another aspect before you; we are looking, say, at an insect whose
wings are beating several thousand times per second, and, with our
vision limited to six times per second, it would be impossible to
count the number of hairs on that wing, or to see which of those hairs
were split, or were bent from the straight, but, if we travelled away
from that insect into space at the rate of light, and were looking
back, the present would then always be with us; the wing, although
still vibrating at that enormous rate, would appear to be stationary,
and so would every other moving thing on the earth, however quick its
movement, and everything would continue in that motionless state for a
million years, provided we continued our flight with the rays of
light. If we travelled a little slower than light, say one minute less
in a thousand years, the same scene would be presented to us, but,
that which was acted upon this earth during one minute of Time, would
now take a thousand years to accomplish; the swiftest railway train
would appear standing still, it would take 5-3/4 days and nights to
cover each inch of ground. It is thus possible to again understand how
the flight of a bird or the lightning flash might be examined under
conditions of time which would lead to the discovery and tracing of
even the principle of life itself. But let us go one step further and
increase our flight beyond the rate at which light travels: scenes
would now progress in the opposite direction to that which we are
accustomed to; men would get out of bed and dress themselves at night
and go to bed in the morning; old men would grow young again; tall
trees would grow backwards and enter the earth, embedding themselves
in the seed, and the seed would rise upwards to the branch that
nourished it; the blood would turn into chyle, into food in the
stomach, into the piece of meat, which would be transferred from the
mouth to the plate, and would then be cut on to the joint, the joint
would go down to the kitchen and be uncooked, would be carried to the
butcher to be cut on to the carcase, and the animal would come to life
and go out into the fields. Human bodies would be formed in the ground
from the dust of the Earth, passing through what we call corruption to
incorruption, the dead would be taken from their graves, brought back
to their homes and put to bed; the Doctor would arrive, a miracle
would happen, the patient would come to life; though this would hardly
be a feather in the cap of the Doctor, as it would be seen that the
medicine came out from the mouth of the patient, would be put into
bottles to be thrown away, and it would be the Doctor who had to pay
the Fee, and the bigger the Doctor the bigger the Fee he would have to
pay. The future would in fact change places with the past, the effect
would give birth to the cause as presented to our finite senses, and,
though it is difficult to realise, it is indeed just as true, or
untrue, that we come into this world through the grave, instead of in
the way we are accustomed to, because to the Reality there is no
change, the Here and the Now comprising all beginnings and ends, all
causes and effects.
In this flight on the wings of light we did not in reality depart in
the least from the Here, because there is no such thing as space, it
is all included in a mathematical point, the Here; and as the whole of
time is included in the Now, the Future, however remote with all
events therein, is existent in the present; the writers of books 5000
years hence are therefore writing them now, and the Human Race has
read and is reading them _now_; we have always hitherto maintained
that these things are only "going to happen" 5000 years hence, but in
reality all events in the future are events in the same Now in which
we are living at the present moment, and, as it is just as true, that
time is flowing from the Future to the Present and on to the Past, as
in the contrary direction (of our present outlook), so it is quite
conceivable that we may some day, in the not far distant future, not
only realise that the future exists already, but that we may even be
able to handle and read the books written 5000 years hence, in a
similar manner to that which enables us now to handle and read those
which were written 5000 years ago.
VIEW EIGHT
CREATION
In our first View we saw the necessity of clearing away the weeds, the
moss, and the lichen from the stem of our Real Personality before that
Transcendental Self could send forth fresh buds for the advancement of
_conscious_ thought to higher levels; we found that the first step
towards this clearing the approach to our window, was to recognise
that a knowledge of the Truth was to be gained by the use of
"Introspection" rather than by Intellectualism--to realise, in fact,
that it is not we, with our intellects, who are looking out upon
Nature, but that it is the Absolute looking into us and ever trying to
teach us divine truths concerning the "Reality of Being." We saw that
the phenomena, which our senses would have us believe to be the
reality or solidity of our material surroundings, are illusions
created by the fact that those senses are limited in their perception
to that which is conditioned in Time and Space, necessitating _motion_
as the basis of our perceptions, and that, when the rate of motion
exceeds our units of perception, we have the impression of continuity
of events, which we accept as the objective existence of matter; we
also saw that the duration of Time and extension of Space had no
existence for us apart from those senses, our very consciousness of
these two non-realities depending upon "relativity"--they could, in
fact, be increased or diminished indefinitely, without our knowing
that any change had been made.
In our second View I attempted to take another step forward by showing
how, by means of this "Introspection," it was even possible to
understand that these two limitations might be eliminated from
consciousness; we then realised that the whole Physical Universe is
but a thin film, set up by our finite Senses, between our
Consciousness and the "Reality of Being"; we saw that this could only
be understood when, by the Mystical Sense, we realised that physical
phenomena were but symbols or shadows of the Reality or Noumenon
underlying them.
