Portals in paranormal vernacular are supposed to be inter-dimensional doorways for the afterlife to enter our physical world. Does physics entertain the possibility of their existence? It depends on being more specific about what a portal might actually be. Is the "other side" and our existence within the same space but dimensionally separate? Does a simple portal suffice or is there a type of dimensional corridor to traverse? One such corridor would be likened to a wormhole.
It follows that a discussion of portals should also include ideas of what bodily death is itself. Dr. Peter Fenwick, PhD states from his studies that "Death is an expansion of consciousness, not a switching off." He claims this is data driven and has produced statistical results showing "the amount of suffering people had experienced when dying as well as the non-suffering they had... it matters the amount of suffering you have had in your life. For example, in NDE (Near Death Experiences) 90% of the people went through without any trouble at all. Why? They knew what dying was like, or thought they did. Then, people who pray get a better passage. People who meditate get a better passage. But this one group, people who are curious about the afterlife, experience a very good death." He recommends "cleaning" yourself, that is, be willing to let go of your earthly attachments, family, possessions, etc., wait for your ego function to crumble and move forward being curious, and you'll be ok. This is the dying process from his subjective point of view. It bears similarities both real and metaphorical to a kind of religious contrition or penitence. It is in the "letting go of earthly attachments or not" that makes the idea of the need for a "portal" to come into the picture. This would be a need to settle something left undone in that person's mind and using the word "mind" in this scenario indicates the mind being outside of the physical brain. In paranormal circles the idea of not being able to let go of earthly attachments is often attributed to the reason spirits linger behind. This is not an easily accepted idea, nonetheless is dealt with according to "Siddhi," an important concept in Buddhism, Hinduism and yogic teachings. It is the term given for a spiritual or seemingly magical power or capability. They arise naturally when, through spiritual practices, the emptiness and openness of the mind is realized... no portal required! Yet, just as referenced above concerning the "cleaning" of oneself, achieving "Siddhis" also carries a certain responsibility by definition: "from a scientific perspective it may be exceptionally difficult to find people who have achieved these rarified states and are willing to demonstrate them, because paradoxically they have reached those states precisely because they have not demonstrated them in public. Avoid invitations to display or identify with any accomplishments in yoga, including the siddhis, even if invited by a respected person, because this can reinforce one’s sense of separate self, leading to ego, pride, and arrogance, and this becomes an impediment toward further spiritual unfoldment." That kind of ties in to Dr. Fenwick's contentions.
What about Near Death Experiences (NDE)? Isn't that like some kind of a portal where we supposedly leave our bodies, looking through a kind of doorway back into the physical world? Approximately 20% who experience NDE talk about the "past life review." Is this verifiable? Not actually, as one would have to have an "actual" death experience and not just an NDE. Cardio driven data samples put that number at about 12%. Where does that leave us in relation to talking about spirits re-entering our world of the physical through things such as the hypothesized folklore of the "ghost portal?" Does nothing happen when you die that affects the physical world you are leaving behind? Proponents of the possibility of portals contend that just like an NDE life review, it happens outside of time and space and thus explains why someone is able to experience a lifetime of memory review, moment by moment, in such a short amount of time, possibly minutes or even seconds. It is interesting to add that they have reported not only experiencing their life from their perspective, but from the perspective of experiences of people they have interacted with throughout their life. An example of this is if they had treated someone horribly or hurt someone else in some way and they themselves experience the pain they inflicted on others. This is a fascinating point of view in that there is no God standing over you going over a list of your transgressions. The lifetime review seems to be a self-judgement. This suggests the mind being outside of the physical brain and part of our alleged "soul."
When those in the paranormal community mention "portals," they do so without mentioning the mechanisms that allow them to exist. It is an unfalsifiable claim based on the contention that if you cannot disprove the existence of something, you cannot argue against it's existence. The problem with that is you cannot research and prove something exists if you cannot prove it does not exist. As Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
Despite contrary scientific facts, believers in portals include that belief as part of their preferred ideology. There's nothing wrong with entertaining alternative ideas, but don't they have to have some kind of basis in truth or fact to them? Do portals exist that allow spirits to travel back and forth between our physical world or dimension and theirs? Are they like wormholes? Neil De Grasse Tyson is quoted as saying, "A wormhole is a particular distortion of space and time." Isn't that what a portal would be considered to be?
Taken from the National Bestseller "Black Holes & Time Warps" by Kip S. Thorne, "Wormholes are not mere figments of a science fiction writer's imagination. They were discovered by Ludwig Flamm mathematically, as a solution to Einstein's field equation, in 1916, just a few months after Einstein formulated his equation; none of the wormholes that had been found as a solution of Einstein's equation could be traversed safely. Each and every one of them was predicted to evolve with time in a very peculiar way: The wormhole is created at some moment of time, opens up briefly, and then pinches off and disappears --- and its total life span from creation to pinch-off is so short that nothing whatsoever (no person, no radiation, no signal of any sort) can travel through it, from one mouth to the other. Anything that tries will get caught and destroyed in the pinch-off."
