The creation of this article I had somewhere in the back of my head for a long time, because, although it does not talk about travels as such, it is an explanation of the key things necessary to at least minimally understand what multidimensionality in the Astral is, and how big It is in itself. The information contained in this article will also be a kind of background to everything I have said so far and background to almost everything I will talk about.
Understanding the things described in this article is a key to comprehend the basic cause and effect relations concerning the Astral. I also don’t see how Obenaut could be unaware of the things described here and yet consider himself as a traveller who understands the structure of the Astral and how it works.
So let’s talk about multidimensionality understood as extension of known to us Time-Space and about its consequences. I will try to use the most accessible language that is possible here, because I realize that not everyone loves complicated concepts. For some of you, most of the things I will write about here are probably familiar and will not bring much new information, but I invite you to read anyway, bear with me please.
I. Overview of dimensions.
In order to talk about what consequences the existence of extra dimensions has for 4-dimensional beings, it is necessary to describe each successive dimension starting from the first, as I think this will give some idea of how limited we are by being confined in 4-dimensions.
The information contained in this section is not intended to explain how the 4 dimensions we know function, but what the consequences may be of meeting a being who functions in more dimensions than those known to humans, and how difficult it is to understand this being until, for the purposes of communication, it begins to function in the dimensions we perceive.
One dimension:
Imagine a hypothetical one-dimensional space that is simply a straight line. To illustrate the whole I have invented a being which is called a Ball, although in one dimension the Ball does not realize that it is actually a Ball - it sees itself rather as a dot - so it does not feel absolutely the spatial figure that a three-dimensional Ball is. One-dimensional space is a straight line on which our Ball can be located at any point on that line and can be turned in any direction - although there are only two directions "forward" and "backward". However, the Ball does not know that someone (us) is watching it right now from the side, i.e. from an additional dimension; in fact, the Ball does not even know that it has a side. The whole world of the Ball is what it sees in front of it and behind it - and this in a very close, straight line. It also does not know that something can be above it or below it, so if a 2-dimensional being, which can be on any point of the X-axis of our Ball and on any point of the Y-axis, which is the second dimension (width), were to enter the world of the Ball then this being could peep at our Ball from the side in such a way that the Ball would not realize that someone is watching it - after all, our Ball cannot turn its head sideways, and even if it did with difficulty, it would see nothing there anyway, because it cannot perceive this extra dimension. Our 2-dimensional traveler, could throw a stone at our Ball from the side, which would annihilate the Ball, and the Ball would not even realize what had happened to it.
Two dimensions:
The traveler described earlier can perceive and function in 2-dimensional space, i.e. on the X and Y axis. He is not able to move smoothly, because for this he needs an additional dimension, i.e. time - motion is, after all, a sequence of events in which the position changes over time. However, let us simplify the matter and assume that our traveler can somehow move. Let us imagine it as a cube which moves on a flat table, while we observe it from above. So our traveler will be able to move in any direction of the table, but it still can't look up because it doesn't have access to the third dimension. Our cube doesn't know it is a cube - it thinks it is a square because it only notices these two areas, namely length and width. It lacks access to the third dimension, which would make it a spatial, three-dimensional figure. The cube perceives the Ball not as a point, but as a circle, a flat disc. (In fact, he perceives the circle as a line the length of the diameter of the circle, but let's stay with the flat disk).
Into the land of the Cube enters the Octahedron, which is a three dimensional structure - by the way, Octahedron is a nice word, isn't it 🙂 I like it. Of course our Square thinks that the Octahedron is representative of his species, after all, from his, flat perspective these two guys look the same (that is, looking at the image from above, flat, where we only perceive 2 dimensions).
The Octahedron, however, uses its extra dimension and floats upwards. For our Cube (a.k.a. Square), it has completely disappeared from sight - it has simply vanished into thin air. The Octahedron looks down on our Cube (aka. Square) and throws a huge stone at it. Boom! A wet spot is left of the Cube. A wet spot that didn't realize until the end that a stone was flying at it from above. From what mountain, asks the Cube, after all, no mountain exists - or at least he does not notice it.
Three dimensions:
In this fabulous space lives our Octahedron, who perceives three dimensions and so perceives his companions - only he knows that a Square is a Cube and a Ball is not a point but a Sphere. Octahedron can be in any position of the X, Y and Z axes, but the phenomenon of time, which is the fourth dimension, does not exist for him. Octahedron does not know what the past is and what the future is. The events he experiences have no logical sequence, and he does not know how much time has passed between his successive changes of position in the X,Y,Z system, because he is not aware of the existence of fourth dimension. Has a second or a million years passed between changes of position? The Octahedron does not know, and yet a lot could have happened in that interval - for example, someone could have appeared who could see the time dimension, and that someone could have simply pulled the Octahedron out of its X,Y,Z system, erased it, and made it never exist.
