The Metaphysics of Glenn Clark
Hi Friends,
After you read Part 1 of the book I am about to introduce, you will likely see the world and your life in a new way. Life is lived out, according to Glenn Clark, in seven dimensions. Besides the three dimensions we are familiar with, Charles Fillmore recognized a fourth dimension, as does much of traditional Christianity, which refers to it as Heaven or the kingdom of God.
Glenn Clark does two other things that Mr. Fillmore and most of us fail to do. First, he provides a deeper understanding of the three dimensions which we take for granted as being available to average human understanding and experience. Second, he provides a deeper understanding of what is typically called the fourth dimension, separating from it three higher dimensions. The result is a view of the Cosmos in seven dimensions.
The mistake I made when reading this book for the first time is assuming that dimensions are states of consciousness, much like the hierarchy of human development taught by Claire Graves and popularized by Don Beck. They are much more, according to Glenn Clark. They are alternative external realities and the internal states of consciousness we associate with them are simply glimpses of awareness we have of their existence and their operation in life.
I use the word Cosmos instead of Universe because the 5th, 6th and 7th dimensions Glenn Clark writes about are supernatural, beyond the senses and what we typically call the “quantum” universe. At that point, we enter into a sphere of non-theistic metaphysics, a realm of Love and a sphere of theistic mysticism. More about that later.
Here are seven things we see in our world today, which I have classified by my understanding of what Glenn Clark has to say and I express in my own words:
- The first dimensional (primitive) realm is where a teenage boy shoots up a school so that he may communicate his total despair in life.
- The second dimensional (animal) realm is where a Russian president bombs a neighboring country so that the world will respect the greatness of his own country.
- The third dimensional (human) realm is where the political machinery of the world’s first liberal democracy sends us endless streams of mail, email and political advertisements so that we will choose the best way peacefully forward toward peace and prosperity.
- The fourth dimensional (quantum) realm is where the harmony of affirmations and denials of millions of people can shift the collective consciousness of humanity and its leaders.
- The fifth dimensional (metaphysical) realm is where Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela can achieve peace by calling us to live up to eternal ideals and principles.
- The sixth dimensional (social) realm is where Fred Rogers, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Pope Francis can draw into existence loving solutions to persistent problems, overcoming self-doubt and differences in belief, prejudice and hatred.
- The seventh dimensional (mystical) realm is where Emilie Cady, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Father Thomas Keating and Thich Nhat Hanh can, through stillness, awaken within us an awareness of the sacredness of all life and all creation.
I am sure I left out some important people in this outline. My point is not to raise these people up so much as it is to raise all of us up to an awareness of the higher dimensions. And I am grateful to Glenn Clark for providing a deeper insight into what is happening in our Cosmos today.
Let me return to my comment about non-theistic metaphysics, the realm of love and theistic mysticism. These are realms that we can only experience; we do not have the capacity to understand how they work.
Many of you are dog lovers. A dog is an animal, of the second dimension, which many unfairly refer to as the dog-eat-dog world. While a dog is not capable of understanding or participating in a liberal democracy (third dimension), a dog is at the same time fully capable of experiencing all the higher dimensions, including principled behavior, love and, perhaps, sacredness, and is capable in some ways in participating in life at that level.1
Such is the case of human beings when it comes to understanding and experiencing the higher dimensions. Of these dimensions, we see through a glass darkly. Like a dog, we understand little of these dimensions, but we can experience them deeply. These realms are supernatural, and we would do best by not belittling those who experience and share the love of a personal God they find there.
My favorite prayer is, “Jesus Christ is now here, raising me up to that place where the Holy Spirit pours out its inspiration up me.” What is that place? Part 1 of Glenn Clark’s book, God’s Reach, identifies what that place is. The book is, as the subtitle says, “An analysis of spiritual growth.” I have found it very helpful in understanding life as it unfolds today.
It also identifies how it is that Jesus Christ raises us up. I will have more to say about that next week.
Sunday, October 23, 2022
- It just may be that is why the Fillmores were vegetarian.
Foreword to Part I
1. The Four Known Dimensions of Man
2. The Mysteries of God’s Fifth Dimension
3. The Mysteries of God’s Sixth Dimension
4. The Mysteries of God’s Seventh Dimension
5. A Survey of All the Dimensions
PART I
Forward
When in all history has there been a greater amassing of knowledge of man and the universe than in these last fifty years? Through psychiatry nearly all the mysteries of the subconscious realm have been brought to light and yet what more have we learned about man’s soul than our ancestors knew! For years we have been flying through the air, and now we are shooting pictures through the air. For years we were harnessing waterfalls to turn great turbines, and now we harness the split atoms to fight our battles for us. We are setting in motion powers such as our forefathers never dreamed of. But how few of us have learned that the power of prayer is greater than the radio and the power of love greater than the atomic bomb?
Yes, with all our vaunted progress, what has it brought us? The thirty years between 1915 and 1945 have seen more people killed, more property destroyed, more terrible cruelty and savagery released in the hearts of mankind than has occurred in the entire history of the world from the time of Christ until the year 1915. I have made the assertion before audiences in all the largest cities of America that I could have gone into any insane asylum in the country in 1915 and picked out the thirty worst cases and put them at the heads of the thirty greatest governments and let them conduct the affairs of the nations for the following thirty years and the world would not have been any worse off by 1945 than it is now. And I couldn't find a single person willing to debate it with me.
Some of us who have taken careful stock of the world as it is today believe that the whole predicament of modern man springs from his limiting his search for solutions to a level too low. The only way to overcome trouble is to come up over it. To extricate ourselves and our world from the dilemma it is in we should “raise our sights.” We must set a higher goal and start climbing. The purpose of Part One is to chart a pathway that may help some to make that upward climb.
CHAPTER I
The Four Known Dimensions of Man
THIS world, we are told, is a world of three dimensions — length, breadth and height. The first dimension consists of a straight line and those who live in that dimension move from one point straight to another point with no digression right or left. The second dimension is at right angles to the first; it spreads out to the right and left in space but is incapable of moving upward or downward. The third dimension is at right angles to the second and spreads above and below. If the first dimension is a line, the second is a square, and the third is a cube.
The normal place of the snail is the realm of one dimension; it always travels on a straight line toward its food. The normal place of the dog is the realm of two dimensions; it moves over a square surface in search of two things — something to eat, and someone to love. The normal place of man is the third dimension; he seeks three things — food and friends and knowledge.
When man is pressed back into one of the lower dimensions there is abnormality of some kind. The man compressed into one dimension is the insane man, completely obsessed with one idea; or he is the thoroughly conditioned criminal whose conscience regarding right and wrong is dead, whose anti-social tendencies have completely blunted all natural affection. He has only one center of reference — self.
The man of two dimensions is one who confines his attention to his gains and appetities and that of his immediate family without any regard to what happens to others.
