3 time dimensions of the mind

“That’s where the light gets in…”

OK, this will sound seriously weird, especially if you have no practice with meditation or similar spiritual practices. As usual, lots of reading can substitute for actual practice, with the exception that if you get some small detail wrong, you end up with a completely different world. But that is life, I guess. And practice is hard to come by, as timelessness takes time.

Read on, then, and be amazed. Or suspicious or something. For I will tell you that unlike the world of physics, the world of the mind has not just one but at least 3 time dimensions. Or I suppose you could say that the fourth dimension, time, is the entrance to the next two. In any case, please bear in mind that this is about the human mind and how it relates to its world. It is not a substitute for physics, nor is physics a substitute for it.

OK, time is the fourth dimension. I hope we can agree to that. All creatures unfold in time, but humans may be the only who can wander it more or less at will. So you may not remember what you ate for dinner on May 25, 2000. Or perhaps you do. Most of us don’t even remember what weekday it was. But there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of memories we can revisit. Many of them at will, others by surprise. And probably unlike any other animal, we can make elaborate projections of the future and work toward them. In fact, we seem to do this more or less automatically. (OK, perhaps not the “work toward” part, unless it is something very exciting.) We spend so much time in the past and the future – and in futures that will never be, and even pasts that never were – that there is very little time left for now.

But the tiny little pinhole of Now is actually the key to eternity. This may sound counter-intuitive, but thousands of years of experience bears it out. If we just flicker past the now on our way into some other time, we will ever lack depth. This depth is the fifth dimension. You can envision it as follows: The small point in time that is Now, can be extended from the surface consciousness into the unconscious. This is a mental dimension, of course. But it is none the less real, because for the most part it is your unconscious that makes your big decisions, while you run after it and rationalize them.

We could say that the unconscious consists of the subconscious (shadow) and supraconscious (light). In Freud’s coarse terms, the id and the superego, although his idea of both is appallingly simplistic. There is a whole kingdom within. Actually more like a universe, but we have to start small. If you could remember your dreams, chances are there are more people within you than you will get to know in a lifetime. -Of course, remembering dreams is a mixed pleasure, as I have mentioned elsewhere. In your unconscious you may meet your guardian angel, but you will also meet your “guardian devil”. There are forces on both sides keeping you in balance, as if you were chained to each of them with heavy iron, so that any attempt to move in either direction will be painfully slow.

This is intentional: If we could just change ourselves on a whim, we would likely change into someone popular, or someone who excels at work, or someone who we think would be loved by a special someone. And if it was that simple, just snap your fingers and you have changed, then most of us would throw away our real self on a whim and likely an illusion at that. Therefore we are chained this way, so that we can neither fall too fast nor rise speedily. When someone rattles the chains, the laws of nature (not to say society) perceives it as madness and puts on the brakes. Whether the madness consists in attacking your neighbor with an axe or giving your money to the poor, the response is pretty much the same. And so we are fettered, for our own safety. But in truth it is possible to move, though it takes an inordinate amount of energy, or dedication, or time, or any combination of these.

This was a glimpse into the effects of extending the tiny pinhole of time from the surface consciousness into the fifth dimension of the mental substance. By the simple process of abiding in the Now, observing calmly, you will experience things you could not otherwise see, at least not and retain your sanity. Such as it is.

As you open up to what is outside (or should we say inside) the surface consciousness, your personal bubble of Now will begin to grow. The pinprick hole in the dark bowl over your head will widen. This is another dimension of time. You will now not only notice that there are things moving outside (or inside) the wall. As you continue to observe these things in the Now, the opening will slowly widen. I have referred to this as “spiritual aperture”. In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. In the more poetic words of Leonard Cohen:
There is a crack, a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets in.

As your aperture widens, the tiny hole that became a line into the unknown becomes a column. You can now see more than just light and shadow moving. A vista opens unlike anything we have seen in the outer world, and beyond the words of our languages. Poetry, allegory or the ravings of a lunatic are your choices if you try to share what you have “seen”.

Actually I haven’t seen all that much, because I haven’t taken this practice all that seriously for all that long. This may be convenient for you, or I might have just given up on saying anything at all, since it would be beyond your wildest imagination. Unless, of course, you have been there, as a lot of people have throughout history. But not anything even resembling a majority. Probably not even a multitude, however many that is.

Are there more dimensions? We started with the horizontal time dimension through which our minds habitually run back and forth. Through a tiny hole in this, we shot at right angles into the unconscious, or mental substance. Then we widened this aperture, yet another direction. So beyond these, how many more dimensions are there? Light knows. I have just commenced dabbling in this stuff. It seems that even if I get my full 120 years, it will be hard to get beyond dabbling. But if I do, I will tell you… Light willing. Then again I, or even you, could be gone long before that. So this is it for now.

2 thoughts on “3 time dimensions of the mind

  1. How do you tell the difference between seeing another dimension, divine inspiration and a hallucination?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *