Part 12

"Also, figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other animals, wrought in wood, stone, and all kinds of materials, together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and, as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and others silent"

"You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners."

"They resemble us," I replied. "For let me ask you, in the first place, whether persons so confined could have seen anything of themselves or of each other, beyond the shadows thrown by the fire upon the part of the cavern facing them."

"Certainly not, if you suppose them to have been compelled all their lifetime to keep their heads unmoved."

"And is not their knowledge of the things carried past them equally limited?"

"Unquestionably it is."

"And if they were able to converse with one another, do you not think that they would be in the habit of giving names to the objects which they saw before them?"

"Doubtless they would."

"Again: if their prison house returned an echo from the part facing them, whenever one of the passers-by opened his lips, to what, let me ask you, could they refer the voice, if not to the shadow which was passing?"

"Unquestionably they would refer it to that."

"Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of the manufactured articles to be the only realities."

"Without a doubt they would."

Plato (in the person of Socrates) then considers what would happen if the course of nature brought to the prisoners a release from their fetters and a remedy for their foolishness, and concludes as follows:

"Now this imaginary case, my dear Glaucon, you must apply in all its parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the eye reveals, to the prison-house, and the light of the fire therein to the power of the sun; and if, by the upward ascent and the contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of the soul in the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of my own surmises ... the view which I take of the subject is to the following effect."

Briefly, the view taken is that the "Form of Good" perceived by the mind is the source of everything that is perceived by the senses. This is equivalent to saying that the objects of our three-space world are projections of higher-dimensional realities--that there is a supernal world related to this world as a body is related to the shadow which it casts.

SWEDENBORG

Emerson, in his Representative Men, chose Swedenborg as the representative mystic. He accepted Swedenborg's way of looking at the world as universally characteristic of the mystical temperament. The Higher Space Theory was unheard of in Swedenborg's day, nevertheless in his religious writings--thick clouds shot with lightning--the idea is implicit and sometimes even expressed, though in a terminology all his own.

To Swedenborg's vision, as to Plato's, this physical world is a world of ultimates, in all things correspondent to the casual world, which he names "heaven." "It is to be observed," he says, "that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause."

According to Swedenborg, conditions in "heaven" are different from those in the world: space is different: distance is different He says, "Space in heaven is not like space in the world, for space in the world is fixed, and therefore measurable: but in heaven it is not fixed and therefore cannot be measured."

Herein is suggested a fluidic condition, singularly in accord with certain modern conceptions in theoretical physics. Commenting upon the significance of Lobatchewsky's and Bolyai's work along the lines of non-Euclidian geometry, Hinton says, "By immersing the conception of distance in matter, to which it properly belongs, it promises to be of the greatest aid in analysis, for the effective distance of any two particles is the result of complex material conditions, and cannot be measured by hard and fast rules."

The higher correlative of physical distance is a difference of state or condition, according to the Norwegian seer. "Those are far apart who differ much," he says "and those are near who differ little." Distance in the spiritual world, he declares, originates solely "in the difference in the state of their minds, and in the heavenly world, from the difference in the state of their loves." This immediately suggests the Oriental teaching that the place and human environment into which a man is born have been determined by his own thoughts, desires, and affections in anterior existences, and that instant by instant all are determining their future births. The reader to whom the idea of reincarnation is repellent or unfamiliar may not be prepared to go this length, but he must at least grant that in the span of a single lifetime thought and desire determine action, and consequently, position in space. The ambitious man goes from the village to the city; the lover of nature seeks the wilds; the misanthrope avoids his fellowmen, the gregarious man gravitates to crowds. We seek out those whom we love, we avoid those whom we dislike; everywhere the forces of attraction and repulsion play their part in determining the tangled orbits of our every-day lives. In other words, the subjective, and (hypothetically) higher activity in every man records itself in a world of three dimensions as action upon an environment. Thought expresses itself in action, and so flows outward into space.

Observe how perfectly this fits in with Swedenborg's contention that physical remoteness has for its higher correspondence a difference of love and of interest; and physical juxtaposition, a similarity of these. In heaven, he says, "Angels of similar character are as it were spontaneously drawn together." So would it be on earth, but for impediments inherent in our terrestrial space. Swedenborg's angels are men freed from these limitations. We suffer because the free thing in us is hampered by the restrictions of a space to which it is not native. Reason sufficient for such restriction is apparent in the success that crowns every effort at the annihilation of space, and the augmentation of power and knowledge that such effort brings. It would appear that a narrowing of interest and endeavor is always the price of efficiency. The angel is confined to "the narrow prison of the breast" that it may react upon matter just as an axe is narrowed to an edge that it may cleave.

MAN THE SPACE-EATER

Man has been called the thinking animal. Space-eater would be a more appropriate title, since he so dauntlessly and persistently addresses himself to overcoming the limitations of his space. To realize his success in this, compare, for example, the voyage of Columbus' caravels with that of an ocean liner; or traveling by stage coach with train de luxe. Consider the telephone, the phonograph, the cinematograph, from the standpoint of space-conquest--and wireless telegraphy which sends forth messages in every direction, over sea and land. Most impressive of all are the achievements in the domain of astronomy. One by one the sky has yielded its amazing secrets, till the mind roams free among the stars. The reason why there are to-day so many men braving death in the air is because the conquest of the third dimension is the task to which the Zeit-Geist has for the moment addressed itself, and these intrepid aviators are its chosen instruments--sacrificial pawns in the dimension-gaining game.

All these things are only the outward and visible signs of the angel, incarnate in a world of three dimensions, striving to realize higher spatial, or heavenly, conditions. This spectacle, for example, of a millionaire hurled across a continent in a special train to be present at the bedside of a stricken dear one, may be interpreted as the endeavor of an incarnate soul to achieve, with the aid of human ingenuity applied to space annihilation, that which, discarnate, it could compass without delay or effort.

THE WITHIN AND WITHOUT

In Swedenborg's heaven "all communicate by the extension of the sphere which goes forth from the life of every one. The sphere of their life is the sphere of their affections of love and hate."

This is as fair a description of thought transference and its necessary condition as could well be devised, for as in wireless telegraphy, its mechanical counterpart, it depends upon synchronism of vibration in a "sphere which goes forth from the life of every one." Thought transference and kindred phenomena in which all categories of space and time lose their significance baffle our understanding because they appear to involve the idea of being in two places--in many places--at once, a thing manifestly at variance with our own conscious experience. It is as though the pen point should suddenly become the sheet of paper. But strange as are these matters and mysterious as are their method, no other hypothesis so well explains them as that they are higher-dimensional experiences of the self. We have the universal testimony of all mystics that the attainment of mystical consciousness is by inward contemplation--turning the mind back upon itself. Swedenborg says, "It can in no case be said that heaven is outside of any one, but it is within him for every angel participates in the heaven around him by virtue of the heaven which is within him." Christ said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," and there is a saying attributed to Him to the effect that "When the outside becomes the inside, then the Kingdom of Heaven is come." These and such arcane sayings as "Know Thyself" engraved upon the lintels of ancient temples of initiation, powerfully suggest the possibility that by penetrating to the center of our individual consciousness we expand outwardly into the cosmic consciousness as though in and out were the positive and negative of a new dimension. By exerting a force in the negative direction upon a slender column of water in a hydraulic press, it is possible to raise in the positive direction a vast bulk of water with which that column, through the mechanism of the press, is connected. This is because both columns, the little and the big, enclose one body of fluid. The attainment of higher states of consciousness is potential in every one, for the reason that the consciousness of a greater being flows through each individual.