The man of three dimensions has eyes for his work and his family but also for the higher values of life — education, religion, art, and literature. His chief limitation is that he thinks of himself and his family as entirely separate from all others. Moreover, because he knows that his associates who sink back into the lower dimensions are abnormal, he complacently brands all those who rise to higher dimensions as also abnormal. In other words he considers anyone who attempts to function outside his own personal status quo as a little bit queer.
If we should take a bird’s eye view of the world of three dimensions we should see people, cattle, horses, automobiles and trains — all solid creatures of various shapes and sizes — pinned down to the heavy earth by the law of gravity, moving ponderously about from one place to another through leisurely intervals ticked off on our clock called Time.
But with the marvelous inventions of radar and television we are on the threshold of a new dimension opening to man independent of the laws of gravity.
“If with the aid of sensitive mechanical instruments such as radio, radar and television, we try to picture the world of four dimensions, we would see or hear or feel the atmosphere around us filled with movements, currents and forces entirely independent of gravity, circling, spiralling, and radiating in every possible combination, utilizing every possible wave length — requiring only some sensitive receiving or recording instrument plugged in to the same wave length to reveal their hidden secrets in moving pictures or vibrant sound. If we would use a still more sensitive instrument than radio or television, to wit our enlightened imagination, we could penetrate into the realm of infinitely more thrilling, more powerful forces, currents and movements spiralling and radiating out from trillions of stars, constellations and solar systems — powerful currents that are called cosmic rays spreading out in all directions and re-radiating again from every stellar body they strike. These rays are each one of different mineral and magnetic composition and wherever two intersect a different electrical and chemical reaction is produced. As the rotating planets cut through these rays in their spiralling motion around the sun, all the life upon this globe is produced. Scientists have for some time been trying to tell us that this unseen, vibrating life which is playing through all space is really a tangible, and definite manifestation which, if we only had eyes to see, would appear much more crowded and intricate to our sight than our everyday physical world.”1
According to the scientists this earth that seems so heavy and tangible and solid is 57 times more porous than the ether through which it moves. Imagine, if you can, a feather floating through a rock! Incredible as it may seem that is what the earth is like as it floats through the ether. The earth has only one ingredient the ether does not have and that is cohesion. If some unifying principle should start to work in the interstellar spaces where the chemical reactions of the cosmic rays are intermingling and occuring, we should see a new and heavier planet suddenly brought to birth.
This, then, is the fourth dimension. It is the plane which gives passage to the electrical and other life forces that are completely independent of gravity. If a man could lift his consciousness to the fourth dimension and always function there he would be able to see and hear in every direction at once to any distance and he would travel through all space with the speed of electricity. Today the improvements in radar, radio and jet planes hint that this time is not so far off.
The man of four dimensions is no longer confined, as the man of three dimensions, to the little spot in space where he happens to stand. Through the magic of radio and radar, through the aid of telephone, telegraph and television and airplane and jet plane hardly a sight or sound upon this earth can escape him. And now with the world-wide acceptance of telepathy it is only a question of time before the thoughts of a man in New York wuhout mechanical transmitter of any kind, may be able to reach his friend in Los Angeles.
But not only can the man of four dimensions step outside this space, but he can also step outside this time and see himself in all the moments of the past before Now and in all the moments of the future after Now. This view contrasted with the average man’s view is like seeing in a cinema the 26,000 snapshots that pass in sequence before the eye contrasted with a single snapshot projected by the old-fashioned magic lantern. A man who has this fourth dimensional view of his past and future, when brought face to face with a man whose view is confined to his three-dimensional present self, is irresistible. Alexander the Great as a youth slept every night with a copy of Homer’s story of Achilles under his pillow, and Napoleon slept with a copy of the Life of Alexander the Great under his pillow. These men looked into the timeless past for their inspiration, they visioned the years of future victory as already theirs. When Alexander started forth with a small army to conquer the world, an advisor said, “If you go forth to conquer, these are too few; if it be to be conquered, they are too many.” To this Alexander replied, “You forget I have my hopes” His hopes were fourth-dimensional, and through his hopes he conquered.
One of my college boys could not walk until he was eleven, but he pasted pictures of famous runners on the walls of his bedroom, and day-dreamed of the time when his own feet would be speeding over the ground. When he was sixteen, he ran the fastest quarter-mile ever run in the high schools in Minnesota. His fourth-dimensional viewpoint made him irresistible.
The fourth-dimensional man is the man who brings the daydreams of his youth to add impact to the present, and who in middle life continues to hold before himself a vision to live for and a purpose to work for, clear up to the very end.
The characteristic of the third-dimensional man is his individuality, his points of difference, his separateness from everyone and everything else. With the split-up of the Roman Empire, and the Holy Catholic Church, the third dimension simply ran riot in the world for a thousand years. Churches were divided and then sub-divided. Nations broke off from nations. Bacon’s “Novum Organum” replaced Aristotle’s “Organum,” supplanting the old deductive reasoning with the modern inductive reasoning. Molecules were divided into atoms and atoms into electrons until they reached the point where no further sub-division seemed possible. The key word that dominated the thinking world was analysis. The summit of the three-dimensional outlook was when everything was separate from everything else. There came a time when all this three-dimensional thinking culminated in two World Wars. We had reached the paralysis of analysis.
Then began the Age of the Fourth Dimension. An army of scientists pioneered the way as prospectors, pathfinders and promoters. The radio, airplane and television began breaking down the thin walls of partition that kept men apart and changed the emphasis of the age from separate to penetrate. The scholar followed the scientist by changing the key word from analysis to synthesis. The very air became so charged with the new rhythm toward Union that any attempt to disunion resulted in terrible repercussions and catastrophes.
Union and penetration are the key words we shall be hearing in this new age, nor has the old tradition of separateness power to stand before them. As the radio airwaves carry sound rhythmically from one part of the world to another, as the airplanes carry people rhythmically from one place to another, so our daydreams and visions and definite life purposes can carry the freshness and vigor of one’s youth into middle age, and the power and wisdom of middle age can create permanent accomplishments on down through the centuries. All these things belong to the Fourth Dimensional Era of Living.
Anyone who would explore this new dimension and tap its possibilities should note carefully that this penetrating, traveling, conveying power of the fourth dimension, whether it goes through time or space, is greatly increased if it is done rhythmically and gracefully and joyously rather than jerkily, spasmodically and gloomily. Put harmony and joy into your radio broadcast through space, and put even more joy and harmony into your daydream broadcast through time, if you would experience this new dimension at its best.
There was one advantage in living in a three-dimensional world. By holding mankind in bondage to gravity, the confining walls of Time and Space served as a protective sieve to ration the stimulus of the outer world slowly enough for mankind to assimilate it properly. On the other hand, the disadvantage of these confining walls of the third-dimensional world was that it separated each man from everyone else. In that age the slogans heard the most were, “The survival of the fittest,” “Everyone for himself,” and “The devil take the hindmost.” The world became divided into nations, and the nations into classes. Prejudice, bigotry and intolerance ran wild. Man came to adore his physical world and lived only for what it could give him. As the world consisted of solid objects that one could handle and own, greed and covetousness took possession of man. He sought multiplicity rather than simplicity, as revealed in the degeneracy of his architecture into fussiness, his college courses into a hundred different subjects, and his home into a storehouse filled with gadgets.
