Imagine a music machine so cunningly constructed and adjusted as not only to sound each note and chord in its proper sequence and relation, but to regulate also the duration of the sound vibration. If this machine were operated in such a manner as to play, in a single second of time, the entire overture of an opera which would normally occupy half an hour, we should hear only an unintelligible noise a second long. This would be due to no defect in the sound-producing mechanism, but to the limitations of the sound-receiving mechanism, our auditory apparatus. Could this be altered to conform to the unusual conditions—could it capture and convey to consciousness every note of the overture in a second of time—that second would seem to last half an hour, provided that every other criterion for the measurement of duration were denied for the time being.

Now dreams seem long: we only discover afterwards and by accident their almost incredible brevity. May we not—must we not—infer from this that the body is an organ of many stops and more than one keyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. The theory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts in part for the great longing for sleep. "What is it that is much desired by man, but which they know not while possessing?" again asks Leonardo. "It is sleep," is his answer. This longing for sleep is more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings is less of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstand the deprivation of food and water longer and better than the deprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondingly greater.

Experiments have been made with mature University students by which they have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experiments were finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a long sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more time than was regular with him. And this has been the experience over and over again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awake for long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation in which they have been placed.

In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of the time sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantable assumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep must be as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, the ratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it would seem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the time element of consciousness.

THE EASTERN TEACHING IN REGARD TO SLEEP AND DREAMS

In this matter of the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment, of sleep and dreams, the most modern psychology and the most ancient wisdom meet on common ground. Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon the problems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—the gross, the subtle and the pure. In the waking state—that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate to materiality—the individual self is as a captive in a citadel of flesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances to enact itself before the windows of his prison. In the dream state, when the more violent vibrations of the body are stilled in sleep, consciousness becomes active in its subtle (four-dimensional) vehicle, and ranges free throughout the ampler spaces of this subtler world. In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition—the individual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longer prismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes the pure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into the primordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, no longer "besprent with seven-hued circumstance," is swallowed up in duration.

"There are two paths for him, within and without, and they both turn back in a day and a night.... After having subdued by sleep all that belongs to the body, he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping. Having assumed light, he goes again to his place, the golden person, the lonely bird" UPANISHADS.

SPACE IN DREAMS

However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the waking state, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really one of inhibition—that the world is only a "shoal of time"—it is curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to special objects and particular persons—these things form insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit perfectly with the Eastern idea that "he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping." And to the questions, "How, and from whence?" in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, "By the curvature of time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension."

Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to account for some of the dream experiences recorded in Human Personality, since he asks for "an intermediate conception of space—something between space as we know it in the material world and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world." He suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that "intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by our hypothesis.

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to: think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep—"perchance to dream," Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment—and perhaps age by age as well.

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when the senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world? It is somewhere else, awake to some other environment. Though we may not be able to verify this from our own experience, there are methods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another—that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in the mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that these experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance. The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. The inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the possibility of deception, and for that reason science still looks askance at all evidence drawn from this source. But in essaying to write a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but the mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the object of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of hypnotism and kindred phenomena.



VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance of certain sordid and sinister associations. We are apt to think of them only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profit by itinerant professors and untidy sibyls. Larger knowledge of the night side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view. The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber where a little group of people sit attentive to the voice of one entranced—listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world. This "news from nowhere," garnered under so-called test conditions and faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerable literature, accessible to all—one with which every well-informed person is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance.

A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists of an apparent confusion between past, present and future. As in the game of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what order the three will turn up—was, is and will be, lose their special significance. Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible of classification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision. Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced. It is the past become present. Present vision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time. Prevision is the future in the present. These various orders of clear-seeing transcend the limits of the actual knowledge and experience of the seer. This classification and these definitions are important only to us, to whom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated in thought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though bound in body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world where these discriminations vanish. Why do they vanish? This question can best be answered by means of a homely analogy.