In our next View I gave an example of the use of Mystical and
Symbolical thought, leading, in the fourth View, to the subject of
Everlasting Life and the Efficacy of Prayer, wherein I tried to show
that by examining the phenomena of Nature, as depicted on the Physical
Film, it is possible to reach a point where we may even feel that we
are actually listening to, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts
of the Absolute. This led to the next View, where we examined the
Physical Film itself, and this we analysed in the next two Views into
those component parts, by means of which this Film presents to our
senses the impression of the whole Physical Universe as an objective
reality.
We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the
visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from
the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the
Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes
in our consciousness, as lines and planes are the visible boundaries
of solids. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a locality but a _state_ of
Divine "loving and knowing communion"; it is within us in the sense
that we are interior and not exterior entities of the "Reality of
Being."
We have now arrived at a point where we can better realise that the
Absolute cannot be localised or bounded by space, and must be
Omnipresent--cannot be conditioned in Time, and must therefore be
Omniscient--the Here comprising all Space, and the Now all Time in the
"Reality of Being."
With these conclusions before us I will ask you to form a new
conception of Creation. All creation around us is the materialisation
of the Thought of the Deity. He does not require time to think as we
do--the whole of the Universe is therefore one instantaneous Thought
of the Great Reality; the forming of this world and its destruction,
the appearance of man, the birth and death of each one of us are
absolutely at the same instant; it is only our finite minds which
necessitate drawing this Thought out into a long line, and our want of
knowledge and inability to grasp the whole, which force us to conceive
that one event happened before or after another. In our finite way we
examine and strive to understand this wondrous Thought, and at last, a
Darwin, after a life spent in accumulating facts on this little
isolated spot of the Universe, discovers what appears to be a law of
sequence, and calls it the evolution theory; but this is probably only
one of countless other modes by which the _intent_ of that Thought is
working towards completion, the apparent direction of certain lines on
that great tracing board of the Creator, whereon is depicted the whole
plan of His work.
Let me give a simple example of Creation by a "word," which even our
finite minds can grasp. When I utter the word _Cat_, it starts a
practically instantaneous thought in your minds, the power of that
thought being dependent upon the knowledge you have gained. If you
analyse it you will find that, though practically instantaneous, it
comprises all the sensations you have ever felt on that subject
throughout your life. It commenced, perhaps, when you were only a year
old, and, sitting on your mother's knee, your hand was made to stroke
a kitten, and you felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure. Later on,
when you were older, you had it in your arms, and you felt the first
intimation of that wonderful "[Greek: storge]," which manifests itself
in most children in their love for dolls; you found it delightful to
cuddle and that it purred. Later on, you found that it played with a
reel of cotton, and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and
countless other things, which not only make up the life of a cat, but
connect it with the world around us. All these thousand and one facts
are now drawn out, by analysis in Time and Space, into a long line,
and are placed one in front of the other; but the thought started by
the word Cat was a fair example of an instantaneous creation.
One other example of an instantaneous thought. Let us suppose a large
room fitted with, say, a hundred thousand volumes, comprising all the
knowledge gained by every Specialist in every Science concerning the
plan of Creation. In our finite minds, under the limits of Time and
Space, the word representing the contents of that library would start,
when uttered, an instantaneous thought analogous to that of our last
example, according to the knowledge that each individual had already
acquired of the contents of those books; but this knowledge had only
been gained by taking down each volume separately and reading one book
at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each
word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to
read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were _complete_, the word
representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous
thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page,
word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one
which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time.
It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the
perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance,
as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration
of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning,
where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water,
the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and
the multitude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly
before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been
put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not
affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of
Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such
conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting
steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever
that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of
several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting
steadily when the anaesthetic had passed away, and it was quite
impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached
more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I
should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of
what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a
sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar
experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and
dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He
held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of
that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death,
and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The
guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to
find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon
his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him
declared, at that very moment."
