The 4th Dimension

For a long time, occult authors and practitioners have used pseudo-scientific language to make their views seem more credible to a materialist viewpoint (cough cough, New Age, cough cough, Chaos Magick).

Now, one of the terms that get thrown around a lot is “4D” or “5D, 6D” etc. Basically, the idea is that spirits reside in a higher dimension. This speaks as if these Dimensions are spaces completely separate from each other, like different Universes, but spirits can see “below” like how we can see below to the 2nd and 1st Dimension.

So, clearly this is talking about Spatial Dimensions. But, spirits do not exist in the 4th Dimension, or the 5th, or the 6th, and so on. This is because, if they did, we would be able to see them. The idea of them seeing below is not very well thought out. If they were higher (spatial) dimensional beings, and we could not see them, their mode of movement would be… extremely… strange.

The thing is, everything in our world occupies all 3 Spatial Dimensions at once. But of course we can get a good idea of what 1st and 2nd Dimensional existence would look like, since we can actually see these dimensions. Now, the thing is, if spirits were of a higher dimension, they would also occupy all dimensions at once. We would be able to see what parts of them exist in the 3 Dimensions that we perceive, they would just look pretty strange, with their shape appearing to warp in odd looking ways and how they move would look extremely strange, but we would still be able to perceive part of them.

So, no, spirits do not live in a higher dimension. Using terms like 4D and 5D etc. looks appealing to some, and gives the illusion of materialistic validation (As in, that these spirits are actually material beings, which popularly seems more “sci-fi”) but in reality doesn’t make much sense.
Be careful when occult authors throw around seemingly scientific terms, such as talking about quantum mechanics, etc. as often times it’s in reality pseudo-scientific, and no actual scientist in that field would agree with them.

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True, everything physical. What about things like data, soundwaves, microwaves? No argument from me, just something that popped into my head. From a spatial or perceptive perspective they’re more conceptual than anything… but I guess I say that because I rely on sight as a primary sense :thinking:

I can accept people using “4D” to refer to time, linear or non-linear, but in a “3D” world, space and time are inseparable, hence “spacetime”. That said, I guess you can refer to time as an additional dimension, because a dimension is something we use to measure, and time is a given measurement unit as well.

I feel attacked :joy:
(kidding, it is an interesting subject and one worth discussing)

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Ok. Let’s do a thought experiment:
let’s pretend we’re an ant
and a foot is coming to crush it.

Does it see the foot? I argue you’re right it sees
A 2D surface coming to crush it and not the 3D
Foot, because it does run away, so at least it senses something.

Now, in my life in my opinion we don’t see spirits
because the material they made of is mostly
Energy and so light mostly passes through them and isn’t reflected back to our eyes and so not processed to an image by our brains.

So, I argue that we have no way of knowing how many dimensions they live in if we don’t ask them directly.

Maybe, some occult authors asked the spirits in how many dimensions they exist, why don’t you ask them yourself.

I myself don’t do it yet because only recently began working with prince Orobas and haven’t really worked with entities before and maybe I’ll ask him.

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It depends on how you think of “dimensions”. If we say spirits exist in or on another dimension (exclusively), that just seems nonsensical. It’s like asking if humans exist in the first dimension. We kinda both do and do not at the same time. We can mostly conceptualise a single dimensional realm, but we can’t ourselves exist or participate in an environment with only a single dimension. However we likely could not exist in further dimensions without being present in 1D.

2D is easier for modern and postmodern humans, since we can look at images on a flat surface (like watching a TV show or viewing art), we can understand it, and we can easily extrapolate a third dimension from the second, since it’s what we’re used to.

:point_up:

This is the same argument for things like: say, if two mages lived in the same city and both summoned the same spirit at the same time, would the demon appear to only one of the mages? Or appear to both simultaneously, even if each mage had a different perceptual experience of the spirit? Generally we would think it’s the latter. Spirits can interact with the 3D the same way I can draw something on a piece of paper and say I’m interacting with the “2D world”.

Sorry if I am butchering your thread @Dankquanicus :sweat_smile:

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This is how Jerry Alan Johnson breaks it down, for what it’s worth:

When I leave my body, people generally cannot hear or see me, despite my best efforts. It’s not my physical body that’s interacting with them, but I’m very much there in the room with them.

