“It’s impossible”, they said

Some things make no sense until you add another dimension, then everything falls into place.

Square roots

(Just skim over this when you get lost, this will perfectly demonstrate my point)

During high school, we were introduced to square roots.  We knew that 2×2=4, 3×3=9, etc.  Now we could reverse this process so we could express “what times itself makes this number” e.g. “what times what equals 25?”  Mathematically we say x = √25  which equals 5.

Now this is really cool.  It provides math teachers with yet another opportunity to inflict confusion on their victims.  Mwhahahah 😉

Really, it provides us with a whole new tool for solving problems.  For example, my paint covers 16m².  That means it would cover 4 x 4 meters.  But actually, if it covers 13m², our calculator says it covers about 3.6 x 3.6 meters.

So, we do a whole lot of maths exercises, and find this works great, but only if we stay positive and avoid any negativity.  We’ve all plugged in a number like -5, then √, only for our calculator to rudely say “Error”.  We ask our teacher, “What’s up with that – it’s useless for half the numbers in the universe!”  They sheepishly reply, “It’s impossible, you just can’t take a negative number and get its square root.”

Imaginary numbers

What a have!  What a farce.  They keep feeding us this rubbish for a few years, then finally they turn around and say, “Well actually, you can…”

Mathematicians and scientists were so frustrated with this problem that they decided to make negative roots possible.  They declared that we will define √-1  as this thing called “i”.  Now this is nothing to do with Apple devices – neither is it a realization that the root of negativity is our own ego, but that’s an interesting diversion.  Since √xy = √x*√y, we can say √-x = √-1*x = √-1*√x  which is written i√x e.g. √-25 = 5i.

Such numbers are called imaginary numbers.  You can find out more in Wikipedia or the Khan Academy.

Complex numbers

We can combine imaginary numbers with “real numbers” to form “complex numbers” (Wikipedia or Khan).  These play a huge role in physics, applicable particularly to electronic engineering and astrophysics.

They look like a + bi.  Whatever the equation, you can always split out the imaginary and real parts into two parts you can add together.

Remember back in primary school, we used a number line to understand adding and subtracting.  This was particularly useful when we learned about negative numbers.  Complex numbers are represented with two-dimensions – like a point on an x-y graph, where the real number is like x and the imaginary number is like y – think of a + bi like the point (ax, by).

My point

The introduction of imaginary numbers enabled scientists a greater understanding of nature.  Only through this understanding have many modern technologies become possible.  Without this, we wouldn’t have computers or medical imaging devices.

Complex numbers add a whole new dimension through which we understand things.
Likewise, the spiritual dimension
helps us understand things.

Now, it’s interesting that what Christians call “spiritual” atheists call “imaginary”.  Atheists choose to only understand the world through what they perceive as real, but so many things just don’t make sense – they’re impossible.  However, when we add the spiritual dimension, we start to make sense of things beyond our natural perception.  Atheists are happy to use imaginary numbers to understand the universe; but refuse to consider the spiritual dimension.  Things like death have a completely different meaning when viewed with a spiritual dimension.  Instead of a life coming to an end and disappearing from existence, it shifts into the spiritual dimension to continue eternally.  Life is like a meagre line on an infinite two-dimensional plane.  The natural touches so little of the spiritual dimension and reality, that it is infinitesimally insignificant.

Actually, it doesn’t end there.  Where we perceive four dimensions of width, height, depth and time, scientists understand the universe with 10 mathematical dimensions.  I’ve heard that someone like Einstein left behind several problems limited to the six dimensions they perceived.  These were resolved when someone reading the Bible was inspired that there were ten.  By considering the extra dimension, everything just fell into place.

In a similar manner, when we accept the fact of the spiritual dimension, we can go beyond this to more spiritual dimensions.  In other words, more different perspectives come to our understanding by which we being to comprehend the heavenlies.

Conclusion

When we view death from a natural perspective, we see the horrific early annihilation of a fellow sentient.  And even if we see the growth and compassion attained from suffering, it’s still unfair for a life to continue to its ugly end in such manner.  Further, we shun the death penalty even for grievous crimes.

When we view death and suffering from a spiritual perspective, we begin to see that what we experience in the natural, during this life is insignificant.  While we experience these as painful and things such as the death penalty, seem abhorrent; or God destroying societies apocalyptically.  From a spiritual perspective, we can see death as a release from our sin-infected bodies into a sinless one, and a life cut short is one reaching eternity after enduring fewer troubles of this sinful world.  We can also appreciate the reason God destroys unredeemable societies, rather than allow more children to be born into inevitable eternal destruction, and further contamination of nearby societies.

This extra dimension doesn’t only make sense of death and suffering; but allows us to understand the supernatural.  When Jesus appeared in a locked room, we can envisage him just stepping from the spiritual dimension into the natural plane.  We see the raptures of Enoch, Moses’ body and Elijah as stretching physics by an extra dimension.  As with the rapture of Phillip away from the Ethiopian, and Jesus occasional unexplainably mysterious appearance in a distant place.  This extra dimension totally messes with our understanding of nature, and so the impossible becomes a variant expression of the supernatural, which is our true reality.

When we add the spiritual dimension, we can understand things that were impossible are in fact natural.