Since the fourth dimension is as continuous as those of space, all our past momentary selves in both their mental and physical states form a single continuous organism with what we are now. This is why our present psycho-­corporeal state is in dialogue with all we have been before. Not only does our past being directly affect our present state, this continuity means that what we do and choose now must have its effects directly on the meaning of all our previous states. That we can and do alter our own past for good or ill has always been understood in a moral sense, but this means that we do so in a natural sense as well. Otherwise, the religious idea of redemption would be confined to just one part of one's life, with no objective power over the previous life.

It also confers an additional objective reality on the psychoanalytical practice of getting in touch with one's self as it was in earlier times when it suffered some trauma.  We can assume that the present state of the self can thus heal earlier ones because they really exist in union with what we are now. The ontological continuity of past, present, and future in the individual has its counterpart in the collective being of mankind. This means, among other things, that the redemptive mission of revealed religion can on this basis be extended backwards to humanity in pre-Christian and pre-Islamic times. The Christian belief in the harrowing of hell shows that this idea is admitted by tradition.

In view of its fourth-dimensional extension, our psycho-corporeal being must in reality be an extremely extended object, and for this reason Nicoll claims that the ancient Egyptians assimilated it to the serpent Apophis, which they depicted as weaving its coils in a region between Isis and Osiris. This image implies that the extension of the real self is not likely to be a straight line. As to which form it should take, an answer is given by Guénon in The Symbolism of the Cross, where he describes our individual being as a system of spirals which develop both in the horizontal and the vertical.

However, Nicoll does not draw the conclusion that this linear-type extension is owing only to our present temporal condition. In reality, it is the passage of time which is constantly drawing our psycho-corporeal being beyond itself. While this allows new possibilities to be realised without directly impinging on what has gone before, this comes at the expense of conscious wholeness. When physical life ends, so also must the uprooting process of time, so that there would no longer be any reason for the self to be quantitatively extended. All the apparently separated states of the self should then be capable of conscious intercommunion, quite apart from the ongoing life of the disembodied soul. Even though the soul may subsequently be embodied with a different kind of matter from that of this life, so as to have a "spiritual body," the latter must still be continuous with the body of this life by the mediation of the immortal soul. It is still the identity of the soul which is the cause of the bodily form, whether at a moment or through the fourth dimension.

Where he relates immortality to eternal recurrence, however, there is an inconsistency in Nicoll's thought, where he writes as though the end of a person's life must mean that that person is free to re-commence and relive it, if they had not realised their true purpose. The confusion here is between the life to be lived and the person who is to live it. According to the four-­dimensional conception, the permanently subsistent life and the person who has lived it are one and the same thing. What we call the completed life is the sum total of all the person's being, as a single organism extending from conception to death. To speak of the person as though he or she could live the same life over again is as absurd as to suggest that they could live their life backwards. If there was a discarnate self which could live all over again, its very existence would refute the central idea that the true self is realised in a four-dimensional extension.

Nicoll states that " . . . man repeats his period independently of the period of manifestation of the aeon of the world,"[3] and that "Man lives his life again,"[4] although this is to confuse the objective life with a subjective appreciation of it. In one sense we constantly relive our lives simply in the living of them, for the reasons explained already. But if a literal reliving of a life was possible, it would be futile if it were an identical repetition, not least because it would be a duplication of something which was in any case permanent.

The state which follows upon the end of natural life, then, is no longer a kind of linear extension, but a restitution of present mode of being, many times enriched. The supposed memory of the whole past life which some people experience when in mortal danger is therefore not really memory, because it is the life itself which is becoming manifest for a while. Memory becomes irrelevant when the whole life is all present at once since it is necessary only to counter the passage of time while time is passing. It could be said that in heaven, memory is swallowed up in reality, as in the verse quoted by Thomas Taylor: "There in the sight of Jove, the Parent king, Th'immortal gods and mortal men reside, With all that ever was, and shall hereafter be."[5]

However, the orthodox teaching is that the Judgement comes after death, but how is this to be understood in the light of what has just been described? If mortal life concludes with an everlasting body, and develops into one with supernatural powers, it may seem that death would be pure gain for everyone.

The objection to this is that the extension of the self in the fourth dimension in its life on earth is not bound to proceed in any particular direction. The very idea of extension necessarily implies direction at the same time. Its "qualitative direction" depends on the will, which in man is at any given time the integral sum of his physical, emotional and intellectual propensities. On the one hand, his will may be directed to God, its First Cause, by aligning itself with Providence, where Providence comprises the revealed will of God, together with the archetypal forms of individuals. In this way, the development of the self will lead to integration with the archetypal Form which it was his or her purpose to realise in this life. The significance of Forms of individuals is that they are man's only points of entry into the realm of eternal realities. Where Plato says that those who have lived well return to their own star, the star in this context corresponds to the individual Form.

On the other hand, these possibilities imply their converse, unfortunately, because of the permanence of the person in the fourth dimension results from the very conditions of existence, and not from its relation to Providence. If the self develops in a direction which is dictated only by natural conditions, and not by its archetypal Form, it will not have the necessary basis for any relation to God. This would result in an immortality which was deprived of the power to realise itself in the realm of the spirit, such that it could not either truly be or cease to be. The will would remain fixed on what is finally revealed to be an impossibility, while it is no longer able to change direction. As long as we are in time, this danger can be ignored, because the temporal condition veils so much from our awareness.