Why is it always presented to us that the spirits that enter our physical world through a portal can exist in our physical world, yet we in the physical world cannot enter that same doorway into their realm? Just how the hell is this spirit, the essence of a former person but now without a physical body, somehow possessing the knowledge and ability to construct the portal for use? Are they borrowing some other spirit's portal or are they being created when and where needed? And what about the considerations of time? Does the spirit that comes into our physical world through a portal come through appearing from a particular time in their own personal life or is it a particular moment in the framework of time itself? Are portals needed even for ghost hunters to receive EVP? After all, sound waves require a medium. They don't travel in a vacuum. What is the medium in the spirit world that would allow sound waves to travel from them to us. Steven Hawking contended that "we will very likely discover that chronology is protected: the explosion always does destroy any time machine, when it is first activated." The portal/doorway itself is pictured as a singular thing, the same as a door connecting two rooms in your home. If a portal does include the consideration of time, does that require a need for a corridor and another doorway from the spirit side? This doesn't sound dissimilar to "walking to the light." Current physics calculations indicate it is impossible to travel to a time earlier than when a wormhole first became a time machine. If the portal-manifesting spirit has obviously already experienced bodily death at a specific moment in time past, how can its emergence through the portal now represent that previous moment in time? Also consider the actual point of portal contact between the spirit world and our world. How are these points compatible without their effects being noticeable or even disruptive of each other as Hawking explains with wormholes.
Ethan Siegel: "Wherever space-time exists, so do the laws of physics, and so do the fundamental quantum fields that underpin all of nature... talking about what occurs in the absence of space-time is as nonsensical — at least from a physics perspective... There’s nothing you can do to “detect” space-time directly; you can only detect the individual quanta of matter and energy that exist within your space-time. Such a thing may exist, but we have no physical conception of it."
Karen Crowther, in Issue 95, 23rd March 2021 - IAI news - The crisis of quantum gravity: “We are seeking a replacement for a particular theory because we believe that theory is incorrect. Yet, we are relying on this older theory as an essential means of confirming the newer theory.”
Einstein declared that all the energy of the universe is constant, it can neither be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed into another form of energy. If we are to believe the paranormal TV shows, it can be transformed into a ghost, that they use "energy" to manifest. What really happens to our "energy" when we die bodily?
The following taken from a livescience.com article:
"the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. When a human dies, the energy stored in his or her body is released in the form of heat, and transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. If we are cremated, the energy in our bodies is released in the form of heat and light. When we eat dead plants and animals, we are consuming their energy and converting it for our own use. Food is metabolized when digested, and chemical reactions release the energy the animal needs to live, move, reproduce, etc. That energy does not exist in the form of a glowing, ghostly ball of electromagnetic energy, but rather in the form of heat and chemical energy. Many ghost hunters say they can detect the electric fields created by ghosts. And while it's true that the metabolic processes of humans and other organisms actually do generate very low-level electrical currents, these are no longer generated once the organism dies. Because the source of the energy stops, the electrical current stops — just as a light bulb turns off when you switch off the electricity running to it. Most of the "energy" that any dead person leaves behind takes years to re-enter the environment in the form of food; the rest dissipates shortly after death, and is not in a form that can be detected years later with popular ghost-hunting devices like electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors."
(NOTE: By using the popular ghost hunting "tech," ghost hunters actually set the conditions of the situation with their equipment. They claim that variations to their initial, baseline readings (which usually consist of only two data points, thus making them meaningless) constitute evidence, and that the degree of variation of the baseline constitutes alleged level of haunting). From Livescience.com: "Ghost hunters who repeat the claim that Einstein's theories provide a sound basis for ghosts reveal less about ghosts than they do about their poor understanding of basic science. Ghosts may indeed exist, but neither Einstein nor his laws of physics suggests that ghosts are real."
Gemma Ware of "The Conversation Weekly," is involved in a podcast that works with academic experts around the world to help explain what’s going on. It showcases expert analysis and cutting-edge research. Gemma: "people who study particle physics can be broken down into two broad types: those who do experiments at places like Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, these are the experimentalists; and those who try to generate theories using super complex mathematics, these are the theorists."
Playing "devils advocate," should we accept without question the nature of Einstein's laws, not allowing for the existence of ghosts? After all, the nature of Einstein's dynamical equations of theoretical physics limit the actual number of calculations used to define the theory itself. Physicists contend that space-time is inseparable from gravity. As accepted and compelling as that claim is, it is predictive theory, allowing room for possibilities not yet available for hypothesis.
I am always brought back to what I feel is the most compelling nature of the observable, physical universe. I am referring to the "balance" of the cosmos. There appears to be an undeniable opposite to everything in existence, and not just in the material sense. Examples would be dark vs light, heat vs cold, or specifically in the world of science, matter vs anti-matter. A non-material example would be good vs evil. A "Theoretical Consequence" example would be the "multiverse." Yet, with these examples in mind, science cannot argue empirically against the possibility of the existence of ghosts, ruling it out completely.
I didn't fall off the portal yesterday (intentional pun there). Wormholes are at present, theoretically explained by Einstein's laws, yet unequivocally unexplainable due to lack of sufficient understanding of quantum laws as they apply to space-time and gravity. The very recent noted strange behavior of "muons" at the Large Hadron Collider attests to the fact there is still much to discover beyond today's current understanding of the Cosmos, including theorized dark matter's gravitational affects. If portals exist as hypothesized in the paranormal sense, are they something else, outside of space-time? If they are indeed outside of space-time, science might never be able to validate or explain their existence. In that case, the claim by my Cajun Medicine Man friend makes the most sense where he says, "In the world of the unseen, there is no such thing as time."
Upon reading this article, my hope is to not only have left you more confused (as I am), but with more questions borne from not being stuck in a paradigm that refuses to entertain them in the first place... at least that is what I think in MY MIND ... wherever, whenever and whatever THAT is.
- MoonJoey