Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

IX THE MYSTICS

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

The mystic, however far removed he may be from Nietzsche's ideal of the Superman, nevertheless represents superhumanity in the domain of consciousness. By means of quotations, taken almost at random from the rich literature of mysticism, the author will attempt to show that the consciousness of the mystic involves the awareness of dimensionally higher worlds. The first group of quotations is culled from certain of the Sacred Books of Hermes Trismegistus.

"Comprehend clearly" (says Hermes to Asclepios) "that this sensible world is enfolded, as in a garment, by the supernal world."

We think of our three dimensional space, "the sensible world," as immersed in higher space; "enfolded as in a garment," therefore. And we think of the objects of our world as having extension in a dimensionally higher region, that "supernal world" in which the phenomena of this sensible world arise. For:

"Celestial order reigns over terrestrial order: all that is done and said upon earth has its origin in the heights, from which all essences are dispensed with measure and equilibrium: nor is there anything which does not emanate from one above and return thither"

THE PAGE AND THE PRESS

The idea of an all-embracing unity within and behind the seeming manifoldness of life forms the ground rhythm of all inspired literature, sacred and profane alike. For clarity and conciseness it would be difficult to improve upon the formulation of this idea contained in the following fragment:

"In the manifold unity of universal life the innumerable individualities distinguished by their variations are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everything proceeds from unity.

"For all things depend upon unity, or develop from it, and because they appear distant from one another it is believed that they are many, whereas in their collectivity they form but one."

Now nothing so successfully resolves this paradox of the one and the many as the concept that the things of this world are embraced and united in a dimensionally higher world in a manner analogous to that in which all conic sections are embraced and united within the cone. A more elaborate and fanciful figure may serve to make this clearer to the mind.

Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letter is a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, larger communities and groups. These "innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations" must needs seem to themselves as "distant from one another," their very differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity. Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards an end of which they cannot be aware. The mind of the reader unites and interprets the letters into continuous thought, though they be voiceless as stones to one another. Even so may our sad and stony identities spell out a world's word which we know not of, by reason of our singularity and isolation. Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually "united in such a manner that the whole is one." The metal that has moulded each into its significant form amalgamates them into a higher unity. So also the power that makes us separate is the same power that makes us one.

THE SHIP AND ITS CAPTAIN

Here follows the lament of the souls awaiting incarnation:

"Behold the sad future in store for us—to minister to the wants of a fluctuating and dissoluble body! No more may our eyes distinguish the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess—not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast!"

That the soul—the so-called subliminal self—draws from a broader, deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is a commonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as higher-dimensional with relation to the body, but so concerned with the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicle as to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking and moving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogy he uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the whole passage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted, that it is given here entire.

"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ample experience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the world of real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition of four-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process we are engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signals of our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitions derived from the inner experience.

"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modern battleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he is in communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey his messages and commands to every part of the ship, and receive information from the conning tower and the engine room. Now suppose the captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his ship over the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of the direction of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that he forgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind of movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are so familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of the ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies himself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean.

"Such is the relation, as I imagine it, of the soul to the body. A relation which we can imagine as existing momentarily in the case of the captain is the normal one in the case of the soul with its craft. As the captain is capable of a kind of movement, an amplitude of motion, which does not enter into his thoughts with regard to the directing of the ship over the plane surface of the ocean, so the soul is capable of a kind of movement, has an amplitude of motion, which is not used in its task of directing the body in the three-dimensional region in which the body's activity lies. If for any reason it becomes necessary for the captain to consider three-dimensional motions with regard to his ship, it would not be difficult for him to gain the materials for thinking about such motions; all he has to do is to call experience into play. As far as the navigation of the ship is concerned, however, he is not obliged to call on such experience. The ship as a whole simply moves on a surface. The problem of three-dimensional movement does not ordinarily concern its steering. And thus with regard to ourselves all those movements and activities which characterize our bodily organs are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the ampler movements. But we do more than use these movements of our body to effect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass when we act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play which lie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind of thought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as a whole.

