers passed away within a few months of each other, and we both had a strange “knowing” that the other’s parent had died. Larry also lost his mom the same year and had many unusual experiences where he felt his parents were contacting him, despite his usual scientific and skeptical nature. I, too, have had way too many experiences and synchronicities in my life to deny the existence of a Gridlike connectivity that we are all immersed in.

The Grid is a concept that presents an intriguing and exciting possibility – that reality actually does have a form, a structure, and a blueprint (albeit a hidden one!)… with layer upon layer of interlocking and intersecting realities that allow glimpses and passages to other levels. Yet the Grid is also the entirety of this infrastructure, the whole entirety of creation, itself. Including us. We exist within The Grid, but are also The Grid itself.

And that Grid includes what we see as not just the normal…but also the paranormal.

Nowadays, if you haven’t seen a ghostly apparition, experienced a psychic event, or spotted a UFO in the night sky, you are considered abnormal! There seems to be a growing collective belief that the veils between worlds are thinning as more people experience events that defy everyday reality.

In The Grid, certain environmental and physiological elements and influences act as triggers by which those mechanisms kick into gear, and allow us a glimpse into another reality. Sometimes, that glimpse comes in the form of a paranormal experience we simply cannot explain or prove with modern science.

Most paranormal researchers of the past focused on such a limited scope of possibilities as to what, let’s say, a ghost might be, and where it might be coming from. The usual and typical belief was that a ghost was the essence or spirit of a person now deceased that for, whatever rhyme or reason, chose to stay behind and not “cross over” to the next level of reality. Often, ghosts would be associated with graveyards and asylums and old abandoned buildings where they may have lost their physical bodies, but sometimes ghosts did things that didn’t quite jive with this narrow-minded view.

Ghosts often appear as imprinted, or looped, visuals that repeat the same movements over and over again, lacking awareness or sentience. Some ghosts seem aware of their surroundings, and do different things each time they are observed. Other ghosts are nothing but shimmery apparitions, and other still appear as quite identifiable, down to the type of clothing they are wearing. Inconsistencies abound in the paranormal field when it comes to trying to pinpoint what a ghost is, let alone what it is doing here in our world.

The Grid offers a new way to look at this phenomenon. Instead of always assuming that a ghost is the essence of a dead person that now hangs around and “haunts” a familiar locale, The Grid suggests that ghosts, many of them at least, could be alive and well and living on another level of reality, a parallel universe, another dimension beyond our own. Perhaps we are seeing glimpses of living people along a different timeline than our own.

A ghost, then, might not be a dead person at all, but someone who is walking around on another plane, alive and kicking, but beyond our reach because they exist within their own laws of physics and their own timeline. We then get glimpses of these apparitions only when certain environmental and physiological influences align just so, which we discuss in more detail in the book, allowing us to see what walks The Grid.

One, then, might also ask…can they see us?

The one subject we most think about, fear and dread facing is death. Mortality is something we all share, yet few, if any of us, are prepared to face the day when we will end our lives on this level of reality and be gone from our loved ones in any kind of physical sense.

But do we have any real proof that death is the end to our complete existence? Because the body returns to ash and earth, does it mean that our consciousness and personality and soul and essence do as well? We can first look at the thousands of subjective and personal experiences of people who have had Near Death Experiences as hopeful “circumstantial evidence” that life not only goes on, but also has a purpose, and that we will one day be reunited with loved ones as we return to Source. Even a famous neurosurgeon like Dr. Eben Alexander, author of “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife,” a best selling book that documents his own experience after entering a medically induced coma, seems convinced that dying is not the same as ending, that a part of us continues on even as the brain and the body have finished their business in this reality. The experience changed Dr. Alexander so much that he has become the “poster child” of NDEs and helped the scientific field re-examine its stigma against such non-provable and almost paranormal events.

In The Grid of realities, death may very well be just another level we travel to upon the demise of our physicality. Perhaps we obtain there another physicality and are reincarnated, as many Eastern spiritual traditions believe, into another soul journey on another plane, a journey that really is nothing but a new stop along the highway of our conscious evolution. Think of a road trip with friends, and how leaving one town can seem like an ending, but entering another brings a whole new range of experiences.

Scientists continue to look to neuroscience and the study of the brain and consciousness to determine if there really is a way to prove that death is not the final destination. Right now, we are at the mercy of our limitations, but with each and every research study, and with personal experiences by respected people in the scientific and medical fields, we get closer and closer to one day determining if a part of us continues

Energy does not cease to exist, as the First Law of Thermodynamics states. Energy within a system can change into another form, or be transferred into or out of the system, but it cannot be diminished or cease to exist. The energy is conserved in some form. If we are all made up of energy, then we too must be conserved in some form…to live again on another level of The Grid.

An idea or theory is only as good as it is useful to us in our daily lives, though. The Grid suggests that there are many levels of reality, and that when the triggers and mechanisms line up that allow us to experience those realities, our own perception of existence itself is changed forever. We get a more expansive and grander sense of who we are and what life has to offer.

But can we actually walk The Grid ourselves, or must we wait until death or some bizarre paranormal event knocks us out of this particular reality like a smack to the head with a two-by-four? The truth is, we are already walking The Grid, whether we are aware of it or not.

One of the most profound ways to experience another state of conscious reality is to dream. During dreams, our brains and bodies react and respond to stimulus as if it were just as real as anything in the waking state. Many people have dreams of past lives they know they did not live…or did they? Others dream of future events that prove to be precognitive, and others get guidance and answers in these other realms of existence from beings that don’t exist in our own realm.

During the waking state, where we feel reality is “really real,” we often find ourselves experiencing shifts in perception of time and space that make us question our own fixed beliefs about what we think is real. Whether we are having some kind of anomalous or paranormal experience such as seeing a ghost or having a psychic knowing that comes true, or we are listening to music that puts us in a trance and completely changes how we perceive time, or running out in the woods and losing all sense of our own physical bodies, we are walking The Grid.

Meditation, dancing, chanting, drumming and a host of other activities can easily change our brain wave patterns and alter our consciousness enough to allow us access to that greater, grander landscape of potentiality. Sometimes, we have an out and out direct, head on encounter with another reality in the form of a UFO sighting or a glimpse of a strange, cryptozoological creature crossing our path at night.

Time slips and time shifts allow us to step out of the linear confines of the arrow of time and exist with a distortion of that structure. Time can slow down when we are engrossed in an activity, or speed up when we are experiencing an adrenaline rush. Time can even disappear and “go missing” as it has for the thousands of people who have experienced a missing time event, including both the authors of “The Grid!”

Anytime we are outside of our normal brain wave patterns or our conscious waking reality, we enter another level of The Grid. It doesn’t always have to take a dose of ayahuasca or hallucinogenic mushrooms, or a strange contraption that stimulates the frontal lobes, or an earth-shattering Out of Body or Near Death Experience to know that we are immersed in a sea of realities that offer an infinite possibility of experiences to us.