Layers & Levels Chapter 11 Kitchen Sink Multidimensionality

Mind: the Metaphysical Elephant in the Room

eternity
in a moment
this little yellow flower

24.05.19

Maybe this chapter should be a little Punto – just making a quick point and walking away, leaving it hanging like fruit on a tree. Because the idea here is just to point out something extremely simple but potentially very helpful.

One of the sub-themes of this Layers and Levels series involves revealing how many esoteric and/or metaphysical notions happen naturally in our daily experiences. Too often we read about such things and put them on high, conceptual pedestals and in so doing distance ourselves from them, an unfortunate error. Recently, whilst mulling over some of the implications of the multi-layered paradigm being explored, it occurred to me that in some sense the various layers and levels being discussed are dimensions.

There are two main dimensions with which we are supposedly familiar, namely time and space ¹ . Time as we perceive it exists simultaneously with space and yet clearly is a different sort of something. Wolfgang Smith in Chapter 10 has posited the aeviternal as a sphere beyond time that coexists with the Intermediate zone that has time but not the space which takes place at the Corporeal Level. In other parlance we could say there is a timeless Absolute level, a time-space bound Relative Level and an Intermediate Level which, similar to Dream, has time but not physical space. I am not necessarily going along with Wolfgang Smith on this, but I do think he makes a valuable contribution by positing these different levels with some beyond time and others bound by time and/or space.

But let me introduce another dimensional level so obvious that both Professor Smith and everyone else has seemingly overlooked.

Ladies and gentlemen, the metaphysical elephant in the room: Mind.

Leaving aside how it might or might not fit into Smith’s cosmology, let us just posit as components of our experienced reality the following triad:

Time Space Mind

In our experience, there is always some sort of time involved, we are aware every day about whether it is morning, afternoon or evening, whether we are children, adults or senior citizens. Similarly with space we are always somewhere and everything we perceive has its own place relative to our own. Moreover our bodies themselves are three-dimensional with weight, height, thickness and various characteristics we explore and exercise continuously via movement, expression, work, living, loving and so forth.

But along with time and space there is also mind without which there is neither any sense of time nor any awareness of being in one place or another, let alone experiencing a body with its various qualities. Furthermore, if we look at our own personal lived experience there is always some quality of knowing or awareness in the mix which is as continuous and fundamental as both time and space. Indeed, if we think it through, this one come before the other two, or put another way: the other two would not exist experientially without it. Furthermore, we cannot directly identify any beginning or end because it is always there, continuously. We can hypothesize that it began at our birth and will end at our death, but both points are experientially unknown to us in the current moment. Though different things continuously appear on the screen of mind the screen itself remains unchanged. In this sense it lacks either shape or location and is, therefore, formless.

So just as the notion of emptiness or formlessness seems like a remote notion which only the very advanced can understand, actually we experience it all the time every day in the way our mind perceives no end of ever-changing, variegated miracles of experience without itself having any definite location or characteristics, without every fundamentally changing. Mind is a living Absolute, a type of aeviternal even.

Just as time and space are dimensions, so also is mind/consciousness/awareness. This also means that just as Mind is a dimension, so also are Chapter Eight’s Speech and Body.

On the one hand, labelling Mind a dimension might be regarded as just semantic jiggery-pokery. But I think it valuable to point out and define as such because it can help us to understand the nature of reality as far more plastic and playful than most modern materialists such as ourselves tend to ascribe to. The objective reality only comprising physical particles is lifeless, inert. Such a view discounts as irrelevant what we witness when simply looking out of our window: the marvellous natural splendour of sky, clouds, trees, birds, flowers and so forth, all of which beautiful qualities clearly resonate in the minds and spirits of all participating. Surely we should embrace such living, breathing, moving and knowing qualities? This knowing of qualitative differences and inherent play is animated in the dimension of mind, of awareness. This is the experiential universe in which we live and which we help engender and shape by our lives and how we live them. It is a play in which we play a part every moment of every day, including when simply washing our dishes in the kitchen sink.

So when we hear about the multidimensional universes proposed by quantum scientists and science fiction writers, isn’t it nice to know that the universe we currently inhabit is indeed multidimensional, moreover with more dimensions than we have generally noticed. Because once Mind is in the mix, we may very well start discovering a few more related dimensions which again we experience every day in our ordinary lives.

Making them possibly not quite so ordinary after all…

1 We call the latter ‘three dimensional’ though practically speaking the first two don’t happen experientially until all three do.