Living in 4D
Some graphic conceptions of cosmic structure. Note spiral winding and toroid forms.
Source: https://resonance.is/dark-flow-large-scale-cosmic-structure-evidence-multiverse/
This material originally appeared in “The Course” written & revised, 1982 – 1984, by John Lash all rights reserved. No part may be used without consent of the author.
§ Comments and corrections added for Nemeta Course 2 in 2019. I have signaled references to ideas of individuals which I no longer consider valid by #. Further comments added are signaled by §.
TL #1: The Riddle of Spacetime
One of the more beautiful and original literary works of the 20th Century is Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, described (in the author’s own words) as “an interrogation of human values through an honest representation of the human passions,” and artistically modeled on the 4-dimensional spacetime continuum of #Einstein. The first three volumes correspond to the three dimensions of Space: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive. They describe a variety of characters and situations in a kaleidoscopic manner, everything jumbled together in a rich melange of shifting perspectives, with allusions upon allusions and viewpoints juxtaposed in seemingly random ways, and with no consistent tracing-out of temporal connections.
Only the fourth volume, Clea, occurs in Time and exhibits a fixed temporal structure. Its events take place some years after those in the other three volumes, and unfold in regular chronological succession, with all the main characters now “showing their age.” In an addendum to the work, Durrell refers to the modern fusion of Space and Time as one of the greatest “boy meets girl” stories in all history. Here Durrell speaks with the exemplary courage of the artist who wisely accepts the current theories of science as challenging workpoints for creative invention via myth and metaphor.
The way to develop a “human physics” proceeds along similar lines. It does not follow the scientific method in a literal way, but takes the basic features of the scientific world-view as metaphors to be elaborated in artistic and psychological language. It uses scientific ideas as analogue-probes to point out new and as-yet uncharted areas of human potential. In doing so it converts the abstract, inhuman “laws of nature” into the elements of what may be called a magical description: that is, a description that recedes and predisposes the reality it describes, thus serving as the blueprint and impetus for future possibilities of experience and knowledge.
The first task of human physics is to probe and illuminate the idea of spacetime. Not a very tantalizing chore, perhaps. It all depends on how you approach it.
Spacetime
It was # Hermann Minkowski who originally announced that “space and time separately have vanished into the merest shadows, and only a sort of combination of the two preserves any reality.” Taking his word on it, how are we to conceive of the metaphysical marriage?
Well, going by what mathematical physics itself has to tell us, spacetime is really inconceivable except through a set of arcane formulas. This is a typical evasive notion, for science in the 20th Century seems often to pride itself on the fact that its ideas are beyond the range of ordinary experience. They are “irrepresentable” in concepts deriving from naive-intuitive experience. They do not jive with the concepts we use to compute the world according to how it is directly given by our senses. Spacetime, like quarks and quantum-mechanical probability-waves, is non-experiential. You have to push your mind to the fringe of the twilight zone even to get a vague conception of how science describes the world.
The gist of it is, spacetime is a mathematical invention. It is not something we can ever experience in a naive-intuitive way. Rather, it is like a chemical analysis of the diet of an Australian aborigine inscribed on a computer print-out sheet. For the aborigine, this is a long ways from the tangy taste of fresh lizard. To be precise, what Minkowski was really saying was that it had come to the point where the mathematical terms being used to describe the universe demanded the combination of the spatial and temporal aspects into single set of equations. Spacetime came about as a mathematical necessity, as when we count apples and oranges together without distinguishing them, because we want to know how many people we can accommodate for a Halloween dunking game, allowing one appleorange for each contestant. The count is accurate, though no one will win an appleorange, just as no one does not represent an advance in our knowledge of the universe so much as it indicates the admission of a new rule in the game of mathematical physics.
Are we to assume, then, that it is a mere fiction? As a main feature of the scientific world-picture, can it be taken as the analogue-probe to something in human experience? Is there a way of picturing the same thing in another way?
Yab-Yum
One of the oldest cosmologies of the world is contained in the treatises of Hindu Tantra. According to this vision, the universe is seen as arising from a primordial love-act, the erotic union, or maithuna, of the Divine Pair, Shiva and Shakti. These two are envisioned as entwined in a tight and passionate embrace. The posture of mating gods shows up in Tibetan iconography as the yab-yum, one version of which is illustrated on the title page for Part One of the Course. Here the two figures are seated in the classical lotus postures, but sexually interlocked. Usually, the male figure is shown as inert and trance-like while the female is writhing wildly, a contrast which has profound implications in both Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist Tantra.
According to the oldest Hindu versions of the creation-process, the universe is a vast field of vibrations emanating from the love-union of the Divine Pair. (Left: Yab-Yum, Chakrasamvara variant, Tibetan Buddhist thangka).
