Hidden Dimensions, Part 1
Philosophy Podium: Hidden Dimensions, Part 1
Our approach to any world that is unfamiliar to us is strictly limited only by our intellectual luggage, which is really represented by what we are accustomed to. After we learn to walk, we can no longer imagine a way of walking that does not entail legs; and if another way of walking existed, introducing it would only complicate the world that we have so ingeniously simplified. We defend our life against anything that tries to force us to question our motives as a species or to question our claim that we have employed our genius to find positions from which we can now re- solve supposedly complex equations with a minimum of cerebral effort. Degeneration of the human species? Yes! For example, let's analyse our approach to time and space. Let's start with a geometric approach to space. Let's imagine any point in space. Let's give this point the enigmatic definition that the world of science has assigned it: "an area and not a dimension". If we move that point in space, its trajectory becomes a line. The line is then born more by the displacement of a point in space. At that point, if we continue to refuse to give a dimension to our point, we can see that the line by itself imposes its length on our consciousness. Proceeding from a point to which we have refused to assign a dimension, we reached a line that contains a dimension that we are now forced to recognise: its length.
Let's continue our exploration. Let's try to move that line in space. If we keep in mind the fact that moving in the direction that the point has already moved can only make our line longer, we can see that the movement of the line in any other direction will give birth to a plane. Just as the line arrived by forcing us to recognise its dimension, the plane imposes on our consciousness the notions of its length and its width. The width then becomes the second dimension of space. The third dimension is born from moving a plane in space. That will give birth to a three dimensional cube.
And since then, modern civilisation has not succeeded in moving the intellectual capabilities of those it has educated one inch! In other words, the question of knowing in which direction we must now move a three dimensional body to obtain a fourth dimension has received no attention and no answer. The directions of up, down and sideways have become the only movements that are perceptible by our brain as being part of what exists.
We often suspect that time is the fourth dimension, but this attitude is really the speculation of a brain that tries to distance itself from common superstitions. To understand the dimensions beyond this point, we will have to go back to our perception of the preceding dimensions.
A point, as described by modern colonial science, cannot exist because it cannot belong to any world. If we want to maintain that a point can have dimensions that are simply not perceptible, we can also see that such dimensions will submit to the principles of their world. In our world, we can observe a point only if it has a thickness attached to it. I mean, the principle that led to the formation of the three-dimensional body has already been observed with that point by itself! If we can observe a line and a plane, it is because each already has a three-dimensional characteristic, namely thickness.
Another reality to observe is that the first three dimensions are not perceptible by the human brain, whether put together or separated. It is the fourth dimension that opens the door to human consciousness. An object, body, etc., does not exist simply because it is the result of a three-dimensional world, but because it is the result of a three dimensional world within a determined fork of time. If this page you are reading were a page only because it obeys the physical characteristics of a page, it would then represent a grave danger to the whole universe; the dimension in which this page is now evolving is "for how long". There is no object or entity on this Earth or in the whole Universe that is. Things "are" only and always in a period of time. This is maybe why popular wisdom has it that time destroys. Time represents what allows things to stay unfinished. Existence is a place for becoming. There is simply no room for finished products or entities.
The path that leads to the emergence of the "fourth dimension" gives us the impression of being a cycle that repeats itself indefinitely rather than anything else. At the end of this "fourth dimension", at the cross- roads of the fourth dimension, we find a three-dimensional body that appears to have found the direction that gave birth to its own becoming. If that movement disappears, we shall notice what we can call a collapse of energies in that portion of existence. This collapse can continue and set the whole existence back to the level of a point. This is why every- thing we observe appears to obey a cycle of birth, growth, maturity and decomposition. Even gold and diamonds are what they are because they are that in a period of time.
The "fourth dimension", for us, is highly unstable and difficult to lock in, whatever principle it is. If time represents the direction that a three- dimensional body takes, that direction by itself represents a problem if we want simply to be situated. Space offers us a domain solid enough for us to perceive in it the arrival of three dimensions (length, width and height), but as soon as we start talking about time, we find ourselves confronted with the question: is the existence we are observing in the present, past or future?
Honestly speaking, this question has been resolved by society! Yes, society has conditioned us to perceive time in a linear sequence that sub- ordinates time to it.
Before continuing, let us recall that the human brain has its own method of functioning, and this functioning really depends only on the quantity and quality of the elements that are involved in any equation or problem to be solved and in the laws and principles that we have accepted as relevant to the solution. I mean simply that every cerebral operation is a partial operation that makes every truth necessarily partial and as a consequence, necessarily partially false. This reality exposes our personal handicap -- a handicap we usually leave to others to discover in us. Our evolution towards the '"fourth dimension" happened in a sequential manner. We moved a point in space to obtain a line with one dimension: length. The question now is to know whether what we call "the past" is by itself a dimension. The present? The future?! Because in reality, we reached a three-dimensional world by giving movement to a point or location that is non-dimensional, we can see that the future and the past are directions that events take only from the present! In that case, if the present represents a point in time, in which direction must it -- this present point in time -- move to create or form those dimensions that are represented by the past and by the future?
We can affirm that it is the dimension called the past that we need to move in a certain direction in order to obtain a future. This makes the present the beginning of a multi-directional evolution, rather than the middle of a linear sequence. The world of the "fourth dimension" comes, then, with its own dimensions. To understand this fact, we must imagine our evolutions as resembling events happening in an egg. It is impossible to have a new existence in an egg to which all the inhabitants inside the egg did not contribute. If any inhabitant of an egg has a his- tory or a future, both of them are built by the rest of the egg's inhabitants.
