Summary: This post hypothesizes how porous liminal boundaries in our (3+1) dimensional reality may be created, allowing information to pass across dimensional boundaries. These anomalous locations on earth might in fact be related to M-theory and brane proximity. There are special locations on earth which historically have had a reputation for healing while also enabling mystical experiences. These places might indicate proximity to other transcendent realities. Several of these locations appear on the UNESCO World Heritage List, reflecting their recognized cultural and historical significance, and several will be discussed here. While this essay is necessarily speculative, M-theory provides a rigorous physical framework within which such transfers of information across dimensional boundaries are not merely possible but perhaps inevitable.
Hazelnuts have always been a favorite food among homo sapiens. As far back as 8,000 B.C. people have been eating these filberts (named after St. Philibert). Hazelnuts are also used in the production of oil, which has particular applications in cooking. The Celts considered hazelnuts to be sacred because they are frequently found alongside riverbanks, springs, and wells — all holy places to the Celts. Because of the hazel tree’s connection to water, divining rods used to detect subterranean water during drought were frequently made of hazel wood. Celts also believed that these trees could ward off evil spirits, and wood from the hazel was popular when people were building new homes. Finally, the sweet meat of the nut is not only nutritious, but it fits nicely within the confines of the nut’s shell.
One woman in particular who appreciated the hazelnut was Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c. 1416), an anchoress who lived an ascetic life cloistered away from the world while experiencing visions of her Lord. She was never canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church, however, and yet she still bears honorable mention. She writes1 of one occasion when she was reminded of the Hazelnut by God, Himself:
He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: "It is all that is made". I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall last, for God loves it. And so hath all things their beginning by the love of God.
Julian of Norwich believed that God was telling her that the whole cosmos or universe could fit inside a small filbert. He was revealing to her that reality was much greater than what she was aware of. And if this analogy holds true and given that there is more than one hazelnut in the world, it would stand to reason that there could be other universes in other filberts. It is at this point that we consider the possibility of many worlds with “other sheep”2 and rules of their own as far as physics are concerned. But having mentioned Hazelnuts, let’s look at something presently called branes.
Destinations
When people plan a trip abroad, one of the first questions to answer is: what is the point of the trip? Is it to visit relatives? Maybe scenic places or tropical beaches? Whale-watching possibly? Perhaps historical places in a country rich in legend and lore such as England? But how many others do you know who visit spiritual places? Oh! There are tours of the Holy Land, but the places you visit in that case may be religious and not necessarily spiritual, per se. Spiritual places are places that affect a person in subjective ways.3 For example:
A sense of being watched or accompanied. Not threat — presence. Something on the other side of the membrane is aware that you are there, and you are aware of it, without either party fully crossing over.
Heightened attention without identifiable cause. The senses sharpen. Ordinary perception becomes somehow insufficient, as though the information arriving exceeds what the ordinary channels were designed to carry.
Time behaving differently. Hours compress or stretch. The normal forward momentum of experience slows or stalls. This is consistent with what we have been discussing — that at boundaries where the structure of reality is locally unusual, the temporal dimension may not behave with its familiar regularity.
A feeling of being both fully located and somehow between. You are standing in a specific physical place — a stone circle, a desert canyon, an ancient church, a forest clearing at dusk — and simultaneously you are at a threshold, hovering between categories that normally stay separate.”
As an example, I’ve stood on a (most likely refurbished) staircase, but with the original wooden handrail that George Washington used when he visited a house a few miles from mine. I have to admit it was a thrilling experience to me. Of the 3+1 dimensions we have, I was in perfect sync with three of them. Only time was different. For this same reason, I have no desire to visit Dachau or Auschwitz. I’m afraid the experience would overwhelm me in a melancholy way. So in that home that Washington stayed at, each of the four points above was true. However, it was not a spiritual experience. I did not see eighteenth-century scenes, or hear voices, etc. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were not aroused. I could not discern anything revealing about Washington while running my fingers across the bannister that authors had not mentioned many years ago. But I felt in closer alignment, even proximity, to him and especially his era than ever before.
