Life & Universe
  Sensory Perception
  Time
  Option 4
  Option 5
   

           To better understand higher dimensions, here I will briefly discuss the two-dimensional stickman model to better understand our three dimensional world and subsequent dimensions. Edwin Abbot first proposed multi-dimensional theories in his science fiction novel "Flatland", written over one hundred years ago. In this model, there are two guards and a prisoner in a two-dimensional jail cell. The guards can see the prisoner through the peephole that they have. However, I, a three dimensional being, could simply "peel" the prisoner right out of the jail cell and the guards would just think that he disappeared into thin air (remember, the stickmen can NOT see me at all, because I'm in the third dimension). Similarly, if we stuck a 3D triangle through the 2D world, the 2D beings would never know the object was a triangle - they would just think that it is a line, going from small to large. Perhaps the 2D stickman would call the disappearance of the prisoner a "miracle" or "God's work" or "the unknown"? Like the stickman model, as we can see through the stickman's jail, the fourth dimensional entity can clearly see through things that would be opaque to us, such as the house we were previously talking about! Perhaps one could access the light that shined inside the closed doors of the house through the fourth dimension. Maybe they could even hold it, or alter it. That would then give them the ability to "see through closed walls", which is a common theme of being in a higher dimension. And if the fourth dimensional being has power over light, it must be able to travel faster than light. Now let us try to understand the higher dimensional occurrences in our dimension, the third dimension. Do you think they do not exist? You are mistaken, in fact, they exist everywhere! We will get to that soon.

            What is important to understand about the stickman model is that a "higher dimension" is partly characterized by activities that cannot be explained in terms of the current dimension. With the second dimension example, the stickman sees shapes become bigger and smaller out of nowhere. He sees things appear and disappear. He sees the creation of matter out of thin air in his second dimensional world. In other words, this is what is paranormal or even an action the second dimensional being would think was produced by God. Since he lives in the second dimension, he cannot explain what is happening when I play with his universe. He doesn't see or know that I am playing with his universe - he only sees unusual activity. Now let us examine our own world - the 3rd dimension. What are the strange or unusual occurrences that we cannot explain in our universe? Where are the "lines" that appear out of knowhere in our world, as they did when I stuck a 3-D triangle through the stickman's universe? Let's look at the animate and the inanimate. The inanimate being rocks, soil, water, buildings, mountains, etc. On the other hand, the animate are humans, plants, fire, wind, etc. Since inanimate things such as rocks are simple to explain, just like the two dimensional objects in the two dimensional stickman's world (such as the jail cell, etc), occurrences such as growth, reproduction, consciousness, and things that are "random" and "unpredictable" are called life in our world. Life is the unusual and unexplainable entity in OUR universe - in other words, life is the three dimensional man sticking a 3D triangle through the 2 dimensional man's world, except in this case, it is the fourth dimensional man sticking a fourth dimensional "triangle" object in our three-dimensional world. We cannot understand completely or even see the fourth dimensional object, we can only see its strange, unexplainable aftereffects in our three dimensional world. Those effects are growth, reproduction, consciousness, randomness, etc. We can therefore say that life in the 3rd dimension is controlled by entities in what we can call the "fourth dimension".

NNEXT PAGE EXT PAGE