Journeys into the bright world

Coming closer to the earth level a flood of related concepts deluged my brain. I thought of the astrological aspects which are the basis of horoscopy, of the angles of pyramids that exemplified the value of pi, and most of all of the 360 archaic Egyptian gods of time. Observing how the flow of energies that enlivened the bright world were directed into meaningful designs I understood why the Egyptian priests deified the degrees of the circle even to the extent that this was the core of the teachings of their mystery schools. Was this why the ancient occultists of many different cultures worshipped the sacred properties of numbers? Amazing to think that our remote forefathers had so well comprehended the animating geometry of the universe!

I remembered my guru. It seemed that he too had passed this way and blazed a trail of light that others could follow. Then, as always, inside my inside-out world there was my "alter-self" Howard. Our angle was the same as though we had been fused into one dichotomous being. We were moving together like intermeshed strands of purple and gold silk and there was something important about the direction we were taking. Evidently we were making a turn that would create a significant definition of the design we were weaving within a much larger tapestry of flowing colors. We were changing the angle and I could see that this was going to be hard to accomplish. The point was too acute; there was pain in the process of making so sharp a bend. It was like the screech of chalk on a blackboard or the burnt-rubber pressure on the tires of a car as it swerves round a corner. I was trying to engineer this vector so that I would be on the outer edge. In this way it seemed as though I might shield him from the abrasiveness of the contact with the harsh surface that was resisting our progress. "Please, please put him on the inside and me on the outside!" I begged. "I don't want him to have to feel that pain. Let me be at the point of the angle."

But already the gods of the 360 degrees were retreating back to their austere Olympus, the angels of the angles had flattened into black and white lines, and space was a place of static surfaces. As always, the awareness of de-amplifying my consciousness, like stepping down an electrical current, was accompanied by the frustration of realizing that there was still no way that I could link these contrasting realms. There simply weren't enough memory fibers to make the connections, or even to create a verbal reconstruction. However, a mathematical analogy did suggest itself.

It seemed to me that my situation was similar to that which a two-dimensional plane being who, for the sake of analogy I will call "Mr. Square," might encounter if he were trying to explain the dynamics of a cube to his surfacy friends. If Mr. Square could contrive to rise up and down at an angle to his accustomed plane he might to some extent experience the qualities of the cube. He might even become cognizant of the fact that he had always been a cross section of this fuller, deeper state of being. But once the vertical motion ceased he would again become hopelessly horizontal.

Now if Mr. Square could somehow get "high" and thereby ascend into the third dimension his two-dimensional compadres would probably assume that he had merely gone away, leaving only the projected shadow of himself behind. They might also suppose that he had in some mysterious way been diminished, whereas actually the scope of his awareness had increased. Indeed, his square associates would be apt to resent his elevation, since in their normal superficial condition there would be no way they could follow after. To make matters worse, any description Mr. Square could give of the modus operandi of the cube would be bound to sound like arrant nonsense unless other squares could be induced to take the same journey. Only by experiencing "cubeness" themselves could they understand.

Now as I sank back to my own personal Flatland it appeared that there were identifiable reference points along the downward arc. Not that there were any clear lines of demarcation between one stratum and the next; there weren't. It did seem, however, as though I was passing through a spectrum of states of consciousness in which one hue or tonality imperceptibly gave way to the next.

At the highest (or deepest) level there was the cosmatrix, that all-in-all state of purely transcendent, but nonetheless totally sentient, being. According to our illustration the cosmatrix would constitute a dimension even higher than that of the cube-a dimension where everything is everywhere. Probably the best word to describe the quality of that formless fullness is interpenetration.