(© RKP, 1958)Parallelism of Lives
The Zen masters made it clear to us that we must 'die to the past'; the Lankavatara Sutra, which, with the Diamond Sutra, constitutes the Buddhist basis of Zen, explains the disastrous role of habit-memory in anchoring us to the fictitious self which finds therein its principle source of power. What Robert Linssen terms 'Présence au Présent' is the state of enlightenment itself. Let us hope that we have all come to understand that.
But the Zen masters show little sign of having understood the nature of time. Let us, therefore, seek to interpret this essential concept in the time-context. The past does not exist as such, neither past nor future can be passed or to come - for nothing is either 'before' or 'after' anything else. That, the time-sequence, is merely a phenomenal illusion, a product of our receptive mechanism. We visualise time-as-the-fourth-dimension-of-Space as best we may - that is spatially. Perhaps we use the analogy of the runway lights, seen one after the other from the aeroplane that is gathering speed, but seen simultaneously in a pattern when the further dimension of height has been gained.
But we can approach more nearly to reality than that, even though ultimately it should be necessary entirely to discard a spatial concept: the notion of parallel lives is surely a clearer reflection of the truth.
Ouspensky seems to have sensed this, though he never - to my knowledge - developed the intuition, preferring the already admirable, and ancient, concept of recurrence in time. But surely the nearer-truth is that we live lives parallel to the one of which we are conscious from moment to moment. Every moment of our lives should be parallel to every other, so that we live every moment of our lives simultaneously. We do not live again and again in circles of time, as Ouspensky - and no doubt Pythagoras - suggested. We are not reborn every seventy odd years in the same conditions (period, place, and circumstances), repeating every detail of our lives unless we have been able to change our selves and evolve in a further dimension; rather are we living every detail of our lives at the same time on parallel planes.
In this there may seem to be two concepts apparently confused: parallelism of each moment as it enters consciousness, that is parallelism of the time sequence itself, and simultaneity of every moment of the complete time-sequence of a life. In this apparent confusion two different dimensions are involved, at right-angles to one another, in which a single phenomenon is envisaged from two different angles.
Of the dimension in which the simultaneity of a complete life is visualised I know of nothing to say, save that it is difficult for us to conceive, but the dimension in which we are living in parallel to ourselves at this, and every, moment is nearer and may more readily be visualised. Indeed it may merely be the fourth.
The Shape of Life
Let us methodically construct a geometrical representation of what should be a life in the phenomenal aspect of Reality.
We start with our usual and primary notion of a life as horizontal tram-line arbitrarily starting at a point 'B' (birth) and ending suddenly at another point 'D' (death). We recognise at once the absurdity of this, for no such horizontal straight line exists phenomenally, not even traced by light; so we curve it over into a circle. Then we realise that it must also exist in the dimensions at right-angles, that our conception of 'before' and 'after' is equally an 'above' and 'below', a 'right' and 'left', and we curve these over into circles also. But none of these circles has a beginning or end, and a circle springs from every present moment on every point of each of them.
Our figure has already become too complicated to be readily drawn or even conceived, so let us simplify it. We will visualise it as a wheel, with an infinite number of spokes, and the present moment is not on the circumference but is the axis round which this wheel of life revolves; it is eternal and it is perpetual movement at one point. Moreover identical wheels revolve round the same axis in every dimension, and their number is infinite, like their spokes. What we are now looking at is, in simplification, a sphere, a sphere whose elements, infinite in number, are revolving round the axis which is the now of any life. That which we recognise as 'passed' or 'to come' is any point on every spoke of every one of these wheels, whether seen as 'above' and 'below', 'before' and 'after', to 'right' and 'left' - which are appellations only, and each such point, repeated on every spoke, is itself the centre of a sphere.
What are the implications of this representation of a life? First that the Present, eternal, is the axis and dynamic centre of everything in that life, that it, though movement at one point, itself has Immobility, though the source of action, itself is Non-Action. Second that, as we already know, there is no past or future, nothing 'passed' or 'to come', that everything that 'has been' or 'will be' is eternally 'there' (regarded spatially in a spatial diagram), that every present moment creates its own 'past' and 'future' so that what we know as 'past' and 'future' are eternally around us in every 'direction', that is 'above and below', 'before and behind', to 'right and to left' of us, contemporary, simultaneous, here, and now. And we are living them all.
Thirdly, it follows from this that we can alter what we call past and future at every moment, but only by changing ourselves. This process, in those of us in whom it occurs in an appreciable degree, is a gradual one, usually dependent on others, from which we may conclude that our so-called past and future change rarely and by degrees.
Perhaps the answer to most of the questions that depend upon Time is to be found within this framework, and in a manner that ultimately is really very simple? All that may be needed is to visualise this representation, and to look.
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This way of visualising a life incidentally reveals the identity of the I and the Now. If we are able to realise either we have at the same time realised both, for I-Reality and Now are One.
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Past and Future
What we call 'the past' is a memory-impression of the present, of what 'was', and still is, present. Yes.
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Memory-impressions become increasingly transformed by the image-making faculty every time they are brought back into consciousness.
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What we call 'the future' is a series of images in the first dimension of time, based on memory-impressions, and inspired by desires for affirmation.
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The relative reality of what we cannot but regard as the future is a present whose reflection may occasionally be perceived in the form of a memory-impression of that present, which, although familiar to us in another dimension of time, we have not in fact experienced in the time-dimension along which our consciousness is travelling.