The fourth-dimensional viewpoint restores the world to unity again. The problem is whether man, posited in this old solid world, can stand the growing pains that all the stimulus of the whole world pouring into him at once brings upon him. We are right now like the man who is halfway across the turbulent stream, wondering whether it would be safer to go on ahead or turn back. Our only hope is to go on ahead, trusting that we will safely reach the solid shore of the fifth dimension.
- The Fifth Dimension and the Future of Mankind! Vera Stanley Alder, Rider & Co., London.
CHAPTER II
The Mysteries of God’s Fifth Dimension
IF EACH dimension is at right angles to the last and if the fourth is a dimension of movement in contrast to the stodgy confinements of the third, we may well expect the fifth dimension to be also more stationary — an anchor, perhaps, for this feverish electric age into which we are just entering.
And that is exactly what we find. When you see a score of carpenters threading in and out of a great structure that they are erecting, you can be positively sure that somewhere there is resting, motionless and unmoving, the complete blue-print of the building. When an apple tree grows, expands, and produces apples, you can know very well that that entire tree reposed for a long time, whole, perfect and complete, within the tiny seed of an apple. When the air is filled with a new piece of music caught up by your radio, you can know that the music is on a sheet of paper somewhere, without a note or word missing, and that while the song is spreading faster than light all over the nation, the singer himself is quietly standing in one place in an inner room, where his family or any of his friends could easily find him.
That is the fifth dimension. It is the reservoir where all the patterns floating through space above the rhythms, vibrations and radiating waves are stored. In contrast to the fourth dimension which was all motion, the fifth dimension is poised, eternally at rest.
Let us pause a while as we contemplate this marvelous area of God’s universe. Here we find all the dreams and all the fulfillments of mankind. We have at last reached the Secret Place of the Most High, where neither vibration nor rhythm is the key word. We are now on the verge of a great discovery, the discovery that what all these rhythms and vibrations in this world are doing is to bring into manifestation marvelous riches, lovely treasures, beautiful masterpieces that are already there!
We stand where Moses stood when he heard Jehovah’s command, “Build according to the pattern given you in the Mount.” Is that the command recognized by all the great ones of this earth? The greatest of all said, “I did not do these works but the Father in me doeth them. Just as the miner does not claim to create the coal that he mines, but merely sinks a shaft to where the coal was made a billion years before he was born, so the great artists and philosophers agree with Robert Browning:
“Truth is within ourselves, it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all
Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error; and to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.”
And what was Jesus’ secret? He opened a way straight to God and put himself in complete alignment W!th the Father. The epics of Homer and Virgil were produced only after their authors had invoked the Muses to produce the Great Song through them. By this invitation they were putting themselves in alignment to let the All-Song which God had already composed sing in cadences that mankind might hear.
The author of the drama of Job, said by many to be the greatest work of literature in any language, gave practical testimony that such was exactly the way this master-piece and all masterpieces of wisdom and beauty are produced. In Chapter 28 he describes in matchless poetry the way gold and precious stones are discovered by the miners. He compares this with the manner in which hidden wisdom is discovered by going straight to the heart of God. This way, he explains, should be kept straight by “eschewing evil,” which would pull it off the beam. He says the other force that holds it straight is “the fear of God.” And by “fear” he meant the sense of awe and wonder that fastens our gaze upon the object without looking right or left. If this be true, it is not the rhythm, it is not the vibration that creates the thing. The thing is already there.
True, all these great works sing to us in beautiful rhythms. True, the oil and coal dug from the earth run our machinery with the hum of vibration. But note this: the rhythms and vibrations of the fourth dimension are merely the means of bringing Reality to us, not the Reality itself. The waves of the sea are mere surface manifestations, the mighty ocean abides beneath, motionless ,and changeless and undisturbed.
This all reveals to us that if we can go to the sources from which these rhythms and vibrations come, we shall find the perfect patterns—infinite, eternal, motionless, changeless the contemplation of which will bring one into a state of eternal ecstasy, glory and bliss.
“Let us go!” I can hear you exclaim. “Why waste time? That is almost too good to be true. Hurry up and show us the way!”
“Show us the way,” is what the disciples demanded of Jesus, and he replied, “I am the Way.” Jesus is the perfect Pattern. Put yourself in alignment with him and you will be in alignment with all-truth, all-love, all-life. When one’s land is right over an oil field, he doesn’t have to ask the direction to the nearest oil station. All he needs do is to sink a shaft straight to the supply beneath his feet. Note that word, straight (eschew evil and fear God). Where is this Kingdom vof bliss and glory? Jesus was asked. “The Kingdom,” he replied, “is within you.”
“And how do we get there?”
“Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat; because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
“What else must we do?”
Your fieldglass may be directed immediately upon something and yet you cannot see the object on account of the blur. That is because the glass is not in focus. Give it a twist and there you are — your two eyes become single, the blur ceases, and the beautiful reality becomes clear to your vision.
And how hard must we work to remove the blur from our vision and reach our treasure? How hard must we work to find Reality?
“No work at all,” said Jesus. After you sink the shaft of your will straight into the will of God and after you get your vision focused upon the face of God, you need only become still and wait. God will do all the rest.
“Just look at the lilies of the field,” said Jesus. “They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, (i.e. the Perfect, God-made Pattern) and all these things shall be added unto you.”
But isn’t that putting a premium on laziness?
Not at all. Note carefully that the lily does what most people (hundreds of millions of them) never even think of doing. It puts itself in perfect alignment with its source of life. It stands erect with its roots resting down deep in the life-giving loam and its petals open wide to the sunshine and rain. The moment the lily allows someone to build a shed above its petals it had better worry. Look about you at the millions of people in the world with sheds of agnosticism over their heads. Behold the millions of heads covered with hate, or worry, remorse and depression.
Jesus also referred to the birds “of the air” — not birds in cages, or fowls fattened for Sunday dinner — but birds free to fly south in autumn and north in spring with the whole world from which to draw their sustenance, not as work but as play, as joyful expression of their emancipated souls.
Ah, there we erase forever all criticism of Jesus as urging laziness. The energy flowing constantly through the lily that is in alignment with the source of life is as great (if we knew how to release it) as is the energy locked up in uranium. The movement of birds through the air always keeping in alignment with the temperate zone, is so rapid that it puts us lazy-bones on earth to shame. And yet never would anyone accuse the lilies of the field and the birds of the air of doing any “work.”
And neither can anyone, who really knows, ever accuse our great geniuses — which is the name we give to men who are in alignment with Nature and with God — of doing any work. “I never did a day’s work in my life,” said Edison. “It was all play because I put my imagination into it.” One wouldn’t call Michelangelo, Rodin, or Gutzon Borglum lazy, and yet at different times and in different ways each expressed the belief that all he did was to cut away the stone which didn’t belong. The statue was already there.
