Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Quotes

“The scientific world was then so thoroughly mechanized, in fact, that it was defenseless against an individual initiative that it had not foreseen, and the slightest dust of intelligence, lifted by the wind, was able to throw that gigantic clock out of order.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“Nothing is easier to accept, in fact, than the existence of unknown and invisible forces situated inside us, which can be externalized to provoke phenomena that are only surprising in appearance. Everything can thus be explained with the utmost simplicity. In haunted houses, for example, we always find some unbalanced young woman in the neighborhood, whose nervous force, unwittingly externalized, is sufficient to produce the strangest phenomena. From there to thinking that there are unutilized forces dormant within us, more powerful than all the machines in the world, is only a single step. A day will come when we shall understand that there exists within very human being a path of progress much surer and much easier than the external path that science is presently attempting to follow.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“It was decided to intern him in the laboratory where he worked and to monitor him closely for a year. Given the marvelous progress accomplished by science, the prisons and dungeons of old were long gone, and it is understandable that the new world took great pride in that reform, which placed men on a par with gods. To tell the truth, there was no difference between the condition of citizens submissive to the superhuman State and that of ancient convicts, except that the convicts of old enjoyed freedom of thought and the spectacle of nature. Prisons no longer had any utility in such circumstances.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“In the years that followed, this domestication of the masses became even more complete. The whole world was already nothing but an immense, infinitely delicate mechanism composed of an inextricable network of wires, controls, conduits and radiant effluvia, and there was an evident necessity for an absolute order, an exceedingly powerful authority to maintain equilibrium in that vast overcomplicated social machine.
This complexity increased further when the crowd was domesticated, classified into different specialisms by the Savants of the Great Central Laboratory. Masters of the sources of life, the scientists at the Laboratory gradually modified the traditional forms of the human body. The slaves employed in forced labor had their muscles specially developed, while their brains, reduced to an indispensable minimum, were complemented by helmet-meters obedient to the slightest directions issued by the Laboratory.
Other individuals, charged with intellectual labor, were, so to speak, disarmed entirely, from the physical point of view, and reduced in advance to powerlessness should they ever attempt—however improbable it might be—to rebel.
These specializations, multiplied to infinity, were, moreover, welcomed joyfully by the people, who felt completely reassured by this state of dependence. They understood that they were part of a social whole; they found themselves less isolated and better maintained—and, in their new functions, they exaggerated the joys of specialization to the point of folly.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“All the ancient dissimilarities, conflicts and antagonisms were solely due to the fragmentary fashion in which people had been content, until then, to study the universe. When all these divergent rays of thought had found their common focal point in the four-dimensional synthesis, natural variations were no longer anything but harmonic manifestations of a single common thought. And from matter, formerly judged inert, to the noblest speculations of the human mind, the world was now no more than a single soul, living the same life, an emanation of a single diverse thought that was named, in memory of the naïve beliefs of old, the Golden Eagle.
This union of minds, of the same time and all times, by the direct path of the fourth dimension—by the subconscious, as one would once have put it—had nothing blissful or passive about it, though, although no one had believed otherwise in the times when humankind still dreamed of naïve celestial sentimentality and eternal paradisal adoration. More than ever, contradiction engendered an intense intellectual life in which opposition alone, as in all the mind’s operations, was able to motivate thought.
What ensured that all effort became useful and positive, however, was that each individual action of intelligence concurred with the same continuous whole—just as, in a statue, all the lines, because they are opposed, unite to perfect a single masterpiece—and that love had replaced hatred since the language of the four-dimensional soul had been substituted for the fragmentary hypocrisies of three-dimensional modes of expression: hypocrisies contained in the concrete words of language as in the relative formulas of science.
After overturning all human traditions and mores, sincerity, imposed by the direct reading of thoughts, had engendered love and created, in the spiritual domain, a sort of state of nature, this time transcendental, that marked the definitive liberation of the human mind.
Every man understood, in the Age of the Golden Eagle, that he was but one fragment of a single statue—whether an eye, nose or finger did not matter—that he was only one act of the same intelligence, and that he desired the beauty of the whole with all his heart, his duty was to devote all his strength to make the part that was confided to him as beautiful as possible. That detail of the whole, his personality, immortal as the whole outside time, was the art-work signed with his name for all eternity within the universal art-work; it was the “I” marking his place in the universal continuum. It was not important whether the act was one of intelligence, faith, revolt or kindness, provided it was worthy of the whole; on the contrary, woe betide the man if his “I” was nothing but a defect, a lack or a fault, forever.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“The human personality is the free development of an initially determined character in contact with neighboring personalities. Its field is love—which is to say, the union of all personalities in the communal consciousness. Its mission is the contradiction that accentuates characters-which is to say, the differences in which the unique Thought lives. To borrow the ancient symbolic language: man is freer than God; he is His superior, as the work of art is to the author, since it is more complete than he is in the relevant particular. For God is not All, since He seeks to realize himself and, without the creations that are His thoughts, he would remain as non-existent as the human mind would be without thought. The world, in the Universal Consciousness, is, in this sense, here a relative certainty (physical laws), there a contradiction (human works), and one might say that the human personality is God’s sense of humor.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“There is, therefore, nothing external, superior or miraculous outside of us, for our intellectual life is the very life of the universe, and its expression the very highest.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“We must act with discretion and generosity, for we know now that everything that surrounds us is really part of us, and that in hurting others it is ourselves that we hurt. But if love is, in consequence, the most sublime form of egoism, egoism is, by the same token, the most elevated form of love, for it is in demanding everything of ourselves that we best serve others. Above all else, therefore, wherever chance has placed us, we must elevate our personality to superhumanity with honor and courage, and release it from three-dimensional prejudices. We know that we have nothing more to expect from the Author that creates individuals, while the Author expects everything of us, who are creating the Work of Art by living it.
All mystery is henceforth in us, all imagination superior to the universal consciousness, good or evil, solely dependent on our will. Sole inventors of the world, we live in a magnificent fairyland in which the humblest objects are thoughts and the greatest individuals are souls.
Since the consciousness of the world is within us, let us learn how to laugh at appearances; let us learn, above all else, how to conduct ourselves internally like immortal heroes, and no longer as men.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“Humor is like a disturbing moral anarchy when attacking “serious things.”
Humor, on the other hand, seems dangerous, because it insinuates itself into “serious things”—into the accepted reasoning that is the very foundation of human knowledge—in order to extrapolate them to absurdity, using them to prove their own relativity.
Humor is not laughter. Laughter is a social tribunal that judges and condemns the ridiculous in comparing it to accepted verity that comprises law. Humor itself is not in the service of society but of the gods; it limits itself to marking the border between the known and the unknown.
Humor is thus incapable of pleasing those who wallow proudly and complaisantly in their certainties; it is, on the contrary, the little frisson of an intelligence that wants to take flight—but that frisson is always painful, because, as it opens its wings, the mind hurts itself on the bars of its cage.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“Revelation has been within us since the origin of the World.
Let us not, indeed, be mistaken: since the origin of the world, all possibilities and all future ideas have been in existence, as seeds of potential. It is, therefore, not to the future that it is necessary to look for revelation but the power of our memory. The poet of the enlightened land who conceived in very ancient times the symbol of the Earthly Paradise: God saying, after Adam had touched the Tree of Science, “He has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”—which is to say, the for and the against, the androgynous idea—“now we must make sure that he does not touch the Tree of Life and live forever”, thus condemning man to material labor; was several thousand years ahead, not only of his own time, but of ours.
Humankind, as a whole, cannot follow the fulgurant course of an Idea; its progress is slower and “forward thinkers”—precursors—have to have the patience to wait until everyone else’s ideas have caught up with theirs: a patience often difficult for the thinker who, after being madly elevated, must return to his point of departure and, estranged by what he has seen, feels like a foreigner visiting his own world.