In the above case the whole scene was started instantaneously in his
brain, but in waking his mind analysed it in Time and Space and spread
it out into a long historical record. The opposite process to this,
namely, the building up a thought-picture, is what we do every day
when we form and combine our conceptions under the dominion of Time
and Space, until we have accumulated in our minds a multitude of
concepts which form as it were a single subject, somewhat analogous to
a painter when he has completed his picture, a writer his book, an
architect his house, or even a mechanic his machine. An interesting
example of a musician constructing a thought-picture is given by
Mozart himself:
"When I am all right and in good spirits, either in a
carriage or walking, and at night when I cannot sleep,
thoughts come streaming in and at their best. Whence and how
I know not, I cannot make out. The things which occur to me
I keep in my head, and hum them also to myself--at least
others have told me so. If I stick to it, there soon come,
one after another, useful crumbs for the pie, according to
counterpoint, harmony of the different instruments, &c. This
now inflames my soul, that is if I am not disturbed. Then it
keeps on growing, and I keep on expanding it more distinctly,
and the thing, however long it be, becomes indeed almost
finished in my head, so that I can always survey it in spirit
like a beautiful picture or a fine person, and also hear in
imagination, not indeed successively, as by and by it must
come out, but all together. That is a delight! All the
invention and construction go on in me as in a fine strong
dream, but the overhearing it all at once is still the best."
With these illustrations before us may we not carry the analogy even
further, and see that, as our conception of a Cat was made up of
numberless small acquisitions of knowledge, some of which had to be
discarded, or eliminated as errors, from our minds as our knowledge
grew, and as each true fact became confirmed and impressed upon our
brain it made itself a _permanent_ record and became a centre to be
used for gaining further knowledge; so in this wonderful Thought of
the Great Reality, whose mind may be said to be omnipresent, each
individual soul is a working unit in the plan of Creation; each unit
as it gains a knowledge of the Will of the Deity forms for itself a
_personality_ helping forward the work towards its fulfilment;
without that knowledge there can be no personality, no unit in the
great completed thought, no life hereafter.
The True Life is fulfilled by him who has progressed so far in the
knowledge of the Divine as to realise that he is the offspring of the
Absolute, and therefore stands face to face with his Transcendental
Personality, his [Greek: Christos], of which the Physical Ego is only
the outline or boundary form visible in the physical universe. Each
individual has free will to define his own boundaries, his own
limitations; he builds up the walls of the house in which he lives,
and he has power to brick up or open out the windows through which he
may see the Truth; happy are those whose windows are open, but many,
alas, choose to make the wall opaque by confining their attention to
the physical shadows, or by strangling their spiritual intuition and
preventing all advance in thought by blind subservience to obsolete
dogmas.
We are instruments of Divine purpose in the scheme of Creation. Each
individual Physical Ego seems to be a Micro-Cosmos, imaging the
Universe, the Macro-Cosmos. As the phagocytes, the policemen of the
blood, flock to a breach in the human body to overcome any invasion of
the enemy, whether poisons or bacteria, which would otherwise detract
from that progress of cell formation upon which the scheme of human
life depends, so do the true lovers of the Divine meet, by active
resistance, any attempt of the enemies of the Good, Beautiful and True
to retard the advancement of the scheme of Creation to its ultimate
goal of perfection. The human body is composed of innumerable cells
and several special colonies of cells, which we call organs, each of
which has its special work to do, and secretes and discharges special
fluids necessary for the welfare of the whole body. All of these cells
are alive, and myriads of them are moving on their own account,
apparently quite independent of, and in complete ignorance of, the
feeling and perception of the whole body; they are, however,
microscopical units of that body, and its welfare depends upon their
contribution of work; it is, in fact, only through their ceaseless
activities that the life in that body is maintained--a phenomenon
analogous to that described in the simile of a Forest Tree in View
Four. So are we integral parts of the scheme of Creation, and each
act, either in accordance with the Divine purpose or the reverse, is
helping forward or retarding the completion of that Thought, though
like the cells we are ignorant of the end which Creation has in view.
In this life we seem indeed to be only, as it were, in embryo! The
study of embryology has lately shown us clearly how the clothing of
our Physical Ego has been formed, during the past millions of years,
from the lowest forms of life. Each one of us has, during what may be
called his lifetime, gone through all the different stages of
evolutionary development which, since the beginning of life on this
planet, have been employed to build up the human body in its present
form. Embryology has shown us that, during gestation, each human
embryo is a _replica_ of the past; it passes through the different
Imago stages from protoplasm to man, being unrecognisable at certain
stages from a monad, an amoeba, a fish with gills, a lizard, and a
monkey with a tail and dense clothing of hair over the whole body. The
human embryo has also, at an early stage, the thirteenth pair of ribs,
which is found in lower animals and is still seen in a rudimentary
form in anthropoid apes, but which disappears from the human embryo
before birth. Each generation, under evolutionary development, will
witness a further advancement in the clothing of the Physical Ego,
until it may be conceived that a hundred thousand years hence our
present stage of development will be seen only as one of the stages
through which the embryo has to pass before birth at that distant
time. May we not even glimpse at the future to which evolution is
carrying us? For in any of these stages we see organs forming whose
use only comes into play long after that stage has been passed; so
also, in the new rudimentary forms of thought which are started by
every fresh discovery may we not some day be able to descry the
heights which we are destined to attain if we earnestly seek after
Truth?