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I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said that these things are spiritual. Physicists don’t seem to doubt that they’re physical, either.

I think these articles can give more insight. Although It’s a bit beyond my knowledge, currently! But as far as I can tell, that sound is physical is not something doubted. I would imagine the same of microwaves. With data as a concept, I would agree that it is may be more spiritual. But stored data here is physical, at least.

Absolutely! Good point. Some people use 4D to refer to the three Spatial Dimensions plus Time. With that, they say that we do live in a world with 4 Dimensions. Of course, time still occupies and acts on the 3 Spatial Dimensions.

There is a very nice paragraph in ‘The Master Works of Chaos Magick’ by Adam Blackthorne that came to my mind while writing this:

“You can make up reasons to believe it’s all true. This is what most Chaos Magick books help you with – they talk about the way the mind exists in a moment of quantum flux and a string of multiverse potential. That sort of stuff. It sounds scientific and exciting, but it’s really just gobbledygook to convince you that the reality of magick is backed up by science. Most scientists would laugh you out of the room if they read it; better to just trust your hunch about magick.”
(Blackthorne, Adam. The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality (pp. 5-6). Kindle Edition.)

I really liked @Veil’s response. I’ll still give my comment on this:

If ants somehow see in 2D despite having evolved as three dimensional beings, then they do still see us, as you say. We would just look pretty weird to them, and they can’t see every piece of us, but they can always see part of us when looking at us (I mean, we occupy a lot of the first dimension and second dimension, after all). It would just look like some pieces of us seem to warp in and out of existence and likely our shape would morph in strange-looking ways.

This brings me to another point: They don’t seem to be detectable. I don’t think scientists have found any detectable evidence of spirits before, otherwise that would be quite something. So, they must be something undetectable. Like dark energy, as you say. But if they are composed of dark energy, how can they think? How can they actually live? We must remember, we are an extremely complex body that is built up of an immense amount of interacting parts of different substances that allows us to actually think and function. Would pure physical “energy” have the ability to think, to speak, to interact in the complex ways that they do?

I’ve been meaning to write another topic about this, and I have spoken about it before on here, but direct spiritual experience is not a reliable way to get to truth. And honestly it is worth speaking about, since a lot of beginner occultists have gone down some terrible routes because they completely trusted what the spirits told them and what they experienced.

I have no doubt that some occultists have been told by spirits that they exist in 4, or 5, or 6, and so on dimensions. And I also have no doubt that some occultists have been told by spirits that they exist in none!

Direct spiritual experience is not reliable for a few reasons: One, much of it may be illusory, produced by the mind rather than being from a spirit outside of us. Second, spirits have their own opinions about things. Third, they may have motives that cause them to give conflicting answers to different people. So, we have to be careful about fully trusting what every spirit tells us.

This is actually an excellent reference for what I mean by this entire post. Thanks for linking this excerpt from Jerry Alan Johnson.

So, it says that the fourth and fifth dimensions transcend space. That completely removes it from spatial dimensions entirely! A spatial dimension is of course spatial, so when something transcends space, it is no longer part of any spatial dimension.
Even better yet, for the fifth dimension, the author says that it transcends both time and space. Some consider us to be 4 Dimensional beings with Time as the 4th Dimension.

But the author is clearly talking about spatial dimensions since the Third Dimension he explains is the physical world, saying it is three dimensional. So, the fourth and fifth dimensions are supposed to be composed of so many dimensions, but the author has actually removed dimensions from them.

It’s nice sci-fi looking language that looks as if it gives physical or popular credibility to the idea but when you think about it, doesn’t make any sense at all.

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Oh yes, they are undoubtedly a product of the physical world, I didn’t mean to appear to be questioning that. Rather trying to help conceptualise something that is beyond the range of human perception (without certain tools… Or senses) and how that might relate to the topic

The gobbledygook is my guilty pleasure. (Also don’t ever you read Carroll’s Apophenion. :sweat_smile:)

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Ahh I think I understand! Yes, the senses are our way of processing what is out there in the world. What things might actually “look” like, well, things would probably seem a lot stranger. It’s interesting to think about. I remember an article from John Michael Greer suggesting that the ancient animals on Earth that lived hundreds of millions of years ago likely experienced the world very differently from how animals (Including us) do today, if I remember correctly. Senses are a way of organizing information and navigating that.