For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagine yourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelled line at a rate predetermined by the time-table. You approach, reach and pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares. Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can you arrive at places further along the line before the train itself takes you there. Compare this with the freedom to do either of these things, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from the train to an automobile. Then, in effect, you have the freedom of a new dimension. In the one case, you must travel along a single line at a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in any direction and regulate your speed at will. You can go back to a place after the train has left it; you can go forward to some place ahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, and traverse, new country. In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as is trance consciousness to everyday waking life.

MODIFYING THE PAST

Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual's conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual's conscious participation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented by a single line. In sleep and trance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able to travel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own "disassociated memories" but in that greater and more mysterious demesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as the present and the past.

The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation of memory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train of personal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side—that is, as establishing the return of time. It has cleverly been turned to practical account, however, in the treatment of disease. By a series of painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of the role played by "disassociated memories" in causing certain functional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved. It has been shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be—and frequently are—completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious. It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which were determined by the victim's self-suggestion. As a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to get at these disassociated memories and drag them back into the full light of conscious recollection. To get at them, medical psychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing—in short, of any method which will force an entrance into that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may become the present. This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered and transfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to deal with it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with the fixed. Again his past is plastic to the operation of his intelligence and his will. Here is glad news for mortals: the past recoverable and in a manner revocable!

Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance, and this teaching has escaped oblivion because its truth has echoed in so many human hearts. We find that it is possible to deal with our old ignorances in the light of later knowledge. What is this but the self-forgiveness of sins? Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past. Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of this obscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladness of liberation from the payment of old karmic debts. Christ's words, "Thy sins are forgiven," spoken to the woman who washed his feet with her tears, sanctions this idea—that the past is remediable by knowledge and by love.

Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility of moulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shall befall. If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future. This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and fore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be guided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and reincarnation may appropriately find place here.

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores harmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation, and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause and the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following quotation from the Upanishads: "And as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape."

Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual into materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to stimulation, the least.

Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in materiality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of incarnation. When this occurs en masse there transpires that hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep lasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death—in the interval between one life and the next—the specific memories of the personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This center of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly—perhaps retributively—bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.

The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, here so sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamental propositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect is the unfolding of the cause in time.

To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connection with higher time would be to force a passage and then not follow where it leads. The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideas of karma and reincarnation. For what is karma but the return of time, the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago? And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep into objective existence and out again, of which the alternation between waking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?

COLONEL DE ROCHAS' EXPERIMENTS

During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that we never really forget anything. We have rediscovered the memory of the subconscious mind. It is generally known that in the mesmeric or somnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for the habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. This but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past incarnations.

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the memory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:

"First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery.

"Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Josephine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of Isere. By means of downward passes she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Josephine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Josephine no longer answers except by signs: she is not yet born. 'She is floating in darkness.' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that 'of course he's there, and he's speaking;' that 'he sees nothing;' and 'he's in the dark.' They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besancon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes gestures of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

"We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He feels himself growing out of his body; but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is, the mother of Josephine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child's body. Until about the seventh year, his body is surrounded by a sort of floating mist, in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

"The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks at first in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is Philomene Carteron.

"'By intensifying the sleep,' adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, 'I induce the manifestations of a living Philomene. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomene Cherpigny; her grandfather on the mother's side was called Pierre Machon and lived in Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.'"

Before her incarnation, Philomene had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in the darkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no time to do wrong. Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch. He obtained analogous and even more surprising results with other subjects.

Maeterlinck's comments upon all this are of negligible value. He pays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation. "There was never a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and probable creed," he says: yet for all that, it is clear that he has not been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching.

Colonel de Rochas' success, and that of all other experimenters along these lines, is due to their unconscious following of the Eastern method. He himself says that he "avoided everything that should put the subject on a definite tack,"—that is, he refrained from voluntary suggestion.

Having referred so frequently and so familiarly to the Eastern belief in reincarnation, and hinted at a more solid foundation for that belief than the single series of experiments above referred to, it would be unfair to the reader not to gratify his curiosity more fully in regard to these matters. In the light of our hypothesis they take on an importance which justifies their further consideration here.