"When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and apply ourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitual conceptions inadequate. The captain in us must wake up to his own intimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are his own, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how to deal with the problems he has come to."

The Fourth Dimension.

How more accurately and eloquently could "the captain in us," momentarily aroused, give voice to his predicament, than in the words, "Instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast."

DIRECT VISION

The "watery spheres" in the Hermetic fragment are of course the eyes, a mechanism inferior in many ways to the camera of man's own devising. The phenomena of clairvoyance make known a mode of vision which is confined to no specific sense organ, approximating much more closely to true perception than does physical sight. Mr. C.W. Leadbeater in Clairvoyance specifically affirms that this higher power of sight is four-dimensional. He says: "The idea of the fourth dimension as expounded by Mr. Hinton is the only one which gives any kind of explanation down here of astral vision … which lays every point in the interior of a solid body absolutely open to the gaze of the seer, just as every point of the interior of a circle lies open to the gaze of a man looking down upon it." "I can see all around and every way," exclaims one of the psychometers reported in William Denton's The Soul of Things.

The "outer light" by which the physical eye is able to see objects is sunlight. Upon this clairvoyant vision in no wise depends, involving, as it does, other octaves of vibration. We should be able to receive ideas of this order without incredulity since the advent of "dark" photography and the ultra-violet microscope. By aid of the latter, photographs are taken in absolute darkness, the lenses used being transparent to light rays invisible to the eye, but active photographically.

The foregoing passages from The Virgin of the World show a remarkable resemblance between the Hermetic philosophy and modern higher-space thought. The parallelism is not less striking in the case of certain other mystic philosophers of the East.

PLATO'S SHADOW-WATCHERS

"Parmenides," says Hinton, "and the Asiatic thinkers with whom he is in close affinity, propound a theory of existence which is in close accord with a conception of a possible relation between a higher and a lower-dimensional space." He concludes, "Either one of two things must be true, that four-dimensional conceptions give a wonderful power of representing the thought of the East, or that the thinkers of the East must have been looking at and regarding four-dimensional existence."

It would not be difficult to re-state, in terms of our hypothesis, Plato's doctrine of an enduring archetypal world of ideas reflected in a world of transitory images and appearances. Fortunately, Plato has relieved the author of that necessity by doing it himself in his wonderful allegory of the shadow-watchers in The Republic. The trend of his argument is clear; as its shadow is to a solid object, so is the object itself to its archetypal idea. This is the manner in which he presents this thought:

"Imagine a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and neck so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit their wonders."

"I have it," he replied.

"Also, figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other animals, wrought in wood, stone, and all kinds of materials, together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and, as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and others silent"

"You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners."

"They resemble us," I replied. "For let me ask you, in the first place, whether persons so confined could have seen anything of themselves or of each other, beyond the shadows thrown by the fire upon the part of the cavern facing them."

"Certainly not, if you suppose them to have been compelled all their lifetime to keep their heads unmoved."

"And is not their knowledge of the things carried past them equally limited?"

"Unquestionably it is."

"And if they were able to converse with one another, do you not think that they would be in the habit of giving names to the objects which they saw before them?"

"Doubtless they would."

"Again: if their prison house returned an echo from the part facing them, whenever one of the passers-by opened his lips, to what, let me ask you, could they refer the voice, if not to the shadow which was passing?"

"Unquestionably they would refer it to that."

"Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of the manufactured articles to be the only realities."

"Without a doubt they would."

Plato (in the person of Socrates) then considers what would happen if the course of nature brought to the prisoners a release from their fetters and a remedy for their foolishness, and concludes as follows:

"Now this imaginary case, my dear Glaucon, you must apply in all its parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the eye reveals, to the prison-house, and the light of the fire therein to the power of the sun; and if, by the upward ascent and the contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of the soul in the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of my own surmises … the view which I take of the subject is to the following effect."

