The Fourth Dimension, 2

Standing Up in Flatland

This is a an elaboration of the metaphysics presented in the opening sections of Self and Unself, and summarised in my audio piece ‘The System and The Self’ (which appears at the beginning of Ad Radicem).

Part 1, The Paradoxes of Consciousness presents an outline of the literal, subjective-objective self, and of that which cannot be literally spoken of; transdimensional, ‘panjective’ unself.

Part 2, Standing up in Flatland looks at how the metaphor of the fourth dimension does away with all the fundamental ‘literalist’ conflicts and mysteries of the ‘three dimensional’ self.

Part 3, The Hard Problem of Everything explains the fear, craving, violence, boredom, confusion, insularity, idolatry and madness that follow, of necessity, from taking reality literally.

Part 4, The Soft Solution to Everything shows how to arrive at absolute certainty as to the nature of ‘four-dimensional’ consciousness, and why this entails immense pain.

A Forgotten Metaphor

Let us consider a metaphor of transcendence which makes intuitive sense of consciousness and, consequently, of the mysteries of philosophy, science and art; the allegory of ‘Flatland.’ Popularised by Edwin Abbott in 1884,¹ this metaphorical framework had mathematical roots stretching back through Charles Hinton’s fourth-dimensional speculations² and Bernhard Riemann’s ‘manifolds’, to Carl Friedrich Gauss’ intrinsic geometry and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s musings on time as a fourth dimension. Flatland, and the reality it metaphorically represented, was largely abandoned when Einstein’s theory of relativity formalised such notions into the rigorous geometry of spacetime, but it captivated writers, artists, and even scientists exploring higher dimensions at the close of the 19th century.

Our ordinary understanding of time and space posits self as existing in three conceivable spatial dimensions, and an inconceivable, non-spatial, fourth dimension which we call ‘time’ (because it is inconceivable, all our conceptions of time—sundial shadows, clock ticks, cycles of radiation from a caesium atom and ordinary prepositional terms like ‘before’ and ‘after’—are spatial metaphors). Imagine, instead, a world of two spatial dimensions, ‘Flatland’, on a plane of length and breadth but zero height, upon which Flatlanders live their lives. How, the metaphor asks, would the literal two-dimensional self of a Flatlander perceive a three-dimensional object, say an apple, that bisected its reality? It would literally or ‘naturally’ perceive the 3D apple in two dimensions, as the edge of a slice of zero thickness. Flatlanders would see and move around the outside of the slice, the skin, but could never see what the non-literal three-dimensional apple really is. If the apple passed through Flatland, Flatlanders would see it appear out of nowhere, grow, shrink and vanish again. They would say that it had ‘lived’ and ‘died’ in what they call ‘time’, whereas in truth it had moved through a space they are unable to perceive.

If the apple were connected to a tree which passed through Flatland, Flatlanders would see many separate things being born, living, connecting up (as the branches coalesced into each other), forming one single organism (the trunk) then separating out again (into roots) and vanishing. Again, this would appear to be happening in a mysterious dimension that Flatlanders would call ‘time’, while, in truth, in reality, in three dimensions, there is no separation, no growth and no disappearance at all. There is no change in time, just movement, in space.

Causality would also appear as a mystery to Flatlanders, or rather causality would appear where, in reality, there is none. If, for example, a wheel with a regular and repeated arrangement of different coloured spokes—say red, blue and green—rotated through Flatland, Flatlanders would see two-dimensional coloured ‘things’ appear and disappear in a regular order and would rationally conclude that a separate red event-thing was ‘causing’ a separate blue event-thing, the blue then ‘causing’ the green, the green the red, and so on. It would not occur to Flatlanders that there is no causal arrangement at all (and therefore no detectable causality), because it could not literally occur to them. The idea that causality does not exist would appear ‘mystical’ or, conflated with fanciful ideas that science and logic are arbitrary illusions,³ ‘insane’.

Endeavours to communicate the actual reality of three dimensions to Flatlanders would therefore, quite naturally, be founded on what would appear to be ‘foolish’, ‘fanciful’ and ‘insane’ forms of metaphorical expression. A three-dimensional being, speaking from ‘above’ Flatland (speech, moreover, which would sound as if it were coming from everywhere, both within the body and without) might say that ‘the apple is not living and dying, but moving’ or ‘what you see as separate trees is really a single tree’ or ‘there is no causality as you experience it’, but, like ‘I am you’, such formulations, to the extent they were taken literally, by the literal two-dimensional self, would seem, feel or appear incomprehensible, ridiculous and unserious. Indeed, not just silly and meaningless, but troubling, even actively threatening.

