When I was very young, I did not know the world. The world made itself known to me quite gradually, in small steps that I can now only imagine. I cannot remember these steps. They happened before memory was born. I felt these steps.
Discomfort was a feeling that I learned quickly to correct. My first feelings were those untenable positions which caused me to turn away from irritation into a position of familiarity and contentment.
I kicked and moved to find my snugness, not knowing or caring that my attempt to find relief caused pain to another.
The experience of the world of the womb was lost to me. The world was making itself known, but I knew nothing of the world. I knew nothing about myself for I was not a self. I was as close to being nothing as I have ever been.
Yet in this nothing there was feeling. There was touch. There were senses. I could hear the world making music and the sounds of the body in which I was immersed. Because I did not breath, I could not smell. Because I had no smell, I could not taste. Because I had no eyes I could not see. But there was touch and there was sound and there was feeling. The rest would come later.
The world makes itself known to us slowly.
The distress that I felt at the moment of my birth was sudden and momentous. I left the familiar world of water and warmth, felt the pressure of extreme movement that I had never felt before. The world made me know of constriction and limits. I felt movement and the pressures of my movement, then release to an alien place that made me feel misery. I longed briefly to return to what I had forever known and felt the strange coldness that I had never felt before. Air replaced water. I opened my mouth and tasted of the air. The air forced its way into me and I smelled the horrid stench of it for the first time. I became so agonizingly uncomfortable that I cried.
Since that first forlorn cry that expressed both my surprise and extreme distress, the world has continued to make itself known to me.
That process has not changed much.
The instinct to recoil from aggravation and hurt and return to a known luxury has been retained, but the added senses produced a curiosity to know more about that which caused me displeasure.
In giant strides of courage, I accepted some irritation and began to realize that there was more to everything than I had learned.
Some learning produced not only pleasure but sensations that I welcomed with bright smiles. I knew nothing of time and little of space. I was immersed fully in the now. Then I opened my eyes and the world came roaring in.
It takes both awareness and information processing for dimensions to come into view. To see something in three dimensions, one has to view from outside and above the apparent dimensions. A circle on a plane—like a drawing on paper—does not appear as a sphere until viewed from above the plane. The added property of the height, added to the width and length, creates an object in space that becomes manifest in three dimensions, where height and width, and length are experienced.
The third-dimension requires conscious awareness in that it must be seen from above the plane to become an independent object. Two-dimensional objects are not distinguished from their background until they are observed from above the plane.
Duration is not only an element of time but an element of length. “Length” commonly refers to physical size, as in the length, width, and depth of an object. Duration measures the time period, but the term length is also used to define a period of time as in: “How long have you been waiting?”
ZERO DIMENSION
Being equals existence. Nothing cannot exist because nothing has no being. Nothing was always a human conception, not a natural fact. The Arabian people, Babylonians, and the Mayans all came up with the conception of zero.
The ideas of infinities and endless eternities are foreign to human thought. To believe that one can travel on forever and never see an edge of the universe feels intuitively preposterous. To believe that time goes on infinitely forward and eternally backward is an awkward conception. We all have a hard time coming to terms with infinity. The idea that space is infinite means that infinitely huge sections of space can never be seen. What would be the point in that? We always need a point on which to anchor.
The same holds true for the universe. All things in space and time have beginnings and ends. They are finite. Yet, because the finite exists, then there must be that which is not finite. It is called the infinite. The ‘undefined’ is an even better term.
The same is true of nothing. Nothing does not exist. It is the opposite of existence in its ‘non-existence’.
Yet, nothing exists. It also does not exist. Or is it in a ‘superposition’ where it is both?
The reason infinity can go on forever is that there is nothing there at all. Without time and space, there are no things… nothing.
If the infinite does not exist in time and space, does it exist at all? Is there a geometric plane above time and space where awareness can experience no time and no space and still be aware?
I believe the answer to that is, yes. There is the point… the universal point, the invisible center of every circle in the universe. That point is one-dimensional because it is all there is––just one single point that contains the entire universe. No matter how large or small this point is thought to be, it is still all there is and it is the center of everything everywhere.
We can only speculate about the original point and how the physical world emerges from this super-positioned point that is every place and at the center of everything. The infinite includes the finite, the indefinite, and all that all exists.
I think it is imperative to come to terms with infinity. We need to understand that which is beyond time and space. It is the obvious source of existence and the physical universe. We cannot get away from a first cause that came from nothing. For explanation, some turn to the idea of an eternal universe. Yet, that theory cannot take wing and fly as a conception in the temporal world where all begins and ends. Even if energy is fundamental, the question remains: “From what did it spring?” Is energy eternal? Did it come from nothing?
