112 QUESTION: You say that once one leaves this dimension of time, one enters another time which involves unification of space, time and movement. Will you please clarify that?
ANSWER: Yes, I will try. In your dimension, time and space are two separate factors. I give you a practical example: you find yourself in a certain space, you require time to get there. In order to bridge the distance, movement is necessary. So movement is the bridge that combines time and space. In the next dimension, where there is a wider fragment of what you may call time – which is still far from timelessness – movement, time and space are one. In other words: you are in one space.
You think of the space you wish to be in. The movement required to bridge the distance is your thought. It is of a shorter span of time and motion. Thought, which is movement, brings you into another area of space, regardless of the distance, as measured in your dimension. Do you understand that?
QUESTION: Yes. But it brings two questions to mind. One is: Can this happen on Earth? And two: I saw a TV program recently which explained that in outer space, as we know it today, this adjustment via movement through time and space takes place, so that the time changes according to the rate of speed you are travelling in space. I don’t quite understand it.
ANSWER: To bridge distance with thought is not possible on Earth with material means. The spirit, the psyche, is, of course, capable of experiencing this. In fact, it experiences it constantly, only the waking brain is rarely aware of it. The physical body is incapable of the experience because it is made and adjusted to the limited dimension in which a separation between time and space exists, and the bridge between these is movement.
As to your second question: when material and technical means have been invented to leave this dimension, an inkling of this factor becomes accessible to material brain knowledge. But whether or not the discovery is understood in its profounder meaning, depends, of course, on the individual, on the capacity and willingness of people to understand. I might add that the technical knowledge that brought this cosmic truth into your material world – the same truth that I approached here from a different angle – is a consequence of a general, overall readiness of this Earth sphere to grasp higher truth.
If, in spite of its possibility for growth that brought such higher truth into its grasp, humanity still does not learn the deeper meaning from it, it will stagnate with all the destructive results of such stagnation. It is exactly the same process with an individual. A person who has potential to grow but does not utilize it, will be a more troubled soul than the one who may actually exert less effort in the direction of individual development, but is closer to the given potential. This explains why it is impossible to judge and compare.
To get back to your question: the technical discoveries are one way of helping humanity to acquire a broader awareness. But if a technical discovery does not lead to broader and deeper understanding, such discovery will not only be useless, it will turn destructive. The constructiveness and benefit of every discovery depends on whether or not humanity as a whole understands spiritual and cosmic law on a deeper level than before such a discovery was made.
If this happens, it will help humanity to produce greater inner freedom, faster growth and development, and therefore outer peace and justice in increased measure.
If history is observed from this point of view, it will be found that every Earth upheaval that humanity has experienced is a result of broader knowledge used without the proper understanding. The links between new knowledge in certain eras, and the subsequent upheavals due to ignorance of the real meaning of the knowledge, could be established if historians undertaking such a search were themselves in a fully growing life-process.
New knowledge is not necessarily and exclusively of a technical nature. It can be an influx in art, philosophy, or any realm of experience. The links are not immediately visible, but they are there. It might be an interesting study for a historian who has the inner equipment to see what first seems obscure, but stands out clearly once one’s attention is focused in the right direction.
What you mentioned in your second question is the same in technical terms as what I explained in philosophical and psychological terms.
QA214 QUESTION: Can you give us some conceptual idea about that other dimension that is not the three dimensions of time, space and movement, in which the spiritual exists? What is that other dimension? I don’t get it.
ANSWER: Can you imagine for yourself a state of consciousness in which – I deliberately use as an example now a lesser state of consciousness than the three-dimensional one – in which you cannot perceive width? You can only perceive longitudinal dimensions. Can you imagine that?
QUESTION: Yes.
ANSWER: Now, can you by the same token extend this the other way: that there is a state of consciousness in which yesterday, today and tomorrow fuse and are on one plane – not longitudinal; they are on one plane.
The following analogy may help you to bridge that gap in your consciousness. I have given this example once many years ago, but I will use it again. Of course, again, this is very grossly oversimplified. It is merely an analogy, but it will serve its purpose.
Imagine life, as it opens up in front of you, is covered up with a curtain. This curtain has various openings. One opening is yesterday or last year or last century. Another opening is your Now, this instant.
Another opening over there is your future, to see into the future, to see into tomorrow – not in the sense that the future is a preordained, fixed thing, but the future that is logically foreseeable with all the given factors at hand. Your consciousness, your possibilities, your potentials, the way you move your potentials, the way you utilize them, the direction in which you go can, so to speak, predict the future to a certain extent. Now, that future is there. It is behind another opening in the curtain.
When you look at these openings, they seem disconnected. So a person who has a memory looks through one opening. He may remember a few years ago or if he is more open, he may even remember incarnations ago – a flash may come into his mind. Or he may be attuned to the present moment. He’s focused on that opening. Or he has a flash of what you may call a vision into the future, and he has an instant flash of something that may happen.
But if you take that curtain away, it is all one plane and you live on that one plane. You are not bound by a narrow sequence of time. You are free to expand in all directions. Intellectually, this concept would be very difficult to grasp. Intuitively it can be grasped.