To manufacturers of a social, ethical and aesthetic world founded on two dimensions—founded, that is to say, on transitory, divided, causal experience—a non-transitory, undivided, acausal, transdimensional reality would instinctively be perceived as a menace. In Edwin Abbott’s satire, the threat was to a Victorian society built on rigid intellectual and social hierarchies. A modern Flatlander would be similarly troubled—for little has essentially changed in this regard since the nineteenth century—but also would also sense an attack on the foundation of modern education, law and medicine—all based on mechanistic causality, algorithmic logic and the reduction of individuality to definable identities (or cases)—and on our postmodern obsession with safety and control; also founded on the transitory, divided and causal self, and therefore baffled, disturbed and threatened by the possibility of a non-transitory, undivided, acausal reality to which definable identity is subordinate.

We can predict how Flatlanders would react to the troubling possibility of a higher spatial dimension. If Flatland self and society were founded on literal form, Flatlanders would deal with the baffling, disturbing and threatening possibility of non-literal apprehension of a higher dimension either by suppression and censorship, making it impossible to speak metaphorical ‘blasphemy,’ or, more likely, and more effectively, by making non-transitory, undivided, acausal reality inaccessible to experience. More likely, because the two-dimensional self would automatically abstract transdimensional metaphor into two-dimensional form; into ideas of ‘eternity’, ‘wholeness’ or ‘the absolute’, which, having no referent, would then feel, to the literal self, truthful, reassuring and original, while suffocating genuine apperception of non-literal truth. To two-dimensional selves, living in (and therefore ideologically attached to) an entirely two-dimensional reality, all expressions of actual transcendence, of three dimensions in which there is no birth and death (just movement of the three-dimensional tree through two-dimensional ‘reality’), no separation between subject and object (between ‘my’ branch and ‘yours’), indeed no conceivable things at all; all of this would either be converted to unreal, fake or clichéd religious, spiritual or artistic forms, or be suppressed. That viewing two-dimensional ‘reality’ from a three-dimensional perspective cleared up the perplexing problems of Flatland existence would be neither here nor there, when it would also ‘clear up’ the ‘perplexing problems’ of personal privilege, institutional hegemony and solipsistic individualism upon which powerful Flatlanders built their lives.

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Under the Assumption of Non-Literality

We have been assuming that consciousness is ‘in some way’ non-literal; that it is ‘in some way’ permanent, undivided and acausal. By applying the two-dimensional allegory of Flatland to three dimensions of space—to our ‘Blobland’—we can now get a better idea of what this ‘in some way’ means: that, although the three-dimensional self cannot perceive space in four dimensions (and therefore experiences the fourth dimension as a perplexing mystery, the mystery of time), consciousness-in-itself, if it is independent of the principle of sufficient reason, can. A consciousness-in-itself that transcends literality would be able to apperceive time spatially (or even, as we shall see, ‘materially’), an experience that, insofar as it is realised in the literal self, would necessarily take a symbolic form that baffled, disturbed or threatened both self and society founded on self.

As with the metaphors of transcendence, already discussed, our cultural record is littered with such symbolic forms, which necessarily strike the literal self as baffling, disturbing or threatening. To take an example from the first pillar of Western culture—Judeo-Christian religious thought—the Gospel of John begins with the enigmatic words ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word was made flesh.’⁴ If we take the original [gnostic] Greek terms for ‘Word’ (Logos, misleadingly translated into Latin as Verbum), ‘God’ (Theos, translated into Latin as Deus) and ‘flesh’ (sarx, translated into Latin as caro), the sentence makes intuitive, or apperceptive, sense. Transdimensional, four-dimensional reality (Logos), enigmatic to the three-dimensional self (which names the mystery ‘Theos’ ), appears to self as comprehensible, temporal-mortal matter (sarx).

The mysteries of religion thus evaporate under the assumption of four-dimensional space. Three dimensional man naturally conceives of himself as either possessing an immaterial three-dimensional thing called a soul, which rules over a material three-dimensional thing called a body, or he does away with the soul and lives solely as a ‘humanist’ body. The former belief leads to hatred, fear and violent subjugation of the material body, while the latter leads to soulless hedonism and amoral selfishness. The third alternative, that the ‘soul’ is simply the physical body in four-dimensions—or as William Blake put it,⁵ ‘that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses’—does away with the confusion, violence and horror of three-dimensional religious and three-dimensional secular thought.