It consists of various levels or planes of materiality, from subtle to dense, which are imagined as resonating fields thrown off by the ecstatic love-shivers of the intertwining pair. In the extremely complex metaphysical psychology of the Tantras, the unmoving Shiva represents the ground of consciousness which supports and pervades the entire universe, while the writhing Shakti represents the actual power that materializes the resonant fields from which all elements of manifest creation burst forth, like magical flowers appearing in the sky. Thus everything in the universe is generated from the fragrant, succulent, softly throbbing aura of the Divine Lovers. Their maithuna is the fountainhead of creation.
The yab-yum may also be taken for the image of Space and Time in union. Seen as such, it provides a grounding metaphor of the most vivid sort. You can almost taste it, this union of Space and Time into spacetime, whereas the mathematical version of the same thing is only accessible as a rarified concept to the minds of those who happen to be versed in the freeze-dried cyphers of mathematical physics.
§ My view of Einstein was radically changed when I encountered Einstein’s Theory of Relativity from an Epistemological Viewpoint by Ernst Cassirer. The moment of that development, a major step in my intellectual life, would have been in the spring of 1972 in Kittitas, Washington. I had a job at a grain silo that required me to operate a huge vacuum tube to empty loaded trucks. There was plenty of free time between deliveries. I consider myself hugely fortunate to have made that breakthrough at that time.
How accurate is the yab-yum as an image of spacetime will be investigated below, but for now it will suffice to point out how this image serves to keep us grounded in sensuous and “naive-intuitive” experience as we try to wrap our minds around a difficult cosmological premise. This exemplifies the standard procedure of the Course:
Always to keep within the realm of the sensible and perceptible, while scoping the limits of theoretical knowledge.
As indicated in the Prospectus, the supreme hypocrisy of modern science is to include the human being in its world-picture as a physical agent but to devoid it of any physical effect upon the world process. This point can be elaborated as follows:
Science considers the human being as reducible completely to an ensemble of physical-chemical-electrical forces, with even the processes of consciousness and emotion to be viewed as arising from a material basis. According to sociobiology, our genes determine everything about us, from the color of our eyes to the very expression in them, from the texture of our skin to the way we feel and think. By this view, the human being stands within nature as a physical agent produced in all its functions from the effects of natural processes, yet as an agent it is not endowed with the capacity to act upon nature in turn, except through the mechanical extension of sheer force, using tools and technology.
In short, the human being is not physically designed to exert a returning effect upon the physical cosmos. At most we can say that it works upon nature by application of sheer force or manipulation of givens, but it does not act WITH-AND-IN nature as an inherent co-operative agent.
Over against this view stand two others which have an important bearing on the task of developing a human physics capable of describing how the human being can and does exert a returning effect.
Theoria = Beholding
The first view is the ancient or pre-scientific view. This view was largely eclipsed by the advent of Greek physics around 600 BC but persisted in a weak and obscure form well into the late Renaissance. Known it its late and pale phase as “natural philosophy,” it originally goes back to religious and mythical roots. By this view, the human being is seen as the unique and central agent in natural evolution. Accordingly, the regeneration of nature depends upon the moral action of human beings. This viewpoint is, of course, highly theological. In all ancient versions of the world picture, theology and physics are quite inseparable.
The first precise expression of this notion can be traced to the doctrines of Zarathustra, going as far back as 5000 BC. It persisted, with a good many variations, in later versions of the world-picture which continued to include the human being as the focal agent in evolution, and it attained its final flowering in the West in the phenomenon known as ALCHEMY, now generally recognized as the pre-scientific basis of science — specifically, of chemical science, not to mention psychology.
In this ancient view the main premise is succinct and striking: the human being is, dynamically and physically, the crucial catalytic agent in evolution. However, this teaching does not inform us exactly how the human being effectuates the unique catalytic power it embodies. Therefore the ancient view, traditionally considered as deriving from #Zarathustra, is inspiring but incomplete. It tells us that something is possible but it does not tell us how it is possible.
On the other hand, there is the pop-occult view. This is expounded in a myriad works that fill the shelves of occult and metaphysical bookstores. It appears in many versions, corresponding to the proliferation of occult and esoteric movements which have cropped up in the West in the last forty years. The teaching and theories presented in these movements are exemplary of a kind of meta-physics, a super-physics, attempting to pass itself off as a knowledge-system superior to science. The pop-occult view offers many solutions to the how posed by the ancient view.
It is not necessary, or feasible, to enter here into a critical evaluation of these pop-occult theories and methods. In their own way they attempt to revive the spirit of the Mysteries. Seen symptomatically, the occult and metaphysical systems now in vogue indicate how desperately we need a world-picture that includes the human being in it as an effectual agent in evolution. Most of these spiritual disciplines (as they are called) propose the same strategy: achieve self-realization first and effectual contribution to the world will follow from that. In some cases, they offer extensive programs of occult and magical training, aimed at ultimate empowerment of the individual in the world…
But just as the ancient viewpoints are incomplete, by posing a task without explaining how it is to be performed, the pop-occult systems are flawed in the way they ignore the testing riddles posed by the scientific method. Each of these systems has its own standards and rules, presenting itself as an alternative dogma, a system of “meta-physics” that poses all manner of fantastic laws and theories. Thus, these systems attempt to put the human being back into the world-picture as its central agent, but in doing so they turn away completely from the scientific model of the world-process.
