V. CURVED TIME

TIME FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EXPERIMENT AND OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

In some moment of “sudden light” what one of us has not been able to say, with Rossetti,

    “I have been here before,
    But when or how I cannot tell.”

Are such strange hauntings of our House of Life due to the cyclic return of time? Perhaps,—but what is time?

Suppose some one should ask you, “What is an hour?” Your answer might be, “It is the interval marked off by the clock-hand between 1 and 2.” “But what if your clock is running down or speeding up?” To this you would probably reply, “The clock is set and corrected by the earth, the sun and the stars, which are constant in their movements.” But they are not. The earth is known to be running slow, by reason of tide friction, and this is likely to continue until it will revolve on its axis, not once a day, but once a year, presenting always the same face to the sun.

We can only measure time by uniform motion. Observe the vicious circle. Uniform motion means the covering of equal spaces in equal times. But how are we to determine our equal times? Ultimately we have no other criterion save the uniform motion of the clock-hand or the star dial. The very expressions, “uniform motion,” “equal times,” beg the whole question of the nature of time.

Let us then, in this predicament, consider time not from the standpoint of experiment, but of conscious experience—what Bergson calls “real duration.”

Every point along the line of memory, of conscious experience, has been traced out by that unresting stylus we call “the present moment.” The question of its rate of motion we will not raise, as it is one with which we have found ourselves impotent to deal. We believe on the best of evidence that the conscious experience of others is conditioned like our own. For better understanding let us have recourse to a homely analogy: let us think of these more or less parallel lines of individual experience in the semblance of the strands of a skein of flax. Now if, at the present moment, this skein were cut with a straight knife at right angles to its length, the cut end would represent the time plane—that is, the present moment of all—and it would be the same for all providing that the time plane were flat But is it really flat? Isn't the straightness of the knife a mere poverty of human imagination? Existence is always richer and more dramatic than any diagram.

  “Line in nature is not found;
  Unit and universe are round.
  In vain produced, all rays return;
  Evil will bless and ice will burn.”

Undoubtedly the flat time-plane represents with fair accuracy the temporal conditions that obtain in the human aggregate in this world under normal conditions of consciousness, but if we consider our relation to intelligent beings upon distant worlds of the visible universe the conditions might be widely different The time section corresponding to what our straight knife made flat in the case of the flax may be—nay, probably is—strongly curved.

RELATIVITY

This crude analogy haltingly conveys what is meant by curved time. It is an idea which is implicit in the Theory of Relativity. This theory has profoundly modified many of our basic conceptions about the universe in which we are immersed. It is outside the province of this book and beyond the power of its author even so much as to sketch the main outlines of this theory, but certain of its conclusions are indispensable, since they baldly set forth our dilemma in regard to the measurement of space and time. We can measure neither except relatively, because they must be measured one by the other, and no matter how they vary, these variations always compensate one another, leaving us in the same state of ignorance that we were in before.

Suppose that two intelligent beings, one on Mars, let us say, and the other on the earth, should attempt to establish the same moment of time, by the interchange of light signals, or by any other method which the most rigorous science could devise. Assume that they have for this purpose two identically similar and mechanically perfect chronometers, and that every difficulty of manipulation were successfully overcome. Their experiment could end only in failure, and the measure of this failure neither one, in his own place, could possibly know. If, after the experiment, the Martian, chronometer in hand, could be instantly and miraculously transported to the earth, and the two settings compared, they would be found to be different: how different, we do not know.