The second pillar of Western culture—Greek philosophical thought—also possesses an enigmatic metaphorical description of the three-dimensional self’s relation to four dimensions, in the work of Parmenides, for example, who endeavoured to solve the central mysteries of philosophy by appeal to four-dimensional ontological monism, the idea that reality is ultimately one, unchanging, indivisible whole. This idea was (predictably) ridiculed by his contemporaries, which is why his pupil, Zeno, set out to expose the opposite view, ontological pluralism (the three-dimensional assumption that the universe comprises a multitude of separate things) to ridicule, by showing that it leads to even more absurd conclusions. The belief that ‘there are many things’ must, as Zeno demonstrated in his famous ‘paradoxes,’ terminate in the conclusion that everything is infinitely small and infinitely big, that nothing ever moves and that nothing really exists. These contradictions, all but impossible for the literalist mind to overcome, evaporate at the touch of a four-dimensional finger (or bite of a four-dimensional apple).

Plato also endeavoured to resolve the mysteries of thought by appeal to indivisible wholes. For Plato, as is well known, the world which appears to our senses is a defective representation of a perfect realm of what he (misleadingly) called ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’. These are normally, but incorrectly, understood to be abstract ideas, but we can also see them as four-dimensional things-in-themselves, the ‘whole’ apple or snake of which the ‘slice’ that our self presents is merely a reflection or, to take the famous image presented in Plato’s allegory of the cave, a flat shadow. Unfortunately Plato, for all his genius, did not pursue the ‘folly’ of his ontological monism to wisdom, preserving a dualism between appearance and reality instead of recognising appearances as partial expressions of a single four-dimensional whole.

The idea of four-dimensional space manifesting to self as three-dimensional form, can be traced through the history of Western religious thought. It appears in medieval mysticism, as Jacob Boehme’s ‘signatures’⁶ and Meister Eckhart’s paradoxes,⁷ it appears in Romantic philosophy as William Blake’s ‘Eternal Image’ (‘The Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but Its Eternal Image & Individuality never dies, but renews by its seed’⁸) and Arthur Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of Platonism,⁹ it appears in modern psychology as Jung’s archetypes and in modern spiritualism as Ouspensky’s atmospheres.¹⁰ Kierkegaard’s self, which he speaks of as a transcendental experience, realising itself over time yet at the same time one in eternity, can also be understood as a four-dimensional object that stands opposed to the limited ‘slice’ that most people exist as, isolated from the whole, in a state of existential despair.¹¹ Wittgenstein’s refusal to speak literally of four dimensions, and his surgical dissection of literal language that gives the misleading impression of doing so,¹² might also, with some liberty, be taken as being part of this tradition.

The metaphor of a fourth spatial dimension, like the central insights of Boehme, Blake, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Jung, thus explains and resolves the mystery of being—the millennial impasse between idealism and materialism. Where idealism (and rationalism), only considers the fourth dimension as it presents itself to mind, as ideas of time, materialism (and empiricism), limits itself to matter as it presents itself to the three-dimensional self, as the things of space. The subjective concepts of idealistic time and the objective percepts of materialist space appear, to the self, to be distinct, but for the transdimensional self both necessarily appear in and as the same self. Consciousness-in-itself and the thing-in-itself it apperceives (that it ‘is’) are only elusive to self because they are neither subjectively ideal nor objectively material; but panjectively real.

Here we must make a distinction between real idealism and naive idealism, and between real materialism and naive materialism. Naive idealism and naive materialism are the two poles of naive literalism, the rationalist insistence that reality, consciousness and truth are ultimately reducible to facticity and causality. In this, naive idealism and naive materialism are simultaneously the same—in that neither one can take into account the reality of the thing-in-itself (naive realists and naive idealists never explain what matter or thought actually are)—and at the same time, irreconcilable antipodes, because each takes its position as fundamental and the opposite as derivative, so that what appears to one as primary reality (‘God’ for example, or ‘the material universe’) appears to the other as a by-product (‘God’ is ‘really’ a material idea, or ‘the material universe’ was ‘really’ created by God) leaving them locked in a contradiction that cannot be resolved without abandoning the premises which give rise to it.

The foundation of real materialism and real idealism is also the same, but unlike the abstract sand upon which naive materialism and idealism are built, it is real—actual, conscious experience of the thing-in-itself. This reality may manifest as one or other reconcilable antipode—matter or idea—according to the demands of the situation, but is not limited to either. Thus, for the real materialist, the entire universe is material, and for the real idealist, the entire universe is mental, but because we have, and can have, no idea what either mind or matter actually are,¹³ the positions dissolve, amicably, into each other, making the distinction between them one of mere expedience.

Real materialism and real idealism both affirm, in other words, the same, shared totality, the two antipodes functioning not as dogmatic opposites, but as complementary [three-dimensional] expressions of a single [four-dimensional] reality that sometimes demands hard-minded materialism, and sometimes soft fleshed idealism, the decision between the two depending on conscious sensitivity to the context, on discernment of its requirements, and, consequently, on timing, knowing when to act or accept, push or pull, yes or no; all qualities which are conspicuously absent in the naive literalist and never appear in his life (qua literalist) or work. One searches in vain, through libraries of idealist and materialist knowledge, for a means by which one’s self might change, so that I may perceive a radically different kind of truth to that offered by literalism.

