Science and the Infinite - Sydney T. Klein (free e books to read online .txt) 📗

is to them as full of detail as our life of seventy years; but to them there is no day and night, the Sun is always stationary in the Heavens, they can have no cognisance of Seasons.

I have already referred in View One to the curious results of increasing our unit of perception by a Time Microscope, and I will now carry the investigation of this subject a step further.

As conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, and we can only perceive about six times per second, and as the principal forms of knowledge are gained through the eye, we are conceiving progress in phenomena under a very restricted outlook; we cannot recognise such slow motions as, for instance, the hour-hand of a watch, the growth of a tree, or rise of the tide, except by noting the change that has occurred after a long interval; there is therefore a whole world of events which we cannot see. Owing to this limit, in our unit of time perception, we also cannot perceive events which are taking place beyond a certain quickness, they become blurred and give the impression of continuity, and constitute another world of events lost to us. For the same reason there is a whole world of sensation lost to us by our limited unit of sound perception; we cannot follow separate sound-events if they occur quicker than sixteen in a second, beyond that they become blurred and give the impression of continuity. If, on the other hand, our units of perception were increased a thousandfold, as is probably the case with some insects, our conscious lives would contain a thousand more events than they do at present, and, as the consciousness of length of life is dependent upon the number of events that have been perceived, we should under these conditions have passed on this earth a life equivalent to, say, 70,000 years under our present restricted unit; every second of that long period would have been as full of events for us as is a second in our present life of seventy years. If, on the other hand, our unit of perception were decreased a thousandfold, our length of life, based upon perception of events, would be no longer than 25-1/2 of our present days; if our life were actually reduced to that period (so as to regain our present units of perception) we should be old and grey-headed before the sun had risen for the twenty-fifth time since our birth. If our unit of perception, with our length of life, were again reduced a thousandfold, the whole of our life of seventy years would now only be equal to forty-three minutes, and, in the whole of that life, we could only see the sun move ten degrees, namely, twenty of its own diameters in the heaven; if we were born, say, at noon on midsummer's day, we could never have any idea of anything but daytime, and neither our fathers, nor grandfathers, nor great-grandfathers for fifteen generations before them could have seen the sun rise; but there would have been a tradition, handed down from a far distant past generation, that a long time ago, beyond the memory of man, there was no sun at all, everything was pitch dark, and that time was called the "Great Shadow." If their records could have gone still further back for the same length of time they would have heard that, before the "Great Shadow," the sun was always shining in the heavens, and that that great "Sun" day lasted twice as long as the great shadow.

To understand more clearly this subject of Time perception let me put 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