In Visualization of Our Travels (Part 2) we left off with:
“So we can’t get from, say, the earth to the moon as fast as a laser beam, but then again, if you went to the moon (and we did), you can bring along a lunar rover, which is not something you can do with a beam of light.”
Now we get to the bit about visualization. The Physics of Success describes many things, but the specific application of physics to your future is based on the fact that we are made of mass, mass is energy, and it is traveling at the speed of energy (a.k.a., the Speed of Light). Because pretty much all of the other mass in our world is moving in pretty much the same direction at essentially the same speed, we don’t feel like we’re moving, any more than you feel like your moving in an airliner traveling 500 mph. The flight attendant walking to the back of the plane may be going 499 mph, but to you it looks like she’s walking 1 mph. It’s all relative, just like Einstein said.
So, do you need to be able to visualize more than three dimensions? Not really, but it’s a fun mental exercise, and if you “get it” a couple of times, it helps cement your understanding of how the Universe functions.
The first time I was able to picture something like this, I was looking over a steep hillside with a car climbing up the winding road, with switchbacks and all. I was able to imagine the hill (and by extension, the earth) as a coherent mass, the car as a completely separate coherent mass, and myself and the driver as other separate coherent masses. The whole lot of us were speeding along in the same general direction. The car, however, was moving in slightly different directions as the hill and me as it climbed the road and took the turns.
What was fascinating was that I was able to visualize this as a sequence of events, much like the frames of a film. In addition, it was clear that a consciousness was guiding the course of the car.
Later, I had a similar visualization while looking out the window of an airliner. We were descending into a cloud cover, and I could see where another airliner had done the same thing a short while earlier; there was a wake in the top of the cloud from the passing of the aircraft. I could visualize that plane having passed this way, and our plane, and the cloud, and all of the people as separate coherent masses. The two planes were being guided by consciousness (the pilots). It was completely different circumstances, but much the same visualization.
It bothered me a little bit that even having experienced this before, it wasn’t something I could call up at will. Thinking about it, I realized that the difference between those two occasions and my “normal” life were that I was quite literally above the subject of the observation, looking down on events.
I discuss the concept in The Physics of Success that there are animals on our planet that operate in a virtual two-dimensional world; even though they exist in three dimensions (actually many more than that!), they are only aware of two. It’s exactly the same as the proven fact that we humans exist in more than three dimensions, although we are only aware of three. An ant might see what looks like a big granite mountain, and is completely unaware of what is on the other side. We, as much taller creatures, can look down at the ant and a rock, and we can see exactly what is on the other side of the rock.
So, it occurs to me that even though our minds assemble a 3-D view of our world, we actually function in a 2-D plane; namely the face of the earth. We think in terms of vertical only when we have to mount steps or take an elevator, after which we revert to 2-D thinking. It’s hard to imagine more than three dimensions when you’re only operating in two! However, looking down from a hill at the car on the road, or out of an airplane, you are now operating in 3-D, so-to-speak, and now “imagining” additional dimensions is much easier.
So, get yourself some altitude (I find that just looking out my upstairs window is sufficient), and observe something moving across your field of view. The earth you see is a coherent mass, the moving thing is another coherent mass, and you are another. All three are moving in the almost the same direction at almost the same speed, but within that context, the moving object has a slightly different direction. Then, imagine that there is no “time” as you know it, but from instant to instant, there are tiny changes as all of the energy contained in the mass moves to a new location. Think of the frames of a film where each subsequent frame has tiny changes from the previous and following frames.
Everything you see moves from one place to the next. What you don’t see is that it is moving in a direction (dimension). You don’t see it, because you moved with it. That’s where your imagination comes in.
Everything you see is moving from here, to there, to there, to there, and so on. Every minute change that you see from one instant (place) to the next we perceive as the passage of time. What is incorrect about our perception is that it’s not time that is passing. We are the ones doing the passing. And that’s really the whole point of The Physics of Success; that minute changes can be made with regards to the direction we are traveling, so that we end up where we want to be instead of some default place.
