COSMICBUHAY: FOUR (4) DIMENSIONS OF SPACE

FOUR (4) DIMENSIONS OF SPACE

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Gracious day to all ye seekers and Aspirants to the Path!

For this particular note, the focus will be on the subject of 4-dimensional space. Let it be echoed that the mahatmas of the spiritual Brotherhood have already shared to us the core knowledge about space some couples of decades before Albert Einstein theorized about the Special Theory of Relativity which is premised precisely on a 4-dimensional space.

Space is distinct from the term ‘reality’, in that space has been 4-dimensional from the very inception whereas reality has been subdivided into seven (7) planes or dimensions from the beginnings yet of the emanation of the elements, worlds and sentient beings by the Almighty One I Am That I Am. This note continues on the reflections derived from Sloka 5 of the Book of Dzyan concerning the formation of man ‘the thinker’.

HPBlavatsky, who was mandated by spiritual Brotherhood to release Divine Wisdom to mankind, this being the new policy to share the Wisdom openly to all men and women, articulated more on the subject of space in Volume I, Secret Doctrine, as follows:

The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements—Fire and Earth—and its humanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name Humanity to beings living under conditions unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense (the only way in which it can be used correctly)—“a two-dimensional species.” The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes of the two, three, and four or more “dimensional Space;” but in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound but incomplete intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that*—the use of the modern expression. “the fourth dimension of Space.” To begin with, of course, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the “Fourth dimension of MATTER in Space.”† But it is an unhappy phrase even thus expanded, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The faculties, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste, and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and by the time that it fully develops the next characteristic—let us call it for the moment PERMEABILITY—this will correspond to the next sense of man—let us call it “NORMAL CLAIRVOYANCE;” thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, what they were really in want of, was a sixth characteristic of matter. The three dimensions belong really but to one attribute or characteristic of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that under any condition of things there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth, and thickness. These terms, and the term “dimension” itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of Kosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; and from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not militate in any way against the certainty that in the progress of time—as the faculties of humanity are multiplied—so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar one of the “Sun rising or setting.”

We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here another caveat must be entered. That loose and figurative expression may be regarded—in one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the “Elements” (in the Occult sense)—Fire, Air, Water,* Earth. We are only in the fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The centres of consciousness (destined to develop into humanity as we know it) of the third Round arrived at a perception of the third Element Water.† Those of the fourth Round have added earth as a state of matter to their stock as well as the three other elements in their present transformation. In short, none of the so-called elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know, FIRE may have been pure AKASA, the first Matter of the Magnum Opus of the Creators and “Builders,” that Astral Light which the paradoxical Eliphas Lévi calls in one breath “the body of the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet,” the “Androgyne Goat of Mendes”*; AIR, simply Nitrogen, “the breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,” as the Mahometan mystics call it; WATER, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a living soul with. And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found in Genesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far younger Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which things created appear—namely, Fire (light), Air, Water, and MAN (or the Earth). For the sentence: “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth” is a mistranslation; it is not “Heaven and Earth,” but the duplex or dual Heaven, the upper and the lower Heavens, or the separation of primordial substance that was light in its upper and dark in its lower portions—or the manifested Universe—in its duality of the invisible (to the senses) and the visible to our perceptions. God divided the light from the Darkness (v. 4); and then made the firmament, air (5), “a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,” (6), i.e., “the waters which were under the firmament (our manifested visible Universe) from the waters above the firmament,” or the (to us) invisible planes of being. In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first, light is produced before the Sun. “God made the Earth and the Heavens and every plant of the field before it was in the Earth and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Elohim (‘gods’) had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.” (v. 5)—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plants were created before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now in the fourth Round.

Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the “primordial fire” mentioned above, Eliphas Lévi calls it invariably the “Astral Light.” It is the “grand Agent Magique” with him; undeniably it is so, but—only so far as Black Magic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Akâsa; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The “Astral Light” is simply the older “sidereal Light” of Paracelsus; and to say that “everything which exists has been evolved from it, and it preserves and reproduces all forms,” as he writes, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolved through (or via ) it, it is not the astral light. The latter is not the container of all things but only the reflector, at best, of this all. Eliphas Lévi writes:—

“The great Magic agent is the fourth emanation of the life principle(we say—it is the first in the inner, and the second in the outer (our) Universe), of which the Sun is the third form. . . for the daystar (the sun) is only the reflection and material shadow of the Central Sun of truth, which illuminates the intellectual (invisible) world of Spirit and which itself is but a gleam borrowed from the ABSOLUTE.”

So far he is right enough. But when the great authority of the Western Kabalists adds that nevertheless, “it is not the immortal Spirit as the Indian Hierophants have imagined”—we answer that he slanders the said Hierophants, as they have said nothing of the kind; while even the Purânic exoteric writings flatly contradict the assertion. No Hindu has ever mistaken Prakriti—the Astral Light being only above the lowest plane of Prakriti, the material Kosmos—for the “immortal Spirit.” Prakriti is ever called Maya, illusion, and is doomed to disappear with the rest, the gods included, at the hour of the Pralaya; for it is shown that Akâsa is not even the Ether, least of all then, we imagine, can it be the Astral Light. Those unable to penetrate beyond the dead letter of the Purânas, have occasionally confused Akâsa with Prakriti, with Ether, and even with the visible Sky! It is true also that those who have invariably translated the term Akâsa by “Ether” (Wilson, for instance), finding it called “the material cause of sound” possessing, moreover, this one single property (Vishnu Purâna), have ignorantly imagined it to be “material,” in the physical sense. True, again, that if the characteristics are accepted literally, then, since nothing material or physical, and therefore conditioned and temporary can be immortal—according to metaphysics and philosophy—it would follow that Akâsa is neither infinite nor immortal. But all this is erroneous, since both the words Pradhâna (primeval matter) and sound, as a property, have been misunderstood; the former term (Pradhâna) being certainly synonymous with Mulaprakriti and Akâsa, and the latter (sound) with the Verbum, the Word or the Logos. This is easy to demonstrate; for it is shown in the following sentences in Vishnu Purâna: “In the beginning there was neither day nor night, nor sky, nor earth, nor darkness, nor light. . . . . Save only ONE, unapprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahma and Pums (Spirit) and Pradhâna (primordial matter).” . . . . (Book I., ch. ii.).

Now, what is Pradhâna, if it is not Mulaprakriti, the root of all, in another aspect? For Pradhâna, though said further on to merge into the Deity as everything else does, in order to leave the ONE absolute during the Pralaya, yet is held as infinite and immortal. The Commentator describes the Deity as: “One Pradhánika Brahma Spirit: THAT, was,” and interprets the compound term as a substantive, not as a derivative word used attributively, i.e., like something conjoined with Pradhâna.* Hence Pradhâna even in the Purânas is an aspect of Parabrahmam, not an evolution, and must be the same as the Vedantic Mulaprakriti. “Prakriti in its primary state is Akâsa,” says a Vedantin scholar (see “Five Years of Theosophy,” p. 169). It is almost abstract Nature.

Akâsa, then, is Pradhâna in another form, and as such cannot be Ether, the ever-invisible agent, courted even by physical Science. Nor is it Astral Light. It is, as said, the noumenon of the seven-fold differentiated Prakriti†—the ever immaculate “Mother” of the fatherless Son, who becomes “Father” on the lower manifested plane. For MAHAT is the first product of Pradhâna, or Akâsa, and Mahat—Universal intelligence “whose characteristic property is Buddhi”—is no other than the Logos, for he is called “Eswara” Brahmâ, Bhâva, etc. (See Linga Purâna, sec. lxx. 12 et seq.; and Vâyu Purâna, but especially the former Purâna—prior, section viii., 67-74). He is, in short, the “Creator” or the divine mind in creative operation, “the cause of all things.” …

[Philippines, 19 May 2012]

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