The reason for the failure of any such experiment anywhere conducted can best be made plain by a crude paraphrase of a classic proposition from Relativity. Suppose it is required to determine the same moment of time at two different places on the earth's surface, as must be attempted in finding their difference in longitude. Take the Observatory at Greenwich for one place, and the observatory at Washington for the other. At the moment the sun is on the meridian of Greenwich, the exact time of crossing is noted and cabled to Washington. The chronometer at Washington is set accordingly, and the time checked back to Greenwich. This message arrives two seconds, say, after the original message was sent. Washington is at once notified of this double transmission interval. On the assumption that HALF of it represents the time the message took to travel from east to west, and the other half the time from west to east again, the Washington chronometer is set one second ahead of the signalled time, to compensate for its part of the loss. When the sun has reached the meridian of Washington, the whole process is repeated, and again as before, half of the time the message has taken to cross and recross the Atlantic is added to the Greenwich record of noon at Washington. The number of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of a second between these two corrected records represents the difference in solar time between the two places, and incidentally the same moment of time has been established for both—at least, so it would appear.

But is it established? That each message took an equal time to travel each way is pure assumption, and happens to be a false one. The accuracy of the result is vitiated by a condition of things to which the Relativists have called attention. Our determination might be defended if Washington and Greenwich could be assumed to remain at rest during the experiments, and some argument might even be made in its favor if we could secure any cosmic assurance that the resultant motion of the earth should be the same when Greenwich signalled its noon to Washington and Washington its noon to Greenwich.

Our present discussion is merely illustrative, or diagrammatic; so we will neglect the velocity of the earth in its orbit round the sun, some forty times greater than that of a cannon ball, and the more uncertain and more vertiginous speed of the whole solar system towards its unknown goal. Let us consider only the rotation of the earth on its axis, the tide-speed of day and night. To fix our idea, this may be taken, in our latitudes, at eighteen thousand miles per day, or perhaps half the speed of a Mauser rifle bullet.

So fast, then, will Washington have been moving to meet the message from Greenwich. So fast will Greenwich have been retreating from Washington's message.

Now the ultimate effect of motion on the time-determination cannot be calculated along any such simple lines as these. Indeed, it cannot be exactly calculated at all, for we have not all the data. But there is certainly some effect. Suppose one rows four miles up a river against a current of two miles per hour, at a rowing speed of four miles per hour. This will take two hours, plainly. The return trip with the river's gift of two miles per hour will evidently require but forty minutes. Two hours and forty minutes for the round trip, then, of eight miles.

Now then, to row eight miles in still water, according to our supposition, would have required but two hours. But, some one objects, the current must help the return trip as much as it hindered the outgoing! Ah, here is the snare that catches rough-and-ready common sense! How long would the double journey have taken if the river current had been faster than our rowing speed? How shall we schedule our trip if we cannot learn the correct speed, or if it varies from minute to minute?

These explanations are necessarily symbolistic rather than demonstrative, but any one who will seriously follow out these lines of thought, or, still better, study the attitude of the hard-headed modern physicist towards our classical geometry and mechanics, cannot fail to realize how conventional, artificial—even phantasmal—are the limitations set by the primitive idea of flat space and straight time.

The inferences which we may draw from our hypothetical experiment are plain. The settings of the two chronometers would be defective, they would not show the same time, but each of them would mark the local time, proper to its own place. There would be no means of detecting the amount of error, since the messages were transmitted by a medium involved with them in their transportation. If only local time can be established, the possibility of a warped time-plane—the curvature of time—is directly opened up. Doubtless it is true that on so relatively minute a scale as is offered by the earth, any deviation from perfect flatness of the time-plane would be so inconsiderable and imperceptible as to make it scientifically negligible; but this by no means follows when we consider our relation to other worlds and other systems.

A similar condition holds with regard to space-distortion. The Theory of Relativity enforces the conclusion that from the standpoint of our conventions in regard to these matters, all bodies involved in transportation undergo a contraction in the direction of that transportation, while their dimensions perpendicular to the transportation remain invariable. This contraction is the same for all bodies. For bodies of low velocity, like the earth, this distortion would be almost immeasurably slight; but great or little, no measuring instruments on the body transporting would ever disclose it, for a measure would undergo the same contraction as the thing measured.

