So closer to Ouspensky then would you say?
Pardons - the diagrams did not copy out from pages 1 and 2. Pictures count so please open to view.
In Ouspensky’s formulation of three dimensions of time1 (New Model of Universe, 3rd edition, p 427), hestarts off with the usual idea of linear time, before-now-after. In studies of time there isa universal issue about our psychological perception of it: we havea ‘present moment’ only as long as a breath and then the moment is gone. If it were not for this quirk of nature, time might appear more like one of the spatial dimensions, with everything in the past in full focus instead of becoming increasingly hazy with the passage of time,and with thefuture laid outas if everything had already happened (at leastas far as the next turn in the road). Ouspensky goes on to consider ‘eternity’: what it is, where it lies. It is not ‘all time’, it is ‘out of time’. He draws thefollowing diagram: At each moment of time there is a perpendicular line of ‘perpetual now’ (nunc stans in medieval Christianity). He calls this perpendicular direction the ‘fifth dimension’. He speculates that parallel to our ‘historical’ line of time there may be other possible lines of time, shown as dotted lines. Each moment brings different possibilitiesand it is possible to swap from one line to the next asa different possibility is realised, so our progress on what is now a plane of thefourth and fifth dimensions is a zig-zag rather than a straight line. Perhaps he means something like thefollowing, where the dotted lines are unrealised possibilities: 1 By coincidence the idea of a second dimension of time is a topical issue
Supposethefull line is your life. If it is uneventful, there is no possibility of changeand it continues on in a straight line. Ata time of decision or crisis, change is possible: you might change your job or partner; maybe the new arrangement is what you should have done years ago; you have now switched to a time-line where this possibility existed but was not realised. Ouspensky goes on to consider the sixth dimension – out of the plane of the paper, in which all possibilities in the moment are realised. That is, only one possible line of time is followed in the fourth dimension, but all the possiblealternativesarefollowed as lines out of the plane of paper in the sixth dimension, so the time-line becomes asolid. Maybe in a previous life you had one job and in the present life another, so both time-lines exist. Hesays subsequently that three dimensionsaresensed by us as direction, duration and velocity. This needs somethought. Arguing that relativity theory shows thatall objects havea separatetimesystem, he writes: Separate time is always a completed circle. We can think of time as a straight line only on the great straight line of the great time. If the great time does not exist, every separate time can only be a circle, that is, a closed curve. But a circle or any closed curve requires two coordinates for its definition. The circle (circumference) is a two dimensional figure. If the second dimension of time is eternity, this means that eternity enters into every circle of time and into every moment of the circle of time. Eternity is the curvature of time. Eternity is also movement, an eternal movement. And if we imagine time as a circle or as any other closed curve, eternity will signify eternal movement along this curve, eternal repetition, eternal recurrence. The fifth dimension is movement in the circle, repetition, recurrence. The sixth dimension is the way out of the circle. If we imaginethat one end of the curve rises from the surface, we visualise thethird dimension of time – the sixth dimension of space. The line of time becomes a spiral.
