Cora Lenore Williams

“ As you wend your way down the Avenue of Time you feel an inexpressive lightness, a sensation of being lifted out of yourself. The moment seems unique. Things are unrelated. There is no concern of proportion. The place is one of immediacy. You wander from the ephemeral to the ephemeral. 'Time is,' you say, in childish glee. And you hasten to assemble images as many and as disparate as possible, believing that you are drinking life at its fountain head. ”

“ And when we have once obtained our spiritual balance we shall doubtless find that our space world has taken to itself another direction, inconceivable as that now seems.
Space is more than room wherein to move about; it is, first of all, the room in which we think, and upon how we do so depends the number of its dimensions. If the attention has become 'riveted to the object of its practical interest' to the extent that this is the only good the creature knows, then is its thought-form one-dimensional even though its bodily movements are three-spaced. ”

“ How marvelously strange the sight of the world-consciousness passing over into a higher thought-form! Each individual element suffering reversal to take its proper place in the new world-order! You see positive becoming negative, negative becoming positive, and Evolution giving place to Involution - a process as yet uncomprehended by our narrow thought. And the secret of the world-struggle across the sea you know; men passing their nature's bound ”

“ That the majority of persons are still feeling their way over the surface of things is attested by the general mental ineptitude for the study of solid geometry. Depth and height play little part in our physical perception. For most of us the third dimension is practically unknown beyond the reach of a few feet. A Beachey soaring aloft - why all the bravado of curve and loop? Sooner or later he will fall to his death. Ay, verily! but his is a joyous martyrdom making for the evolution of consciousness. Not always shall we crawl like flies the surface of our globe! ”

“ And again that 'vexing, forward reaching sense of some more noble permanence' urges you on. 'Time was;' you joyously affirm for man to come to the knowledge of an eternal self. But that, your tradition and education have led you to believe, is still yonder, worlds away. And you image the soul in its quest passing from life to life as you are now passing from building to building, from hall to hall. But glad the thought - there will be courts wherein you may perhaps glimpse the plan of the whole and so gather strength and purpose for another housing. ”

“ While a man's space-world is limited by his thought, it is, on the other hand, as boundless as his thought. That the world evolves with our consciousness, is at once the philosophy of 'Creative Evolution' and of the higher space theory. Our present spatial milieu has settled down to a seemingly three dimensional finality because our thought-form has become so habitual as to give rise to certain geometric axioms. All we need in order to come to a fourth-dimensional consciousness, said Henri Poincare, 'the greatest of moderns,' is a new table of distribution ”

“ A feeling of detachment comes over you. This is augmented by the burst of light and color that flashes across the field of your vision, and for the first time you understand the purport of those 'banners yellow, glorious, golden' which 'do float and flow.' They seem to bear you on breezes of their own creating to the freedom of outer spaces. ”

“ So long as man knew only an absolute good was his world a definitely determined world. Now that the question of relative values obtrudes itself on every side the range of consciousness promises to be infinite. ”

“ While many books have been written descriptive of the Exposition, none has succeeded in accounting completely for the joy we have in yonder miracle of beauty. And this through no fault of the writers. When all has been said concerning plan and execution there is still a subtle something not spatialized for consciousness. Length, breadth, and height do not suffice to set forth the ways of our delight in it. ”

“ And in that light we have to regard what of worth and meaning the Exposition has for us.
Although the scientist has found it useful on occasion to postulate the fourth dimension, he has not thought necessary as yet to put it in the category of reality; much less has the layman. Consequently the mathematician holds the sole title to its knowledge unless we recognize the claims of the medium to a fourth-dimensional insight.
There is much, however, today which points to our coming to such perception as the natural result of our evolution and quite apart from geometrical abstractions or occultism. ”

“ Progress in thought and imagination naturally followed, with the result that these were lifted above the majority and came thereby to larger vision. Failure may well be the measure of extension in a new dimension.
The significance of the much fumbling and groping of earth's creatures is the desire for a larger outlook. Man has to feel his way out of a three-fold world even as the worm out of his hole. That we are hearing much of the principle of relativity is perhaps the best indication we have that the collective human consciousness is about to enter a higher dimension. ”

“ Henceforth the multiplicity that you seek is one of organization and has nothing to do with number. 'Time was,' you proclaim, that consciousness might sift out the irrelevant. As you pass from collection to collection individual fact becomes prolonged into general law and science dominates the field of thought. A thousand years are as a day when subsumed by its laws. You look at the objects of man's creating with new eyes. ”

