Her faced showed a hint of incredulity.
Dr. King pivoted her head just a bit to the right while keeping eye contact, the bare beginning of a frown creasing her brow. “Trans-dimensional” she repeated slowly, as if testing how it sounded in her voice.
Sadler assured her quickly, “It’s not about space aliens or advanced technology. You can’t get there from here, as the old saying goes. I took a lot of math and science courses, too, and the models for higher dimensions are all wrong. You have to leave your human body and intellect behind to visit a higher dimension. Human awareness is another thing; it’s not limited to intellect alone.”
It was a genuine curiosity, now. “So you’ve experienced this higher dimension.”
He put his flatware down, having already finished his meal. “It’s more than a mere encounter; a part of me is still there. I’m currently living in more than one simultaneous plane of existence. Most importantly, the higher one isn’t just another one, but envelopes this one. I’m not going to pretend I can explain, or even understand, if there are multiple levels beyond ours, but the main point is escaping this one. Once you are outside the strictures of this plane of existence, you gain an entirely new faculty for dealing with this one. Suddenly, everything here makes sense.”
He waited while she chewed another mouthful of food and swallowed. “I suppose it’s our culture bias that we would expect someone with such an exposure to act more peaceful and less difficult.”
He almost laughed. “Despite what appears to most people as rudeness, I’m not arrogant about holding some imaginary superiority. The arrogance is in Western social conditioning. Remember: Western intellectual assumptions don’t just ignore the existence of other dimensions. It’s a truculent and hateful denial, a cultural arrogance that treats anything outside the boundaries as a horrific evil. People who are sensitive to bias understand enough to give other people room to be different. Most Westerners are forbidden to even think consciously about their assumptions. They are conditioned to be defensive and even hateful about it, even as they paint a heavy layer of patronizing nice-ness over it. The fake nice-ness excuses the arrogance.”
She stared down at here plate, but the focus of her vision was far away. After a moment she stabbed at something and lifted it from the plate. Raising her eyes again, she smiled. “My God, how that stirs up some bad memories.” Then she poked the food into her mouth.
Resting his elbows on either side of his tray, he joined his hands above it and interlaced his fingers. “The only possible peace is internal. I think you recognize that on some level. But the solution isn’t in the debate over which cultural approach is better, or convergence of human cultures or refinements. All of those things have their place, but that place could not possibly approach any kind of panacea for human conflict. Having seen things from that higher plane, I realize this one is permanently broken, so I suffer no delusion about fixing it. Every moment is a choice among various options for minimizing conflict, but the highest priority is remaining faithful to that higher realm. From there, it’s not a question of creating conflict, but of various degrees of exposing the inherent conflicts.”
Dropping his hands to rest on the edge of the table, he leaned back just a bit in his chair and continued. “Nor do I suffer any pretense of fixing other people and their problems. My personal experience of hyper-reality is mine alone. I’m hardly the only person who has connected to the higher plane. I’m in contact with a significant number of people who are trans-dimensional. The results of that connection are completely individual and it’s wholly inconsistent with the nature of that higher faculty to pretend I could even suggest others conform to my vision of reality. At the same time, I cannot afford to walk away from that unique personal vision. I operate under the assumption anyone can go there, but everyone has their own unique gateway. My experience as been that remaining faithful to my own vision is one best way to help others find their own. But given our cultural truculence to the very notion itself, my life seems to be a long series of encounters with people who refuse to allow my differences. Most of it I absorb, but I must not allow anyone else’s limitations to limit me.”
He spread his hands to indicate he was powerless. “This thing is beyond description and does not take ‘no’ for an answer. At the cost of some minor social conflicts, I cannot restrict myself to their level, despite understanding it all too well. I won’t go out of my way to confront people, but I also won’t hide from it.”
She chuckled, just a hint of nervousness, “It sounds almost like a religion.”
He understood the mirth. “It inevitably results in religion, but it is not itself a religion. Religion is a human response to something far bigger than us. I’ve encountered people with all flavors of religion, some radically different from my own, yet it was obvious to me they were trans-dimensional souls.”
She cocked her head to one side. “Obvious how?”
He offered a half-smile. “It’s built into the sense of awareness. Once you train your senses and reason to build from this higher awareness, the awareness itself tags others who have it. There is no objective standard. I have no doubt I’ll miss some because they are entirely too different from me, but it works out well enough. Those I can recognize as fellow trans-dimensionals are folks I can work with on some level.”
Then his face darkened and his gaze drifted down to the table top. “Sadly, a significant number of those folks are so deeply wedded to our Western culture that they trap themselves in all kinds of corrupting religious constructs. Those constructs reflect the Western bias of rejecting the very thing that fires their religious urges. So there are an awful lot of folks I could and should be working with, but they refuse to come out of the prison.”
