Dimension

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘dimension’ operates not as a neutral geometric descriptor but as a philosophically charged term designating planes, registers, or orders of reality that exceed ordinary three-dimensional consciousness. The term’s deployment ranges widely: Govinda employs it to articulate how meditative integration of multiple centres of consciousness produces a ‘higher dimensionality’ inaccessible to discursive intellect alone; Hillman recruits it for a psychological hermeneutic in which ‘depth’ is itself a dimension of soul — one without limit — constituted through the act of penetrating toward what is hidden; von Franz links the relativity of the space-time dimension to synchronicity, examining how both physics and Jungian psychology encounter its breakdown under certain extreme conditions; Corbin uses it to anatomize the ontological structure of being itself, distinguishing the dimension of necessary being from the dimension of contingent being as two faces visible only to the mystic; McGilchrist interrogates the asymmetry between time (always one dimension) and space (multiple dimensions) as expressive of fundamentally different modes of existence. The central tension in the corpus is between dimension as a quantitative, mathematical scaffold (space-time, quaternary structure, imaginary time) and dimension as a qualitative register of experience — particularly of soul, depth, and transpersonal reality — that overflows any formal mapping. This makes ‘dimension’ a boundary concept where physics, metaphysics, and depth psychology converge.

In the library 11 passages

an experience of higher dimensionality is achieved by integration of experiences of different centres and levels of consciousness… we live simultaneously in different dimensions, of which that of the intellect, the faculty of discursive thought, is only one.

Govinda argues that meditative integration of multiple consciousness-levels yields a higher dimensionality that three-dimensional discursive thought cannot represent, just as a painter cannot fully render three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis

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soul is not only a region in Freud’s topographical sense, or even a dimension in Heraclitus’ own sense; it is an operation of penetrating… If soul is a prime mover, then its primary movement is deepening, by which it increases its dimension.

Hillman redefines soul’s ‘depth dimension’ not as a fixed spatial register but as a self-augmenting operation of penetration toward hidden truth, such that dimension is constituted by the very act of psychological deepening.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis

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what those two faces show the visionary is the twofold dimension of being precisely analyzed in Avicenna’s ontology as the dimension of necessary being and the dimension of ‘contingent’ being.

Corbin employs ‘dimension’ ontologically to denote the two constitutive registers of every existent — its necessary being and its actualized possibility — visible only to the mystic perceiving both faces of a thing.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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a second time dimension without an intrinsic ‘arrow’ reminds the psychologist of the illud-tempus or Aljira idea of certain primitives… this new theory of a second time dimension seems to spring from a tentative effort to grasp that double aspect of reality which Jung has called ‘acausal-orderedness’ and ‘synchronicity.’

Von Franz maps the physicist’s proposed imaginary second time dimension onto the Jungian archetype of synchronicity, arguing both represent attempts to conceptualise a temporality outside ordinary causal succession.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

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Relativity of the Space-Time Dimension: In the world of particles, the dimension of space becomes a problem, because… ‘objects, even if they occupy regions of space very distant from one another, are not really separate.’ In the same way, at the time of certain synchronistic incidents… space seems to disappear.

Von Franz draws a structural parallel between quantum non-locality and synchronistic experience to argue that the space-time dimension is itself relative and can effectively vanish in psychophysically meaningful events.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and 11 or even more dimensions.

McGilchrist uses the contrast between time’s singular dimension and space’s plurality of dimensions to argue for the qualitative asymmetry between these two fundamental registers of existence.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and 11 or even more dimensions.

A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist’s argument that the dimensionality of time differs categorically from that of space, with profound consequences for understanding consciousness and lived experience.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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why would the individual, such as it appears, not conserve a dimension of pre-individuality in its dimension of being, which would be somewhat associated and irreducible to what can be thought in terms of the ‘individual’?

Simondon introduces ‘dimension’ to argue that the individual retains an irreducible pre-individual register within its being that persists beyond and cannot be collapsed into the merely individuated.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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when it comes to representing the complex of a hexagram, one cannot do without the help of a fourth dimension, which is indeed imaginable to the mathematical mind but which cannot be represented concretely.

Wilhelm invokes a fourth dimension as the necessary but unrepresentable formal requirement for capturing the full complexity of the hexagram system, linking mathematical imagination to the limits of concrete representation.

Hellmut Wilhelm, Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching, 1960supporting

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the corporeal schema converts these topological structures into Euclidean structures through a mediate system of relations that is the very dimensionality of the corporeal schema.

Simondon identifies dimensionality as the mediating function of the corporeal schema that translates irreducible topological structures into the Euclidean spatial forms available to ordinary perception.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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