Briefly, the view taken is that the "Form of Good" perceived by the mind is the source of everything that is perceived by the senses. This is equivalent to saying that the objects of our three-space world are projections of higher-dimensional realities—that there is a supernal world related to this world as a body is related to the shadow which it casts.

SWEDENBORG

Emerson, in his Representative Men, chose Swedenborg as the representative mystic. He accepted Swedenborg's way of looking at the world as universally characteristic of the mystical temperament. The Higher Space Theory was unheard of in Swedenborg's day, nevertheless in his religious writings—thick clouds shot with lightning—the idea is implicit and sometimes even expressed, though in a terminology all his own.

To Swedenborg's vision, as to Plato's, this physical world is a world of ultimates, in all things correspondent to the casual world, which he names "heaven." "It is to be observed," he says, "that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause."

According to Swedenborg, conditions in "heaven" are different from those in the world: space is different: distance is different He says, "Space in heaven is not like space in the world, for space in the world is fixed, and therefore measurable: but in heaven it is not fixed and therefore cannot be measured."

Herein is suggested a fluidic condition, singularly in accord with certain modern conceptions in theoretical physics. Commenting upon the significance of Lobatchewsky's and Bolyai's work along the lines of non-Euclidian geometry, Hinton says, "By immersing the conception of distance in matter, to which it properly belongs, it promises to be of the greatest aid in analysis, for the effective distance of any two particles is the result of complex material conditions, and cannot be measured by hard and fast rules."

The higher correlative of physical distance is a difference of state or condition, according to the Norwegian seer. "Those are far apart who differ much," he says "and those are near who differ little." Distance in the spiritual world, he declares, originates solely "in the difference in the state of their minds, and in the heavenly world, from the difference in the state of their loves." This immediately suggests the Oriental teaching that the place and human environment into which a man is born have been determined by his own thoughts, desires, and affections in anterior existences, and that instant by instant all are determining their future births. The reader to whom the idea of reincarnation is repellent or unfamiliar may not be prepared to go this length, but he must at least grant that in the span of a single lifetime thought and desire determine action, and consequently, position in space. The ambitious man goes from the village to the city; the lover of nature seeks the wilds; the misanthrope avoids his fellowmen, the gregarious man gravitates to crowds. We seek out those whom we love, we avoid those whom we dislike; everywhere the forces of attraction and repulsion play their part in determining the tangled orbits of our every-day lives. In other words, the subjective, and (hypothetically) higher activity in every man records itself in a world of three dimensions as action upon an environment. Thought expresses itself in action, and so flows outward into space.

Observe how perfectly this fits in with Swedenborg's contention that physical remoteness has for its higher correspondence a difference of love and of interest; and physical juxtaposition, a similarity of these. In heaven, he says, "Angels of similar character are as it were spontaneously drawn together." So would it be on earth, but for impediments inherent in our terrestrial space. Swedenborg's angels are men freed from these limitations. We suffer because the free thing in us is hampered by the restrictions of a space to which it is not native. Reason sufficient for such restriction is apparent in the success that crowns every effort at the annihilation of space, and the augmentation of power and knowledge that such effort brings. It would appear that a narrowing of interest and endeavor is always the price of efficiency. The angel is confined to "the narrow prison of the breast" that it may react upon matter just as an axe is narrowed to an edge that it may cleave.

MAN THE SPACE-EATER

Man has been called the thinking animal. Space-eater would be a more appropriate title, since he so dauntlessly and persistently addresses himself to overcoming the limitations of his space. To realize his success in this, compare, for example, the voyage of Columbus' caravels with that of an ocean liner; or traveling by stage coach with train de luxe. Consider the telephone, the phonograph, the cinematograph, from the standpoint of space-conquest—and wireless telegraphy which sends forth messages in every direction, over sea and land. Most impressive of all are the achievements in the domain of astronomy. One by one the sky has yielded its amazing secrets, till the mind roams free among the stars. The reason why there are to-day so many men braving death in the air is because the conquest of the third dimension is the task to which the Zeit-Geist has for the moment addressed itself, and these intrepid aviators are its chosen instruments—sacrificial pawns in the dimension-gaining game.