The usefulness of precursors.
Is it necessary to conclude that these forward thinkers, these bold recognitions, are useless? Quite the contrary, for it is in bringing superhuman heroes to life, imagining the reality of facts whose prototypes remain latent in the world of ideas, that poets and researchers construct the frame of the world. Their exceptional follies of today will become the banality of tomorrow, and the crowd will eventually hasten to take the presently-accessible steps which they are carving out in the clouds—and that crowd, in its blind course, will have been upraised without knowing it.
Without changing position, the opposition of yesterday becomes the reaction of tomorrow, the exception becomes the law in its turn; only the Idea is immutable through its successive incarnations, its changes of material form: the relativities, in a word, that we call Life. It is for us to extract the substance from the shadow and seize the eternal element of things.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“The reign of goodness is only possible in the four-dimensional continuum; it will make us understand the universality of love.
Doubt is indeed a virtue of maturity for civilizations as for men; it engenders indulgence and disinclination to action; it should be a motive for discouragement for the ignorant, but the crown of all science for those who have learned everything.
Now, the reign of goodness will not be possible on Earth until the day when the language of the soul has replaced the provisional deception of formulas and words. And on that day alone will the profound and universal meaning be revealed of love: a symbol still infinitely relative and restricted today, but which will become the formidable continuous reality of the future world of four dimensions, as pain is that of the engendered world of three dimensions.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“On the day our Father dies, it will be necessary for us to take His place.
It has sometimes been observed that a man only becomes a man on the day his father dies. However old, active or independent he might be, it is on that day alone that he experiences a distressing sense of emptiness above him. He is now the responsible leader who marches ahead and who masks the unknown for those who follow him. No guide will any longer return in a bad situation to offer him a hand; he remains alone in life, facing the horizon over which death looms.
It is then that the man pauses for reflection, and looks back at those he must help. He becomes conscious of his worth and his responsibilities; he finally understands that nothing can come henceforth from anyone but him.
In the history of the world, the human mind will not be free of its infancy until the day when it will experience that crisis of distress, hesitation and mourning. On that day, a thinker or a poet will have the courage to pronounce these oppressive words: “Heaven is empty, my father is dead, or rather, never existed; it was my shadow, immeasurably magnified, that I followed along the road.”
Above all, though, he will have the superhuman strength to add: “It is up to us, henceforth, to take the place of our dead father and to realize that necessary God to whom we have attributed all science, all wisdom and all providence.”
I do not know whether many men would be capable today of making the prodigiously painful effort that would claim such an enfranchisement, and centuries might yet be necessary to discern the sense of it. On that day, we shall doubtless understand that no unknown exists outside ourselves and that it is within ourselves that all of the immense unknown must be sought.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

“The God-scientist will know doubt, and will search for God.
For on that day, in the depths of his consciousness, the distressing mystery of the contrary with pose itself again.
Knowing the universe to the extent of its extreme limits, its intimate life and its construction, the new God will, however, understand that he only knows it from within, which is to say, from himself, and that he has none of the vision from without that a superior God, for example, might possess.
And, beginning to doubt himself, the savant God will soon kneel down like his human ancestors before the great mystery.
Pensive, anxiously turning his gaze toward the Heavens, the new God would search for God. He will have done everything to understand the world, and he will have reconstructed it scientifically, piece by piece, in his own image, his will imposing itself on the universe—and, at the moment of attaining the absolute, of integrating all science, the magnificent edifice will fall into dust before the light breath of the contrary, which the poets of yesteryear would doubtless have named the Evil Genius, but which men of common sense simply call humor.”
― Gaston De Pawlowski, Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension