of
regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite
pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner,
as if events moved necessarily in this order and at this precise rate.
But that may be only one mode of regarding them. The events may be in
some sort of existence always, both past and future, and it may be we
who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a
traveler in a railway train is useful; if he could never leave the
train, nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as
necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. We
perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time,
the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present
limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be
actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling
influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the
'higher plane' or totality of things after which, it seems to me, we are
impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or
determinism, and the action of human beings consciously directed to a
definite and preconceived end."
The Oriental Teaching.
The Hindus, and other oriental peoples, however, have a clearly defined
and positive explanation of the phenomena of Future Time Clairvoyance,
which must be included in our consideration of the subject, even though
it does involve certain metaphysical or philosophical conceptions which
are apart from our present inquiry as conducted in this book. The
oriental theory is based upon that basic conception of the eastern
philosophies which hold that the beginning, duration, and ending of any
particular one of the infinitude of successive universes created by the
Supreme Being, is to that Being but as a single moment of time; or, as
the celebrated Hindu proverb runs: "The creation, duration, and
destruction of a universe is but the time of the twinkling of an eye to
Brahman." In other words, that to the Supreme Being, all the past, all
the present, all the future of the universe, must be as but a single
thought in a single moment of time--an instantaneous act of
consciousness.
The Eternal Now.
A writer on this subject has said: "Those occultists and metaphysicians
who have thought long and deeply upon the ultimate facts and nature of
the universe, have dared to think that there must
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