Crystal and Arabesque
Sandy Isenstadt
Places September 16, 2009 DOI: 10.22269/090916 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that early 20th-century thinkers such as Claude Bragdon understood the fourth dimension as a higher spatial order that completed three-dimensional space and offered a physical basis for spiritual and psychic phenomena. For them, the promise of evolution was not Darwinian description or technological progress but the prospect of access to a higher realm of existence, with individual consciousness conceived as a slice of a higher consciousness. |
Abstract
Until the early 20th century, the fourth dimension was understood less as an element in a continuum of space-time than as a higher order of space that completed and made whole our three familiar dimensions. As such, it suggested the presence of another realm, invisible to the poor perceptual equipment humankind was initially issued, but that could help explain psychic experiences that violated laws of Euclidean space such as, say, astral projection. In a materialist age, the fourth dimension gave spiritual phenomena some purchase in the physical realm. The triumph of evolution, then, for Bragdon and others, was not the descriptive theories of Darwin, nor the evident technological progress spawned by science and distributed broadly by industrialization. Rather it was the prospect of entry, or at least insight, into a formerly unknowable sphere of existence. Just as the three-dimensional world can be imagined as a cross-section through a four-dimensional world, so might individual consciousness be simply a slice of a higher form of conscious existence. However fleeting, knowledge of a fourth dimension promised to release the individual from the prison of his own bounded terrestrial spirit.