Idealism and materialism have the same metaphorical relation to each other as waves and particles, a distinction which also dissolves—and with it the mysteries of quantum physics—under the assumption of a non-literal fourth dimension. Neither waves nor particles can literally reflect the thing-in-itself, unimaginable to the literal, three-dimensional self, which can only grasp phenomenal reflections of noumena, either one thing or another, depending on the perspective the self (or its measuring instruments) takes. Thus, if self sends photons of light through a double slit without determining which path they take, they appear to be everywhere and nowhere. If they are measured so as to determine which slit they pass through, they appear to ‘know’ they are being measured and appear as localised particle-like events. If the decision to discover which slit the photon ‘chose’ is made after it has passed through the slits, it appears to ‘know’, retrospectively, whether it went through one slit or both. And if the spin of one of a pair of entangled particles is measured, it appears to ‘know’, instantaneously, what result will be obtained when the other is measured, even if it lies on the other side of the universe.

This extraordinary ‘knowledge’ is, of course, like the equations that quantum physicists use to understand the extraordinary results of their experiments, another metaphor. Just as Flatlanders must express their apperception of the unified noumena ‘behind’ divided phenomena in strange metaphors (‘I am you’), so do Bloblanders. Standard quantum physics provides a predictive structure for literal epistemological appearances, or ‘outcomes’, while necessarily remaining silent on the ontology of what, if anything, the wavefunction corresponds to; for the simple reason that if a transdimensional, panjective reality is ‘producing’ what appear to be separate, objective waves and particles, there is nothing that purely literalist ‘scientific’ thought can ever say about it. The contradictions of ‘superposition’ dissolve under the assumption of non-literal, four-dimensional space, in which there is no difference between objective things appearing to exist in multiple states at once, and their apparent dependence on subjective observation, but this metaphor must be waved away by a literalist science which demands rational (factual-causal) definition and testability

Such an assumption also solves the mystery of emergence that cripples materialist accounts of consciousness and the self-evident physicality of the universe that idealism cannot account for. There is, contra materialism, nothing fundamentally (four-dimensionally) non-conscious in the universe for consciousness to emerge from, nor even, ultimately, anything separate from consciousness that could ‘cause’ it. Yet, at the same time, contra idealism, separate, independent and localised material three-dimensional things self-evidently do exist—which is how they can be detected, tested and coherently analysed, how we can make reliable predictions from doing so, and why those who completely reject the separate, self-evident facts of materialism and their logical (‘scientific’) relations are rightly considered to be mad or stupid. These facts and relations exist, but only in three-dimensional space. Just as the materialist ‘science’ of Flatland cannot be applied to three dimensions, so our science cannot be applied to four.

Where materialism cannot explain how the truth of consciousness emerged from the mere facts of non-conscious matter, idealism cannot explain how unified mind ‘decombines’ into detailed, law-governed matter. Both non-literalist panjectivism and literalist panpsychism drive between the horns of the mystery of combination, but the latter, as we have seen, produces a problem of its own, an inability to explain how the various, conscious—and literal—bits of the universe combine into single, complex—equally literal—consciousness. Panjectivist transdimensionality does away with this difficulty at a stroke. Three-dimensional forms are ‘slices’ through a four-dimensional space that combines what appear to be—and indeed, from the perspective of three spatial dimensions, are—the separate noumena of things, but which—in four-dimensional space—are one and the same; just as a road that, when I am on it, appears different at the beginning and the end, but which, when I rise above it, is revealed as the same thing.

The metaphor of transdimensionality also resolves the various mysteries of biology, such as the mystery of evolution, the tension between the lack of observable purpose in biological form, which makes it impossible to account for the fact that everywhere in nature we observe forms that are perfectly adapted to their environment, and the self-evident incoherence of teleological explanations which can explain how a light-sensitive skin patch recessed itself, grew a lens, developed an optic nerve and set up imaging facilities in the brain, but at the expense of providing any mechanism for doing so. Transdimensional panjectivism resolves the dispute between non-teleological (Darwinian) and teleological (Lamarckian) theories of evolution, by doing away with both the autonomy of biological form and the need for a teleological ‘mechanism’. A four-dimensional object does not comprise a series of evolving forms, either pushed from the rear by natural selection or pulled from the nose by teleological intent, any more than a three-dimensional object does. It just seems that way to the time-bound self which can only experience complete four dimensional space as an incomplete process in time; and which, therefore, finds itself mystified by how this process ‘works’.

