The ancient Greeks believed that beams shot from our eyes, like Superman's X-ray vision minus the X-rays. Whatever those beams landed on was what we saw. To them, that's how vision worked. Stemming from this mistaken perspective grew the idea of the evil eye and its dark powers.

Today, thanks to the materialistic light of science we know that the "beam" part of seeing is a receptive event. Beams of light (an electromagnetic force) reflect off an object and enter our eyes. From there, they rush along our neural pathways until they reach the brain. Once there, that magnificent bio-computer processes those signals into life-like, three-dimensional pictures of the world. We call those pictures "reality." As it turns out, all of our senses are similarly receptive. They receive input from the environment and transfer it to the brain, which then tries to convert it to something meaningful.

If the senses have any metaphysical properties related to them, science, unfortunately, cannot shed much light. This is because its instruments are too coarse to detect data from those planes, or metaphysics operates within laws beyond physics, or both.

String theory, science's pet Theory of Everything, finds itself in a similar yet more humiliating position. Although mathematically sound, a condition rarely found in metaphysics, string theory lacks any experimental means to prove or disprove its conclusions. Strings, they claim, are far too small to measure. This forever banishes the intriguing Theory of Everything to the realm of philosophy or metaphysics — perhaps rightly so.

Conversely, metaphysical reality, when manifesting on the earth plane, sometimes appears to follow the laws of earth science. For example, most can feel "bad vibes" from another person just by standing next to him or her. Several have even reported feeling physically ill by seeing certain politicians on television! Most have spoken to a "poisonous person" on the telephone and felt bad during and after the conversation. This suggests that metaphysical energy can travel over the airwaves and phone lines.

You can experiment with this. Say that you are involved in one of those poisonous conversations. Move the phone two inches from your ear. You'll notice that this significantly reduces the poisoning effect. If you move it away another two inches, it dissipates more. This is revealing. If you could quantify the degree of poisoning at the various distances, then you could arrive at a mathematical formula that describes the rate of falloff. This would give the phenomenon the status of a scientific theory (assuming the unlikely possibility that scientists could consistently replicate the results).

Materialists will argue that the poisoning effect is strictly a psychological affair. If this were true, it shouldn't matter how far the phone is from your ear, as long as you can hear the words and the vocal tone. But because distance does have a marked effect, some force — in addition to a psychological one — must be at work. We'll call that force, unscientifically, vibes. Bad vibes bring us down; good vibes rejuvenate us. In religious terminology, they are vibes from either Heaven or hell.