Chapter 7
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.
X GENIUS
IMMANENCE
The greatest largess to the mind which higher thought brings is the conviction of a transcendent existence. Though we do not know the nature of this existence, except obscurely, we are assured of its reality and of its immanence, through a growing sense that all that happens to us is simply our relation to it.
In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of this transcendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the help afforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by the flesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit not to attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of the world-order now and then vouchsafed. For the genius stands midway between man and Beyond-man: in Nietzsche's phrase, "Man is a bridge and not a goal."
Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. According to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of its _perceptions_. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, and consequently in greater purity and distinctness." This profounder perception arises from his detachment: his intellect has to a certain extent freed itself from the service of his will, and leads an independent life. So long as the intellect is in the service of the will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist for the intellect; but along with this partial severance of the two there comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, a complex of relationships not reproducible in _linear_ thought, for the mind is oriented simultaneously in _many_ different directions. Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is a classic example. He is reported to have said of his manner of composing, "I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance ... in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as succession--the way it comes later--but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! all the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream."
TIMELESSNESS
The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision--the power to see life clearly and "see it whole." Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream," awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless. It brings thence some immortelle whose power of survival establishes the authenticity of the inspiration. However local and personal any masterpiece may be, it escapes by some potent magic all geographical and temporal categories, and appears always new-born from a sphere in which such categories do not exist.
No writer was more of his period than Shakespeare, yet how contemporary he seems to each succeeding generation. Leonardo, in a perfect portrait, showed forth the face of a subtle, sensuous, and mocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks. It represents not alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every individual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous and orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. Living hearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and of Beethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in our music halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern; the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in that of Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under a different name.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: BEAUTY
The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifference to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other than the Love of God.
Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty," is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted, through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects them for us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in Hell itself. The _terribilita_ of Michaelangelo, the chaos and anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear--these find expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "from which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of the air and of the fishes of the sea."
THE DAEMONIC
"Unknown,--albeit lying near,-- To men the path to the Daemon sphere."
But to men of genius--"Minions of the Morning Star"--the path is not unknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly shows itself in their works and in their lives. Dante, Cellini, Goethe, three men as unlike in the nature of their several gifts and in their temperaments as could easily be named together, are drawn to a common likeness through the daemonic gleam which plays and hovers over them at times. With William Blake it was a flame that wrapped him round. Today no one knows how Brunelleschi was able to construct his great dome without centering, nor how Michaelangelo could limn his terrible figures on the wet plaster of the Sistine vault with such extraordinary swiftness and skill; but we have their testimony that they invoked and received divine aid. Shakespeare, the master-magician, is silent on this point of supernatural assistance--as on all points--except as his plays speak for him; but how eloquently they speak! "The Tempest" is made up of the daemonic; the murky tragedy of "Macbeth" unfolds under the guidance of incarnate forces of evil which drive the hero to his doom and final deliverance in death: Hamlet sees and communes with the ghost of his father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of these plays as salt is part of the ocean. If from any masterpiece we could abstract everything not strictly rational--every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment--it would be like taking all of the unknown quantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve. The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight us largely for this reason: we, too, respond to these vibrations and are demonologists in our secret hearts.