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"One sees through them all the wheels and through these the dial, but lying backwards; in astralem Schauen astral sight, however, one sees the dial in the correct position and all the wheels lying individually, but not one on top of the other."

Here we have, all at once, the fundamental tone and the most important circumstance regarding this change. The person now sees everything from an entirely new standpoint, different from anything they could have ever imagined before. It no longer presents the slightest difficulty to read a page in a closed book, because they no longer need to see it through all the other pages lying in front of or behind it; instead, they see it directly in front of them, as if it were the only visible page. The depth at which a vein of metal or coal lies is no longer an obstacle, because they no longer look through the intervening deep earth. The thickness of a wall or the number of walls between the observer and the object would make a great difference for ätherisches Sehen etheric sight, yet for astral sight, it makes not the slightest difference, because the walls would not lie between the observer and the object at all. This sounds paradoxical and seems impossible, and for someone not specifically trained to grasp the idea, it is quite inexplicable; nevertheless, it is true.

This leads us into the middle of the much-debated question of the fourth dimension: a question of the deepest interest, although it cannot be treated in full in this work. Those who wish to study the subject as it deserves should begin with Mrs. C. H. Hinton’s Scientific Romances or with Dr. A. T. Schofield’s Another World and then read the larger work by the first-named author, A New Era of Thought. Mr. Hinton claims not only to be able to mentally grasp some of the simpler four-dimensional figures himself, but he also says that anyone who will take the trouble to follow his instructions can, through perseverance, also acquire this mental understanding. Now, I would not wish to claim with certainty that this ability is accessible to everyone, as

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Mr. Hinton suggests, for it seems to me as if a great mathematical talent would be necessary for it; but I can at least testify that the tesseract a four-dimensional cube or the four-dimensional cube he describes actually exists, for it is a very well-known figure on the Astralplane astral plane. He has now perfected a new method by representing the different dimensions with colors instead of arbitrarily written symbols. He claims that this simplifies study greatly, as the reader will then be able to distinguish any part or side of the tesseract immediately upon looking at it. A complete description of this new method with illustrations is already ready for printing, so those who wish to begin this highly interesting study would do well to read this work. Original footnote: Obtainable through the Theosophical Publishing House of Dr. Hugo Vollrath, Leipzig.

Regarding the theory of the fourth dimension, Madame Blavatsky said that it was only a clumsy way of stating the idea of the complete permeability of matter, and Mr. Stead followed this opinion by presenting the concept to his readers under the name throught a term coined by W.T. Stead to mean "through-thness" or the ability to see through objects. Careful, often repeated, and thorough research has, however, finally proven that this explanation does not include all facts. It is a perfect explanation of etheric sight, but the further and quite different idea of the fourth dimension, as Mr. Hinton explains it, is the only one that gives us an adequate explanation of the constantly observed facts of astral sight. I would therefore venture to assume, with all respect, that when Madame Blavatsky wrote this, she was thinking of etheric clairvoyance and not astral, and that the ultimate applicability of the sentence to this other and higher faculty, which she was not thinking of at the moment, did not occur to her.

The possession of this extraordinary and hardly explainable power must now be kept in mind during everything that follows. This power lays every point in the interior of every solid body absolutely open to the gaze of the seer, just as every point in the interior of a circle lies open to the gaze of someone looking down upon it.