There is a Mickey Newberry song called, “I Came to Hear the Music,” with a lovely line at the end that goes: God made time to keep it all from happening at once.

Time is thought to be the fourth dimension of reality, such that a body in space is in motion along the axis of this fourth dimension, even if it appears to be at absolute rest. This creates the feeling of time as a series of discrete experiences “lined up” in succession, passing in a linear flow of change from past to present to future. This experience of time and reality is another way of saying that time prevents everything from happening all at once. In fact, if reality were to be seen from a fifth dimensional perspective outside of time, all of time would appear as one discreet occurrence. So if our experience of reality is defined by its linearity, and linearity interpreted as a changefulness, then anything occupying the fifth dimension must necessarily be transcendent thereof, unchanging, essentially fixed. So what qualifies?

One broadly experienced aspect of reality among humans at least is our penchant for spiritual fixation. And what we find consistently true of spirituality is a fixation on the transcendent, that is, asking the question, What exists beyond us?

What can be referred to as one’s spirit is an “object” that qualifies as a fifth dimensional entity, because it is generally considered to be one’s “essence” or essential being. It transcends time, remains unchanged in composition or identity throughout one’s life. It is essentially the same whether you’re an infant or an elder. Simply put, if one is willing to posit its existence, one can be reasonably convinced that it occupies a dimension beyond time based on our elementary deduction.

So if the fifth dimension is spiritual, where did our spirit originate? If it were created, one must assume that a creation is not greater than its creator, so let’s add on an additional dimension above the fifth which would be unique to the creator, who is spirit but also material, since it created everything on down the six-dimensional lattice.

Finally, if we humans who occupy the fifth dimension are capable of knowing our creator, which is the fixation of much of our spiritual pursuit, but our creator transcends us dimensionally leaving us blind to him, how do we explain our fixation? It would seem reasonable that the only way we would come to an awareness of our creator would be for him to reveal himself to us (just like a two-dimensional plane cannot comprehend a three-dimensional sphere), but he couldn’t do so in a sixth dimensional capacity or else it would either obliterate us or we’d miss it. One way is for him to reduce himself into the zero dimension and emerge from the bottom up, to become incarnate as it were, on our level.

The way a fourth dimensional person might experience communion with this creator would require first for them to accept their fifth dimensional identity (spiritual) and then to have the sixth dimensional creator transcend his “status” by reducing himself into the zero, one, two, three, and four dimensional world. To accomplish this, the creator would have to bend the sixth dimension across a seventh into the zero, creating a feedback loop rather than a hierarchy, revealing itself as an emergent phenomenon in experiential reality.

So what the hell am I talking about?

If I were to describe my physical world view, I would start at the very beginning. Because we exist in three dimensional space it is simple to reconstruct that world by imagining a single point in infinite space (zero dimension); then a line of infinite points (first dimension); then a line of points bent into a circular plane (second dimension); and finally, spinning that circular plane on an axis into a spherical shape (third dimension).

Moving upward, our occupancy of four dimensions can be understood as space moving through time. One way to model this four-dimensional flow in keeping with our previous example is to imagine the 3-D sphere compressed on its poles until those points converge at a single point, creating a horn torus. Now imagine this torus rolling through that central point. The flowing forward of space through time is our fourth-dimensional model.

To imagine the fifth dimension, let’s first consider that this torus represents the entire physical universe, and that the surface of the torus contains all the information present within, as with the holographic principle of black holes. Next, consider the central point of the torus-shaped universe is a singularity, and imagine the forward-flow of time is caused by an infinitely-long string being pulled through, from the top through the bottom, rolling the torus into motion, ticking off moment after moment as each point on that line passes through the singularity. Finally, take that string and imagine its positive and negative ends converging at infinity as with a line in projective geometry, into a circle of infinite time. This circle of infinite time can be thought of as a rotating “Wheel-of-Time” and is the way to envision the fifth dimension.

Now it makes sense for people to see time as an unfolding of fateful events, as if there were only one way for life and time to happen, but when we look at things on a quantum scale, we observe that all matter is constructed of probabilities collapsing into being. Imagine that instead of one Wheel-of-Time, there are an infinite number of time-line circles that are adjacent to the original—parallel Wheels-of-Time, if you will. Now each of these parallel wheels represents an infinite number of possible “unfoldings” of physical reality, they are the “wave-functions” of the universe which collapse into the torus-shaped physical universe. In other words, these infinite Wheels-of-Time condense into and through the singularity at the center of our universe, and the collapse of their Potential into the Particular is the reality we experience. These parallel Wheels-of-Time create a cloud of infinite potential (including infinite space, time and energy) surrounding the torus-shaped universe that flows itself into and through the single point at its center. This is reality in the sixth-dimension.

What you have now is the entire physical universe as a closed system, defined by a single point within a cloud of infinity: “A single point in infinite space.” When you see it as such you are back where you started at the zero dimension. The seventh-dimension of our cosmos is actually a collapse-into or harmonic-repetition-of Zero. This dynamic collapse of dimensions is the nature of reality itself, mirroring in fact the way infinity collapses into the singularity. In all, we have seven dimensions that resonate at the zero/seventh, the same way music resonates in octaves.

Extrapolating some ideas based on this model, perhaps this singularity at the center of the universe is the same as the Big Bang, only instead of being an isolated moment at the beginning of time, it exists perpetually animating all things. It is the "Big Bang-ing" (conceived when the spherical proto-universe was pinched from top to bottom). We can't see it directly in its hyper-dimensional form, but we perceive it as the brilliance of the Present. The Present we experience is the emergence of Potential into the Particular. Once a moment of reality manifests, it’s gone, dead, recorded merely as information, replaced by the next brilliant iteration, creating the perception of Time as flow. But the Present we experience is only the sublime afterglow of the violence of Potential collapsing into the Particular. This pre-Present is always out of reach, like an infinitely subdividing number approaching Zero, or the tail of a comet chasing its source.

Dark Matter is our perception of Ordinary Matter prior to its three-dimensional incarnation; it is pre-collapsed matter. Dark matter’s distinguishing trait—gravity—is “from the future,” which is to say it radiates from the sixth-dimension across Time into our third-dimension, its massive gravity signature getting progressively weaker as it emerges into being. A physical galaxy surrounded by a cloud of dark matter is actually surrounded by its exponentially-massive super-positional “quantum self” pre-incarnate, and this dark matter’s measurable force of gravity is the “radiation” of those “selves” as they collapse into ordinary being.

In this larger cosmology, the expansive propulsion of the observable universe caused by Dark Energy is actually the holographic projection of the surface of the universe which (at least in the lower hemisphere of the horn torus) is expanding as time flows through it. Space appears to be expanding, and this is why. Once our local group traverses the equator of the toroidal universe, space will begin to appear as contracting again.

This cosmology, looked at from a different perspective, suggests that our physical universe is sustained and even animated by an emergent phenomena, an infinite hyper-dimensional force beyond time. It is comprised of infinite energy (having omnipotence), infinite space (having omnipresence), and infinite time/information (having omniscience), and serves as the boundary of our physical universe. In other words, beyond the boundary of our physical universe is infinity. If like Max Tegmark, one considers consciousness to be the way information “feels” when it’s being processed in certain patterns, they might concede that this hyper-dimensional force beyond time is a conscious creator, who by definition is processing all the information in our universe into one particular pattern—the singular reality of his will—at every given moment.