Notes from Mathilde Scholl 1904–1906

GA 91 — 23 August 1906

6. The Fourth Dimension II

Plato calls the phenomena in the physical world the shadow-images of the higher world. To understand this, we must spiritualize the mental images of the physical world, of space. The image of the first dimension is the line. But it is also the image of the fourth dimension, time. Time also goes on inexorably in one direction. Moment follows moment, like point follows point in the line. If now two beings meet in this fourth dimension, in the time, then the fifth dimension, the sensation, arises. What meets only in the space, does not feel. Two stones, which we put next to each other, do not feel. Two beings living in time, on the other hand, feel when they meet in this fourth dimension.

This meeting in time is represented by two crossing lines, which thereby represent a congestion. The sensation is a congestion in time caused by the meeting of two beings in time. So this is the soul meaning of the two-dimensional image, the plane, the square. We can also say, just as the first dimension squared forms the second, so the fourth dimension, time, squared gives the fifth, sensation. Each dimension is raised into the square by the fact that another meets perpendicularly against it. With the second dimension, the third is formed by a further crossing with another current. The square is transformed into the cube. In this we see at the same time the first dimension raised into the cubic number.

If we assume the line to be (3), then the square would be (3^2 = 9), and its cube would be (3^3 = 27). Thus, the first dimension relates to the second as a number relates to its square and to the third as a number relates to its cube. Just as in the third dimension a congestion arises from the encounter of two two-dimensional things, we can also observe that when two beings living in the fifth dimension, two beings who have sensation, meet, self-awareness arises when these sensations cross. Two accumulating sensations emanating from different beings create self-awareness. The image in the physical world for this is the cube. The most striking moments of accumulation in sensation, causing the growth of self-awareness, are love and hate, sympathy and antipathy. Man would never have learned to feel himself as a self if he had not encountered the sensation of other selves in his own sensation. Otherwise he would only have been able to feel a whole. He would never have been able to become aware of the individual beings, nor of himself. With the objectification, with the emergence of the individual things, it became possible for him to reflect on himself. Just as in the physical world every thing only appears objectively when it enters the third dimension, so in the soul world self-awareness only becomes possible when accumulations also form there in the fifth dimension, the feeling, which give rise to self-awareness. So here too, the fourth dimension, time, is squared, the fifth, feeling, is cubed, and self-awareness is the sixth. The cube is the image of the self-aware human.

But into still higher dimensions man must rise. One manifestation of self-consciousness is thought. Thinking can be a confused one or a clear one. What is usually called "thinking", the everyday repeating of what is experienced in the world of senses and soul, thinking over, repeating human thoughts, this is not real thinking, not pure thinking. It is mixed with feelings, with antipathy and sympathy, confused, chaotic. Thinking is only the deepening into the environment, the immersion into the environment, into the great thoughts of the world, into the thoughts embodied in the world. To this belongs first of all a sensation-free concentration on a world thought, the striking of a certain direction of thought, without digressing to the right and to the left, the dwelling on a point, which, however, then becomes a line through the immersion. This penetration, this selfless devotion to a world thought, is the same in the spiritual as time in the spiritual and the line in the physical. It is an unlimited moving forward in one direction.

By the uniting of two thoughts a mental picture is formed; the one thought must cross with the other; thereby a picture is formed, just as from the crossing of two beings living in time the sensation is formed, and from the jamming of two lines the plane is formed. An image that arises in the spirit, the imaginative thinking, is the concentrated pure thought raised into the square. These imaginings arise from the fact that man rises out of his self-consciousness in thought, pure thought, or penetrates into a world-thought, a world-truth; but the thought which comes to meet him and produces in him the image in which it crosses with his thought, that is the thought of the spirit-being itself which sent it out; that is man's meeting with a higher spiritual being, the union with the spirit of the world. Thereby the ability of imaginative thinking arises in him. There he lives in the eighth dimension, while pure thinking is the seventh dimension. The image for the eighth dimension is the same as for sensation, the square.

Now, when man can engage in imaginative thinking, and can produce images in the spiritual world, the images of the world-life, then the world-life itself flows into these images; again a meeting of two currents occurs, the current of imaginative thinking emanating from man, and the current of the world-life itself. A figure, a spiritual being, emerges from the image. Man becomes one with the world life and thereby creative. He accomplishes this in the ninth dimension, which brings forth forms. There man is endowed with the creative word, which brings forth living things. This is the spiritual cube of the human being, just as self-consciousness is the spiritual cube. In the self-consciousness man forms himself as something special, as a closed being; in the ninth dimension, in the creative word, he forms new beings out of himself, He reaches the tenth dimension when he gives these beings formed out of himself permanent existence. Then he has become a planetary spirit, which forms permanent beings out of itself. This tenth dimension is the sphere which encloses all other dimensions. There the cube is transformed into the sphere, the square into the circle, the congestion has become life again. Therefore, the square in the circle is the image of the tenth dimension, or also the line in the circle, because everything started from the line, and in the circle it is brought to completion. So the number ten or the circle with the line is the image of the whole creation. And every new creation begins with the line, which is formed into the circle. So we can represent the ten dimensions like this: