The Future can have meaning only in relation to some time. But to when? to the present? to now? By the time 'now' is uttered, it is already past! The future is a horizon ever receding as it is approached. The Stanzas of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine speak of a time before Time:
Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration
(Stanza 1, sloka2)
Can it be said that Time began? Where is there a beginning of anything? Before the oak-tree there was the acorn, and before the acorn another oak-tree, and so on into an unimaginable mind-destroying past.
The teaching of the Buddha, as given in the incomparable language of The Light of Asia, warns against the useless attempt to reach the timelessness of THAT with the instrument of the rational mind:
OM, Amitaya!
Measure not with words
Th'Immeasurable, nor sink the string of thought
Into the Fathomless.
Who asksdoth err,
Who answers, errs.
Say nought!
The ancient text, questing backwards into past time in search of a beginning, is echoed in the Christian Scriptures, where the Gospel according to St John opens with the familiar words:
In the beginning was the Word.
But wait! There are other translations. For beauty and familiarity of language, we may well keep to the King James version, but let us not ignore what later scholarship can add to our understanding. In The New English Bible there is a significant difference:
When all things began,
the Word already was.
See what immeasurable immensity unfolds from the word 'already': ALREADY - that is, before the beginning of anything, there was something! For is it not axiomatic that nothing can arise out of nothing? Yet were we to imagine that by pressing further and further back in time we might eventually reach a point which we could call the beginning, we would still be thwarted, for no time - past or present or future - can be static. The very phrase 'a point in time' has no correspondence with Reality.
"These three words", says the Mahatma, "past, present and future! Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole...about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving". (Letter 8 [15]).
In the Commentary on Sloka 2 (quoted above), Madame Blavatsky explains:
Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change - or the same - for the billionth part of a second... 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...
Do we not tend to make our judgements of our fellows on the momentary perception of a momentary aspect of each individual, ignoring the fact that our own views of people, places, things and events is constantly changing as we respond to the pressure of experience from without and the consequent maturing of faculties within?
It is easy to recognize the changes in physical skills that are brought about by practice and training: it may be less easy to recognize - except in relation to particular skills - the
psychic and psychological changes that are taking place through the normal circumstances of living.
The future Mahatma dwells already within the unwashed Bennett with his dirty finger-nails (see Letter 43 in The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett), just as surely as the future Beethoven dwells within the infant shaking his rattle in his cot.
This January 2002 article is based on a talk given in Sydney by the late Ianthe Hoskins in 1995 at the Centenary Convention of the Australian Section of The Theosophical Society. The overall theme was Theosophy: Sign-Post to the Future.
Colin Price
Edward Archer