Let us return for a moment to these patterns. A scientist, Dr. Snow, took ten thousand photographs of snowflakes. He found all were beautiful, all were perfect, and no two had the same design. “Scientists have discovered that certain conditions universally produce a characteristic frost pattern upon a glass windowpane, no matter where the windowpane happens to be. These beautiful forms have existed forever out in invisible space, just waiting for a cool windowpane and a cold day to bring them into visibility. Another remarkable thing is that when the sun is veiled, the patterns take the form of ferns or other forms of primeval vegetation which existed on earth when it was shrouded in thick mists. When the sun shines the frost patterns take the form of roses and other sun-kissed flower-shapes.”1 These patterns are not exclusive to one land — they appear in all lands. They exist somewhere in the infinite treasuries of God and are instantly available anywhere conditions are in alignment to bring them forth.
The great allegories and myths and fairy stories are also in God’s vast treasury, all ready to come forth through anyone who is in alignment with God on the one hand and open to the hearts of little children on the other. The Sleeping Princess, symbolic of the awakening of the soul in man, is a tale known in every land of the globe, not passed across the seas from place to place, as some scholars think, but welling up effortlessly through the hearts of simple folk. And Mother Goose rhymes were born in the hearts of mothers and lovers of children even when the tale had never been heard before.
It is just as absurd to imagine that coal was carried from the Ruhr by human hands to the Pennsylvania coal fields as to insist that this and that fairy story was carried from the Aztecs to the Russians or from the Swiss to the English and so on and on, as research scholars are always trying to tell us.
While the man of the fourth dimension, transcending both time and space, is seeking his perfect fulfillment at life’s periphery, the man of the fifth dimension rests secure at the center where all the perfect fulfillments abide through all eternity.
Napoleon and Alexander the Great, with all their daydreams behind them extending from the cradle to the grave, toppled over little generals who thought only of the hour and the minute in which they lived. But Jesus did not limit his daydream pictures of himself to the years that extended from the manger to the cross. He knew himself as existing through all time and eternity, in the dreams of his nation for a Messiah from centuries before, and as a Savior of men for centuries to come. “Before Abraham was I am” and “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the age” were not mere idle words.
The difference between Alexander the Great and the opposing King of Persia was that Alexander was a fourth-dimensional man and the King was a three-dimensional man, and the difference between Jesus and Pilate was that Pilate was a three-dimensional man and Jesus was functioning as a five-dimensional man. When Alexander stood before the Persian generals, the Persian generals were toppled over like ten-pins, and Alexander emerged the winner for that time. When Jesus stood before Pilate, Pilate was toppled over and Jesus emerged the winner for all eternity.
Now the key word of each dimension is exactly the opposite to the key word of the last dimension. The straight line characterizes one dimension. The square with lines at perfect right angles to the one-dimensional line characterizes two dimensions. The cube, built at right angles to the square, characterizes the third dimension. The multiplication of these cubes in consecutive moments of time characterizes the fourth dimension, giving the impression (as these cubes go flitting past) of continued movement. So in contrast to the penetrating rhythmic movement of constant becoming characteristic of the fourth dimension, we come upon the permanent, static being, yes, the perfect seeming motionlessness of the fifth dimension.
The man of the fourth dimension eagerly watches the moving pictures flashing past him, eager and curious and at times concerned at what will come next. But the man of the fifth dimension knows that all the pictures are safely on the reel and that nothing can be taken from them and nothing can be added to them. The fifth-dimensional man, when he starts carving a statue, knows that the statue is already there, perfect and complete, and all he has to do is merely cut away the parts that don’t belong. The relationships of the various dimensions can best be shown by the way a genius produces his masterpiece. The great poet knows, for instance, that the All-Song has been already sung in the fifth dimension and that he needs but put himself in rhythmic alignment with that Song and let the rhythms of the fourth dimension write it through him upon paper for the people in the third dimension to read and enjoy.
Very calm and unhurried are the men of the fifth dimension. They move rarely but every move brings something permanent to pass. They never make a waste motion. Most of the things done in these lesser dimensions have to be done over again. A lifetime of grubbing and saving in the third dimension builds a fortune that goes crashing down in 1929. In the fourth-dimensional realm we witness the dreams of Mein Kampf dashed into misery and ruin far worse than anything the world had ever experienced before. Had Hitler stepped into the fifth dimension he would have realized the truth in the refrain:
“Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own.”
And now we come to the question, can we go beyond the fifth dimension? Let us take one peep into the dim unknown and see what we shall see.
- The Fifth Dimension and the Future of Mankind: Alder, Rider & Co., London.
CHAPTER III
The Mysteries of God’s Sixth Dimension
WHEN we glimpse into the dim unknown above the fifth dimension we find residing in the heart of the sixth dimension a power which, when unlocked, transcends all the powers of the lower five dimensions combined. It is a power that can even modify and alter the so-called unchangeable Divine Plan of the fifth dimension. It is the power of intense feeling filtered through the highest channels known to men warm and devoted love and yet unpossessive, unselfish, and if need be, sacrificial. “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.” “By this they shall know that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another.”
One can go through his plodding work in the third dimension and attain some measure of success, but add love for his work and abounding love for his fellow workers and the success will be doubled and tripled immediately. In the fourth dimension of wireless, radio, and telepathy, messages pass from one to another with lightning rapidity, but add love and the sensitivity and effectiveness both in the broadcasting and receiving ends of the line are greatly increased.
Even the patterns of life which have existed in the fifth dimension from the beginning of time can be changed by the powerful influence of unselfish, sacrificial love. “Prophecies may fail,” said Paul, “but love never fails.” Add the sixth dimension to the fifth and a feeling of fatalism is instantly replaced by a sense of destiny. That is to say, every element in the Divine Plan is seen in proper relationship. “All things work together for good.” Evil fades away. If, for instance, your inner divination should foresee death looming near for you on the road ahead, love can turn it into the rapture of stepping into the Kingdom here and now without all that inconvenience of “laying off the mortal coil.” If a man is “fated” to lose himself in a power greater than himself, through Love and Prayer, his Divine Destiny can change his course from losing himself in alcoholic spirits that have plagued him in the past, to losing himself in the Holy Spirit that can redeem his life in the present and future. Jesus possessed this sixth-dimensional love, and behold how he could raise even the dead to life! He said we, too, could have that power through this simple formula: “When two or three agree together asking anything in the sixth dimension (i.e. in his loving name) whatsoever ye ask shall be done.”
Let us pause for a moment to contemplate again how infinitely more powerful each higher dimension is than the dimension lower down. The dog is more powerful than the moth and the man is more powerful than the dog. Likewise, the fourth dimension, when understood and applied, releases much greater forces than the third. “An average man would naturally think that a stone hatchet was more powerful than a hatchet made of gas,” writes Alder, “but when he sees the way an acetylene blowpipe cuts through metals — even under water, where a hatchet would be hopelessly inadequate, he quickly changes his mind.” Whenever fourth-dimensional forces are used, they are able to master anything in the third-dimensional realm.
