Gehenna is a State of Mind

In three dimensions, an object is static. It is what it is, as if that set of molecules has eternally existed as that object and eternally will. In 3-dimensional thinking, once that object no longer serves a purpose in its current incarnation, it ceases to exist, has died, and is a carcass to be removed from our living space. Thus we have "waste" as a concept, the wrappers and bones of what we consume piled in a heap and abandoned to whatever scavengers discover it.

However in four dimensions, an object is perceived within history. Contemplating it, we also see its origins and the sources of its components, including the hands that made it or the organisms that grew it, the smelter that forged it, the transportation system that brought it to its location, and its previous incarnations as living tissues, ores, other manufactured objects, light, air, water, and even the supernova that created the heavy elements that exist in the earth's crust. We also see its future incarnations, whether as flame, soil, a new object devised for our use, gases that return to the atmosphere or nutrients that return to the earth and are eventually taken up by organisms, or constituents changed by light, oxidation or digestion into another state of being.

When you can see the sun, water, air and stone hidden in the origin of a familiar object, you can see its connectedness to the entire world. By extension, while contemplating yourself you can perceive the elements, organisms, sediments, and unbroken chain of inheritance that made your body – you are as old as life itself, and have always been part of its fabric, as is every living thing that ever has been and ever will be. The first strand of DNA that ever existed implied your existence, and your existence implies the future of the world. What is death but a change of clothes?

In five dimensions, the branching chains of historical succession become systems of relationship that loop back upon themselves and interlace with one another. Geology and weather become biology, ecology and evolution. Families become social groups become civic systems – trade, numeracy, literacy, horticulture, economics, politics, religion, architecture, manufacturing, technology, transportation, and information systems all braided together into the infrastructure of superorganisms. Time and space change their relationship to consciousness as what once took months becomes nearly instantaneous. In four dimensions, we see the layered history behind and future beyond the present. In five dimensions, everything is connected to everything else. A change in one relationship causes an adjustment in every other system. This creates endless feedback: causes lead to effects, but these effects impact their causes, creating a cyclical looping of balancing and reinforcement. Now questions aren't so much about what something has been and what it could become, but more about how systems are stabilized, how they grow, what their buffers are, and how they collapse. Like Indra's Net, every bead reflects every other bead.

These leaps in consciousness from three to four and five dimensions so greatly influence our perception of matter that we cease to see a static field of view filled with separated things, and instead see ancient ongoing processes as they are currently embodied, flowing through their endless transformations just as magma rises from below the crust at mid-ocean ridges and becomes seafloor, then is slowly subducted back beneath the ocean floor to become a new kind of metamorphic stone formed by heat and pressure which then melts into magma again, rises through a volcano and cools into igneous rock, which weathers away and settles layer after layer to form sedimentary minerals or becomes enriched with organics and part of the soil. Which of these is "death"? Which is "waste"? The sand washed onto the beach? The silt of the streambeds? The crystals in the hearts of mountains? The molten rock that forms island chains?

Where I live right now, the flood has receded and the view of formerly-inundated dead leaves and brown twigs is giving way to branches covered in buds and new leaves. The insects have returned from wherever they were hibernating. Birds are pairing up; eagles are wheeling and crying to each other. As the light returns to strength, what seemed to have been waste and death is revealed to have only been sleep and preparation for the overturning.