Four dimensions:
That is, everything we know as humans. We cannot imagine an extra dimension, just as our friends the Ball, the Cube and the Octahedron could not imagine that there was an extra dimension. This brought them to their doom, but they were also unaware that they themselves are not beings enclosed in the dimensions they perceive, but coexist in another dimension as well.
The ball perceived itself as a dot/point, the Cube perceived itself and the fellow Octahedron as squares, and the Octahedron didn’t realize that between its successive displacements in the X,Y,Z system there is a phenomenon of time, which may be of greater or lesser value and during which something additional may happen.
The hero of the fourth dimension will be Man. Man can crush the previously mentioned beings with a stone in such a way that they will not even realize that something is threatening them… well, just as Man does not realize that a being who has access to only one extra dimension can do whatever he likes with us and Man will remain completely powerless. We have no chance to notice a stone smacking us in the forehead that will fly in from the fifth dimension.
How then can we conceive of another, fifth dimension? We can imagine it as a vanishing point. The Ball could only see what was in front of it, in a straight line. If the square moved out of this line of sight of the Ball it ceased to be visible to it. So let us imagine that we are in a vast glade. We look ahead and see only the horizon. We take a step forward and a wall appears a few metres from us. We take another step forward and the wall disappears. We step back and the wall is visible again. The thought arises in our head that there is something wrong with this world, the wall once exists, but half a metre closer to the wall we no longer see it. However, the wall is in fact in the same place all the time, it does not move and it does not disappear. It is our perception, limited to 4 dimensions, which can perceive it only from a certain perspective. This is definitely a situation that a human being will not be able to grasp with his/her mind, nor even to investigate this phenomenon with any tools available to him/her in 4-dimensional space.
And do extra dimensions exist, according to academic knowledge? Yes, they do. Already many years ago it was proven in a mathematical way, and a few years ago physicists who won the Nobel Prize (but not for this discovery) experimentally, for the time being on a subatomic scale, proved the existence of another dimension – which we do not perceive and do not understand. (source)
To give a simple example, an electron jumps from one orbit to another without ever being in between. This is knowledge from primary school. But the question is how does it move between orbits, does it teleport? No. It makes a continuous linear movement, but we cannot perceive this movement, we only see a sudden jump which lasts exactly 0 seconds (under a special microscope, of course), because the movement between the orbits of the atomic nucleus takes place in an additional dimension which is invisible to us. Does this dimension therefore appear and disappear at the moment of the electron’s motion? No. The extra dimension exists continuously and concerns every atom of the physical universe. Every atom, that is, including those of which people are made. So we are constantly in an extra dimension, but our limited perception does not perceive it.
Let us make another attempt to imagine an extra dimension. Let’s expand the dot/point so that one of its stages of development is a cube and go through the spatial dimensions. So we have: A Dot that goes through another dimension and becomes a Line. The Line becomes a Square, and the Square in the next dimension is a Cube. And what is next? Next is a 4-dimensional hypercube, but I don’t like that name; another name for a 4-dimensional hypercube is Tesseract. Doesn’t that name sound more worthy? We can’t draw a Tesseract because it’s a 4-dimensional solid figure, and we can draw at most 3-dimensional ones on a piece of paper. But let us make the attempt and visualise it somehow.
On a flat surface it could look more or less like this, but what if we wanted to visualise it as a rotating solid in three dimensions? Like, for example, a spinning cube, which is easy to imagine. Let’s strain our grey cells and abstract thinking. Ta dah! Unless you’re an Obenaut who has a knack for dealing with the fifth dimension, I’ll tell you right away that you’ve done it wrong, because it surpasses the perceptual abilities of any human. The animation below shows how spatially the Tesseract might appear. Note that the inner cube behaves in an unpredictable and illogical way. So does a solid that completely breaks known logic have a right to exist? Yes, it does and it has been proven mathematically. Mathematics is the queen of sciences and there is nothing to argue with it. I tried when I was a young, ignorant student and, well, I always came out as an ignorant, limited and uneducated moron, so I will never make any more mistakes in mathematics as such 😛
Source: Wikipedia
In a very simple theorem we can say that in an n-dimensional hypercube (i.e. it doesn’t necessarily have to be 4-dimensional, it can actually be x-dimensional (read: arbitrarily dimensional but greater than 3) n perpendicular edges come out of each of its vertices.
