Four Dimensions

What is it in each of us that searches for explanations in what is greater than ourselves? The church speaks of God and theology. Scientists postulate that the world is governed by unchanging mathematically and physically provable theories. Humanists search for the good that lies within themselves. Even in relationships, we look for what is greater, enviable even, in the other person. We are in constant motion to discover what is superior, what is infinite, what is divine. We all want to discover the truth.

Truth. How this era has ravaged and decimated our assumptions of truth. For, what is truth? How can we claim that any single truth exists? If I see it, is it true? If I can touch it? What if my soul confirms its existence? The juggernaut of post-modernity will assert this subjective reasoning, claiming that experiential knowledge is in itself reality. I hesitate to embrace the idea that what is conceptualized as truth can be so ephemeral and undulating. That there is no overarching reality that bonds humanity together seems counter-intuitive to me.

I want to be a reasonable person. I cannot believe anything simply because I am told to or because it seems right. I want to have proof: measurable, experiential, reasonable.

Of late, I have been struggling to redefine my beliefs, those expounded by the church, the teachings and sayings tossed around since my childhood. My life has turned, it seems, to call into question whether I believe what I have long clung to. Such will, or should, occur when one is faced with various paradigms, other cultures, sundry beliefs.

I do not want to be the person who criticizes the church for all that I see, as if I am to be greater than the beliefs that for so long defined me. I can not disbelieve just because it is fashionable to do so; the questions run so much deeper than that. When truly stirred by hypocrisies or the inability to answer, then I will question.

Recently, I wondered whether I had lost my faith. This pitiful, enervated quasi-pneumatic creature that is my faith writhes silently at my feet, shudderingly breathing its last, closing its eyes, falling away. It is not, as I assumed, lost forever. True, it is largely comatose, but I am too greatly defined as a person by what I believe. These beliefs are far too essential to have disappeared. In danger of extinction, I now seek to weed out the sickly beliefs from the essential ones. I want so badly to thrive wholly.

Lately I have been teaching in one of my classes about "dimensions," mainly because the dialogue centers on Minsu going to see a 3-D movie. Unsure that I had adequately explained the concept, I asked my co-teacher to explain it in Korean. Apparently he is somewhat fascinated by this subject, as he began illustrating each dimension and spoke for a long while (well, everything feels longer when you are uncomprehendingly listening to a different language) about the fourth dimension. He even drew graphs for each dimension, explaining the fourth dimension was unplotable on a graph.

Realizing how long it has been since I have taken any sort of math or science class, I looked up "dimensions," specifically the fourth dimension, on Wikipedia, scanning over its definition. It explained that our perception of space is three dimensional; it is mathematically demonstrated by perpendicularly connecting a line to a plane. The same was previously done in moving up other dimensions: go from none to the first by placing non-dimensional points in a row to form a line, go from first to second by setting two lines perpendicular to one another. The fourth dimension, then, is conceptually achieved by lining up several three dimensional spaces. It is often thought of as time, stationary objects moving across a span of years.

It went on to speak of "Flatland," a book by Edwin Abbott, which hypothesizes about life in a fourth dimension. Just as a hypothetical living two dimensional object, such as if a flat photograph image came to life, could not comprehend a three dimensional object, neither could we, in a three dimensional world, comprehend a four dimensional object. A two dimensional object upon being confronted with our image, could only understand us within its two dimensional frame of reference. Were we to step slightly out of its view, moving across a dimension that does not exist in its world, it would assume we had somehow disappeared. The same concept can then be applied to an animate four dimensional object entering into our world. If it merely traveled across its monopolized dimension, it would appear in our world to have vanished. It is greater and more advanced than what exists in our world.

Given the swirling of my mind of late that has gridlocked my penned thoughts, I could not resist reflecting on this super-dimensional world as being the very place that God exists. In keeping with how I was raised, my core cries out that the tangible world is not everything. What I can see is superseded by an over-arching reality, by a fourth dimension. In here, there is a God who moves freely, able to regard our fish bowl world from a superior angle. At times, flashes of divinity are exhibited in the world, then moving just beyond our view, disappearing.

My mind, at times even more two dimensional than three dimensional, cannot fully comprehend these considerations. After all, one may only conjecture at what exists beyond our understanding. So here I am, in a semi-permanent state of incomprehension, moving across time three dimensionally, grasping for a solid truth that exists to me in glimmers around my periphery.

I have no answers, just questions.