THE SPOON-MAN

These concepts that space and time are not as immutable as they appear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lag or hasten without our being in the least aware, may be made interestingly clear by an illustration first suggested by Helmholtz, of which the following is in the nature of a paraphrase.

If you look at your own image in the shining surface of a teapot, or the back of a silver spoon, all things therein appear grotesquely distorted, and all distances strangely altered. But if you choose to make the bizarre supposition that this spoon-world is real, and your image—the spoon-man—a thinking and speaking being, certain interesting facts could be developed by a discussion between yourself and him.

You say, “Your world is a distorted transcript of the one in which I live.”

“Prove it to me,” says the spoon-man.

With a foot-rule you proceed to make measurements to show the rectangularity of the room in which you are standing. Simultaneously he makes measurements giving the same numerical results; for his foot-rule shrinks and curves in the exact proportion to give the true number of feet when he measures his shrunken and distorted rear wall. No measurement you can apply will prove you in the right, nor him in the wrong. Indeed he is likely to retort upon you that it is your room which is distorted, for he can show that in spite of all its nightmare aspects his world is governed by the same orderly geometry that governs yours.

The above illustration deals purely with space relations, for such relations are easily grasped; but certain distortions in time relations are no less absolutely imperceptible and unprovable. So far from having any advantage over the spoon-man, our plight is his. The Principle of Relativity discovers us in the predicament of the Mikado's “prisoner pent,” condemned to play with crooked cues and elliptical billiard balls, and of the opium victim, for whom “space swells” and time moves sometimes swift and sometimes slow.

THE ORBITAL MOVEMENT OF TIME

Now if our space is curved in higher space, since such curvature is at present undetectable by us, we must assume, as Hinton chose to assume, that it curves in the minute, or, as some astronomers assume, that its curve is vast. These assumptions are not mutually exclusive: they are quite in analogy with the general curvature of the earth's surface which is in no wise interfered with by the lesser curvatures represented by mountains and valleys. It is easiest to think of our space as completely curved in higher space in analogy with the surface of a sphere.

Similarly, if time is curved, the idea of the cyclic return of time naturally (though not inevitably) follows, and the division of the greater cycles into lesser loops; for it is easier to assign this elliptical movement to time than any other, by reason of the orbital movements of the planets and their satellites. What results from conceptions of this order? Amazing things! If our space is curved in higher space, you may be looking toward the back of your own head. If time flows in cycles, in travelling toward to-morrow you may be facing yesterday.

This “eternal return,” so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates time curvature in consciousness. Yugas, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. “Since the soul perpetually runs,” says Zoroaster, “in a certain space of time it passes through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world.” Time curvature is implicit in the Greek idea of the iron, bronze, silver, and golden ages, succeeding each other in the same order: the winter, seed-time, summer and harvest of the larger year. Astrology, seership, prophecy, become plausible on the higher-time hypothesis. From this point of view history becomes less puzzling and paradoxical. What were the Middle Ages but a forgetting of Greek and Roman civilization, and what was the Renaissance but a remembering of them—a striving to re-create the ruined stage-settings and to re-enact the urbane play of Pagan life. The spirit of the Crusades is now again animate throughout Europe. Nations are uniting in a Holy War against the Infidel de nos jours.

But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvature receives its most striking confirmation—those lesser returns and rhythms to which we give the name of periodicity. Before considering these, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must be exposed.

MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything—even thought and emotion—in materiality, has betrayed us into the error of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by which they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the form in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises: it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is turning toward the Idea of Pain.

Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application. Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action, and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.

PERIODICITY

We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar manifestations of it as Nature affords in periodicity. We recognize it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the wanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that go with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrences do not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurement that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return. Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too, may be but “a sleep and a forgetting.” The reason that sleep fails to terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that memory leafs the chasm. Why should death bedreaded any more than bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget? As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, “Whatever has gone into the mind may come out of the mind,” and in a subsequent chapter this aphorism will be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author of it appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night and winter to winter, but such things as “the night-time of the spirit” and “the winter of our discontent” are not recognized as having either cause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states of consciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable in believing that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moods and moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be related to the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winter are related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth.

