THE DIMENSIONS OF EXPERIENCE

A lucid, thought-provoking and wide-ranging metaphysical treatise by novelist, scientific researcher and Stanford Ph.D. Smith.

Heralded as “the first complete history of consciousness ever written,” The Dimensions of Experience covers an astonishing amount of ground, from evolutionary theory to postmodernist linguistics, physics and even obscure Victorian literature. Smith’s central contention is that “the miraculous is much closer to home” than many human beings understand. By this he does not mean a hidden realm of elves and dragons–or any sort of religious transcendence, at least as understood in the biblical sense–but a miracle of dimensions. “However many dimensions there are in the universe, we–all of us, all forms of life–exist in all of them,” Smith argues. “They are all within our reach. What we lack–some species more than others, but again, all of us to some extent–is the ability to experience all of these dimensions.” Over 11 tightly written and edited chapters, Smith goes on to explicate the evolution of consciousness and how we came to understand the world as we do today. He discusses transcendental meditation and the benefits and fallacies therein; he ventures bravely into the world of coral reefs, worm colonies and bacterium, showing how even the simplest of organisms experience life in a range of dimensions. “According to science,” he writes, “the three major dimensions of space are a condition of all existence, within which the entire evolutionary history of earth has played out.” Not so, he counters. The Dimensions of Experience makes the case for a more dynamic form of evolution, where beings evolve through time and space, but also through dimensions we do not yet properly understand. Smith’s great accomplishment is verisimilitude: he holds forth with equal skill on both the biology of proto-organisms and the knottiest work of post-structuralists like Derrida, and he weaves every chapter deftly into a convincing narrative.

An engaging, supple scientific text, blessedly free of weighty academic jargon.