Chapter XVI (part 11)

All the beings assumed by us to exist in the world of many dimensions , cannot know one another, i.e., cannot know that we are binding them together in different wholes in our phenomenal world, just as in general they cannot know our phenomenal world and its relations. But they must know themselves , although it is impossible for us to define the degree of clearness of this consciousness. It may be clearer than ours, and it may be more vague—dreamlike, as it were. Between these beings there may be a continuous but imperfectly perceived exchange of thoughts , analogous to the exchange of substance in a living organism. They may experience certain feelings in common, certain thoughts may arise in them spontaneously as it were, under the influence of general causes. Upon the lines of this inner communion they must divide themselves into different wholes of some categories to us entirely incomprehensible, or only guessed at. The essence of each such separate being must consist in its knowledge of itself and its nearest functions and relations; it must feel things analogous to itself, and must have the faculty of telling about itself and them, i.e., this consciousness must always behold a picture of itself and its conditioning relations. It is eternally studying this picture and instantly communicating it to another being coming into communion with it. Whether these consciousnesses in sections of the world other than ours exist or not, we, under the existing conditions of our receptivity , cannot say. They can be sensed only by the changed psyche. Our usual receptivity and thinking are too absorbed by the sensations of the phenomenal world, and by themselves, and therefore do not reflect impressions coming to them from other beings, or reflect them so weakly that they are not fixed there in any intelligible form. Moreover we do not recognize the fact that we are in constant communion with the noumena of all surrounding things, near and remote, with beings like ourselves and others entirely different, with the life of everything in the world and of all the world. But if the impressions coming from other beings are so forceful p. 194 that the consciousness feels them, then our mind immediately projects them into the outer world of phenomena and seeks for their cause in the phenomenal world, exactly in the same manner that a two-dimensional being, inhabiting a plane, seeks in its plane for the cause of the impressions which come from a higher world. ______ Our psyche is limited by its phenomenal receptivity, i.e., it is surrounded by itself. The world of phenomena, i.e., the form of its own perception, surrounds it as a ring, or as a wall, and it sees nothing save this wall. But if the psyche succeeds in escaping out of this limiting circle, it will invariably see much that is new in the world. If we will separate self-elements in our perception, writes Hinton [ A New Era of Thought , pp. 36, 37], then it will be found that the deadness which we ascribe to the external world is not really there, but is put in by us because of our own limitations. It is really the self-elements in our knowledge which make us talk of mechanical necessity, dead matter. When our limitations fall, we behold the spirit of the world as we behold the spirit of a friend—something which is discerned in and through the material presentation of a body to us. Our thought means are sufficient at present to show us human souls; but all except human beings is, as far as science is concerned, inanimate. Our self-element must be got rid of from our perception, and this will be changed. But is the unknowableness of the noumenal world as absolute for us as it sometimes seems? In The Critique of Pure Reason and in other writings, Kant denied the possibility of "spiritual sight." But in Dreams of a Ghost-seer he not only admitted this possibility, but gave to it one of the best definitions which we have ever had up to now.