The fifth-dimensional forces whenever they are brought into play are likewise far more powerful than anything the fourth dimension can offer. Think what tremendous power must be at work to hold a design permanently in the atmosphere immune to any disturbances or conditions whatever! Electricity, which belongs to the fourth dimension, powerful as it is, can be turned on and off at will. But this mysterious fifth dimension is independent of all these laws and conditions. The patterns are there engraved upon the cosmic mountains of the Lord, held permanent in the ethers, sustained by the great primal forces of creation. No force on sea or land can destroy them. Like the fruits of the Spirit described by Saint Paul, “against these there is no law.”
Can anything be more powerful than these perfect designs held in permanent place in the fifth dimension? Yes, there is a greater power, the mere fringe of which I have touched upon in this chapter. As the hardest glass can be cut by a diamond, so even our fifth dimensional patterns may be modified and improved and lifted into higher usefulness through the mysterious powers of love.
As each new dimension is at right angles, or in complete contrast, to the one before, and as the fifth dimension is motionless, so we would naturally expect the sixth dimension to be filled with motion. But it must be a higher, more invisible motion than the motions of the fourth dimension. And so we discover it is much more powerful than electricity and more revealing than radio. Instead of the radiation of electricity, of wireless, of radio and of television, it is the radiation from the souls of men upon this earth and in heaven.
“The two greatest commandments,” said Jesus, “are love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself.” Upon these two commandments hang all the law (of the fourth dimension) and the prophets (of the fifth dimension). And he summed up his ministry in the simple words, “By this shall all men know ye are my disciples in that ye love one another.”
Strange, is it not, that the emotion we think we are the best acquainted with, the feelings that are most rooted in and native to our being, are the strongest forces in the universe and we knew it not? At first we resist it — we can’t believe it. But don’t you remember how Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country”? Love is the “Prophet emotion” in man, abused, discredited, unhonored and unsung. No, I must qualify that. No quality in man has been so often glorified and sung about. But no quality has been so misused, so misunderstood, and in its highest reaches so neglected.
Nevertheless, it is a power infinitely greater than electricity, than the atom bomb, than the hydrogen bomb, than anything discovered or invented by man. And yet, like the Holy Grail that Sir Launfal sought throughout the breadth of the land, it has been waiting all this time right at our palace gate. But is it not true that electricity was also all around us, in our sky and earth and only in the last century discovered and put to use? Is it not true that uranium was always in the earth beneath our feet and only discovered as a source of power within the last decade? Therefore, why should we be surprised to learn that Love, which man has been writing poetry about for a thousand years, and alternately scoffing and extolling, is suddenly discovered to have power enough literally to save the world? And yet it has been lying largely unused within us all the time. Now we know what Jesus meant when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Paul of Tarsus, two thousand years ago, summed this up beautifully when he said:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy (of the fifth dimension), and understand all mysteries (of the fourth dimension), and all knowledge (of the third dimension), and have not Love (of the sixth dimension), I am nothing. Love never faileth, but whether there be prophecies (on the fifth dimension) they shall fail; whether there be tongues (on the fourth dimension) they shall cease; whether there be knowledge (on the third dimension) it shall vanish away. For we (on the lower dimensions) know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
“When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
“Finally there abideth faith (in the fourth dimension), hope (in the fifth dimension), and love (in the sixth dimension) ; these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
CHAPTER IV
The Mysteries of God’s Seventh Dimension
WE HAVE been going up a series of stairways, each step taking us a little closer to God. Because these are such important steps, each one carrying the implications, almost, of a rebirth, we have used the definitive word “dimensions” instead of the figurative word “steps.” The level or dimension where most of us stop and live and move and have our being is the third — the place where the solid, stuffy people live. The fourth level brings us to the place where the rhythmic, dancing people live. Here the solid matter is melted up into protons and electrons, and all matter is seen as nothing but energy in motion, and the minds of men are engaged in the rhythms of radio, radar, television and telepathy.
Next we stepped into the fifth dimension, where the peaceful people live—in other words, the area above all vibrations and rhythms of the fourth dimension where are to be found the perfect patterns for every person and every nation and every event if we can clear away the fogs sufficiently in our minds and souls to see them. As long as a vessel is ploughing through thick fog banks, its navigators have to keep their radar working constantly to catch the return vibrations from any iceberg or jutting headland that may endanger the journey. But when the mist is all cleared away, no longer does the captain have to depend upon instruments to record vibrations — he can steer the course easily and rhythmically into the harbor that awaits him, because now he can see the perfect course before him.
Jesus, who could see the perfect pattern of each disciple, cautioned his seventy not to be so thrilled over the vibrations they could control in the fourth dimension by which they could cast out demons, but to rejoice rather that their perfect patterns in the fifth dimension were already created for them in heaven.
The sixth dimension might be called the place of orchestration, where all these patterns, in other words these “names that are written in heaven,” can be brought together in perfect agreement and harmony. Jesus defined this dimension when he said, “If two of you shall agree (symphonize) on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”
It was stated when we were considering the fifth dimension, that just one person, when he got still enough for the fogs to roll away, and the blur to leave his vision, would be able to see his Divine Plan or the “pattern given in the Mount” so clearly that great things could come through him. The All-Song would then sing through him, or the perfect guidance come to him, or the exact supply his needs appear when the need called.
But when, not you alone, but two or three others join with you and get just as still, grow just as clear, and see just as vividly, then the Power that comes through will be greatly multiplied. When seven or twelve agree, the power becomes tremendous. When one hundred and twenty come together in one place and all are of one mind, the Event will be heralded in heaven and upon earth as a Pentecost.
In the fifth dimension we found that there is a particular plan for each of us, just as there is a pattern for each snowflake. In the sixth we see many patterns brought into union, symphonized in power and beauty, as an orchestra brings numbers of instruments together to produce something that no instrument playing alone can achieve. Ultimately in the seventh dimension we find The Pattern which unites all patterns in the heart of God Himself. The great step that the saints have made in more or less degree, but only Jesus has made perfectly, is to abide so completely in the Father that the Father and they are one. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?”
In Portland, Maine, I once witnessed a complete eclipse of the sun. Because the form of the moon is made after the image and likeness of the sun, both being perfect spheres, when the moon swings in its orbit in front of the sun it shuts out the view of the sun entirely. Let us imagine that you are the moon and God is the sun and completely reverse the process — the world would be flooded with light. Whenever man lets God swing in front of him, letting his little self be completely erased from view by the greater Self of God, something wonderful happens!
