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.”

XI THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

CONCEPT AND CONDUCT

A surgeon once remarked to the author that among his professional associates he had noticed an increasing awareness of the invisible.  This he claimed was manifest in the fact that the young men educated since the rise of bacteriological science were more punctilious in the matter of extreme personal cleanliness and the sterilization of their instruments than the older and often more accomplished surgeons whose habits in these matters had been formed before the general sense of an invisible menace had become acute.

This anecdote well illustrates the unconscious reaction of new concepts upon conduct.  Preoccupation with the problems of space hyper-dimensionality cannot fail to produce profound changes in our ethical outlook upon life and in our attitude towards our fellow beings.  The nature of these changes it is not difficult to forecast.

Although higher-space thought makes painfully clear our limitations, it nevertheless leads to the perception that these very limitations are inhibited powers.  In this way it supplies us with a workable method whereby we may enter that transcendental world of which we glimpse so many vistas.  This method consists in first becoming aware of a limitation, and then in forcing ourselves to dramatize the experience that would be ours if the limitation did not affect us.  We then discover in ourselves a power for transcending the limitation, and presently we come to live in the new mode as easily as in the old.  Thought, conscious of its own limitations, leads to the New Freedom.  “Become what thou art!” is the maxim engraved upon the lintel of this new Temple of Initiation.