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Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers by Swami Bhakta Vishita

V CLAIRVOYANCE: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

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The Nature of Time.

That eminent scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, offers an ingenious and interesting, though very technical explanation of this class of clairvoyant phenomena as follows: "Time is but a relative mode of regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner, as if events moved necessarily in this order and at this precise rate. But that may be only one mode of regarding them. The events may be in some sort of existence always, both past and future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a traveler in a railway train is useful; if he could never leave the train, nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. We perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time, the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the 'higher plane' or totality of things after which, it seems to me, we are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or determinism, and the action of human beings consciously directed to a definite and preconceived end."

The Oriental Teaching.

The Hindus, and other oriental peoples, however, have a clearly defined and positive explanation of the phenomena of Future Time Clairvoyance, which must be included in our consideration of the subject, even though it does involve certain metaphysical or philosophical conceptions which are apart from our present inquiry as conducted in this book. The oriental theory is based upon that basic conception of the eastern philosophies which hold that the beginning, duration, and ending of any particular one of the infinitude of successive universes created by the Supreme Being, is to that Being but as a single moment of time; or, as the celebrated Hindu proverb runs: "The creation, duration, and destruction of a universe is but the time of the twinkling of an eye to Brahman." In other words, that to the Supreme Being, all the past, all the present, all the future of the universe, must be as but a single thought in a single moment of time--an instantaneous act of consciousness.

The Eternal Now.

A writer on this subject has said: "Those occultists and metaphysicians who have thought long and deeply upon the ultimate facts and nature of the universe, have dared to think that there must exist some absolute consciousness--some absolute mind--which must perceive the past, present, and future of the universe as one happening; as simultaneously and actively present at one moment of absolute time. They reason that just as a man may see at one moment of his time some particular event which might appear as a year to some minute form of life and mind--the microscopic creatures in a drop of water, for instance--so that which seems as a year, or as a hundred years, to the mind of man, may appear as the happening of a single moment of a higher scale of time to some exalted Being, or form of consciousness on a higher plane."

Absolute Time

The daring flights of metaphysical fancy have resulted in the general acceptance, on the part of advanced metaphysicians, of the postulate of the existence of an Absolute Mind, independent of Time and Space, to which everything exists HERE and NOW. To such a mind the entire sequence of events in the life-history of a universe would appear as a single unit of conscious experience--an infinitesimal point of time in Eternity. The human imagination staggers at the idea, but logical thought finally posits it as an unescapable conclusion of extended thought. This, possibly, is the secret of Future Time Clairvoyance, Prevision, Second Sight, etc.