Here are just a few of the places on our planet that have reputations in a spiritual sense
The Oracle of Delphi (a caveat)
The Oracle of Delphi (actually a lineage of different people over the centuries who claimed the title of Pythia). Pythia is the name which refers to the giant snake that Apollo killed and threw to the earth. The carcass fell into a deep cleft in the ground, and over the centuries the rotting flesh caused fumes to exit the crevice. A temple to Apollo, which still stands, was built over this crevice. The oracle would inhale these fumes and then prophesy, often in vague sentences. This all remained a myth until forty or so years ago, when a geological study discovered a seismic fault directly under the temple. This fault, called the Delphi Fault, intersected with another fault called the Kerna Fault. The two faults interact with each other enough to heat the underlying bituminous limestone and release light hydrocarbon gases such as ethylene, ethane, and methane that accumulate in the water of numerous springs in the area. Ethylene has specific psychopharmacological properties that can cause hallucinations and was once used as a surgical anesthetic. Thus, the Pythia likely inhaled this gas instead of the remains of the mythological Python, and this caused her trance-like pronouncements. It may also have poisoned her, because the historical records note that the Pythia tended to have shorter lives than other people.
However, this does not explain perhaps the most famous prophecy from any of the oracles at Delphi. In order not to belabor the point, I’ve added this curious but important incident as a footnote4.
Access might be closer than you might imagine
I don’t mean to imply that there are only certain places on earth where someone can encounter a ministering angel or the Holy Spirit. St. Luke tells us that Saul encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. For St. Augustine, it was while sitting in a garden. There are people in public places who unexpectedly encounter God while out running errands. For still others, it may be in the privacy of their home. It is conceivable that a theophany might occur in the prison cell of someone on Death Row. To me, these locations where the creature meets their Creator are all holy places. God does not hear you better when you are in Rome than when you are in Rottingham or Rochester.
I was advised not to confine myself to the Christian experience in this post. Certainly there are indigenous peoples in the world, and members of other cultures and faiths, who have their own encounters — whether through a vision quest, a near-death experience (NDE), or some other trigger. Doing a comparative study is beyond my qualifications and a topic for a separate post— but the limitation on the scope of this study does not in itself make my argument any less valid.
I do know, however, that there is one major point that sets Christianity apart from other faiths. That point is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The Buddha, Confucius, Moses, et al. — none of whom returned bodily from death — are all dead. When God raised Jesus from the dead to return to this reality for forty days, and assuming my hypothesis is correct in describing in part how it may have been accomplished, it certainly involved crossing some liminal boundary from whatever reality lies beyond death into the reality of the living, in a way that has never happened before. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet (3.1.78–79), the grave is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” Jesus alone crossed that boundary in both directions — and came back to tell us what lies on the other side.
The Pool of Bethesda
So let’s look at the pool of Bethesda (John, chapter 5), which almost certainly was a localized area where liminal boundaries were routinely porous. The pool of Bethesda existed for almost two centuries before Christ. Alexander the Great (356 B.C.–323 B.C.) introduced Hellenistic culture to the Holy Land, and by the time the Romans moved in, there were hundreds of baths and springs dedicated to Asclepius throughout the Roman world, and at least one of these was almost certainly the pool of Bethesda, pictured as it sadly appears today. The invalid who spoke to Jesus admitted that he had been going to the pool for a healing since before Jesus was born, but without a miracle. In other words, the crippled person, presumably a Jew — but we cannot know for certain — was seeking a miracle from a Greek god, but he never could enter the pool before his stronger rivals, and thus
he was not healed (until Jesus came). Years later, out of perhaps contempt for Judaism and certainly a desire to stamp out Christianity, the emperor Hadrian (76 A.D.–138 A.D.) rebuilt the shrine to Asclepius exactly over the pool as it existed in Jesus’ day. And there is at least circumstantial evidence in the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and in Rabbi Akiva writing in the Babylonian Talmud of the same era, that healing miracles continued beyond Hadrian’s rule. So regardless of the ministry of Jesus, the pool had a long life and some degree of success.