But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of time curvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions which it is our pleasure now to explore.

VI. SLEEP AND DREAMS

SLEEP

Our space is called three-dimensional because it takes three numbers—measurement in three mutually perpendicular directions—to determine and mark out any particular point from the totality of points. Time, as the individual experiences it, is called one-dimensional for an analogous reason: one number is all that is required to determine and mark out any particular event of a series from all the rest. Now in order to establish a position in a space of four dimensions it would be necessary to measure in four mutually perpendicular directions. Time curvature opens up the possibility of a corresponding higher development in time: one whereby time would be more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure. Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception. Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and the fact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsing all the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that in the time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well as sequence—time ceases to be linear and becomes plane. More remarkable illustrations of the sublimation of the time-sense are to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams.

“Oh, thou that sleepest, what is sleep?” asks the curious Leonardo. Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positive nature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at least effectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists who would have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of blood circulation or of intoxication by accumulation of waste products in the system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel of the life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he has only become unresponsive to the mass of stimuli of the external world which constitutes his environment. As Sidis says, “When our interest in external existence fags and fades away, we go to sleep. When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up the bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far as possible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to our own world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is the interruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is the laying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce with the world.”

The twin concepts of higher space and curved time sanction a view of sleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to be free of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to be free—that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain, and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance of the fourth dimension, where time and space are less rigid to resist the fulfillment of desire.

DREAMS

We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality and irrationality—it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and flotsam “of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,” whose vastitude, whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore—the tired brain in sleep.

For it is the remembered dream alone that is incoherent—the dream that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world, and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable— “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?” DuPrel and others have shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance, trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of thresholds—that they are all related states and merge into one another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it. Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is lifted, but the art of dreaming true remains for the most part unmastered—one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store for the sons and daughters of men.

The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams develop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the product, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong to both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the four-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a higher development of time.

TIME IN DREAMS

The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of consciousness—moments so closely compacted that we think of them as simultaneous—a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment. Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed denouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain.

Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in The Hasheesh Eater, the dreams that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the drug. He says, “I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy.”

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a previous conversation. He says, “As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice kept speaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which hasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun.”

This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale, proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, and that the “dream organ” of consciousness has a time scale of its own. If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and in dreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be sought in the vehicle of consciousness, for clearly the limit of impressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishes the time scale, just as the size of the body with relation to objects establishes the space scale. Time must be different for the ant and the elephant, for example, as space is different.

Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with which impressions succeed one another. Were we capable of receiving only one impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer, the ordinary term of life would seem very short. On the other hand, if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncounted aeons would seem to be lived through in the interval between childhood and old age.

Imagine a music machine so cunningly constructed and adjusted as not only to sound each note and chord in its proper sequence and relation, but to regulate also the duration of the sound vibration. If this machine were operated in such a manner as to play, in a single second of time, the entire overture of an opera which would normally occupy half an hour, we should hear only an unintelligible noise a second long. This would be due to no defect in the sound-producing mechanism, but to the limitations of the sound-receiving mechanism, our auditory apparatus. Could this be altered to conform to the unusual conditions—could it capture and convey to consciousness every note of the overture in a second of time—that second would seem to last half an hour, provided that every other criterion for the measurement of duration were denied for the time being.

Now dreams seem long: we only discover afterwards and by accident their almost incredible brevity. May we not—must we not—infer from this that the body is an organ of many stops and more than one keyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. The theory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts in part for the great longing for sleep. “What is it that is much desired by man, but which they know not while possessing?” again asks Leonardo. “It is sleep,” is his answer. This longing for sleep is more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings is less of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstand the deprivation of food and water longer and better than the deprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondingly greater.

