Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death—these things we say are irrational, and so in a sense they are. Bergson has compared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of a cinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion by flashing upon the screen a correlated series of fixed images. In like manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it to consciousness part by part, but never as a whole. In supernormal states however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrier life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness. Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances, in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Might it not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world, higher-dimensional in relation to our own? Just as a moving picture shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat images on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on the three-dimensional screen of the world men and women engaged in unfolding the drama of personal life may be but the images of souls enacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation. The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is said to have been due to his belief that something of his personality, his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much the poorer from that time forth. Suppose such indeed to be the case: that the flat-man on the moving picture screen leads his little life of thought and emotion, related to the mental and emotional life of the living original as the body is related to its photographic counterpart. In similar manner the potencies of the higher self, the dweller in higher spaces, may flow into and express themselves in and through us. We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon the luminous screen of material existence, revealing there, however imperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higher space.

The saying, "All the world's a stage," may be true in a sense Shakespeare never intended. It formulates, in effect, the oldest of all philosophical doctrines, that contained in the Upanishads of Brahma, the Enjoyer, who takes the form of a mechanically perfect universe in order to read his own law with eyes of his own creation. "He thought: 'Shall I send forth worlds?' He sent forth these worlds." To the question, "What worlds?" the Higher Space Hypothesis makes answer, "Dimensional systems, from lowest to highest, each one a representation of the one next above, where it stands dramatized, as it were. This is the play of Brahm; endlessly to dissever, in time and space, and to unite in consciousness, like the geometrician who discovers every ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, in the cone where all inhere."

The particular act of the drama of unfolding consciousness upon which the curtain is now upfurled is that wherein we discover the world to be indeed a stage, a playground for forces masquerading as forms: "they have their exits and their entrances," or, as expressed in the Upanishads, "All that goes hence (dies on earth) heaven consumes it all; and all that goes thence (returns from heaven to a new life) the earth consumes it all."

XI THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

CONCEPT AND CONDUCT

A surgeon once remarked to the author that among his professional associates he had noticed an increasing awareness of the invisible. This he claimed was manifest in the fact that the young men educated since the rise of bacteriological science were more punctilious in the matter of extreme personal cleanliness and the sterilization of their instruments than the older and often more accomplished surgeons whose habits in these matters had been formed before the general sense of an invisible menace had become acute.

This anecdote well illustrates the unconscious reaction of new concepts upon conduct. Preoccupation with the problems of space hyper-dimensionality cannot fail to produce profound changes in our ethical outlook upon life and in our attitude towards our fellow beings. The nature of these changes it is not difficult to forecast.

Although higher-space thought makes painfully clear our limitations, it nevertheless leads to the perception that these very limitations are inhibited powers. In this way it supplies us with a workable method whereby we may enter that transcendental world of which we glimpse so many vistas. This method consists in first becoming aware of a limitation, and then in forcing ourselves to dramatize the experience that would be ours if the limitation did not affect us. We then discover in ourselves a power for transcending the limitation, and presently we come to live in the new mode as easily as in the old. Thought, conscious of its own limitations, leads to the New Freedom. "Become what thou art!" is the maxim engraved upon the lintel of this new Temple of Initiation.

SELFLESSNESS

Higher-space speculation is an education in selflessness, for it demands the elimination of what Hinton calls self-elements of observation. The diurnal motion of the sun is an example of a self-element: it has nothing to do with the sun but everything to do with the observer. The Ptolemaic system founded on this illusion tyrannized over the human mind for centuries, but who knows of how many other illusions we continue to be victims—for the worst of a self-element is that its presence is never dreamed of until it is done away with. The Theory of Relativity presents us with an effort to get rid of the self-element in regard to space and time. A self-centered man cannot do full justice to this theory: it requires of the mind a certain detachment, and the idea becomes clear in proportion as this detachment, this selflessness, is attained.