Haha, I’ve been thinking of reading into Chaos Magick, and I have been thinking of writing some book reviews, so I’m sorry, I might get into it some day! :stuck_out_tongue: But for now, I’m quite focused, so it may take quite a while before I get to it!

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Hehehe, all good. I personally love a bit of pop-sci in my praxis, and that is very likely to overlap with pseudoscience as actual research gets filtered down into digestible content for the unwashed masses. However I’m highly trusting and assume that the authors have researched appropriately :stuck_out_tongue:

I remember reading something (an article? book? maybe watching a film or video? I hardly remember) about how supposedly creatures who were more prone to “subjective” rather than “objective” perspective were more… evolved. Or how evolution did not favour creatures who “saw reality for what it truly was”. Or something like that.

Can’t find the exact thing again, but I did find a social sciences paper talking about something rather similar:

There are few metaphysical solipsists; indeed, any such solipsist must, to be consistent, insist that there is but one. The rest of us, to the contrary, are willing to wager, e.g., when we buy life insurance, that there is a reality that is objective in the sense that it would exist even if we did not.

The majority of us believe, moreover, that our perceptual experiences give genuine insight into the true nature of that objective reality. In particular, most of us believe that the reason we have perceptual experiences of a space-time world containing animate and inanimate objects is because the objective world is indeed spatiotemporal and in fact contains such objects. We admit that our perceptions do not exhaustively describe the objective world: we cannot see, without aid of technology, the very small, the very large, the very distant; nor can we see beyond the 400 to 650 nanometer window of electromagnetic wavelengths to which our eyes are tuned. And we admit that we are subject, on occasion, to illusions and misperceptions. But within these limits we are confident that our perceptions give us a real window into the true nature of the objective world.

:woman_shrugging: an interesting perspective… I say, after reading only the introduction and nothing further

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image


Ref: Initiation Into Hermetics (Franz Bardon)

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Thanks for the excerpt! From it, he says that the Astral Plane has no time or space. So, again, it cannot be called the 4th Dimension (What dimensions?) It would more accurately be called No Dimension (the keyword is more). You could view it as a degree of condensation of the Spirit. But, if this is only the 3rd Degree, what is more dense than matter? It seems to end here. So, it’s interesting how this term floated around.

But, on the excerpt, I wouldn’t personally agree with all of it. I don’t think that the Astral Plane is entirely timeless and spaceless, but rather part of it is the underlying Spirit of all things. Although, time is likely experienced a bit… weirdly, there. And space is a bit illusory, since all things are connected to one another and Spirit travels to a place near instantanously. But there are also degrees of strength (Not all objects are as strongly sympathetically linked to a person, for example).

Although, it contains the image of time and space that is present in the material world. And so, the Sun, Moon, Planets, and Stars visible in the sky move, an indication of some image of time present in the Astral world, but again, it’s… different. If you’ve observed your magick very intently, you may have observed that some rituals had an effect before it was even performed. Spirits seem to know what you will say before you have said the whole sentence. But, the ritual hasn’t seemed to affect you your whole life, but took an effect close to the time.

I believe this way of how time works is seen in the Astral world with how Aspects between the Planets work. Aspects are when Planets are specific degrees from one another. When two Planets are 30 Degrees from one another, they are beholding each other in a Sextile Aspect. However, the Planets have Orbs, which make it so that the effect of this Aspect take a level of effect before the Aspect is perfected. And when they seperate from this aspect, part of it is still felt for some time afterwards.

As far as I’ve seen, more modern cosmologies are quite simplified from the traditional, dividing things into orders like Etheric > Astral > Material. But traditionally, it is a bit more extensive. One order from a particular influential Medieval Arabic text is this:

God/τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ/The Good/The One > Intellect > Spirit > Quintessence > Primum Mobile > Sphere of the Fixed Stars > Sphere of Saturn > Sphere of Jupiter > Sphere of Mars > Sphere of Sol > Sphere of Venus > Sphere of Mercury > Sphere of Luna > Prima Materia > The Elements, and then what is composed of the Elements.

I’d say, what is above the Primum Mobile is beyond time and space.

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Also, if we look at Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, part of the Astral would have a beginning. That is, the Soul and Spirit of the Cosmos. And this is why Time was created, the image of Eternity, so that the Cosmos may endure forever.

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