Experiments have been made with mature University students by which they have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experiments were finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a long sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more time than was regular with him. And this has been the experience over and over again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awake for long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation in which they have been placed.

In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of the time sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantable assumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep must be as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, the ratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it would seem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the time element of consciousness.

THE EASTERN TEACHING IN REGARD TO SLEEP AND DREAMS

In this matter of the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment, of sleep and dreams, the most modern psychology and the most ancient wisdom meet on common ground. Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon the problems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—the gross, the subtle and the pure. In the waking state—that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate to materiality—the individual self is as a captive in a citadel of flesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances to enact itself before the windows of his prison. In the dream state, when the more violent vibrations of the body are stilled in sleep, consciousness becomes active in its subtle (four-dimensional) vehicle, and ranges free throughout the ampler spaces of this subtler world. In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition—the individual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longer prismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes the pure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into the primordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, no longer “besprent with seven-hued circumstance,” is swallowed up in duration.

“There are two paths for him, within and without, and they both turn back in a day and a night.... After having subdued by sleep all that belongs to the body, he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping. Having assumed light, he goes again to his place, the golden person, the lonely bird” UPANISHADS.

SPACE IN DREAMS

However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the waking state, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really one of inhibition—that the world is only a “shoal of time”—it is curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to special objects and particular persons—these things form insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit perfectly with the Eastern idea that “he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping.” And to the questions, “How, and from whence?” in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, “By the curvature of time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension.”

Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to account for some of the dream experiences recorded in Human Personality, since he asks for “an intermediate conception of space—something between space as we know it in the material world and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world.” He suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that “intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by our hypothesis.

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to: think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep—“perchance to dream,” Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment—and perhaps age by age as well.

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when the senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world? It is somewhere else, awake to some other environment. Though we may not be able to verify this from our own experience, there are methods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another—that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in the mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that these experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance. The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. The inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the possibility of deception, and for that reason science still looks askance at all evidence drawn from this source. But in essaying to write a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but the mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the object of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of hypnotism and kindred phenomena.

VII. THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance of certain sordid and sinister associations. We are apt to think of them only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profit by itinerant professors and untidy sibyls. Larger knowledge of the night side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view. The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber where a little group of people sit attentive to the voice of one entranced—listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world. This “news from nowhere,” garnered under so-called test conditions and faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerable literature, accessible to all—one with which every well-informed person is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance.

A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists of an apparent confusion between past, present and future. As in the game of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what order the three will turn up—was, is and will be, lose their special significance. Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible of classification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision. Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced. It is the past become present. Present vision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time. Prevision is the future in the present. These various orders of clear-seeing transcend the limits of the actual knowledge and experience of the seer. This classification and these definitions are important only to us, to whom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated in thought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though bound in body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world where these discriminations vanish. Why do they vanish? This question can best be answered by means of a homely analogy.

For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagine yourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelled line at a rate predetermined by the time-table. You approach, reach and pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares. Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can you arrive at places further along the line before the train itself takes you there. Compare this with the freedom to do either of these things, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from the train to an automobile. Then, in effect, you have the freedom of a new dimension. In the one case, you must travel along a single line at a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in any direction and regulate your speed at will. You can go back to a place after the train has left it; you can go forward to some place ahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, and traverse, new country. In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as is trance consciousness to everyday waking life.

MODIFYING THE PAST

Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual's conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual's conscious participation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented by a single line. In sleep and trance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able to travel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own “disassociated memories” but in that greater and more mysterious demesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as the present and the past.

The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation of memory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train of personal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side—that is, as establishing the return of time. It has cleverly been turned to practical account, however, in the treatment of disease. By a series of painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of the role played by “disassociated memories” in causing certain functional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved. It has been shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be—and frequently are—completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious. It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which were determined by the victim's self-suggestion. As a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to get at these disassociated memories and drag them back into the full light of conscious recollection. To get at them, medical psychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing—in short, of any method which will force an entrance into that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may become the present. This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered and transfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to deal with it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with the fixed. Again his past is plastic to the operation of his intelligence and his will. Here is glad news for mortals: the past recoverable and in a manner revocable!

Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance, and this teaching has escaped oblivion because its truth has echoed in so many human hearts. We find that it is possible to deal with our old ignorances in the light of later knowledge. What is this but the self-forgiveness of sins? Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past. Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of this obscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladness of liberation from the payment of old karmic debts. Christ's words, “Thy sins are forgiven,” spoken to the woman who washed his feet with her tears, sanctions this idea—that the past is remediable by knowledge and by love.

Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility of moulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shall befall. If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future. This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and fore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be guided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and reincarnation may appropriately find place here.

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores harmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation, and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause and the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following quotation from the Upanishads: “And as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape.”

Reincarnation is the periodic “dip” of an immortal individual into materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to stimulation, the least.

Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in materiality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of incarnation. When this occurs en masse there transpires that hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep lasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death—in the interval between one life and the next—the specific memories of the personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This center of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly—perhaps retributively—bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and character is self-created. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.

The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, here so sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamental propositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect is the unfolding of the cause in time.

To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connection with higher time would be to force a passage and then not follow where it leads. The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideas of karma and reincarnation. For what is karma but the return of time, the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago? And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep into objective existence and out again, of which the alternation between waking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?

COLONEL DE ROCHAS' EXPERIMENTS

During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that we never really forget anything. We have rediscovered the memory of the subconscious mind. It is generally known that in the mesmeric or somnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for the habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. This but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past incarnations.

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the memory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:

“First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery.

“Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Josephine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of Isere. By means of downward passes she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Josephine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Josephine no longer answers except by signs: she is not yet born. 'She is floating in darkness.' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that 'of course he's there, and he's speaking;' that 'he sees nothing;' and 'he's in the dark.' They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besancon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes gestures of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

“We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He feels himself growing out of his body; but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is, the mother of Josephine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child's body. Until about the seventh year, his body is surrounded by a sort of floating mist, in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

“The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks at first in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is Philomene Carteron.

“'By intensifying the sleep,' adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, 'I induce the manifestations of a living Philomene. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomene Cherpigny; her grandfather on the mother's side was called Pierre Machon and lived in Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.'“

Before her incarnation, Philomene had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in the darkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no time to do wrong. Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch. He obtained analogous and even more surprising results with other subjects.

Maeterlinck's comments upon all this are of negligible value. He pays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation. “There was never a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and probable creed,” he says: yet for all that, it is clear that he has not been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching.

Colonel de Rochas' success, and that of all other experimenters along these lines, is due to their unconscious following of the Eastern method. He himself says that he “avoided everything that should put the subject on a definite tack,”—that is, he refrained from voluntary suggestion.

Having referred so frequently and so familiarly to the Eastern belief in reincarnation, and hinted at a more solid foundation for that belief than the single series of experiments above referred to, it would be unfair to the reader not to gratify his curiosity more fully in regard to these matters. In the light of our hypothesis they take on an importance which justifies their further consideration here.

VIII. THE EASTERN TEACHING

ORIENTAL PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Western physical science, pursued with ardor and devotion for the past hundred years, has attained to a control over physical phenomena little short of magical, but in our understanding and mastery of subjective phenomena we are far behind those Eastern peoples who have made these matters the subject of study and experiment for thousands of years. The informed Hindu, rightly or wrongly, regards the Western practice of hypnotism, both in its methods and in its results, with mingled horror and contempt. To him it is not different from Black Magic, pernicious to operator and subject alike, since it involves an unwarrantable tyranny of the will on the part of the operator, and a dangerous submission to the obsession of an invading will on the part of the subject. Eastern hypnotism—at its highest and best—is profoundly different from Western, in that the sanctity of the individual is respected. Its aim is not to enslave the will, but temporarily to emancipate consciousness, under favorable circumstances, from its physical limitation.

