Glimpsing Indirectly Into the Fourth Dimension: Revisited

I recently gave a talk at the Philosophy Forum called “Glimpsing Indirectly Into the Fourth Dimension,” unpacking the complex ways mathematicians have attempted to conceptualize the fourth dimension, then relating this eventually to Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus and my own personal conceptualization of the idea of God.

But I realize there is something wrong with the title of this talk. Through this exploration I realized that there are no 2-dimensional objects or 3-dimensional objects. There are just objects. And we can look at them from particular vantage points allowing us to recognize a certain number of dimensions. That is, we can look at cube through a 2-dimensional lens, and it appears to be a square. We can look at a square through a 1-dimensional lens, and it appears to be a line. But neither the line, the square, the cube, nor the tesseract exist as independent objects. They are all different manifestations of the same object viewed through different dimensions. We do not glimpse “at” the fourth dimension or “into” the fourth dimension. Instead, we see the same object “through” a 4-dimensional lens.

So what is the relationship between God and the 4th dimension?
For a long time I thought it was just that God is ineffable in the same way that the 4th dimension is ineffable, and that religions are ways to indirectly point at the ineffable God in the same way that the tesseract is a way to indirectly point at the ineffable fourth dimension. Now I’m recognizing, though, that the fourth dimension is not something “out there” that we can glimpse at; it’s right here. Seeing the fourth dimension is merely a change in the way we perceive this reality. And similarly, perhaps God is not something “out there” that we can glimpse at, but maybe He’s right here. Perhaps God is just a different way of perceiving this reality.

So is there a relationship between religious wisdom and what we know of the fourth dimension?
When the shadow of an object is cast against a wall, and that object is in rotation, the 2-dimensional shadow appears to be morphing, changing shape, stretching and shrinking. But we know the 3-dimensional object actually remains the same. Now, similarly, perhaps all the the morphing we perceive in this world, all of the ups and downs, all the light times and the dark times, all of the Good and all of the Bad, perhaps these appear to us only because of our limited perception. But if we were to adopt a transcendent perspective, a Godly lens, an enlightened lens, we’d see that there is no Good, there is no bad, there is no better, there is no worse, there is no death, there is no life, there is no change. There’s just this.