One who achieves this is called a mystic. Don’t be afraid of that word. Before you decline it, define it! “Mysticism,” says Evelyn Underhill, “means union with Reality.” And the greatest of all Realities is God! The simplest way to achieve this union is through absolute surrender, through completely losing oneself in the Absolute God. Jesus has himself defined it in many different ways — all of them more beautiful than any dictionary definition could be. The one I like best is, “He who would lose his life shall save it.” Another is, “I am the Vine; ye are the branches.” And in his prayer in the Upper Room Jesus ended with a special intercession for you and for me. When he finished praying for his disciples he said, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.”
As we are branches and Christ is the Vine, the biggest decision that we must make in life is where we shall take our stand; shall we let our consciousness — our awareness rest where the branch connects with the Vine, or out at the tip far away from the center, exposed to every wind of emotion and desire that blows?
That is the battle that Job had to fight when his great calamity fell upon him. In the presence of his very conservative friends he was faced with the dilemma — should he declare himself as united with God or with the dust of the earth? At which end of the branch should he take his stand? Should he be modest and tell a falsehood; or should he be true and appear to others to be boastful and arrogant? He listened deep down in his heart, and there he found only one answer. “Be true to the highest light you have; there is no other way. Speak the truth as you see and know it, even though the heavens fall.”
And what was it that down in his heart he knew? Simply this, that in his essential nature, in his real self, the self which is of God, and through which God speaks, acts and thinks, he was perfect. He knew that the utterance of these words would in themselves condemn him in the eyes and before the traditions of those who sat with him. Therefore he said, “If I speak, my own words will condemn me.” Nevertheless he exclaimed, “I am perfect; I regard not myself!”
Notice that he did not say, “I declare myself to be perfect,” but “I AM perfect.” In this inner struggle there was evidence that the author of Job made a distinction between the I which is subjective, within, governing, controlling, creating; and the me which is objective, without, governed, controlled, created. There is a distinction between the creator and the creation. Man as the creator is perfect, one with God; man the creation is imperfect, one with the earth.
Everywhere in the Bible humility is counselled, and usually as the very highest good. But it is always humility and humiliation of the outer, objectified me; never of the creative and life-building I.
The publican’s prayer is commended to us by Jesus, but it is noteworthy that he did not say, “I AM a sinner, be merciful to me,” but “God, be merciful unto me, a sinner.” When the young man came worshipping Jesus, Jesus did not say, “I AM not good” or “I AM not worthy to be called good.” What he did say was, “Why callest thou me good? Only one is good, the Father which is in heaven.” His spiritual intuition told him that the young man was not worshipping the inner Heavenly Father, the divine I in Jesus, but the outer personality of the human me, and he would have nothing to do with it.
The final test of spiritual insight, spiritual discernment, spiritual understanding, is the power of one to see in another not the me but the I. Great spiritual natures who have fastened themselves to the Father or, rather, who see and recognize their union with the Father, make that the test of finding the spiritual union with others.
God made one definition of Himself, the only time He ever defined Himself according to the Bible: “I AM that I AM.” Someone has said that we take God’s name in vain whenever we say, “I AM sick, I AM wicked, I AM hopeless,” etc. We can say, “Sickness has come to me“ or “Sin has fallen upon me“ or “Despair has come upon me“ if we wish. What is the difference, one may ask? There is a whole world of difference. The “I” way of talking assumes that sickness, sin and despair are parts of ourselves, integrally related to us, permeating us, staining and saturating us. It is this philosophy of taking the name of the Lord in vain that has led men to believe that the way to get rid of sin was to destroy and punish the sinner; that when a man was sick it was in some cases impossible to cure him; that when a man was in despair he had something to despair of.
But when we think of these things as falling upon, or attacking the objective me from the outside, not the inner I part of ourselves, we see that sin, sickness and unhappiness are merely like dead leaves falling upon our hat brims, or like records played upon a phonograph — something which may be easily brushed away or lifted off, leaving the hat unstained and the victrola ready to receive a new and better record.
Job said, “I AM perfect; I regard not myself“ thus hinting that he took his stand with the I part of his nature and not the me part. Because he thus classed himself as an equal and co-equal with God rather than with the worms, he was reviled by his friends and accounted as the greatest sinner of his time. When Jesus said, “The Father and I (not me) are one,” he gave the chief weapon the Pharisees needed to condemn him. However, God put his stamp of approval upon these statements of Job when he spoke out of the whirlwind and said, “Job had spake wisdom unto his friends”; and when he spoke out of the sky to Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” But in spite of all this, the good men of Job’s day condemned Job, and the good men of Jesus’ day crucified Jesus. “For what good work do you condemn me?” asked Jesus of the Pharisees. “For no good work,” they replied, “but because, being a man, you make yourself equal to God.”
And today? Whenever one takes his stand with the I within him which is united with God — then miracles begin to occur around him because he lives, moves, and has his being in the creative, God-like part of his nature instead of in the created, manifested, material side of his nature. People will then willingly accept the miracles, wonder at them, celebrate them, and advertise them, and even exploit them, but they may turn upon him, and condemn him, call him queer and fanatical, and advise the orthodox to stay away. And yet has not Jesus said, “Greater works shall ye do, because I go to the Father”? We can hear him say, “The Father and I are one; I am perfect; I am the Alpha and the Omega; I am the power to create; I am the power to conceive and express truth; I am the power to love. Before Abraham — (the outer, objectified, physical Abraham) — I AM.”
And is it not true that the I, the power to create which resides within us all, existed before any created thing existed? How could a creation exist before the power to create existed? And the power to create that is in you and in me must be of the same essence as the power to create that is in God — part of that great, eternal, All-in-All which works through, in and over all of us. Before the physical manifestation of Abraham existed, the Christ power to create that outer expression of man surely existed, that power that is a part of you as well as of me, as surely as it is of God. Does that make us seem too much like gods? What did Jesus say, when the Pharisees chided him upon calling himself the Son of God? “Did not the Scriptures say, Ye are gods?” and then he added, “And the Scriptures cannot be broken.”
Yes, we can take our stand at the inner end of the branch that connects us with the Vine, instead of residing out at the tip of the branch. We can be one with the Great I AM THAT I AM; we can be more than mere manifestations, for we are manifestos as well. Through us God does His manifesting, all of it, if we but knew the ultimate mystery of creation. For when we are in tune with God, our will one with his will, our mind one with his mind, all our desires and wishes and thoughts and plans can come into manifestation.
For we are then creators, co-workers with the great I AM.
CHAPTER V
A Survey of All the Dimensions
NOW THAT we have reached the seventh dimension, let us pause and take a bird’s eye view of the dimensions through which we have travelled.
As we look back upon the first dimension we see it was a mere line, the second a plane, and the third a cube. Mankind living in the third dimension conceived of himself as weighed down by gravity and separated from everyone else. In contrast to that, the fourth dimension becomes revealed as a place of motion, everything penetrating everything else. The fifth dimension makes another right angle turn, and in contrast to this fourth dimension of motion, is revealed as a dimension of motionlessness. Therefore when we reach the sixth dimension we expect to move again, but this time we discover that the motion is on a grander, more celestial scale than the motion of the fourth dimension, for its root lies not in the telepathy of thought but in the telepathy of love. The motionlessness of the fifth dimension proves to be the perfect pattern at the end of the rainbow which was dimly glimpsed by the fourth-dimensional man. The new sixth-dimensional motion does not add anything further to the individual’s separate pattern of life, but it brings a perfect interweaving of his pattern with all the other patterns of mankind, beginning with the “mutuals” that God has especially given him. When two or three can agree together, bringing Christ right into their midst, the bliss of the sixth dimension is experienced. And so we discover that the key word of the sixth dimension is orchestration.
