HOME The Circle Of Eternity

If I may be boring for a moment, I would like to talk about the human condition for the umpteenth time.   Thinking about time, most people would see it as a road running from the past into the future, where you cannot go back and you can only go forward at a slow, unvarying pace, almost as if you were being carried, which may be why some people think of it as a stream, rather than a road.   As the past recedes behind us, we can see the objects we used to be familiar with become fainter and fainter until finally they fade out altogether and we can no longer see them, while ahead of us, from the future, new objects appear, at first faint and not perfectly understood, but gradually becoming more and more real, until at last we can grasp them with our hands and with out minds.   People suppose that this road, or stream, of time is straight and comes from a forgotten past to go into an unimaginable future. Yet, any evidence we have seems to suggest that this road is circular rather than straight, that nothing really new can ever happen, and that things only appear as new because the human race has totally forgotten about them.   If you think about it, you will realise that human action and human thinking has not changed one iota in all recorded history, and from beyond human memory, both descriptions of, and objects themselves, sometimes turn up that emulate modern technology. Just as objects may be abandoned and forgotten because of some break-up of civilisation, so might thinking be also abandoned, for some future civilisation to rediscover.   I sometimes think that, perhaps, God is some celestial scientist and the human race is one of his experiments. We are placed on a circular pathway, with walls on either side of us, encouraged to go only forward, and around we go, conditioned to think that there is only one direction. We know the past exists, because we have come from it, and we know the future must exist, because we can go towards it, but because the walls of nothingness are on either side of us, we think there is no other direction.   What if the scientist forgets his experiment, or dies and tells no one else? If that happens, then the experiment will go on forever in a circle, because in a circle it has been conditioned to go, and there can never be any new developments.   If we could, for a moment, look sideways through the glass walls of nothingness, what might we see? The infinity of the laboratory? Things so unimaginable to us, that we just could not believe in them, because conditioning is an impenetrable barrier, even to thinking.   And if we should break through that barrier, what would we find? Real life? Real death? It all depends on just how free we are, whither we are truly spirits, able to move between worlds, or just cogs in the machine of the universe. Do cogwheels think? Has the answer been discovered before and forgotten? If so, it will be discovered again. In the meantime, let's get back on the treadmill.