In search of the hidden realms of consciousness

‘It appears that mystics have long known what physicists over the past century have slowly learned through the mathematics of quantum mechanics and electrical engineering.’ Shelli Renée Joye

What is meant by the term ‘metaverse’, increasingly encountered nowadays, in scientific debate?

Author Shelli Renée Joye tells us that it refers to domains beyond our familiar four dimensions of spacetime: at least an additional seven dimensions theorised in the field of high-energy quantum physics.

Under the mathematics of what’s known as string theory, or M-theory (M for magic or mystery), acceptance is required of an expanded idea of the universe which embraces multiple dimensions.

Joye, a computer and electrical engineer who has authored more than twenty books, begins her latest title, The Metaverse of Consciousness: Mapping the multiple dimensions of reality (Inner Traditions, May, 2025), with commentary on string/M-theory which, although remaining a lively sphere of research, is still essentially a mathematical construct unsupported by observational experiments.

But for Joye it cashes out in terms of the word ‘universe’ now being outmoded to describe our experience of existence; ‘metaverse’ implies a much larger reality than that perceived by our forebears — a…