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 ***

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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
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

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