New knowledge from the most recent advances in a little-known area of science matches many of the accounts surviving down the ages from mystics, meditators, people who have survived near-death experiences, inspired sages and shamans, and experiences from dreams and trance states.

Such accounts have until now been dismissed by people inclined to hold 'materialistic' views of the world. Many people often take pride in describing themselves as 'sceptics' or 'agnostics'. In A New Science of Heaven, Robert Temple takes the view that it is reasonable to be sceptical, but can understand how these altered states may have been used in the past to access awareness of the elusive and apparently immaterial 'Other World' by shamans and seers over the millennia. We may discover that many of their accounts and experiences have remarkable validity.

Scientific progress is now sufficiently advanced to enable a world of the spirit to be described and explained in a rigourous fashion for the first time. The advances made in the physics of complex plasmas in recent years provides a mathematical and physical basis to describe the soul, or spirit. These advances make it possible to understand ghosts, for complex plasmas can pass through walls and emerge the same on the other side. (Indeed, they can pass through each other and survive intact as well.)

The 'Other World' is material, but it is a different kind of matter.