Great God Almighty, I'm Free at Last! Now, Who Stole My Chains?!

This will be a short post, just to get us started. It's an early day, and I gotta get out of here.

Here is the full text of what Mouravieff says about the higher dimensions of time:

"For the moment, it will be sufficent to say that Time possesses not one but three dimensions, and that these dimensions are strictly analogous to those of Space."

Okay, I'm with you so far: in Euclidian space there is line, plane, and sphere. This must mean that there are analogies to these three in Time. Please continue.

"We shall limit ourselves to saying that we know that the waking consciousness, that of the 'I' of the personality is extremely relative and is able neither to grasp nor directly observe these two higher dimensions of Time, nor their effects."

Rather, the local ego, or what a I prefer to call (•), "confuses them with the fourth dimension, in a single perception of the ensemble which is the Line of Time."

In other words, dimensions Five and Six get lumped in with Four, which is reminiscent of Bion's "attacks on linking," which I have described as a kind of "dimensional defense," in that the primitive mind is easily able to render null and void meanings that only exist in a higher dimension by fleeing into a lower one.

This is what unifies psychological defense mechanisms as diverse as regression, splitting, denial, and acting out, in that each of these, in its own way, is analogous to seeking refuge in the Circle for fear of what lurks in the Sphere.

Or, as in the case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), one might flee the Circle for the Line. With OCD, the person's existence is quite literally reduced to a line in which they go back and forth between anxiety and its temporary dissipation in the ritual of the obsession or compulsion. Thus, it is actually a kind of circular line, but a line nonetheless, as one always ends up back where one started -- A to B and then back to A.

But this also renders a kind of false eternity, doesn't it, perhaps analogous to the hell of Nietzsche's eternal return? For at the ground floor of all human striving -- including of course intellectual striving -- is the desire to know the Absolute, i.e., God or O.

Now, one easy -- and all too human -- way to do this is to reduce the Absolute to something more manageable, by, say, washing one's hands hundreds of times a day, or devoting one's life to a political candidate in the belief that he will change one's existence, or placing one's faith in a two-dimensional scientific theory such as Darwinism in the belief that this linear scheme explains the Sphere.

Perhaps a clinical example will better explain my meaning. Not too long ago I evaluated a person who was crippled by a lifelong case of OCD. In fact, the OCD had been present for so long that for him it was normative. He knew no other way of existing. Furthermore, his obsessions and compulsions -- his various physical and mental rituals -- gave him comfort in the same way that one can obtain comfort from food, or sex, or companionship, or a scientific theory, or God, whatever.

This individual eventually became depressed, which is inevitable, since OCD is originally put in place to protect a vulnerable self, but ends up depriving the self of what it needs to survive and grow. In other words, the person's life revolves around his rituals, so that he cannot metabolize sufficient Love, Truth, and Beauty to remain intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.

Anyway, this person ended up being prescribed an SSRI for his depression, but it had the added benefit of eliminating the OCD (which his doctor hadn't even known about, since the patient didn't see it as a "problem" and therefore hadn't even mentioned it).

Long story short, he ended up discontinuing the SSRI because he missed his OCD. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he was literally lost without his rituals, in the sense that he was now naked in the infinite Sphere without so much as a figleaf of compulsiveness to help him cling to the finite line. He was suddenly "free," but for him, this actually meant terror -- quite literal terror, Pascal's eternal silence of these infinite space -- as he was now face-to-face with the very reality which his OCD had been implemented to protect him from in the first place!

Now, could we make a gratuitous comment about how this is analogous to what the leftist -- I mean the true believer, not merely the clueless Democrat -- does with the terror of his God-given political freedom?

For what is the Nanny State but a gargantuan two-dimensional plane that we should all cling to in order to protect us from the infinite Sphere of Life?

And what are all of the thousands of useless laws and agencies they put in place, but a kind of collective OCD, in which we always end up back where we started? In other words, trillions of wasted dollars later, we have the same poverty, the same violence, the same stupidity. The same Mankind, frankly, only worse for the systematic neglect of man's true nature.

And the leftist does not wish to be cured, any more than the above patient did. For to be cured is to realize that one's life has been wasted in meaningless rituals. And that's a depressing thought.