Unfortunately, mathematicians have not yet reached such a point in their knowledge of mathematics that they would be able to refute the previous theorem in favour of a new theorem (and simultaneously prove this new theorem), which reads: In an n-dimensional hypercube there are n perpendicular edges coming out of each vertex, which are simultaneously parallel edges in each of n minus 1 dimensions. This information I have of course from the Astral, because on Earth I am not able to defend this thesis either, my brain is not able to do it, but in about 70 years’ time mankind will be able to defend “my” thesis and then if someone comes across this website they will begin to wonder how this guy knew about it, or maybe he just wrote it like that and it just happens to be true? For Obenauts who use mathematical analysis in the study of other dimensions this theorem is so obvious and so well understood that any discussion about it does not make much sense, just as it does not make sense for people to prove that 1+1 is 2.
But let’s go back to our n-dimensional friends and make a bold thesis that Ball survived being hit by a stone, and along with the bump on his head, the thought occurred to him that this bump was the result of something that came to him from an alien world. Ball experiences a vibration, leaves her physical body (or rather her physical sphere) and enters 4-dimensional space. She is enchanted by what she sees; at first she notices that she is not a meaningless dot, but a circle. But after a while she begins to see that she is something else than a circle, she is a Sphere! Beautiful and shiny… and what is more, this Sphere can travel to the past and to the future. The Sphere’s dream is to return to her 1-dimensional world and to find the guy who threw the stone at her. So he travels to the 2-dimensional space where the little rascal lives. There she meets this Cube, which she thinks is a square. However, Ball is now much wiser and aware, she no longer wants to take revenge on the Cube, she wants to help him somehow, she wants to make him realize that he is not a Square but a Cube, but all he has to say to her is: “silly you, what are you talking about, I am no Cube, because what does that mean. I’m a square… and I’m proud of it!” If I were a cube, the square scientists of my world would have figured it out long ago. So the ball tries to approach the Cube and take it in a way: ‘Cube,’ he says, ‘you are no simple square, you are a complex Cube and of that you should be proud! – the square simpleton replies: give me a break, you are talking nonsense, if I were a Cube I would know it and feel it, so instead of talking give me scientific proof that I am a Cube. The thought enters the ball’s mind “I can’t prove it to him because his 2 dimensional world can’t discover the 3rd dimension”. Ball lets the conversation continue because she knows that she cannot explain to Square something that he has not experienced and that is beyond his reasoning abilities. Ball’s conversation with the Square has been listened to by another Square, who, filled with excitement and a sense of standing on the threshold of something unknown, begins to ask Ball a host of questions. Ball, richer in his previous experience, replies to the other Square: “I have some knowledge, but I won’t share it with you, because you won’t understand it anyway”. The second Square says: wise guy, you know, but you won’t tell, why are you even talking to me? Ball says: – ‘I’m talking because you’ve had this conversation yourself. You will not understand what I have to tell you, but I can teach you how you can leave your physical square and experience what I know and what I understand, but which I have no way of telling you in the words of your world. When you experience this for yourself, you will not need any further information or explanation from me, because suddenly everything will become clear to you, and when you return to your body, although you will see yourself as a square, you will be aware that you are a cube.
Experiencing the Astral being in the OOBE state, we experience additional dimensions that expand the ones we already know. Time, when seen from the perspective of the extra dimension, ceases to be a straight line filled with events and begins to be a circle, interwoven with a vast number of threads that influence each other. Space and matter become malleable and we see that we can have unlimited influence on them through our thoughts. We can create matter out of energy and energy out of any matter, and as our astral body is filled with vast quantities of different types of energy, in appropriate spaces we can create real, physical, material shapes out of our thoughts – this is what happens, among other things, in the areas we reach when having lucid dreams.
One example illustrating time as a circle can be my agreement I once made with my Higher Self. Below I am pasting my comment I made to Tom in response to his question about what specifically my agreement with my Higher Self is. Tom’s comments and mine appeared under an article entitled “Should I experience OOBEs and how to do it?”
Once, long ago, MHS told me that He would pass on His knowledge to me, but I must be aware that one day He will have nothing more to say to me and I, knowing my path of development, will have to follow it alone in order to close the circle, a segment of which is help from the MHS. Another part of the circle must be my teaching others what I already know, which will allow me to look at what I know from different perspectives. At the very end of an immensely long adventure, I will be a conscious being enough to know that one day, a young teenage traveler named Matthew will come to me. Matthew, with a slight fear and excitement will ask me who I am and I will answer him with a blush on my face – Matthew, I have been waiting for this moment for a long time and it is a pleasure to meet you, I am your Higher Self and it may be difficult for you to understand now, but I used to be you.