Eastern practical psychology and metaphysics can be understood only through a knowledge of Eastern physics. These we would call transcendental, since they recognize not one theatre of consciousness, but three: the gross, the subtle, and the pure. These correspond to the material, the etherial, and the empyreal worlds of Greek philosophy, and to the physical, astral, and mental planes of modern Theosophy. They may be thought of as universal substance in three different octaves of vibration. Upon this, the trained will of man is able to act directly, for the reason that—as claimed by Balzac—it is a living force.

In Eastern hypnotism the gross vibrations of the physical vehicle are inhibited by the will of the operator, putting the body of the subject to sleep, whereat the consciousness, free in its subtle body, awakens to a dimensionally higher world. The operator, by means of questions, reaps such profit as he may by following the “true dreams" of the entranced subject, scrupulously refraining from imposing his own will further than is necessary to obtain the information which he seeks. The higher power of Eastern hypnotism, totally unknown in the West, consists of inhibiting the subtle vibrations of the astral vehicle also, permitting the consciousness to revert to its “pure" condition. In these deep states of trance the subject is able to communicate knowledges shut away from the generality of men—among them the knowledge of past births.

THE SELF-RECOVERED MEMORY OF PAST BIRTHS

The strength of will necessary to accomplish this higher power of hypnotism is achieved by arduous and long-continued exercises in concentration, by the practice of a strict morality, and by submission to a physical regimen which few Occidentals would care to undergo. Severe as is this training, it is less so than that which the true Yogi imposes upon himself, and its fruits are less. The achievement to which he addresses himself is far beyond that of the most accomplished hypnotist. The Yogi scorns all supernormal powers, even while possessing them. The Yogi, as the word implies—it means literally union—seeks to unite himself with his own higher self, the eternal and immortal part of his own nature, and the achievement of this brings with it the freedom of the three worlds at all times, and in full consciousness. As this involves an inward turning of the mind and will, and the withdrawal from the ordinary active life of average humanity, he alone is witness of his own success. “The rest is silence.”

The knowledge of past births which may be obtained by the questionable and cumbersome method of hypnotism is one of the wayside flowers which the Yogi may pluck, if he will, on his path towards perfection. There are definite rules for the attainment of this knowledge, and they conform so closely to Colonel de Rochas' method—save for the fact that operator and subject are one and not twain—that it will be interesting to give them here. The ensuing passage is from the Vishuddhi Marga, or Path of Purity, a work written some sixteen hundred years ago by the famous sage, Buddhaghosha, whose name signifies the Voice of Buddha, the revealer of Buddha's teachings. It is quoted in Charles Johnston's The Memory of Past Births.

“The devotee, then, who tries for the first time to call to mind former states of existence, should choose a time after breakfast, when he has returned from collecting alms, and is alone and plunged in meditation, and has been absorbed in the four trances in succession. On rising from the fourth trance, which leads to the higher powers, he should consider the event which last took place, namely, his sitting down; next, the spreading of the mat; the entering of the room; the putting away of bowl and robe; his eating; his leaving the village; his going the rounds of the village for alms; his entering the village for alms; his departure from the monastery; his offering adoration in the courts of the shrine and of the Bodhi tree; his washing the bowl; what he did between taking the bowl and rinsing his mouth; what he did at dawn; what he did in the middle watch of the night; what he did in the first watch of the night. Thus he must consider what he did for a whole day and night, going backwards over it in reverse order.

“In the same reverse order he must consider what he did the day before, the day before that, up to the fifth day, the tenth day, a fortnight ago, a month ago, a year ago; and having in the same manner considered the previous ten and twenty years, and so on up to the time of his conception in this birth, he must then consider the name and form which he had at the moment of death in his last birth. But since the name and form of the last birth came quite to an end, and were replaced by others, this point of time is like thick darkness, and difficult to be made out by the mind of any person still deluded. But even such a one should not despair nor say: 'I shall never be able to penetrate beyond conception, or take as the object of my thought the name and form which I had in my last birth, at the moment of death,' but he should again and again enter the trance which leads to the higher powers, and each time he rises from the trance, he should again intend his mind upon that point of time.

