Monday, October 22, 2012

Substance


You’ve said that concrete things or systems are by definition substantial or material, but what exactly is substance?

Substance is that which can be perceived and touched – though not necessarily by ourselves.

Matter basically means the same thing, though it’s often used to refer to only physical grades of substance.

Concrete things are therefore something rather than nothing, whereas abstractions are in themselves nothing, though they may be represented in a concrete form, e.g. as words on paper, electrical patterns in our brains, or as ethereal thought-forms, which are visible to some clairvoyants.

But what is substance in and of itself?

What’s it made of?

We could say that matter particles of one grade are temporary, relatively stable condensations of an underlying medium, composed of finer particles which are condensations of a deeper substantial medium, and so on, ad infinitum.

Ultimately everything can be resolved into motion or vibration, but motion is just an empty abstraction unless it is motion of something, and something by definition is substance.

Every grade of substance is generated by motion of a more ethereal grade of substance, and consists of particlelike discontinuities, though it may seem relatively homogeneous and undifferentiated to beings on other planes.

Are the inner worlds or planes extra dimensions?

No.

In its broadest sense, a dimension is any measurable property or quantity, such as length, mass, temperature, time, etc.

Strictly speaking, infinite space has no dimensions because it can’t be measured.

Only finite units of space, or concrete objects and entities are measurable.

It seems reasonable to suppose that on every plane of reality, size can be measured in only three directions, corresponding to length, width, and height.

Which are often referred to loosely as ‘spatial’ dimensions.

But the inner worlds themselves should not really be called dimensions.
.
David Pratt

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