If anybody wonders how big layers of energy are dormant in our astral bodies, for the moment I will only say that each astral body has condensed energy which is much bigger than the sum of all energies existing in the physical universe… but to realize how big this energy is we have to talk about numbers.
III. Questions concerning the Astral.
1. How big is the Astral?
– Well it is big and that’s it, let’s not get into details 🙂
2. Do you know the hierarchy of beings in the Astral and can you describe it?
– Yes, I know, but no, I can’t describe it, because my physical body (physical brain) can’t remember the structure exactly, but assuming I could remember the whole thing, it would probably take me several years of constant talking to list all of them, the successive rungs and connections. Being in the OOBE state, on the other hand, memory works differently than the physical one and there I know and understand exactly the whole hierarchical structure.
3. Why do some people claim that the Astral is only one part of reality and there is something deeper in the Astral?
– I don’t know why they claim this – perhaps they think that the Astral is small and new names need to be created to increase its size 🙂 The beings I have met in the Astral and with whom I have taken up this thread have always claimed that the term Astral is equivalent to the word “everything”. Everything therefore does not divide into parts, but is the sum of them – such a verbal paradox.
4. What relation in the hierarchy does man have to MHS?
– The ladder is really very long, while the Higher Self in relation to man is just another step on the ladder. The Higher Self has another being above it, this one another and so every one step on the wooden ladder reaching from the ground to the clouds.
5. So where is God in all this and can he hear us?
– The Astral in its strict, deepest nucleus is pure, energy, which does not show the characteristics of self-awareness, so it is simply a huge “battery”. God with a capital “G” is probably the collective consciousness of the beings that live right next to this high-energy core – and at the same time is located at the very top of the previously mentioned ladder.
So is there any point in asking this God with a capital “G” for help? No 🙂 Every Higher Self has such sufficient knowledge of the structure and functioning of the physical universe that it would create such a space by itself without much difficulty. Do you remember the number of stars in the Milky Way? It is really a damn complicated structure – and for the Higher Self to create such a universe is a snap of the fingers. So we don’t have to try to contact God with a capital “G” in our consciousness to get answers to such trivial from the whole perspective presented here, questions “how to find the purpose in my life?”. Let us try to contact the Higher Self, and the time will come for us to contact God someday – when we will already fully understand why this contact should take place.
No, what we may call God cannot hear us. The radiation of successive rungs of the ladder increases so enormously that God is unable to intercept and process our “prayers” – We are transmitting on completely different frequencies and it works both ways. This does not mean that we are alone in what we are doing, however, we should measure our strength and needs against our needs.
On the subject of trying to talk to God reminds me of an anecdote from my teenage years. A long time ago, a rather popular platform (colloquially speaking) for network communication was a service called IRC. Let’s say an online chat. As a teenager I used to sit in programmers’ rooms and there I observed an interesting phenomenon. People would enter the chat room for programmers and immediately ask if there were any great programmers with years of experience in the room, because they had a problem they couldn’t solve… and then it turned out that the problem was so trivial that it would be a pity to bother the great programmers, because the problem could easily be solved by other novice programmers. This is a bit like our willingness to share our very important and very difficult matters with God with a capital “G”. These issues are unfortunately difficult and important often only from our perspective and this is one of the issues that is worth understanding if we want to grow spiritually.
6. (among a series of my favourites) Why do different Obenauts describe differently the places they have visited in the Astral?
Let’s leave aside the fact that descriptions of places are usually free interpretations of what the observer sees. How would you describe the Eiffel Tower so that anyone who has never seen it would immediately have in mind exactly the place you saw? We already know that the Astral is unimaginably large. If one of the not fully skilled Obenauts reached a place, which he described as a luminous city, and another Obenauta also described a luminous city, or simply their descriptions did not specify the location of this place, knowing that the Astral is unimaginably huge, why do we assume that they described the same luminous city? I myself have described dozens of luminous cities, and trying to describe them in details of their functioning and topography, in fact the differences will be enormous. So is it worth at all to undertake the description of these places? Both yes and no, depending on our purpose and audience. In my opinion, it’s better to give the Obenauts, who are able to get there, a general outline and characteristics of this place together with the identIdent - indywidualny, niepowtarzalny odcisk energetyczny, który posiada każda istota zamieszkująca przestrzeń astralną. Ident posiada kilka cech wspólnych, dla wszystkich istot: 1. Jest w pełni unikalny - nie istnieją dwie istoty o tak... of this place (it’s impossible to do it on the physical plane), and for people who only want or are just beginning their adventure with exploring astral space, it’s worth describing unusual aspects of this place in relation to places known from physicality and emphasize that it’s one of many such places that can occur in the Astral – to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings.
Thanks to Wejsza & Bratu for the translation.