From the book "Gods About Us", Max Rempel
Metaphysics is a science that reaches beyond physics, a science that embraces both the material and the immaterial world, the one reverently called "the other side," the divine world, the realm beyond the looking glass.
With the development of quantum mechanics nearly a century ago, it became clear that our material world is material only in a very conditional sense, that solid matter only seems solid, while in reality we are clusters of electromagnetic fields obeying remarkable wave laws, that is, laws proper to fields. Thus the boundary between matter and non-matter is blurred even in official, academic physics.
The paranormal and parapsychological research that will be discussed below has allowed us to advance rather far in understanding the connection between the material and immaterial worlds.
Among these studies, a special place belongs to messages from the immaterial world and to two-way contacts with its intelligent inhabitants. These inhabitants can be divided, roughly, into two categories: travelers from other dimensions who possess a body (usually called extraterrestrials), and forms of intelligence without a body, often called angels. Both kinds took direct part in the creation and evolution of humanity. In ancient times both were called gods. Traces of their visits are found in many cultures, and their mark is clearly visible in the Bible.
In our own time, thanks to the printed word and the internet, communication with these forms of intelligence has not ceased but, on the contrary, has expanded. What the gods tell us about ourselves, about our history, our biology, our energy bodies, our souls, the present development of our civilization, and the otherworldly forces influencing that development, is extraordinarily interesting and constitutes the subject of modern metaphysics. This book is devoted to an introduction to that subject.
In its subject of study, metaphysics coincides with religion; that is, it concerns itself with the cosmos, encompassing both the earthly and the divine worlds. But metaphysics differs from religion in its approach: it holds no fear, only enlightened curiosity. Metaphysics treats messages from the higher spheres without reverence. The mere fact that a message was dictated through a medium is no proof of its truth. For metaphysics as a science, there is no authority other than truth and common sense. It employs the scientific method; that is, it first of all compares different sources and independent testimonies, advances hypotheses, and tests them through research.
It might seem that metaphysics and paranormal research leave no room for experiment, but this is far from the case. The immaterial world too can be studied experimentally. At the same time, let us note that in many sciences experiment is not the principal method. In history, archaeology, sociology, economics, and even in such descriptive sciences as biology and geology, a full-fledged science can be built simply by describing and systematically comparing observations, without intervening in the process under study.
Darwin, for example, developed the theory of evolution (broadly correct, though not the only correct one) without any experiments at all, simply by systematically testing his hypothesis against new observations. As a science, metaphysics is composed chiefly of the systematic collection of material and its analysis. Here I present the results and generalizations of such an analysis.
The principal facts are accompanied by references to other authors, so that the reader may independently continue studying the primary sources of greatest interest. In other words, this book contains no proof of the existence of the supernatural, but is intended as an introduction to the topic and a guide to the primary sources. Here I summarize, in accessible form, the materials of other researchers, most of whom write in English and are often not adapted for easy reading.