Another mystery of biology that a transdimensionality resolves is the mystery of morphogenesis, how, that is to say, cells in a developing embryo ‘know’ what to become (cell differentiation) and where to go (pattern formation and spatial organisation). Several mechanisms have been proposed for this, and, although none as yet explains the scalability, robustness, and miraculous precision of development, one may end up fitting the three dimensional facts as well as the theory of evolution does (i.e. imperfectly, with huge lacunae, but well enough for practical purposes); but the existence of four spatial dimensions simply evaporates the puzzle. Cells don’t ‘know’ where to go; they are already there. Again, no mechanism needs to be discovered, nor any teleological mission, any more than Flatlanders need such things to explain how the branches of a tree ‘know’ where to go to connect up with each other.

Similarly, the miraculous sensitivity of lifeforms which react not just to what the moment demands, but what the future appears to require, is comprehensible in a transdimensional universe. The mystery of intuition, the astonishing powers of instinct life appears to possess, to ‘know’ what to do or how to behave, or where to look for food, or how to avoid danger, or when to make a move, all become intuitively explicable under the assumption of non-literal transdimensionality. Conscious man, like everything in nature, has this sense of transdimensional fate, and so is also capable of ‘feeling out’, by instinct, the whole being of an idea, thing, impulse or situation, and intuiting what to do with it. Unconscious man, existentially committed to the autonomy of a three-dimensional reality, such as it appears to the senses, has to rely on selfish instinct or rational thought, the former, as scientists well understand, being little better than guesswork, the latter, as young children well understand, being impotent before the unknown.

Such ‘fate instinct’ allows us to grasp the baffling harmony of a flight of starlings, of ants building their nests, or even of a football team playing well, without recourse to mechanistic explanations that fail to account for the simultaneity of such phenomena, or to fanciful ‘morphic resonance’-type theories which explain their field-like (wave-like) nature at the cost of causal intelligibility and empirical constraint (or falsifiability). The apparently separate elements of groups are four-dimensionally unified into a fractal form in the same way that the apparently separate branches of a tree, seen in two dimensions, are imperfectly perceived instances of a complete organism.

Here we run up against a potential objection. If our three-dimensional actions are already complete in four-dimensions, it would appear that we have no freedom, and therefore no responsibility. But this perennial enigma, the mystery of free will, also evaporates under the light of transdimensionality, for the determinism of higher dimensions is incomprehensible. Any attempt to formulate fate as a comprehensible rational process betrays it in the same way that religious endeavours to rationalise God’s relation to the universe do. In order to describe the constraints of four-dimensional form we must use metaphors like ‘God’s will’, but to take this metaphor literally is to turn the experienced reality of the relation between the individual, 3D self and the transpersonal 4D consciousness on its head, and make a flimsy fatalist belief out of a robust truth.

In truth, when the 3D self looks ‘outwards’ into a phenomenal world of other 3D selves, it discovers an entirely rational principle of sufficient reason wherever it turns—every effect has a relative cause (the latter preceding the former). In being such a logico-temporal self, one feels free (actions that flow from one’s own reasons register causally as ‘I did it’), but it is a freedom that also produces a contradictory feeling of oppressive confinement and anxiety, because there is no imaginable reason to act.¹⁴ If, on the other hand, consciousness intuits its own noumenal nature and discovers that there is no facticity or causality, then there is no freedom, not because it is causally compelled one way or another, but because, ultimately, there is no thing to be free of. The delicate paradox of such an experience, of absolute liberation (and therefore responsibility), in the midst of cast-iron determinism, is, as we shall see, the subject of pre-modern tragedy, which presents the tension between unavoidable fate and ethical responsibility.

Returning to biology, we can now grasp the solution to another mystery, related to that of both evolution and tragedy—and swept aside with the same blithe lack of serious reflection by literalist thought, namely the mystery of life itself; how it can be that despite the incontrovertible second law of thermodynamics—the ‘entropic’ principle that things only ever fall apart, never together (or break down, never up)—how it can be that, despite this, everywhere we look we find order, beauty and complexity. As with the mystery of free will, this baffling ‘mystery of negentropy’ simply falls away under the assumption of a non-literal fourth-dimension, in which there are no ‘things’ that can fall apart. Entropy, like the absence of freedom it is a necessary corollary of (a closed system is only ‘free’ to move towards greater disorder), only applies to external, three-dimensional form; it cannot apply to the thing in itself which ‘produces’ form, because it is not in time or space at all, and so does not belong to the order of phenomena governed by entropic causality.

