Chapter 8

For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the interest which we take in ourselves. Genius but utters experiences common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a noetic value--"some veil did fall"--revealing visions remembered even unto the hour of death.

"DEATH"

That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his being able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure of attention to life--so complete a failure that memory brings back nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams--yet even this little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.

Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms. Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the meaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, those parchments where are written the last testament of the departed spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy, sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, save when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.

THE PLAY OF BRAHM

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.

So while it would be too much to claim that higher thought makes men unselfish, it at least cracks the hard shell in which their selfishness abides. If a man disciplines himself to abdicate his personal point of view in thinking about the world he lives in, it makes easier a similar attitude in relation to his fellow men.

HUMILITY

One of the earliest effects of selfless thought is the exorcism of all arrogance. The effort to dramatize the relation of an earthworm to its environment makes us recognize that its predicament is our own, different only in degree. We are exercising ourselves in humility and meekness, but of a sort leading to a mastery that may well make the meek the inheritors of the earth. Hinton was himself so meek a man that his desire did not rise to the height of expecting or looking for the beautiful or the good: he simply asked for something to know. He despaired of knowing anything definitely and certainly except arrangements in space. We have his testimony as to how abundantly this hunger and thirst after that right knowledge which is righteousness was gratified. "All I want to do," he says, "is to make this humble beginning of knowledge and show how inevitably, by devotion to it, it leads to marvellous and far-distant truths, and how, by strange paths, it leads directly into the presence of some of the highest conceptions which great minds have given us."

Here speaks the blessed man referred to by the psalmist, "Whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night." Abandoning a vain search after abstractions, and applying his simple formula to life, Hinton found that it enabled him to express the faith in his heart in terms conformable to reason; that it led back to, and illumined the teachings of every spiritual instructor and inspirer of mankind.

SOLIDARITY

That we are all members of one body, branches of one vine, is a matter of faith and of feeling; but with the first use of the weapon of higher thought the paradox of the one and the many is capable of so clear and simple a resolution that the sublime idea of human solidarity is brought down from the nebulous heaven of the mystic to the earth of every day life. To our ordinary space-thought, men are isolated, distinct, each "an infinitely repellent particle," but we conceive of space too narrowly. The broader view admits the idea that men are related by reason of a superior union, that their isolation is but an affair of limited consciousness. Applying this concept to conduct, we come to discern a literal truth in the words of the Master, "He who hath done it unto the least of these my children, hath done it unto me," and "Where two or three are gathered together in my name." If we conceive of each individual as a "slice" or cross-section of a higher being, each fragment isolated by an inhibition of consciousness which it is moment by moment engaged in transcending, the sacrifice of the Logos takes on a new meaning. This disseverance into millions of human beings is that each may realize God in himself. Conceiving of humanity as God's broken body, we are driven to make peace among its members, and by realization we become the Children of God.

LIVE OPENLY

"_Blessed are the meek," "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness." "Blessed are the peacemakers_." It would not be impossible to trace a relation between higher space thought and the other beatitudes also, but it will suffice simply to note the fact that the central and essential teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, "Let your light shine before men" is implicit in the conviction of every one who thinks on higher space: he must _live openly_. By continual dwelling upon the predicament of the flat-man, naked, as it were, to observation from an eye which looks down upon his plane, we come to realize our own exposure. In that large world all that we think, or do, or imagine, lies open, palpable; there is no such thing as secrecy. Imbued with this idea, we begin to live openly because we must; but soon we come to do so because we desire it. In making toward one another our limited lives open and manifest, we treat each other in the service of truth as though we were all members of that higher world. We imitate, in our world, our true existence in a higher world, and so help to establish heavenly conditions upon earth.

NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL

The problem of ugliness and evil would seem at first thought to be totally unrelated to the subject of space hyperdimensionality, but there is at least a symbolical relation. This was suggested to the author by the endeavor of two friends whose interests were pre-eminently mathematical to discover what certain four-dimensional figures would look like in three-dimensional space. They found that in a great number of cases these cross-sections, when thus isolated, revealed little of the symmetry and beauty of their higher-dimensional archetypes. It is clear that a beautiful form of our world, traversing a plane, would show nothing of its beauty to the planeman, who lacked the power of perceiving it entire; for the sense of beauty is largely a matter of co-ordination. We give the names of evil, chance, fate, ugliness, to those aspects of life and of the world that we fail to perceive in their true relations, in regard to which our power of correlation breaks down. Yet we often find that in the light of fuller knowledge or subsequent experience, the fortune which seemed evil was really good fortune in the making, that the chance act or encounter was too momentous in its consequences to be regarded as other than ordained.

The self-element plays a large part in our idea of good and evil, ugliness and beauty. "All things are as they seem to all." Desire of her will make any woman beautiful, and fear will exercise an absolute inhibition upon the aesthetic sense. As we recede in time from events, they more and more emancipate themselves from the tyranny of our personal prejudices and predilections, and we are able to perceive them with greater clarity, more as they appear from the standpoint of higher time and higher space. "Old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago" lose their poignancy of pain and take on the poignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often the last thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness we are quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only in retrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for the sake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accept their gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There is a profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, "Resist not evil." Honor this truth by use, and welcome destiny in however sinister a guise.

THE IMMANENT DIVINE

In the fact of the limited nature of our space perceptions is found a connecting link between materialism and idealism. For, passing deeper and deeper in our observation of the material world, that which we at first felt as real passes away to become but the outward sign of a reality infinitely greater, of which our realities are appearances only, and we become convinced of the existence of _an immanent divine._ "In Him we live and move and have our being." Our space is but a limitation of infinite "room to move about": "_In my Father's house are many mansions_." Our time is but a limitation of infinite duration: "_Before Abraham was, I am_." Our sense of space is the consciousness that we abide in Him; our sense of time is the consciousness that He abides in us. Both are modes of apprehension of divinity--growing, expanding modes. In conceiving of a space of more than three dimensions we prove that our relation to God is not static, but dynamic. Christ said to the man who was sick of the palsy, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk." The narrow concept of three-dimensional space is a bed in which the human mind has lain so long as to become at last inanimate. The divine voice calls to us again to demonstrate that we are alive. Thinking in terms of the higher we issue from the tomb of materialism into the sunlight of that sane and life-giving idealism which is Christ's.

End of Project Gutenberg's Four-Dimensional Vistas, by Claude Fayette Bragdon