Saturday, December 12, 2009

On time.

Before I sit down to practice, tonight (which will take monumental effort, as today was quite taxing), I'd like to mention something that jumped right out and grabbed me, last night, in the Ouspensky book. It was a fairly in-depth description of his theory on dimensions, and the beginnings of how they relate to Gurdjieff's octaves. Seeing this in print was thrilling and alarming, because I'd never seen anything like this in a book before, but it was directly related to some speculation on dimensions that I'd written down, back in May/June 2009. True, someone had already gotten to it before me, but the fact that it was Ouspensky was a much bigger shock.

This is something that I'll be uploading to this journal in full, in the future, but a quick sketch of the idea from June:

We are already aware of multiple dimensions: 1, 2, and 3, with the 4th dimension being time.

Think, instead, of dimensions in this way. The first dimension is a line. One might think of it as a ray, with a beginning from a point, but it is a line.

The second is essentially two lines, an x and a y, yielding a graph.

The third adds depth, or z, creating a three-dimensional graph. One could measure out a cube or a 3-d shape.

The fourth adds time. This allows things to not just exist, but to exist with a directionality to it. It is important to think of this as ray-based, as opposed to a continuous line, simply because time exists in one direction, essentially.

The fifth dimension adds other time, or an alternative directionality to the time. It could simply be the other direction, so to speak, or it could be to another spot, but the really interesting work starts when one realizes that, as before, time can only go in one direction, so it's entirely possible for time to work backwards and end in the same spot as forwards. If it doesn't make any sense, it's because it really doesn't: we don't perceive time in this fashion. It has one direction for us, and to think of the concept of time moving backwards as we raise a glass of water to our lips, and to ostensibly be raising the glass as we're putting it down, does not compute in our brains.

The sixth dimension adds a third directionality, which essentially adds depth to the picture. Now, everything in a given field of measurement is happening at once. A block of time is literally a block of time.

And how is a seventh dimension to be perceived and described?

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