In Agrippa’s universe there were three levels of reality. These were the elementary, the celestial and the intellectual.

The oldest written records we have date back to around 4000 BCE and were found in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. The civilization that reached this level of sophistication had as its capital the city of Sumer (the biblical Shinar). According to modern research, the Sumerians were additionally responsible for the

This emptiness presents itself to an observing consciousness as being full of seemingly material objects – mountains, trees, other people, planets, galaxies. This is what German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his book Critique of Pure Reason (1781), termed the noumenal world. But Kant added to this the absolute fact that any observing consciousness

In shamanism, dismemberment is followed by the resurrection of the shaman and an encounter with the divine self, the other that until now has been hidden.

For philosophers such as Chang Tsai, the bedrock of reality is ch’i. Ch’i translates as “gas” or “ether” and is a tenuous and non-perceptible form of matter which is present throughout space and can condense into solid material objects. The idea that matter somehow condenses out of ch’i is amazingly prescient, because there is a process that echoes

The collective minds of all observing creatures collapse the various wave functions into a seemingly physical and material world. But this world is malleable. I would like to call this reality the Sensereal Realm. It is a domain that has its own borderlands, places where the inhabitants of the Pleroma can break through into the Kenoma. This

Corbin argues that the Mundus Imaginalis can also be apprehended in “the intermediary state between waking and sleeping”. The spiritualists of Shi’a Islam call this the “country of the hidden Imam”. As we shall see later, modern psychology calls this the hypnagogic state.

In Tibet these mind-created entities have long been known as “tulpas”.

It is important to realize that every electron in the universe is absolutely identical to every other electron, and the same goes for every proton and every neutron. As we have seen, electrons are elementary particles, which means that they are not made up of any other, smaller particles (see p5). Protons and neutrons are not elementary particles: