The Play of Brahm

"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 a 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 be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernatural 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, and acting 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 were in indeed 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 an express themselves in and through us. We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts as 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 the eyes of his own creation. "He thought: 'Shall I send forth worlds?' He sent forth those 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, and the whole or dramatization of consciousness. This is the play of Brahm: endlessly to dissect and dissever, then to rediscover and reunite, as does the geometrician who discovers every ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola in the cone where all inhere."

Related Text: The Surface of Appearances

Related Imagery: The Surface and Its Surroundings