Radio-Activity has shown us that all forms of matter are but different
combinations of one primal brick; by synthesis thousands of new forms
of matter, unknown in Nature, are actually now being built up in our
laboratories, and the number of such combinations cannot conceivably
be limited; so do we also see that all the known forms of energy in
nature are interchangeable, one with another, with exactly known
equivalents and ratios, pointing to their being only different
combinations of one unit of energy. If such is the case, it would seem
to follow that there are countless other forces of which we at present
have no cognisance, but which may at any time come within our field of
investigation.
In our life here we are steadily progressing from the lower to the
higher form of being, from the purely Physical towards the
Transcendental, each generation starting from a higher level; the
boundary line between the Physical and Transcendental is being
continually advanced towards the latter, and it may well be, as I
have already suggested in View IV, that we are even now on the eve of
discovering a new force, or aspect of Creation, which will open a
wider view and give us a clearer knowledge of the goal which we are
destined to reach hereafter.
Each generation will, according to the teaching of Embryology,
gradually come into the world at a higher stage of development than
its predecessors, until the last Physical Ego, at its birth, will
coincide with the final stage of development, when there will be no
more physical clothing, the disintegration of Matter being completed,
and, it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be
nothing imperfect, no shadow left, that all will be spiritual. The
object of Creation would therefore appear to be the population of the
Real Universe with spiritual entities, until the whole Spiritual
Universe will be taken up by Transcendental Personalities, which will
be one with the Reality, and the Great Thought completed.
Once more let us recognise that we are dependent for knowledge of
surroundings upon our perception of movements, and that as our
conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, our
thoughts are limited by Time and Space and can only deal with finite
subjects. From this arises all our difficulty of understanding the
Infinite; we cannot under our present conditions know the whole
Truth; if we could do that we should be able, as it were, to look all
round the subject, and Infinity would then be seen to be a
pseudo-conception of our finite thoughts. We can only think of one
finite subject at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are
cancelled; we can, in fact, only think in sequences, and, taking the
particular Infinities of duration and extension which we have been
examining, we can only think of points in Time and Space as existing
beyond or before other fixed points, which again must be followed by
other points. We cannot fix a point in Time or Space so as to exclude
the thought of a point beyond; the idea of an Infinite is therefore a
necessary result of the limitation of our thoughts. The whole Truth is
there before us, but we can only examine it in a form of finite
sequences. A book contains a complete story, but we can only know that
story by taking each word in succession and insisting that one word
comes in front of another, and yet the story is lying before us
complete. So with Creation; we are forced to look upon it as a long
line going back to past eternity, and another long line going on to
future eternity, and, with our limitations, we can only think of all
events therein as happening in sequence; but eliminate Time and we
become Omniscient, the whole of Creation would be before us as an
Instantaneous Thought of God.
Accordingly under the dominion of Time we appear to be in a similar
position to that of a being whose senses are limited to
one-dimensional space--namely, to a line; we can only have cognisance
of what is in front and behind, we have no knowledge of what is to the
right or left, we appear to be limited to looking lengthwise in Time,
whereas an Omniscient and Omnipresent Being looks at Time crosswise
and sees it as a whole. A small light, when at rest, appears as a
point of light, but when we apply quick motion, the product of Time
and Space, to it, we get the appearance of a line of light, and this
continuous line, formed by motion of a point, is, I think, analogous
to the Physical Universe appearing to our finite senses as continuous
in Time duration and Space extension, though really comprised in the
Now and the Here, the whole of Creation being therefore an
Instantaneous Thought.
A consideration of our limitation in Space may also be useful to show
how impossible it is for us to hope to see by our senses the Reality
or by our thoughts to know the Spiritual. Our senses and thoughts are
limited to a Space of three dimensions, and we can therefore only see
or know that part of the Absolute which is or can be represented to
us in three dimensions; a being whose senses were limited to a
Universe of one dimension--namely, a _line_, could have no real
knowledge of another being who was in a Universe of two
dimensions--namely, a _flat surface_, except so far as the
two-dimensional being could be represented within his line of
sensation; so also the two-dimensional being, on a _plane_, could have
no true knowledge of a being like ourselves in a Universe of three
dimensions. To his thoughts, limited within two dimensions, a being
like ourselves would be unthinkable, except so far as our nature could
be made manifest on his plane; so can it be seen that we, limited by
our finite senses to Time and Space, and our consciousness dependent
upon that limited basis of thought, can only know that aspect of the
Reality which can be manifested within that range of thought--namely,
as Motion, or what we call physical phenomena.