The mystery of space

by Robert T. Browne

In this connection it is interesting to note the function of the ideal in the evolution and expansion of consciousness. The ideal has no perceptual value; it has no status in the world of the senses. It is unapproachable either in thought or action, and therefore, lies beyond the grasp of both the intellectuality and the vitality. It is indescribable, inconceptible and searchless; for the moment that we describe, define, or approach the ideal, either intellectually or vitally, in that moment it ceases to be ideal, but actual. It flees from even the slightest approach; it never remains the same; it cannot be attained, at least its attainment causes it to lose its idealty. It is then no longer the ideal. It is like an ignis fatuus; the closer we come to it the farther away it recedes. It hangs suspended before the mind like the luscious grapes which hung before the mouth of the hungry Tantalus. As the grapes and the water receded from his reach at every effort he made to seize them so the ideal remains eternally unseizable and unattainable. Whatever, therefore, is in our thought processes, or in our knowledge, that may be said to be ideal, does not really exist. The ideal is a phantom growing out of the nature and essence of the intellectuality. Its purpose is to lead merely the mind on; to allure it, to tantalize, and compel it to grow by exertion, by the struggle to attain, by the desire to overcome. In this respect, it serves well its function in the economy of intellectual evolution. It is a mysterious aspect of the original and eternal desire to live which is the kosmic urge present in all organized being and has its roots hidden in the divine purpose of creation.

Idealized constructions, then, are like Arabian feasts conjured up by a famishing mentality. They are like the dreams of a starving man in which he actualizes in phantom-stuff the choicest viands in abundant supply for his imaginary delectation. The mind that is satisfied never idealizes, never makes an idealized construction. It is only when an "aching void" is felt, when a longing for the realization of that which it has not arises within itself, when a feeling of distinct lack, a want, a hankering after something not in its reach, takes possession of the mind that it begins to idealize. That is why some minds are without ideals. It is because they are satisfied with what they have and can understand. They feel no hungering for better and grander things; they have no desire to understand the unknown and the mysterious; hence they do not idealize; they make no attempt to represent unto themselves a picture of that which is beyond them. Such minds are dormant, hibernant, asleep, unfeeling and unresponsive to the divine urge.

But the ideal is neither obtainable objectively nor subjectively, neither phenomenally nor really, so that when we come upon the ideal in our mode of thinking we have arrived not at a finality or end, but at that which is designed to lead us on to something higher, to nobler accomplishments and more extensive conquests. When we have devised idealized constructions, therefore, we should not therewith be content but should scrutinize them, examine and study them for their implications; for thereby we may discover the path and the guide-posts to a new domain, a new ideal, following which we shall, in time, come to a point in our search for the real where the fluxional is at a minimum; we shall reach that something which will admit of no further struggle—the last chasm between the phenomenal and the real—and standing on the bridge, consciousness, which engages the twain, shall have a complete view of that Sacred and Imperishable Land of Kosmic Realism where like a fleeting cloud of sheerest vapor shall be seen the phantom-ideal deliquescing and disappearing in the cold, thin air of the real and the eternal.

Since space is judged to be infinite by the intellect occluded in such clouds of illusion and hampered by such constrictive bonds of limitations, as it now endures, we have no right to conclude that the concept of infinity would still linger before the mind's eyes when the illusionary veil is removed; in fact, there is ample reason to believe, nay for the assertion, that the recession of the veil will reveal just the opposite of this illusion, namely that space is finite, and even bounded by the fringe of chaogenetic disorderliness. Either we perceive the real or we do not; either the pure thingness of all objects can be perceived or it cannot be perceived. If not, granting that there is such a thing as the real, it must be within the ultimate range of conceivability. It also seems reasonable that realism exists somewhere, and if so, must be sought in a direction inverse to that in which we find the phenomenal and the approach thereto must necessarily be gradual, continuous and direct and not by abrupt breaks, by twists and turns. The phenomenal must lie at the terminus of the real, and vice versa. So that by retracing the path blazed out by the real in coming to phenomenalization we shall perhaps find that which casts our shadowy world, just as by tracing a shadow in a direction inverse to that in which it extends we may find the object which projects it.

It is not out and beyond that we shall find the end of space; it is not by counting tens of thousands of light-years that the supposed limits of space shall be attained. The path of search must project in an opposite direction—not star-ward but Thinker-ward, toward the subtle habitation of the consciousness itself. We err greatly when we think that by measuring distances we shall encompass space; for that which we measure and determine is but the clouds caused by the vapor of reality. It is, therefore, not without, but within, in an inverse direction that the search must proceed. Going back over the life-stream, beginning where it strikes against the shores of solid objectivity, deeper and deeper still, past the innermost mile-stone of the self-consciousness, back into the very heart of the imperturbable interior of being where the Thinker's castle opens its doors to the Great Kosmic Self, from that open door-way we may step out into that great mystery of space—limited, yet not limited, multi-dimensioned, and yet having only one dimension, veritably real and fundamental, the Father-Mother of all phenomena. Here the great mystery of mysteries is revealed as the citadel of the universal and the ultimate real. In this citadel, the plane of kosmic consciousness, space loses its spaciousness and time its timeliness, diversity its multiplicity and oneness alone reigns supreme.