Speaking of complexity, we might note here the mystery of language acquisition, or how it can be that children learn an enormously complex system of communication from, as Noam Chomsky noted, limited cognition and messy, incomplete stimulus. Chomsky, understanding the weakness of materialist explanations for this apparent miracle, famously placed it at the core of his theories, but if our innate grammar (Chomsky’s now discredited ‘Universal Grammar’) rests on a four-dimensional template which children ‘collapse’ into three-dimensional rules for their specific language, we have no need either of Chomsky’s idealism—the belief that we possess innate ideas for all the concepts we use—or of the materialist ‘blank slate’ theories—which derive the citadel of language from empirical, three-dimensional potsherds—that Chomsky derides. Chomsky, taking anti-empiricism (‘innatism’) to its logical limits,¹⁵ is forced to conceive of a literalist, and therefore ridiculous, solution to the mystery—that we are born with the latent concept ‘radiator’ and ‘carburettor’—which is quite unnecessary, once we grasp the metaphor of a fourth-dimension which the child intuits until such a time as he empirically experiences its three-dimensional instantiation as things and as words for them.

This is also what the great artist does, again and again. He finds apt three-dimensional forms for the four-dimensional reality presented to his conscious intuition, expressing, as we have seen, the enigmatic inner quality of the other through truthful metaphor, by feeling out what disparate forms have in common; not just distant from each other in space—the common quality shared by, to choose three examples from an infinite number, gluttonous mouths and lecherous tales (Chaucer), the stroke of death and a lover’s pinch (Shakespeare), and coffined thoughts and embalmed mummies (Joyce)—but also separated from each other in time—the unity that coheres through evolving and growing forms revealed in the integrity of a whole symphony or myth. The great artist is able to unite singular, individual, three dimensional parts with universal, collective four dimensional wholes (in his characters, in his melodies, in his images) and feel out the ‘fate’ of apparently evolving forms, from rough cuts to ever finer and finer finished products, with near miraculous instinct (as miraculous to the artist as it is to his audience). As Michelangelo put it, ‘the sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.’

Such mysteries of art, to those with sufficient consciousness to be baffled by them, are also intuitively approached through the fourth dimension. The profound sense of unity between, for example, great actors improvising, or between great musicians jamming, or between the great artist and his subject, or between the great comedian and his audience, or between the great writer and his world—or, more straightforwardly, between two conscious people talking, working together or making love—all such miraculous immediacy and preternatural anticipation comes about though selfless immersion in a four-dimensional ‘super-self’, the rare capacity of sacrifice that we call genius, which our innate consciousness responds to when we fall in love with a majestic performance or with a work of true greatness, an experience that always strikes us, as the self is stilled or ‘bypassed,’ as having something recognisable to it, as if, in our deeper experience, it was always there, out of time, and ‘waiting’ for its moment to appear.

Here we confront a contradiction inherent in our experience of time, or rather, in the experience that self has of time and the experience consciousness has of it. For the self, time is either a series of objective or subjective facts—3D events, perceptions, feelings or ideas, causally related to each other. For consciousness-in-itself (and we are still assuming that the thing-in-itself transcends literality) time is an experience which ‘precedes’ self, and which therefore ‘precedes’ the time of self. This is why consciousness, despite being time (time as space), also seems ‘timeless’, because it is conscious of the indirect experience of the time self lives by (time as change). It is also why consciousness is synonymous with presence,—because there is no distance, in time, between consciousness-in-itself and its own experience—and why presence feels ‘unreal’, ‘dreamlike,’ or ‘like a film’, to self, because the mutually-reinforced matrix of things that self presents as reality no longer holds. It is also why great artists, those capable of presenting the paradox of self and consciousness as an ‘unreal’, ‘dreamlike’ ‘film’ (or song, or painting) are, in the moment of creation, and despite what they might believe when they are not working, all devotees at the altar of transdimensionality. They may give this transcendent (to self) experience the name ‘Calliope’, or ‘God’, or the vaguer and more hesitant term ‘the unconscious’, but howsoever termed there has never been a great artist who wasn’t acutely aware that work that emerges from this mysterious source is better, and wholly different in kind, to that which is produced from a mere act of will.

Speaking of ‘mystery’, the same contradiction holds for this word. The mysteries that are resolved under the assumption of transdimensional panjectivism, do not thereby become comprehensible. They remain mysterious to consciousness in the same way that time does, with the difference that self is no longer baffled or troubled, because I am the mystery. This is why conscious people baffle and trouble unconscious selves, because there is something frustratingly elusive about them, something which cannot quite be pinned down. The literal self is its (three-dimensional) sensations, ideas, feelings and desires, which compels it to relate to (or ‘resonate’ with) the same ideas, feelings, actions and sensations in others. It can understand selves with different sensations, ideas, feelings and desires, but it is not disturbed by the conflict and compromise that contact with such selves necessitates, and even enjoys the drama. Not so with the conscious man, whom self finds it impossible either to relate to or to not relate to. Most troubling; as troubling as being itself, and as nature, and as fate, and as great art.

