It is commonly understood by mystics that this inner is just a gloss made by an organism that is trained daily to schematize space in three dimensions. Two is painful; four is hard to acquire (although Rudy Rucker claims to have done it—that is, actually intuited four-dimensional hyperspace as an immediate and cognized presence—for up to 17 seconds per attempt, and racked up a cumulative visiting time of 15 minutes in 15 years:

I’ve enjoyed a grand total of perhaps fifteen minutes’ worth of direct vision into four-dimensional space

Yet if you can visualize four-dimensional space, this means that that space as object really exists. If was take (with Kant) space to be a real ideal entity, then actual space is the dimensionality we intuit. Actually, we already know that Euclidean space is ideal from knowing that physical space is curved and “yet men do not see it, ” as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas (113). If what we see is what is there, then seeing 4D means 4D is there. We are not creatively imagining anything new, because no content is posited. We are simply intuiting depth of framework, something that is superimposed on all seeing. The sense contents that are the phenomenal matter of material objects is really, really there.

The point: Consciousness is space; space is the theater of consciousness. This vastness transcends visual projection. Our awareness of time is another dimension—it is no less a holder than space, and holding is the ontological basis of our sense of space. Consciousness is higher-dimensional, and we clumsily express this using the metaphor inner.

At least it is spatial. But it fails: how can you get more inner than a point? Pick a geometrical point in your body—say, your center of gravity. Is this enough? Does identifying with it satisfy your really-experience inner-ness? No—self is always beyond, under, behind, prior, around. For space to get at, grasp, surround, or puncture your consciousness, where would it go? This untouchable Witness, this always-a-subject, is always beyond the “level” of the objective. There is an otherness of dimension that consciousness proves itself to have in its successfully objectifying space.