The Fourth Dimension, 4

The Soft Solution to Everything

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.

I Cannot Prove I Cannot Be

We have seen that self, in itself, has no independent access to itself, and is therefore confined to a literal, ‘factual-causal’ representation of a reality it can never grasp.¹ It is unable to directly experience the thing-in-itself, and so can only make assumptions or hold beliefs about the nature of that which transcends self, if anything does. We have described what such assumptions and beliefs entail; on the one hand, a literal, ‘three-dimensional’ pseudo-existence of anxiety, incoherence and suffering; and on the other, a ‘panjective’, four dimensional consciousness-in-itself that does away with the misery of being a finite, mortal thing among things, as well as resolving all the mysteries that the ego-thing discovers in philosophy, psychology, science, art and religion.

But we have offered no proof that these assumptions—an extended argument from analogy—actually apply to the thing-in-itself. The reason is simple; because no literal proof, based on factual-causal reason, can possibly be given that will satisfy self that a thing-in-itself that transcends the limits of self exists, any more than literal proof can satisfy a dreamer that my dreamself, ‘here’, is one and the same as another dreamself, ‘there’. All proof is founded on facticity and causality, and so can no more determine the existence of non-literal reality, than it can its absence. Self, by itself—unable to access the reality ‘behind’ its own projections— can only ever assume or believe that Trendelenburg’s gap is bridged in the thing-in-itself, or that it is not. Which leaves us back with the egoic self, and all its misery and confusion, for assuming or believing that the thing-in-itself is not confined by facticity and causality leaves us bound by the very literality that the assumption ostensibly frees us from, unable to determine whether selfless consciousness is possible—and actually transcends the limitations of self—or whether what goes by the name ‘consciousness’ is really a literal form of awareness, and therefore, despite possessing elevated, optimistic, idealistic assumptions and beliefs about a divine realm of four-dimensional space, confined to the same solipsistic nutshell as the base, pessimistic, materialistic beliefs of the so-called ‘realist’, who may be forever alienated from his own consciousness, and so condemned to nihilism, but can at least dispense with the frustrating need to live up to an ideal and the hypocrisy, latent in every idealist, of failing to do so.

And so the explanatory power of assuming reality transcends facticity and causality is fully beside the point. It matters not that, under the assumption of or belief in non-literality, my personal, social and philosophical problems are solved, while, under the assumption of literality, I find myself trapped in lunatic asylum in which all the inmates are me; because it is self that is making the assumption or holding the belief, and so, even if ego assumes that the thing-in-itself is non-literal, or believes that there is an elusive-to-mind noumenon behind the phenomena that mind brings to self; that is all it can do, assume and believe. Such faith and hope might be reassuring to the egoic self, but it makes no essential difference to it. It possesses essentially the same self-informed nature, it is condemned to the same essential uncertainty, it operates according to essentially the same prime directive—expend forever—and it is haunted by essentially the same selfish feelings. The only difference is that it is now wearing an exalted, idealistic mask.

So how am I to decide? How is self to adjudicate between the two assumptions we have offered, when self, by itself—having no way of knowing whether reality, ‘behind’ appearance, is, following Kant, essentially unself-like, or, following Trendelenburg, essentially self-like—can only make assumptions? We appear to be in quite a bind. If the literal logic of self cannot determine that within the thing-in-itself that transcends self, then we appear to be left with an ad-hoc theory, immunised against criticism by the fact that it is untestable. It can account for all the problems of philosophy, which makes it an attractive proposition, but it would appear to be unfalsifiable, and therefore exposed to the charge that it is not a theory at all. Both the optimistic idealist believer (in the non-physical), and the pessimistic materialist believer (in the physical), can dispense with the unsettling idea that belief itself is unfounded, when there is nothing more certain to live by. Self can never know what lies beyond the veil of representation, what things really are ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ how they appear to self, and so self can never know what things are, how reality came to be, what happens when ‘I’ die or, consequently, with nothing real to ground its values on, how self should live or what it should do. The believer (or ‘non-believer’—which just means belief in physical, rather than in non-physical representation) is thus trapped, because he is his self. There is no exit. He is like a prisoner who has been hypnotised to believe he is the prison, and so cannot even conceive of escape,² or like a dreamer who has never been awake, and so can only take the idea that he is that which he perceives, to be a form of madness.³ He therefore has to hold beliefs and make assumptions, or sweep the whole problem aside—the problem, that is to say, of being itself—as a useless, unprofitable or boring mind game for dreamers caught up in gratifying illusions and philosophers with nothing better to do with their lives. The realist—the sensible man—is, and has to be, a sceptic, a cynic or a nihilist.

Put differently, there is, and can never be, any conceivable reason to slip the knot of nihilism. The only way out of the literalist predicament is not just inconceivable to self, but imperceivable, undoable and unfeelable; for, as we have seen, the only way I can determine for myself the nature of unselfish consciousness is to directly experience the only consciousness in the universe I have direct, unmediated, access to. My own. That which I am, but which self is not. Such literally unbelievable experience is the only reason to accept the existence of consciousness in the first place, much less a (metaphorical) theory about its nature. The conscious experience of the reading I (as opposed to self’s experience of itself) is the only way to determine the reality and quality of consciousness-in-itself, as well as the only way to free self from the solipsistic confusion and suffering of being confined to its own awareness. Everything else, every theory, every feeling, every action and every sensation, only ever delivers a representational fact, feeling, event or sensation of consciousness. Entertaining perhaps, or reassuring, perhaps even strange, magical and mystical, but still; self.

Going beyond self I thus find (or, more accurately lose) myself in a place where literalist science, philosophy, art and religion can never go; the actual, living consciousness of the scientist, philosopher, artist and priest. If man does not have inner, unselfish, access to his own being—is not conscious of unself—no argument can possibly persuade him of its existence or nature, any more than argument can resolve those fundamental disagreements—scientific, political, philosophical, artistic or religious—which are based on selfish experience, for these are not built on reason, but on attachment, which is why, firstly, the meaning or quality of consciousness never appears in the work of literalist selves; why, secondly, philosophy which does not have as its aim a change of self—a different way of living—is worthless; why, thirdly, towering philosophies of mind and being yield instantly to a good story; and why, finally, as thousands of years of philosophical debate, ideological conflict and personal contention, demonstrate, reason has no power to fundamentally change self.⁴

So what does? What can deliver the thing-in-itself to my experience? It would seem to be a fairly straightforward matter to discover, for myself, whether unselfish, non-literal consciousness exists. Surely all the self reading these words has to do is sacrifice itself to consciousness-in-itself? If this experience transcends the locality of self and unites what appears to be ‘me’ with the nature of the other, with the reality of the context and with the ineffable, timeless totality of my own life, sub specie aeternitatis, then surely I can accept the truth of transcendental analogies, such as that of the fourth spatial dimension? If I read a theory which concludes that it is possible to eat light, all I have to do is sit in the sun for a while and see if my hunger goes away, so why can’t I sit in the sun of my own consciousness and see if my sense of separateness—and with it my hunger for security, novelty, power, stimulation and so forth—go away?

I’ll explain. But self won’t like it.