New user here, a few questions on 4D's ana and kata.

[Gir]

Exactly what is ana or kata? I've been having trouble picturing it, I know it's the 4D direction of up and down but how cam I better imagine it if we don't exactly know what 4D vision is?

[Keiji]

Ana and kata are more like left and right than up and down.

[timespace]

doesnt really matter which direction it is because we can't imagine it with pictures, only because we've never seen the fourth dimension...we see in 2-d and exist in 3-d.

[iki]

i can help you out on this one pretty good ok to start off will make it simple and keep it simple
a 0d point cuts a line in two
a 1d line cuts a 2d plane in two
a 2d plane cuts a 3d space in two
so a 3d space would cut a 4d hyperspace in two regions
the 2 regions would be ana and kata
please post reply if you understand but if you dont ill help some more

[wendy]

ana and kata are supposed to be the second set of "across" directions.

The laws of nature set up by gravity, up and down, and by motion forwards and backwards. Anything not in this set is then "across".

The space of "motion" and "across" represent the space where things dont fall, ie the ground, or a shelf. If you stand on the ground, the centre of across is a point representing "straight forward". In three dimensions, one has a 1d across-space, so we can set one side 'left' and the other 'right'.

We can represent the ground in 4d as a 3d map. In a map, things don't fall from top to bottom. They stay just where you put them. Consider now the notion of going down the map = going forward in 4d.

The people who posit that you can divide up the 2d across into "left/right" and "ana/kata" presuppose that there is something else that makes a preferred direction.

If you are falling in a straight line, you will fall at (0,0). But suppose you can steer the fall. There is nothing intrinsic about the x or y axis, and nothing saying that you have to face north when you fall.

So if you steer five units, you could end at 5,0 or 0,5 or 4,3 or 3,4, or any change of signs of these (eg -3, 4). There's no left-right.

You could easily demonstrate this by laying a clock on the ground. It faces upwards on the map, but where is there reason to set the 12-oclock sign. And here-in lies the difficulty with left/right + ana/kata.

On the other hand, you *can* tell if the clock is going clockwise or anticlockwise, and this is the only intrinsic thing one sees in the forward direction.

Interestingly, stars in 4d always go one way (eg if you stand and face west, the stars might spiral clockwise before they set. ie, a star might rise at [3-oclock] and travel 180 degrees through [6-oclock] setting at [9-oclock], or it could rise at [7-oclock], reaching its height at [10 oclock] before setting at [1 oclock].

[Chaos]

Forgetting gravity and laws of nature for a moment, you'll have noticed that the three directions we have are perpendicular. You can follow one of them without moving in any of the other two. You can also turn your head and up can become left, forward can become down etc. So if you were floating in space the directions would generally be indistinguishable. Therefore ana and kata must also be perpendicular to the current directions, and must also be indistinguishable from certain points of view.

Another way of looking at it is with planespace. Depending on your point of view once again, planespace can have ANY two directions. They may have length and width, or width and depth, or length and depth etc. It doesn't matter, because all three are basically the same, once again depending on point of view. Which means that we could actually be moving ana and kata now, from a certain point of view. A 4D person might say, 'Oh, realmspace has three directions: forward and back, left and right, ana and kata. Too bad they don't have up and down like we do.'

The only thing that really defines up and down for us is gravity. A person on the other side of the world's down is actually my up, but we all call it up because we generally say up is against gravity, while down is with gravity. Forward and backward also get mixed up with left and right, but we generally say forward is the way we're facing.