And this leads to the culmination toward which all these dimensions are moving, and brings into clear light the key word that marks the seventh, the crux and crown of all our earthly and heavenly endeavor — Oneness. By this is meant the universal oneness with one’s neighbor, oneness with God the Father, oneness with Christ. The motionlessness of the seventh dimension at its very highest is expressed in the greatest of all the parables of Jesus, the parable of the Vine and its branches.
Jesus’ teachings, when properly understood, constitute the only authentic road-map for reaching the sixth and seventh dimensions. Nevertheless, he himself, being the perfect union of humanity and divinity, had dominion over all the dimensions. “I have many things that I cannot tell you now.” Gradually, whenever and wherever he could, he introduced his people to a new dimension, one step at a time, each above where they had been last. But he cautioned his disciples not to travel too fast. “Cast not your pearls before swine, neither give that which is holy unto the dogs, lest they trample them under foot and turn and rend you.”
But someday, he prophesied, there will be enough of you living, moving and having your being in the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions, and when that time comes, “greater things than I have done ye shall then be able to do.”
He spoke of the fourth dimension when he said, “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
Of the fifth dimension when he said, “Your names are written in Heaven.”
Of the sixth dimension when he said, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven.”
Of the seventh dimension when he said, “I pray that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” Yes, that is the culmination — “that all may be perfect in one.” “At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, ye in me and I in you.”
In these four statements you can read the key words of the four highest dimensions: penetration, motionlessness, orchestration and oneness.
When one enters a new field of thought he has to learn a new language. Experts in child psychology don’t apologize for the repetitions of words in the primers they put into children’s hands. As Part One of this book is a primer in the higher dimensions and as a thorough understanding of these dimensions will make all the subsequent sections clear, I know my readers will forgive me if before we leave this section I make a rapid review of the ground we have covered, restating the fundamental principles in slightly different terms and from a fresh viewpoint. So with this end in mind let us go back again to the very roots of things.
In the first place, we learned that the world of the snail and the moth is not our world. These creatures are one-dimensional; they move in straight line. They are repelled or attracted by each stimulus presented to them, otherwise they do not see it or cognize it at all. They live in a world governed entirely by sensation. They have no power of grouping many sensations into a perception. If they could, they would graduate from their world into a two-dimensional world.
In the second place, we learned that the dog and the cat live in a world which is not our world. True, they have the capacity of grouping many sensations together to make a perception, but they have not the power of grouping these perceptions to make a conception. They can, for instance, group the sensation of pain which dashing into an attractive yellow flame inflicts upon them, with other similar sensations, and come to a distinct perception that flames should not be dashed into, something the moth can never understand. So while the moth is destroyed in the flame, the dog can change its course, i.e. step out of the straight line into a line at right angles to the destructive object, and go around it. Thus the dog is two-dimensional, has width as well as length to his world. But the sky remains one plane to him, and because he cannot get a “conception” of anything but merely a perception, the building he passes each morning is a new building every day, just as the sunrise each day seems to us to be a new day, and the spring a new spring.
Now if you notice carefully, you will see that each step into a higher conception brings to us a greater power of unifying the experience of our lives on a lower dimension. The being who possesses sensation only, lives, in one dimension; the being which can unify these sensations into perceptions lives in two dimensions; the being which can unify perceptions into conceptions lives in three dimensions. Man enters here.
But until man can unify his individual, personal conceptions into universal conceptions, he does not become a four- or five-dimensional creature. Consequently he lives in a world of time instead of Eternity. As the one-dimensional thought-world of the moth and snail is cancelled out by the higher-dimensional thinking of the dog, and as the thinking of the dog is cancelled out by the higher thinking of man, in the same way we may know that most of our thinking about life and our efforts to formulate a philosophy of life will be false and so much effort wasted if they proceed on a three-dimensional scale of selfishness, prejudice, hate and fear, instead of on a still higher dimensional scale of unselfishness, faith and love. And how can we reach that higher scale? The first requirement is to leap the chasm of separateness and see unity in all things. We must accept our dwelling place not as a multi-verse but as a universe. The boundaries of time conceal that unity from three-dimensional creatures, just as the boundaries of space conceptions prevented the lower creatures from seeing unity in sensations or unity in perceptions.
Our initial purpose, then, should be to see unity in the Universe. Once get this realization clear, and you have taken your first stand in higher thinking, and all the truths of life will become increasingly clearer to you as you proceed.
A mosquito, for instance, bites a man’s foot and then his hand, but is not aware that these limbs are parts of the same man. A dog sees his master as a whole man and is faithful to him, but he does not understand that the stranger who rushes into his master’s arms is his long-lost brother.
And now comes the three-dimensional man, who recognizes the two men as brothers, members of the same family, but does not recognize the Japanese or the German whom this man may be fighting as being also his brother, nor does he see that the man he is trying to crush in business is his brother as well. Jesus, when he said, “I am the vine and ye are the branches,” when he said, “Ye are my brothers, my sisters and my mother,” when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan, lifted mankind with him to the level of higher-dimensional thinking.
As soon as we rise to this higher realization, as soon as we attain this perfect union with reality, we find that heaven commences to be seen around us. Then complete happiness is ours, correct thinking is ours, perfect friendships are ours, harmonious love, beauty and self-expression are ours. We have become unresisting witnesses to God’s imperishable glory. We find also that hell, as far as we are concerned, ceases to exist.
Indeed, what is hell? Hell is merely the confining of our souls in cramping bondage to a lower dimensional world than the one for which we were created. What was the most terrifying nightmare of your childhood? Was it not finding yourself cramped in a drain pipe, or under a porch, so tightly caught you could not get out? Such is the hell many of us confine ourselves in now the bondage to hypocrisy, hate and fear in a three-dimensional world which we are supposed to outgrow.
How can we escape from hell? By turning to the world of reality above us — turning to God. We escape from evil just as an automobile driver escapes from a signpost in the middle of the road ahead — he turns.
Let us trace this further and see where it leads.
The moth, living in a world of mere sensation, governed by his attractions and repulsions and nothing else, is drawn into the flame. Because he cannot unify his sensations so as to create a perception of danger, he does not escape. If he could only turn to the world of reality right beside him, the two-dimensional world of perception of the dog and cat, he could escape as they do, by turning aside. But he cannot and he is therefore destroyed. To the moth, the flame which first represents desire, finally becomes hell.
