The concept of a spiritual plane is a universal notion that has found expression in all cultures from antiquity to modern times. Goethe referred to it when he wrote, “I have a firm conviction that our spirit is a being of indestructible nature…” and Manly P. Hall echoes this sentiment with the following: “There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist…” Indeed, our world scriptures speak of celestial beings including the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran and many others. The assertion that the true reality behind life is unseen or spiritual is a common one, and the Hebrew scriptures in particular contend that a human is a tripartite being consisting of body, soul and spirit.

Even if she is the most ardent skeptic, a truly objective scientist is forced to admit that the existence of spiritual phenomena is, at a bare minimum, possible. Open-minded scientists know that the idea itself is in accord with several lines of indirect evidence, both newly emerging and classic. I find it fallacious and closed-minded to assume that all we can experience empirically is all there is, mostly because the number of phenomena we can detect empirically grows in accordance with our technology and knowledge. Due to an unhealthy interpretation of the scientific method as the ultimate test of truth, modern society has conditioned itself to believe mainly in what it can see, experience and reproduce, and it is a very limiting proposition to frame reality in the context of orthodox naturalism.

Human perception is a wonderful servant but a horrible master. Scientifically speaking, normal limits exist regarding the physical senses such as hearing or sight, evidenced by a dog’s ability to perceive audio frequencies too high in pitch for a human to perceive. That is why those little whistles drive dogs absolutely crazy yet have no effect on humans. Just because we can’t hear those whistles doesn’t mean the frequencies they emit are not real. Just ask the dog! In similar fashion, the human retina is only able to perceive roughly five percent of the electromagnetic light spectrum. The rods and cones of the human eye are tuned to perceive energy only within the narrow range of 800nm to 400nm. Anything outside of this energy frequency goes undetected by the human eye. In other words, about ninety-five percent of the energy that surrounds us is visually imperceptible to us. Who is to say that spirits are not simply beings composed of higher or lower frequency energy that we cannot detect with our extremely short range of visual perception?

Exploring the religious or mystical side, the key words used to denote the spirit are ruach and neshemah in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek. Both words have strong connection to the ideas of ‘breath’ or ‘air.’ It is also interesting is that across the board, death is accompanied by a cessation of breath, and a cessation of breath is accompanied by death. We literally, "give up our breath" the moment we expire. Indeed a human being is a conglomeration of chemicals and elements that can be weighed and measured, but there is also an integral impetus that pushes these non-living chemicals into a progressive and life-unfolding organization. Like the proverbial Prometheus, we can cup this fire in our hands and dispense it in lesser increments. In the blink of an eye this deeper impetus halts its operation of the body, and upon that moment the same exact bundle of chemicals and elements that was just teeming with molecular dynamism begins an corollary process of entropic decay. The plight of all physical life in the current earthly sphere is disintegration into dust, which is in accord with Genesis 3:19.

An excellent deliberation of these concepts is afforded in the book Grand Illusions, author Little.