Adam Blatner

One dimension is a line, two dimensions is a plane, and our world is experienced in three dimensions, length, breadth, height. But in truth, we experience it in what Einstein called a fourth dimension of time, and our experiencing it might well be viewed as from a fifth dimension: Mind.

Let’s then reflect how existence involves all these dimensions. Animals exist and grow in planes and truly, also, in height. There’s basic registering in consciousness, from rudimentary to complex; Animals do that. Maybe plant cells. It operates at the fifth dimension, a level beyond the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time.

Then there’s another level, so to speak—an awareness of mind itself. Humans alone can reflect on what they were going to do and what they might have done, or should have done instead. They speculate: What I might yet do. Or perhaps this other course of action would be better. The sub-junctive tense is what marks the complexification that is human consciousness.

But wait! Mind can think about its own workings. It can say, “Whoa! I got fooled!” And it can inquire, “How does that work?” Indeed, there are a thousand ways human beings fool them-selves. To be able to think—including questioning thinking, noticing that some thinking is foolish—is yet another level, a seventh level. This is my contribution: Humans can notice that thinking about thinking is different from thinking, just as thinking is different from the 5th level of bare perception or registering.

To restate: Plant cells operate at the borderline of basic perception, too, as do bacteria, between the 4th and 5th dimension. One could conceivably suggest that an even more rudimentary form of mind operates below the 5th dimension, and more, beyond the 7th dimension.

Now, another proposal: At the 8th dimension one perceives mystically. It is not really a mystery, though. Everything is part of the great mind of God. Which is not to say that all-of-God can be perceived at the eighth dimension, but it is sort-of “obvious” in a non-visual-perception way that it’s true. I don’t presume to speak of higher dimensions, and really I can only speak of the eighth dimension having barely tasted it—but confabulated in the aforementioned paragraphs what that barely perceived–intuited super-reality is. I don’t presume to speak any more rationally about this layer than our dogs can barely perceive that humans have something that make them the boss.

The point, to say again in summary, is that mind is layered and each includes the lesser dimensions. They’re all true, insofar as they really exist; but each is also subsidiary to the level above it. This also challenges philosophical thinking about existence! Existence happens in layers? Come on! But yes, as it has been described above….I think.