Now witness a dog cast upon an island of rock and sand. He will soon perish from hunger unless he can contrive snares for birds or nets for fish. By so doing he could turn from his world of mere perceptions to a world of conceptions. This he cannot do, hence he dies the lingering death of starvation. Starvation is hell for the dog.
Now witness man engaged in a great world war. Fifty million men, women and children are being butchered like cattle, a hundred million are being dragged into terrible suffering and privation. Hate is hell, fear is hell, man’s failure to see the unity of mankind is hell.
We make our own hell. Can we unmake it? Certainly. All we have to do is to turn to the world of reality just above us, the world of higher dimensions, the world where men are all brothers, where they are all branches of the same vine, where all is one vast unity.
Then we shall see that we cannot hurt our neighbor without also hurting ourselves.
Just as the only escape for the moth from the flame is to turn, the only salvation ahead for man is to turn to an entirely different concept of mankind. All other schemes on a mundane plane are merely different ways of dashing himself into the flame. HE MUST TURN.
I know just how difficult it is for the average reader to form a conception of this higher dimension. It is because each higher plane must be at right angles to the plane below, which means that every word that is competent to describe it seems to contradict every word that described the previous plane.
We saw, for instance, how each dimension swallowed up and cancelled out the dimension which preceded it — the line being swallowed in the plane, and the plane in the cube. That brought us to the question, what can be at right angles to the cube, a good, strong, material, physical cube? What is antithetical — opposite — at right angles, so to speak, to material things? Is it not spiritual things? Saint Paul did a good job of contrasting the carnal and the spiritual, showing how the spiritual world swallows up, cancels out, the fragile limitations of the material world. This, then, is the higher-dimensional world, the world of reality toward which we are striving. And because this new world is so exactly opposite to the self-centered world in which most of us live, Jesus never spoke of it except in paradoxes.
As all philosophies of life built upon the single sensation plane of the one-dimensional snail fail, and must be supplanted by the perception plane of the dog and the cat; as the latter must be thrown overboard as so much worthless rubbish when confronted by the three-dimensional philosophy of life in a material world of the philosopher and scientist; even more so, because with each increase in altitude the leap between the “planes” becomes greater, we must throw into the discard as so much sound and foam, as so much chaff and litter, our worn-out philosophy of life geared only to a material universe, and supplant it with a philosophy of life adapted to and adequate for a spiritual universe.
Such a philosophy cannot come from ourselves, it must come from above. But as the material scientists may erect radio wires to catch the thoughts that are passing through the material world, so we may erect altars to catch the celestial thoughts that will come down to us from the spiritual world. That these thoughts may be different for each one of us is, of course, expected. That no two persons may see the same light, or catch the same heat from the same fire, is also to be expected. It is not in the hope of teaching anything new that this is being written, but rather to emphasize the world-shaking truths that Jesus proclaimed and so few of his followers seem able to comprehend. When you step from this mundane level of thinking into the higher dimensions that Christ charted for you you will seem to be in a new world. In this new world you will discover seven things:
I. The first thing that you will discover is that while everything in this world seems to be new, there has been actually no change at all in God’s universe, the change has been entirely within you. This perfect, harmonious uni-verse was all about you from the beginning of time, merely awaiting your capacity to see it for it to grow within you.
II. The second discovery that will come to you is that each plane is perpendicular to the plane below. Width is perpendicular to length and height is perpendicular to width; time is perpendicular to space and eternity is perpendicular to time, love is perpendicular to hate and peace is perpendicular to war. In other words, each plane is at right angles and in direct antithesis to the other planes below, swallowing them up or cancelling them out in every instance. This means that to enter each new plane you must (and this requires effort) die to the lower world and be born again in the higher; in other words, make a complete turn.
III. Third you will discover that after rising into the new plane you see the lower planes spread out before you in their proper perspective, which enables you to see relationships and connections between various parts that you never saw before. That is to say, you see unity and harmony where before you saw only diversity and discord.
IV. The fourth thing you learn is that after all these changes have occurred within yourself, their effect is the same as if they had created an entirely new world outside of you. That is to say, the new combinations and newly discovered unities of the old, lower dimensions in their new relations to the higher world in which you are moving, bring to pass the sensation of finding the world all over again as an entirely new world, which is a perfectly natural experience for one who is born again.
V. The fifth thing you will learn is that what is spoken in secret will be proclaimed from the housetop. A characteristic of the man who lives, moves and has his being in the higher dimensions is that he leads a singularly open life, his thoughts are as clean as his words, for he knows that what one thinks in his heart is manifest in action, what is done in secret becomes visible to the entire world.
VI. The sixth thing you will learn is that evil has no power in itself except the power that you give it. A man who lives in the upper dimensions is characterized by a singular disregard or non-resistance or non-recognition of evil, for he knows it as something that is cancelled out by the incoming current of the vaster, larger life.
In fact he finds that evil is usually something good in the wrong place. A spade-full of rich garden loam is a wonderful thing when dumped in the garden, but a heinous crime when dumped on a banquet table. Thrift is a virtue when used to guard the depositor’s money, but becomes a vice when expressed in the greed that steals it. Love is the greatest of virtues when it feeds others, but becomes lust when it feeds upon others. Covetousness, lust, jealousy, greed, hate and prejudice are cast out of one’s life and left far behind us as one makes the turn and rises to a higher dimension where he finds it impossible to do anything else but love God with all his mind, strength, heart and soul, and his neighbor as himself. The upperdimensional man knows how it is that upon these two Commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
VII. The seventh thing you learn is that to save your life you must lose it. The most outstanding trait of a higher-dimensional man is his selflessness. This is a positive, not negative characteristic, as is so commonly supposed. It is a losing of the lower-dimensional life, true — but with perfect knowledge that the greater unity that takes its place leads to an infinitely larger life — he that loseth his life shall truly find it.
Let us imagine a little “practical” moth scolding an idealistic moth who thinks of leaving the life of exquisite, separate sensation for a life where the sensations will be lost — merged in perceptions. “How silly, how foolish, how visionary you are” he tells him. But behold, even while he is chiding, the visionary moth “makes the turn” and escapes the flame of hell in which the other perishes.
And so the practical, prehistoric apeman, munching his bones, smelling the interesting new trails (the same old one is new each day to him), roundly gives a piece of his mind to the dreamer man who thinks he will turn and lose his perceptions in concepts, and dreams and plans. But the latter begins to use words and build bridges while the apeman perishes in the flood.
Today this thinking, practical man who uses words and builds bridges has, alas, been starting wars and inventing unspeakable means of destruction. He laughs to scorn the idealist who says we are all brothers, that nations should make gifts to other nations of food and machinery, that we should break down barriers and destroy our armaments, and substitute love for hate and prayer for argument. “Such outrageous foolishness!” he exclaims.
But — mark my words — we have reached the flame. Millions of our race have already perished. Those who scoff and spread hate will perish, as those who love and build schools will survive. There is no longer time for laughing or scornful words. God is on our right hand. We must make the turn.
