Four-Dimensional Vistas

Claude Fayette Bragdon

Four-Dimensional Vistas

Published by Good Press, 2022

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4057664630520

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS

I THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

II THE DIMENSIONAL LADDER

III PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

IV TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS

V CURVED TIME

VI SLEEP AND DREAMS

VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

VIII THE EASTERN TEACHING

IX THE MYSTICS

X GENIUS

XI THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

There are two notable emancipations of the mind from the tyranny of mere appearances that have received scant attention save from mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

In 1823 Bolyai declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, I will draw two lines through a given point, both of which will be parallel to a given line. The drawing of these lines led to the concept of the curvature of space, and this to the idea of higher space.

The recently developed Theory of Relativity has compelled the revision of the time concept as used in classical physics. One result of this has been to introduce the notion of curved time.

These two ideas, of curved time and higher space, by their very nature are bound to profoundly modify human thought. They loosen the bonds within which advancing knowledge has increasingly labored, they lighten the dark abysses of consciousness, they reconcile the discoveries of Western workers with the inspirations of Eastern dreamers; but best of all, they open vistas, they offer glimpses that may make us less forlorn.

I. THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

The Undiscovered Country—Miracles—The Failure of Common Sense—The

Function of Science—Mathematics—Intuition—Our Sense of Space—The

Subjectivity of Space—The Need of an Enlarged Space-Concept.

II. THE DIMENSIONAL LADDER

Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces—From the Cosmos to the

Corpuscle—And Beyond—Evolution as Space-Conquest—Dimensional

Sequences—Man the Geometer—Higher, and Highest, Space.

III. PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

Looking for the Greater in the Less—Symmetry—Other Allied

Phenomena—Isomerism—The Orbital Motion of Spheres: Cell-Subdivision—

The Electric Current—The Greater Universe—A Hint from Astronomy—

Gravitation—The Ether of Space.

IV. TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS

Zöllner—Apparitions—Possession—Clairvoyance in Space—Clairvoyance in Time—Pisgah Sights of Life's Pageant.

V. CURVED TIME

Time from the Standpoint of Experiment and of Conscious Experience— Relativity—The Spoon-Man—The Orbital Movement of Time—Materiality the Mirror of Consciousness—Periodicity.

VI. SLEEP AND DREAMS

Sleep—Dreams—Time in Dreams—The Eastern Teaching in regard to Sleep and Dreams—Space in Dreams—The Phenomenon of Pause.

VII. THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Field of Psychic Research—Modifying the Past—Karma and

Reincarnation—Colonel De Rochas' Experiments.

VIII. THE EASTERN TEACHING

Oriental Physics and Metaphysics—The Self-Recovered Memory of past

Births—Release.

IX. THE MYSTICS

Hermes Trismegistus—The Page and the Press—The Ship and its

Captain—Direct Vision—Plato's Shadow-Watchers—Swedenborg—Man,

the Space-Eater—The Within and Without—Intuition and Reason—The

Coil of Life.

X. GENIUS

Immanence—Timelessness—Beyond Good and Evil: Beauty—The Daemonic—

A Dream and a Forgetting—The Play of Brahm.

XI. THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

Concept and Conduct—Selflessness—Humility—Solidarity—Live Openly—

Non-Resistance to Evil—The Immanent Divine.

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS

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I THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

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THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Expectancy of freedom is the dominant note of to-day. Amid the crash of armies and the clash of systems we await some liberating stroke which shall release us from the old dreary thralldoms. As Nietzsche says, It would seem as though we had before us, as a reward for all our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizons of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror and divinity, that both our curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness.

Should a name be demanded for this home of freedom, there are those who would unhesitatingly call it The Fourth Dimension of Space. For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of this seemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenment will lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where and what is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here—in us, and all about us—in a direction toward which we can never point because at right angles to all the directions that we know. Our space cannot contain it, because it contains our space. No walls separate us from this demesne, not even the walls of our fleshly prison; yet we may not enter, even though we are already there. It is the place of dreams, of living dead men: it is At the Back of the North Wind and Behind the Looking Glass.

So might one go on, piling figure upon figure and paradox upon paradox, to little profit. The effective method is the ordered and deliberate one; therefore the author asks of his reader the endurance of his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations of the mind.

MIRACLES

Could one of our aviators have landed in ancient Athens, doubtless he would have been given a place in the Greek Pantheon, for the old idea of a demigod was a man with wings. Why, then, does a flying man so little amaze us? Because we know about engines, and the smell of gasoline has dulled our sense of the sublime. The living voice of a dead man leaves us unterrified if only we can be sure that it comes from a phonograph; but let that voice speak to us out of vacancy and we fall a prey to the same order of alarm that is felt by a savage at the report of a gun that he has never seen.

This illustration very well defines the nature of a miracle: it is a manifestation of power new to experience, and counter to the current thought of the time, Miracles are therefore always in order, they always happen. It is nothing that the sober facts of to-day are more marvellous than the fictions of Baron Munchausen, so long as we understand them: it is everything that phenomena are multiplying, that we are unable to understand. This increasing pressure upon consciousness from a new direction has created a need to found belief on something firmer than a bottomless gullibility of mind. This book is aimed to meet that need by giving the mind the freedom of new spaces; but before it can even begin to do so, the reader must be brought to see the fallacy of attempting to measure the limits of the possible by that faculty known as common sense. And by common sense is meant, not the appeal to abstract reason, but to concrete experience.

THE FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE

Common sense had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of I told you so! at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. A wife whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectually silenced her husband's ridicule of what he called her credulity by reminding him that when wireless telegraphy was first suggested he had exclaimed, Ah, that, you know, is one of the things that is not possible! He was betrayed by his common sense.

The lessons such things teach us are summed up in the reply of Arago, the great savant, to the wife of Daguerre. She asked him if he thought her husband was losing his mind because he was trying to make permanent the image in a mirror. Arago is said to have answered, He who, outside of pure mathematics, says a thing is impossible, speaks without reason.

Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere commonplace of the day after to-morrow. If common sense can so little anticipate the ordinary and orderly advancement of human knowledge, it is still less able to take that leap into the dark which is demanded of it now. The course of wisdom is therefore to place reliance upon reason and intuition, leaving to common sense the task of guiding the routine affairs of life, and guiding these alone.

THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE

In enlisting the aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall be following in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist's own. Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these should be clearly understood.

Science is that knowledge which can be gained by exact observation and correct thinking. If science makes use of any methods but these it