Another order of communication, contact and inter-relation can take place with influences that while originating in this world basic on the phyiscal manifestation and evolution of life and mind upon that framework, are nevertheless now subtilised and reside and act elsewhere than purely in the physical world. “There may also be an awareness of influences, presences, beings that do not seem to belong to other worlds beyond us but are here as a hidden element behind the veil in terrestrial nature. As conatct with the supraphysical is possible, a contact can also take place subjective or objective,–or at least objectivised,–between our own consciousness and the consciousness of other once embodied beings who have passed into a supraphysical status in these other regions of existence. It is possible also to pass beyond a subjective contact or a subtle-sense perception and, in certain subliminal states of consciousness, to enter actually into other worlds and know something of their secrets.”
While this type of experience has taken place and been described in remarkably similar terms all around the world throughout human history, it is true that the physical mind has a tendency to try to turn this into some kind of formulation that fits within the limited framework possible for the physical mind; and thus, it takes on popularised but distorted imagery that tends to reduce credible acceptance by those who can see the distortions, but who do not yet have the capacity or willingness to sort through and find the kernals of truth hidden within these sometimes grotesque images.
It is easy therefore for the mind of science to try to dismiss this type of experience out of hand as something illusory or hallucinatory, or to categorise it as “superstition” and thereby dismiss it from thought. However, Sri Aurobindo points out that “It is not possible for anyone who has had these contacts with any intimacy and not only by scattered abnormal accidents, to put them aside as mere superstition or hallucination; for they are too insistent, real, effective, organic in their pressure, too constantly confirmed by their action and results to be so flung aside: an appreciation, an interpretation, a mental organisation of this side of our capacity of experience is indispensable.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 21, The Order of the Worlds
Sri Aurobindo Studies 