And as ghosts, devils and aliens; which transdimensionality also makes sense of, without recourse either to foolish theories about gods, spacemen and fairies, or to sweeping the supernatural experiences of mankind away as a trick of the light. The mystery of superstition, the universally-attested experience of so-called ‘supernatural’ phenomena which cannot be reduced to three-dimensional explanation, becomes intuitively comprehensible under the assumption of transdimensional non-literality, for a thing-in-itself that exists ‘beyond’ literal space must be capable of appearing to the three dimensional self in a manner as weird and surprising as three dimensional forms would to a Flatlander. Such appearances—fairies, UFOs, angels, devils, ghosts, djinn and so on—are taken by the isolated 3D self to be either literally true (‘angels really exist’) or as literally false (‘angels are hallucinations’). Under the assumptions of non-literality, a third approach becomes available, that self is apperceiving a four-dimensional form in the same way that a Flatlander might non-literally hear a three dimensional voice or sense a three-dimensional presence. Having only his culturally-formed self through which to experience such intuition he must see it in a culturally-recognisable form, which is why primitive tribes see tree gods, medieval peasants see devils, and modern atheists see UFOs, or nothing at all. Such enculturated perceptual sets are retinal after effects in the self, not literal experiences of things that are happening, or of things that have happened, but metaphorical interpretations of non-things which are always happening.

Another superstitious intuition, already touched on, which makes no sense to literalist thought, but which is intuitively meaningful under the assumption of four spatial dimensions, is that which pertains to the mystery of death. Self only ends or changes in what it calls ‘time’ in the same way that a three dimensional object passing through Flatland can be said to ‘die’. What remains may be unimaginable to the limited, literalist perspective of self, but religious beliefs that assert that self perceives its whole existence ‘in a flash’, or that there is a form of karmic reckoning, retributive justice and ‘divine judgement’, are all entirely consonant with an experience in which temporal succession is dissolved into a single co-present manifold of states in which subject and object do not stand dichotomously opposed, but collapse into a unified field of experience within which apparent separation is merely perspectival. It makes intuitive sense, in other words, that at the moment of death one’s whole life is experienced in a timeless instant, and that there is no separation between everything I have subjectively felt, thought, sensed and done, and its objective (or ‘karmic’) correlate or ‘effect’.

Thus supernatural occurrences, where they are not solipsistic or intra-solipsistic fantasies, represent the same thing-in-itself as appears to artists, in moments of inspiration, and to everyone in dreams. In the former case, as P.D. Ouspensky noted, the artist is sensing, in a sad human face that was once full of joy, or in an abandoned block of wood that was once a gallows pole, its unified, non-literal nature. In the latter case, the dreaming mind divides the unified, non-literal nature of the dreamer into the subjective experience of the dreaming protagonist and all the strange, objective people and things he encounters. In both cases, the experience is apperceived to be greater, or more pregnant with meaning, than the phenomenal thing itself. This is why apples, trees and snakes in myths and dreams, tend to touch us with their meaning far more vividly that ‘real’ apples, trees and snakes do. Only young children, whose selves are yet to be formed, see things directly, under the aspect of eternity, and so rich with a quality that, by the time they have grown up, has been forgotten, replaced by its appearance.

We can now begin to understand how ‘the self can know what it is like to be a bat,’ or, to put it more accurately, how consciousness can apperceive the noumenal bat; because there is, essentially—in four dimensions—no difference between my consciousness-in-itself and the bat-in-itself. When this feeling ‘emerges’ (again scare quotes, as this, under the assumptions of non-literality, cannot be said to happen in factual-causal spacetime) into the phenomenal self, where there is a difference, consciousness finds it must express the feeling non-literally, as some form of metaphor (e.g., as a poetic image or myth), as an ambiguous gesture or tone, or, most eloquently, as silence. Thus, only a conscious man or woman can tell us ‘what it is like to be a bat’ (‘The Bat that flits at close of Eve Has left the Brain that won’t Believe’¹⁶), because only consciousness knows what it is to be a human. Anyone who does not know what it is like to be a bat, or a child, or an onion, or a paragraph, is not fully conscious, and therefore, not fully human.

