When asked to give a simple definition of the fourth dimension, Edgar Cayce answered with a single word: "idea." Quite independently, the psychiatrist Carl Jung provided exactly the same, single word definition. The fourth dimension is the realm of ideas, the world of patterns in the mind of God, the world of the imagination. It's a big world, infinite; certainly big enough for one to get lost within it unless you know the secret of navigation.

A woman once complained to Edgar Cayce about a problem she had with meditation. She had "raised" her consciousness during meditation, but afterwards she had difficulty coming back down into her body. She would remain floating above herself. Mr. Cayce replied that to "raise" her consciousness, she did not have to leave her body. He advised her to seek the highest "within" herself.

How do you "raise" your consciousness, seeking the "highest" within yourself? Is the highest within you a spot just beneath the top of your skull? Or does raising your consciousness actually have something to do with changing the quality of consciousness, the pattern of your experience? Indeed, it does, and this change in quality involves a shift in the fourth dimension, not the third.

This amusing paradox shows the problem of discussing the fourth dimension with terms derived from the three dimensional world. Even to say "movement" in the fourth dimension borrows from the 3-D world of time and space. Perhaps it would be better to say "changes" instead of movement, when discussing the fourth dimension, for we can "travel" in the fourth dimension without moving at all. We don't actually travel, but rather we change our intentions and thus the pattern of our experience.

Contemplating the fourth dimension is a very useful exercise. The fourth dimension offers a novel and intriguing addition to our worldview that is becoming particularly important today. It provides the necessary stage upon which we can experience the reality of the soul. At a time when more and more people are wanting to have a relationship with soul, it is important to reckon with its fourth dimensional nature.

Many people still talk about "having" a soul, as if it were something they wore around their neck, or that was lodged in some portion of their brain. It is more important to imagine that we are souls. It is difficult, but necessary, to imagine that our bodies are the portion of the soul that exists in the three dimensional world and is visible to the senses. I regularly ask Atlantic University students to draw diagrams of this proposition and they are typically perplexed at the assignment.

Recently some help is available in the form of a new book, Spiritual Unfoldment: A Guide to Liberating Your Soul (Unfoldment Publications). The author, Richard Barrett, is the founder of the World Bank's Spiritual Unfoldment Society, which suggests that he has experience linking the world of intangibles with the world of hard currency. Judging from his book, one would gather that he is adept in explaining the loftiest subjects to the most materialistic of audiences. When asked why we are not more aware of the fourth dimensional realities in ordinary life, he says it is because "we have blocked out this perspective with three dimensional conditioning." Describing changes within the fourth dimension with a third dimensional term of "movement" is one example, and treating events that happen in the imagination as "imaginary," meaning not real, is another example of viewing the fourth dimension from the perspective of the three-dimensional world.

Physical awareness is three-dimensional, soul awareness is of the fourth dimension. Three-dimensional awareness has the basic qualities, Barrett explains, of time, space and matter. These qualities creates the experiences of separation, death and mass. Fourth dimensional awareness, on the other hand, has the basic qualities of timelessness, spacelessness and energy. These qualities create the experiences of unity, being and flow. In the fourth dimension, there is consciousness of eternity, where past and future simultaneously co-exist. There is consciousness of omnipresence, in which everywhere is located right here. In other words, the here and now is "Home Central" of the fourth dimension. There is a sense in the here and now of a permanent sense of being. That being is not of things, but of energy. As Barrett puts it, "In the fourth dimension of consciousness there is only an eternal moment that we call now and everything exists in energy forms."