new faculty of four-dimensional consciousness

Every man of consciousness is somewhere on this journey, and it is of immeasurable help to know where you are on the scale of evolution. Almost all of us in Western society are Hamlets. Compulsory education, our social structure, the dictates of our lifestyle have obliterated the two-dimensional man from American life. Adolescents is the last primitives among us, but we are obliterating it by urging youth to become adults as rapidly as possible and simultaneously bearing an unquenchable nostalgia for it.

The more intelligent a man is, the more profound will be his suffering. Two avenues of solace are available. He may keep some small point of contact with a simple, warm, uncomplicated world by maintaining a bit of primitive behavior in his life. At best this can be jogging; camping; having an array of adolescent equipment, including his car; gardening; or reclaiming some dimension of life ordinarily relegated to the store or shop. Its dark form — the second avenue of solace — can be vandalism, gang behavior, and other types of juvenile delinquency, including drug use.

Some information and a profound integrity can save a man from the very long dry times; but no one escapes at least a touch of the dry desert. We have invented new terms for this: midlife crisis, identity crisis, the Big Four-Zero, the seven-year itch. When the dark night begins to lift, one morning there is an unaccountable touch of joy in the air. It is the tiniest trickle of energy, light, and hope, but enough to keep you alive. This is the first contact with the four-dimensional consciousness, and one can begin to live from that source of energy. Something of the subtle inner world becomes your center of gravity: poetry, music, a new perceptiveness when you are jogging, a blossoming of philosophic inquiry, a new religious understanding — something of this world captures you. Less worthy channels for this new energy are fanaticism, dictatorial religious beliefs, and ego inflations of all kinds. If the new energy flows into such channels, you are quickly sent back to the Hamlet condition for further boiling in the oil of transformation.

Enlightenment is never total or permanent in this lifetime. Mythology has to construct personalities who are perfect, but they always live somewhere else or at some other time. Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed.

Is it consistent to say that a new faculty — four-dimensional consciousness, as we lamely describe it — is only now appearing for ordinary men and women in our human evolution? If this is so, it would follow that the new faculty is extremely rare, fragile when it does appear, and very easily lost. Jung spent his old age writing about and contemplating this new evolution of man, the progression from incompleteness to wholeness, from three to four; it’s time for all of us to do the same.