The Fourth Dimension
GA 324a Mathematics and Reality
From Lecture VI:
In other words, all beings for whom time has an inner meaning are images of four-dimensional beings. This cube is still the same after three or six years. The lily bud changes. Because for it, time has a real meaning. Therefore, what we see in the lily is only the three-dimensional image of the four-dimensional lily being. So time is an image, a projection of the fourth dimension, the organic liveliness, into the three spatial dimensions of the physical world.
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From there, we want to create an idea of the fifth dimension. We will have to imagine that the fourth dimension, which we have found expressed as time, behaves in a positive and negative way. Now take two beings for whom time has a meaning, and imagine two such beings colliding with each other. Then something must appear as a result, similar to what we have previously called an accumulation of [opposing] forces; and what arises as a result when two four-dimensional beings come into relation with each other is their fifth dimension. This fifth dimension arises as a result, as a consequence of an exchange [a neutralization of polar force effects], in that two living beings, through their mutual interaction, produce something that they do not have outside [in the three ordinary spatial dimensions together], nor do they have in [the fourth dimension,] time, but have completely outside these [previously discussed dimensions or] boundaries. This is what we call compassion [or feeling], by which one being knows another, thus the realization of the [spiritual and mental] inner being of another being.
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Developing the sixth dimension in the same way would be too difficult, so I will only indicate it. [If we tried to progress in this way, something could be developed as an expression of the sixth dimension that,] when placed in the three-dimensional physical world, is self-conscious.
