O day and night, but this is
  wondrous strange!

  And therefore as a stranger
  give it welcome.

  There are more things in
  heaven and earth, Hendrix,

  Than are dreamt of in your
  philosophy.

  Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5,

  by William Shakespeare

  My wonderful dog, Hendrix, standing in
  for the character Horatio in the quote
  above.

    Hendrix is a big, slobbering, goofy, beautiful mutt. His mother was a purebred boxer, but you can’t see it. Daddy is a mystery, so only his momma knew where he got those glacier blue eyes and giraffe legs, and she refused to say. As a puppy, he was a watermelon-sized bundle of energy. One day, he showed me the disquieting effect of discovering that existence has more dimensions than previously thought.

    Quantum physics teaches us that there are at least ten dimensions. Given that we seem to be consciously aware of only three of them -- four, if you count time as a dimension -- then there seems to be an awful lot of existence that we are consciously unaware of.

    We have consciousness in every one of these dimensions. Most of us, however, are not aware of this latent consciousness and it remains unexplored except by an intrepid few.

    My daughter had just come home from a party where she was given a helium balloon. She skipped into the house, letting go of the ribbon tied to the balloon, which rose and stuck to the ceiling. Thinking nothing more of it, as children are prone to do, she left the room.

    Dogs -- and people -- are really two dimensional creatures. The world is mostly forward/backward and left/right. Up/down does figure in, but very shallowly. We humans have not come very far from our ancestors who thought the world was flat because they could envision nothing more.

    The vastness of a three-dimensional Universe is incomprehensible. How do you wrap your head around infinity? If you are ignorant and fearful, you keep your imagination close to home, so when the motion of the planets makes it apparent that the heavens move, our small and fearful minds make sure that motion is around a central point upon which we stand and damnation to anyone, like Galileo, who believes otherwise.

    How vast and complex must be a ten-dimensional Universe! How uncomprehended by a human race barely coping with three.

    In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right? Nope, ‘fraid not. Actually, the one-eyed man is stoned to death, burned at the stake, or locked into a padded cell because he is aware of things that no one else can sense. Do we not do the same, even today, labeling seers as lunatics or publicly ridiculing them when they relay what they perceive -- until they learn to keep silent? Keep your visions to yourself because you scare the rest of us is the message sent.

    Hendrix trotted into the room and noticed the colorful ribbon. I watched as his eyes travelled up the ribbon to the balloon at the ceiling. He jumped in a double-take and began to bark at the balloon. In case you are thinking that the reaction was to the balloon itself, let me point out that for many days afterward he would enter any room and check out the ceiling. He noticed the ceiling fans and the spider webs. He had discovered up.

    So, blind flatlander, what dimensions are awaiting your discovery?

[See related essay in this blog: “What does a Fish Know of the Water?”]