Thus, literalist science can express how the bat is composed, how it works, and how, under present conditions, it can be expected to behave in the future, but it can no more express what the bat is than a pixelated computer screen can express a true natural gradient. Literalist science cannot, as David Hume realised to his despair, even be sure of its own rational foundations; it can neither detect causality (Hume’s mystery of causation; the necessary connection between events cannot be observed) nor justify the uniformity of nature (Hume’s mystery of induction;¹⁷ it is impossible to justify inferences from observed to unobserved cases). Everything is a mystery to science, including its own logic, because it can only solve mysteries literally, by turning them into things, which just creates more mysteries. The hard problem of consciousness turns out to be the hard problem of everything.

A non-literalist approach to consciousness-in-itself, that metaphorically takes in a spatial fourth dimension, can do away with Hume’s confusion (in the fourth dimension ‘each thing,’ as Blake put it, ‘is its own cause and its own effect’) and solve the hard problem of everything, the mystery of existence itself. It doesn’t just provide a comprehensible three-dimensional theory of that which ‘precedes’ the scattered things of representation—which by itself is as contradictory, misleading and irrelevant to lived experience as any other isolated idea—but, as we shall see, it grounds this theory in conscious participation in that which theory can only ever be of, delivering to self that which three-dimensional thought can never reach; sensitivity, discernment and timing.

Without precluding three-dimensional explanations. The metaphor of a fourth spatial dimension is entirely compatible with mechanistic metaphors of materialism and with vitalistic metaphors of idealism. There is no incompatibility between a bird, for example, mechanically sensing the gravitational fields of the earth and being instinctively drawn to the four-dimensional whole that such a mechanism instantiates; nor between being able to logically account for the scientific ‘value’ of a superstitious ritual and its ineffable quality; nor between great art being a product of measurable social forces, personal influences and acquired technique and its transcendence of the measurable; nor between meaningfully speaking of submission to the Will of God, or to Fate, or to Providence, or to what ‘Moira’ demands and the absolute ethical responsibility of existential freedom of the will. In the light of transdimensionality, the darkness of ideological conflict thus comes to an end. Fate and freedom, science and art, idealism and materialism, atheism and theism, paternalism and fraternalism, man and woman, me and you; all find peace in unity, without having to give up what is best about their separateness.

Good news indeed; but not, as we shall see, for the literal, self-informed self.

Part Three of this series will appear next week.

In the meantime, feel free to write to me with criticisms of this article or any other in the series. Before technical expertise (specialists in the fields of biology, physics and philosophy), I write under factual correction.

See also

Self and Unself

1. Abbott, E. A. (2006). Flatland: A romance of many dimensions (R. J. Wilson, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1884).

2. Hinton, C. H. (1980). Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected writings of Charles H. Hinton (R. Rucker, Ed.). Dover Publications.

3. And the many ‘theories’ based thereon; that diseases are caused by moral failings; poverty is caused by bad decisions; the tides are caused by my thoughts; and so on.

4. The Holy Bible: King James Version. (2008). Oxford University Press.

5. William Blake. (2004). The marriage of heaven and hell. In A. Ostriker (Ed.), The complete poems (Penguin Classics). Penguin Books.

6. Böhme, J. (1912). The Signature of all Things: And other writings (J. Ellistone, Trans.; C. J. Barker, Ed.). James Clarke & Co. (Original work published 1621).

7. Eckhart, M. (2009). The Complete Mystical works of Meister Eckhart (M. O’C. Walshe, Trans.; B. McGinn, Rev. & Ed.). Crossroad Publishing Company.

8. William Blake. (1997). A vision of the last judgment. In D. V. Erdman (Ed.), The complete poetry & prose of William Blake (H. Bloom, Commentary). Vintage Books.

9. Schopenhauer, A. (2010). The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 1, J. Norman, A. Welchman, & C. Janaway, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

10. Ouspensky, P. D. (1982). Tertium Organum: The third canon of thought, a key to the enigmas of the world (E. Kadloubovsky & P. D. Ouspensky, Trans.; C. Bragdon, Intro.). Penguin Books.

11. Søren Kierkegaard. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript to Philosophical fragments (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press. The Sickness unto Death (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans. & Eds.). Princeton University Press.

12. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, Trans.; G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Eds.; 4th ed., rev.). Wiley-Blackwell.

13. literalist thought, either scientific or religious, is incapable of primary ontology, or direct experience, substituting secondary epistemology, or indirect knowledge, for it.

14. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics Arthur Schopenhauer. (2009). The two fundamental problems of ethics (C. Janaway, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

15. Noam Chomsky. (1968). Language and mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. / Noam Chomsky. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Praeger.

16. William Blake. (2004). Auguries of innocence. In A. Ostriker (Ed.), The complete poems (Penguin Classics). Penguin Books.

17. Hume, D. (2000). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press.