The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and PhilosophyBlavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Religion
The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Theosophy
“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 the 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 material form to its disappearance from 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 would 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—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
eternities constitute that Duration in which alone anything has true
existence, were our senses but able to cognize it.
3. UNIVERSAL MIND WAS NOT, FOR THERE WERE NO AH‐HI(56) TO CONTAIN IT.(57)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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