Why the third level is not an extension of the physical universe, where the soul returns between incarnations, and what I encountered during my first journeys into the realm I recognize as our true Home.
The second energy level remains closely connected to physical reality. There, we can see an energetic reflection of our room, our city, Earth, and the surrounding cosmos. Its environment is fluid, responds quickly to thought, and constantly challenges the explorer to distinguish a stable reality from images created by the mind.
The third energy level is different.
It is not a more beautiful copy of our world. It is not another layer of the physical universe’s energetic reflection, nor is it an endless dream created by one person’s thoughts. It is an independent realm of the soul: a vast system of worlds, communities, and environments beyond the physical universe as we know it.
When I first entered it consciously, the greatest discovery was not the unfamiliar landscape or the new ways of moving through space. It was the feeling of returning. Everything around me felt extraordinarily pure, alive, and familiar. I was not merely looking at an unknown place. Every part of my being recognized it.
I was Home.
From that moment on, my understanding of life, death, and human incarnation changed forever.
Why the Third Level Is So Much Harder to Reach
Consciously separating from the physical body does not automatically bring a person into the world of the soul. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person first enters the second energy level, the realm closest to our own.
Moving beyond it requires more than a desire to see something unusual. You must change your inner state, hold a clear intention, and attune yourself to an entirely different quality of energy.
I know two primary ways of making that transition.
The first is direct attunement to a specific place. A person holds not only its visual appearance but also its inner feeling, its energetic signature. If that connection is precise enough, the transition can occur immediately after leaving the body, without a prolonged journey through the second level.
The second method is to change the frequency of your own energy after you are already outside the body. It feels like another separation, even though the physical body has already been left behind. The environment of the second level disappears, perception reorganizes itself, and you enter another realm of reality.
Reaching it is only part of the challenge. Remaining there is even harder.
A sudden memory of the body, an emotional surge, fear, or a loss of focus can pull you back immediately. Your state must correspond to the environment you have entered. That is why the first conscious transition is easier with a guide, a being who knows this reality and can help another person attune to it.
That is how it happened for me.
My First Meeting with Ilrin
That evening I was at home, meditating to quiet music. I had built a separate, well-insulated room specifically for my practice. After about half an hour, I separated from my body, rose through the ceiling and roof, and found myself above the house.
A young man I did not recognize was sitting on the ridge of the roof, watching me closely.
I approached and introduced myself. His response did not come as an ordinary voice. It arrived directly in my awareness:
“Hello. My name is Ilrin.”
No one had ever communicated with me that way before. The thought arrived whole, without moving lips and without the usual sequence of sounds. Ilrin explained that he had deliberately begun the conversation this way to show me another form of communication.
He appeared to be about thirty years old. He smiled calmly, and I felt no threat from him. When I asked where he came from, Ilrin said that he lived very close, though not in a neighboring house or town. He offered to show me his home and possibilities I did not yet know existed.
I prepared to fly, but he told me that no flight was necessary.
Ilrin took my hands and asked me to relax, close my eyes, feel the vibrations, and accelerate them. Within moments I felt a slight dizziness and a powerful change in my inner state. When it passed, he told me to open my eyes.
My house was gone.
We were standing in a green field. Flowers rose through the thick grass. Trees grew in the distance, and mountains stood along the horizon. The entire landscape was filled with brilliant light, although I could see no familiar source of it. A light breeze carried the scent of plants. We wore the same loose, light-colored clothing, and both of us were barefoot.
Ilrin explained that this was the realm where he lived. He had intentionally brought me first to an open field so I could feel the energy of the place and later return to it on my own.
I closed my eyes and focused on what I was experiencing.
The difference between the second and third levels was enormous. On the second level, I had already felt lightness and freedom from the physical body’s limitations. Here, it felt as though I had received a new body, one that was lighter, clearer, and more alive. I sensed more than the touch of grass or the movement of air. I felt the inner energy of the surrounding space, the flowers, the ground, and Ilrin himself.
My perception became more expansive. My energy pulsed in rhythm with everything around me. I was filled with peace, joy, and a profound sense of belonging.
Then a thought arose: I do not want this to end.
Almost immediately, I returned to my physical body.
The contrast was overwhelming. My body felt heavy, as though an enormous weight had fallen on me. After the purity and freedom of what I had just experienced, the density of our world was especially intense. Along with it came a sense of loss, as though I had briefly returned to the place I once came from and then found myself far away from Home again.
But now I knew that Home existed.
Guides Do Not Walk Our Path for Us
The subject of guides is surrounded by fear, legend, and religious imagery. My experience gave me a simpler understanding.