Well, so what it they do? Does it matter whether or not the pop-occult programs for self-realization satisfy the criteria of modern science, or conventional psychology? Yes, it does matter, but not because science is an authority whose standards must be met. To say that pop-occult programs violate the scientific method, or ignore it completely, is really to say that they fail to answer the true needs of the time because they do not address the testing riddles embodied in scientific dogma. The Sphinx is a monster whose riddle must be answered before we can pass.
The Human Effect
Now if the ancient view offers a human centered world-picture but does not explain exactly how the human being effectuates its evolutionary role, and if the pop-occult systems tell how but only by posing metaphysical laws that do not answer to the testing riddles of the age, there is still a third way. This is indicated by the opening comment on Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. We do not have to be masters of the scientific method to evolve a genuine “planetary physics,” just as Durrell did not have to be a genius of mathematical physics to produce a set of novels brilliantly and accurately illustrating, in purely human terms, the #”4-dimensional spacetime continuum” of Einstein.
For our purpose, spacetime is a testing riddle which, transformed metaphorically, leads directly to the secret of how the Human can indeed exert a returning effect upon the physics of nature. The riddle of spacetime is a blind for the Mystery of the Human, the first and foremost Mystery now to be reclaimed. And the supreme hypocrisy of science, which excludes the Human from the world-process as a catalyst through including it as a mere end-product, is like a finger pointing to this Mystery. By this very exclusion, we can infer that what is called “spacetime” somehow conceals the secret of the Human Effect.
To investigate this secret, it is only necessary to ask the obvious questions and answer them directly from naive-intuitive experience. For instance:
How do we, the Human, experience Space and Time?
How do we find ourselves situated in Space and Time?
How does our experience of Space differ from that of Time?
How do we experience the coming-together (if at all) of Space and Time?
First-off, is it correct to say that we experience ourselves as existing in Space and Time? No, not really, not exactly. Here it is enlightening to see how a more exact fashioning of language draws attention to the conceptual errors imbuing what we say. To be precise, the question must be: Do we exist in Space and in Time in the same way?
Then the answer is: obviously not.
Certainly, we exist in Space. This is demonstrated by this way we are able to move around in it. Space encompasses us, a vast plenum of seeming emptiness through which we can move freely in all directions. We operate continually with references to its three dimensions (so-called): height or up-down, depth or front-back, and breadth or right-left. All this is simple and obvious and requires no elaboration. But can it be said we exist in Time in a similar or even parallel way.
No, for we cannot move around in Time. With Time, we are confined to a single, persisting moment called NOW. This is only one of the three aspects of Time which may be tentatively compared to the three dimensions of Space. Namely: past, present and future. But as far as we know, we seem only ever to be self-consciously present in one of these, the present. Though we can move at will through the three dimensions of Space, we cannot relocate ourselves from the present into past or future. Yet we have vivid impressions of both past and future. These continually work upon us, effect us. Events in the past and future exert a tremendous determining effect upon what occurs in the present. Thus it might be accurate to say that we do not live in Time but rather in the effects of Time.
Again, a very precise fashioning of language is required to state the situation just as naive-intuitive experience presents it: We are present in Space with Time present to us, so that Time presents its effects in the NOW. Only in the NOW, the present moment, do we feel we are existing in Time — but it could as well be that in the NOW Time is in us… While Space is definitely an extensive, all-surrounding medium in which we exist, the most we can say of Time is that it is present to us, perhaps in us, manifesting its effects in ways that are undeniable; for instance, via memory and anticipation.
Also important to note, is how naive-intuitive experience informs us that Space and Time, though given in quite different ways, are given simultaneously, in one and the same gestalt. Combining these observations yields the following statements:
WE EXPERIENCE OURSELVES AS EXISTING IN SPACE WITH TIME PRESENT TO US, IN SUCH A WAY THAT SPACE AND TIME ARE GIVEN SIMULTANEOUSLY, IN ONE AND THE SAME GESTALT.
This elegant statement can be called “simplific”; meaning that it concentrates on essentials with no sacrifice of the details, in contrast to a simplistic statement that generalizes at the expense of precision.
§ Conclusion: In common sense cosmology, the human animal living on earth can be said to exist — to locate itself — in a 4D continuum comprised of three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
§Fine, but additional to that one dimension of time, NOW, the present moment, there are two other aspects of time, past and future. How does the entire ensemble of three aspects of Space and three aspects of Time fit together in a gestalt, a unitary formation?