Branes
Here is my artistic conception of branes. In an attempt to assist you in visualizing what a brane might look like, I’ve included four branes that are more ribbon-like than the flat, boring diagrams of branes elsewhere. But who knows for sure what we’ll discover in the future as far as their appearance goes? In this illustration, I wanted to emphasize how they are not thought to hang flat and lifeless like tapestry on a wall. Gravitational attraction, flux discharges, and other forces can cause perturbations in space, gradually causing branes to drift a bit, touch and therefore interact. The brane on the far right shows many points of light that are, in fact, not individual stars but galaxies of perhaps millions of stars and each point of light is actually a galaxy unto itself. So, let’s say that the far right brane represents our reality. The other branes reflect other realities. They might be filled with dark matter or massive clouds of gas with hidden bodies that follow laws of a different type of physics than we are aware of in our universe, which itself fits within a single brane.
Can Heaven and Hell exist on branes?
From a physics standpoint and as far as Scripture is concerned, the answer is Yes! A brane is nor observable and we cannot cross back and forth even though it might be millimeters or less from our own brane.
Before my proposal and to the best of my knowledge, there was no satisfactory explanation of where heaven is except “up.” But there is nothing observable that could be described as heaven or hell. This is where M-Theory might come in. The branes I’ve discussed in this post are encompassed by and embedded in what is called the bulk. There is also, in theory, the notion of a shadow brane in some M-Theory models. According to this theory, there may be isolated branes, but other branes may have a “shadow” or companion. This shadow brane would in theory run parallel to ours through time just as ours does. So, in some sense it could be temporal — or not — and could very well be angelic, yet not completely divine as such. And it could represent — that is, house — anything from Abraham’s bosom to one of the heavens to which Paul was translated. It could also represent an interim state of God’s presence for departed souls until the resurrection of the dead. Or it could be the location of Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol. Think of the parable Jesus spoke of concerning Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31).
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.
At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores
and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried.
In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.
So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.
And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family,
for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
What makes liminal experiences more likely
I’m not a big fan of psychic-related practices or exercises such as transcendental meditation, aromatherapy, drugs, and what have you. But there are some preparatory practices that are useful.
The are some nonanatomical differences in some people’s brains (such as those whose right hemisphere is dominant) that put a pilgrim visiting a sacred space more in tune with any “vibes” and therefore a possible spiritual experience. Also important are a person’s curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, imaginative richness, and tolerance for ambiguity.
Fasting: Looking to Moses, Elijah, Daniel, Jesus, et al., it is clear that fasting has some merit, and it has been considered by some to be the single most effective predictor of success in spiritual matters, whether in terms of insight or spiritual warfare. In fasting, the body depends less on glucose for fuel and more on ketones, which are partially metabolized fat calories. Fasting can elevate cortisol production and cause hypoglycemia, which alter the signal-to-noise ratio and may provide the person with increased sensitivity to otherwise weak signals that bleed across the branes (at least until the person passes out in a life threatening state). Fasting has an effect on cortisol, serotonin and norepinephrine levels and an ideal fast for the sake of getting guidance from the Lord requires a certain balance. Prophets, rabbis, pastors and priests understood this eons ago. They knew what techniques tended to work and which did not. This empiricism on their part does not equate to superstition by any means
Sleep deprivation and the hypnagogic threshold. In the hypnagogic stage while falling asleep, or the hypnopompic state while awakening, people are more sensitive to preternatural or otherworldly activity (particularly in women more than men). This affects just over a third of all people, so it is not a mental health disorder. The DSM-5 notes: “the term hallucination is not ordinarily applied to the perceptions that occur during dreaming, while falling asleep (hypnagogic), or upon awakening (hypnopompic).” Visual, auditory, taste, smell, touch, the feeling of falling, out-of-body experiences, and the appearance of apparitions, and so on, have been reported. People in these two states occasionally report a sense of presence, voices, smells, and sometimes a feeling that they are moving through their room. Some report sexual sensations. In the case of arousal during hypnopompic states, the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and other sensations are often related to the end of REM sleep. REM sleep, of course, is the period of deep dreaming, and one’s rapid eye movements indicate this. When you wake up normally, however without an alarm clock, not all parts of your brain wake up simultaneously. I tried to find a way to illustrate this and settled on a mosaic tile pattern below.