“ As the past fuses with the present you awaken to a larger privilege of life than man now knows. You feel yourself encompassed by truth, vital and strong. This art, erstwhile so baffling, stands revealed as the struggle of a superhuman entity for self-expression. The tendency toward God has to begin anew with each round of the life-spiral - that eternal circle which life pursues. ”

“ Man's interest having in these latter days become largely centered on value-judgments and estimates of worth, an exposition affords perhaps the most general application of the principle of relativity, bringing it home to the collective mind in an intimately human way as nothing else could: - With nation vying with nation and individual with individual in all of the arts and crafts of human industry, absolute standards must needs vanish, and with their going we may be able to set up such a distribution of values as will give new direction to our efforts. ”

“ In the mad bustle and noise you are conscious only of mechanical power; of speed - always of speed. Your voice far away - 'The child, oh, the child!' A swooning sensation. Men's faces as triangles and horses with countless legs. ”

“ However that may be, the industrial competition to which, in the last analysis, the Exposition owes its inception, is pushing many aside from the beaten highways into hitherto unexplored regions of thought and endeavor, and who is to say that we may not in consequence find a direction quite at right angles to all of our wonted ways of thinking. Certainly there could be no more fitting occasion for the launching of a new thought-form than a great international exposition. ”

“ You see the holy city coming down out of heaven - her light is like unto a stone most precious, as it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal, and the walls thereof are adorned with all manner of precious stones - and they brought the glory and the honor of the nations into it. ”

“ Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too large for the personality of the owner; the right setting for certain idiosyncrasies; character building as a constructive process; the ideal as the limit of an infinite series - each pointing the way, as you think, to a different vista of human outlook. ”

“ Why, then, do you seek to spatialize it?' And the layman out of his mental repugnance to things mathematical echoes, 'Why?' We have to answer that the process of creative evolution makes imperative the transfixion by the intellect of these so-called spiritual perceptions. Although the intuition transcends the intelligence in its grasp of beauty and truth, we may attain to the higher insight it has to offer only if the things of the spirit become known to the intellect - a point in Bergson's philosophy which the majority of his readers overlook. ”

“ Unity, balance, and harmony become manifest as spatial properties - you had been taught to regard them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment. You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its particular insight. ”

“ Miles, half dead with fear, said that it fell down of itself and that with the noise and fire that followed he was almost frightened out of his wits. Friar Bacon asked him if it did not speak.
'Yes,' quoth Miles, 'it spake, but to no purpose.'
General Status of the Fourth-Dimensional Theory
The human mind has so long followed its early cow-paths through the wilderness of sense that great hardihood is required even to suggest that there may be other and better ways of traversing the empirical common. ”

“ The routine and monotony of daily toil become glorified in the light that now falls athwart your vision. You learn to substitute for your personal feeling the common impersonal element felt by the many. ”

“ The intuitive person is a person who has suffered. When conditions press sufficiently hard, a new table of distribution may be the only means for survival. Thus we proceed to make a virtue of necessity and so come to the recognition of other values which we denominate spiritual because we have not as yet spatialized them. The caterpillar has to mount the twig to find the tender green that is his food, but, he solaces himself for the journey by thinking himself a creature of the light. ”

“ What you had taken for reality is but its cross-section - so does this empirical realm stand to the higher world of your spirit, even as a plane to a solid.
Now you turn your attention from things to relations in the hope of getting at truth in the large. A passage in Plato comes vividly to your mind. 'For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason ”

“ You see that truth has made itself manifest through the long repetition of the same fundamental theme. That which is unique and personal you are surprised to find of less value than the habit perfected by patient practice. ”

“ Rockefeller knows his goal and attains it, regardless of other moral worths. For these the way is certain. They can suffer no deflection since there are no relative values, no possible choices. Their purpose makes the road one-dimensional. ”

“ Carpenter, in an interesting study of what he calls Intermediate Types, shows that the seers and spiritually-minded come to be such because they found themselves differing in some wise from their fellows, and dwelling on that difference had their minds turned inward. ”

“ Then called Friar Bacon his man Miles, and told him that it was not unknown to him what pains Friar Bungey and himself had taken for three weeks space only to make and to hear the Brazen Head speak, which if they did not, then had they lost all their labor, and all England had a great loss thereby. Therefore he entreated Miles that he would watch whilst that they slept and call them if the head spake. 'Fear not (good master) , I will harken and attend, upon the head and if it do chance to speak, I will call you ”