The impossibility of change for the will in the hereafter results from the fact that it is only in this world that the natural life can be accumulated. The cessation of time for the individual, even if it were to be a moment without sequel, would still be quite other than what physical death appears to be. It would mean a summation and integration of innumerable states of being whose relations to one another and to God may have been ignored. The self as a whole is invisible, for the reason already given, from whence comes the possibility of delusion about the self. As death can occupy only a few such moments, its impact on the whole being can only be mental and moral, but not physical. While there is nothing to prevent the continuation of this being outside time, its destiny depends on how much its final summation corresponds to its archetype.

Man's Cosmic Role

If such be the case with the death, resurrection, and judgement of the individual, the same things must apply to the whole cosmic order as well. When the world ends, all animal, vegetable, and inanimate beings will also be released from their temporal dismemberment. The passage of time, which was the medium of their development, is at the same time the cause of this apparent dismemberment into a series of separate though similar bits which all seem to perish, as with human life. For this reason, the General Judgement will mean the reintegration of all beings in their fully-realised natures. For the irrational creation, its adequacy to its archetype is not in doubt, since only human beings can fail in this respect. This is simply the compensating penalty for the human position as the supreme part of creation, with its power of self-determination and self-creation for good or ill; to have the highest place is to have the obligation of making oneself worthy of it.

This, then, is in outline the answer to questions as to what must become of the non-human creation in the hereafter. The non­-human creation can thus be understood as part of the "furniture" of Heaven, so to speak. The human power of self-determination has its implications for the whole of creation, as well as for the individual, since the human state is in virtual contact with everything else in creation. This is why the spiritual regeneration of each person has a regenerative effect on nature as a whole, while our failure in this respect has a dissolving effect on it. Thus it would be logical for the end of the world to come about through a climactic amount of delusion and sin, as the Book of Revelation indicates.

The means for realising this cosmic relatedness in mankind lies in the representation of the world in each rational soul which is always centered on the body, the body being the unique instantiation of the soul. The Hermetic precept to envisage not only all the states of one's own life, but the states of world before and after it, serves to awaken this awareness of the individually-perceived world as in some sense an extension of the self: 

"I am in heaven, in earth, in water, in air. I am among animals, among plants, in the womb, after the womb, everywhere."[6] "I behold the Universe and myself in The Mind."[7]

In this text, a wider union with the non-ego is added to that of all the component states of the ego, referred to before. Philosophy has expressed this universal identification as mind's ability to recognise that its nature is to contain a representation of the world. But however expressed, the point of this concept is that the alienation of the cosmos from the larger self can be overcome. Such a teaching can be seen to correspond, as Nicoll points out, to what is taught by St.Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and elsewhere. For example, he wishes his hearers to have the power "to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth . . . that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."[8] This follows from the nature of the Church which is "the fullness of him who fills all in all."[9]

St.Paul's explanation as to how this conscious fullness of being is to be brought about is inseparable from a conscious relationship with Christ, while the idea of identity expressed in the Hermetica appears as a consequence rather than a direct objective. In this way, it is a possibility we can verify for ourselves. We have as much, and more, reason to identify with this larger sphere of realities as we have to identify with the tiny sphere of the ego and its desires and aversions. All things that are determinations of our consciousness have an equal right to be constituents of our identity, but the freedom we have in the way we relate to them must respect the purposes for which they were created. The penalty for this freedom is that human beings alone in nature can represent reality as other than what it must be, and invert the order of priorities between the objective and the subjective. Sin ignores the difference between the self and the not-self, that is, between one's whole being and one of its modalities. The commonest way in which this can happen is where means are made into ends. In this way, pseudo-ends fill the place which should belong to the real ends of life. The ability to misrepresent reality is an inevitable consequence of the ability to represent it, which is essential to man's state of being.

All this is a complete contrast to the common sense way of regarding the self and the world, for which only the ego of the moment is identified with, and everything else is seen as alien. While the ego is much over-valued, it perceives itself at the same time as adrift in an alien world which is indifferent to it, and which will ultimately destroy it. Thus the momentary physical self seems to be all the reality we have, and it prompts us to over-value it as a compensation for the way in which it is seen to be dwarfed by its world. Obviously, this elementary idea of personal identity is not untrue in itself, since it answers to facts which are easily verifiable, but by itself it is so incomplete and one-sided that it can only be a cause of conflict outwardly and despair inwardly. However, it can be transformed when integrated with the higher and invisible self through which identification is possible with all past states of being, and with innumerable other realities of the represented world. In short, the world experienced as within the self is the necessary counterpoise to the natural and commonplace experience of the self as an item contained in the outside world.

The idea of our whole past life being always really present, and awaiting us after death, can cause quite different reactions. Some may find it consoling, and others may find it appalling, since it is necessarily a test of the way in which one's life has been used. But no matter how threatening it may appear to some, this conception also implies that while physical facts cannot be altered, their meaning always can be. The meaning of things past is changed or confirmed by the way in which we live now. Nothing is irrevocable, since it never ceases to be in contact with the activity of the self at the present time and with its deepening relation to God. To live with this enlargement of being is also to "put on Christ" as St.Paul calls it, and that must mean a certain share in the transcendence of time which is affirmed of Christ in the Easter liturgy, where it says:

 "Christ yesterday, and today; the beginning, and the end; Alpha and Omega; all time belongs to him; and all the ages; to him be glory and power through every age and for ever. Amen."