How to understand your waking brain
The black tiles represent parts of your brain that are still “asleep” in some neurochemical sense. The light tan areas represent those parts of your brain that are more or less fully awake as you start to arouse. The dark brown tiles represent
areas that are still in the transitional zone between wakefulness and sleep. This is where unusual thoughts, disembodied or fantastic perceptions arise. Eventually, one becomes completely awake. But these transitional chestnut-colored zones are where you are most receptive to external signals, as the noise is reduced.
I don’t want to go afield with discussions on neurotransmitters, theta waves, etc. Suffice it to say, while not every or likely even most dreams should concern you, God does have a habit of working through dreams, so there certainly is a precedent. In Genesis 28, Jacob’s ladder appears in a dream. Jacob wrestled with an angel at night (Genesis 32). It was while Samuel was a small boy asleep that God repeatedly called to him. Then there were the prophetic dreams of the servants of Pharaoh’s house (Genesis 40) that Joseph interpreted. Fast forward to Matthew 2, where God warns Joseph to take Mary and the baby Jesus to Egypt because their lives were in danger.
If I were to have a troubling dream, I would pray about it. If the dream repeated itself, I would consult a discerning minister or priest. I would not start with Craigslist or the classified sections of the newspaper. You don’t want astrologers, mediums, and others offering their two cents. This is because while they may have interesting or even accurate interpretations (or not) these opinions are not anchored in God’s Word and most likely do not originate with godly spirits. Remember the words of St. Paul in Galatians 1:8:
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!”
There are other considerations, but I believe I covered the main ones.
What makes liminal experiences less likely
Probably the worst place you can be if you are looking for guidance is on the forty yard line during a Superbowl half-time show. The loud music, the screaming crowds, the fireworks, the Thunderbird flyover, the sheer extravaganza will extinguish whatever you might otherwise experience in quiet, contemplative, soothing environment with subdued lighting.
Why do Hierophanic locations cease to exist?
Power grids, cell phone towers, Wi-Fi and radio infrastructure all create dimensional static which (theoretically) tends to seal any porisity of the brane. And there are other things such as violence, the encroachment of profane businesses or industry, and development in terms of concreteand urbanization. Radical changes to the architecture of the sites also degrades the usefulness of any site. Pollution, commercialization and so on may cause a holy site to fail.
The last prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi (delivered in 361 AD–362 AD) was as follows:
Tell the king: the richly adorned hall has fallen. Phoebus no longer has a home, nor the prophetic laurel, nor the speaking spring. The voice of the water is silent.
Just as brane proximity and therefore porosity is initiated by certain forces, these same mechanisms in reverse might cause a return to the status quo ante. These forces might involve the physical separation of the branes, a reduction in the expression of quantum coherence, and increases in the entropic noise that eventually made the weak signals indecipherable. The noise was
the product of the vibrations of atoms, or perhaps it was the rock strata that focused the spring water that shifted slightly, altering the ethylene content. The oracle’s chamber was populated with artifacts that amplified either what she heard or “felt,” as the case may be. Over time, these enhancements were looted until finally the noise overwhelmed the signal and “the voice of the water” became silent, meaning it could no longer be discerned. Today, we have other sources of noises that interfere with any meaningful focus. They may seem trivial to us but on a quantum scale they might make a decisive difference.
Conclusion
If you want to research evolution, a geometry book will be of little value to you. Nor will a book on musical theory help you prepare your taxes. The Bible is not a science book. It does not support geocentrism any more than we do when we talk about “sunrise” and “sunset.” And a physics book does not endorse intelligent design (though maybe it should take a closer look).
