Consider a table. It has three dimensions of space that we can measure and see: a height, width, and breadth. As does every object in our universe. In imagaining what the table would look like in higher dimensions, I was understandably stumped. I couldn't do it. In barking up the tree of extra dimensional space, I blinded myself to the very obvious dimension of time, which was literally staring me in the face. As well as a height, width and a breadth, a table has a lifespan, a history, spanning a path from its construction and destruction. The same is true of everything, our own selves notswithstanding.

The Theory of Six Dimensions says: "Some say there are three or four dimensions, some say more dimensions (10, 11, and 26 are current favorites of some physicists), some say there are an infinite number of dimensions. But Ouspensky's explanation of the six dimensions resolves that dilemma by showing how six dimensions are both all-inclusive and yet only partial.

"This entire area is at best only theoretical for me, but I find it gives me a valuable point of view in dealing with ideas of dimension, space and time. Ouspensky first developed his thoughts on the six dimensions prior to meeting the fourth way, but was later struck by certain correlations between the teaching of cosmoses in the fourth way and his thoughts on dimensions. He continued to develop and refine his theory of dimensions, but I know of no final conclusion, or even late summation of it by him. What follows is my understanding of Ouspensky's ideas on this topic. (Click here to read the full article.)

or perhaps a palace (of which there are no shortage in Bangkok!) I am walking along a road lined with tropically green trees; the sky is a tropical overcast. Becoming lucid, I realize this is a good chance to enjoy some astral travel, so I take control of my movements -- step by step. But lucidity is just another form of dreaming and in my experience, it is impossible to consciously control a dream. You have to ride the tide. My fist thought is to find a hotel where I can case myself in the city. Interestingly, this recalls/follows on from my difficulty in finding a hotel in my dream visit to Koh Phan Gan island a few weeks earlier. I enter some hotel facing across the road to the airport/palace, and manage to find a room. Someone is accompanying me, I am not sure whom but there is a vageu feeling it is my Uncle Phil (not really my uncle) who I travelled around Vietnam with last year (the holiday codenamed Family Ties. Then again, I might have been by myself. (This lack of clarity in dreams could be a suggestion of the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics, or a revelation that there are infinite possibilities in 6th Dimensional Space/Time.) These days when I feel myself lucid in a dream (please note: this so called lucidity may well be sham, a trick of the dream to maintain its control over you) my first impulse is to hunt down the nearest good looking female. Just like Blazes Boylan out of Ulysses. The immensity of the task of conscious individuation lies precisely in the fact that the collective mind, as I have said, is constituted not only of the existing generations but also by the whole cumulative influence of its hereditary antecedents which are continually active at the level of the subconscious mind. Consciousness may become conditioned by such hereditary elements but it is neither caused by them nor is it inherently bound by them. One of the most important conclusions that can be drawn from these considerations is that a true civilization, what I have called a civilization of the universe, one that is really in harmony with the universe, is the achievement of an organic integration of conscious individuals, not the exteriorization of the mass psyche, or the collective mind. Only the conscious individual is connected to reality. For the collective man, reality is mediated through the unconscious mass mind and therefore he is fundamentally delusional. Even in the modern case where a succession of unique individuals have contributed to the economic and technological improvement of the man of the mass, the result is not an advancement of civilization because it does not result in the emergence of the conscious individual. The contributions of the great individual have historically been put at the service of the usual narcissism of the mass mind once they have become part of it. Hence mankind remains completely tribalist and fundamentally primitive in its disposition for which patriotism and nationalism are but thin disguises. Civilization is a not a possibility of the mass mind. Reality is relational and real knowledge therefore means total integration with reality, not distance, not separation, not provincialism, not isolation, not prejudice. The conscious self-responsible, self-originated and self-realized individual - one who has directly realized reality - is the only true man or woman, the only source of truth and sanity, the only foundation of a civilization worthy of the name and the only hope for the future [5]. Since the mass mind of terrestrial humanity is passive - the direct realization and identification with reality having being broken or rendered ineffective - it is necessarily controlled by that which lies outside it, and given the overwhelming obstructions in its historical development, it follows that the ultimate controllers of the current humanity are not beings who have transcended the psychic domain by virtue of a unique realization. They are not individuals or truly individuated beings who have conquered the collective unconsciousness of the mass psyche on the basis of a sublime realization of the spirit or consciousness itself. The controllers of the present humanity pertain to yet another mass mind that lies outside the vectors and coordinates of the terrestrial plane and properly pertain to an extra-human species. This species clearly demonstrates a vaster psychic amplitude and mechanical cunning than does the present humanity in virtue of which this species is able to dominate it. Even the Gods of the religions have been exceptionally useful tools for its purposes. There is a faction on earth that sees the human species as another animal to be husbanded. ____________________________ [4] For a consideration of the cosmological significance of the moon as the locus of the gene pool of humanity in the process of anthropogenesis see The Solar Body, pp. 16-18. [5] To complete these considerations it should be noted that the �gleader�h of the masses is not involved with their evolution and he has no interest in it. The mass merely recognizes itself in him; he is the mirror and focus of their aspirations and tendencies. The true leader of humanity in the universal sense is not one who merely consoles man; he is at war with the mass mind and all its passive narcissistic illusions. In reality he is a catalyst for the emergence of the self-realized individual and all individuals from the crowd. Authoritarianism is inseparable from the psychological structure of the collective mind.