Foremost Questions
by Hans Holzer

Again and again, I find myself pondering the very disturbing question -- what are the foremost puzzles in our lives yet to be resolved?

At such moments I look way past my own successful career and knowledge, way past the temporary -- and the temporal -- questions mankind faces every day of our lives, into a kind of mental telescope focused on what lies “out there,” way out there.

I am fortunate in having had a good education, to have acquired knowledge of this universe from many angles, and to be gifted with a keen sense of perception that does not allow for easy answers or closed doors.

Through 121 published books, through newspaper and magazine articles, through television appearances and film, through theatre and lectures and meetings and interviews, over the years, I have pointed at the frontiers of the mind and what lay beyond them. I have found some opposition, largely from those who were quite comfortable within the confines of their convictions and structures, afraid of new and upsetting knowledge that might conceivably rob them of their giddy sense of composure and complacency. But I have also found tremendous interest from the majority of people I have met or reached out to through the media, people who find my postulations and the evidence presented both challenging and reassuring to them. These are people in all walks of life, all ages, all socio-economic groups. What they have in common is a healthy curiosity about themselves, their place in the universe and the hint of some very important answers to age-old questions about the nature of man, and this universe we live in.

At a time when it was almost ludicrous to do so, I stepped forward and wrote about the psychic evidence that man survives the dissolution of the physical body, about another dimension into which we all pass -- but from the point of view of science, not religion. Belief had nothing to do with it, reasonable evidence obtained under scientifically valid conditions, through observation or experimentation, were, and are, my tools. I brought together a small group of dedicated scientists, doctors, and researchers with a similar outlook, to try and establish a Center at some future date when we might have the appropriate support, and deal with the question of “life after death,” with reincarnation evidence, and with the nature of Extrasensory Perception and psychic experiences, spontaneous phenomena, and unorthodox healing, in a relaxed, scientific yet positive atmosphere, for maximum results, and a better understanding how all this works.

Inevitably, my path soon led to other areas crying for reasonable answers, areas beyond human experience and this planet. In a veritable jungle of halftruths and outright delusion, I tried to isolate the hard facts and dispose of the reports and individuals who were projecting false images of this research, thus impeding our progress. But after I had written and published a successful book dealing with extraterrestrial incursions of our planet, and after examining even more cases coming to my attention after the book had been published, I came to the firm conviction that many of these reported incidents were true. The implication of human-like life existing on other planets circling other suns was inescapable. But if this was so, would it not be one of the two most important questions to be resolved by this humanity -- the other being further evidence and understanding of the nature of man in respect to survival of physical death, and reincarnation?

Yet, very little is being done to address these two foremost subjects. Humanity is concerned with survival in this physical world, with mundane matters, with power struggles and greed.

Lacking major official interest, and finding little private support, I then turned to my own resources to find ways of doing this necessary work, by creating television series, motion pictures, theatrical plays and even musicals, as well as more books and magazine stories, to touch upon these matters in popular ways, yet capable of -- generating profits large enough to be put into the service of my Greater Agenda.

But when all this is said and done, and we proceed on a road of totally unbiased inquiry into these subject matters, is it not also necessary to address the much more difficult question that must eventually arise even if and when we know the answers to all of the above?

This is the question of the nature of the universe itself, and of Creation.

Clearly, we cannot fall back upon religion here as a copout, though I am a totally spiritual person with strong religious convictions. No, the answers can only come from the mind, and from exploration itself.

Various theories are being offered by the best astronomers regarding the birth of the universe -- from the Big Bang to gradual development from gaseous matter, congealing under the influence of some form of energy, and the theories keep changing simply because they do not address the fundamental problem: If “the universe” -- the grand total of all that exists in space, known to us or not -- is finite, and has boundaries, what exists “beyond” the universe? What begins where the universe ends? Clearly, an impossible question to answer with our knowledge and scientific tools of today.

But let us assume there is no universe, no heavenly bodies at all, just black, empty space without beginning or end. Only “nothing” can get away with that: anything that is “something” needs to be defined in some way as to appearance, size, extension. But nothing is, well, nothing.

But we know this vast nothing does contain huge amounts of things, physical galaxies, energy fields, gases, manifestations originating in some form of the energy-matter-time-space continuum. How did that come about, by what means, when and why?

It is of course easy to see that a Divine Fiat is the perfect answer, and for all I know, it may well be the correct one. But pending that confirmation, let me postulate a possible way by which this all came about, which leads me back to my earlier disclosures about the hard evidence for the existence of another dimension, a lighter, faster, thinner world but nevertheless a real world in which the spiritual part of our persona continues to exist as a conscious human being. From a variety of tests and responsible observations, I have become convinced that the “next world”, so to speak, is co-existing spacially with our physical world, with which it does not collide since its “vibrations” (its movement -- for everything is always in motion!) occur at a higher speed than the movement of particles on the physical plane and thus can co-exist in the same spacial world, though not in the same time continuum -- somewhat like polaroid light and ordinary light which can co-exist because of the different angle polaroid light takes.

The late “prophet” Edgar Cayce -- many psychical researchers as well -- have stated that the “inner body”, that is, the so-called spirit, creates and controls the physical outer body, and thus all illness needs to be dealt with by dealing with that finer, inner body first. Even orthodox medicine acknowledges the power of the mind over purely physical manifestations. But what is “mind” other than human energy directed in specific paths?

As we know through Einstein’s work, energy and matter are inter-related, and actually represent different ends of the same scale -- energy turning into matter under certain conditions, and vice-versa.

The “spiritual” universe, being energy field, could conceivably also “manifest” a denser layer called matter, over long stretches of what we have come to call “time.” But being composed only of energy, being a field, it cannot have boundaries as we understand the meaning of this term: only a potential, which may either increase or decrease depending upon the activities of this power reservoir. Thus, the “spiritual” universe would lie outside the space-time continuum, even though it does occupy “space”: this factor it has in common with the vast nothingness of empty space -- both are truly infinite.

But when this “spiritual” universe proceeds to manifest a physical counterpart, that universe becomes finite to the extent of its creation and development: the “expanding universe” theory then fits.

What remains unanswered, perhaps forever by its very nature, is the question of what, or who put this development into motion: and who, or what so appointed that authority. There may well exist laws in the universe we do not know or understand, under which these developments occur quite naturally.

On the other hand, the hard evidence for what we have come to call “life after death” in the vernacular, is mounting, and the existence of a dimension beyond our physical world is no longer questioned by serious researchers who are familiar with the facts.

Thus, the borderline between pure scientific inquiry and the spiritual existence, even religion, is increasingly getting blurred -- until, perhaps, the two paths merge into one. That “other side” of life is neither supernatural nor haphazard. But who or what arranged all this? Who is in charge? And who appointed that person in the first place, if it is a “person”?

The answer is not yet and may well never come. But I do know that there is “law and order” in that universe just as it is in its physical counterpart.•

Hans Holzer is the author of 121 books, including ESP and You, Life Beyond Life, and The UFOnauts. He taught Parapsychology for eight years at the New York Institute of Technology, lectures widely, and has been an active writer/producer and on camera person in television, notably the NBC series “In Search of...” Professor Holzer studied at the University of Vienna and Columbia University, and obtained his Ph.D. from London College of Applied Science; he is a member of several scientific societies, and is listed in Who’s Who in America. Dr. Holzer lives in New York.
©1999 Vol. 17 No. 1