If the human soul had an existence of its own, and it hardly mattered whether or not it was attached to a material body, then what use was the material body? How could that unacceptable duality be reconciled? How could that Idea, sufficient in itself, representing the universe entire but nevertheless opposed to the natural phenomena observed by science, be explained?
When people had examined the essential nature of the fourth dimension in depth, all these questions seemed infinitely clear and easy to resolve; all objections crumbled of their own accord. Consciousness, whose screen once seemed to be opposed to three-dimensional sensations, was no more than the fourth dimension bringing about the definitive synthesis of the world, permitting the mind to seize the very substance of phenomena at a stroke, without the intermediary of any notion of space or time.
The absolute and unity, expressions previously devoid of sense, obtained their exact signification when it was understood that they could be clarified by the necessary notion of the fourth dimension.
Love followed the same evolution in this new vision of the universe; it was understood that it was no more, in sum, than the obscure pantheistic instinct that had been encouraging humankind for centuries to pursue intellectual unity in communal thought, in an irresistible sympathy of homogeneous elements.
All the ancient dissimilarities, conflicts and antagonisms were solely due to the fragmentary fashion in which people had been content, until then, to study the universe. When all these divergent rays of thought had found their common focal point in the four-dimensional synthesis, natural variations were no longer anything but harmonic manifestations of a single common thought. And from matter, formerly judged inert, to the noblest speculations of the human mind, the world was now no more than a single soul, living the same life, an emanation of a single diverse thought that was named, in memory of the naïve beliefs of old, the Golden Eagle.
This union of minds, of the same time and all times, by the direct path of the fourth dimension—by the subconscious, as one would once have put it—had nothing blissful or passive about it, though, although no one had believed otherwise in the times when humankind still dreamed of naïve celestial sentimentality and eternal paradisal adoration. More than ever, contradiction engendered an intense intellectual life in which opposition alone, as in all the mind’s operations, was able to motivate thought.
What ensured that all effort became useful and positive, however, was that each individual action of intelligence concurred with the same continuous whole—just as, in a statue, all the lines, because they are opposed, unite to perfect a single masterpiece—and that love had replaced hatred since the language of the four-dimensional soul had been substituted for the fragmentary hypocrisies of three-dimensional modes of expression: hypocrisies contained in the concrete words of language as in the relative formulas of science.
After overturning all human traditions and mores, sincerity, imposed by the direct reading of thoughts, had engendered love and created, in the spiritual domain, a sort of state of nature, this time transcendental, that marked the definitive liberation of the human mind.
Every man understood, in the Age of the Golden Eagle, that he was but one fragment of a single statue—whether an eye, nose or finger did not matter—that he was only one act of the same intelligence, and that he desired the beauty of the whole with all his heart, his duty was to devote all his strength to make the part that was confided to him as beautiful as possible. That detail of the whole, his personality, immortal as the whole outside time, was the art-work signed with his name for all eternity within the universal art-work; it was the “I” marking his place in the universal continuum. It was not important whether the act was one of intelligence, faith, revolt or kindness, provided it was worthy of the whole; on the contrary, woe betide the man if his “I” was nothing but a defect, a lack or a fault, forever.
XLIX. Resurrection
I admit, sadly, that, since the day when it was given to me to reach the era of the Golden Eagle, I have been confronted with a dearth of expressions to translate in an appropriate manner the strange revelations that overwhelmed me there.
At the outset of my motionless displacements in the fourth dimension, observation was easier for me. I undoubtedly experienced, at first, a sort of anguish, a perfectly comprehensible hesitation. The men of the 20th century are so habituated to moving in three-dimensional space that they recoil, as if before death, when it suddenly becomes necessary for them to envisage the possibility of moving in four-dimensional space, and it seems to them that something in their brain might break if they make the effort necessary to pass from the world of phenomena to the continuum.
The first time that they try, for example, to escape from a sealed room and move outside it, they are afraid and they hesitate, as they hesitate again when the possibility is demonstrated to them of making a voluminous object—their body, if necessary—pass through a keyhole or form a bow-knot in a taut cord. Their physical nature rebels, as it has already rebelled against the idea of a vision passing through opaque bodies or a human voice making itself heard all over the world—but these are only the hesitations of a debutante, which dissipate when mental life gets the upper hand over physical life.
The fourth dimension, in fact, is nothing but a fashion of expressing the qualitative reality of the universe, which does not correspond in any respect to apparent mathematical realities. To assimilate space to algebraic representations, to see in the grandeur of space the idea of multiplicity, is a naïve error into which the first German researchers fell who took the trouble to research non-Euclidean geometry.
When, with further practice, the true nature of the fourth dimension is glimpsed by the mind, one understands immediately that the fourth dimension has been in current usage for centuries, under the names of consciousness and the subconscious, and that, properly understood, it is only the passage of that substance without which the three-dimensional universe cannot have any real explanation.