All these things are only the outward and visible signs of the angel, incarnate in a world of three dimensions, striving to realize higher spatial, or heavenly, conditions. This spectacle, for example, of a millionaire hurled across a continent in a special train to be present at the bedside of a stricken dear one, may be interpreted as the endeavor of an incarnate soul to achieve, with the aid of human ingenuity applied to space annihilation, that which, discarnate, it could compass without delay or effort.

THE WITHIN AND WITHOUT

In Swedenborg's heaven "all communicate by the extension of the sphere which goes forth from the life of every one. The sphere of their life is the sphere of their affections of love and hate."

This is as fair a description of thought transference and its necessary condition as could well be devised, for as in wireless telegraphy, its mechanical counterpart, it depends upon synchronism of vibration in a "sphere which goes forth from the life of every one." Thought transference and kindred phenomena in which all categories of space and time lose their significance baffle our understanding because they appear to involve the idea of being in two places—in many places—at once, a thing manifestly at variance with our own conscious experience. It is as though the pen point should suddenly become the sheet of paper. But strange as are these matters and mysterious as are their method, no other hypothesis so well explains them as that they are higher-dimensional experiences of the self. We have the universal testimony of all mystics that the attainment of mystical consciousness is by inward contemplation—turning the mind back upon itself. Swedenborg says, "It can in no case be said that heaven is outside of any one, but it is within him for every angel participates in the heaven around him by virtue of the heaven which is within him." Christ said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," and there is a saying attributed to Him to the effect that "When the outside becomes the inside, then the Kingdom of Heaven is come." These and such arcane sayings as "Know Thyself" engraved upon the lintels of ancient temples of initiation, powerfully suggest the possibility that by penetrating to the center of our individual consciousness we expand outwardly into the cosmic consciousness as though in and out were the positive and negative of a new dimension. By exerting a force in the negative direction upon a slender column of water in a hydraulic press, it is possible to raise in the positive direction a vast bulk of water with which that column, through the mechanism of the press, is connected. This is because both columns, the little and the big, enclose one body of fluid. The attainment of higher states of consciousness is potential in every one, for the reason that the consciousness of a greater being flows through each individual.

INTUITION AND REASON

There is the utmost unanimity in the testimony of the mystics that the world without and the world within are but different aspects of the same reality—"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He sees me." They never weary of the telling of the solidarity and invisible continuity of life, the inclusion not only of the minute in the vast, but of the vast in the minute. We may accept this form of perception as characteristic of consciousness in its free state. Its instrument is the intuition, which divines relations between diverse things through a perception of unity. The instrument of the purely mundane consciousness, on the other hand, is the reason, which dissevers and dissects phenomena, divining unity through correlation. Now if physical phenomena, in all their manifoldness, are lower-dimensional projections, upon a lower-dimensional space, of a higher unity, then reason and intuition are seen to be two modes of one intelligence, engaged in apprehending life from below (by means of the reason) through its diversity, and from above (by means of intuition) through its unity.

Those who recognize in the intuition a valid organ of knowledge, are disposed to exalt it above the reason, but at our present state of evolution, and given our environment, it would seem that the reason is the more generally useful faculty of the two. In that unfolding, that manifesting of the higher in the lower—which is the idea the four-dimensionalist has of the world—the painstaking, minute, methodical action of the reasoning mind applied to phenomena achieves results impossible to Pisgah-sighted intuition. The power, peculiar to the reason, of isolating part after part from the whole to which it belongs, and considering them thus isolated, makes possible in the end a synthesis in which the whole is not merely glimpsed, but known to the last detail.