VIII THE EASTERN TEACHING

ORIENTAL PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Western physical science, pursued with ardor and devotion for the past hundred years, has attained to a control over physical phenomena little short of magical, but in our understanding and mastery of subjective phenomena we are far behind those Eastern peoples who have made these matters the subject of study and experiment for thousands of years. The informed Hindu, rightly or wrongly, regards the Western practice of hypnotism, both in its methods and in its results, with mingled horror and contempt. To him it is not different from Black Magic, pernicious to operator and subject alike, since it involves an unwarrantable tyranny of the will on the part of the operator, and a dangerous submission to the obsession of an invading will on the part of the subject. Eastern hypnotism—at its highest and best—is profoundly different from Western, in that the sanctity of the individual is respected. Its aim is not to enslave the will, but temporarily to emancipate consciousness, under favorable circumstances, from its physical limitation.

Eastern practical psychology and metaphysics can be understood only through a knowledge of Eastern physics. These we would call transcendental, since they recognize not one theatre of consciousness, but three: the gross, the subtle, and the pure. These correspond to the material, the etherial, and the empyreal worlds of Greek philosophy, and to the physical, astral, and mental planes of modern Theosophy. They may be thought of as universal substance in three different octaves of vibration. Upon this, the trained will of man is able to act directly, for the reason that—as claimed by Balzac—it is a living force.

In Eastern hypnotism the gross vibrations of the physical vehicle are inhibited by the will of the operator, putting the body of the subject to sleep, whereat the consciousness, free in its subtle body, awakens to a dimensionally higher world. The operator, by means of questions, reaps such profit as he may by following the "true dreams" of the entranced subject, scrupulously refraining from imposing his own will further than is necessary to obtain the information which he seeks. The higher power of Eastern hypnotism, totally unknown in the West, consists of inhibiting the subtle vibrations of the astral vehicle also, permitting the consciousness to revert to its "pure" condition. In these deep states of trance the subject is able to communicate knowledges shut away from the generality of men—among them the knowledge of past births.

THE SELF-RECOVERED MEMORY OF PAST BIRTHS

The strength of will necessary to accomplish this higher power of hypnotism is achieved by arduous and long-continued exercises in concentration, by the practice of a strict morality, and by submission to a physical regimen which few Occidentals would care to undergo. Severe as is this training, it is less so than that which the true Yogi imposes upon himself, and its fruits are less. The achievement to which he addresses himself is far beyond that of the most accomplished hypnotist. The Yogi scorns all supernormal powers, even while possessing them. The Yogi, as the word implies—it means literally union—seeks to unite himself with his own higher self, the eternal and immortal part of his own nature, and the achievement of this brings with it the freedom of the three worlds at all times, and in full consciousness. As this involves an inward turning of the mind and will, and the withdrawal from the ordinary active life of average humanity, he alone is witness of his own success. "The rest is silence."

The knowledge of past births which may be obtained by the questionable and cumbersome method of hypnotism is one of the wayside flowers which the Yogi may pluck, if he will, on his path towards perfection. There are definite rules for the attainment of this knowledge, and they conform so closely to Colonel de Rochas' method—save for the fact that operator and subject are one and not twain—that it will be interesting to give them here. The ensuing passage is from the Vishuddhi Marga, or Path of Purity, a work written some sixteen hundred years ago by the famous sage, Buddhaghosha, whose name signifies the Voice of Buddha, the revealer of Buddha's teachings. It is quoted in Charles Johnston's The Memory of Past Births.

"The devotee, then, who tries for the first time to call to mind former states of existence, should choose a time after breakfast, when he has returned from collecting alms, and is alone and plunged in meditation, and has been absorbed in the four trances in succession. On rising from the fourth trance, which leads to the higher powers, he should consider the event which last took place, namely, his sitting down; next, the spreading of the mat; the entering of the room; the putting away of bowl and robe; his eating; his leaving the village; his going the rounds of the village for alms; his entering the village for alms; his departure from the monastery; his offering adoration in the courts of the shrine and of the Bodhi tree; his washing the bowl; what he did between taking the bowl and rinsing his mouth; what he did at dawn; what he did in the middle watch of the night; what he did in the first watch of the night. Thus he must consider what he did for a whole day and night, going backwards over it in reverse order.