The zero-dimension must be indefinite. It cannot be more than a point or it would be two-dimensional. It cannot be less than a point or it would have no existence. As such, the indefinite holds everything within it, including the finite. The indefinite is not limited by dimensional views. The indefinite has no reason to distinguish between the realms of physical and mental being for they are molded as one.
Consciousness creates the idea of time, then measures the duration as well. We need to understand that the realization of our world is both a mental conception and a physical reality. The world around us has myriads of viewpoints that change as our consciousness moves through the now. The person I call myself is but a collection of memories, hereditary information, experiences, learning, emotions, and patterns of thinking. We are here in the now because this is the only place for us to be. We cannot be in the past or the future except in mental processes. The physicality of our existence changes as the mental universe changes. Being in the now is a conscious and continuous mental state.
Our self-consciousness creates the dichotomy between mental being and physical being. They are two separate states of awareness. Each is equally welcome and both have their own dimensional viewpoints, complete duplicates of one another except one is coded into the physical state and the other is informational and coded into the mental state. The informational data of the universe is coded in the mental aspect (2-D). It is a part of the infinite while simultaneously, through entanglement, the data is physically encoded in the temporal world of physicality.
We are always in the middle. We create the ideas of time and motion and eternity and project them into a timeless era where they do not belong. Timelessness must exist, though we can barely imagine it. Experience, we deduce, cannot be had without events in time. How, then, can timelessness be possible?
It is possible because the now is always present. To be present in the now requires no thought or action at all. It simply is. Physical change occurs in time but time is not the cause of the change. It is the movement of conscious awareness through the eternal line of the electric now that creates change. Change is a movement that when measured, becomes time. But it is the conscious awareness that is doing the movement. It is the awareness that creates the change we call movement. The physical counterpoint of awareness is pressure, the force responsible for all physical movement.
We can surmise that the tool called mathematics springs from a natural source because the universe exhibits mathematical precision and patterns from the very start. Perhaps human minds create mathematics, but the muse is Nature itself. Mathematics and equations are commonly used to define what physical changes can produce.
In order to be useful, knowledge and information must be stored. Genetics and the nervous system are where we store our personal data. I think that the totality of this information and experience is stored mentally in the second dimension and physically in the third. The infinite plane of the second-dimension is similar to a universal soft drive that records all reality perpetually. Alas, this can probably never be proved, but it makes for great hope. It would answer the question as to why the universe destroys and recreates its parts.
Knowledge and experience form our four-dimensional viewpoints. Modern viewpoints revolve around the physical aspects of the mind. These scientific interpretations often hold that the mind is roughly identical to the brain and is reducible to physical phenomena such as the firing of neurons and the chemical encodings of memory.
Yet, we did not always think in this manner. Throughout the age of human reasoning, the mind has been connected to the psyche. The term “soul” is often used synonymously with the psyche—which includes the totality of the human mind, both the conscious and unconscious elements. The soul has long been thought to be the immortal aspect of the human condition, a ghostly spirit where the personality and moral compass resides.
Carl Jung used the words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ as they are the same word in the German language. Of this he wrote: “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797)
In a universe paired with a mental aspect and a physical aspect, would the realities in each pair be different? The first dimension of the one point would be the same in both, but the second dimension of the two points becoming connected to form a line would be different. It is through this difference that they come to be independent entities. If one point is infinite and the other is temporal, then the world line of the eternal second dimension would be a straight line to infinity in the mental state. Meanwhile, the world line of the finite point would curve and eventually return to its own starting point, creating an orbit—a geometric figure. It would be temporal and physical because it had a beginning and an ending.
Infinity is not one thing. Even infinity must be paired to its opposite, the finite. Infinity simply has no beginning nor end. There can be many infinities in a larger infinity because small infinities, like endless numbers, take up no space at all and are not in time.
Objects exist beyond my personal awareness—such as the place I dwell, the people I know, and the universe I inhabit. They too exist in the now. They are a product of consciousness, but they cannot be of my consciousness alone. They are in the consciousness of all.
We all have a similar basic vision of the world about us. A common sharing of conscious knowledge between existing entities and objects obviously occurs––though much of nature works through an unconscious mental process. Our conceptions reside in the mental state and deal directly with the infinite process of energy transformation and electrical connections. This mental state has to be of universal proportion—just as the physical state is of universal proportion.
When we realize that objective awareness is essential for the very existence of objects, we come to understand the unity of all. We are all objects. We are mental conceptions, dreams that are molded together in the one universe that provides adventure, knowledge, and experience for all from the interactions of its individual parts.
Kenneth Harper Finton 