“Just as a strong man in cutting down a mighty tree to be used as the peaked roof of a pagoda, if the edge of his axe be turned in lopping off the branches and twigs, will not despair of cutting down the tree, but will go to an iron-worker's shop, have his axe sharpened, return, and go on with his cutting; and if the edge of his axe be turned a second time, he will a second time have it sharpened, and return, and go on with his cutting; and since nothing that he chopped once needs to be chopped again, he will in no long time, when there is nothing left to chop, fell that mighty tree. In the same way the devotee rising from the trance which leads to the higher powers, without considering what he has considered once, and considering only the moment of conception, in no long time will penetrate beyond the moment of conception, and take as his object the name and form which he had at the moment of death, in his last birth.

“His alert attention having become possessed of this knowledge, he can call to mind many former states of existence, as, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, and so on, in the words of the text.”

This quotation casts an interesting light upon Eastern monasticism. The Buddhist monasteries are here revealed as schools of practical psychology, the life of the monk a life of arduous and unceasing labor, but labor of a sort which seems but idleness. The successive “initiations” which are the milestones on the “Path of Perfection” upon which the devotee has set his feet represent successive emancipations of consciousness gained through work and knowledge. Their nature may best be understood by means of a fanciful analogy.

RELEASE

If we assume that all life is conscious life, as much aware of its environment as the freedom of movement of its life vehicle in that environment permits, a corpuscle vibrating in a solid would have a certain sense of space and of movement in space gained from its own experience. Now imagine the solid, which is its world, to be subjected to the influence of heat. When the temperature reached a certain point the solid would transform itself into a liquid. To the corpuscle all the old barriers would seem to be broken down; space would be different, time would be different, and its world a different place. Again, at another increase of temperature, when the liquid became a gas, the corpuscle would experience a further emancipation: it would possess a further freedom, with all the facts of its universe to learn anew.

Each of these successive crises would constitute for it an initiation, and since the heat has acted upon it from within, causing an expansion of its life vehicle, it would seem to itself to have attained to these new freedoms through self-development.

The parallel is now plain to the reader: the corpuscle is the Yogi, bent on liberation: the heat which warms him is the Divine Love, centered in his heart, his initiations are the successive emancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attains Nirvana—inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world. As latent heat resides in the corpuscle, so is Release hidden in the heart—release from time and space. The perception of this prompted the exultant apostrophe of Buddha, “Looking for the maker of this tabernacle, I have run through a course of many births, not finding him; and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained the extinction of all desires.”

Upon the mystery of Nirvana the Higher Space Hypothesis casts not a little light. To “approach the Eternal” can only be to approach a condition where time is not. Because there is an escape from time in proportion as space dimensions are added to, and assimilated by, consciousness, any development involving this element of space conquest (and evolution is itself such a development) involves time annihilation also. To be in a state of desire is to be conditioned by a limitation, because one can desire only that which one has not or is not. The extinction of a desire is only another name for the transcending of a limitation—of all desires, of all limitations. If these limitations are of space they are of time also; therefore is the “approach to the Eternal” through the “extinction of all desire.” Christ said, “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar of the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out”—go out, that is, into incarnation—into “time, besprent with seven-hued circumstance.”

Such are the testimonies of the world-saviors regarding the means and end of liberation. Below them on the evolutionary ladder stand the mystics, earth-bound, but soul-free; below them, in turn, yet far above common humanity, stand the men of genius, caught still in the net of passion, but able, in their work, to reflect something of the glory of the supernal world. Let us consider, in the next two chapters, each of these in turn.