At the beginning of the reign of the Golden Eagle, which succeeded the Scientific Era, ideas were rapidly modified and the universe evolved in a new way, no longer in quantity in time, but in quality in all times.
As I have already said, it began to be understood that Love had a significance infinitely greater than had previously been thought, and that the obscure instinct that had led a passionate lover to desire all women or a philosopher to love all humankind, and even nature entire, was nothing, in sum, but a naïve expression of the communal consciousness that unites all beings.
The great pantheistic aspirations of past centuries soon found their definitive justification in the realization of that great work which the alchemists of old had glimpsed. It was no longer simply metal that could be transmuted at will by the medium of a common agent, it was all the manifestations of nature—the most dissimilar beings and things—that could be transmuted in what were previously called space and time, thanks to the complete intelligence that was then obtained of the fourth dimension.
It is there, unfortunately that the modes of expression at our disposal all come to a stop, utterly impotent to describe such events.
Imponderable, without measure, without space, the intellectual universe as it was then offers nothing comparable to the phenomenal idea that we are able to have of it. And, to speak the incoherent language of today, we could not claim that it was definitively dead then, if we did not know that, delivered forever from dependence on time, no longer having, properly speaking, a beginning or an end, its empire extended to the very eras in which we think we live, as to eras presently elapsed.
While humankind limited its vision to three-dimensional possibilities, its obscure aspirations to immortality remained inexplicable and absurd. How, in fact, could one conceive an infinity succeeding the end of life, a superior state of the soul engendered by the decrepitude of the mind that precedes physical death, a resurrection after decease that could, in itself, justify the miracle of a providential complicity?
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p; When the fourth dimension had released humankind from the prejudice of succession in time, the union of the souls of all times in the same time—excuse the expression—explains, as well as the predictions and visions of the future of past eras, the natural resurrection of the souls of the past that were elevated to the superior plane of the mystic life by an act of intelligence or faith. For, just as a superior mind retains an indelible memory of the beauty and forgets the ugliness of life, so the Universal Consciousness only retains the thoughts that serve it, and that is the whole mystery of the Last Judgment advertised and foreseen since the origins of the world.
By the same token, one understands the cowardice of the men of old who postponed the superior life until after their death, instead of understanding that they could only attain it in the most intense moments of life, by will and not by miracle, solely by means of quality and not by advancement in time.
Few people of the 20th century, alas, saw those of future ages who extended a hand to them and lived alongside them; few lived again, during life, outside time. There is nothing astonishing in that, since we ourselves, who have glimpsed future ages as well as pasts and presents, are incapable of talking about it without employing the absurd expressions of “past” and “future” imposed by three-dimensional language, which signify nothing when one know that reality and personality can only exist in terms of quality. The word “resurrection” itself implies a false notion of succession in time although the true resurrection can occur at any moment in life, for a mind that realizes, at the humble or sublime combat-station at which it is placed, a desire for the unique Consciousness.
L. The Invention of the World
The Idea invents the world, which develops like the hero of a novel. It is not indistinguishable from it, any more that the geometric form of a crystal is indistinguishable from the matter of the crystal, but it is what suggests the characteristics of the innumerable aggregations of forces, those associations of ideas that we call matter. The four-dimensional Idea is eternal and immutable, without measure and without age. It manifests itself in the symbols of three-dimensional matter that now appear to us in motion, and in a state of perpetual becoming.44
Consider a work of art attentively. You will not have any trouble distinguishing the material, three-dimensional part of it, submissive to time and space—which is to say, that which reveals an epoch or a substance—and, on the other hand, an idea, often a simple line, that reveals the fourth dimension, which is that of all times, which does not depend on evolution or civilizations: an immortal idea that escapes space and time. Matter, here as elsewhere, is nothing but an assembly of provisional hypotheses. Pure Art has no history; it cannot evolve.
Does that mean that the vision of the three-dimensional world is useless? Far from it; it is, for the eternal Idea, a method of abstraction, a possibility of motionless movement, of improvement in quality—in a word, of intellectual life. Without that partial vision, we would be unable to generate within our minds the procession of hypotheses that are facts, until we recognize in our place of exile the image that leads to our birthplace. The vision of the three-dimensional world permits us to evoke the possibilities of the Idea type, but it is, we repeat, only a method of abstraction, and the fourth dimension alone, furnished by our consciousness, allows us to attain Reality.
As I have already said, these principal notions, and others, more clearly evident at the time of the Great Idealist Renaissance, overturned all the ancient prejudices concerning death, infinity and immortality. The entire history of evolution appeared clearly as a continuous creation of the mind inventing the world, in accordance with a Desire that imperfect three-dimensional language would have judged pre-existent, but which it would be more correct to call co-existent, formal appearance being nothing but the qualitative reasoning of the universal consciousness engendering time and space, a thought resulting, in a word, in a character once posited.
