Four Dimensional Vistas by Claude Fayette Bragdon
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Claude Fayette Bragdon >> Four Dimensional Vistas
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But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvature
receives its most striking confirmation--those lesser returns and
rhythms to which we give the name of periodicity. Before considering
these, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must be
exposed.
MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything--even
thought and emotion--in materiality, has betrayed us into the error
of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by
which they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the form
in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of
as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously
interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened
in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to
contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is
not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but
because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the
Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that
clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises:
it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is
turning toward the Idea of Pain.
Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek
in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines
circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The
organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations
in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an
object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a
figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application.
Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede
from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the
forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action,
and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.
PERIODICITY
We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar
manifestations of it as Nature affords in _periodicity_. We recognize
it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be
co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the
wanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that
go with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrences
do not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurement
that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return.
Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too,
may be but "a sleep and a forgetting." The reason that sleep fails to
terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that
_memory leafs the chasm_. Why should death bedreaded any more than
bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget?
As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, "Whatever has gone into the mind
may come out of the mind," and in a subsequent chapter this aphorism
will be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author of
it appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night and
winter to winter, but such things as "the night-time of the spirit"
and "the winter of our discontent" are not recognized as having either
cause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states of
consciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable in
believing that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moods
and moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be related
to the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winter
are related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth.
But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of time
curvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions which
it is our pleasure now to explore.
VI SLEEP AND DREAMS
SLEEP
Our space is called three-dimensional because it takes three
numbers--measurement in three mutually perpendicular directions--to
determine and mark out any particular point from the totality of
points. Time, as the individual experiences it, is called
one-dimensional for an analogous reason: one number is all that is
required to determine and mark out any particular event of a series
from all the rest. Now in order to establish a position in a space of
four dimensions it would be necessary to measure in _four_ mutually
perpendicular directions. Time curvature opens up the possibility of
a corresponding higher development in time: one whereby time would
be more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure.
Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception.
Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and the
fact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsing
all the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that in
the time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well as
sequence--time ceases to be linear and becomes _plane_. More
remarkable illustrations of the sublimation of the time-sense are
to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams.
"Oh, thou that sleepest, what is sleep?" asks the curious Leonardo.
Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positive
nature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at least
effectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists who
would have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of blood
circulation or of intoxication by accumulation of waste products in
the system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel of
the life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he has
only become unresponsive to the mass of stimuli of the external
world which constitutes his environment. As Sidis says, "When our
interest in external existence fags and fades away, we go to sleep.
When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up the
bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far as
possible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to our
own world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is the
interruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is the
laying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce
with the world."
The twin concepts of higher space and curved time sanction a view of
sleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to be
free of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to be
free--that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain,
and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance of
the fourth dimension, where time and space are less rigid to resist
the fulfillment of desire.
DREAMS
We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however
good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream
experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance
we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely
subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality
and irrationality--it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime
thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer
to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the
subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly
to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking
experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are
sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the
meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and
flotsam "of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," whose vastitude,
whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be
inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore--the tired
brain in sleep.
For it is the _remembered_ dream alone that is incoherent--the dream
that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world,
and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that
the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not
wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or
felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete
symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know
that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from
the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in
the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable--
"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" DuPrel and others have
shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance,
trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of
thresholds--that they are all related states and merge into one
another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a
certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and
seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it.
Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is
lifted, but the art of _dreaming true_ remains for the most part
unmastered--one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store
for the sons and daughters of men.
The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams
develop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the
product, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong to
both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the
four-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of
daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that
experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a
higher development of time.
TIME IN DREAMS
The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from
the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression
at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of
consciousness--moments so closely compacted that we think of them as
simultaneous--a coherent series of representations may take place,
involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment.
Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this
character, in which the long-delayed denouement was suggested and
prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the
entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression
to travel from the skin to the brain.
Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary
lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its
time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of
time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in _The Hasheesh Eater_, the dreams
that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more
awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the
drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various
states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons
of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of
the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.
Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I
spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in
the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of
music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled
with a strange and unimagined ecstasy."
Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in
order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to
have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following
curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a
previous conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton I
began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of
my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke,
and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice kept
speaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which
hasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the
reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the
last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in
the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation
might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held
me when I heard it begun."
This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale,
proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, and
that the "dream organ" of consciousness has a time scale of its own.
If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and in
dreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be sought
in the _vehicle_ of consciousness, for clearly the limit of
impressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishes
the time scale, just as the size of the body with relation to
objects establishes the space scale. Time must be different for the
ant and the elephant, for example, as space is different.
Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with which
impressions succeed one another. Were we capable of receiving only
one impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer,
the ordinary term of life would seem very short. On the other hand,
if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncounted
aeons would seem to be lived through in the interval between
childhood and old age.
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.
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