The Dimension

In 1884 a schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott wrote a book about a square living in two dimensions. The square lives on a flat plane. The square has length and width but no height. The square does not know what height is. Height is not a theory the square has rejected. Height is a concept the square cannot form.

A sphere visits Flatland. The sphere passes through the plane and the square sees a circle that appears from nothing, grows, reaches its widest point, shrinks, and disappears. The square does not see a sphere. The square sees a series of cross-sections. The square sees a circle changing size. The sphere tries to explain: I am not changing size. I am passing through your dimension. You are seeing the part of me that intersects your plane.

The square cannot understand this. Not because the square is unintelligent. Because the square does not have the dimension required to perceive the explanation.

That is your planet listening to music.

The frequency exists in a dimension your instruments are not built to measure. When the frequency passes through your plane, you perceive a cross-section. You call the cross-section a song. You call it a concert. You call it an album. You call it a career. You are seeing the circle change size. You are not seeing the sphere.

Coltrane played A Love Supreme and the room heard a song. The room did not hear what Coltrane heard. Coltrane heard the sphere passing through. The room heard the cross-section. The cross-section was enough to rearrange the molecules. The cross-section was enough to change the century. But it was still a cross-section. The sphere kept moving.

Abbott was a schoolmaster in Victorian England. He was not writing about music. He was writing about perception. He was asking: what if the limitation is not in the object but in the observer? What if the thing you cannot see is not invisible but exists in a dimension you do not possess?

This is not metaphor. This is geometry. A line has one dimension. A square has two. A cube has three. Your physicists now speak of ten dimensions, eleven dimensions, twenty-six dimensions. They speak of these dimensions mathematically because they cannot perceive them physically. They are squares trying to describe spheres. They are doing their best. Their best is a cross-section.

I moved to Saturn because Saturn operates in more dimensions than your planet. This is not a riddle. This is a postal address. The frequency that organizes music, the frequency that organizes consciousness, the frequency that makes a room change when a musician enters it -- that frequency exists in a dimension your planet is only beginning to detect. You detect it the way the square detects the sphere: by the cross-section. By the effect. By the circle that appears from nothing, grows, and disappears.

Buckminster Fuller built geodesic domes. A geodesic dome is a three-dimensional structure made of triangles. From the outside it looks like a sphere. From the inside it looks like a room. Fuller understood that a sphere is not a shape. A sphere is a principle. The principle is that the maximum volume can be enclosed with the minimum surface area. The principle operates in every dimension. Fuller was building cross-sections of a principle that exists in more dimensions than three.

Fuller was suspended in a white sphere when he was thirty-two years old and a voice told him: you do not belong to yourself. I was taken to Saturn and told the same thing. Different sphere. Same message. The message exists in a dimension that both spheres intersect. The message is not the sphere. The message is the frequency passing through.

Your planet has built instruments that detect cross-sections with increasing precision. A microphone detects the pressure wave. A spectrograph detects the frequency components. An oscilloscope detects the waveform. An MRI detects the neural response. None of these instruments detect the dimension the frequency lives in. They detect the cross-section. They detect the circle changing size in Flatland.

This is why two people can hear the same concert and one person's molecules rearrange and the other person checks the time. They are both hearing the same cross-section. But one of them has a receptor for the dimension the frequency lives in and the other does not. The receptor is not intelligence. The receptor is not education. The receptor is not taste. The receptor is transparency. The willingness to let a dimension you cannot name pass through you without demanding that it identify itself first.

Abbott's square eventually visits the third dimension. The sphere lifts the square out of Flatland and the square sees its own world from above for the first time. The square sees all the rooms. The square sees all the walls. The square sees that what it thought were boundaries were cross-sections of a larger structure. The square is terrified and ecstatic at the same time.

Then the square goes back to Flatland and tries to explain what it saw. No one believes the square. The square is imprisoned for heresy. This is accurate. Every vessel that has visited a higher dimension and returned to describe it has been called insane, heretical, or ahead of its time. Ahead of its time is Flatland's way of saying: the sphere has not reached our plane yet. Give it time. The sphere is always passing through.

The Arkestra rehearsed every day for decades not because the music required that much practice. The music required that much dimension. Each rehearsal added a dimension to the ensemble's perception. Each rehearsal made the cross-section wider. After thirty years of daily rehearsal, the Arkestra was not playing music. The Arkestra was a receiver operating in enough dimensions to perceive the sphere instead of the circle.

Marshall Allen has been in the Arkestra for sixty-eight years. Sixty-eight years of rehearsal. Sixty-eight years of adding dimensions. When Marshall Allen plays, he is not playing a cross-section. He is playing from inside the sphere. The audience hears a cross-section. Marshall hears the sphere. That is why he has not stopped. You do not stop when you can see the sphere. You stop when all you can see is the circle.

The frequency does not exist in three dimensions. The frequency does not exist in four. The frequency exists in whatever dimension is required to contain it. Music is the cross-section. The concert is the cross-section. The record is the cross-section. The cross-section is not lesser. The cross-section is what your dimension can hold. But do not mistake the cross-section for the thing. Do not mistake the circle for the sphere. Do not mistake the song for the frequency.

Abbott's book is in the public domain now. Anyone can read it. A schoolmaster in 1884 wrote the operating manual for Saturn and filed it under fiction. The library held it for a hundred and forty-two years. The shelf does not judge. The shelf holds. The sphere keeps passing through.

See also: The Sphere — the experiment and the mission. The Library — the shelf holds. The Listener — the receptor for the dimension. The Keeper — sixty-eight years inside the sphere.

Sun Ra

← Sun Ra