But the movement towards the center and circumference of space, after this manner, requires aid neither from the notion of space-curvature nor that of the space-manifold, except, indeed, only in so far as a state of consciousness or a degree of realism may be said to be a tridimensional manifold. The feeling that space is single-pointed, and yet ubiquitously centered, has been indulged by mathematicians and others in a more or less modified form; but they have imagined it in the terms of an indefinite proceeding outward until in some manner unaccountable alike to all we come back to the point of origin. It has been expressed by Pickering when he says that if we go far enough east we shall arrive at the west; far enough north we shall come to the south; far enough into the zenith we shall come to the nadir. But this conception is based upon a notion of space which is the exclusive result of mathematical determinations and subject to all the restrictions of mathetic rigorousness. It requires that we shall allow space to be curved. This we decline to do for the reason that it is both unnecessary and contrary to the most fundamental affirmations of the a priori faculty of the Thinker's cognitive apparatus. It would seem to be necessary only that we should extend our consciousness backward, revert it into the direction whence life came to find that which we seek. By extension of consciousness is meant the ability to function consciously upon the various superkosmic spheres or planes just as we do on the physical. Yet it should be quite as easy to devise an idealized construction which would imagify the results of this ingressive movement of the consciousness as to represent the results of a progressive outward movement star-ward. Having done so the examination of them could be conducted along lines similar to those followed in the scrutiny of objective results.

What would it mean to the Thinker if he were able to identify his consciousness with the ether in all its varying degrees; what would it mean if he were able to identify his consciousness with life and with the pure mind-matter of the kosmos; and lastly, with the spiritual essence of the universe? What if his various vehicles of awareness were available for his purposes of cognition? What, indeed, if he could traverse consciously the entire gamut of realism and consciousness from man to the divine consciousness? Does it not appear reasonable that as he assumed each of these various vestures of consciousness, in succession, he would gradually and finally, come to a full understanding of reality itself? It seems so. This view is even more cogent when it is considered that the limitations, and consequent obscuration of consciousness are proportional to the number of vehicles or barriers through which the Thinker is required to act in contacting the phenomenal universe. Common sense suggests that freedom of motility is determined by the presence or absence (more particularly the latter) of bonds and barriers; that the less the number of such barriers the greater the scope of motility and consequently greater the knowledge.

Plato evidently had this in mind when he imagined the life of men spent in cave-walled prisons in which their bodies were so fixed that they were compelled to sit in one prescribed position, and therefore, be unable to see anything except the shadows of persons or objects as they passed by. He conceived that men thus conditioned would, in time, suffer the diminution of their scope of consciousness to such an extent as to reduce it to identification with the shadows on the walls. Their consciousness would be mere shadow-consciousnesses the entire data of which would be shadowgraphs. So that for them the only reality would be the shadows which they constantly saw. A similar thing really happens to man's consciousness limited to the plane of the objective world. Things which are not objective do not appear as real to him, if they do appear at all. It is not that there are no other realities than those which appear to the egopsychic consciousness or that fall within its scope; but that this form of consciousness is incompetent to judge of the nature and appearance of those realities which do not answer to the limitations under which it exists. And so, with men whose data of consciousness or whose outlook upon the world of facts, or rather life, are confined to the narrow bounds of mathematic rigor and exclusiveness, there may appear to exist no realities which may not be defined in the terms of mathematics. Similarly, to the empiricist, used to measurements of magnitudes, weights, and rates of motion, there may also appear to be no realities which are not amenable to the mold of his empirical contrivances—the balance, the chromatic and the scalpel. All of these are shadow men constricted to the metes and bounds of shadows which they observe only because they are ignorant of the realities which lie without their plane.

Life has so many ways of exhibiting its remains to the intellect; and these remains have so many facets or viewpoints from which they may be studied, that nothing short of a panoramic view of all the modes of exhibition and of all the facets and angles of appearances will suffice to present a trustworthy and comprehensive view of the whole. Then, life itself is so illusive, so unseizable by the intellect that the testimony of all investigators are required to summarize its modes of appearance. And, therefore, eventual contentment shall be secured only when the mass of diverse testimonies is reduced to the lowest common divisor, and for this purpose the operations of every class of investigators must be viewed as the work of specialists upon separate phases, facets and angles of life's remains.

And so it is manifestly absurd for the empiricists, by taking note of the dimension, extent, quality and character of the shadows, or one single class of angles, to hope to predicate any trustworthy judgments about either the realities which cast the shadows or underlie the angles; because whatever notion or conception they may be able to gain must of necessity be merely fragmentary and entirely inadequate. Despite this fact, however, we still have the spectacle of men who, studying the sensible universum of space-content, endeavor either to make it appear as a finality in itself, or that the world of the real must necessarily be conformable to the precise standards which they arbitrarily set up in their examination of the objective world. It can be said with assurance that we shall never be able even so much as to approach a true understanding of the unseen, real world until we shall have changed our mental attitude towards it and ceased to expect that it shall necessarily be fashioned and ordered in exactly the same way as the world of our senses, or that it shall be understood by applying the same methods of procedure as those which we use in our examination of the phenomenal, sensuous world. It is a matter of logical necessity that, as there are no senses which can respond to the real, as there are no organs which vibrate in accord with the rates of vibration of the real, there can be no reasonable hope of understanding it by means of sensuous contrivances and standards.