In the year 1926, Pluto was still several years away from being discovered by Clyde Tombaugh. We knew of only 22 moons in our solar system. Today we know of approximately 290 — a number that continues to grow. A hundred years ago, we did not know of a single exoplanet. Today, NASA has catalogued over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in their archive. In 1926, Albert Michelson was trying to accurately compute the speed of light. Penzias and Wilson had not yet been born. Nor had Schrödinger’s cat.
A lot can happen in a century,
I find that God generally works within the laws of nature that He has created, although sometimes He personally gets involved. Balaam’s donkey spoke Hebrew on one occasion as the beast had an epiphany of his own. Jesus turned water into wine in a matter of seconds. Who really knows where we will be in the year 2126 and what we will learn between now and then?
My purpose in writing this post is not to try to convince anyone that heaven and hell exist on branes. At the moment, and other than exotic mathematical solutions, I don’t know of any evidence to support M-Theory. Rather, I hoped to show that there are theoretical possibilities and explanations for belief systems. Our bodies produce electricity, else our hearts would not pump. They have an electromagnetic potential that we can measure using an electroencephalograph. The ethylene at Delphi and the incubation sleep at the sanctuary of Amphiaraus affected the entropic noise and the ability of the participants to become aware of signals they would likely have missed were they fully sensible. And even as society grapples with the question of when human life begins, we are beginning to wonder whether we truly know when life ends. How long does consciousness continue after the heart beats its last beat?
We are learning that there is much more to our galaxy and universe than we thought. All we know now sooms to be a gain of sand on the beach, barely enough to fill a Hazelnut. CERN is working overtime to test hypotheses and expand our understanding every year. There is nothing wrong with looking at things from an interdisciplinary point of view, and I think and hope we will see more of this in the future.
And we must remember that as we discover that the universe, or multiverses are larger than expected, our own little piece of heaven is proportionately smaller. And long before Einstein or Hawking proved it, Julian of Norwich spoke of it. And it is God’s love as much as the strong nuclear forces that holds protons, neutrons and quarks together.
Footnotes
1Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter Five.
2John 10:16.
3Anthropic. (2026). Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) [Large language model]. Cosmic Events and Brane Movement (The Phenomenology Matches)
4Croesus was the last king of Lydia (present day Türkiye). We don’t know precisely when he was born, though we know he died in 547 BC. He faced the most important decision in his career and needed divine guidance. So he sent messengers to seven oracles on two continents. The messengers were instructed to report to their assigned oracle at the same time and ask the question: “What is Croesus, king of Lydia, doing at this exact moment?” As a precaution, Croesus did not decide what to do until the day the messengers were to report to their assigned oracle. This was to prevent them from accidentally tipping off the oracle with what they knew, or to keep the oracle from reading their minds.
On the day they reported to the oracle, the king did something highly unusual for the time. He killed a tortoise and a lamb, and at the time the messengers asked the question of their assigned oracle, Croesus was boiling both animals together in a bronze kettle with a bronze lid. As soon as the oracle of Delphi received the question, she replied:
I know the number of the grains of sand and the measure of the sea. I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voice of him who speak not. There comes to my senses the smell of a hard-shelled tortoise boiling in bronze together with the flesh of a lamb, where bronze is laid beneath and bronze is placed on top.
Herodotus says that only the oracle of Delphi got the answer right, though Croesus insists that the oracle of Amphiareion of Oropos located 23 miles NE of Athens was also correct. So, we are left with a mystery. How did these two oracles know what Croesus was doing at that hour when until that day Croesus himself did not know what he’d be doing? Amphiareion, a slain Greek hero and seer was the inspiration for a spa-like cliinic at Oropos. After ritualistic cleansing and other religious observances, people seeking assistance would sleep on the floor of the facility and Amphiareion would visit them in their dreams, often healing them of some affliction. This location and Delphi were apparently in areas where the liminal barrier allowed some sort of supernatural knowledge to seep through into this reality.
One Response
It’s fascinating to think that ancient rituals or pilgrimages might have been attempts to access these porous boundaries between dimensions. It really highlights how human culture and history could be intertwined with phenomena we’re only beginning to theorize about. Makes you wonder how much of our heritage encodes experiences we’ve yet to fully understand.