In any case, the laws of natural selection and evolution have long seemed insufficient to explain the prodigies of mimicry, the plan of the nervous system or a beehive, or the involvement of insects in the fecundity of certain plants. How, for example, can one explain the rational construction of the mechanism of the eye or the ear, without intelligent premeditation?
When one has traveled the ages that will follow the 20th century, one knows how man, still under the influence of more elevated desires suggested by his consciousness, will be able to increase the power of his vision by developing in the retinal layer, as well as rods and cones, new nerve-endings sensitive to ultra-violet rays. Is it also necessary to mention, at the beginning of the Great Idealist Evolution, the appearance in the inner ear of a new canal, circular in this instance, giving man an indispensable sense of balance in four-dimensional displacements of the body?
In auditory sensibility, in fact, it is to the three semi-circular canals that man that man owes the notion of space and a sense of balance in the relative positions of three-dimensional bodies. It is true that one can subject an animal to irregular movements of rotation, rolling or turning somersaults following experimental action upon the horizontal canal, the anterior vertical canal or the posterior vertical canal, each canal corresponding to a distinct spatial dimension. When the first attempts were made employing the fourth dimension for bodily displacements, a fourth canal developed in a circle, surrounding the three others, to combat the painful sensation of instability with which all those who practice levitation are familiar. Unfortunately, as I related in a preceding chapter, the old body could not accommodate itself to the fourth dimension, the organs no longer having a fixed relationship to a particular axis, and the new circular canal was no more resistant to disintegration. The adventure nevertheless demonstrated, yet again, that matter is modified according to the indications of the Idea, that the Idea alone created the desired function and the organ itself.
Matter, in fact, has no independent existence; it is only a hypothesis of inventive intelligence, and, in the relationships of its new position, reveals new values around it, ever-richer and more numerous vibrations.
The history of civilizations is similar. When one studies attentively the role of writers, poets and artists, one easily understands that their effect on mores involves similar procedures. In accordance with their eternal internal desires, they propose new situations and ever-more-elevated thoughts; the offer exemplary superior heroes to humankind, and their creations, by virtue of a natural illusion, and subsequently projected into the past, serving generations to come as real models.
History itself does not escape this idealist transformation; the most ordinary events of life, the passions that are, in reality, the basest and the most instinctive actions are generalized four-dimensionally by historians as by poets, recast in a legendary form and represented not as they were, but as it would have been desirable for them to be. One cannot reasonably pretend that all these legends correspond to reality or that they are automatic creations of matter; they are imaginations proposed by the Idea, anticipations inspired by the eternal desires that are inside us and whose development we foster, a little more each day.
By virtue of that perpetual creation, what was merely a simple fiction eventually becomes a reality. As a result of hearing tales of legendary prowess or the virtuous actions of imaginary beings, human beings become accustomed to the possibility of these exemplary lives, gradually incorporating these supernatural events to quotidian life, and the man of today is always, in a way, the son of the fictitious heroes of old. When the gods materialize, when heroic legendary deeds become true, the poets are there to offer new, even more elevated, models to humankind; it is by this means, taking examples from an imaginary past, that man draws closer—without a shadow of a doubt—to the absolute type desired by the Idea.
Immortality, eternity, infinity, the absolute and progress: such ideas are not located, in the final analysis, either forwards or backwards in time, nor are they subject to any necessity of space; they are always present, alway
s accessible and cannot be subject to any quantitative evolution. When one understands these notions better, simple as they are, one ends up attaching less importance to physical life and the phenomena of birth and death than was previously attributed to them; one understands that they are only, quite simply, experimental modalities of the Idea.
Undoubtedly, to facilitate the task they had undertaken, people strove to prolong the period of three-dimensional aggregation that was once called human life; they succeeded without difficulty, to an extraordinary extent.
Nevertheless, it has to be said, the question lost much of its former interest in the new era; it was realized that, in the final analysis, the average man had lived as long as he needed, that the length of his life, that his life itself, depended solely on his own will—life being, after all, merely a useful but provisional hypothesis of the Idea. It was, at the end of the day, with their own consent—by virtue of discouragement or the inability to realize a personal creation—that the men of old slowly allowed themselves to die; it was consciously that the men of the Great Idealist Renaissance allowed the material instrument of their body to disintegrate, every time they understood that they could no longer expect anything.
Living for a slightly longer or shorter period is of no importance in the history of the world as soon as one has attained the Idea that can create life and invent ever-new appearances, since it imagines the world. One then understands the relativity of the three-dimensional world, which, created in a determinate form by the Idea, was incapable of making a proper decision and had to repeat the same actions in every case, eternally.
Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Page 22
