“THE PAST, the Present, and the Future are, in the esoteric philosophy, a compound time,” wrote Helena Blavatsky, “for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane—but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity.”
Our generally accepted worldview of duration and time “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association,” explained Blavatsky.
And according to a precept in the Buddhist Prasanga-Madhyamika teaching:
“The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”
Because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge,” as Blavatsky said, reductionist ideas are useful only for mechanical concerns—and because they ignore holistic experience, must eventually fall away in the face of man’s deeper spiritual understandings.
Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a daring explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the immeasurable. In this clip he explains ongoing experiments demonstrating evidence of “presentiment” and “precognition”:
Clocks are useful for getting to meetings on time. Otherwise, time in this sense, being only the “panoramic succession of our [ordinary] states of consciousness,” it is therefore reductionist—and has only materialistic value.
Ground-level experience reveals only the outer edge of the rabbit hole, and keeps us blind to the mysteries hidden beneath — the experience which leads us to the sum-total of existence. The frontier consciousness sciences emerging today offer an exciting prospect.
In this new country, as the Red Queen told Alice:
“you must run fast just to stay in one place.”
"I'm late for a very important date!"
The eye-popping series of progressive awakenings experienced by Alice, surely led her and her readers to a greater appreciation of the mysterious and paradoxical. “Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change,” proclaimed Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Like couch-potatoes, standard-model science sits on a railway platform for a train that, for them, will never come.
A Forest for The Trees
In the words of a Theosophical Master:
“Three clumsy words — Past, Present, and Future — miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.”
Objective time and reality always appear in a linear frame. But even the legendary punster of the Yankee’s baseball team, Yogi Berra, sensed there was more when he took a playful swipe at the phenomenon of precognition and non-locality with:
“I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.”
The Mind’s Eye – 1
The author and diarist Anais Nin famously remarked:
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
If what “we are” is determined solely by our five senses, then we see only what’s inside a sealed box.
John Muir, for whom stuffy boxes were anathema believed instead that “The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
Blavatsky’s “Compound time” cannot be separated from the future which is an essential part of the mystery “wilderness” within us. The illusion occurs in separation, and then we are unable see the greater forest for the trees, though they are one.
Julia Butterfly Hill
William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” that most of us would probably have passed unnoticed. (Heaven in a Wild Flower)
But even such sublime ethics “must give room to still further absolute perfection,” Blavatsky wrote, “to a higher standard of excellence — just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit.”
“All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond. Even let him catch sight of the moon, and still he cannot see its beauty.” – Osho (Adhyatama Upanishads)
Bruce Lee – “Finger Pointing To The Moon”
“Optical Illusion of Separateness”
Albert Einstein’s main objection to quantum mechanics, as accepted then, was that it provided no reasonable explanation of the world, and in some sense denied what many believed it means to truly exist. While walking with his biographer physicist Abraham Pais, Pais reported Einstein in frustration asked “whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”
Einstein also complained in a letter to friend and fellow physicist, Max Born who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics:
“You believe in the God that plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.”
Uncertainty Principle
The complicated genius was, nevertheless, a universal and compassionate thinker, who said: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space.”
And Einstein wrote of the human being that:
“He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The Mind’s Eye – 2
Non-Duality
Universal unity or non-duality is a popular topic of discussion today. There is a website devoted to it (nonduality.com), and a blog and even a conference October 21-25: titled Science And Non-Duality.
It’s the same concept that engaged Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Everything is alive and conscious in “Esoteric philosophy,” she wrote, and “life we look upon as ‘the one form of existence, manifesting in what is called matter—or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter.” Further:-
“Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence, and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology.”
Seeing The Future
Advaita
At Francis Lucille’s The Advaita Channel you’ll find an insightful article A Primer on Advaita. We were inspired by a quote from Professor Lucille on Advaita philosophy, which tackles the problem of duality by first focusing our full attention on the ‘I’ at every moment.
Once the illusion or limitation becomes obvious, it falls away, and then begin to appreciate the ‘not-I’—by this practice, paradoxically, we are gradually compelled to attend to the greater wholeness within which the smaller ‘I’ exists. As Lao-Tze put it: “The Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.”
“Consciousness is defined as that, whatever that is, which is aware of these very words right here, right now. … The student who practices self inquiry keeps his attention focused onto the source of the I-thoughts and I-feelings, whenever they arise.
“Once enlightenment has taken place, the process of self inquiry continues effortlessly. The attention spontaneously reverts to the source at the end of each thought and feeling and there is no need to focus the attention any longer.”
“Sum-Totals”
by H. P. Blavatsky
The Secret Doctrine
“TIME is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced — but ‘lies asleep.’
“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past.
“Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second.
“And the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past.
“In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth.
“It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future,’ and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past.’
“No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean.
“Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—[they]
present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves,
as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that ‘duration‘ in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.”
