Four-Dimensional Vistas

Four-Dimensional Vistas

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Title: Four-Dimensional Vistas
Author: Claude Fayette Bragdon
Release Date: April 4, 2004 [EBook #11906]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS
by
Claude Bragdon
[Illustration]
New York

"Perception has a destiny." Emerson.

INTRODUCTION
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."

CONTENTS
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
Z?llner--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

I THE QUEST OF FREEDOM
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