Adam Blatner

I am rather sure that there are dimensions beyond what most folks can perceive, contemplate, travel in or beyond. My “magnum opus” is an illustrated philosophical contemplation of the many facets of existence, most of which few people imagine much less contemplate.

There’s one dimension, which means more or less of anything. More brightness or contrast in the printing of these words, for example, or the way the letters are formed, more or less legibly. Large or small, elaborate or simple—and those are just parameters of letters, for goodness sake. What then for articulated concepts about philosophy, an acceptable possible tract on what seems to be magic.

In two dimensions, pattern exists, and color, and all diagrams and drawn forms.

Three dimensions gives substance. That’s what many people think of as “reality,” but if you think of it, there is birth, growth, elaboration, staleness, aging, familiarity, boredom, sickness, death—all four dimensional phenomena.

The fifth dimension is real—that’s the point here! And it offers not only perception of what was thought to be real at the lower dimensions, but alternative interpre-tations of whatever transpires next.

The sixth dimension perceives all this, realizes that thought and perception can be fooled. It knows about illusions and propaganda, rhetoric and sloppy thinking. But it doesn’t recognize itself (compounded thinking), or even thinking, as a dimension. Pity.

At the seventh dimension all of human mind is included: Hallucinations, psychotic thinking, mysticism, songs and sentimentality, feelings of belonging, exclusion, victory or humiliation. Non-thinking mentation in its many forms operates here. Logic and coherence occupy a somewhat privileged stance, but not absolutely. Demagogues use slogans that bypass clear thought.

The eighth dimension is called mystical or integrative: It recognizes eras of though, paradigms, the multiplicity of implicit thought in architecture and environmental design. One must figuratively stand on tiptoe to get intuitions about how mind forms are related.

It’s not as if the other levels are unreal or even less real. They’re all real! But there are other realities that are also real! It‘s not less real, but rather a different kind of reality! That’s hard to wrap your mind around, perhaps, because most educated people have bought into the idea that there is indeed a reality, one reality, and all should submit to whatever evaluations we conclude (it seems correctly) about it. But indeed, it’s just one of many potential paradigms.

Lastly, we may figuratively (again) stand on tiptoe and dare to imagine yet other realities that we can’t precisely make out—but we sense they’re there! All this comes from considering perspectives as dimensions of mind-reality.