Names and their Reverberations

The more earthy, the more real. The realms of Matter and of Spirit. The transcendental. Trans-? Across, beyond. My own immediate association comes from that word, not transatlantic travel, thus trans- means above; the air, for instance. We consider air sort of insubstantial in everyday language—unless we find that we can’t breathe. Airy, therefore, has a reverberation of insubstantiality although, technically, air isn’t. Our thinking is earth-rooted. Language is always challenged when it attempts to grasp what can’t be physically held.

Different languages, different twists, but the fundamentals are the same. In German, for example, the word Geist principally signals intelligence although it also means “ghost”; it is “mind” which also appears to be insubstantial, like a ghost; but Germans have adapted ghost for mind and also for the spiritual, a word that we take from Latin, where it means “breath,” so there you are: airy.

I am reading Malcolm Moncrieff’s book, The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. There he juxtaposes three-dimensionality and four-dimensionality, in effect attempting to give an earthy sort of foundation to the elusively transcending real by going from 3- to 4-. It’s a tough row to hoe. He emphasizes the words’ endings, those -itys, and says that he doesn’t mean the actual three dimensions of space nor yet the kind of fourth dimension mathematicians can and do project. He means something I would call “orders,” the 3D being the physical, the 4D being meaning. And since meaning is a common experience here in 3D-Land, he sees the two orders interpenetrating.

So why doesn’t he simply call it the spiritual order? Here culture shows its influence. Moncrieff published his book in 1951 hoping to make a contribution to the understanding of paranormal phenomena. But paranormal studies then had, as now they still have, aspirations of being viewed as sciences, and in that realm the spiritual is heterodox. Orthodox science is monistic. In quantum physics and such places it more and more resembles idealism pure and simple; the greater mass of science is still materialistic (physics is too hard to master); but both are monistic. Whereas, by contrast, the spiritual strongly suggests a dualism. Had Moncrieff written in the 1990s, he might have called his fourth-dimensionality quantum-mechanicity. That sort of thing is almost a reflex among people captured by the enormous fascination of the transcendental while wishing to stay on the reservation. The problem is that no matter how hard you strum the material strings, you don’t actually produce spiritual music, just the same old d‑itty entitled “Me too.” I think I’ll stick with the ghost.