Guides are kindred or more experienced souls who help us when we enter an unfamiliar realm. They may offer support, explain what we are seeing, direct our attention, or help us make a transition. But they do not live our lives for us.
Help does not remove personal responsibility.
We enter physical life for our own experience. If every correct answer were handed to us in advance, incarnation would lose its meaning. This is why the third level cannot be used as a help desk where we obtain a winning lottery number, the date of our death, or a ready-made solution to every problem.
I do not see this as an attempt to conceal the truth. It protects the experience itself. We must learn, make mistakes, correct them, love, take responsibility for our actions, and develop our own understanding. A guide can illuminate part of the road, but each person must walk it.
The Structure of the Third Level
The best metaphor I have found for the structure of the third level is a vast field of enormous soap bubbles.
Some touch one another; others exist on their own. Some contain entire worlds with immense populations. Others form smaller environments created by a close group of souls. Each “bubble” contains its own reality: stable, inhabited, and organized.
There are worlds that resemble Earth, aquatic and atmospheric environments, and realms for forms of life completely unlike human beings. The size of a physical body and a species’ position in an earthly food chain tell us nothing about the value or development of its soul.
Human arrogance often leads us to imagine that we are the only beings worthy of continued existence after death. Occasionally, we are willing to make an exception for the animals we love. But in the reality I encountered, life is one, and the soul is not the exclusive possession of humanity.
No one is forgotten or lost.
All living beings follow their own path. Each receives the experience appropriate to its nature, and every form of life belongs to a much larger process of development. Our tasks and accumulated experience differ, but we arose from the same Source and remain parts of one whole.
The Soul’s World Between Incarnations
In my map of reality, the third energy level is the soul’s primary home between physical incarnations.
Souls generally live in small, closely connected groups. They are joined by shared experience, love, incarnations lived together, and work undertaken in common. Teachers and mentors remain nearby: more experienced souls that no longer need to incarnate in dense physical reality.
After an earthly life, the soul needs to recover. Physical incarnation demands enormous energy. We return to our group, reunite with those close to us, rest, and gradually regain a more complete understanding of who we are.
Then comes a review of the life we have lived. It is not a trial in the human sense and no sentence is handed down. It is a deep examination of the experience we acquired. The soul sees its actions from a wider perspective, understands their consequences, and recognizes what the earthly personality could not see from within its limited position.
Learning and preparation then continue. Souls develop needed abilities, work with the energy of their environment, communicate, create, and prepare for further incarnations. Several members of a close group may enter the same physical life again, taking different roles and helping one another through a shared stage of development.
Most of the Soul Does Not Enter the Physical Body
Through altered states and out-of-body travel, I came to understand that consciousness can divide without losing its inner unity.
When a soul incarnates in the physical world, it does not place all its energy and memory into one human body. Only a part of the greater consciousness enters the earthly personality. Another part continues to exist on the third level.
This is what I call the Higher Self.
During an out-of-body experience, another division occurs. Part of our energy continues to maintain the connection with the physical body and support its functions, while another part becomes free to act beyond it. All these parts remain connected and able to exchange information.
This helps explain why returning Home does not turn a person into someone else or dissolve the individual into an impersonal ocean of energy. Earthly experience enters the soul’s broader memory. Everything we have lived through, including love, pain, actions, mistakes, and relationships, remains part of its development.
The human self is not destroyed. It returns to a more complete understanding of itself.
Time Works Differently
It would be inaccurate to say that time does not exist at all on the third level. Development, learning, creation, and communication still occur. There is a sequence: one state is followed by another.
But time is no longer measured and controlled as it is here.
In the physical world, life is bounded by birth and death. We constantly count hours, years, and the time remaining because every earthly process has a limit. On the third level, the soul does not age or die. Learning can continue for as long as it needs to. Time therefore stops acting as a force that continually drives us toward an ending.
The third level also exists outside the linear time of the first and second levels. Relationships among events can be perceived as a whole. The past is no longer something that has vanished completely, and the future is no longer an empty space that does not yet exist. Perception takes in a much wider picture than the succession of isolated moments available to us in a physical body.
My Return and the Luminous Sphere
After my first meeting with Ilrin, I trained every day, working to reproduce the state I had felt beside him. A week later, I succeeded in attuning myself to the familiar field on my own.
Once again, I stood among thick grass and flowers. The realm greeted me with the same sense of light, purity, and inner joy. I felt that I had been expected.
Ilrin’s voice sounded directly within my awareness, although I could not see him. Then a sphere appeared nearby, about sixteen feet in diameter. It glowed with a soft pink light from within, resembling a crystal while also shimmering like the surface of a soap bubble.
Part of its wall disappeared, and Ilrin stepped out.
He explained that the sphere was used for movement and controlled by thought. It could change its shape and size and move instantly from one environment to another. Inside were two chairs but no familiar controls or instrument panel.
We rose above the ground and traveled toward a valley between the mountains. Forests, meadows, and a lake passed beneath us. Light filled the entire landscape, although no sun existed in the sky. The environment itself appeared to be the source of illumination.
About a thousand souls lived in the valley. Houses resembling large mushrooms or umbrellas stood among the trees. They did not form crowded streets and were not separated by fences. The entire place felt like a beautiful park created for life, fellowship, and rest.
At Ilrin’s home, I met his companion Leyal and a remarkable being resembling a large black cat. It communicated directly, conveying not only words but also its mood, curiosity, and desire to play. Ilrin explained that living beings there understand one another without learning a particular language. By touching an animal or plant, one can sense its state and enter into communication with it.
The house, the garden, the trees, and the surrounding valley did not feel like scenery. This was a living, stable reality. It did not change with every passing thought or submit to my expectations. I had entered an existing world with its own history, inhabitants, and internal order.
A World Created by Shared Consciousness
Ilrin and Leyal explained that the environments of the third level are created and sustained through the power of the souls’ thought. But this is not the same as an accidental personal thought-form on the second level.
A solitary image may appear quickly and disappear just as fast. When thousands of souls unite their intention, experience, and energy, the reality they create becomes stable. It becomes a place where souls can live, learn, reunite, recover, and create.
The less experience a soul has in working with the energy of its environment, the more help it needs from teachers. Over time, it learns to form stable structures, sustain a shared environment, and interact with others in harmony.
Creation on the third level is therefore not private fantasy. It is the collective work of consciousness. It requires cooperation, understanding, and responsibility.
Earthly life teaches us to act within dense matter, where results demand time and effort. The third level opens another form of creation, but it does not eliminate the need for development. The power of thought without maturity does not make a soul more advanced. Greater ability brings greater responsibility.
Why Not All Information Is Available
The third level contains an immense body of knowledge about the soul, incarnation, and the structure of reality. But entering it does not make a person all-knowing.
Not every realm opens immediately. Not every question receives an answer. Some knowledge cannot be transferred into physical memory in its full form. At other times, a person may still lack the experience, inner stability, or capacity needed to understand what is being received.
I do not see these limits as punishment. A child is not given the solution to every problem in advance, because without personal effort, no learning would occur.
Knowledge comes as we become ready to use it.
This is why exploring the third level requires more than a technique for leaving the body. It demands awareness, patience, inner stability, and respect for other beings. An attempt to subordinate this reality to human curiosity or a desire for power closes far more doors than it opens.
What the Third Level Reveals About Death
After my first conscious experience of the third level, death no longer looked like disappearance.
The physical body completes its work, but the soul does not cease to exist. It is released from a limited form of perception, returns to a wider memory, and reenters the realm it knew before birth.
This does not make earthly life unimportant. It makes it more meaningful. If acquired experience remains, then everything we live through contributes to the soul’s development. Love does not end with the body. Relationships continue in a broader form. Mistakes do not become an eternal sentence; they become material for understanding and growth.
The third level gave me hope, but not the hope of escaping life. It showed me the meaning of fully participating in it.
We do not come here simply to leave as quickly as possible. The physical world offers an experience that cannot be gained in a realm that responds immediately to thought. Here, love must become action, courage must appear in the presence of real fear, and our inner qualities must be expressed through the way we live.
The soul does not enter dense matter by mistake. It comes for development.
Then it returns Home, not empty and not unchanged, but enriched by another life.
This Is Not the Final Boundary
The third energy level is vast. It contains countless worlds, forms of life, and paths of development. It could be explored without end, and I do not believe I have seen more than a small part of its structure.
Yet even this is not the final boundary.
The teachers and elders who work with groups of souls continue their own development. Some no longer need physical incarnation and are moving toward another state. Beyond the soul’s world lies the fourth energy level, a reality in which familiar form nearly disappears and individual consciousness enters a far deeper unity with the Source.
It is even harder to describe because human language was created for bodies, objects, distances, and sequential events. Yet this is where the next stage of our map of reality leads.
In the next article, I will explore the fourth energy level, existence beyond form, and the boundaries beyond which ordinary words can no longer carry the full meaning of an experience.
I describe these journeys, my conversations with Ilrin and Leyal, and my conclusions about the soul’s world in greater depth in my book, The Phenomenon of Consciousness Outside the Body.
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