"In the same reverse order he must consider what he did the day before, the day before that, up to the fifth day, the tenth day, a fortnight ago, a month ago, a year ago; and having in the same manner considered the previous ten and twenty years, and so on up to the time of his conception in this birth, he must then consider the name and form which he had at the moment of death in his last birth. But since the name and form of the last birth came quite to an end, and were replaced by others, this point of time is like thick darkness, and difficult to be made out by the mind of any person still deluded. But even such a one should not despair nor say: 'I shall never be able to penetrate beyond conception, or take as the object of my thought the name and form which I had in my last birth, at the moment of death,' but he should again and again enter the trance which leads to the higher powers, and each time he rises from the trance, he should again intend his mind upon that point of time.

"Just as a strong man in cutting down a mighty tree to be used as the peaked roof of a pagoda, if the edge of his axe be turned in lopping off the branches and twigs, will not despair of cutting down the tree, but will go to an iron-worker's shop, have his axe sharpened, return, and go on with his cutting; and if the edge of his axe be turned a second time, he will a second time have it sharpened, and return, and go on with his cutting; and since nothing that he chopped once needs to be chopped again, he will in no long time, when there is nothing left to chop, fell that mighty tree. In the same way the devotee rising from the trance which leads to the higher powers, without considering what he has considered once, and considering only the moment of conception, in no long time will penetrate beyond the moment of conception, and take as his object the name and form which he had at the moment of death, in his last birth.

"His alert attention having become possessed of this knowledge, he can call to mind many former states of existence, as, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, and so on, in the words of the text."

This quotation casts an interesting light upon Eastern monasticism. The Buddhist monasteries are here revealed as schools of practical psychology, the life of the monk a life of arduous and unceasing labor, but labor of a sort which seems but idleness. The successive "initiations" which are the milestones on the "Path of Perfection" upon which the devotee has set his feet represent successive emancipations of consciousness gained through work and knowledge. Their nature may best be understood by means of a fanciful analogy.

RELEASE

If we assume that all life is conscious life, as much aware of its environment as the freedom of movement of its life vehicle in that environment permits, a corpuscle vibrating in a solid would have a certain sense of space and of movement in space gained from its own experience. Now imagine the solid, which is its world, to be subjected to the influence of heat. When the temperature reached a certain point the solid would transform itself into a liquid. To the corpuscle all the old barriers would seem to be broken down; space would be different, time would be different, and its world a different place. Again, at another increase of temperature, when the liquid became a gas, the corpuscle would experience a further emancipation: it would possess a further freedom, with all the facts of its universe to learn anew.

Each of these successive crises would constitute for it an initiation, and since the heat has acted upon it from within, causing an expansion of its life vehicle, it would seem to itself to have attained to these new freedoms through self-development.

The parallel is now plain to the reader: the corpuscle is the Yogi, bent on liberation: the heat which warms him is the Divine Love, centered in his heart, his initiations are the successive emancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attains Nirvana—inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world. As latent heat resides in the corpuscle, so is Release hidden in the heart—release from time and space. The perception of this prompted the exultant apostrophe of Buddha, "Looking for the maker of this tabernacle, I have run through a course of many births, not finding him; and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained the extinction of all desires."

Upon the mystery of Nirvana the Higher Space Hypothesis casts not a little light. To "approach the Eternal" can only be to approach a condition where time is not. Because there is an escape from time in proportion as space dimensions are added to, and assimilated by, consciousness, any development involving this element of space conquest (and evolution is itself such a development) involves time annihilation also. To be in a state of desire is to be conditioned by a limitation, because one can desire only that which one has not or is not. The extinction of a desire is only another name for the transcending of a limitation—of all desires, of all limitations. If these limitations are of space they are of time also; therefore is the "approach to the Eternal" through the "extinction of all desire." Christ said, "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar of the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out"—go out, that is, into incarnation—into "time, besprent with seven-hued circumstance."

