Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death--these things we
say are _irrational_, and so in a sense they are. Bergson has
compared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of a
cinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion by
flashing upon the screen a correlated series of _fixed_ images. In
like manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it to
consciousness part by part, but never as a whole. In supernormal
states however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrier
life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and
therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness.
Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances,
in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Might
it not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world,
higher-dimensional in relation to our own? Just as a moving picture
shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat
images on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on the
three-dimensional screen of the world men and women engaged in
unfolding the drama of personal life may be but the images of souls
enacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation.
The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is said
to have been due to his belief that something of his personality,
his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much the
poorer from that time forth. Suppose such indeed to be the case:
that the flat-man on the moving picture screen leads his little life
of thought and emotion, related to the mental and emotional life of
the living original as the body is related to its photographic
counterpart. In similar manner the potencies of the higher self, the
dweller in higher spaces, may flow into and express themselves in and
through us. We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts
shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon the
luminous screen of material existence, revealing there, however
imperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higher
space.
The saying, "All the world's a stage," may be true in a sense
Shakespeare never intended. It formulates, in effect, the oldest of
all philosophical doctrines, that contained in the Upanishads of
Brahma, the Enjoyer, who takes the form of a mechanically perfect
universe in order to read his own law with eyes of his own creation.
"He thought: 'Shall I send forth worlds?' He sent forth these worlds."
To the question, "What worlds?" the Higher Space Hypothesis makes
answer, "Dimensional systems, from lowest to highest, each one a
_representation_ of the one next above, where it stands _dramatized_,
as it were. This is the play of Brahm; endlessly to dissever, in
time and space, and to unite in consciousness, like the geometrician
who discovers every ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, in the cone
where all inhere."
The particular act of the drama of unfolding consciousness upon
which the curtain is now upfurled is that wherein we discover the
world to be indeed a stage, a playground for forces masquerading as
forms: "they have their exits and their entrances," or, as expressed
in the Upanishads, "All that goes hence (dies on earth) heaven
consumes it all; and all that goes thence (returns from heaven to a
new life) the earth consumes it all."