The method of the reason is symbolized in so trifling a thing as the dealing out one by one of a pack of cards and their reassembling. The pack has been made to show forth its content by a process of disruption—of slicing. Similarly, if a scientist wants to gain a thorough comprehension of a complicated organism, he dissects it, or submits it to a process of slicing, studying each slice separately under the microscope while keeping constantly in mind the relation of one slice to another. This amounts to nothing less than reducing a thing from three dimensions to two, in order to know it thoroughly. Now the flux of things corresponds to the four-dimensional aspect of the world, and with this the reason finds it impossible to deal. As Bergson has so well shown, the reason cuts life into countless cross-sections: a thing must be dead before it can be dissected. This is why the higher-dimensional aspect of life, divined by the intuition, escapes rational analysis.

THE COIL OF LIFE

Swedenborg's description of "the ascent and descent of forms" and the "forces and powers" which flow therefrom, suggests, by reason of the increasing amplitude and variety of form and motion, a progression from space to space. This description is too long and involved to find place here, but its conclusion is as follows:

"Such now is the ascent and descent of forms or substances in the greatest, and in our least universe: similar also is the descent of all forces and powers which flow from them. But all their perfection consists in the possibility and virtue of varying themselves, or of changing states, which possibility increases with their elevations, so that in number it exceeds all the series of calculations unfolded by human minds, and still inwardly involved by them: which infinities finally become what is finite in the Supreme. Our ideas are merely progressions by variations of form, and thus by actual changes of state."

His sense of the beauty and orderliness of the whole process, and his despair of communicating it, find characteristic utterance in the following passage:

"If thou could'st discern, my beloved, how distinctly and ordinately these forms are arranged and connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things conspiring into one, thou would'st fall down, from an inmost impulse, with sacred astonishment, and at the same time pious joy, to perform an act of worship and of love before such an architect."

In his description of the manner in which these forms cohere and successively unfold, he introduces one of the basic concepts of higher space thought; namely, that in the "descent of forms" from space to space, that which in the higher exists all together—that is, simultaneously—can only manifest itself in the lower piecemeal—that is, successively. He says:

"Nothing is together in any texture or effect which was not successively introduced; and everything is therein, according as order itself introduces it: wherefore simultaneous order derives its birth, nature and perfection from successive orders, and the former is only rendered perspicuous and plain by the latter…. What is supreme in things successive takes the inmost place in things simultaneous: thus things superior in order super-involve things inferior and wrap them together, that these latter may become exterior in the same order: by this method first principles, which are also called simple, unfold themselves, and involve themselves in things posterior or compound: wherefore every perfection of what is outermost flows forth from inmost principles by their series: hence thy beauty, my daughter, the only parent of which is order itself."

This passage, like a proffered dish full of rare fruit, tempts the metaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; but not to weary the reader, the author will content himself by the abstraction of a single plum. The plum in question is simply this (and the reader is asked to read the quotation carefully again): may not every act, incident, circumstance in a human life be the "uncoiling" of a karmic aggregate? This coil of life may be thought of most conveniently in this connection as the character of the person, a character built up, or "successively introduced" in antecedent lives. The sequence of events resultant on its "unwinding" would be the destiny of the person—a destiny determined, necessarily, by past action. This concept gives a new and more eloquent meaning to the phrase "Character is destiny." If we carry our thought no further, we are plunged into the slough of determinism—sheer fatality. But in each reincarnation, however predetermined every act and event, their reaction upon consciousness remains a matter of determination—is therefore self-determined. We may not control the event, but our acceptance of it we may control. Moreover, each "unwinding" of the karmic coil takes place in a new environment, in a world more highly organized by reason of the play upon it of the collective consciousness of mankind. Though the same individual again and again intersects the stream of mundane experience, it is an evolving ego and an augmenting stream. Therefore each life of a given series forms a different, a more intricate, and a more amazing pattern: in each the thread is drawn from nearer the central energy, which is divine, and so shows forth more of the coiled power within the soul.