Such are the testimonies of the world-saviors regarding the means and end of liberation. Below them on the evolutionary ladder stand the mystics, earth-bound, but soul-free; below them, in turn, yet far above common humanity, stand the men of genius, caught still in the net of passion, but able, in their work, to reflect something of the glory of the supernal world. Let us consider, in the next two chapters, each of these in turn.



IX THE MYSTICS

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

The mystic, however far removed he may be from Nietzsche's ideal of the Superman, nevertheless represents superhumanity in the domain of consciousness. By means of quotations, taken almost at random from the rich literature of mysticism, the author will attempt to show that the consciousness of the mystic involves the awareness of dimensionally higher worlds. The first group of quotations is culled from certain of the Sacred Books of Hermes Trismegistus.

"Comprehend clearly" (says Hermes to Asclepios) "that this sensible world is enfolded, as in a garment, by the supernal world."

We think of our three dimensional space, "the sensible world," as immersed in higher space; "enfolded as in a garment," therefore. And we think of the objects of our world as having extension in a dimensionally higher region, that "supernal world" in which the phenomena of this sensible world arise. For:

"Celestial order reigns over terrestrial order: all that is done and said upon earth has its origin in the heights, from which all essences are dispensed with measure and equilibrium: nor is there anything which does not emanate from one above and return thither"

THE PAGE AND THE PRESS

The idea of an all-embracing unity within and behind the seeming manifoldness of life forms the ground rhythm of all inspired literature, sacred and profane alike. For clarity and conciseness it would be difficult to improve upon the formulation of this idea contained in the following fragment:

"In the manifold unity of universal life the innumerable individualities distinguished by their variations are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everything proceeds from unity.

"For all things depend upon unity, or develop from it, and because they appear distant from one another it is believed that they are many, whereas in their collectivity they form but one."

Now nothing so successfully resolves this paradox of the one and the many as the concept that the things of this world are embraced and united in a dimensionally higher world in a manner analogous to that in which all conic sections are embraced and united within the cone. A more elaborate and fanciful figure may serve to make this clearer to the mind.

Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letter is a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, larger communities and groups. These "innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations" must needs seem to themselves as "distant from one another," their very differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity. Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards an end of which they cannot be aware. The mind of the reader unites and interprets the letters into continuous thought, though they be voiceless as stones to one another. Even so may our sad and stony identities spell out a world's word which we know not of, by reason of our singularity and isolation. Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually "united in such a manner that the whole is one." The metal that has moulded each into its significant form amalgamates them into a higher unity. So also the power that makes us separate is the same power that makes us one.

THE SHIP AND ITS CAPTAIN

Here follows the lament of the souls awaiting incarnation:

"Behold the sad future in store for us—to minister to the wants of a fluctuating and dissoluble body! No more may our eyes distinguish the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess—not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast!"

That the soul—the so-called subliminal self—draws from a broader, deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is a commonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as higher-dimensional with relation to the body, but so concerned with the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicle as to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking and moving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogy he uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the whole passage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted, that it is given here entire.

"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ample experience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the world of real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition of four-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process we are engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signals of our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitions derived from the inner experience.

"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modern battleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he is in communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey his messages and commands to every part of the ship, and receive information from the conning tower and the engine room. Now suppose the captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his ship over the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of the direction of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that he forgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind of movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are so familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of the ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies himself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean.

"Such is the relation, as I imagine it, of the soul to the body. A relation which we can imagine as existing momentarily in the case of the captain is the normal one in the case of the soul with its craft. As the captain is capable of a kind of movement, an amplitude of motion, which does not enter into his thoughts with regard to the directing of the ship over the plane surface of the ocean, so the soul is capable of a kind of movement, has an amplitude of motion, which is not used in its task of directing the body in the three-dimensional region in which the body's activity lies. If for any reason it becomes necessary for the captain to consider three-dimensional motions with regard to his ship, it would not be difficult for him to gain the materials for thinking about such motions; all he has to do is to call experience into play. As far as the navigation of the ship is concerned, however, he is not obliged to call on such experience. The ship as a whole simply moves on a surface. The problem of three-dimensional movement does not ordinarily concern its steering. And thus with regard to ourselves all those movements and activities which characterize our bodily organs are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the ampler movements. But we do more than use these movements of our body to effect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass when we act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play which lie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind of thought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as a whole.

"When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and apply ourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitual conceptions inadequate. The captain in us must wake up to his own intimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are his own, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how to deal with the problems he has come to."

The Fourth Dimension.

How more accurately and eloquently could "the captain in us," momentarily aroused, give voice to his predicament, than in the words, "Instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast."

DIRECT VISION

The "watery spheres" in the Hermetic fragment are of course the eyes, a mechanism inferior in many ways to the camera of man's own devising. The phenomena of clairvoyance make known a mode of vision which is confined to no specific sense organ, approximating much more closely to true perception than does physical sight. Mr. C.W. Leadbeater in Clairvoyance specifically affirms that this higher power of sight is four-dimensional. He says: "The idea of the fourth dimension as expounded by Mr. Hinton is the only one which gives any kind of explanation down here of astral vision ... which lays every point in the interior of a solid body absolutely open to the gaze of the seer, just as every point of the interior of a circle lies open to the gaze of a man looking down upon it." "I can see all around and every way," exclaims one of the psychometers reported in William Denton's The Soul of Things.

The "outer light" by which the physical eye is able to see objects is sunlight. Upon this clairvoyant vision in no wise depends, involving, as it does, other octaves of vibration. We should be able to receive ideas of this order without incredulity since the advent of "dark" photography and the ultra-violet microscope. By aid of the latter, photographs are taken in absolute darkness, the lenses used being transparent to light rays invisible to the eye, but active photographically.

The foregoing passages from The Virgin of the World show a remarkable resemblance between the Hermetic philosophy and modern higher-space thought. The parallelism is not less striking in the case of certain other mystic philosophers of the East.

PLATO'S SHADOW-WATCHERS

"Parmenides," says Hinton, "and the Asiatic thinkers with whom he is in close affinity, propound a theory of existence which is in close accord with a conception of a possible relation between a higher and a lower-dimensional space." He concludes, "Either one of two things must be true, that four-dimensional conceptions give a wonderful power of representing the thought of the East, or that the thinkers of the East must have been looking at and regarding four-dimensional existence."

It would not be difficult to re-state, in terms of our hypothesis, Plato's doctrine of an enduring archetypal world of ideas reflected in a world of transitory images and appearances. Fortunately, Plato has relieved the author of that necessity by doing it himself in his wonderful allegory of the shadow-watchers in The Republic. The trend of his argument is clear; as its shadow is to a solid object, so is the object itself to its archetypal idea. This is the manner in which he presents this thought:

"Imagine a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and neck so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit their wonders."

"I have it," he replied.

"Also, figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other animals, wrought in wood, stone, and all kinds of materials, together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and, as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and others silent"

"You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners."

"They resemble us," I replied. "For let me ask you, in the first place, whether persons so confined could have seen anything of themselves or of each other, beyond the shadows thrown by the fire upon the part of the cavern facing them."

"Certainly not, if you suppose them to have been compelled all their lifetime to keep their heads unmoved."

"And is not their knowledge of the things carried past them equally limited?"

"Unquestionably it is."

"And if they were able to converse with one another, do you not think that they would be in the habit of giving names to the objects which they saw before them?"

"Doubtless they would."

"Again: if their prison house returned an echo from the part facing them, whenever one of the passers-by opened his lips, to what, let me ask you, could they refer the voice, if not to the shadow which was passing?"

"Unquestionably they would refer it to that."

"Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of the manufactured articles to be the only realities."

"Without a doubt they would."

Plato (in the person of Socrates) then considers what would happen if the course of nature brought to the prisoners a release from their fetters and a remedy for their foolishness, and concludes as follows:

"Now this imaginary case, my dear Glaucon, you must apply in all its parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the eye reveals, to the prison-house, and the light of the fire therein to the power of the sun; and if, by the upward ascent and the contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of the soul in the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of my own surmises ... the view which I take of the subject is to the following effect."

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.

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.

THE END